There is no above-it-all high enough to clear climate catastrophe

Gideon Rachman: Inability to prevent mass suffering and death a “dilemma for climate activists” 8

This column from Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times really pushes my buttons. There’s something beneath the surface that is downright pathological, and not at all unique to Rachman. It besets most political pundits on this issue. I’ll try to dig it out.

The premise of Rachman’s column is that while everyone accuses climate change skeptics of being in denial, in fact climate activists are in denial as well. They keep hanging on to the U.N. negotiation process long after it’s become clear that developing countries aren’t going to budge. The politics of an international climate accord are incredibly difficult, possibly insoluble.

That’s an arguable point, but a fair one. The U.N. process is open to criticism. And the politics really are difficult. But listen to this conclusion:

The state of international negotiations presents a huge dilemma for climate change activists. Most genuinely believe that a failure to achieve an international agreement in Copenhagen would be catastrophic. But they also know that, even if a deal is reached, it is likely to be feeble and ineffective. If they admit this publicly, they risk creating a climate of despair and inaction. But if they press ahead, they are putting all their energy into an approach that they must know is highly unlikely to deliver.

It is a horrible dilemma. But, in difficult situations, it is best to start by facing facts. The trouble is that—in different ways—both sides of the climate change debate are in denial.

This kind of language is so familiar that you have to step back a moment to recognize that there’s something bizarre about it.

Climate science indicates that a business-as-usual path will lead to at least 5 degrees of warming by 2100, which represents utter catastrophe. Many scientists believe that we are near (or have passed) tipping points after which positive feedbacks become self-reinforcing and climate changes are irreversible. If we want to avoid that, we have very little time to peak and start reducing global emissions. No one has proposed a credible way of doing that aside from international negotiations.

All that is either true, or it’s not. The mainstream science and policy communities think it’s true.

If it is true, then millions of people, and possibly civilization itself, are threatened by climate shifts, within the lifetime of people alive today. If it is true, then the difficulty of getting an international agreement is not a “dilemma for climate change activists.” It’s a dilemma for human beings. “A climate of despair and inaction” is not a risk to activists. It’s a risk to the lives and welfare of hundreds of millions of people and future generations.

So I want to ask Rachman, and all the pundits who address climate politics: Do you believe it’s true? Do you believe the mainstream scientific consensus that climate change poses massive risks for humanity, and that urgent international action is necessary to reduce those risks?

If so, it is incoherent, even immoral, to go on treating this issue as though it were merely a clash of interest groups. It’s not like climate policy is for “climate activists” what card check is for unions, or financial regulations are to the banking sector, or subsidies are to farmers. It’s not a parochial issue.

Do you believe it’s true? If not, say so, clearly. If so, then it’s your fight too. You cannot stand on the sidelines in the pose of a savvy, above-it-all observer. There are no sidelines.

David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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  1. veritone Posted 6:42 pm
    29 Jul 2009

    Absolutely right, there are no sidelines! And like you I believe we should press the punditry, and the politicians, very hard to state their true positions. Like the old union song goes: "which side are you on?"

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  2. CreativeGreenius's avatar

    CreativeGreenius Posted 9:25 pm
    29 Jul 2009

    I came here via your Twitter feed which I dig following.  Thanks for the Nelly hook up too.  I have it on while I'm writing you this comment.  I think I'll follow it up with Stevie Wonder's Master Blaster from Hotter Than July and go older school...I'm glad to see you bringing this subject up because I feel strongly about it.  I was moved to write a piece in my blog, Creative Greenius, this morning with my own take on the topic:The Real Climate Change Debate: Are All Deniers Evil or Are Some Merely Ignorant?Even though you find Joe Romm's various cyber fueds with folks like the Breakstuff Institute tiresome, I've learned an awful lot from Romm and enjoy reading him every day.  I think we need people like Romm who know what they're talking about, won't knuckle under to the bullyboy tactics of the mostly right-wingers and neo cons who belong to the denier cult.  I don't always agree with Romm and have been reprimanded by him in the past and had my comments moderated by him too, but his blog, Climate Progress, is consistently a source of information I don't get elsewhere.  I liked his book too. I think Romm's focus on the mainstream media's failure to do more than play the "stenographer's" role on the climate change story has been particularly strong and on point and is particularly relevant here.  I don't know if I would have discovered Eric Pooley's work on the subject and become a fan of his writing, without first reading about Pooley's How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change on Climate Progress.  That's where Pooley's line about the media acquiescing to the "stenographer" position comes from and it's a good one. I like the way Pooley frames his story in the opening paragraph of his paper's introduction:"Suppose our leading scientists discovered that a meteor, hurtling toward the earth, was set to strike later this century; the governments of the world had less than ten years to divert or destroy it. How would news organizations cover this story? Even in an era of financial distress, they would throw teams of reporters at it and give them the resources needed to follow it in extraordinary depth and detail. After all, the race to stop the meteor would be the story of the century."I personally believe that it's the failure of the mainstream media, along with elected representatives - both backed by the same self-serving fossil fuel industry's money to burn - that has made fertile soil for consensous science and daily evidence to be ignored while nut job conspiracy theorists and defiantly ignorant purveyors of propoganda are given the respect and presumption of credability they will never earn or deserve.Your conclusion, "There are no sidelines," says it very well, because as the timer "beep-beep-beeps" that our time is up, on one side is right and ever less possible salvation - and on the other side is wrong and ever more possible condemnation. And yeah, it really IS as black and white as that.

