Why climate, as opposed to biodiversity, overshoot or meta-crisis? And why emergency?

Priorities, triage and communications strategy.

Many of my colleagues have quite fairly wondered if the focus on climate change is appropriate, strategic, or an accurate description of the troubles we face and the best route to addressing them.

It’s an important question, and I respect the thinkers who land in a different place than me. But here I will try to consolidate my thinking on the matter, for my own process and so that others can tell me why I’m wrong or join me in trying to convince the other others to prioritize this emergency.

After much reading and reflection and working with others over the past few years, it seems to me that the biggest threat to the ecosystems in our region and everywhere are from climate change (medium confidence).

It’s hard to be brief, because it’s such a big matter (the entire atmosphere, which contains the biosphere and human cultures). But I’ll try for a summary.

1. Triage and Prioritization

• We are faced with overwhelming environmental crises and threats, requiring the difficult task of prioritizing efforts through triage.

• Addressing climate change must be the top priority currently, as failure to do so in time risks losing everything we care about.

• The scientific community has provided clear guidelines on dangerous levels of pollution and warming that are rapidly approaching or being exceeded.

2. Climate Change as an Overarching Threat

• Climate change is altering the fundamental conditions upon which all species depend, posing an existential risk.

• Addressing climate change adequately will likely help mitigate other environmental threats as well, since the causes are so pervasive.

• In contrast to issues like biodiversity loss, climate change has gained more urgency and mainstream attention due to its visceral impacts on human lives.

3. Need for Emergency Response

• Incremental progress on climate change is insufficient; an emergency, wartime-level mobilization is required given the short timelines and severe consequences of failure.

• More individuals and institutions need to communicate the urgency and compel an emergency response from society.

• Historical examples like World War II show that societies can undergo transformative changes when faced with an existential threat.

4. Increasing Risks and Tipping Points

• The risks and projected impacts of climate change have worsened at lower levels of warming than previously thought, based on updated scientific understanding.

• There is a possibility of crossing catastrophic "tipping points" leading to abrupt, irreversible changes even at current or Paris Agreement warming levels.

• Both negative and positive social tipping points are possible, with the next major climate event potentially triggering a societal shift.

In summary, we need an emergency, all-hands-on-deck approach to combating climate change as the paramount crisis facing ecosystems, underscoring the latest scientific warnings about its escalating risks and the need for radical, system-wide transformation to avert massive ecological losses and civilizational collapse (ie. hell on earth). The tide has turned some, but we are still losing ground fast. Until more citizens apply a lot more pressure, we will keep losing.

… More about all that:

Yes, there are many crises and threats.

Triage

Triage is the art of determining how to prioritize efforts in an overwhelming situation. It’s brutal. When we do this with people, as with global threats to ecosystems or humans — there are going to be tragedies that could have been avoided if we’d had more time or resources. But this will be less tragic than the greater losses by not triage-ing.

If we fail to address climate change in time, we’ll lose basically everything we care about. We need all our resources, at this time, now, to steer away from the possible worst-case scenarios. We will lose other things we care about if we focus on the climate, but the overall tragedy will be less.

We are out of time.

The scientific community has given us some firm guidelines. They’ve defined the boundary of ‘too dangerous’ in terms of how much pollution and how much warming. That boundary is very much upon us... Canada’s fair-share of the pollution that takes us over the boundary is already exhausted. This means that if we don’t move waaaay faster, and help the rest of the world pick up the slack, then we’ll go waaaay past the ‘safe’ levels that the world agreed to.

I wrote another thing about the details of our timeline and our responsibility.

This is a major challenge that will take more than everything we’ve got. We’ve seen hard pushback against even insignificant effort. So to do enough, we’re going to have to be so much stronger, so united.

The timelines are tight. The consequences of failure are effectively permanent or even self-perpetually worsening over time.

Crossing those boundaries will harm all human systems and ecosystems beyond a tolerable amount, with a risk of tipping points. We don’t have this kind of or level of warning for other threats and impacts. So, as a literate non-scientist, I should prioritize as the science directs.

Nature is resilient.

