So: an extreme August. Wildfires continued to blaze worldwide. I was especially saddened to hear about the wildfire in Tenerife, because I’d visited the island in 2018 and climbed Mount Teide. But the fires elsewhere were also dreadful, especially on the Hawaiian Island of Maui. However the Hawaii fires started, they were wind-driven, triggering evacuations, killing at least 115 people and leaving at least 388 missing. Meanwhile in Canada, 20,000 residents of the city of Yellowknife, were forced to flee the city due to wildfires. Some scientists were explaining this wasn't a local problem, with the amount of forest burning worldwide doubling in the last 20 years. Already overstrained emergency services have had their work cut out for them. The impression was of a situation that at least at times was becoming difficult for the institutions of civilisation to contain.
It was almost with relief that I saw that the New Scientist had published a special issue on “a year of extreme weather.” Surely here would be some objective analysis. However irrationally, I wanted – needed – someone, anyone, to tell me that everything was okay. That we could still put things right. The catch was that I also needed the truth.
In an article entitled “Is it worse than we thought it would be?” Michael Le Page claimed that the world was not warming faster than expected (Le Page, 2023). Le Page quoted Zeke Hausfather at the US nonprofit Berkeley Earth saying that “If anything, temperatures have been at the cool end.” (p. 10). Hausfather also claims that because of progress on clean energy a five degree celsius rise is now ruled out by the end of the century, although he does admit that “we still cannot exclude the possibility of 4° C warming by 2100.” (Quoted in Le Page, p. 10).
Part of me wanted Hausfather to be correct. If his claims were true, then maybe we’d be able to dodge climate catastrophe after all. However, I was also dubious. I’d encountered Hausfather’s views before. In 2020, Glen Peters and he claimed that the IPCC “business as usual” projection, technically known as RCP 8.5, had been used illegitimately to spread alarm in the media (Peters & Hausfather, 2020). Their claims were disputed by the IPCC study authors who stated that
Given what is known about biotic feedbacks, our current path, and the success of past forecasts to anticipate human behavior, RCP8.5 is the preferred choice for assessing the climate humans currently live in and is the best tool for assessing the risks to come through midcentury. (Schlam, Glendon & Duffy, 2020).
So according to the authors of the IPCC, Hausfather’s position on the climate science is sometimes questionable.
What do climate scientists really think?
In an article entitled ‘Off-the-charts records:’ has humanity broken the climate?’ (Monday 28th August), the Guardian polled 45 climate scientists. Superficially, their views seemed comparable to those expressed in the New Scientist: that despite the frightening turn that global events had taken, that global heating was “entirely in line with three decades of scientific predictions.”
The same article did reveal a split between those researchers who thought the extreme weather impacts were hitting “faster and harder than expected” and those who were less sure. Some climate experts expressed shock over the impacts; Professor Krishna AcutaRao of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, admitted to being “scared.” Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick stated her opinion that “we are hitting record-breaking temperatures much sooner” than she expected. However, other scientists disagreed, thinking that the extreme weather we’re seeing was “shocking” but within predictions.
A key point on which experts seemed to agree was that societies and ecosystems were becoming more “vulnerable” to these extreme events. This vulnerability is something to think about. A growing body of scientific literature on ‘collapsology’ has pointed to potential cracks in the pillars that support global civilisation.
Take one example: food supply. Earlier this year a paper was published in the prestigious journal Nature that suggested that we’ve significantly underestimated the danger of a food supply chain collapse. The danger comes from a “meandering" jet stream, and the authors of the paper were concerned about the possibility of “simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions.” (Kornhuber et al., 2023). So when I see articles discussing climate-induced crop failure in China, or stating that India has banned the export of some kinds of rice, or that US farmers have also had their crops wiped out by extreme weather, I start to worry.
Kill All Doomers!
Despite these dangers, professional climate scientists are likely to underplay the dangers of climate breakdown. This is in part because of the nature of professional training. The physicist Jeff Schmidt has suggested that professional training instils a basic conservatism (Schmidt, 2000). He means that professionals will frequently fail to question the politics built into their work. The ‘politics’ of professional work very often means favouring “the interest of their employer.” (Schmidt, 2000). And it’s not too difficult to imagine why most employers (institutions, professional organisations, corporations, billionaires, etc.) might shrink from the possibility of serious danger or even societal collapse.
