Far more must be invested in adapting to warming, says new global commission that aims to rebuild political will after US withdrawal from Paris agreement
Bill Gates and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon (right) are among the leaders of the new Global Commission on Adaptation.
Photograph: Evan Schneider/UN Photo
Far too little is being done to protect people from the heatwaves, storms and floods being supercharged by climate change,
according to a high-level international commission. It aims to rebuild
the political will to act that was damaged when US president, Donald
Trump, rejected the global Paris agreement.
The Global Commission on Adaptation
is being led by Ban Ki-Moon, Bill Gates and Kristalina Georgieva, CEO
of the World Bank. It involves 17 countries including China, India,
South Africa, Indonesia, Canada and the UK.
Much more money is being invested in cutting carbon emissions than
preparing for the climate change impacts that are already inevitable.
More than $380bn (£287bn) was spent on reducing CO2 in 2015-16, compared
with just $20bn boosting protection from extreme weather.
Former UN secretary general Ban said a step change in adaptation can
and must be achieved: “Climate change is happening much, much faster
than one may think. [But] where there is political will, anything can be
done.”
However, he said the international consensus to fight global warming had been damaged by Trump’s actions. On Sunday, Trump questioned whether global warming was caused by human activities, contradicting the long-established conclusions of the world’s scientists.
“We were very much united until December 2015 in Paris,” Ban told the
Guardian. “Now unfortunately the level of solidarity is being loosened,
especially by the Trump administration. Even though it is just one
country, it has caused big political damage.”
Adaptation measures to safeguard people’s homes, food, water and
energy are being implemented in some places, but at far too small a
scale, the commissioners said.
“Continued economic growth and reductions in global poverty are
possible despite these daunting challenges – but only if societies
invest much more in adaptation,” said Ban. “The costs of adapting are
less than the cost of doing business as usual and the benefits are many
times larger.”
“We are at a moment of high risk and great promise,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “If everyone does their part, we can reduce carbon emissions, increase access to affordable energy, and help farmers everywhere grow more productive crops.”
“Our climate has already changed. Dramatic weather events and
volatile seasons are the new normal,” said Georgieva. “We face a choice:
business as usual and hope for the best. Or we act now and build for a
resilient future.”
The new group is comprised of 28 commissioners, including two
national presidents, representing all regions of the globe and all
sectors of development and industry. The US administration is not
represented but Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, is a commissioner.
The commission will produce a major report on adapting to climate
change for the UN climate summit in September 2019, followed by a year
of action to implement its recommendations.
“Scientists and economists believe the cost of adaptation could rise
to $500bn per year by 2050 and, in the mid-term, $300bn by 2030,” said
Ban. This money is available, he said: “I don’t think it is a matter of
[getting the] money. The money can be mobilised. If there is political will, I think we can handle this matter.”
In particular, the trillions of dollars held by investment managers
and insurers should be put to work, Ban said: “We should not expect all
this money to come from governments. The private sector has to be fully
engaged.” He said 63% of the $380bn invested in cutting emissions in
2015-16 was from the private sector.
LEFT: Cedars grow sparsely in the mountains near Jaj, Lebanon. RIGHT: Children swim by moai statues off the coast of Easter Island. Photos Josh Haner/The New York Times
One of the cruelties of global warming is that it threatens humanity’s past as well as its future.
That was brought into sharp focus by a study issued Tuesday.
It says that some of the most important ancient sites in the
Mediterranean region — the Greek city of Ephesus, Istanbul’s historic
districts, Venice’s canals — might not survive the era of climate
change.
Those places joined a list
of others that we’ve covered extensively here at The Times. Our series
on cultural heritage has looked at the Cedars of Lebanon, the Stone Age villages of Scotland and the statues of Easter Island, all of which are threatened by climate change.
Rising
ocean levels are causing waves to break on the statues and platforms
built a thousand years ago.
The island risks losing its cultural
heritage. Again.
March 14, 2018
In the case of Scotland and Easter Island, the menace is from rising
seas. Many civilizations of the past, much like many present-day cities,
were centered on coastal areas. As sea levels rise — both because
warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, and because of
melting glaciers — these heritage sites face sharply increased risks
from both coastal erosion and flooding.The new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed
49 Unesco heritage sites in the Mediterranean region in terms of
end-of-century sea level rise projections that assume we don’t mitigate
climate change.
Saving Scotland’s Heritage From the Rising Seas Citizens and scientists on the Orkney Islands are racing to protect thousands of ancient structures threatened by climate change. Sept. 25, 2018
In Lebanon, the danger is shrinking habitat. The conditions the cedar
trees need to live are becoming more and more rare as the Middle East
heats up.
The researchers concluded that of the 49 sites, 46 will be threatened by
coastal erosion and 40 by flooding if greenhouse gas emissions continue
to rise.
If you haven’t seen our heritage series, or if you missed an article, this might be the occasion for a virtual journey to Lebanon, the Orkney Islands, or Easter Island. The images are stunning and the stories are gripping.
In the face of sustained government stupidity, many feel powerless. Voters in Wentworth can lead the way
Get Up protest in the seat of Wentworth at a byelection forum on Monday.
Photograph: Carly Earl for the Guardian
If
a bricklayer builds a wall that falls over 12 years later, killing
someone, the bricklayer can be sued and even jailed. If a doctor finds
some old packets of thalidomide in their surgery and, in spite of the
overwhelming scientific evidence of its horrific effects, dispenses it
to pregnant women, they would go to jail. The example can be multiplied
endlessly: the reality of our world is that we are responsible for our
acts.
Unless, that is, you are an Australian politician.
A politician can destroy our future, a politician can ignore the best
evidence and be responsible for decisions that lead to deaths of many
and the suffering of all, and still be free until the end of their days
to milk the legal corruption that is Australian public life, picking up
highly paid sinecures as ambassadors, board directors and lobbyists for
the corporations they were once meant to regulate in our interest.
Last Monday there came the unbelievable news contained in the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. If large-scale
action is not taken now we will face a global warming catastrophe.
The report was a nightmarish scream heard through a spithood of
formal scientific language. Any rise above 1.5C is highly likely to be
disastrous, with millions of people displaced by rising seas, the
extinction of numerous species, and the loss of most coral reefs. At 2C
the rate of crop loss doubles, as does the decline in sea fisheries.
Almost all coral reefs will be dead. Diseases such as dengue and malaria
will be far more widespread, extreme droughts and floods far more
common, while security and economic growth will be imperilled.
One of the report’s lead authors, the geographer Adelle Thomas, said,
“The scientific consensus is really strong. It’s not just a political
slogan: ‘1.5 to stay alive.’ It’s true.”
The report was specific in how long we have to keep warming at 1.5C: until 2030.
Twelve years.
This Saturday the voters of Wentworth have the opportunity to turn
their byelection into a referendum on climate change. If you are a
Wentworth voter, consider the historic responsibility you have and how
in the past you have used it to good effect. Last year it was Wentworth,
after all, that voted 80.8% yes for marriage equality, the
fourth-highest yes vote in the nation.
Marriage equality, as many have since noted, was not given to us by
enlightened politicians. It was forced on a recalcitrant government by
the countless acts of individual courage shown by those who stood up in
their workplaces, families, in their kitchens, cafes, sporting clubs,
for their dignity and freedom; it was made possible by organisation and a
passion that transcended party loyalties, and could not finally be
refused. Marriage equality was won by the people, in other words, not
gifted by the politicians.
Our prime minister, a man with a wit that would make Kenny look like Oscar Wilde, once thought it funny to wave a lump of coal in parliament
during the middle of one of eastern Australia’s worst heatwaves.
Luckily he had Barnaby Joyce there to laugh. With a similar bro and brio
he dismissed the IPCC report while speaking to Alan Jones, saying he
wouldn’t be bound by its recommendations. His deputy, Michael McCormack,
declared the government would not change policy “just because somebody
might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow”.
Scott Morrison Brings Lump of Coal Into House of Representatives
That “some sort of report” – the findings of 91 of the world’s most
eminent climate change scientists surveying more than 6,000 studies of
the most recent research – didn’t trouble McCormack because he hadn’t
read the report. Neither had our environment minister, Melissa Price,
who told ABC radio the IPCC report, whatever the shared judgment of its
global expertise, was “drawing a long bow” by calling for an end to coal
by 2050.
But then, of course, this is the same government that offers total
political support for the Adani coalmine at a time when the IPCC says
coal must be phased out. This is the same government that granted $440m to a foundation that never asked for the cash,
to deal with water runoff and the crown-of-thorns starfish on the Great
Barrier Reef when the science is clear that climate change is what will
kill the reef.
We have shown that we are large, that we care, and that we think
And this is the same government that has no policies to meet
Australia’s commitments to the Paris climate agreement. This is the same
government that hides shameful greenhouse emissions reports showing our
pollution increasing by releasing them in the days before Christmas, without publicity.
And its leader, our prime minister, is the man who says that
“we’re doing well” when the government’s own figures show that our
pollution is increasing.
The Liberal candidate Dave Sharma echoes the same smug complacency of the Liberal government he expects to join next Monday.
“I do think we are doing enough,” Sharma has said, “and I do think we
have had a good record on climate change. Emissions are at their lowest
levels in 28 years,” he said. The evidence is otherwise: absolute
emissions continue to rise and are among the highest in the OECD.
Like our prime minister, who claims we will meet our Paris agreement targets “in a canter”,
Sharma says: “We are on track to meet the Paris commitments and I
believe we will address the Paris commitments and we will be addressing
affordability and sustainable and coherent energy policy.”
