{"id":138614,"date":"2019-07-29T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=138614"},"modified":"2019-08-12T10:16:34","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T09:16:34","slug":"all-the-news-is-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/07\/all-the-news-is-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"All the News Is Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future<\/em><\/strong> by David Wallace-Wells,<\/a> Allen Lane, 320\u00a0pp, Feb 2019<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1 Aug 2019 – How long do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: \u2018It\u2019s worse, much worse, than you think.\u2019 All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale. Transformations that will have consequences for thousands of years to come are already being expressed in sudden crises that spring up overnight. The changes are at once planetary and minute, affecting everything from the earth\u2019s variable ability to reflect light from the sun to the microbes inside your body. Everything, it seems, is dissolving.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s focus is on the most direct effects of global warming \u2013 hotter temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather and so on \u2013 as well as what these effects mean for humanity. Wallace-Wells leaves out much of our disastrous impact on the natural world. He doesn\u2019t dwell on biodiversity loss, for instance, or the details of the mass extinction that we are by all accounts now living through, though he reminds us that of the five previous mass extinctions, only the most recent was caused by an asteroid. What was responsible for the other four? \u2018Climate change produced by greenhouse gas.\u2019 The deadliest occurred 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when 96 per cent of life on earth was wiped out. High levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led to around 5\u00b0C of warming, which in turn triggered the release of methane \u2013 a much more powerful greenhouse gas \u2013 and possibly highly toxic and ozone-destroying hydrogen sulphide, produced by the anaerobic green sulphur bacteria that began to thrive in the warm oceans. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate \u2018considerably faster\u2019 than it took to cause this near-total erasure of complex life. \u2018By most estimates,\u2019 Wallace-Wells writes, \u2018at least ten times faster.\u2019 We may not be at anything like end-Permian levels yet, but the parallels are clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that if emissions continue to rise at the current rate, the earth could experience as much as 4.5\u00b0C of warming by 2100. Permafrost in the Arctic is already melting, with the potential to release large quantities of methane, while the hydrogen sulphide that is thought to have \u2018capped the end-Permian extinction, once all the feedback loops had been triggered\u2019, is currently \u2018bubbling out of the sea\u2019 along a thousand-mile stretch of the Namibian coast, where green sulphur bacteria have caused a vast oceanic dead zone, devoid of oxygen and life.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s by no means the only one. There are now more than four hundred such dead zones in the world\u2019s oceans, totalling an area the size of Europe. Most cluster around cities and river mouths, where the combination of warming waters, sewage pollution and fertiliser run-off causes blooms of algae whose decay leaches oxygen from the water. Others are caused by upwellings of the green sulphur bacteria, which has survived from a primordial planetary era before oxygen, waiting in the deep ocean for a chance to turn the seas back into a toxic microbial stew. Warmer seas and the subsequent changes to ocean currents mean their chance may be coming. The Baltic Sea now contains a layer of anoxic water all year round; the Gulf of Mexico dead zone is nine thousand square miles in size; it\u2019s possible that the recently discovered dead zone in the Arabian Sea is large enough to consume the entire Gulf of Oman. Dead zones are examined briefly by Wallace-Wells in a chapter called \u2018Dying Oceans\u2019; only briefly, because he also has to consider ocean acidification, ocean warming, coral bleaching and the attendant die-offs of ocean life, as well as the slowing and potential failure of the Gulf Stream and other currents whose movements are intimately tied to regional climate. Should this last come to pass, the results would be \u2018inconceivably catastrophic\u2019. The Gulf Stream has already slowed by 15 per cent, something which hasn\u2019t happened for at least a thousand years. A paper from 2018 suggests that the vast ocean circulation current is moving at its slowest rate for 1500 years. According to most global warming scenarios, this wasn\u2019t supposed to happen for another hundred years.<\/p>\n

