Don’t give up on the human race’s climate response

Jonathan Franzen has finally seen the light. Unfortunately, it has blinded him. The distinguished American novelist and essayist has a piece in the current issue of The New Yorker titled: ‘‘What if we stopped pretending?’’ Stop pretending that the climate apocalypse is not going to sweep us all away, he means. As he writes: ‘‘To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.’’

It’s elegant and philosophical – Marcus Aurelius for beginners. Yes, we have wasted 30 years and not cut our global emissions at all. Yes, we are heading for the ‘‘never exceed’’ average global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius. And yes, that means there will be famines, huge waves of climate refugees, a lot of killing at borders – and then it will get really serious.

So far, I’m with Franzen all the way. In fact, I know exactly how he feels – because I got there about a dozen years ago, and I felt awful.

I had spent 11⁄2 years interviewing everybody you ever heard of in the climate field, and many you haven’t, for a book I was doing – and at the end of it, I had a kind of double vision. Not a physical double vision, of course, but overlaid on current reality I could sort of see the hell that was coming.

That sort of thing can ruin your breakfast, so I manfully set the visions aside and got on with my life.

Maybe Franzen will get over it, too, eventually, but at the moment he thinks we’re doomed, and all we can do is little things to slow the apocalypse down a bit and relish the brief time we have left.

We really shouldn’t be surprised that he thinks like this. Franzen’s Wikipedia entry (I take my research seriously) says he was heavily influenced by Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, so stylish despair is his default setting. But it’s not time yet to give up on the big things, like survival.

First of all, change your perspective and stop deploring the human race’s failings.

A million years ago, our ancestors were clever apes. Even 10,000 years ago, they were all hunter-gatherers who had little time or motive to worry about the longer term. Don’t write us off because we’re still not very good at it.

Now we’re in really deep trouble, and all our evolutionary baggage means that we’re still having difficulty acting to avoid disasters that are only a decade or two ahead. We may be able to rise above it when the crisis becomes present and palpable, but the procrastination, the disbelief and the delays were inevitable.

So here we are, and it’s going to be tricky. We are almost certainly going to crash through 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere in less than 15 years, which in the natural course of events would take us up through a 2C rise about a decade later. Welcome to the climate apocalypse.

Unlike Franzen, I talk to climate scientists – and it’s hard to get them to say this on the record. They don’t want to sow panic. But if you backed them up against a wall and threatened them with a knife, most would admit that they think going beyond 450ppm is nearly inevitable now – mainly because human politics can’t change fast enough to stop it.

But what the climate scientists all know, and some think might save us, is that 450ppm and a 2C rise are not indissolubly linked. What we need is more time, and it is theoretically possible to hold the global temperature down while we work frantically first to get our emissions down, then eliminate them entirely, and finally draw down the excess CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere.

There are a number of potential methods for doing this, all of them controversial. The leading proposal at the moment is injecting sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere. This would reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight and keep the planet below a 2C rise and its attendant calamities for the time we need.

There are no safe and painless courses left, but there are still choices to be made. The game is not over.

All our evolutionary baggage means that we’re still having difficulty acting to avoid disasters that are only a decade or two ahead.

GETTY IMAGES It is theoretically possible to hold the global temperature down while we work frantically to get our emissions down, then eliminate them entirely, and finally draw down the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere.