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| Thu, 6th Aug 2020 12:20:00 |
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In tackling the global climate crisis, doom and optimism are both dangerous traps |
The environmental crisis is one of the most serious and pressing issues facing the world today. But a discourse sharply divided between doom and dismissal risks obstructing climate action, rather than motivating it.
When we try to project how the climate might change in the future, we confront three big uncertainties: how much greenhouse gases humans will emit, how the accumulation of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere might change as a result, and how sensitive atmospheric temperatures are to this.
Feedbacks may also be important. Today, about half of our CO2 emissions are absorbed by the oceans and land vegetation, but this could weaken as the oceans become warmer, and as drier soils, more frequent fires and thawing permafrost result in more CO2 being released. Many of these processes are included in our climate models, but it is still unclear how fast these changes will occur and what the overall effect on the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere will be.
Though most of the challenges we overcome as a species are not existential risks, they are nonetheless critically important. We see a real risk that dwelling on doom may serve to obstruct climate action rather than motivating it, promoting fatalism and further polarisation. There is also evidence that fear is not a very effective tool to engage people around the climate. But dismissing the severity of climate impacts and the real possibility of worst-case outcomes is also an extremely dangerous gamble. The risks are serious enough, and we need a common understanding of the urgent need to tackle them.
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