Sharma’s diplomatic wording cloaks the truth: the Liberal government
is the Aleppo of energy policy. It has none, only the shell-shocked
ruins of a once great party. As for the Paris climate targets, according
to consultants, NDEVR Environmental, Australia is on a trajectory that will see it fail to reach them.
In the face of such sustained stupidity by our leaders many Australians have felt an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.
But we should not.
If you are a Liberal voter, consider the voices of true conservatism and business
As the marriage equality vote showed, as the Sydney Opera House
controversy revealed, if we choose to exercise our power we discover
that we are not as we have so often been told, small and mean and
self-serving, cast in the shrivelled image of our politicians. To the
contrary, we have shown that we are large, that we care, and that we
think – and that when we dare to exercise it, that the power is ours.
In
evading their responsibilities on climate change, our politicians have
been irresponsible to the point of what would be, in any other sphere of
life, criminality.
If you are a Liberal voter, consider the voices of true conservatism and business.
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, recently warned “of
the catastrophic impacts that climate change could have for the world
financial system”.
“We accept the IPPC assessment of climate change and that human
influence is clear and that the physical impacts are unavoidable,” Jac
Nasser, the former chairman of BHP, the world’s biggest resource
company, declared, while Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google,
said: “The facts of climate change are not in question. People who
oppose it are hurting our children and making the world a worse place.
They’re just simply lying.” Listen to Fiona Simson, the president of the
National Farmers’ Federation, who has stated “We’ve turned a corner on
climate change … overwhelmingly, I think it’s got to a point where the
science is very acceptable.”
These are hardly the lunatic voices of the far left. It is clear that
the traditional constituencies of the Coalition, business and farmers,
support major action on climate change – as do the majority of
Australians according to all published research, as do the majority of
people in Wentworth.
Yet the government, from the prime minister down, dismisses the
issue. Indeed, both the government and Sharma, state that they are
“doing enough” on climate change.
The very phrase drips with the contempt of our political class for
Australian citizens who they take for passive fools, easily manipulated.
As with marriage equality we see a polity determined to do nothing.
Since 2013, the Coalition government in its various incarnations has
lied, laughed and destroyed when it comes to this most fundamental
matter: that of our future. Their record is one of deceit, obfuscation
and craven capitulation to the fossil fuel industry. It is a party that
has evaded its most fundamental responsibility to our land and our
people, and the time for a reckoning has arrived.
This Saturday, voters of Wentworth can lead Australia as they did in
the marriage equality survey. They can make the byelection a referendum
on climate change by voting the candidate they believe has the best
climate policy number 1, any who might have a reasonable policy from 2
to 15, and put Dave Sharma at 16.
“We
have presented governments with pretty hard choices,” Prof Jim Skea,
co-chairman of the IPCC panel has been quoted as saying. “We show it can
be done within laws of physics and chemistry. Then the final tick box
is political will.”
The most important thing a voter can do on election day is
demonstrate that this threat to our future must be our politicians’
number one priority, and give our politicians the political will to act
now.
There is so much beauty in this world. Sometimes it is hard to
believe this life that is given us. Sometimes it is hard to believe that
it is possible to change it for the better, or save it from the worst.
But from today we must, and we can.
If we take our compass from power we will know only despair. But if
we take our compass from those around us and their actions we discover
hope. It is time we rediscovered not partisan division but a common
humanity ready to take on our gravest crisis. It is time we acted, and
the Wentworth byelection is the first chance Australians have. Our tomorrows are running out. We have only today.
Australia's climate wars: a decade of dithering
*Richard Flanagan is the Man Booker prize winning Australian author *Businessman Geoff Cousins is a former Howard government adviser Links
NUALA MCGOVERN: The report contained particularly bad news for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, predicting that if the planet hits 2 degrees of warming instead, more than 99 per cent of the world’s coral will be wiped out. - Outside Source, BBC World News, 9 October, 2018
Hello, I’m Paul Barry, welcome to Media Watch.
And last week’s dramatic report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change really sounded the alarm on the future of our planet, with scientists predicting the Great Barrier Reef could be wiped out by 2050 if we don’t act to slow down global warming.
And you would have thought that would make big headlines in Australia, given the reef is on the World Heritage list, our largest tourist attraction and gives jobs to 60,000 people.
So what was front-page news in the local papers?
On Tuesday and Wednesday, News Corp’s Cairns Post had this. VIEW VIDEO
News Corp’s Townsville Bulletin had this. VIEW VIDEO
And News Corp’s Daily Mercury in Mackay had this. VIEW VIDEO
Inside the paper they all had something on climate, but typically only a few paragraphs and the reef barely got a mention.
Remarkable, eh?
But in News Corp’s tabloids around the country the story was the same.
Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph had a horse on its front page:
Get off ya high horse - The Daily Telegraph, 9 October, 2018
And, its only climate story was six paragraphs inside the paper about going nuclear. VIEW VIDEO
The Courier-Mail had this on the front, and the same small piece on nuclear power. VIEW VIDEO
And Melbourne’s Herald Sun had this on the front and nothing at all in its news pages about climate or the reef. VIEW VIDEO
So how could those News Corp papers all but ignore this huge story, which The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan and ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reckon is the media’s absolute duty to report?
The planet is on a fast path to destruction. The media must cover this like it’s the only story that matters - The Washington Post, 8 October, 2018
If voters are kept in the dark about global warming by newspapers then urgent action by democratic politicians becomes a hundred times harder - Twitter, @arusbridger, 2018
Back in Australia, News Corp’s columnists did think the IPCC warnings were worth noting, but only to ridicule the threat and the idea of doing anything about it, with Miranda Devine writing scornfully:
This week’s hysterical missive from the United Nation’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is just the latest case of the boy who cried wolf. - The Daily Telegraph, 10 October, 2018
So, is Miranda a scientist? No.
Nor is the Herald Sun’s Terry McCrann, who went off even harder, branding the threat to the Reef:
… emotional — and utterly dishonest — blackmail deployed by the IPCC climate hysterics of the grubby coalition of theological climate extremists and greedy money-chasing renewable energy rent-seekers; carpetbaggers and mainchancers all. - Herald Sun, 8 October, 2018
Quite a broadside.
To its credit, The Australian did give the IPCC front-page treatment, with Environment Editor Graham Lloyd running a couple of stories.
But within hours the paper’s columnists had switched to all-out attack, with Chris Kenny deriding the scientists’ warnings as “alarmism”, “virtue-signalling”, “sanctimony” and “crying wolf”.
And Judith Sloan joined the chorus of derision, by claiming that the IPCC report – written by 91 climate experts and citing 6000 peer-reviewed papers – was not science and all old hat.
More people being inundated, more floods/droughts … You know, the normal catastrophic stuff. - The Australian, 9 October, 2018
Meanwhile, Environment Editor Graham Lloyd – who should know better – had two swipes, declaring the scientists to be living in a parallel universe, and attempting to discredit the data on which the warnings were based:
Claims of 70 problems found with key temperature dataset used by climate models “The primary conclusion of the audit is the dataset shows exaggerated warming …” - The Australian, 8 October, 2018
Lloyd’s story mirrored identical attacks from leading climate sceptics the day before.
Led by James Delingpole, another non-scientist who says global warming is a scam, on the notorious alt-right website Breitbart:
Climate Bombshell: Global Warming Scare Is Based on ‘Careless and Amateur’ Data, Finds Audit - Breitbart, 7 October, 2018
And by Joanne Nova – who is a scientist, but says the world should thank Australia for its CO2 emissions – who claimed:
The IPCC demands for cash rest on freak data, empty fields, Fahrenheit temps recorded as Celsius, mistakes in longitude and latitude, brutal adjustments and even spelling errors. - JoanneNova.com, 7 October, 2018
All three attempted demolition jobs relied on data analyst Dr John McLean, whose work they all claimed showed the IPCC had got it hopelessly wrong.
So, who is McLean?
Well, let’s get another of his fans, One Nation’s climate expert, to introduce him:
MALCOLM ROBERTS: Hi, I’m Malcolm Roberts and I’m with Dr John McLean from Melbourne and he’s on Skype with us and he is 13 years in climate science … And he’s just conducted the first audit of the temperature database known as HadCRUT 4. - Facebook, Malcolm Roberts, 11 October, 2018
McLean’s audit of the data earned him a PhD from James Cook University in Townsville, where his supervisor was Peter Ridd, another well-known climate sceptic who was recently sacked.
So how good is McLean’s track record?
Well, seven years ago, he famously predicted:
It is likely that 2011 will be the coolest year since 1956, or even earlier - Climate Realists, 9 March, 2011
That was 100% wrong. According to NASA:
… the year was the 9th hottest in the past 130 years. - NASA, 20 January, 2012
A previous academic paper of McLean’s in 2009, claiming El Nino was responsible for most of the rise in global temperatures, was ripped apart by climate experts who accused him of cherry-picking the data.
His co-author then was yet another famous climate sceptic, the late Bob Carter, who liked to tell his admirer Alan Jones that man-made global warming was rubbish:
BOB CARTER: Well, there's only two words you can use to describe it - it's a farce and it's a circus. ALAN JONES: It is. BOB CARTER: And the sad thing about it is ... ALAN JONES: It's a lie. It's a lie. BOB CARTER: Yes, and because of the way it is pushed as you say, in the education system and in the news media, so many well-intentioned people have been sucked in. - The Alan Jones Breakfast Show, 2GB, 10 December, 2012
The work that backs up McLean’s new data audit is dedicated to Bob Carter.