\u2018Dying Oceans\u2019 is one of 12 chapters discussing what Wallace-Wells calls the \u2018elements of chaos\u2019. Each is dedicated to a particular aspect of what we can expect in a warming world, from simple increases in temperature to crop failure, freshwater shortages, and violent and unpredictable weather, as well as secondary features such as greater migration and an increased incidence of wars. The US military is \u2018obsessed with climate change\u2019, Wallace-Wells writes, and the Pentagon is actively \u2018planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming\u2019. They are not alone in thinking this way. The Chinese government is responding to the anticipated loss of military and naval bases in the rising Pacific by creating militarised artificial islands in the South China Sea, \u2018a dry run, so to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world\u2019. A new era of geopolitical contest looms, and it sounds like science fiction: end-time resource wars on a dying planet.<\/p>\n

The Uninhabitable Earth<\/em> is an example of the class of writing the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has described as \u2018ecological information data dump\u2019: quantities of frightening and confusing information, mostly out of date by the time of publication, \u2018shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing facts\u2019. Morton believes this approach is unhelpful, and that it is essentially a symptom of the diffuse psychological pain caused by climate change \u2013 an attempt to prepare us for what has in fact already happened. And most of what Wallace-Wells describes has already happened. The phenomena he documents in the first part of the book are not hypothetical outcomes or doomsday prophecies: they are accounts of real events.<\/p>\n

Take wildfires. Wallace-Wells concentrates on California, which has always been susceptible to burning. In 2017, more than nine thousand separate wildfires were recorded, including five of the twenty worst ever recorded in the state. Two thousand square miles burned. A similar area was destroyed again in 2018 by six thousand fires, among them a giant network called the \u2018Mendocino Complex\u2019, which blazed across four counties between July and September. It grew to be bigger than New York, destroying almost half a million acres of land. Wildfires now burn twice as much land per year in the US as they did fifty years ago, and that figure is expected to double again by 2050 to twenty million acres per year. \u2018For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple.\u2019 This isn\u2019t just an American problem, of course: in Greenland ten times more land than usual was lost to wildfires in 2017; in 2018, Swedish forests within the Arctic Circle succumbed to fires of unprecedented size. Wildfires in Greece killed more than a hundred people during the European heatwave of 2018, the sixth highest direct death toll in the last century. A hundred thousand fires burned across the Amazon during 2017.<\/p>\n

Like everything else that happens within a responsive and interconnected ecological system, fires contribute to cumulative processes. Soot and ash from boreal fires blacken the northern ice sheets, which then absorb more solar heat and melt faster. Denuded hillsides increase the likelihood of disasters such as flooding and landslides (thousands were evacuated and many killed in the mudslides that followed the 2017 California fires). Burning forests release vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. One major wildfire in California can set the emission gains of the entire state back to zero for the year, making \u2018a mockery of the technocratic, meliorist approach to emissions reduction\u2019. Recent news reports suggest that Arctic wildfires have released as much carbon dioxide in the last month as Sweden does in the course of a year.<\/p>\n

The loss of forests to fire adds to the general disaster of worldwide deforestation, a major cause of increasing carbon emissions. It is estimated that, at current rates, tropical deforestation would produce a further 1.5\u00b0C of warming, even if emissions from fossil fuels stopped tomorrow. The loss of forest resulting from Jair Bolsonaro\u2019s policy of opening the Amazon to \u2018development\u2019 could add 13.2 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere before 2030, the equivalent of almost a year\u2019s worth of Chinese and American emissions. (Given what we now know about the consequences of unabated emissions, perhaps acts of such destructive magnitude should be recognised as a special kind of international crime.)<\/p>\n

As the unprecedented disasters, terrifying statistics and nightmare scenarios continue to mount, the links between them multiply in tangled profusion. Climate scientists refer to \u2018systems crises\u2019, Wallace-Wells to \u2018cascades\u2019: tumbling sequences of events connected within a dynamic chaos of feedback loops, amplification and reinforcement. \u2018Complexity is how warming articulates its brutality,\u2019 as Wallace-Wells puts it. Most of the known feedback mechanisms look as though they will trigger even more warming. One of the key variables complicating climate forecasts is how much more carbon we will pump into the atmosphere. On that count too, the reports are dismal. Only seven of the 195 signatories to the 2016 Paris Agreement are \u2018in range\u2019 of their carbon emissions pledges. Even if every country was to keep to its target, this could still deliver more than 3\u00b0C of warming (not given to understatement, Wallace-Wells says this would \u2018unleash suffering beyond anything humans have ever experienced\u2019). The agreed \u2018must-meet target\u2019 in 2016 was 2\u00b0C, a level which will anyway almost certainly be enough to cause the collapse of the polar ice sheets, and the attainment of which is now regarded as improbable without the massive implementation of carbon capture technology, a technology that does not exist on any meaningful scale. (Nature<\/em> has dismissed global warming projections based on carbon capture and storage as \u2018magical thinking\u2019.) Some estimates suggest that to keep warming below the agreed 2\u00b0C using existing technology would require ten new carbon capture plants to open every week for seventy years. There are currently 18 plants worldwide. And since the Paris Agreement, overall emissions have risen. The World Bank predicts that there will be 140 million climate refugees by 2050; the UN thinks it might be more like 200 million, or even, in the worst-case scenario, a billion. The poorest countries, which have caused least pollution, will bear the brunt of the suffering, and already do.<\/p>\n

