Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation:
They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an “Oh, shit” moment–an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself.
It’s especially alarming when people who, ahem, know their shit, speak about their own personal “Oh Shit” moment.
Take Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, and a physicist whose specialty is chaos theory.
Speaking in July at an invitation only conference in New Mexico, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues’ study states that the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020. Yep, that means quit carbon completely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035.
The world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050.
This kind of timetable is lightyears from what the IPCC is proposing, and failing to get agreement on.
But even this “brutal” timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber admitted, wouldn’t guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so–”worse odds than Russian roulette …But it is the best we can do.”
To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner.
“I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers,” Schellnhuber said. Hans’ suggestion to push past that rising “Oh Shit” feeling and avert paralysis? “War-time mobilisation.”
So, time to share: what’s produced your latest “Oh Shit” moment? Or have you, like many of the Australians polled in the latest Lowy Institute survey, managed to ignore the bad news and pushed climate change down the list of your concerns, to, oh, seventh — just behind job security, the economy, terrorism and the threat of nuclear weapons?
Oh, shit.
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Hahaha. My spelling error. I meant oh shit – but what I read did make me sit down!!!
I come late to this fascinating and productive correspondence. I particularly commend Karen Duncan;s [78] perceptive and fluent discussion of the bizarre grip of denialism on Australian policy response to dangerous climate change. She breaks new analytical ground here – her thoughts shoulkd be heeded and built on.
My OSM was in 2006, during a Camino walk through Spain from Granada to Santiago. I was strugglimg along the verge of a major busy highway – there was nowhere else to walk at that stage of the recommended pilgrimage route – and this is how I recalled the experience in Ch 10 of my subsequent book ‘Walking the Camino”.
”Walking along the edges of the roaring N630, I experienced intense physical distress. The motor traffic on the highway assailed ny ears, lungs, nose, eyes. As huge mechanical monsters screamed along the highway, brushing aside my frail human boidy, I felt and smelt huge blasts of heat and carbon dioxide gas they were pumping out into the highwayside air. I experienced with an almost physical pain the fact of how fast humankind is using up its precious stored-energy resources. I thought of this scene infinitely multiplied on every highway in every rich industrial country in the world, and a sense of profligate waste overwhelmed me. I thought: this cannot go on, it is totally irresponsible.’
That was when I started thinking hard about climate change: like others, thinking about peak oil was my road into it. I am still optimistic that humanity can get through the crisis of childhood’s end we are now entering; as Hansen says, the solution has to be moving to 100% renewable energy and stopping burning coal and oil – fast. This is achievable if we recognise the scale of the challenge, and the impediments to systemic infrastructure change.
This is mostly about social action through politics – what we do as individuals is important in shifting values, but makes little difference in the immediate GHG crisis.
The cynical alliance of the political centre [which includes Rudd ahd Turnbull ] and the professionally moulded climate change denialism we see at work in Australia will be exposed more clearly over the next few years. When it is so exposed, when ordinary people in large numbers finally understand how the powerful lobbies for no change are corrupting the debate and stealing all of our children’s future climate security, there will be great rage and great political changes. My new book ”Crunch Time” sets this political analysis and prognosis out in a lot more detail. I hope it will be a contribution to achieving a better future. I refuse to admit we are doomed as a species by our own profound fossil fuel burning mistake over the past 250 years – I believe still that courage and resolute informed rational action as a human society can save our children and grandchildren from a pretty horrible future.
Tony@102 – “The cynical alliance of the political centre [which includes Rudd ahd Turnbull ] and the professionally moulded climate change denialism we see at work in Australia will be exposed more clearly over the next few years. When it is so exposed, when ordinary people in large numbers finally understand how the powerful lobbies for no change are corrupting the debate and stealing all of our children’s future climate security, there will be great rage and great political changes.”
This is why I see the future political landscape being Labor (joined by the last few Liberal moderates) vs the Greens. As with the rise of Labor, it requires a massive dislocation in society or its expectations for a new party to become a chance at government. This time around, with class consciousness fading and everyone a capitalist via super funds, the rationale for the Labor/Liberal labor/capital dichotomy is fading. The Liberals are increasingly (at Federal level anyway) a party of the hard right with nothing sensible to say about climate change and hence heading for ratbag minority status (think DLP, One Nation and, nearly forgot, the Nationals). Future social consciousness will be on green issues as the effects of climate change increase.
Karen@78 – interesting insights into the psychology of the (very vocal) greenhouse denial lobby. I think it’s also worth noting how visible they are in Australia – we are a materialistic nation built on theft and so presumably this subliminal worry is shared by many. However, very few of this lobby would be as interested in public opposition to vaccination, flouridation, Creationism or Holocaust denial, all similar anti-evidence, anti-science conspiratorial beliefs.
What’s of particular interest to me is not why the Right writes this crap, but why the non-fringe media publishes it. We’re not talking about occasional columns from outsiders that are thrown in to (rightly) stir the pot, I’m talking about people who are published week in and week out and hence part of the total news and commentary service that the outlet provides. If we had similar levels of condemnation of evolution submitted, I can’t see them being published, let alone if they were submitted again and again.
There’s a pertinent comment from George Monbiot of the Guardian writing to the Spectator re. its “Relax: Global Warming is just a Myth” front cover splash for Ian Plimer: (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/09/14/correspondence-with-the-spectator/)
“If a man walked into your office and claimed that the entire canon of lunar science was wrong and the moon was, after all, made of green cheese, I suspect you would do one of two things: either send him on his way or, if you were feeling generous, ask him for evidence, then give it to experts in the field to assess. When they assured you that it was nonsense, you would drop the matter.
