Deniers, delayers, debate and democracy

When it comes to climate change, debating climate deniers is seldom worth the effort. They will stick to their talking points, won’t listen to arguments and are not interested in understanding climate science. And you can count on that sooner or later they will turn to invectives and name calling. Still, when a self proclaimed expert on tennis bookmaking makes aggressive statements on the “fake climate science” it’s a bit too much to swallow, even if responding to him is more taking a stand than for a moment believing that I can influence his views. 

Delayers on the other hand are more complicated to handle and they tend to come in many varieties. One of these persons claimed to be a “climate realists” but immediately resorted to calling Greta Thunberg a tool of the "communist elites". He must be a very scared person. 

But it is clear that Greta Thunberg has caused a lot of anxiety among the people with vested interest in fossil fuels and status quo. As this article on “What we need to do the next 18 months" by Matt McGrath points out: 

And it is not only Greta, she has many fellow activists and followers all over the globe, especially among other young girls and women. These activists have found their voice, are demanding real actions and are taking on a heavy burden to ensure that they will have a liveable future. We should do everything we can to support them!

This brings me to another example of the kind of climate delay that comes from people who claim to know better. In a recent Op-Ed in NY Times, Christopher Caldwell was ranting about Greta Thunberg as a threat to democracy, while he proposed more wait and see as a climate “strategy”. 

His piece has been thoroughly taken apart and debunked by many of the worlds climate scientists and activists: 

 

 

A huge number of scientist have already thoroughly sided with the young protesters, as shown by this article in Science and the 52 pages of signatories… 

Haven Coleman, one of these young climate activists called Caldwell a “Rita Skeeter” person (if you haven’t read Harry Potter you need to look this up). Dr. Genevieve Guenther made a thorough dissection of Caldwells “points” which is well worth reading (much better spending your time there than on Caldwell). 

There is certainly a right for everyones to have an opinion, but there is no right for anyone to have his or hers own facts. Nor is there a ‘right' for anyone to have plattform such as NY Times for attacks and spreading confusion. The fossil fuel industry has been allowed to do this for decades; what we need now is debate over which action to take, not if we should act at some later time. Predatory delay is the term Alex Steffen has coined for this behaviour.  

But the debate about Caldwells Op-Ed has made it clear that there are still other kind of delayers, who do accept the climate science - but still don’t want to press ahead with straight talk and strong actions. Instead they wave the banner of free speech and “both sides” must be able to have their say. But there is no both sides to the climate crisis and we don’t give talking space to flat earth proponents. 

What these persons also might have missed is that climate change is itself a profound threat to both society and democracy. This is already evident in the energy area: 

But worse is to come if we continue to delay climate action.  We all now how badly the European Union handled a million refugees from war torn Syria. Climate change will increase that number with one and maybe two factors of ten in the coming decades - can our societies handle that and still be working democracies? The scariest thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other says Kate Marvel, climate climate scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Real sustainability only comes in one variety, now: Disruptive. That is scary and will cause a great deal of discomfort for those presently in power. But the alternative, to allow climate disruption to descend us into chaos, is much worse. For all of these reasons, the time for "opinionated ignorance” by people such as Caldwell is over.   

PS

Maybe the supporters of Caldwell right to publish should have looked more into his background. Some examples:  

Here's Christopher Caldwell's glowing defense of Germany's far-right, climate denying AfD, which lost big to the Greens in the European Parliament elections after using its campaign to attack Greta Thunberg. Maybe he's bitter? 

The Spectator has somehow managed to outdo the Telegraph for ignorance on Ireland. American journalist Christopher Caldwell says that a “British unification” under the “moral tutelage” of London would make more sense for Ireland than EU membership.

Is it likely that this person has something worthwhile to contribute with when it comes to discussing climate change and democracy?

Sunset reflections: Stand by the girls!

A few days ago, on the warmest day yet this spring, outdoor café’s and bars in Gothenburg were filled with people enjoying the weather. It was a sunny day, almost 20°C in early April so I choose to take a long walk in the nature reserve adjacent to the Botanical garden. Sitting on a hill, only a few km from the city centre, the traffic noise of the city was reduced to a slow humming in the background, almost drowned out by the sound of blackbirds singing in the treetops. 

In a moment like this, looking at the sun setting over the water in the distance, everything looked almost normal. The distant flash from the Vinga lighthouse becoming visible as dusk was setting; the spring sky still too light for any stars to show.

Yet we know… 

• 3 million years are slowly catching up with us. 
• 3 million years of change that we have compressed into 2 centuries since the start of the industrial revolution.
• 3 million years of change that were hidden in the deep sea and the slowly melting glaciers.
• 3 million years of change that will transform the world as we know it.

