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VILLAGEAugust/September
S
CIENCE warns us that humanity is on
a collision course with physics. Failure
to radically decarbonise the global
energy system and to ease human impacts
on the biosphere is, we have been warned,
likely to lead to catastrophic climate change
in the coming decades. You’ve heard this
before, but it’s still exceedingly difficult to
imagine a future so radically different to the
present and the immediate past.
That’s where ‘The Collapse of Western
Civilisation – a View From The Future ‘comes
in. Science historians Naomi Oreskes and
Erik Conway’s extended essay allows them
to engage in literary and historical hind-
sight by setting the story at the end of the
tumultuous st century and casting a his-
torian’s eye back at the unfolding tragedy of
what they call the Penumbral Period (-
).
“To the historian studying this tragic
period of human history, the most
astounding fact is that the victims
knew what was happening and why.
Indeed, they chronicled it in detail
precisely because they knew that fos-
sil fuel combustion was to blame”.
There was copious scientific evidence
available by the first decade of the cen-
tury to signal that the current system was
unsustainable, unstable and certain to lead
to disaster. We knew, yet we did not act. The
generation with access to more information
than any other in human history chose not
to act to save itself. Why?
Our historian concludes that a second
Dark Age had fallen on Western civilisation,
in which denial and self-deception, rooted
in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets,
disabled the world’s powerful
nations in the face of tragedy.
Moreover, the scientists
who best understood the prob-
lem were hamstrung by their
own cultural practices, which
demanded an excessively strin-
gent standard for accepting
claims of any kind – even those
involving imminent threats.
Western civilisation, the
authors suggest, had become
“trapped in the grip of two
inhibiting ideologies: positivism
and market fundamentalism”.
ENVIRONMENT FUTURE HISTORY
How
it will
happen
Science historians
show the way climate
change will threaten
life. By John Gibbons
Newspapers
often quoted
think tank
employees
as if they
were climate
researchers
“
August/September VILLAGE
Despite all the research undertaken in the
late th and early st centuries, the
knowledge that accrued from this vast sci-
entific enterprise did little or nothing to dent
the powerful economic and political forces
wedded to hydrocarbon extraction, a net-
work they label the “carbon-combustion
complex”.
“Maintaining the carbon-combustion
complex was clearly in the self-interest
of these groups, so they cloaked this fact
behind a network of ‘think tanks’ that
issued challenges to scientific knowledge
they found threatening. Newspapers often
quoted think tank employees as if they were
climate researchers, juxtaposing their views
against those of epistemologically independ-
ent university or government scientists”.
The emergence of a powerful new ideology
known as market fundamentalism, espe-
cially after the end of the Cold War in ,
deepened the crisis. Market fundamentalism
took on all the trappings of a quasi-religious
cult, its proponents bitterly opposing even
the most rudimentary forms of government
intervention in the ‘free market’.
The founding fathers of market funda-
mentalism, such as Friedrich von Hayek,
actually respected science and saw it as the
natural companion to capitalism. However,
“when environmental science showed that
government action was needed to pro-
tect citizens and the natural environment
from unintended harms, the carbon-com-
bustion complex began to treat science as
an enemy to be fought by whatever means
necessary”.
Arguing against regulation of any kind
had become so ingrained (and profitable)
for corporations that even the repeated
presentation of scientific evidence failed
to shake them from their certainties – with
tragic consequences. “It is hard to imagine
why anyone in the th century would have
argued against government protection of the
natural environment on which human life
depends. Yet such arguments were not just
made, they dominated the public sphere”.
The irony here is rich: “The ultimate para-
dox was that neoliberalism, meant to ensure
individual freedom above all, led eventually
to a situation that necessitated large-scale
government intervention”.
It is, the authors contend, “difficult to
understand why humans did not respond
appropriately in the early Penumbral Period,
when preventive measures were still pos-
sible. Many have sought an answer in the
general phenomenon of human adaptive
optimism”. Even more puzzling to future
historians will be how scientists, the very
people whose job was to understand the
threat and to warn society, mostly them-
selves failed to grasp the sheer magnitude
of the threat of climate change.