So, is McLean to be believed ahead of 91 leading climate experts and 6000 peer-reviewed scientific papers when he claims the IPCC’s work is worthless?
The Australian, Breitbart, Joanne Nova and Miranda Devine clearly reckon he is.
And so does Alan Jones, who cited McLean last week in telling his listeners:
ALAN JONES: Don’t believe the global warming science is settled. It is corrupt. - The Alan Jones Breakfast Show, 2GB, 12 October, 2018
One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts is also convinced by McLean’s argument:
MALCOLM ROBERTS: So this is what is underpinning the UN’s climate scare, which is underpinning government policies in this country. What we need to do then John is pull out of Paris. JOHN MCLEAN: Yes, we certainly should be stepping right back and saying, hey, this data is crazy. Come back to us when we’ve got some, when you’ve got some decent data and a convincing argument. - Facebook, Malcolm Roberts, 11 October, 2018
But how convincing is John McLean? We asked a number of climate experts to review his audit.
Professor Steven Sherwood at NSW University’s Climate Change Research Centre told us it:
… turns up little if anything new … seems specifically motivated to discredit global warming ... - Professor Steven Sherwood, Email, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW, 12 October, 2018
And he added:
Its naive claims of alternative causes of global warming do not consider the relevant laws of physics and do not make sense. - Professor Steven Sherwood, Email, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW, 12 October, 2018
The ANU’s Nerilie Abram, lead author of a coming IPCC report on the oceans, told Media Watch:
Regardless of whether the PhD thesis work has any merit or not, the claim that this falsifies IPCC findings is wrong. - Associate Professor Nerilie Abram, Email, ANU, 12 October, 2018
And the UK Met Office was just as emphatic, putting McLean’s, quote, “70 problems” into context by pointing out that the HadCRUT dataset which it looks after:
… contains over 7 million points of data from in excess of 7500 observation stations on land around the globe, together with millions of measurements of sea-surface temperature. The small number of specific errors highlighted represent a tiny fraction of the data and as such are likely to have a negligible impact on the overall results. The long-term increase in global temperature is unequivocal. This is backed up by other globally recognised datasets, all of which are run independently, and find very similar warming.- Met Office, Email, 13 October, 2018
And that takes us back to the bigger picture, where the concern is that so much of News Corp treats climate science, and the threat to our planet, with such contempt.
Why is that so? Presumably, because Rupert Murdoch is a non-believer.
But sadly, it’s not new, and not just in Australia. Back in 2012, America’s Union of Concerned Scientists audited News Corp’s coverage in the US and concluded:
Representations of climate science on Fox News Channel and in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages are overwhelmingly misleading - Is News Corp Failing Science?, Union of Concerned Scientists, September, 2012
And it then gave examples of what that coverage contained:
… broad dismissals of human-caused climate change, rejections of climate science as a body of knowledge, and disparaging comments about individual scientists. Furthermore, much of this coverage denigrated climate science by either promoting distrust in scientists and scientific institutions or placing acceptance of climate change in an ideological, rather than fact-based, context.- Is News Corp Failing Science?, Union of Concerned Scientists, September, 2012
Six years later, the same determination to deny and denigrate climate science is flourishing in Australia.
And what makes it even more serious is that in Australia News Corp controls around 60 per cent of our daily newspaper circulation.
Not to mention a whole bunch of websites and of course Sky News which, for once, we have not even bothered to audit because we know too well what we’ll find.
And we should add we put a series of questions to John McLean. He declined to answer them. You can read the emails on our website.
Finding humor in climate change isn’t easy (trust us!). That’s especially true this week, when U.N. scientists handed the world a big, scary report saying we’re on the road to catastrophe and Hurricane Michael
carved a path of devastation through the Florida Panhandle. But Sarah
Silverman is up for the challenge. The comedian delivered a nine-minute
plea for climate action on Thursday in the latest episode of her Hulu
show I Love You, America.
“I know climate change is not the most exciting issue, and the media
knows it too, which is part of why it’s covered so infrequently,”
Silverman said. She pointed to MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes’ controversial tweet in which he said climate change is a “palpable ratings killer” for news shows and so “the incentives are not great.”
“You know what’s a great incentive?” Silverman asked. “We’re all gonna f*#&’ing die.”
“I feel compelled to use my platform to speak out,” Silverman said.
“Granted, my platform is on the third largest streaming network of
three, so it’s not so much shouting from the rooftops as like
complaining from an open mic at Panera Bread.”
Silverman covered a ton of ground in the segment, from scientists’
terrifying climate predictions to the “it’s a hoax” views of President
Trump, who she calls a “Fox News grandpa.” Here’s a clip of her
explaining how “absurdly rich and powerful people” are ruining the
planet for the rest of us (the full thing is on Hulu):
“The only option is that we react to this massive state of emergency
with massive action,” Silverman said. She brought up climate change on
her show last month, too, explaining the Trump administration’s rollback
of methane regulations.
