Despite repeated warnings

"Despite repeated warnings 

Of dangers up ahead

The captain won't be listening

To what's been said”

These are the first lines of Paul McCartney new song from his latest album. Listen to the words. Take them to your heart. Our political leaders have been warned. But they are not listening to the dangers of climate change.

The warnings have been clearly articulated for decades, with more strength for each passing year. For every IPCC report, for every research publication on the subject of climate change, the message has been more urgent. Still carbon emissions keep going up despite the promises made when the Paris accord was signed. Economy and endless growth is still allowed to rule over the physical world. 

There has been some comments that recent severe weather events like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Florence gives us a glimpse of the future. That is not true, they show us the present as bad as it is. The future will be much worse, how bad it'is not possible to say. Science can not yet tell us exactly when further temperature increase will result in vicious feedback cycles that will fundamentally destabilise our climate.

But by looking into the past, we can understand the future. The figure below describes the unknown era we are entering into in one graph. The red and blue lines shows carbon dioxide and temperature going up and down together as the planet has moved in and out of ice ages during many millennials. The correlation is clearly visible; as CO2 has varied between 180 and 280 ppm, the temperature has been about 4°C colder during ice ages as compared to present times. 

Atmospheric CO2 from Antarctic ice cores (Jouzel et al., 2007) and modern NOAA measurements, and global surface temperature change estimated from ocean core data of Zachos et al. (2001) using an approximation described in our ‘Climate Sensitivity’ paper for converting ocean core δ18O to surface temperature. 

On the far right end of the graph however, the time scale has been expanded to show what has happened during the last 150 years. Two things are bluntly obvious: The present rate of change in carbon dioxide level is far quicker than at any time during the last 800,000 years. And the temperature is lagging behind, which means that we have seen only a fraction of the warming that will happen if carbon dioxide continues to rise in the atmosphere. 

The sad fact is that no graph however convincing to the people who care about our collective future is enough to be a wake up call for those who pretend to be sleeping. Climate scientist have gone from concerned to engaged, even enraged at the lack of political will and action. They know that continued emissions will lead to meters of sea level rise, unpredictable conditions for agriculture and mass extinction of both plants and animals. That in turn will disrupt civilisation as we know it. 

In Sweden, the Conservative party leader is trying to form a new government after the recent parliamentary elections which gave a very complicated outcome, with no clear majority to back a new prime minister. During the election campaign he claimed to take the role of "the grown up in the debate”. Yet at no time has he talked about the climate crisis as a fundamental factor when forming a new government. He articulates no understating of the connection between his stated ambition to reduce immigration and the fact that continued climate change will drive hundred of millions of people from their homes. 

Instead of the so called grown ups, it has been from youth that we have received the call to action. Greta Thunberg is a 15 year old girl who in the lead-up to the election decided to go on strike from school. By sitting outside the Swedish parlament, she called attention to the bizarre situation that she was obliged to learn facts in school that our politicians choose to neglect. Her question was both simple and clear: “Why don’t we treat climate change as the crisis it is?” Greta was recently interviewed in the New Yorker by Masha Gessen who wrote "Thunberg is a voice of unaccommodating clarity".

There is a link between the (mostly male) leaders unwillingness to act on the climate threat and what we have seen during the recent process to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. What Kavanaugh demonstrated above all was his scorn towards the demand that he should to take responsibility for his actions. He very clearly felt entitled to drink, harass and abuse as much as he wanted as a youth, without it having any repercussions later in life. It was clear that he sees himself as belonging to a group of (again mostly) men who deem themselves superior to others, especially women. But the same attitude can also be seen in these groups in how they view nature, the environment and our climate. Trump and his accomplices demonstrate a total lack of comprehension why they should in any way restrict themselves for the sake of our common future. Risk of 4 C warming? Then we might as well burn some more coal! A business deal with an asbestos producer? Who cares about a little cancer?

The saying "Après moi, le déluge” by Louis XV clearly fits in with Trump and similar “leaders” who hold on to power and enrich themselves by degrading both society and nature. They are a clear threat, both directly and because they drain our energy and the resources we need to fight for a liveable climate. So should we give up? Absolutely not, instead we need to muster the courage to confront both the climate change deniers and the authoritarian tendencies in our time. Sweden is not the US and the struggle will look different in different parts of the world. "We should only lament our future if we lack the will to fight for it” writes David Rothkopf. Being a man, I can do my part, but I think a large part of the fight will need to be taken by all the women who have found their strength and anger during the last year. And by young people like Greta, who’s questions we must answer. 

It is time for our leaders to listen to the warnings. When the water starts to rise, there will be a reckoning time.

"Oh, but he should have listened 

To the will of the people"