“We must,” António Guterres tells us, “end the merciless, relentless, senseless war on nature.” By this, of course, the UN secretary-general meant our unbroken quest to write a civilisation-scale suicide note as we continue, unperturbed, our unnatural and extreme chemistry experiment on the planet.
Unintentionally, though, his words summon one of the great delusions about global warming and our place in the world: that global heating is a crisis engulfing the natural world, as distinct from our own; that our very ingenuity as a species — our conquest of nature — coupled with nature’s seeming permanence inspires little scope for alarm; and that within this unhurried realm the price of continued prosperity justifiably remains tied, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese insists, to the ongoing burning and exports of fossil fuels.
Whether taken individually or together, each of these claims licenses a national deceit, and one that’s long served governments more liable to define the public interest in terms that correspond with the interests of the fossil-fuel sector rather than the people.
But as the world comes to grips with the lingua franca of global warming — where words such as “heat dome”, “pyrocene” and “five- or six-sigma event” enter common usage, and the meanings of others, such as “extreme”, “record-breaking” or “unprecedented” fade and recede in significance — it seems decidedly unlikely this deceit will survive the scrutiny of time, much less what paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber has dubbed the “killing fields” and “water wars” of our future.
Providing but a glimpse into this bend towards unheralded climate suffering lies the cacophony of preposterous, deadly heat that has menaced the northern hemisphere and the world’s oceans in recent months, along with the constellation of wildfires, gargantuan storms and mass flooding unleashed in its wake — some of it truly weird; some of it biblical in scope.
To the minds of some experts, these events loosely fall within the limits of what climate-change science has long predicted, while others have added that even if that’s so, their gravity is such that they lend themselves to an overwhelming vision of climate horror: “Many scientists knew these things would happen,” William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University told The Atlantic, “but we’re taken aback by the severity of the major changes we’re seeing.”
Speaking to the BBC, London School of Economics environmental geographer Thomas Smith was of a similar view, pointing out both the very ferocity of change and the uniform descent of “all parts of the climate system” into “record-breaking or abnormal territory” lacked an analogue in the vast sweep of earth’s history.
It bears emphasising these experts weren’t merely referencing the extreme weather of late, but so too the creeping fear or realisation that humanity, unbeknown to it, may have already triggered up to five climate tipping points, thereby rendering an abrupt and irreversible destabilisation of life as we know it all but certain.
So much, for instance, finds support in the spooky and unforeseen melting of Antarctic sea ice since April, where a mass of sea ice the size of Western Australia has mysteriously disappeared; the unnerving revelations last week that great tracts of the Greenland ice-sheet collapsed thousands of years ago in comparable or cooler conditions; and, not least, the startling slowing of deepwater formation in the Southern Ocean.
Beyond this research, some of which is speculative and novel, was more ominous news that the mighty North Atlantic current might not collapse well into next century, as previously predicted, but conversely within decades, or as early as 2025 — a spectre that would herald certain death and untold suffering for billions of people.
Seizing on this anthology of despair on Monday was the independent federal crossbench, led by Warringah MP Zali Steggall, which has jointly written to Albanese and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, calling on them to “urgently update” the country’s (criminally weak) climate policies.
The two-page letter, sighted by Crikey, echoes the UN’s concern that climate inaction has condemned the world to an “era of global boiling”, but pointedly notes that blame for this deepening predicament extends to the Albanese government.
“Despite the constant barrage of evidence that the world is warming at an unsustainable rate,” the letter states, “your government has to date failed to do enough to reduce emissions and address climate change … We call on the government to act with greater ambition and accelerate emissions reduction to respond to this growing crisis.
“There is no time to wait.”
On any view, this crescendo of urgency is perfectly coherent and rational. After all, the last time the world confronted comparable levels of atmospheric carbon was more than 3 million years ago during the far hotter Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were more than 30 metres higher, and giant camels patrolled the ice-free forests of the ancient arctic shoreline.
But what isn’t coherent, much less rational, is the notion peddled by some that plain-speaking about climate change from the promontory of the present moment is somehow churlish. That it constitutes a form of “doomism” that strays all too easily into ecological nihilism, or is otherwise unduly “alarmist”, “fatalistic” or “hyperbolic”.
Even more perverse is the idea that those who fully grasp and speak to the weight of the challenge are a force more dangerous than climate deniers by reason of their propensity to spread defeatism.
In reality, such criticism not only dangerously circumscribes the scope of what passes for reasonable discussion about global warming, but also plays directly into the narratives wielded by both outright climate deniers and more subtle climate deniers, such as Albanese, who have an interest in downplaying or ignoring the escalating crisis.
Consider the Albanese government’s signature climate policy, which permits fossil fuel projects to continue and expand under the guise of climate progress through the scam of carbon credits — a ploy described by experts as “environmental and taxpayer fraud” and possibly illegal.
Consider too his government’s underreporting of annual greenhouse gas pollution; its refusal to purge from the Climate Change Authority all those with links to the fossil-fuel industry; its multibillion-dollar investment in discredited, fossil-fuel appeasing technology, such as carbon capture storage; and how it’s employed green language to rebadge the highly contentious and irresponsible fossil-fuel projects, such as the Middle Arm gas development in Darwin harbour, as “sustainable development”.
Now turn your mind to Albanese’s international greenwashing, his unconcealed vassalage to the gas sector, his approval of yet more fossil-fuel projects, and not least his inane logic that we ought to keep exporting our so-called clean coal because if we did not, someone else would meet the demand.
This is the language and conduct of unreality — a profound deceit, if you like, freighted with naked political design. But in the given context it approaches something closer to multigenerational betrayal.
To deem plain-speaking on climate change a force designed to give way to climate determinism is naïve in the extreme. And to construe doomism as something that’s more liable to sow the seeds of defeat over change is misguided and short-sighted. Indeed — as the world’s leading climate scientist James Hansen recently put it — it’s to “persuade the darned fools” of the magnitude of the crisis and the corresponding need to act with speed. And by “darned fools”, Hansen expressly said he meant not just outright climate deniers but “those who pursue a wishful thinking policy approach”.
It’s probably only then — at the moment when people everywhere become suitably gripped with alarm and when this alarmism is brought to bear on government — that we might finally begin see a shift in approach. And one that extends to the source of what lends ecological grief its fullest expression today: the known unknowns that surround large and, in many instances, untraceable political donations from the fossil-fuel sector and, not least, the revolving door that’s long subsisted between lobbyists and politicians.
Doomism, from this vantage point, owes its existence at least as much to the shameless willingness of government to surrender our futures for short-term political gain as it does the grim realities of palaeontology.
And so this is it: absent a radical shift in sentiment and action, the world will continue its onward march towards 4 and up to 8 degrees warming by century’s end, assuming the accuracy of the latest IPCC report, beyond which today’s intuitions of utter hopelessness will look Panglossian by comparison.
The only comfort, and it’s a dark one, is that the pace of change is such that the likes of Albanese and all those who follow his lead will not be spared the terrible grandeur this waking nightmare evokes, much less the judgment of history.