Silverman isn’t the only comedian taking on climate change: Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah also came up with jokes about the scary U.N. report … somehow.
So are comedians good messengers for climate change? Perhaps! A study from earlier this year
found that humor, rather than fear or straightforward facts, got young
people the most excited about taking action on climate change.
After the panicky IPCC report on climate change, it’s easy for pessimism to set in – but that would be conceding defeat
Illustration: Nathalie Lees
In response to Monday’s release of the IPCC report on the climate crisis
– which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed if global
warming increases 1.5C beyond the pre-industrial period – a standup
comic I know posted this plaintive request on her Facebook: “Damn this
latest report about climate change is just terrifying. People that know a
lot about this stuff, is there anything to be potentially optimistic
about? I think this week I feel even worse than Nov 2016 and I’m really
trying to find some hope here.”
A bunch of her friends posted variations on “we’re doomed” and “it’s
hopeless,” which perhaps made them feel that they were in charge of one
thing in this overwhelming situation,
the facts. They weren’t, of course. They were letting understandable
grief at the news morph into an assumption that they know just how the
future is going to turn out. They don’t.
The future hasn’t already been decided. That is, climate change is an
inescapable present and future reality, but the point of the IPCC
report is that there is still a chance to seize the best-case scenario
rather than surrender to the worst. Natan Sharansky, who spent nine
years in a gulag for his work with Soviet dissident Andrei Sarkovsky,
recalls his mentor saying, “They want us to believe there’s no chance of
success. But whether or not there’s hope for change is not the
question. If you want to be a free person, you don’t stand up for human
rights because it will work, but because it is right. We must continue
living as decent people.” Right now living as decent people means every
one of us with resources taking serious climate action, or stepping up
what we’re already doing.
Climate action is human rights, because climate change affects the
most vulnerable first and hardest – it already has, with droughts,
fires, floods, crop failures. It affects the myriad species and habitats
that make this earth such an intricately beautiful place, from the
coral reefs to the caribou herds. What we’re deciding now is what life
will be like for the kids born this year who will be 82 in 2100, and
their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren. They will
curse the era that devastated the planet, and perhaps they’ll bless the
memory of those who tried to limit this destruction. The report says we
need to drop fossil fuel consumption by 45% by 2030, when these kids
will be 12. That’s a difficult but not impossible proposition.
The histories of change that have made me hopeful are often about small groups that seem at the outset unrealistic in their ambition
Taking action is the best way to live in conditions of crisis and
violation, for your spirit and your conscience as well as for society.
It’s entirely compatible with grief and horror; you can work to elect
climate heroes while being sad. There are no guarantees – but just as
Sakharov and Sharansky probably didn’t imagine that the Soviet Union
would dissolve itself in the early 1990s, so we can anticipate that we
don’t exactly know what will happen and how our actions will help shape
the future.
The histories of change that have made me hopeful are often about
small groups that seem at the outset unrealistic in their ambition.
Whether they were taking on slavery in antebellum USA or human rights in
the Soviet bloc, these movements grew exponentially and changed
consciousness and then toppled institutions or regimes. We also don’t
know what technological breakthroughs, large-scale social changes, or
catastrophic ecological feedback loops will shape the next 20 years.
Knowing that we don’t know isn’t grounds for confidence, but it is fuel
against despair, which is a form of certainty. This future is as
uncertain as it’s ever been.
There have been countless encouraging developments in the
global climate movement. The movement was small, fragmented, mild a
dozen years ago, and the climate recommendations then were mostly
polite, with too much change-your-lightbulbs focus on personal virtue.
But personal virtue only matters if it scales up (and even individual
acts depend on collective decisions – I have, for example, 100%
renewable electricity at home because other citizens pushed our amoral
power company to evolve, and it’s more feasible for me to ride a bike
because there are now bike lanes all over my city).
The
movement that has taken on pipelines and fuel trains, refineries and
shipping terminals, fracking and mountaintop removal, divestment and
finance, policy and law, and sometimes won is evidence of what can
happen in 12 years. Some of what were regarded as climate activists’
wild ideas and unreasonable demands are now policy and conventional
common sense. There are so many transformative projects under way from
local work to transition off fossil fuels, to the effort to stop
pipelines (with some major victories, including the one to stop the
Trans-Mountain pipeline, which won in court in late August), to the
lawsuit against the US government on behalf of 21 young people, charging
it with violating their rights and the public trust. The trial begins
on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon.
The other thing I find most encouraging and even a little
awe-inspiring is how profoundly the global energy landscape has already
changed in this century. At the beginning of the 21st century,
renewables were expensive, inefficient, infant technologies incapable of
meeting our energy needs. In a revolution at least as profound as the
industrial revolution, wind and solar engineering and manufacturing have
changed everything; we now have the technological capacity to largely
leave fossil fuel behind. It was not possible then; it is now. That is
stunning. And encouraging.
