16 year old Greta Thunberg: "I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is."
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| Thousands of young people gather in Parliament Square in central London to protest against the government's lack of action on climate change on February 15, 2019. |
For decades, the climate movement has suffered from a debilitating self-inflicted wound: the assumption that “we can’t tell the public the truth” about the urgency of the crisis, or the scale and speed of the necessary solution. Many climate scientists joined forces with professional “climate communicators” and corporate philanthropies to decree: Fear doesn’t work as a motivator! Only hope “works,” so let’s keep things positive and promote gradualist policies like carbon pricing! This counterproductive mentality is finally changing — and author David Wallace-Wells is a major part of the reason why.
In July 2017, David Wallace-Wells broke through the iron curtain of euphemism, optimism and gradualism, pulled no punches and told the truth with the publication of his article “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York Magazine. Wallace-Wells explored some of the worst-case scenarios of climate change in detail, making the potential nightmare of civilizational collapse and total destruction of our life-support system vivid and real for readers. No false optimism, only rigorous journalistic inquiry and true horror. Its publication caused an uproar amongst “climate communicators” — “You aren’t supposed to tell the whole truth,” they exclaimed — “it turns people off!” And yet people were not turned off. “The Uninhabitable Earth” became the most-read New York Magazine article in history, and was a key inflection point for the climate movement.
In his brand new book released this week, The Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming, Wallace-Wells has a chance to again transform, and critically, expand this conversation.
In his book, unlike his article, Wallace-Wells looks at the most likely outcomes. For example, Wallace-Wells describes how even the best-case scenarios for climate change will involve millions of deaths, and tens or hundreds of millions of refugees. We are looking at a “best-case outcome … death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts.” The book is grim but gripping; an encyclopedic but also narratively compelling exploration of the many ways that climate change will displace, flood, kill, starve, dehydrate and impoverish billions, while enabling the rise of “Climate Leviathan” authoritarian governments.
The facts are sobering: Humans are now adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere 10 times faster than during the Permian mass extinction, which tripped feedback loops that “ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead.” More than half of all greenhouse gas emissions, ever, have happened in just one generation — the past 30 years.
His startling analysis is at its strongest when reckoning directly with the physical and moral climate crisis, which is just beginning to unfold and may last for millennia. “We are not living in a new normal,” Wallace-Wells writes, “but a world that will never be normal again.” His work paints a chillingly clear picture of the speed and scale of the crisis, and of just how bad things will get at two degrees, three degrees, four degrees or more of warming.
Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/its-possible-to-face-climate-horrors-and-still-find-hope/
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