Rejoice, the End is Near
It is no longer possible to deny that climate change targets sufficient to stave off total disaster will never be met, but while this realization should give us pause, should it give us despondency?
Disrespect for nature is leading to our own destruction. By desecrating the biosphere with our pollution and having caused Earth’s sixth mass extinction by annihilating species around the planet, we are setting ourselves up for what I believe will ultimately be our own extinction…
Reporting on the catastrophic impact of climate disruption for this book involved trips to the front lines of collapsing geo- and biospheres and interviews and reports about near-apocalyptic scenarios: about rapidly thawing permafrost, the release of methane into the atmosphere, the flooding of coastal cities, the increasing likelihood of billions of people dying in the not-so-distant future. Though I learned to find a way of looking unwaveringly at what was happening to the planet, I fell into a deep depression and I began to wonder whether there was any point in even writing about this.
I had hoped my work in Iraq would contribute to ending the U.S. occupation of that country. I had hoped, too, that writing climate dispatches and bludgeoning people with scientific reports about increasingly dire predictions of the future would wake them up to the planetary crisis we find ourselves in. It has been difficult for me to surrender that hope. But I came to understand that hope blocked the greater need to grieve, so that was the reason necessitating the surrender of it.
From Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice (page 216-217)
I recently published the fourth part of a series of informal surveys of recent developments in the climate change realm, all of which are characterized by the oft-repeated media phrases “worse than anticipated” and “sooner than expected.” The reality and the lethal danger of climate change is now undeniable, if it ever was legitimately questionable (it was not). Our fate would be in limbo even if world governments came together today and instated effective, far-reaching climate legislation to immediately halt or even reverse emissions, but this is not the case—by any relevant criteria, we are charging forward toward irreversible baked-in warming, ecological and meteorological feedback loops that will amplify extant degradations (which are massive) and terrifying tipping points past which we can never return.
Three such tipping points:
Change #1: Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica could collapse
Ice sheets are the massive expanses of ice that cover Greenland and Antarctica, and which contain about two thirds of the freshwater on Earth. Climate change is already causing them to melt, and raising sea levels around the world.
But if the Earth lingers at, or above, 2 degrees Celsius of warming, as it is on track to, that melting will steadily accelerate. Scientists warn that will cause parts of the ice sheets to collapse, sending massive amounts of water into the world's oceans…
Change #2: Permanently frozen ground could thaw
Climate change is causing permafrost – the permanently frozen ground in the Arctic – to thaw. And as the Earth approaches 2 degrees Celsius of warming, that thawing ground will cause both local and global problems.
Let's start local. When permafrost thaws, the ice that's trapped in the ground turns into water and drains away. "It can have really profound consequences," says Merritt Turetsky, the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We can see lakes draining overnight. We can see ecosystems becoming much drier in some areas, because the permafrost was actually holding the water up at the surface."
That's because when the ground is frozen, it's impermeable to moisture, like the lining of a bathtub. "When it thaws, we pull the drain out of the bathtub," Turetsky explains…
Change #3: Coral reefs could be gone forever
By overall area, coral reefs are a tiny part of the ocean. But they're a bedrock ecosystem for marine life, supporting an estimated 25% of all species.
Corals are highly sensitive to heat, and as the oceans warm, the future of reefs is in peril. When marine heat waves hit, corals under stress expel their algae companions, which they need to survive. The reefs turn a ghostly white color.
A bleaching event doesn't necessarily mean the end for a coral reef. Corals have the ability to recover, given enough time. But repeated heat waves, as seen at Australia's Great Barrier Reef, can kill a reef, leading to the collapse of the ecosystem.
Unless we very soon radically reorient our way of life (even this is no guarantee at this late stage), everything and everyone we know and love will soon go up in flames, get swallowed by rising seas or flash floods, or lie rotting and desiccated in an abandoned, drought-stricken desert. The end was always inevitable, in our individual lives and now, thanks to our ignorance and hubris, in our collective ones as well. Both the good and the bad within us was built around planned obsolescence: as beings incapable of experiencing or even perceiving significantly lengthy periods of time, let alone eternity, the human mind must necessarily grapple with its inborn finite nature—the instinctive drive to continue to live must be confronted. Some of the (non-religious) coping mechanisms and comforting thoughts which often successfully allow us to navigate mortality can be applied to our ever-shortening civilizational lifespan as well.
All of our achievements will soon be washed away along with our ossified sufferings and attendant grievances, regrets and trauma, and indeed any record whatsoever of our presence on this planet, a sobering and yet simultaneously freeing inevitability. This was always the ultimate long-term fate of at least our galaxy and possibly the universe: to lose our home and all memories of it to entropic disintegration eons after the last of us vanished. Absent any realistic potential for the comforting potential of the immortality of our bodies or our works, the meaning we make for ourselves is necessarily short-term and subjective, a realization which has given enough of us pause that whole religious dynasties with millions of adherents have persisted for thousands of years, all reflective of a desperate effort to grasp at unending life or at least unending legacy. All of this, despite organized religion’s ultimate hinderance of our most important goal: to bring about a sustainable, sufficiently egalitarian civilization which maximizes the potential of all to enjoy its existence in contrast to the state of nature we’d otherwise find ourselves in. After all, what else could justify the imposition of rules and obligations on otherwise free animals? Something must be gained in the bargain, or we would have been better off in the trees and caves (knowing what we know now about climate change, this is even more salient a point). In a previous entry, I make the case that religious doubt and irrationality leads adherents to make similarly evidence-free assertions in the moral and political realms:
This argument was recently proven correct:
Most adults in the United States – including a large majority of Christians and people who identify with other religions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it.
But highly religious Americans – those who pray daily, regularly attend religious services and consider religion crucial in their lives -- are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about global warming.
Those are among the key findings in a comprehensive report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 10,156 U.S. adults from April 11 to April 17. It’s margin of error for the full sample of respondents is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
The survey says religious Americans tend to be less concerned about climate change for several reasons.
“First and foremost is politics: The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion,” the report says.
“Highly religious Americans are more inclined than others to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and Republicans tend to be much less likely than Democrats to believe human activity (such as burning fossil fuels) is warming the Earth or to consider climate change a serious problem.”
Coping in what appears to be a healthy or harmless manner may thus be dangerous in unpredictable ways when irrationality is involved. When scientific and philosophical rigor is observed, as mature individuals are capable of doing, one can prepare for the end without resorting to floundering perpetually in the denial or bargaining stages of grief, potentially stopping us from seeking life-saving care or pursuing bunk holistic remedies in its stead. We will need to recognize this terminal illness sooner rather than later, whether we like it or not, given the issues mentioned above as well as the added strain of the proliferation of fertility-reducing substances everywhere on the planet:
Now that we have recognized the end is near, how should we react to this concession? Central to this question is the value of the human race itself, which was never meant to be perpetual according to any naturalistic or evolutionary thinking. According to nature, we exist only to pass along our genetic material, which in and of itself is neither an inherent good nor is it a measure of any kind of success beyond the narrow biological sense. What is there to say about a species which is, by and large, incapable of ceding the idea of infinite life and which eagerly rationalizes its destructive nature for paltry, inconsequential (and worse, easily replaced) comforts and the profoundly uneven scraps of our business as usual late stage capitalist model of production? Boiled down to its essentials, the human race has immolated itself because lifting a finger to seek water would have been difficult (or, in the words of far-right denialists, effete and “soy”).
By the shorter-term, “life’s what you make it” measure as well, we have failed. Rather than sadness or resignation, we should regard the imminent certain end of our civilization and race as a morally neutral one, because in the same way one can no longer meaningfully harm a corpse, the finality of our self-destruction ensures that there will be no more suffering and no more observers to be distressed by what took place. To be sure, the process of dying out will be painful, and will be visited most severely on poorer nations who had the smallest hand in contributing to emissions and biosphere destruction. Absent an outside observer and with all subjects long deceased, it will be meaningless to ascribe a moral condemnation to our annihilation. The human race not inherently worthy of preserving, in the same way a terminally ill patient may find their lives to be no longer worth living past a certain point in their disease’s progression, and this position leads to both a calming stoicism about our nature and a concomitant acceptance of another unpopular truth, that the most effective weapon in the average Earthling’s climate arsenal is abstinence:
Regardless of the outcome, our fealty should only be to the truth of things. All other positions would naturally require some compelling reason to adopt them, and none of them do. The default, which is to see the world as it is and not as we would like it to be (this is our natural way of interacting with and learning about the world), should not therefore be replaced by any happier alternatives.
