We should be scared—thoroughly—with the scenarios spelled out in the UN’s latest climate report. Fortunately, the press is covering it fairly well, so you probably have heard at least a few of the warnings of extreme weather, sea level rise, Arctic sea ice loss, fires, floods, heat waves, and monumental impacts on nature. What’s worse, the time frame to avoid warming of 1.5C, the world’s aspirational goal, is short indeed and would require unprecedented worldwide action that seems unlikely at best. Scary indeed! Yet, I saw the report as primarily a call to action.
Unprecedented changes needed at an unprecedented rate. A good friend, Andrew Jones, and his colleague Auden Schendler penned an excellent New York Times op-ed well worth reading that starkly illustrated the challenges we face. Jones’s Climate Interactive works with political and climate leaders across the globe to project the effectiveness of various emission scenarios and pledges on future climate, and Schendler works with Aspen SkiCo on sustainability and climate. On keeping below 1.5C of rise, they warn that “we’re going to have to really want it, and even then it will be tough.” Specifically, “To have a prayer of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we would need to leave most of the remaining coal, oil and gas underground.”
1.5C versus 2C is the real message: While many headlines reflected the catastrophic nature of the warnings, the real message, as I saw it, was a call to action to avoid a warming of 2C. By contrasting impacts at 1.5 with 2C, the scientists ticked down the list of how much worse those impacts would be. I must admit that the one that stopped me cold, was the IPCC statement that “Coral reefs, for example, are projected to decline by a further 70–90% at 1.5°C (high confidence) with larger losses (>99%) at 2°C (very high confidence).” I would admit that avoiding 1.5C appears extremely unlikely, and we will most likely need to live with those impacts for a long, long time, but all that’s at stake if we don’t avoid 2C should convince us that we must commit to unprecedented actions, and do it now.
What do we mean by winning, solving, or fixing it? As Jones and Schendler point out, we would be wise to drop the “American focus on destination over journey”, and think more about “the right way to live” than winning. I’d say we need to resign ourselves to a life-long (probably civilization-long) struggle to protect, restore, and improve our world with no expectation of ever being able to let down our guard. Given all the problems we humans seem to be able to generate and all that we love that would be otherwise at risk, I think that is a naturally human—and noble—calling. With this climate crisis—and the closely linked biodiversity crisis—we need to adjust to this better way of living mighty fast.
Cliffs versus minefields: Admittedly, we need targets—1.5 and 2C may yield to 3 or even 4C—but avoiding any one of them is not a “win” in the larger scheme of things. Likewise, as renowned climate scientist, Michael Mann points out, crossing any one of those thresholds is not like falling off a cliff, but entering a new minefield, with unknown dangers and tipping points. Mann and other scientists continue to see the IPCC being too conservative in several key ways and not warning the public of some pending tipping points, potential feedbacks, and other unknowns—the minefield we are in even now.
Surprises go both ways: We have had our share of climate surprises lately—case after case of changes happening even faster than scientists have expected. This may be partly due to the inherent tendency of scientists to be conservative in their public statements, but it also stems from the fact that we just can’t know everything, that even seemingly unlikely things do happen. But there can be some good surprises, and that keeps me hoping. I am looking for some good news in the climate science—maybe clouds or some unknown helpful feedback mechanism, but where the wild cards really are is in society’s responses. We have had some welcome surprises—the fall of the Berlin Wall, medical breakthroughs, wilderness protection against all odds, the ratcheting back of the Cold War nuclear tensions (let’s keep working on that)—that give me some refreshing hope, what I call possibilism.
Preparing for hard times—with fairness, care, and compassion: For all the adaptation strategies out there for increasing the resilience of our coastal cities, agriculture, economy, and the like, I see the greatest need being increased care and compassion for those least responsible for climate change and often the most vulnerable to its impacts—both the underprivileged people around the globe as well as the natural world itself. Before we start feeling sorry for ourselves as climate changes ratchet up here, we need to recognize that many impacts will be most acutely felt and felt earlier by those (human and otherwise) with the least ability to absorb those impacts. Besides the immorality of this situation, from a selfish point of view, those of us in affluent countries may well be affected by climate-induced global societal unrest well before our beach homes are flooded and ski areas browned. We must replace our ability and tendency to let the less privileged suffer with a greater sense of compassion and fairness. (Think immigration to begin with.)
So what about food??? Jones and Schendler speak of the role of “practice”, or traditions, or simply habits in guiding us in making our life both useful and rewarding. What better way to start than by making the food choices we make—three times a day—part of the solution. How we grow, chose, buy, and enjoy our food can directly address carbon emissions and sequestration at home and across the globe. It can be a means of deliberately increasing our care for others and the planet—with fairness, caring, and compassion. It can inform our political choices in the voting booth (voting with ballots and our food dollars). It can open our eyes to how we impact and depend upon nature as we provide for ourselves. It can inspire us to address climate—between meals—in the rest of our daily lives. It can help improve—as a multisolving tool—our health, our local economy and agriculture, our communities, as well as our climate. It can be a way of starting on that journey, that right path, toward a better world for us, other-than-us, and the future.
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