A child in flood-affected Bangladesh in 2017. What we’re deciding now is
what life will be like for the kids born this year who will be 82 in
2100. Photograph: Zakir Chowdhury/Barcroft Images
Astoundingly, 98% of the energy Costa Rica generates is from
non-fossil fuel sources. Scotland closed its last coal-fired power plant
two years ago and overall emissions there are half what they were in
1990. Texas is getting more of its energy from wind than from coal –
about a quarter on good days and half on a great day recently. Iowa
already gets more than a third of its energy from wind because wind is
already more cost-effective than fossil fuel, and more turbines are
being set up. Cities and states in the USA and elsewhere are setting
ambitious goals to reduce fossil fuel consumption or go entirely
renewable. Last month California committed to make its electricity 100%
carbon-free by 2045. There are stories like this from all over the world
that tell us a transition is already under way. They need to scale up
and speed up, but we are not starting from scratch today.
The IPCC report recommends urgent work on many fronts – from how we
produce food and to what use we put land (more forests) to how we
generate and use energy (and the unsexy business of energy efficiency
also matters). It describes four paths forward, three of which depend on
carbon-capturing technologies not yet realized, the fourth includes the
most radical reductions in fossil-fuel use and planting a lot of trees.
The major obstacles to this withdrawal are political, the fossil fuel
and energy corporations and the governments obscenely intertwined with
them. I called up Steve Kretzmann, the longtime director of the climate
policy-and-action group Oil Change International (on whose board I sit),
and he reflected on the two approaches to climate action – changing
consumption and changing production.
Going after production often gets neglected, and places like Alberta,
Canada, like to boast about their virtuous energy consumption projects
while their energy production – in Alberta’s case, the tar sands –
threatens the future of the planet. Addressing production means going
after some of the most powerful and ruthless corporations on earth and
the regimes that protect them and are rewarded by them – or, as with
Russia and Saudi Arabia and to some extent the US are indistinguishable
from them.
Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France and Costa Rica – are working on bans on new exploration and extraction
Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France and Costa Rica –
are already working on bans on new exploration and extractionSteve told
me, “We have to be real about this: this is the oil industry and wars
are fought over it. There’s a lot of political power here and there’s a
lot of people defending that power.” But he also noted, “The moment it’s
clear it’s inexorably on the wane, it will pop.” You can hasten the
popping by cutting the enormous subsidies, and by divesting from fossil
fuel corporations – to date the once-mocked divestment movement has
gotten $6tn withdrawn. As Damien Carrington reported for the Guardian
last month, “Major oil companies such as Shell have this year cited
divestment as a material risk to its business.”
We also need to shut down production directly, with a just transition
for workers in those sectors. Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New
Zealand, France and Costa Rica – are already working on bans on new
exploration and extraction, and the World Bank sent shockwaves around
the world last December when it announced that after 2019 it would no
longer finance oil and gas extraction.
Given that the clean energy comes with lots of jobs – and jobs that
don’t give people black lung and don’t poison surrounding communities –
there’s a lot of ancillary benefit. Fossil fuel is, even aside from the
carbon it pumps into the atmosphere, literally poison, from the mercury
that contaminates the air when coal is burned and the mountains of coal
ash residue to the toxic emissions and water contamination of fracking
and the sinister chemicals emitted by refineries to the smog from cars.
“Giving up” is often how fossil fuel is talked about, as though it’s
pure loss, but renouncing poison doesn’t have to be framed as sacrifice.
Part of the work we need to do is to imagine not only the devastation
of climate change, and the immense difference between 2 or 3 degrees of
warming and 1.5 degrees, but the benefits of making a transition from
fossil fuel. The fading away of the malevolent power of the oil
companies would be a profound transformation, politically as well as
ecologically.
I don’t know exactly if or how we’ll get to where we need to go, but I
know that we must set out better options with all the passion, power
and intelligence we have. A revolution is what we need, and we can begin
by imagining and demanding it and doing what we can to try to realize
it. Rather than waiting to see what happens, we can be what happens. And
by the way, the comedian I mentioned: she’s already organizing
fundraisers for climate groups.
With just 12 years left to tackle climate change, perhaps it’s time the Doctor made an intervention
Illustration by David Foldvari
Last week, there was really only one story. And it wasn’t that a children’s television science-fiction character,
who never reproduces or has sexual relations with anyone, is now played
by a human of a different gender than at any point previously. Despite
this, like all the other crying centrists, I wept hot snowflakes to
witness it happen in my lifetime.