Facts, indeed, do not care about your feelings. Shame that the most notable user of this phrase, far-right propagandist Ben Shapiro, has never encountered one. But we must recognize the truth of our imminent extinction no matter how dark and terrifying it might initially seem. Truth exists independently of our ability to countenance it and reflects an immutable scientific and normative reality which is not altered by interpretation or the tolerability of its outcomes. The outcomes of recognizing this truth cannot alter it—these incidental ramifications are owned by the subject conceding to reality and by this subject alone. Climate optimists will be quick to argue that pessimism leads to resignation and therefore the truth is malleable depending on our predictive interpretations of it, but this is not accurate on the face of it—false hope in fact leads to inaction. From the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change:
For the first time this millennium, growth in carbon emissions has slowed. Indeed, the year 2014 was the first time in 40 years that the planet saw zero growth in emissions. We examine whether this message of progress can be effective in motivating people to engage in mitigation efforts. This question dovetails with commentary suggesting that gloomy messages about climate change risk fatiguing the population, and that alternative approaches are necessary. It is also informed by work suggesting that hope is a motivating force in terms of engaging in collective action and social change. Study 1 (N = 574) showed that negative emotions were strongly related to mitigation motivation and feelings of efficacy, but hope-related emotions had a much weaker relationship with these constructs. In the main experiment (Study 2: N = 431) participants read an optimistic, pessimistic, or neutral message about the rate of progress in reducing global carbon emissions. Relative to the pessimistic message, the optimistic message reduced participants’ sense that climate change represented a risk to them, and the associated feelings of distress. Consequently, the optimistic message was less successful in increasing mitigation motivation than the pessimistic message. In sum, predictions that the optimistic message would increase efficacy did not transpire; concerns that the optimistic message would increase complacency did transpire. Recent progress in curbing global carbon emissions is welcome, but we found no evidence that messages focusing on this progress constitute an effective communication strategy.
Further reading from the Harvard Gazette:
Two Democratic fundraising emails were sent to supporters. In one version, the candidate was leading a closely contested race; in the other, he was trailing. Which email got more clicks and coaxed more donations?
Perhaps counterintuitively, the losing candidate’s message sparked the most action.
The experiment was part of a study that explored how optimism can lead to inaction. Behavioral scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School and colleagues conducted six related studies that explored “belief in a favorable future” across various contexts and cultures, and found that people tend to believe that others will come around to their point of view over time.
“It often seems that partisans believe they are so correct that others will eventually come to see the obviousness of their correctness,” Rogers said. “Ironically, our findings indicate that this belief in a favorable future may diminish the likelihood that people will take action to ensure [it] becomes reality.”
In one online study, the researchers asked 254 participants to report their views on nine wide-ranging topics: abortion, same-sex marriage, climate change, ideology, party affiliation, President Trump, soda, the National Basketball Association, and phone preferences. For all topics, the participants’ own beliefs were tied to their predictions of how others’ views would change.
Recognizing the relative long-term futility of our situation should not lead incontrovertibly to any specific reaction, whether positive or negative. If it does lead to distress or despair in some individuals, this is at best a regrettable but necessary stepping stone on their path to enlightenment. We should not avert our eyes at this late stage, recognizing that in order to at least curb the worst impacts of climate change, we must first recognize its severity, lest we place our trust in insufficient or even counterproductive climate legislation, such as the pursuit of green technology, carbon credits, and other nigh-useless, exploitable non-solutions such as carbon capture, which is both an unworkable solution and a boon for polluting industries:
It is an appealing proposition for a nation urgently trying to confront global warming: enlist state-of-the-art machinery to trap and bury harmful greenhouse gas emissions from the most heavily polluting industries, enabling them to otherwise continue business as usual.
Billions of dollars of new subsidies for such carbon capture technology are a signature component of the $370 billion climate package President Biden signed into law in August, with the administration and lawmakers across party lines promising it will help America meet its climate goals.
Yet after years of underwhelming results in carbon capture experimentation, this surge of cash strikes many climate scholars as predominantly a gift to fossil fuel, chemical and industrial agriculture companies seeking a lucrative route to rebrand as “green.” The vastly increased tax credit, which lobbyists of every major oil company pursued, will propel a technology that has failed to deliver in several prominent trials.