\u2018We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place,\u2019 Wallace-Wells writes, \u2018in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human civilisation, is now, like a parent, dead.\u2019 He is not a climate scientist, so is perhaps less circumspect than he might be: the data here is designed to scare us. \u2018I am alarmed,\u2019 he writes. Who isn\u2019t? We know exactly where we are, despite the continuous chatter of doubt and denial. Wallace-Wells is scathing about the oil industry, whose disinformation clogs public discourse and waylays political processes: \u2018A more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world.\u2019<\/p>\n

How on earth are we supposed to think about all this horror? How do we plan for the future or raise children knowing what we know? The magnitude and implications of climate change short-circuit the imagination. Wallace-Wells cites the novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has suggested that we fail to put climate change into proper perspective because we don\u2019t yet have the stories to comprehend it. Even the refrains \u2018by 2100\u2019 or \u2018by 2050\u2019 seem more like magic charms, pushing the disaster into an infinitely receding future. Faced with a planetary-scale crisis that requires urgent collective action, contemporary minds and institutions are left embarrassingly exposed: imagining the necessary change within our political cycles, even our lifespan, appears to be an impossible leap.<\/p>\n

What will real action look like, if and when it finally comes? Wallace-Wells reminds us that we have the tools to change things, and even \u2013 a rare moment of optimism \u2013 \u2018to stop it all\u2019. His remedy involves \u2018a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.\u2019 But whether the changes that are already underway could be stopped by such measures is presently moot: \u2018We \u2026 haven\u2019t yet discovered the political will, economic might and cultural flexibility to install and activate them.\u2019 Depressingly, it could have been so much easier. If decarbonisation had started in 2000, only a 3 per cent annual emissions reduction would have been necessary to keep us below 2\u00b0C of warming. The figure now is 10 per cent per year. If we wait until 2030, it will be 30 per cent. The UN secretary general, Ant\u00f3nio Guterres, believes there is only one year left in which to begin this reduction. The IPCC says that global mobilisation on the scale of the Second World War will be necessary.<\/p>\n

Many people, especially the young, have seen enough; like Wallace-Wells, they demand that others, especially those with the power to act, start to respond too. The pepper-spraying of Extinction Rebellion protesters in Paris in June and the claim by the former head of British counterterrorism that the group represents \u2018anarchism with a smile\u2019 illustrate how climate-related action by the public is likely to be handled, even by ostensibly liberal governments. State security services and corporate interests long ago classified environmental groups as a threat; they will not be quick to recast them as the vanguard of planetary salvation. Reporting on the environment is second only to reporting from war zones in terms of the number of journalists killed, attacked or threatened. Talk of a \u2018Green New Deal\u2019 and similar policies still belongs to political factions and activist groups, when everything we know about climate change suggests it should be the global first order of business. It may be symbolically significant for the UK government to declare a \u2018climate emergency\u2019, but what is urgently needed are vast, co-ordinated programmes of decarbonisation. The old certainties no longer apply. We are on an alien planet.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 lrb.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How long do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: \u2018It\u2019s worse, much worse, than you think.\u2019 All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, he paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale. –>The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells, Allen Lane, 320 pp, Feb 2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,61,67],"tags":[686,401,1175,993,112,870,126,118],"class_list":["post-138614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-environment","category-reviews","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-extinction","tag-global-warming","tag-pentagon","tag-reviews","tag-violence","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}