Nature is usually resilient and often bounces back strongly if the underlying conditions are still there to support them. Climate change is, by definition, the experimental and dramatically rapid alteration of the superstructure upon which all species (including us) depend. Yes, if nature is dying by a thousand cuts, climate change is like a nuke on a short fuse.

Interestingly, people often point to nuclear weapon test site bikini atoll to remark on the resilience of nature. And this serves well to make my point: “Despite the previous devastation, the reefs are thriving, have high coral cover, teem with fish, and most of the coral species have returned.” Meanwhile, science predicts that 1.5C of average global warming might be too much for all the warm-water coral species. 1.5C is a level of warming that we may already be at (2023 marked the first dips up into 1.5C).

Climate envelops all.

The atmosphere literally covers everything. And more metaphorically, addressing climate change in a sufficient way, will likely help with all the other threats.

We will need to leave more ecosystems intact (trees sequester carbon), reduce farm runoff into rivers (excess fertilizer is climate pollution), people will need to share more and use less (all those climate impacting activities also have the other impacts).

The causes of climate change are so pervasive or widespread, that we will need to change almost everything in order to meet the challenge.

We will need to mobilize a huge portion of the population to strongly prioritize moral and forward-looking activities over short-sighted instant gratification. This will have massive knock-on effects. We will change economic systems if we are going to sufficiently address climate change, and this will change the bad incentives that currently drive many other environmental impacts. This new movement will have to take power away from those who have it now — the same power-types that lie behind resistance to many other improvements we would like to see.

Switching to local renewable energy could decentralize power, and reduce the number of bought politicians and dictatorships. Some estimates say it would reduce ship traffic by an estimated 40%. We would produce only 4% as much waste (because so much of our waste is fossil fuels).

And, last I checked, species loss was so far being driven by not-climate change human activities like habitat destruction and invasive species, but climate change is quickly taking over. And habitats can often grow back, but climate change stays changed (ok… many species will adapt to some levels of warming and we could unchange the climate eventually a bit somewhat).

Admittedly, if we solve for biodiversity loss, then we might make major progress on climate change. It seems much less clear to me. I can see this possibly being true, but for strategic reasons it seems like a harder route (that issue is next).

Strategic goal setting.

People trying to protect nature have had to try to convince people that they should care about the natural world for its own intrinsic reasons, or because it’s beautiful, or because we really need it for its ecosystem services. All true, but for most people it’s a stretch.

Focusing on climate change has the advantage of being a visceral, dramatic, direct impact on people’s lives. It destroys entire communities like Lytton, Lahaina, Puerto Rico, Houston, Florida. It hammers rich people who have power and will join us. It washes out infrastructure and costs people money in so many ways. Insurance companies are beginning to not insure, which means banks will not fund. Climate change causes revolution in ways that biodiversity loss, just doesn’t or hasn’t yet.

And maybe for this reason and others, climate change has a head start into the minds and hearts of the masses of people that we need to activate in order to solve all the problems. It makes it on to the list of Canadians’ most cared about issues, where biodiversity or metacrisis does not.

Go where the energy is strongest, build on the best momentum.

There is also a tribal aspect to all this… Many people don’t identify as environmentalist, and so they won’t care too much about nature-stuff. But climate change can cross identity lines because we all need to eat and survive… it started out as a not politically polarized issue. Apparently for folks under 25 years old, climate change is a real thing for Americans on either side of the political divide.

Strategically, a sweeping win on climate is most likely (albeit a massive challenge), and if done right can solve many other issues.

Emergency Mode Required.

Mediocre, slow progress on climate change is not good enough. It might have been good enough 30 years ago, when the world knew this was coming. That would have been smooth.

Now, we’re so far behind and so much needs to change in such a short amount of time that we need emergency mode, like WW2 mobilization.

In ww2, losing was felt to be unacceptable, the war was thought to be maybe unwinnable, so Canada and the ‘allies’ threw everything they had at it. Emergency mode.
Food stuffs were rationed.
Fuel and other resources were rationed.
Farmers in the UK were told to kill their cows because they’re inefficient.
If you had spare space in your house in the UK, that would be made available for our war refugees and the new farm workforce.
Industries were closed or transitioned into supplying the war effort.
Excess profits were taken and redirected.
Tax rate on income over $200k was 94%.
We set up new gov’t institutions to oversee many aspects of society.

