Climate Change Is Intergenerational Theft. That's Why My Son Is Part Of This Story

The Guardian - Naomi Klein

By including Toma in my film at the Great Barrier Reef I want to show how environmental disasters are creating a lonely world for our children

Naomi Klein with her son Toma and John Rumney from the Great Barrier Reef Legacy project. ‘The strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with Toma and his peers. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for them. But even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know.’ Photograph: Josh Wall for the Guardian

The short film I’ve made with the Guardian stars my son, Toma, aged four years and five months. That’s a little scary for me to write, since, up until this moment, my husband, Avi, and I have been pretty careful about protecting him from public exposure. No matter how damn cute we think he’s being, absolutely no tweeting is allowed.
So I want to explain how I decided to introduce him to you in this very public way.
For the past eight years, I have been writing and speaking about climate change pretty much around the clock. I use all the communication tools I can — books, articles, feature documentary, photographs, lectures.
Yet I still struggle with a nagging feeling that I’m not doing justice to the enormous stakes of this threat. The safety and habitability of our shared home is intensely emotional terrain, triggering perfectly rational feelings of loss, fear and grief. Yet climate discourse is usually pretty clinical, weighed down with statistics and policy jargon.
All that information is important, of course. But I have started to worry that, by being so calm and clinical, we may be tacitly sending the message that this isn’t really an existential emergency after all. If it were, wouldn’t the people raising the alarm sound more … alarmed? Wouldn’t we share more of our own emotions?

Naomi Klein at the Great Barrier Reef: what have we left for our children?

I was thinking a lot about these questions when the Guardian approached me about making a short film at the Great Barrier Reef while I visited Australia to receive the Sydney peace prize. I initially refused. I had already decided to travel to Queensland and see the bleaching and die-off for myself. But I was planning to go with my family and saw our visit as a very personal experience. Precisely because I knew I would be overwhelmed by seeing this tragedy through my son’s eyes, I didn’t want cameras around.A few days later, the Guardian asked again. And I started thinking: maybe this was a chance to get at aspects of climate disruption that scientific reports and political arguments just can’t convey. Perhaps it could communicate, in a visceral way, the intergenerational theft at the heart of this crisis.
There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with Toma and his peers. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for them. But even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. These kids are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of being surrounded by so many fast-disappearing life forms.
According to a new WWF report, since I was born in 1970 the number of wild animals on the planet has dropped by more than half – and by 2020 it is expected to drop by two-thirds. What a lonely world we are creating for these kids. And what more powerful place to illustrate that absence than the Great Barrier Reef, on the knife-edge of survival?
So this film shows the reef through Toma’s eyes. He’s too young to understand concepts like coral bleaching and dying – it’s tough enough for him to understand that coral was ever alive in the first place.
It also shows the Great Barrier Reef through the eyes of his mother: moved by the beauty that remains, heartbroken and infuriated by what has been lost. Because what has happened to this wondrous part of the world is not just a tragedy, it’s a crime. And the crime is still very much in progress, with our respective governments busily clearing the way for new coalmines and new oil pipelines.
In a way, that’s the good news: we still have both the time and power to force our politicians to change course. It’s too late for most of the world’s coral reefs but it’s not too late for all of them. And it’s not too late to keep temperatures below levels that would save millions of lives and livelihoods.
For that kind of rapid change to happen, however, we are all going to have to stop being so impeccably calm and reasonable. We’re going to have to find that part of ourselves that feels this threat in our hearts, as well as our heads.
So meet Toma, who just discovered that there is a magical world beneath the waves.

Links

• Naomi Klein criticises lack of global action on climate change after Sydney Peace prize win
• Let’s make this a real ‘leap’ year, and go fossil fuel-freeNaomi Klein at the Great Barrier Reef: what have we left for our children? – video
• ‘It’s a depressing sight’: climate change unleashes ghostly death on Great Barrier Reef
• Nasa scans Great Barrier Reef to find answers to coral's poor health
• Climate change: John Hewson accuses Coalition of 'national disgrace'
• Revealed: first mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change
• The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare
• How Greg Hunt and his department turned good news into an international scandal

2015’s Record-Breaking Temperatures Will Be Normal By 2030 - It’s Time To Adapt

The Conversation - Sophie Lewis

Australia's 2013 'angry' summer was characterised by heatwaves and major bushfires. Such a summer will be normal by 2035. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Generation Y has grown up in a rapidly warming world. According to the US National Climate Data Centre, every month since February 1985 has seen above average global temperatures, compared with the twentieth century. I have no memories of a "normal" month.
2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous records set in 2015 and in 2014. These are just a few of the flurry of recent record temperatures, which includes Australia's hottest day, week, month, season and year.
The question now is what the future will look like. At some point in the decades to come, these record-breaking temperatures will not be rare; they will become normal. But when exactly?
In a new study just released in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, I (together with co-authors Andrew King and Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick) find that on the current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, global temperatures like 2015 will by normal by 2030, and Australia's record-breaking 2013 summer will likely be an average summer by 2035.
While we still have time to delay some of these changes, others are already locked in - cutting emissions will make no difference - so we must also adapt to a warmer world. This should be a sobering thought as world leaders gather in Marrakech to begin work on achieving the Paris Agreement which came into force last week.