And I couldn’t be happier that the Time Lady’s new companions include a black teenager with mild learning difficulties and a female Asian police officer. Predictably, The Chase’s
Bradley Walsh let the side down by being a straight white man. Though I
understand that in tonight’s episode Bradley Walsh reveals that, as a
result of unpredictable side-effects from his character’s chemotherapy
treatment, he now has both male and female genitalia, while a cloaca on
his left thigh also enables him to reproduce parthenogenetically,
although not without some discomfort.
Like the Zuni berdache,
Bradley Walsh will become an intergender priest-princess, an ambassador
between different dimensional realities, his engagements unencumbered
by a traditional sexual identity. Typical BBC! It’s political
correctness gone mad!! Nonetheless, the genitalia of fictional time
travellers wasn’t the week’s big story.
On Monday, scientists revealed
that we have only 12 years to put in place real strategies to combat
climate change before the future of all life on Earth is doomed. It has
taken our government more than two years to fail to agree that Brexit is
more difficult than David Davis’s proposed easiest thing in the world.
In the light of the progress of these negotiations, I don’t hold out
much hope for the survival of the Melton Mowbray pork pie, let alone the
continued existence of all the life on Earth.
But while climate change experts were once derided as cranks, a kind of environmental Flat Earth Society, finally their message is believed. And now the cranks are oil industry cheerleaders such as Nigel Lawson,
ranting outside the window like a Hogarth etching of some bawling
fictional aristocrat; Lord Entitlement Demands His Buttermilk Ramekin.
The definitive mass extinction bombshell held its position in the news chart for a few days and on Wednesday all four of the Guardian’s
page four stories covered the end of all life as we know it and related
fossil fuel consumption and rainforest obliteration news, shunting Adrian Searle’s review of the artist Anni Albers’s new abstract textiles exhibition all the way back to a humiliating page nine.
A further story, that the Dutch are developing robot bees
to pollinate the crops we need to survive after the now inevitable
insect apocalypse, ran on page 14, being five pages less important that
the textile display. I immediately began to worry that intelligent robot
bees would realise the best way to ensure the survival of the crops
they were programmed to nurture was to destroy the human race who were
poisoning the Earth. I wondered how me and my family would best survive
attack by millions of Dutch nano-bees. I began learning the phrase
“Robot bee, I am your friend” in as many Dutch dialects as I could
master: West Frisian, Papiamento, Low Saxon and Limburgish.
If the Doctor really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us? Photograph: Sophie Mutevilian/BBC
In other newspapers, we were back to business as usual. On the front page of Wednesday’s Sun,
the end of all life on Earth forgotten, it was revealed that a comedy
man had kissed a dancing lady behind an acting lady’s back. Really? As a
species, we don’t deserve to live. It’s just a shame we’re going to
take all the insects, animals and plants down with us. Unless we are
exterminated by robot bees.
The imminent extinction of all life on Earth exposes a logical hole in the Doctor Who
mythos. The Doctor loves to help humanity but as a time traveller she
must know that within a decade or so our whole race will be doomed. If
she really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us all from
ourselves? But by doing what exactly? Preventing Trump from weakening
the Paris accord last June? Exposing the 1970s oil companies that sat on climate change data
they knew would make their brands toxic in the short term? Or going
back to the dawn of time and preventing the clever troglodyte, Keith
Flintsparker, the first fire-starter, from dipping a dry twig into a
puddle of tar and flint-sparking it into fuel.
The 1975 Tom Baker Doctor Who story Genesis of the Hateweed
explores this conundrum. In it, the Doctor finds himself in the
laboratory where his future nemesis, the Hateweed, is being genetically
engineered into existence. He holds the spores over a nearby toilet and
eventually decides that flushing them down the bowl and destroying them
would constitute too great an intervention in the timeline. Nicholas
Parsons, in a rare serious role as the Hateweed’s creator, Anglias the
Weedseeder, watches him while eating a blue space pie, in an act of
defiant indifference.
In 1992, I worked with Baker on the BBC radio comedy series The Inexplicable Worlds of Patrick Nimmo
and I loved pumping Baker for behind-the-scenes Who stash. Baker told
me he had been professionally jealous of the popularity of the Hateweed
with female Doctor Who fans and had intended to change the
scene while filming by “throwing the fucking seeds into the toilet and
doing a massive, fast wee on them and shouting, ‘That’s pissed in their
chips!’ But Nicholas Parsons said, ‘You, Thomas Stewart Baker, are
drunk,’ and he said he would throw the space pie at me if I did a wee. I
said, ‘I may be drunk, but you are Nicholas Parsons and in the morning I
will be sober.’ We had a jolly good laugh and it was all forgotten over
a few jars.”
I share a personal trainer with Bradley Walsh and so I went to meet him in Doctor Who’s
Cardiff studios on Thursday and asked him if he thought the new Doctor
should intervene in the climate change catastrophe. Bradley Walsh, who
was patiently being fitted for multiple prosthetic genitals, both male
and female, and those of a bird, said he didn’t know.