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  3. neosapiens Posted 10:37 pm
    29 Jul 2009

    We buy car insurance, insurance to cover losses due to fire, theft, earthquakes and floods.  Global warming and ocean acidification are far more likely to hurt us and have immensely greater impact than any ordinary contingency that we all more or less gladly pay insurance premiums for.   It's utterly irresponsible to oppose the comparatively small cost of mitigating climate catastrophe, and it's even worse for someone to do it for personal gain.  If we take action, and it turns out to be unnecessary, we all get to live--and pretty much as well as we do now. If we take no action, and it turns out to have been essential, we're hosed.  It ought to be a no-brainer: it's prudent to act. If we have compensate some people for financial wrinkles caused by addressing GHG reduction, then so be it.  Opponents of climate action are either ignorant, pathologically irresponsible or nuts.

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  4. Ted Nace's avatar

    Ted Nace Posted 11:44 am
    30 Jul 2009

    It's so great that Grist has a guy writing on climate issues who has the ability to clean the crap off the windshield and show the reader how to do the same. You're putting your philosophy training to worldly use David Roberts.

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  5. dstoney's avatar

    dstoney Posted 1:25 pm
    30 Jul 2009

    Excellent piece, David Roberts!Our nation's government is broken.  Our election system requires that very large amounts of money be raised from corporate donors.  Those donations have become a form of bribery and, together with a dash of ignorance - after all, who has the time to research climate change and make an informed opinion - leads to destructive decisions.  So, should time permit, we need to make all national elections publicly supported.  Only then can we expect reason to triumph over expediency.And, while watching sea level rise and waiting for that to happen, we can read Matthew Glass' novel, Ultimatum, about what happens in 2030 when the new President learns there will be 4 times as many people to be relocated in the US than was previously thought. 

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  6. Billhook Posted 5:37 am
    31 Jul 2009

    In one critically important sense Rachman is right, the climate activist is prone to self censorship.I'm guilty of it myself on occasion - how should one try to explain the super-exponential rate of change arising from multiple, diverse, iterative, positive warming feedback loops to someone with a failed degree in media studies ?I find such efforts unproductive, and so usually stick to the overviews of outcome, and it is this that is a somewhat lonely position.Most activists will readily use the term chaos and sometimes catastrophe, but the reality for many millions of people will, more likely than not, be death by famine. Given that this has been readily foreseeable for over two decades (GHG pollution causes GW causes climate destabilization causes widespread crop failure causes starvation) the charge against those politicians and industrialists who've failed to act is one of complicity in genocide.And how many activists use the term GENOCIDE ? A handful . And what effect will its use have on the national and global policy debate ? Fundamental, for it unveils the moral depravity of the prevaricators, and it raises the awful prospect of fully 'justified' retaliatory violence on a proportionate scale, as well as indicating the mega-scale of climate refugees marching northward demanding safe haven as a right.So when will the cliimate activists end their self censorship and adopt the charge of genocide as a key advance of the campaign ?At GCI we've been waiting for this since '94. Please, step out of denial and get on with it.Regards,Billhook

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  7. Teuthis Posted 7:33 am
    31 Jul 2009

    What bugs me are terms like "climate activists" and "proponents of climate change."  As if by asserting its existence, we promote it.  As if we want to believe in it. Why would anyone want to be terrified of the future if they didn't think they had to be?

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    1. veritone Posted 8:44 pm
      31 Jul 2009

      You make an interesting point which touches on something I've been meaning to write about. I would give intimate body parts for the climate crisis not to be true. I DO NOT want to believe it, but I have no choice, the evidence is too compelling and the consequences of inaction are unthinkable.Confronting it and doing something about it requires real courage, real bravery. I'm not trying to boast here and I am pleased to know that I am not alone, although I wish I had more company.I regard the folks that Romm calls "Deniers and Delayers" (or Monbiot calls "Denialogues") to be cowards. If they happpen to have craven political or economic interests they advance by their denialoguery they are even further beneath my contempt. However, those who so quickly grasp for denial, those who comfort themselves with it, or like Rachman, stand on the sidelines, lack something fundamental: a spine and gonads.

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