In the case of climate science, this conservatism manifests itself as a tendency to understate existential risk. A 2018 study conducted by independent scientists found this tendency to be widespread in the scientific literature on climate breakdown. The study authors concluded that “The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay [existential or catastrophic] risks, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence….” (Spratt & Dunlop, 2018). This ‘scholarly reticence’ has been further encouraged by regular accusations of exaggeration from climate deniers and right-wing media outlets.
Still, a number of climate scientists have broken ranks. The Climate Majority Project has put together a statement, signed by over 50 climate experts, stating that the “time has passed for “protecting” the public from hard truths.” This statement claims that time is up for the ‘last warning’ approach to climate breakdown; “The weather has visibly shifted, weather related disasters are increasing.” The statement also refers to anonymous polling which has shown that “climate science experts privately accept that the world is beyond the IPCC’s “final warning” of march 2023.”
But the instilled conservatism of which Schmidt spoke is still a significant force. Other climate scientists have reacted with irritation or anger to such dissent. This includes attempts to discredit those who have spoken out. Zeke Hausfather has tweeted that “Doomism is a disease, and a self-fulfilling prophecy,” (6 Jun 2022), and Professor Michael Mann claimed that “Doomism…has become nearly as great a threat as denial.” (Cuff, 2023, p. 13). These comments represent attempts to control the climate breakdown narrative and keep it within ‘respectable’ bounds. This, too, is part of the politics of professional work.
A closer look at Mann and Hausfather’s careers indicates possible motivations behind these statements. Professor Michael Mann is a veteran climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and is highly distinguished. His research team was responsible for the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that shows a 20th century uptick in Northern Hemisphere temperatures. He has also recently written a book condemning fossil fuel corporations, The New Climate War. So there’s no doubt that his opinions have some credibility. But for all this, he’s an establishment scientist and this, again, implies a conservative stance towards the facts.
This is reflected in his further statement in the New Scientist that “the truth is bad enough” and that there’s “No need to squander credibility by exaggerating things.” (Quoted in Cuff, 2023, p. 13). On the surface, this seems fair enough. But it’s made in the context of an unresolved and ongoing debate over the severity of climate breakdown. In this debate, Bill McGuire has pointed to a “growing propensity to label pretty much anything outside the current consensus as doomist.” Mann defines ‘doomism’ as the “belief that there is nothing we can do.” (Quoted in Cuff, 2023, p. 13).
There’s a problem with this definition. In these debates, I’ve never encountered anyone who’s claimed that there’s nothing ‘we’ can do. The concern is that what ‘we’ can do will be constrained increasingly severely by the ongoing, unpleasant consequences of climate breakdown. That on our current trajectory we’ll enter the ‘hothouse Earth,’ a state that will render large portions of the Earth uninhabitable (McGuire, 2022).
This shift might well be severely disruptive to food supply chains, economies, monetary systems and politics as well as catastrophic for biodiversity, human populations and climate. These ongoing rapid changes, whether predicted or not, seem likely to outstrip consumer-industrial civilisation’s capacity to cope. Indeed, it’s possible that this is already happening (McKibben, 2019; Bendell, 2023). But claiming this is very different from throwing up one’s hands and stating that “there is nothing ‘we’ can do.”
Tech Bros Hate Doomers
Zeke Hausfather seems to be coming from a slightly different place than Mann. A look at his employment history furnishes some clues about what this place might be. Before working at Berkeley Earth, Hausfather was a senior fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, a nonprofit organisation that operates from Berkeley, California. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Institute has been controversial from its outset. It has been accused of “advancing right-wing ideas” and advancing “policy proposals that would delay action on climate change.” For example, it provided a favourable report on shale-gas that may have influenced President Obama. The Institute also favours ‘ecomodern’ approaches to the ecological crisis, which basically means high-energy, high-tech solutions.
Berkeley Earth, Hausfather’s current employer, has gained a widespread reputation for impartiality. The organisation, also a non-profit, provides ongoing independent climate data and analysis for various organisations and institutions. If you do a Google search you will find the following statement, under the question “Is Berkeley Earth Reliable?”
“Regularly cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, The World Economic Forum, MIT Technology Review, and others, Berkeley Earth's independent data and analysis serve as a source of high-quality, accurate, and impartial climate data and analysis for the world's leading media outlets.”
Berkeley Earth was founded in 2010 when Richard and Elizabeth Muller “found merit in some of the concerns of climate skeptics.” This led to the funding of an analysis that actually busted a number of claims made by the climate skeptics, including the idea that urban heat islands might be responsible for warming. Interestingly, this study was partly funded by the Koch Foundation, which has also funded organisations, think-tanks and lobby groups promoting climate skepticism. This funding did not seem to influence the analysis.
