The sky is clearing

Living near the coast, you get used to ever changing weather. Rain and hail in the morning, overcast while walking to work, rain again at lunch and then a sunny evening turning into a breezy night with stars abundant on the clear fall sky. An occasional falling star draws a quick line against the darkness and I find myself wishing….

Fall is here, a time of harvest and reflection. While we may loathe the coming of winter in a few months, in nature this is a period of reloading and soon resting. In contrast, we as humans prefer resting in the sun, but now summer is over. And it was a fantastic summer in Sweden. We have enjoyed sunny and hot days, spent long warm evenings with friends. Colleagues came back from their vacations looking tanned and fit, rested and relaxed. This was a summer to remember.

Yes, remember it we should, but also for memories less evident than basking in the sun. To me, this summer was almost schizophrenic in the dual messages it delivered. We benefitted from heat records while splashing at the beachside, but other signs were close at hand. A large forest fire scorched central Sweden and could only be controlled with international help from water dumping aircrafts. In other parts of our country, extreme downpour flooded streets and villages, submerging cars and creating havoc in traffic. But one word was conspicuously absent in the news reporting; connecting the dots between weather and climate.

If we raise our glance just a little bit we would also see ominous signs all around. Yet another summer of quickly melting Arctic ice and down south, the first signs of irrevocable collapse of the ice fields of West Antarctica. The vulnerability of Greenland was demonstrated by the Dark Snow project.  Rising sea levels will have a detrimental effect on future food availability, while in other parts of the world; drought is already impacting food production.

In addition to the bad signals from nature, societies were falling apart from internal and external conflicts all around us. An unexpected (or maybe not) war in Ukraine, the unresolved civil war in Syria restarting the conflict in Iraq and of course the ever-continuing Israeli bombardments of Gaza. On top of that, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is slowly spiralling out of control.

Climate and conflict, disease and religion, resource scarcity and poverty; all these factors are intertwined in a increasingly malevolent dance. In Sweden, we receive many refugees from Syria, a country that has collapsed into a civil war with appalling suffering. Of course they need our help! But what few people know is that the basis of the disaster was drought, partly due to climate change. The drought caused agriculture to collapse, while people received no help from an ignorant government, leading to depopulation of the countryside as people were forced into poverty and poor conditions in the cities. The powder keg was created; it took only a spark ...

What lies ahead? Recent reports from the well-known “fringe” organisation such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank have all had the same message. On our current trajectory of not doing very much to mitigate climate change, we are on a fast track to a world more than 4°C warmer than the pre-industrial average. So far, we have increased the temperature about 0.8°C and that has already led to major problems. A four-degree world, states among others Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall institute, is not compatible with an organised society….

Change is inevitable. Naomi Klein writes it in her new book “This changes everything”; either we change our behaviour and thus also how large parts of our economic system function or the natural world will change and degrade our societies beyond recognition.

It is a task so grand that it is hard to know where to start. As I have previously written, I oscillate between optimism and dystopia. But recently I have become slightly more optimistic. No, I don’t see any quick fixes or technology that will save our day and let us move on with our easy lives. What I see is hope from real people organising and working together.

Last weekend, the biggest ever climate demonstration was held in New York. More than 300,000 people, form all countries, ages, ethnicities and background marched in the common belief that it was due time to send a message to politician and world leaders gathered at the UN. And the message was clear; the time for procrastination is over and the time for action has come.

Our less grand but no less important contribution, “Climate Call Göteborg” was made possible by a small group of people of different age, gender and background. We joined together to create our local participation in the emerging global movement. And while we were not many thousand, we formed a green heart; a picture that was then sent to and showed in New York. Had we not joined together this would not have happened.

I have spent the day by the sea. When looking at the endless waves passing by I know that this is essentially the same view I have watched all of my life. That is a soothing thought; the sea looks the same from distance. Still, I know there is a change also in the ocean. Carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly acidifying the seawater. This, together with overfishing and nutrient overload is changing the ocean to something murky and filled with slime, more jelly than fish. In addition, our consumer society is rapidly filling the ocean with plastics of all sorts. And the sky I was watching last night, was it as clear as in my youth? On this abnormally warm September weekend, will the increasing water vapour in the warming sky make the stars more vague and flickering?

It is hard to accept but the nature I grew up with is slipping away. Therefore, it is time to fight for what we have. It to late to just preserve, we need to prepare, to be resilient. That is a BIG difference from both laissez-faire and giving up. All actions are needed and that is why the last weeks work with Climate Call was both fun and a morale booster, showing that “Yes we can” not by declarations from above but by joining together.

Climate change, racism and misogyny to name a few are things we must work against. But we need to do more than that. We need also to redefine our vision and from that our mission. We need personal responsibility but we cannot do it on our own. Even Sweden as a rich country could not solve a single forest fire on our own. United we stand.

We need also to fight back against those who claim that our role and our actions are negligible, that what we do makes no difference. In Sweden we will be among the least affected by climate change. But our role is not to sit back and watch in perceived but false safety. Our role is to participate and be active, as individuals, organisations, companies and country.

How? I’ll be back!