Amid the dire warnings, we need some perspective on this apocalypse
Amid the dire warnings on climate change, let’s put some perspective on this latest human catastrophe
Whatever happened to those wide-eyed zealots who used to walk up and down the High Street with a sandwich board bearing the words The End of the World is Nigh? I haven’t seen one in ages; but then again they are no longer needed when apocalyptic doommongering is now a mainstream activity.
Television news has become a gigantic on-air equivalent of the fire and brimstone prophet damning us all for our sins. No sooner does it look like the Covid pandemic has abated to the point where the 99.8 per cent of the population that survived can breathe a sigh of relief than we are again assailed with warnings of our imminent demise, this time from global warming. “Code Red for Humanity”, screamed the headlines following this week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Nothing much changes. I grew up in the shadow of the atomic bomb. On its first detonation in July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, quoted from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Reaching for a theological allusion to capture a sense of foreboding is understandable since most religions are an attempt to come to terms with our mortality and tend to have an eschatological, or end-time, element to them.
The Revelation to John, the last book of the New Testament – also known as the Book of the Apocalypse from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning “unveiling” – has often been the narrative of choice for Christians when disaster strikes. Maybe those poor Greeks whose forests and islands are burning are consulting it once more. The Book of Revelation has been widely cited during the coronavirus pandemic, especially online, as the harbinger of the long-predicted catastrophe now being visited upon mankind. The fact that it is nothing like an Extinction Level Event on a par with the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs seems not to matter to the end-timers. To them, we have all had it anyway and it’s just a matter of deciding which calamity will deliver the coup de grâce.
We can be sure it won’t be Covid, however much governments continue to impose controls out of all proportion to the general, as opposed to the individual, threat posed by the virus. It could still be a nuclear war, which was the expected mankind-ending event of my formative years. We came pretty close in 1962 with the stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union over Cuban missile bases, with conflict averted by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.
But there are enough nukes still in existence to wipe out mankind. At the height of the Cold War, a must-have addition to the home of the overanxious was a fallout shelter. Many public buildings had bunkers reserved for those bureaucrats and politicians whose existence was judged critical to the continuation of the human race.
Presumably they still await the nuclear winter, though judging by the preparations for the pandemic, Boris and his entourage will arrive to find nothing there save a few tins of Spam and some powdered milk. Moreover, while these shelters were being made ready for the great and the good, the rest of us were being told to put brown paper over the windows and sit under a table to await Armageddon.
Back then, we also faced a climaterelated doomsday scenario, though it was not warming we were concerned with but cooling. The last Ice Age ended just 11,000 years ago, covering much of northern Europe in an ice cap half a mile thick, making about 30 per cent of the planet uninhabitable. Warming will change the way we live, what we can grow and cause sea levels to rise but is unlikely to be as catastrophic as freezing.
Experts today say that earlier predictions that emissions would cool the planet rather than heat it up have since been proven to be demonstrably false. But ice ages had nothing to do with man since we weren’t around in sufficient numbers to influence the climate so there must have been another vector at work. Notwithstanding the current warming we are, geologically speaking, still in the Holocene interglacial period.
It is possible to see climate change other than through an anthropogenic prism even if mankind has unwittingly interfered with the planetary thermostat. Whether we can turn it down again, however, is another matter. The IPCC said the changes were now “inevitable and irreversible” whatever we do next, which suggests that we had better start preparing for the consequences.
At least we know what’s going on, unlike those alive in the sixth century, the period judged by historians to have been the most cataclysmic of modern times (so far). It was the harbinger of famine, pestilence, political upheaval and economic collapse on a grand scale. The cause was a volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 AD which plunged Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into 18 months of darkness. Summer temperatures fell, crops failed and people starved. Then, the Plague of Justinian struck in Egypt, wiping out possibly half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse.
Pandemics, volcanoes, asteroids, nuclear war, ice ages, Y2K and now global warming have been the stuff of nightmares down the centuries but we have to live with them and adapt if we can.
The difficulty now is that warming is happening more quickly than any previous change that scientists have been able to establish. So if we can take mitigating actions we would be mad not to, provided they are effective and not just for show.
As Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, has observed: “Our Earth is 45 million centuries old but this century is the first when one species – ours – can determine the biosphere’s fate.” Undoubtedly this is an extremely serious challenge; but does it merit the “Code Red” sense of finality that underpinned the IPCC report?
We are, of course, all doomed individually which is why cultures and religions down the centuries have readily subscribed to the end-time narrative. Sooner or later, the end is nigh for everyone and we don’t need a message on a sandwich board to remind us of that bleak reality.