The establishment of the IPCC was
supposed to provide an overarching sys-
tem-wide perspective. While the collective
expertise of the IPCC was vast, it concen-
trated on physical sciences, often ignoring
the all-important social science dimen-
sion. “Scientists understood that those
greenhouse gases were accumulating
because of the activities of human beings,
yet they rarely said that the cause was
people, and their patterns of conspicuous
consumption”.
While the scientists dithered, the world
burned. The UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was put in
place in , yet between then and ,
total CO emissions skyrocketed by %
globally.
Our historian from the future observes
that the IPCC had projected a doubling of
atmospheric CO by – in fact, it arrived
ahead of schedule, in . The projected
-ºC surface temperature rise turned out
to be .ºC.
“By , heat waves and droughts were
the norm. Control measures – such as water
and food rationing and Malthusian ‘one-
child’ policies – were widely implemented.
In wealthy countries, the most hurricane-
and tornado-prone regions were gradually
but steadily depopulated, putting increased
social pressure on areas less subject to those
hazards”.
Much worse was to follow. The brutal
Northern Hemisphere summer of
led to global food crop failures, famines,
food riots and unprecedented panic. “Mass
migration of undernourished and dehy-
drated individuals, coupled with explosive
increases in insect populations, led to wide-
spread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue
fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral
agents never before seen”.
By the early s, social order was crum-
bling – first in Africa, but quickly sweeping
through Asia and Europe. The US govern-
ment declared martial law as its breadbasket
dried out and famine swept the continent. As
the situation became ever more desperate,
the ‘Unified Nations Convention on Climate
Engineering & Protection (UNCCEP)’ began
planning a global climate cooling project.
For its first three years, the project
appeared to be succeeding, and tempera-
tures began to edge downwards. However,
an unintended consequence of this geo-en-
gineering gamble was the virtual shutdown
of the Indian monsoon, leading to famine
sweeping across the sub-continent. The
experiment was abandoned in , but
this led to a ‘termination shock’ as the heat-
ing rebounded fiercely – a projected .ºC
cooling quickly became +ºC of additional
heating, pushing global temperatures to
+ºC over pre-industrial levels.
By the mid-s, a global climate tip-
ping point was passed. There was a sudden
and dramatic thaw of permafrost and meth-
ane (CH) release. “Estimated total carbon
release of Arctic CH during the next dec-
ade may have reached over
, gigatonnes, effectively
doubling the total atmospheric
carbon load. This massive
addition of carbon led to what
is known as the Sagan effect, a
strong positive feedback loop
between warming and CH
release. Planetary tempera-
ture increased by an additional
ºC”.
This methane pulse dis-
r up te d o c e a n t e m pe r a t u r es an d
circulation, and dealt the death
blow to the West Antarctic
ice sheet. Between and
, rapid Antarctic melt
sent global sea levels surging
by five metres. Around this
time, the Greenland ice sheet
began to slide into the north
Atlantic, adding another two
metres to sea levels.
Globally, some . billion people were dis-
placed from coastal regions by the - metre
sea level rise. Waves of refugees caused
huge disruption in the already distressed
communities into which they poured. A sec-
ond Black Death swept Europe and North
America. There was no functioning health
system to arrest its spread. Up to half the
affected populations died. Some -%
of all species on Earth went extinct during
this period.
At +ºC, we would assume the Sagan
effect would have led to the obliteration of
all life as a series of positive feedbacks led
to runaway global warming and the death
of the oceans. However, the authors flinch
at such an outcome.
A genetically-modified CO-sucking
lichen rides to the rescue. “Within two
decades, it had visibly altered the visual
landscape and measurably altered atmos-
pheric CO, starting the globe on the road
to atmospheric recovery and the world on
the road to social, political, and economic
recovery”. The idea that we might get a sec-
ond chance after runaway climate change
is the only truly improbable aspect of ‘The
Collapse of Western Civilisation’. •
The most
astounding fact is
that the victims
knew what was
happening and
why but were
in the grip of
two inhibiting
ideologies:
positivism
and market
fundamentalism
“