So what’s the problem? Here’s one. The organisation advertises itself as independent, non-governmental and open source. And there seems little reason to doubt the data they provide. However, their framing of the issues is interesting. Under the GLOBAL WARMING menu on the website is a Skeptics Guide pamphlet. This is a pdf leaflet that begins with the question: “Are you a climate change skeptic?” It goes on to state that:
“You should be. With so many people ignoring the science, it’s important to distinguish facts from alarmist statements. Public exaggeration of the harms from global warming have made many of us skeptical of all reported climate science. And rightly so. Despite this, there are scientific facts about global warming that are not in dispute.”
This paragraph frames climate breakdown in a very specific way. First of all, there’s the invocation of ‘the science’ as the final authority, an authority that is objective and impartial. Secondly, the ‘science’ is contrasted with a nonspecific ‘public exaggeration’ of global warming harms and ‘alarmist statements.’ So by implication, those contemplating worst-case claims scenarios are unscientific alarmists.
This framing is misleading. The reason is quite simple. So-called ‘doomers’ include research scientists who are concerned about collapse. In 2022, a group of these ‘unscientific’ scientists published a paper entitled ‘Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios.’ (Kemp et al., 2022). In this paper, the researchers suggested that the potential for bad to worst case scenarios in the context of climate breakdown are currently poorly understood. (They called it a “dangerously unexplored topic.”) This paper was published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. I think that we can state with some confidence that this paper is just as ‘scientific’ as anything produced by Berkeley Earth.
Is complacency a bigger threat?
At present we simply do not have enough information to know how bad things are going to get. Bill McGuire:
The reality is that our understanding of potential tipping points and feedback effects remains too poorly constrained for us to be confident of how severe climate breakdown will end up proving to be. Furthermore, minimising the potential impact of climate breakdown is more likely to lead to increased reticence in relation to slashing emissions than any potential exaggeration of the likely endgame.
Secondly, criticism of ‘doomers’ seems to me a distraction from the far more dangerous threat posed by complacency and denial. In the UK, we have a Prime Minister who has promised to ‘max out’ on fossil fuels, and who plans to grant 100 new drilling licenses in the North Sea. I fail to see how voicing fears about a potentially catastrophic future is more of a problem than this.
In this context, complacency could end up as major a problem as denial. And I’m afraid to say that the general rhetorical tone of the special issue of the New Scientist reeks of complacency. Another article in the same issue looked at the rise of renewable energy. This article detailed current progress on renewables, including the claim that “emissions from fossil fuels may soon begin their decline.” (Dineen, 2023, p. 12.) This sounds superficially encouraging, except that humanity needs to be dropping its emissions, very fast, yesterday. One recent review paper found that although emissions growth may indeed have started to slow, that:
...the latest available evidence shows that global actions are not yet at the scale to manifest a substantive shift in the direction of global human influence on the Earth's energy imbalance and the resulting global warming. Indeed, our results point to the opposite: the evidence shows continued increase in cumulative CO2 emissions, increased emissions of other GHGs and gains in air quality at the expense of the loss of the cooling effect from aerosols." (Forster et al, 2023).
So it seems to me that the kind of complacency shown in the New Scientist and elsewhere is currently unwarranted. People who question this complacency are not ‘diseased’ or as bad as ‘deniers.’ They’re honestly concerned about the future of humanity, the natural world and the planet.
Thanks to Brian Martin for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
References
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Cuff, M. (19 August 2023). How hard should we ring the alarm bells? New Scientist 19 August 2023, p. 13.
Dinneen, J. (19 August 2023). And now, the good news. New Scientist 19 August 2023, p. 12.
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Kornhuber, K., Lesk, C., Schleussner, C. F., Jägermeyr, J., Pfleiderer, P., & Horton, R. M. (2023). Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections. Nature Communications, 14(1), 3528. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38906-7
Le Page, M. (19 August 2023). Is it worse than we thought it would be? New Scientist 19 August 2023, pp. 10—11.
McKibben, W. (2019). Falter: Has the human game began to play itself out? Arrow.
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Schwalm, C. R., Glendon, S., & Duffy, P. B. (2020). Reply to Hausfather and Peters: RCP8.5 is neither problematic nor misleading. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(45), 27793–27794. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018008117
Spratt, D. & Dunlop, I. (2018). What Lies Beneath: The understatement of existential climate risk. Breakthrough. https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath#:~:text=What%20Lies%20Beneath%20is%20the,of%20the%20world%27s%20leading%20scientists.