This brutal message can be found in several recent studies. 3 million years, that’s how far back we need to go to find a time when carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today. If we could send a scout back in time, he or she would find a world very different from ours, with sea levels 15-20 meters higher than today and trees growing on what are now the ice covered plateaus of Antarctica. Globally, temperatures were 3-4°C higher than today, but in Antarctica, temperatures were 20°C higher, changing it from glacier to tundra. And since that time, the global temperatures have not exceeded 1.5°C over the preindustrial baseline, a level now considered a warning threshold.  

Surely on the return to our time, our time traveller would waste no time to speak before governments and the world, telling us that our coastal cities are about to become the modern versions of Atlantis and a new era of massive migration is upon us. The message would be clear, change path and prepare for a different future or succumb to the climate disruption that we have started.  

But alas, this tale of the imagined time traveller has already been told to us again and again by the scientists that have spent their lives investigating our climate system. For each passing year, their warnings have been more and more stern, their call upon us to act more urgent. So even a truth speaking time traveller might not be enough break through our obsession with “growth and progress”. 

Still, maybe this winter we have seen the arrival of a storyteller persistent enough to break through media wall. But rather than storyteller I would call Greta Thunberg a catalyst that for a movement that might become strong enough to shake us enough to make us understand that change is coming, wether we like it or not. The tool used by Greta and her fellow activists (and there are many around the world) has been to strike from school, using the hard to refute argument “why study for a future that will be denied us?”. What is really amazing and a potential game changer is that Greta has inspired so many other young girls between 13 and 18 years. This is a group that has been looked down upon, almost ridiculed as Generation Z. Instead they have shown to be smart, knowledgable and well organised, making global connections and inspiring each other. 

These kids have like the child in HC Andersens tale about the naked emperor unmasked the various attitudes so many of our political “leaders”; slow or faked engagement, hidden indifference or even climate science denial. Many of the remaining climate deniers or climate delayers are also fiercely opposed to other aspects of a just society, like women’s and LBTQ rights as well as immigration. That the same persons refuse the action on climate change that will lead to the very migration waves they are so scared of is parodic, had it not been so tragic. 

It is unlikely that the young and vocal girls now leading the climate movement will accept to step back and let “older and wiser men” take command again. But to the people in power they are a threat, one reason being that they are not yet entangled in the normality of mortgages and consumption that has subdued so many of us. So we, who call ourselves grownups, need to shake us loose and stand behind and support these young activists. Each and everyone of us should do all that we can in our own lives to live a low carbon life, there is no conflict between personal change and activism. But as I have written before, the valiant quest is not a simple journey. So we need to understand, accept and embrace this task, because it is what we need to do save our humanity.  

Let the Boomers be grounded!

The Boomers (or Baby Boomers) is the generation born from 1945 up till about 1960. I am myself a part of this generation, albeit being born on the trailing edge. This was the generation that benefited from the rebuilding of broken societies after the second World War. Growing economies, from trade and new technologies brought affluence and created a new middle class that could enjoy the consumer society and travel in a more open world. 

Of course not everything was good. Wars were still being fought, in Vietnam among many other places. Nations were invaded, democracies crushed in both East and West, partly due to the Cold War confrontation that kept nuclear annihilation as a Damocles sword over our heads. Nevertheless  this was a period when it was natural to be living a both healthier and richer life than the previous generation. 

Most of the boomers are now entering retirement and many are economically well off. They have benefitted from a growing wealth during their working life, but also just from the passive wealth growth coming from owning a house that has increased in value. So now they want to enjoy life, travel, play golf in Spain and fly to Thailand or the Caribbean to avoid the winter cold. Sadly, that is a privilege they (we) can not be granted due to our collective failure to ensure a liveable future for our children.

The climate crisis is very much about equity in a very double meaning; both fairness and wealth. It’s a question about levelling the economical gap between countries, between the rich and the poor, ensuring that developing countries are given some opportunities that the richer countries took for granted. But as the recent youth activism by Greta Thunberg and her followers have shown, it is also very much a generational question, where the financial equity that the boomers have built up largely has been charged to a planetary credit card that is about to expire, leaving the debt fully for todays children to pick up.

