Predictions
A year ago, I predicted that the Covid19 pandemic would kill 35 million or even more people. Although mortality statistics suggest that the current official death count (about two and a half million at the time of writing) significantly underestimates the real number of deaths, it is also becoming increasingly unlikely that we’ll reach numbers anywhere near that pessimistic prediction any time soon. The reason why my prediction was so far off is the same reason why many other predictions fail: they insufficiently take into account that human behavior changes in response to changes in circumstances. Typically, models used to...
Carbon-neutrality by 2050 (version of December 2020)
(Some corrections were made in this article on March 2, 2022. The most recent version of this article can be found here.) This year several governments announced that their countries will be carbon neutral by 2050. This is a cheap promise, as the target is so far in the future that it doesn’t commit them to do anything significant now, but even if the commitment would be real, one may wonder how probable it is that the target will actually be reached, and whether it will be enough. These are two different questions, of course, and I will try to...
An Upper Limit of 3.9°C for Climate Change?
One of the oldest quantitative claims in climate science is that the likely global average temperature increase due to a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ is between 1.5 and 4.5°C. This range dates back to 1979 and has remained unchanged until yesterday with the publication of a refined estimate by a large group of researchers in the Review of Geophysics. Based on three different and independent lines of research (modeling, historical records, and paleoclimate records), they conclude that the range is between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. This had lead some media to proclaim that both optimists and “doomsayers” have been proven wrong,...
Lessons from the Ongoing Disaster (for the Next One)
Presumably, you are aware that we’re in the middle of a disaster. That’s unpleasant – to say the least – but it’s also quite instructive. There is much we can learn from the ongoing disaster and humanity’s responses to it. But whether we can use those lessons to avert the even bigger disaster looming on the horizon is questionable. Rather, it seems that the most important thing that we can learn from the corona crisis is that we as a species may very well be incapable of avoiding catastrophy. ignore and deny For months, the general attitude of most governments...
What to Do?
(This is part 8 in the No Time for Utopia series.) I never liked Tolkien’s books – I always found them badly written, reactionary garbage – but when I was trying to write this final chapter in the No Time for Utopia series I kept returning to this quote from The Lord of the Rings: “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with...
Human Extinction
Apparently, an increasing number of people say that they believe that climate change will cause human extinction. To what extent all of these people are genuinely convinced about this I don’t know, although, for reasons explained elsewhere, I expect that for most of them it is a desperate attempt to find meaning and make sense of an increasingly meaningless and senseless world more than a genuine conviction. Regardless, the topic of human extinction is an interesting one. How likely is human extinction really? And would human extinction actually be a bad thing? These are the two questions I will focus...
Facing the Anthropocene – Attitudes towards Climate Change
In a review of a number of books about the Anthropocene, British sociologist Leslie Sklair wrote that: Three main narratives have emerged: (1) While posing problems, the Anthropocene is a ‘great opportunity’ for business, science and technology, geoengineering, and so on. (2) The planet and humanity itself are in danger, we cannot ignore the warning signs but if we are clever enough we can save ourselves and the planet with technological fixes (as in 1). (3) We are in great danger, humanity cannot go on living and consuming as we do now, we must change our ways of life radically...
The 2020s and Beyond
(This is part 7 in the No Time for Utopia series.) The main guiding principle of this series is a rejection of “ideal theory”, that is, of idealizations and unwarranted abstractions from the real world. Nevertheless, by viewing the climate crisis in relative isolation and by mostly ignoring how it might interact with various other developments, I have effectively abstracted that issue from the real world. Unfortunately, this is not easily remedied, and any attempt at a broader view will be largely speculative. It can only be speculative, because even a slightly broader view is well beyond the level of...
A Theory of Disaster-Driven Societal Collapse and How to Prevent It
(abstract) — One of the effects of climate change is an increase in extreme weather and natural disasters. Unless CO₂ emissions are significantly reduced very soon, it is inevitable that the effects of disaster will exceed many (and ultimately all) societies’ mitigation capacity. Compounding unmitigated disaster effects will slowly but surely push a society towards collapse. Because no part of the planet is safe from the increase in natural disaster intensity and because some of the effects of disasters – such as refugees and economic decline – spill over boundaries, this will eventually lead to global societal collapse. Furthermore, just...
The Possibility of a Revolution
(This is part 6 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In The Ethics of Climate Insurgency I argued that an insurgency aimed at overthrowing the enemies of our children is not morally justified because it is unlikely that – in the present situation – such an insurgency can succeed. It may seem that that conclusion also makes a discussion of the possibility of some kind of revolution to avoid catastrophe and establish something like the Lesser Dystopia is moot, but that is not exactly the case for (at least) two reasons. Firstly, in considering the possibility of a revolution...
The Ethics of Climate Insurgency
(This is part 5 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Let’s say that you want to avoid the Mad-Maxian hell of societal collapse that climate change is making increasing likely, then how can and should you try to do that? You’d have an incredibly powerful and well-connected enemy, and just asking them to give up their short-term profits in order to save the planet isn’t likely to have any effect – at least, it hasn’t had any effect thus far. Then what? Very many different answers can be given to that last question, but I want to focus here...
Michael Mann versus the “Doomists”
Last month, Breakthrough Australia published a paper by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop that claims that “climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilisation”. Climate scientist Michael Mann was quick to put down the paper as “overblown rhetoric”. He was quoted as saying that “I respect the authors and appreciate that their intentions are good, but as I have written before, overblown rhetoric, exaggeration, and unsupportable doomist framing can be counteractive to climate action.” The quote by Mann raises a number of questions. Is the report by Spratt and Dunlop “overblown rhetoric” indeed? Does Mann...