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2020 Is The Year Climate Change Is Becoming Terrifyingly Real
Umair Haque, October, 2020
Over the last twelve months or so, climate change has become terrifyingly real. The entire West Coast of America’s on fire. The skies in California are crimson — just like those in Australia as the year began. 2020 is the year that the world finally learned, the hard way: climate change is no joke. It is a series of catastrophes the likes of which the human race has never yet seen.
Climate “change” isn’t just a change in the climate. It is a transformation in the geographical and temporal world, against human habitability. The seasons are changing. Can we really call this year’s “summer” in California that — does that word really do it justice when record high temperatures threatened power grids and human safety? Is what used to be called “fire season” — be cautious, stay safe — something more like an inferno, which people simply have to flee from?
So too what used to be cities and towns and regions are now becoming Fire and Flood Belts. If this is what fire season is in 2020, how much worse will it be in 2025? What if, as there’s every reason to believe, every summer, in places like California and Australia, mega fires are simply the new normal? What happens then?
One answer is that human habitability changes — fast. Half a million people in Oregon were just evacuated. How many of those people will come back and stay, if this is what they now face, year in and year out? The short answer is that climate change is making swathes of the world uninhabitable. It is happening in a paradoxical, baffling way. Faster than we think, but slower than we can really believe, yet right before our disbelieving eyes. Wait — California can’t really be becoming unlivable, can it? LOL — no way, it’s California! They’ll find a way to…to. To what? Stop massive walls of fire from incinerating everything in sight? We are watching a planet now being transformed into a place that is not fit for human habitation, except at its edges and margins.
There’s a kind of poetic justice in that.Climate change is anthropogenic, they say — we caused it. It’s more accurate to say that American-style capitalism caused climate change — because it makes corporations and funds pay no price for literally turning the skies blood red. And there it is, the economic machine that’s destroying the world, still chugging away. Despite emissions dropping drastically during lockdowns, 2020 has still marked the highest year yet for the world’s CO2 levels.
This climate catastrophe now unfolding before our bewildered eyes? The truth is that it’s just the beginning. The world’s only hit about 1 to 1.5 degrees of warming so far. It doesn’t sound like much — and that’s probably why, so far, we as a world, and especially nations like America, didn’t take it nearly seriously enough. People think of the thermostats in their homes, and say: “1.5 degrees? Give me a break — what’s the big deal!”
Now we know the big deal. 1.5 degrees is enough to begin doing things like changing the seasons, turning summer into an inferno, making even the world’s most prosperous regions Fire Belts, causing mass evacuations, and producing phenomena we can’t deal with, like megafires.
And yet the best estimates are that somewhere between 3 to 4 degrees of warming are on the way. Fast. By 2050, maybe. What kind of world are we talking about then? At three degrees, places like California and probably America’s entire West Coast become flatly uninhabitable, except by the most die-hard. Summer is megafire season. Everything gets incinerated, over and over again, three to six months of the year. Food chains and ecosystems simply implode, because, well, who can survive being burned alive year after year?
Now expand that to a whole world.California is one of America’s agricultural powerhouses. Now it can’t generate all that produce. Suddenly, prices skyrocket, and Americans are going hungry.
But that, to tell the truth, is a minor effect. What happens as an entire Coast burns? Insurance companies go broke. Banks collapse. The businesses they support then go bust. Massive waves of unemployment spread out across a whole economy. Welcome to the age of Climate Depression. We’re already entering it.
Sure, Fakebook can move it’s HQ to somewhere safer. But the rest of everyone? All those millions? Bang! They now have to be supported by an economy that’s already spiralling into depression. The next stage of a Climate Depression is that the costs of caring for millions of displaced people — there are already 500,000 in Oregon alone — simply cause the public purse to dry up. And there goes everyone else’s healthcare, retirement, schools, and so forth. Society begins to fracture and break apart. People blame the climate refugees — even the internal ones — for wrecking their still safe cities and towns. Authoritarian politics take hold — and the vicious cycle from depression to poverty to political implosion is complete.
And that’s just America. Go ahead and ponder for a moment how a world is going to feed itself when it’s breadbaskets have become Fire Belts. Go ahead and consider how fresh, breathable air is going to become a luxury. Think about what happens when decent food and air become things only the rich can have. Politics turns fascist. Violence rules. A once-stable world really spins out of control (this is just the warm-up, pun fully intended).
At four degrees? Things get way, way more apocalyptic. That’s when sea levels rise in earnest. That means that while some coasts become Fire Belts, the rest of them begin to drown. And I don’t mean the way Miami is. I mean the equivalent of a massive hurricane hitting every single day, walls of water pouring down Manhattan streets, London living behind dykes, much of the world beginning to head for high ground.
What happens then? When, say, easily two to three billion people are fleeing megastorms, megafires, and rising seas — for their lives? You can see how the evacuation of one American state has made global news. Now imagine what happens when most of South India, or South China, or the Middle East becomes unlivable. Consider what happens when the idea that people once lived in California is a distant memory, because it’s sliding into the sea, when it’s not being incinerated — now the real border of human habitability stops at maybe Idaho. In the West, anyways. In the East? Manhattan’s now really an island, and Washington DC became one, too, both protected by massive barriers. But the continental border has shrunk a hundred miles inland, maybe two hundred. And as it did, massive human flight, depression, political chaos, and mass death all ensued.
At four degrees, our civilization simply collapses, almost overnight. Things like functioning power grids and water systems are luxuries. And the systems which depend on them — healthcare, hospitals, schools, offices — they’ve all stopped working, too. They barely function, and that’s for the rich, in their enclaves. For everyone else? Life is just a bitter, brutal battle for survival. A nomadic one. The border of human habitability is shrinking, turning inwards, by a mile, ten miles, a year. The megafires hit this town, the mega floods reached this far, the sea is coming this close. And people have to pack up and leave, year after year. The idea of stability is geotemporally, economically, and socially impossible. The world’s rich middle classes are now impoverished nomads fleeing from the violence of a planet on fire. And the world’s poor? Well, they’re just dying, because they don’t even have that choice.