Today's extremes, tomorrow's normal
The recent record-breaking temperatures have often been described as the "new normal". For example, after the new global temperature record was set in 2016, these high temperatures were described as a new normal.
What is a new normal for our climate? The term has been used broadly in the media and in scientific literature to make sense of climate change. Put simply, we should get used to extremes temperatures, because our future will be extreme.
But without a precise definition, a new normal is limited and difficult to understand. If 2015 was a new normal for global temperatures, what does it mean if 2017, 2018, or 2019 are cooler?
In our study we defined the new normal as the point in time when at least half the following 20 years are warmer than 2015's record breaking global temperatures.
We examined extreme temperatures in a number of state-of-the-art climate models from an international scientific initiative. We also explored how different future greenhouse gas emissions impact temperatures.
We used four different greenhouse gas scenarios, known as Representative Concentration Pathways, or RCPs. These range from a business-as-usual situation (RCP8.5) to a major cut to emissions (RCP2.6).
It is worth emphasising that real-world emissions are tracking above those covered by these hypothetical storylines.

2015's record temperatures will likely become normal between 2020 and 2030.

Future extremes
Our findings were straightforward. 2015's record-breaking temperatures will be the new normal between 2020 and 2030 according to most of the climate models we analysed. We expect within a decade or so that 2015's record temperatures will likely be average or cooler than average.
By 2040, 2015's temperatures were average or cooler than average in 90% of the models. This result was unaffected by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or not - we are already locked in to a significant amount of further warming.
We also looked at the timing of a new normal for different regions. Australia is a canary in the coal mine. While other regions don't see extreme temperatures become the new normal until later in the century, Australia's record-breaking 2013 summer temperatures will be normal by 2035 - according to the majority of the models we looked at.
At smaller spatial scales, such as for state-based based temperature extremes, we can likely delay record-breaking temperatures becoming the new normal by committing to significant greenhouse gas cuts. This would clearly reduce the vulnerability of locations to extreme temperatures.

Cutting emissions (top) and business as usual (bottom) makes little difference to the new normal globally. Author provided

Living in a warmer world
If you like heading to the beach on hot days, warmer Australian summers seem appealing, not alarming.
But Australia's position as a hot spot of future extremes will have serious consequences. The 2013 summer, dubbed the "angry summer", was characterised by extreme heatwaves, widespread bushfires and a strain on infrastructure.
Our results suggest that such a summer will be relatively mild within two decades, and the hottest summers will be much more extreme.
My co-authors, Andrew and Sarah, and I all grew up in a world of above-average temperatures, but our future is in a world were our recent record-breaking temperatures will be mild. Our new research shows this is not a world of more pleasantly hot summer days, but instead of increasingly severe temperature extremes.
These significantly hotter summers present a challenge that we must adapt to. How will we protect ourselves from increases in excess heat deaths and increased fire danger, and our ecosystems from enhanced warming?
While we have already locked ourselves into a future where 2015 will rapidly become a new normal for the globe, we can still act now to reduce our vulnerability to future extreme events occurring in our region, both through cutting emissions and preparing for increased heat.

Links

• 2016 is likely to be the world's hottest year: here's why
• State of the Climate 2015: global warming and El Niño sent records tumbling
• We traced the human fingerprint on record-breaking temperatures back to the 1930s
• More angry, more often: March heatwave signals a new normal

Record Hot Year May Be The New Normal By 2025

ANU

Bushfires are expected to be more common in Australia in future years. Image: Peter Shanks, Flickr.

The hottest year on record globally in 2015 could be an average year by 2025 and beyond if carbon emissions continue to rise at the same rate, new research has found.
Lead author Dr Sophie Lewis from the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society said human activities had already locked in this new normal for future temperatures, but immediate climate action could prevent record extreme seasons year after year.

"If we continue with business-as-usual emissions, extreme seasons will inevitably be the norm within decades and Australia is the canary in the coal mine that will experience this change first," said Dr Lewis, who is also from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.  

"If we don't reduce our rate of emissions the record hot summer of 2013 in Australia - when we saw temperatures approaching 50 degrees Celsius in some areas - could be just another average summer season by 2035.
"This research tells us we can potentially prevent record-breaking seasonal temperatures from becoming average at a regional level."
The idea of a new normal has been used repeatedly when talking about climate change but had never been clearly defined until Dr Lewis and colleagues developed a scientific definition for the term.
"Based on a specific starting point, we determined a new normal occurred when at least half of the years following an extreme year were cooler and half warmer. Only then can a new normal state be declared," Dr Lewis said.
This process was also used to determine new normal conditions for seasonal and regional changes to the climate, she said.
Using the National Computational Infrastructure supercomputer at ANU to run climate models, the researchers explored when new normal states would appear under the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's four emissions pathways.
The research team examined seasonal temperatures from December to February across Australia, Europe, Asia and North America.
"The results revealed that while global average temperatures would inevitably enter a new normal under all emissions scenarios, this wasn't the case at seasonal and regional levels," Dr Lewis.
"We found that with prompt action to reduce greenhouse gases a new normal might never occur in the 21st century at regional levels during the Southern Hemisphere summer and Northern Hemisphere winter."
The research, supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, is published in the Bulletin of the American Meterological Society.

Links

• Humans have caused climate change for 180 years
• Alan Alda on the art of science communication: ‘I want to tell you a story’
• A better way to tell the story of climate change
• Uncontrolled climate change threatens well-being