Deutsche Welle
- Ajit Niranjan
No scientific study has found that climate change is likely to wipe out
civilization, but for many even the possibility is terrifying enough to
upend their lives.
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Rich countries like the US and Australia have seen apocalyptic
images of climate change after smoke from wildfires darkened skies
above big cities
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When Typhoon Vamco battered the Philippines in November last year, unleashing a
month's worth of rain on the capital Manila in less than 24 hours, Mitzi Jonelle
Tan was on her way home from work. Her mother, scared for Tan's safety as roads
flooded, warned her not to come back.
That was the last she heard from her mother for three days.
"We had no electricity, we barely had any cellular signal," said Tan, who stayed
with a friend during the storm as people clambered onto rooftops to escape
two-storey high floodwaters. "I had no idea if my mom was OK, if I had a home to
come home to."
Like most Filipinos, Tan is no stranger to devastating cyclones —
Typhoon Goni, one of the strongest storms ever recorded, barely missed Metro Manila and its
13 million residents when it made landfall just two weeks earlier. But Tan,
co-founder of Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines, also carries a
mental burden: She knows such storms will grow stronger as the planet heats
up.
"Even today, without runaway climate change, we're already suffering," said Tan,
a 22-year-old math graduate who remembers helping her parents scoop floodwater
out of the house as a child and weeks of doing homework by candlelight when
storms cut off electricity. "I have fears of drowning in my own bedroom when I
hear another typhoon is coming."
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Mitzi Jonelle Tan, pictured left, lives in the second-most
dangerous country for environmental activists, according to NGO
Global Witness
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Citizens of the Philippines are adjusting to tropical cyclones that
are growing even stronger
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The emotional toll of climate change is often made worse by an
existential debate riddled with misinformation: Just how
much can society take before it breaks down?
Before Tan reaches the age of her mother, who is 58, sea levels will have risen
so high that
coastal floods
that used to strike once a century will swamp Manila and dozens of other cities
every single year. Wildfires that smother towns in the US and Australia with
choking smoke will feast on plants dried to a crisp by hotter, longer heatwaves.
At least one-quarter of the ice in the
Hindu Kush Himalayas
will have melted, raising tensions for 1.5 billion people who already rely
on its rivers for water in three countries armed with nuclear weapons: India,
China and Pakistan.
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Heatwaves and drought leave dry fuel that helps wildfires spread
out of control
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Groups like the Deep Adaptation Forum — an online support group for 12,000
people — believe climate-fueled societal breakdown is "inevitable, likely
or already unfolding." Their claims have tapped into a wider public fear
that collapse is on the cards.
A YouGov poll at the start of the coronavirus pandemic found that three in
10 US adults think there will be an apocalyptic disaster within their lifetime.
A separate
poll
of five countries in 2019 found that more than half of respondents in France,
Italy, the UK and the US think civilization as they know it will collapse in
years to come. In Germany that figure was slightly lower, at 39%.
Tan said she cried "night after night" upon reading reports that world
leaders are likely to miss their target of keeping warming to
1.5 degrees Celsius
this century. "For a time, I lost hope, thinking: Is everything really just
impossible now?"
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In February a landslide in the Himalayas that melted ice sent
floods downstream that killed scores and trapped hundreds in
tunnels
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Will climate change cause the collapse of civilization?
Despite widespread fears, no peer-reviewed research finds that the breakdown of
society or the collapse of civilization is likely, let alone inevitable.
Scientists used to debunking myths from climate deniers say they must also
fight off claims of collapse that hinge on distorted science.
Still, climate disasters could disrupt politics in some regions enough that "the
glue that holds society together doesn't work very well anymore," said Michael
Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at the University of Princeton. "But
that's where we're getting into the realm of things that are unpredictable."
"We know that we won't be fine, but there's a lot of space between fine and
doomed," said Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of Paleoecology at the
University of Maine's Climate Change Institute. "That space is our greatest
asset because it allows us to choose our future."
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Breeding conditions for the locust swarms that ravaged farms across
East Africa were made more likely by climate change
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Renewable energy has grown so cheap that world leaders could cut
fossil fuel emissions swiftly
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'To avoid collapse, we have to talk about it'
In December, 250 people from a range of mostly academic backgrounds signed
an
open letter that described the collapse of civilization as a credible scenario this
century. "It's not a scientific position, it's a philosophical one," said
Raphael Stevens, an independent researcher who helped draft the letter. "To
avoid [collapse], we have to talk about it."
Climate scientists are experts in the physical phenomena, "but who has the
expertise about what those physical changes are going to cause to happen in the
world?" asked Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and activist who
has written a self-help book about the climate emergency.
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Transient treasure: Of the 2 million-odd people who visit the Great Barrier Reef
annually, a 2016 survey found that 69 percent were coming to see the
UNESCO World Heritage site "before it's too late." And no wonder.
The IPCC says that even if we manage to limit global warming to 2
degrees Celsius, 99 percent of the world's coral will be wiped out.
Tourists can hasten their demise by touching or polluting
reefs.
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"The burden of proof is assumed to be with the collapsologists," said Salamon,
"but I would like to see proof that 1 billion people can be refugees and not
have that collapse." She was referring to a widely publicized report in
September that claimed 1.2 billion people will become climate refugees by
2050.
But migration experts from three organizations told DW
the report misused data by summing snapshots of
internal displacement
to arrive at an exaggerated figure of cross-border migration. The Institute for
Economics and Peace, the think tank behind the study, quietly deleted a graph
with the incorrect analysis but did not retract the estimate.
"The figure itself, to put it pretty politely, is fiction," said Sarah Nash, a
political scientist at the University of Natural Resources and Life
Sciences in Vienna.
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Cities like Karachi, Pakistan, have already been forced to adapt to
increasingly extreme weather
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How does the climate crisis make you feel?
The prospect of collapse has forced scientists and activists to confront a
practical question: Does talking about climate change in extreme terms inspire
people to
act urgently
or push them deep into despair?
"Doom-mongering, ironically, is one way to disengage us," said Michael Mann, a
climate scientist at Penn State University who argues in a new book that it has
overtaken denial as a threat to the climate. "If we are led to believe it's too
late to do anything, then why do anything?"
Yet while hope is often held up as the best motivator of action, research has
shown that anger and fear are also powerful drivers of change
—
if people feel they can shape their lives.
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In cities like Jakarta, Indonesia, rising sea levels combine with
sinking land to leave coastal communities vulnerable to floods
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In March, a study in the
Journal of Climate Change and Health
found that people who felt angry about climate change were more likely to take
part in collective action than those who felt
anxious
about it, and report better mental health than those who feel depressed by it.
"We don't want people to be hopeful, we want people to be angry and we want
people to act," said Tan.
Some people warning of collapse are "obviously channeling their anxieties
into action and raising awareness, but they're not the majority of voters,"
added Gill, from the University of Maine, who has increasingly received
emails from young people feeling hopeless, depressed and even suicidal because
of alarmist claims.
"I'm not going to grieve a planet whose obituary hasn't been published yet."
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Diving in with the rest: Young activists in Berlin took a dip in the city's Spree River to
demonstrate their desire for more action on climate change. Their
protest took place as Germany's upper house of parliament passed a
raft of measures aimed at cutting emissions. However, critics of
the package said it did not go far enough.
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