Bill McKibben: How Bad Is It?

Another excellent article written before Hurricane Ian. 

Bill McKibben writes: "I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story." 

YES, this is the truth! — Molly

Farmers carrying feed for their animals, yesterday in Balochistan province Pakistan

 How Bad Is It?

And what does that question even mean?

 

By Bill McKibben

I got a phone call last night, from a person I admire as much as anyone I know; she’s spent her life working, with great effectiveness, for a wide variety of progressive causes. I turn to her for guidance on dozens of questions. But last night she was turning to me, and with a simple, despairing question: “is it just all over for the climate?”

She’d been reading stories from the past week about the truly horrific flooding in Pakistan (watch this video, please—it’s the single best depiction I’ve seen of what the crisis feels like, and though it’s on CNN, the most mainstream of media, it does not shy away for a second from talking about the blame that falls on the global north for the climate crisis, and the need for reparations), and about the giant Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic retreating twice as fast as scientists had thought, and about a new study showing that even if we stopped emitting carbon now melting ice on Greenland would produce almost a foot of sea level rise. 

I heard from one of the co-authors of that study, Jason Box, a few days later. He sent me photos of a spot where we’d camped on the Greenland ice sheet a few years ago; he’d been back there over the weekend, he said, when his team had to decamp fast because an unprecedented melt was underway. September 1 is supposed to mark the end of the melt season on Greenland, but all of a sudden temperatures were soaring—above freezing even at the very summit of the ice sheet, which is almost always safely below zero. “While rushing down the ice sheet, we felt surprisingly warm pulses of air on our faces, like the Chinook winds I remember from Colorado,” he wrote. As a result of the anomalous warm weather, the Washington Post reported, As a result, “tens of billions of tons of ice were lost — an event that could further Greenland’s already significant contributions to rising sea levels.” As another researcher explained, “Greenland’s ice margin can’t tolerate the conditions that are becoming increasingly common for it. This event is typical of those destabilizing conditions.”

So. There’s an ongoing, sometimes acrid, debate in climate circles about ‘doomism’ versus ‘hopium,’ which I have no desire to join. (As usual, count me with Rebecca Solnit, who spends her time highlighting the fights we are winning: that seems to me entirely useful, because it motivates). I've been fighting this battle for so many years now that sometimes the largest-scale questions don’t even occur to me; but they occur to others, obviously, and they deserve answers. Given events like those of the past few weeks (I haven’t even mentioned what may be the most prolonged heatwave in human history that hit China this summer, nor the current raging heat in the American west) it is a fair question to ask: are we reaching the point where events are so far out of control that our efforts to stem the tide are pointless?

So let me just lay out my own sense, in case it’s helpful to anyone else. 

 

1.We are not getting out of this crisis unscathed, or anything like it. It’s been many years since “stopping global warming” was on the menu. We’ve raised the temperature a degree celsius already, and that’s way too much because—well, see above. A degree is a mess

2. It will get worse. Even if we do everything right at this point, there’s enough momentum in the system to take us near two degrees; that’s going to be far far worse. Not just twice as bad—damage increases exponentially, not linearly, as we head past various tipping points.

3. If we don’t do everything right, that “near to two degrees” will actually be nearer three degrees Celsius, which is five or six degrees Fahrenheit, which is a world where civilizations won’t be able to function in the ways we’re used to them functioning. That civilizational breakdown—a political and human phenomenon, not a scientific one—could come sooner; we don’t know where the civilizational red lines are, only that we’re close. 

4. Which means: despair is not an option yet, at least if it’s that kind of despair that leads to inaction. But desperation is an option—indeed, it’s required. We have to move hard and fast. 

5. The most obvious place we have to move is the energy transition. Physics means we have to go fast; economics means going fast will focus for now on sun, wind, and batteries because they are cheap and available. The fossil fuel industry, desperate to maintain its business model, is in the way; they must be fought.

6. But we also have to shore up civilizations in all the other ways we can imagine, especially by sharing resources and technologies. Our systems are too brittle now; places like Pakistan just lack the resilience to deal with a crisis they did not create. Global solidarity is not kindness; on a small world it’s a survival strategy.

I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story.

Please go here for the original article: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/how-bad-is-it