We did what was required, all together. And for many, life was better. People thrive with shared struggle, challenge and meaning. We had lots of meaning for everyone.

But in order to get into emergency mode, we need more of us and more institutions to communicate the urgency and demand an emergency response, with feeling and facts. We need to bring more people into making that demand so that it has the power to unleash a society that is willing to do what it takes.

Whenever a person or institution fails to communicate this urgency, it communicates the opposite. When the fire alarm goes off, everyone that ignores it sends a strong signal to others that there is probably not an emergency. And that signal is powerful. People are largely conforming creatures and we communicate with our actions as much as or more than anything else.

When we act as though the house is not on fire, then others believe that the house is not on fire. And people don’t want to believe that the house is on fire too! This makes it even easier for them to tend toward that belief. This is why it is so important we communicate with urgency and compel others to do so aswell.

We need a wave of respected individuals and institutions to understand and acknowledge and then communicate the emergency in a way that connects with people deeply.

It’s Worse Than We Thought

We might have thought that other threats were as bad as climate change, or that climate change would only be very bad later, if it got totally out of hand. This has changed over time, but much of the world has not re-calibrated the level of concern. We need to help people recalibrate by sounding the alarm.

This chart shows the impacts in a few categories. The years at the top show how our thinking (and experience) has shifted to recognize greater danger at lower levels of warming. Hit [ctrl] and [+] together to zoom in.

We used to think that large scale discontinuities (tipping points and abrupt massive changes) were a risk at 3C and above. As of 2021, we see this risk as already being possible at todays level of warming, with the risk increasing with more warming.

All the other categories of impacts also have gotten much worse, at much lower levels of warming. If we don’t fix this soon, then we will see a horrific unravelling of the world we once knew.

The Climate-science community is currently a bit torn up about how much warming is already committed to based on emissions so far. There’s a chance Things are bad, they will get worse and it will take everything we’ve got to stop them from getting very very bad.

And there’s also tipping points.

Tipping points.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a neo-liberal organization, not a environmental one. And yet, they studied the latest science and conclude:

Recent state-of-the-art research shows that important tipping points are already “possible” at current levels of warming and may become “likely” within the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to 2°C warming, questioning the previously well-accepted notion that climate tipping points have a low probability of being crossed under low levels of warming.
… it is vital to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C, with no or very limited overshoot. This effectively reduces the number and shapes of possible emissions pathways towards 1.5°C.
…It is therefore critical that 2030 ambition in NDCs is considerably strengthened in the very near term, and that commensurate policies are implemented at relevant timescales to meet these revised targets.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/climate-tipping-points_abc5a69e-en

We really have to ramp up this effort. We won’t win without more people getting off the sidelines. Especially people with resources and access to power — and that means most people in wealthy countries.

Social Tipping Points Exist Too.

Things can tip in both directions. We’ve seen the right-wing push back against the carbon tax. This might tip our national leadership away from climate action. Climate action was already woefully insufficient. So, it appears this really really hard thing (addressing climate change) is going to be even harder than we thought.

Positive tipping points happen too. #Metoo, civil rights, gay rights, the end of slavery… things can be at their worst before they change all at once. And that might be how this goes. And the next climate event could be the thing that tips us.

Conclusion.

The imperative to act on climate change has never been clearer or more urgent.

While confronting this crisis will require an unprecedented societal mobilization akin to wartime efforts, the consequences of failure are almost unimaginably catastrophic. We find ourselves poised at a potential tipping point where the next major climate event could catalyze a radical shift in priorities and policies.

This is our call to embrace an emergency footing and muster the courage to make the transformative changes necessary to navigate humanity through this existential crossroads. The scientific alarms are deafening, but so too are the opportunities to unite behind a shared struggle imbued with profound meaning for our generation and those to follow.

We simply cannot accept failure on an issue that holds the key to the flourishing or unraveling of civilizations and ecological systems across this planet we call home. The time to heed the warnings and act with the moral urgency this crisis demands is now.