Climate change is like death. The larger it looms, the less I want to think about it. Recently, however, I’ve made an effort to face global warming squarely. One goad is the protests of Greta Thunberg and other young activists. Another is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by journalist David Wallace-Wells. It is a nonfiction horror story that, paradoxically, left me feeling more hopeful about the future.
Wallace-Wells came to the topic of climate change late, and reluctantly. He was never particularly green. He likes meat, doesn’t like camping. He cares much more about humanity than about “nature,” whatever that is. He was once skeptical of “the Environmental left,” but after delving into climate change a few years ago, he got scared. “Alarmist” is a derogatory term, but Wallace-Wells embraces it. “I am alarmed,” he says, and we should be too. “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”
Wallace-Wells notes that we are pumping carbon into the atmosphere 10 times faster than the volcanic eruptions that precipitated the Great Permian Extinction 250 million years ago, which “ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead.” Our emissions are already wreaking havoc. Since 1980, annual storms have doubled, coastal floods have quadrupled, life-threatening heat waves have surged fiftyfold. The melt rate of Antarctic ice has tripled just in the last decade. As many as 2.1 billion people already lack safe drinking water, and shortages are growing more severe. Things will surely get worse. How much depends on us. If “the next thirty years of industrial activity trace the same upward arc as the last thirty years have, whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of the century.”
Wallace-Wells packs bad news into chapters titled “Heat Death,” “Hunger,” “Drowning,” and “Climate Conflict.” The latter explores the likelihood that migrations and other climate consequences will trigger wars over water and other resources. I have written critically about this prophecy, which I fear might become self-fulfilling, but the analysis of Wallace-Wells strikes me as awfully credible. He emphasizes that wars exacerbate scarcity as well as vice versa. This is just one of many negative feedback effects that can compound the effects of climate change. He writes, “Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still—and so on.”
Despair is understandable, given the fractious state of politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. We are “recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility,” Wallace-Wells points out, precisely when we need global cooperation. But noting that he and his wife just had a child, he rejects “climate nihilism.” We have all the tools we need, technological and political, to save ourselves. We just need to use them. The scale of climate change itself should be empowering. “If humans are responsible for the problem,” he writes, “they must be capable of undoing it.”
This can-do rhetoric reminds me of a 1963 speech in which President John Kennedy envisioned a world without war. “Our problems are manmade,” JFK declared, “therefore they can be solved by man.” And that brings me to hopeful vision. Over the past decade I have written much more about war than about climate change, because I believe that “war is our most urgent problem.” After reading Uninhabitable Earth, I would amend that claim. I now see war and climate change as equally urgent.
They are also intertwined, and not just because warming might trigger resource wars. As the antiwar group World Beyond War points out, the world spends about $2 trillion a year on arms and armies, money that would go far toward countering climate change. The U.S. accounts for more than a third of this spending, and it is the world’s biggest arms innovator, manufacturer, and dealer. The American military is also the world’s single biggest consumer of fossil fuels.
I’d like to see more acknowledgement of these linkages by green activists and politicians. By calling for reductions in military spending as well as fossil-fuel emissions, they might catalyze a powerful, positive feedback loop. The global cooperation we need to solve global warming can also help us solve war. Imagine what we could do with just half the resources dedicated to “defense”! A green antiwar movement would not only avert the worst catastrophes depicted by Wallace-Wells. It would also create a more peaceful, prosperous, just world.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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