The pursuit of non-revolutionary, yet putatively green reforms of our capitalist system, which are at best red herrings offered only to put off the adoption of real, needed reforms and at worst actively harmful to the environment at large or to vulnerable populations (see for example the discussion of carbon offsets in The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, Adrienne Buller’s compelling new book about the token efforts by corporations and governments to play at environmentalist policy while accomplishing little and externalizing the true costs to poorer nations in the short term and to the environment itself in the long one), might be termed instances of “toxic optimism.” This is a sinister, enforced optimism which can cause otherwise well-meaning, concerned individuals to place their hopes in inadequate, easily-corrupted ‘solutions’ when in reality the pessimist knows that only a revolution could have ever saved us at some point in the past, and only a revolution can meaningfully ameliorate the worst of the coming cataclysm today. Useless measures such as these are in fact a net negative because they preclude the possibility of meaningful change and exhaust reformers’ will, in combination with the increasingly authoritarian spying and infiltration done by governments desperate to maintain hegemony in what promises to be a chaotic series of decades.
In the same way, accepting our eventual death and irrelevance should not lead to despair or suicidal behavior but rather an appreciation for the richness and fullness of life, to the extent that we are lucky enough to find ourselves in a position to do so—already a roll of the dice given the poverty late-stage capitalism has inflicted on billions now living, a number which is sure to grow as the climate crisis deepens inequalities and both spreads and amplifies aggregate suffering. To hear the optimists tell it, acceptance of one’s mortality in this way would lead to immediate existential crisis and then suicide. Yet there are many who accept that finality and continue to live, doing what they can in the meantime to improve their situation, help others, and reduce that aggregate suffering. Neither does our imminent end need to be a wistful affair if we take the coming self-destruction as deserved, a seemingly misanthropic view that is nonetheless based in compelling evidence.
Even a cursory read of human history paints the picture of constant irrational strife, enslavement of the mind and body, thoughtless growth and consumption, and pat rationalizations for this behavior punctuated only rarely by moments of great advancement and prosperity. All of the the human race’s achievements (such as they are), all of its joys, all of its art…all of this taken together fails to justify the suffering and unfairness which has marked our history from the onset. One would not forgive a violent home invader if they left behind a witty poem, nor should we seek redemption for thousands of years of self-mutilating crimes in our incidental accomplishments. To summarize, a quote from Wen Stephenson in The Nation:
End the dishonesty, the deception. Stop lying to yourselves, and to your children. Stop pretending that the crisis can be “solved,” that the planet can be “saved,” that business more-or-less as usual—what progressives and environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years and more—is morally or intellectually tenable. Let go of the pretense that “environmentalism” as we know it—virtuous green consumerism, affluent low-carbon localism, head-in-the-sand conservationism, feel-good greenwashed capitalism—comes anywhere near the radical response our situation requires.
In this abandonment of realistic hope we find the potential for action, as Jamail argues, to prepare for dire eventualities such as this one:
Already record numbers of people are being forced to flee their homes with each passing year. In 2021, there were 89.3 million people, double the number forcibly displayed a decade ago, and in 2022 that number reached 100 million, with climate disasters displacing many more people than conflicts. Floods displaced 33 million people in Pakistan this year, while millions more in Africa have been affected by drought and the threat of famine, from the Horn of Africa to the continent's west coast.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appealed to global leaders at the COP27 climate change conference to take bold action to tackle the humanitarian consequences of global warming. That change needs to be "transformational" according to the UNHRC. "We cannot leave millions of displaced people and their hosts to face the consequences of a changing climate alone," says Grandi.
Without action, hundreds of millions people will have to leave their homes by 2050, according some estimates. One study from 2020 predicts that by 2070, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, "one to three billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years".
With so many people on the move, will this mean that invented political borders, ostensibly imposed for national security, become increasingly meaningless? The threat posed by climate change and its social repercussions dwarf those surrounding national security. Heatwaves already kill more people than those who die as a direct result of violence in wars.
Compounding this, the global population is still growing, particularly in some of the regions worst hit by climate change and poverty. Populations in Africa are set to almost triple by 2100, even as those elsewhere slow in growth. This means there will be a greater number of people in the very areas that are likely to be worst affected by extreme heat, drought and catastrophic storms. A greater number of people will also need food, water, power, housing and resources, just as these become ever harder to supply.
Regardless of our ability to come to terms with it, life on Earth is shortly going to change in a big way. Given our nature, it is likely that we will continue to deny, externalize, and dissemble our way into a premature extinction, first and most harshly suffered by our most vulnerable fellows. But this will be cold comfort for the elites, who will inevitably and deservedly shuffle along into the void not long after them. In this righteous hatred of the primacy of our baser natures and rejection of blinkered, deadly optimism, we can find solace rather than torment.