Climate Change and the Ostrich Syndrome

There is very strong evidence and almost total scientific consensus that climate change will have dramatic impact on planet earth over the next century.  We are already experiencing some of the first effects.  What we don’t know yet is how quickly these effects will multiply and how devastating they will be.  But up to now, the greater part of the world has put its head in the sand and hoped that either the science is wrong or that somehow we will survive.

The U.S. would be the logical choice to lead an international effort to meet this challenge, but climate change denial has become a litmus test for every conservative politician, and the idiot Trump has charged off in the exact opposite direction.

Climate change denial is beginning to weaken, as real-world events that are undeniably linked to climate change begin to pile up.  But most conservatives still believe that predictions of massive devastation in the future are exaggerated and part of the left’s political agenda. 

MIT’s publication Technology Review just had an issue with the front-page title ‘Welcome to Climate Change’.  The issue listed three phases of human response to climate change:

• Mitigation – the attempt to diminish or reverse the effects
• Adaptation – the attempt to adapt to the new climate conditions
• Suffering – the likely social, economic, political consequences and the human suffering that will ensue

MIT is not an institution known for hysteria or melodrama, but this issue of their technology magazine made my blood run cold.  The editor stated that the options for mitigation are running out rapidly and that the issue would focus more on adaptation and suffering.  The articles were, frankly, terrifying.

For most of my youth and early adulthood the specter of nuclear annihilation loomed over the world.  We envisioned a single day of cataclysmic fury that would end human civilization and leave at best a dystopian future of a limited number of homo sapiens.  The world breathed a sigh of relief when the cold war faded away and human beings appeared to be on a path to globalization with economic prosperity and sociopolitical harmony as real possibilities.

But now we face an even greater challenge, one that makes managing the nuclear standoff seem like child’s play.  China, the U.S., Europe and India are responsible for 27, 15, 10 and 7 percent of the world’s carbon emissions respectively, a total of 59%.  Growth in carbon emissions necessary to allow developing countries to reach a middle-class standard of living will certainly overwhelm any efforts by developed countries to reduce emissions unless massive international efforts are made to subsidize renewable energy projects in the poorer nations. 

To mitigate and manage the growing carbon emission crisis would take an international collaboration on a level that has never been achieved before.  Sadly, the international political landscape seems more inclined toward unilateralism than cooperation, so the prospects of any future international plan for mitigation are very slight.

What we will see instead is frighteningly portrayed in the MIT magazine and multiple other articles, as well as fictional predictions in various art forms.  As the slow, but accelerating climate ‘events’ begin to take their toll, nations will act in their self-interest to minimize the damage.  The biggest impacts will be felt first in the poorer nations.  The mass immigrations that we are seeing today will pale in comparison to the tsunamis of desperate people fleeing barren or flooded landscapes in the future.  The richer nations will build walls and become increasingly heartless in their response to world suffering and crises.  After all, they will be afflicted with their own costly wildfires, hurricanes, droughts and floods.

It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure up images of the devastation and the unraveling of civilization that will occur even under a fairly slow advance of climate change.  Is it possible that human beings will rise to the occasion and find a humane and dignified path through the conflagration?  It is often said that the worst of times can bring out the best in people.  But I fear that only applies in a single disaster event.  When the events roll in like endless breakers in a stormy sea, how steadfast will we be in our humanity?

Now would be the time for us to recognize that our ostrich complex is leading us to certain doom and destruction.  Now would be the time for us to put together a global plan to mitigate as much as possible, and then adapt to the changing climate.  Now would be the time for us to band together. 

And so it goes.