Now.
The question is going to arise, especially from Americans, “My God! Tell me what to do about all this!”
The thing that we have to do — I’ll come back to you — as a human race is simple, unprecedented, and maybe impossible. We have to come together to fight for the future of life on this planet, which includes us.
In concrete terms, that means: we need to begin the greatest wave of investment in human history. We need to invest in everything from adaptation — literal firewalls, flood barriers, and so forth — to mitigation, which means energy grids, green construction, and clean energy. We need to invent the economic and financial mechanisms to make it all possible — things like Green GDP and triple bottom lines and balance sheets of real wealth, including natural capital.
We need to invest at a scale that has never — ever — been seen in human history. How much am I talking? My estimate is about $20 trillion. Per year. That’s the size of the American economy, by the way. It is a tremendous number. That is how much it will cost to really begin creating a future and a planet that is fit for life again, instead of spiralling into fire, flood, plague, and chaos. That is what it will take to create a world of clean energy grids, green construction, breathable air, drinkable water, and so on.
What we are doing so far is not working. Except in tiny, tiny pockets of the world — like wise and gentle Europe, perhaps. But the rest of the world is now at grave, grave risk. There is not a country on earth that will not be devastated by climate change, except the geographically privileged, like Canada. Hot places will become infernos. Coastal places will drown. Arid places will become alien planets. Human life will cease to beat with the pulses and rhythms of civilization. Everything from employment to air and water will become luxuries, and there will be a wave of mass death that will make Covid look paltry and kind.
That is what we — the Big We, humanity — need to do. Invest like never before. At a speed that we have never done before, either. We have a decade — if that — to begin this project of fighting for the future. If we don’t do it, it’s a virtual certainty that we will hit at least four degrees, which is game over. So our window is now.
That brings me to you. What can you do? There are many things you can do. Perhaps you own a small business. You can work to make it carbon neutral. Friendly to life. Sustainable and green and clean and ethical and humane. As a consumer, in this broken system we are all trapped in, you can still make better choices. You can stop giving your money to terrible corporations who pollute the planet. You can stop supporting factory farming and even eat less meat. You can be a little more mindful and aware of what impact the money you spend really has.
Those acts may seem tiny. They are not. We are now in a fight for the future of life as we know it on this planet, which includes us. Nothing you do is irrelevant. However you choose to fight this battle is better than not fighting it at all. A million tiny changes like that really can change the behaviour of bad actors, from corporations to hedge funds. They can change social attitudes and cultural mores. Do not give in to despair and fatalism. You are in this fight already — the only question is whether you know it or not.
That brings me to the thing that you can really “do.” It’s the simplest and most powerful action of all. You can educate yourself. About all the above. How dire and desperate the situation really is. How much investment is really required. Do you know what happens at three degrees? At four? At five? My bet is that you don’t — though maybe you can make some idle guesses. But you don’t really know. You are still climate illiterate, in other words.
And the reason you don’t know, the reason you are still climate illiterate, is that, well, our intellectual and leadership class has failed at creating a civilised public sphere. Consider that the NYT still has a columnist who denies climate change…while the entire West Coast burns. Consider that Australia has a PM who denied that climate change had anything to do with the devastating bushfire season. Is it any surprise both of these nations were badly unprepared for megafires?
Is it any surprise that most Americans are confused about climate change, when nobody really educates them about it? You won’t learn the truth about what is heading our way on CNN or in the NYT, and certainly not on Faux News. The self-professed good guys are too busy “debating” simple truths, or sugarcoating them, or dumbing them down. Hence, California and Oregon were totally unprepared for a journey into climate apocalypse, even though summers becoming infernos is exactly what was predicted at this degree of warming, over and over again.
Educate yourself. And I mean this gently and supportively: stop asking people like me what to do. Do you understand how the globe’s ecosystems hang together? Can you name the world’s ten great ecologies? Probably not. You remain climate illiterate, and while it’s not your fault, it is your responsibility. If you stay illiterate, though, you will be three things. One, powerless. Two, ignorant. And three, a sitting duck.
We remain badly ignorant as a world about the age we are heading into, its risks, the catastrophes which await us in the era of apocalypse we have unleashed. So educate yourself. Take some responsibility. Be an adult. Read a dozen books, a hundred. Read a hundred reports, a thousand. Don’t you have better things to do than Netflix and Chill your life away? Do you really want to be a sitting duck for the fire and the flood?
You should be learning about this stuff, as much as you can, as fast as you can. That is what it means to be mature, to be brave, to step up to the challenge of now.So that you can shield and protect your family, your loved ones, your society, all of humanity. Learn about what is coming. Don’t remain ignorant, which is precisely, sadly, the way the system wants you — so that you stay fatalistic, weary, too powerless and unenlightened to change a damned thing.
We are now in a fight for the future of life as we know it on this planet. You are in this fight. The only question is whether you know it yet. If you don’t, then like so many before you, you might just be cannon fodder. So let me say it again. Instead of asking what to do, educate yourself. This is not a drill.
I don’t know if we can win the fight for the future. But I do know that we had better damn well try.
Because this is the closest thing to the apocalypse human beings have ever experienced. Haven’t you already figured that out, suddenly, watching the sky over San Francisco turn the colour of blood?
It’s easy to bury your head in the sand, and only look up when the flames or the flood are only about ten feet away. But by then — it’s usually far, far too late.
Umair
September 2020
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