On being a dystopian optimist

Between hope and despair; that is where I often find myself, between what I believe is necessary and hope can be done to solve our climate crisis on one hand and observing our societal reticence and inertia on the other. I will try to convey to you my ambiguous state of mind.

I know A LOT about climate change and climate science. Although trained as a scientist, I must admit that this is not my primary scientific area. But for a very long time I have followed what researchers and other professionals have written about the subject. I have read reports and papers from academic journals, listened to lectures and podcasts, watched movies and videos online; really trying to become as knowledgeable as possible regarding this subject. And since many years I am also fully convinced that global warming and climate change is occurring, is caused by our emissions of greenhouse gases, is increasing in speed and severity and will create havoc if we stay on the path we are on. I will write more on the science in a later post. 

For a long time I also thought that if I just knew enough, if this knowledge was told and presented using the very best Powerpoint slides, then the scales would fall from peoples eyes and they would embrace the science and action would follow. Alas, how wrong you can be…

With time and from many a bad experience, I started to understand that relying on information will not bring understanding and subsequent action from someone who has not yet understood the concepts of climate change. I have in vain been firing away articles, links, graphs and small lectures, sometimes pompous I must admit, totally focusing on me as a sender and becoming annoyed that the receiver did not understand. 

It is not that I consider myself a bad lecturer; I have often been quite successful when giving talks in other areas. But climate change is a wicked problem. Not wicked in the meaning of evil, but wicked in the respect that to avoid unclear problems in the future, we need to take action now that will make our life’s a bit more complicated, costly and constrained.

The problem is that climate change is long-term, uncertain, unequally distributed across time and geography, disconnected in time and scale from the actions causing it. Even when it produces acute catastrophe — flooding, drought, storms — the link between cause and effect is loose and can be obscured by the regular and annual phenomena of weather. On the other hand, the required changes are more or less permanent. And there’s no real precedent, either.

So how are we are going to get insight and action enough in time to avoid the most painful consequences of climate change, to avoid creating a situation with a 4°C warmer world which, as Kevin Anderson writes, “is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation,’ is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

My experience has lead me to the words awareness, connection and hope. Or rather in another order, connection, awareness and hope.

First we need connection. We need to personally connect to the effects that climate change will have on myself, my children and friends, people and places I hold dear. Without connection the message will not be received. This is something taught in marketing, but is something hardly known in the research community. And the scientists have failed to make their message resonate with some of the most important communicators in today’s society, media and politicians. And in the latter group, we have yet to see the contours and moment of a Winston Churchill in the climate change debate, who dare say what he said in 1936: ”The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”

Come connection, awareness can follow. An open mind has the ability to learn and change. And there is so much we can do now, right now, to lessen the burden on the future. I will write more on that subject later.

The third element, hope, is also very much needed because the battle with climate change will be long and hard. But hope is very personal. Knowing what I know, can I be individually hopeful, embracing change and new ventures, looking for possibilities in love, life and profession while still being fundamentally pessimistic about our collective future? On the other hand, if I start to despair in my private and individual life, there is little chance that I can be a messenger of any kind of positive action. “Nobody loves you when you are down and out” as John Lennon stated it. This holds true in both private and public life.

Hope is also cultural and societal. How do we, together, create hope? What ties us together, unites us and makes us do the seemingly impossible? Should we hope for the next generation, as these bold students in the US, interviewed in Grist?

And yet I can’t deny these young people their right — and privilege — to act on conscience and to struggle nonviolently, against seemingly immutable forces, for their future (and, yes, my own children’s future). Their analysis of the political situation is painfully accurate: at this late hour to be serious about the climate crisis — and what science demands — is to be radical. Sometimes I wonder if young people like these are the only ones in this country with the guts and maturity to accept what that means.

  

Or rather, given their example, what excuse do I have not to strive for connection, seek awareness and continue to bring hope to a cause that will determine the life of my children?