Therefore I think it is time to ground the boomers and that includes myself. We’ve hade our glorious time and did not do enough to leave a stable climate for coming generations, so at least we know should step back and not continue to wreck the planet. Do I want to ban them/us from travel and trips abroad? No, because you learn from travelling and meeting other people. But we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions in ALL sectors of society and for individuals flying can be the largest contribution of greenhouse gases. And for retired boomers, if they have the funding to travel they should have the time to travel on the ground. Take the train, make the journey into an experience, see what you might have missed during your active working life. In Europe, many of us spent summer vacations using the Interrail train pass to visit all corners of our continent. That is still possible and would also create a market demand for more and better trains, which everybody would benefit from. 

I would like coming generations to have some possibilities to travel to far off countries. There is no reason that boomers, who have had it all, should spoil the chances for their kids and grandkids to experience what they did. So, let’s ground the boomers! And while on ground, it is very overdue time for this generation to (again) become activist and fight for stable climate and a good future for coming generations! That will also ensure that the great-grandchildren will be able to say with pride that their ancestors cared for them.   

Children should be seen and heard, from David Suzuki foundation

Reflections on Aniara: Everything will not be OK and we can live with that

Earth is in trouble. Or rather, we as beings living on the surface of planet Earth have gotten ourselves into real trouble, a slow disaster we might not be able to rectify. 

This past weekend I was experiencing doom and the tragic fate of humanity during Gothenburg International Film Festival. I visited the Swedish premiere of Aniara, a film based on a poem from the 1950’s by the Nobel laureate Harry Martinsson. It was written at a time when human annihilation through nuclear war was a persistent scare in peoples mind. In Martinssons story the spaceship Aniara is loaded with people fleeing the dying Earth, but an accident sets Aniara adrift on an endless voyage in space, a bubble in the vast nothingness. 

The film depicts the spaceship as a modern day cruise ship, where the passengers initially try to hang on to normality but gradually become more desperate and succumbs to sects or suicide. There is no Hollywood hopeful ending, when the spaceship finally reaches a habitable planet, the passengers have been dead for many millennia. 

While nuclear extinction was the backdrop for the poem, Harry Martinsson was already in the early 1960’s pointing to environmental destruction as a rising threat to humanity. For Roy Scranton, author of two books with the uplifting titels “Learning to die in the Anthropocene” and “We’re doomed - now what” the impending climate catastrophe is a reality we can not avoid. There are many things that I take to my heart from Roy's texts and the talk he gave during the film festival. I am deeply impressed by the journey that Roy Scranton has traveled moving out from the war in Iraq to writing about the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene. There’s a deep sorrow in his description of what we are inevitably going to loose. And I agree with his notion that we need to slow down, reflect and meditate on what’s really happening with our climate and our societies; do less instead of keep on running. Humans have the ability to make meaning under the worst of circumstances, says Scranton, what we need to do is to organise locally because the cavalry will not be coming to save us. 

But the road that his total acceptance of this situation leads him to is not mine. Roy Scranton is disavowing those who like our most recent climate activist in Sweden, Greta Thunberg choses to fight for a liveable climate. We are lost and resistance to our fate is futile says Scranton. But his reactions rings with both bitterness and even envy towards those who continue to struggle despite the odds of real success being infinitesimally small. Some of the reactions in Swedish press to Roy Scrantons visit encourage this perception, maybe as a token gift to those who fear action more than the future. 

Perhaps we should not view Scranton as a truth sayer, but as the poet he is and wants to be. We can read him as a Baudelaire or Rimbaud of our time, writing about the beauty of death and decay in times of war and conflict. Like in the final verse of Rimbauds poem “Le Dormeur du Val”:

He sleeps in the sun, his hands on his breastAt peace. There are two red holes in his right side

So what to do if we abandon hope? Maybe it is no hope but courage that may save our humanity if not our world and nature as we have come to know it. To cite from a recent article in Washington Post by Dan Zak: 

To grasp the problem, we have to slow down. To respond to it, we have to act fast. We have both no time and more time.“We want there to be a really simple story: You do this, and then everything will be okay,” says Kate Marvel, who works for NASA in New York. “And everything is not going to be okay.”There is opportunity in this acceptance. Marvel thinks we need courage, not hope. We must know what’s coming, we must realize it will hurt, and we must be very strong together.

So we need to accept that the times are a-changing and there are no easy paths forward. We need to strive not for control but to find a way to flow like the waves and grass. 

Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don’t put it down. Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet. As a descendant. As an ancestor.

Finally, what seems to be lacking in Scrantons narrative is the willingness to speak truth to power. "We" are not equally complicit for the climate crisis. Therefore, the light on the super rich gathering in Davos that Greta Thunberg was shining is important. If the super rich, half a percent of the worlds population are responsible for 13% of the worlds consumption related emissions, then solving the climate crisis is a question of both moral and equity. It is not a done deal and we can alter our fate. 

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"