We must stop normalising climate disasters
The Australian fires are a vivid warning of what lies ahead if we fail to act, says David Wallace-wells
In many ways, we are already living in unprecedented times. The world is now 1.1C (2F) warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution, and while that number probably doesn’t sound very big, it already puts us entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose all of human history. And yet we do have certain precedents, certain reference points, to help guide our thinking about the climate future: life in Paris becoming perhaps more like life in Palermo, and life in Palermo perhaps more like life in Mosul. The predicted path for places like Mosul and Calcutta is horrifying: as soon as the middle of the century, summer heatwaves so intense that walking around outside would mean risking heat stroke or even death.
An especially vivid, and terrifying, precedent for our collective future is unfolding in Australia, where bush fires have been burning for several months, and remain almost entirely uncontrolled, having torched 15 million acres, an area roughly the size of Belgium. The fires have been 20 times as destructive as the worst California fire season on record (in 2018) have killed an estimated
480 million animals, raised pollution levels in Sydney more than 10 times higher than the safe level, and turned glaciers as far away as New Zealand first pink, and then brown, in a process of smoke settling on ice that has been called “caramelisation”.
New South Wales is in the grip of what looks like a refugee crisis – thousands of stranded Australians waiting panicked on beaches below orange skies for rescue in desperate, cinematic scenes that have nevertheless somehow failed to capture the world’s imagination or outrage as did, say, the burning of Notre-dame cathedral.
In the decade ahead, of course, not everyone will suffer as Australians are today, even if many more nations of the world elect climate know-nothings such as Scott Morrison to lead us into the darkness. And better policies do promise much more hopeful futures than those shaped by indifference. But if the decade that just ended is any guide to the one just beginning, the experience of the next 10 years will be shaped less profoundly by what terrors arise to surprise us than by the current normalisation of climate disaster, considering what it portends for how we might respond, in the future, to the suffering ahead.
In 2016, the Paris accords promised an opportunity to avoid terrible damage from warming. But by the time of the 2018 “Doomsday” report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), outlining the difference between a world warmed by 1.5C and one by 2C, that window of opportunity already appeared to have closed.
Over the next decade, more intense impacts will surely arrive: more intense flooding events than those that drowned the American Midwest last year; more intense hurricanes than those that swept through the Caribbean in 2017; more intense heatwaves than those that set records in consecutive months in Europe this summer, or in consecutive days in Australia in their summer; and more intense melt events than the one that disgorged 12.5billion tons of ice from Greenland in August (an amount not regularly expected by scientists until 2070).
Climate advocates often describe the challenges of these impacts by referring to contrasting imperatives: mitigation, or actions that would limit future warming, and adaptation, or actions to defend flourishing life from the punishments of that warming.
What I fear – and expect – is that another response will predominate: defining more and more human suffering as acceptable as an excuse for continued inaction.
And while we will surely normalise heatwaves and droughts and wildfires and melt events, what will seem more novel in the decade ahead is their many downstream effects – punishments delivered by climate change not through discrete weather events but through our politics and culture, economies and psychologies.
In my book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, I called these effects “cascades”, and I believe this decade will be defined by them, perhaps in ways as profound as “modernity” shaped the 19th century or “financial capitalism” the late 20th.
If you had to imagine how climate change could reshape politics, you might envisage that intuitions of resource scarcity and a growing sense of zero-sum competition would produce a retreat from international networks of cooperation and a re-embrace of the logic of nationalistic self-interest. That we are already there today is, of course, no comfort – quite possibly that Right-wing response to climate pressure could intensify.
On the world stage, an obligation to rhetorical gesture towards action could obscure basic inaction – climate hypocrisy just another name for the climate normalisation you can see in the public behaviour of leaders such as Justin Trudeau, who signed a declaration of climate emergency to much fanfare and then the very next day approved a new pipeline; or Emmanuel Macron, who threatened Jair Bolsonaro over his bad behaviour in the Amazon, having lost a domestic battle, the previous year, to impose a carbon tax. But it won’t all be empty talk, since soon nations will begin punishing one another for bad behaviour on climate, through sanctions, spiked trade deals, and perhaps ultimately even war.
In our economies, the impacts of disaster, though growing, may nevertheless go undiscussed, though it has been estimated that parts of the developing world have already lost as much as a quarter of their potential GDP. No matter where we lived, defended by no matter how much wealth, we would be living, all of us, in a theatre of climate change, but too many would choose to see it all as simply the furniture of existence.
The most concerning normalisation is of human suffering, which is already reaching unconscionable levels, especially in the developing world. The Lancet has linked more than nine million deaths to air pollution each year, and yet so normalised is this in those parts of the world not choking with smog that hardly anyone mentions it.
Of course, there is another option: mentioning that change, freaking out and fighting it, refusing to normalise it and insisting that we do whatever can be done to avoid it. Believe it or not, in the form of the protests that have swept the globe from Bolivia to Chile and Lebanon to Iran, the past decade offers some courage, though the fate of those protests – not to mention the climate strikes, Hong Kong marches and the fight against Modi’s citizenship act in India – is far from certain.
Which suggests another risk, compounding all the others: that in a world defined by disorder, we normalise mass unrest.
With protests that have swept the globe, the past decade offers some courage