But when it comes to climate change, you and other editors are prepared to accept assertions which are just as nonsensical, without any attempt to check – or even to request – the evidence. ”
Indeed. “Balance” is not about allowing one side to be given a free pass to spout whatever bullshit they like.
Malcolm – Unfortunately I can imagine some newspapers thinking that a man claiming the moon is made of green cheese would make a good story.
If he looked eccentric enough, I can even imagine the story getting some TV coverage!
What I cannot imagine these days is newspapers bothering to ask for evidence, sending this to experts, and awaiting their verdict.
As shown on Media Watch / Hungry Beast, ten minutes on the internet to check some facts is too much these days.
As well as being willing to report the nonsensical, and not checking facts, I think that there are other major problems with “balance” in the media.
In Australia one major problem is that balance is often thought of as just presenting the views of both major parties.
The biggest distortion these days though is the balance between left and right.
For example with climate change, the ABC regards itself as balanced. So one side you get someone like Bolt who denies climate change. The other side can just be the Labor view (good talk about the reality of climate change and the need to take action, but no real response to the crises).
But surely the real balance to a Bolt would be someone who suggest cuts in emissions that would make the Greens look conservative. Ignoring political reality, it would be easy to make a rational case for 20% reductions within two years!
The great victory of John Howard is that a very conservative view is now seen as centre in Australia.
Meski, – in comment 28 asked if there was a ‘plan B’, well there is one.
It was reporting in background briefing (aired on March 28 2008) – http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2444935.htm
It involved pumping large amounts of sulphur particles into the atmosphere to reverse the process.
It sounds like it would involve a major, new, energy intensive, big science sort of project.
John Reidy #106
Well there are natural experiments where suphate has been injected into the upper atmosphere to induce a cooling effect, most notably in post-industrial times during the Krakatoa erruption. The procedure would be fairly straightforward, and probably not terribly energy intensive (maybe the output of one medium sized power station at a guess). However, the unintended consequences of this course of action are unknown. Therefore it’s best avoided if at all possible – mind you the policy vacuum encouraged by industry and politicians encourages the use of these drastic measures to further the continuation of civilisation.
Michael – good point re balance. I usually say that if they’re into balance then the ‘insiders’ couch would have some unreconstructed Marxist freedom fighter in khaki’s and beret facing off against the right wing lunatic on the other side of the couch – bolt, ackerman etc. Instead we get annabel crab giggling away….
I thought I posted to this site but can’t find it now. Just to add to the list my OSMs have been:
1. Recognising the true nature of Rudd’s political deviousness on this issue. I thought he would come up with a pretty flawed scheme but was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually would be trying to do something real. I’m now fairly convinced that he only sees this as a political play directed at wedging the libs/nats and that many in Labor are just as much part of the problem as the Wilson Tuckey types. They just go about it in a more slick way.
2. Upping my reading following the last IPCC report and coming out of a number of CSIRO briefings with for the first time ever a real tangible nauseous feeling having grasped the implications for us and our kids in a physical as well as an intellectual sense.
3. Wondering what the hell we will do as the South East of Australia continues its drying trend, what will this place look like in even 5-10 years time, it doesn’t look great now.
4.Going to my home town in regional Victoria around Christmas time last year. There is a lake there that’s never been dry in the history of my family (going back 120 years or more), its dry now, you can walk over it. Ironically I’m really hoping that some of this is just due to dumb irrigation policies in the surrounding catchment but I don’t think that’s the whole story. The sight of that dry lake made me feel literally sick.
5. Realising that the CPRS/ETS call it what you will, will lock in failure in starting this enormous fight for many years, and we’ll all get to personally compenstate some of the biggest most disgusting polluting corporations for the pleasure of watching them screw us further, in the background will be Rudd congratulating himself of being pragmatic and ‘balanced’.
6. Watching the bickering between liberal and labor and labor and labor states as the Murray, our iconic river of verse and song just dies in the background.
7. Finally, just looking at my beautiful little kids and thinking in the end that I don’t care so much what happens to me but wondering what what a shocking future we are bequeathing to them.
Interesting reading this blog. I don’t really want to comment on my ‘oh shit’ moment because they just keep on coming.
Just one comment I wanted to make which might help some who are finding it hard to put the climate change case:
Some say that even a sceptic believes in using less energy.
Sometimes I think we might be better to dump all that wording that people find hard to grasp – climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and on it goes.
“Saving the world should be engaging – funky even. If the techno-economic gurus and editorial writers spruik you a solution that bores you to tears or requires a degree in astrophysics to understand, reject their solution.”*
I agree with the first bit – we can and should do better at creating a positive path forward – but not with the second! Can’t throw out any possible “solution” unless we replace it with a better one.
*FROM http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/planet-of-the-apes-needs-to-get-real/2007/08/31/1188067365973.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1 (linked by an earlier post)
My first shit was around 20 years ago when I realised that almost everything that humans do makes carbon dioxide.
My biggest was when I realised that Bush was manipulating scientific evidence and that big industry were using the same tactics that they used to repudiate evidence about tobacco.
My saddest was when I realised that gw dellusionists were more interested in their own transient well being than they were about their own children’s or grandchildren’s future.
My last was when I realised that the governments of the world will not do enough. Physics cant be bargained with or bought off and not enough will end in disaster.
Well I’m glad we have got someone intelligent looking over the numbers.
Unfortunately, a two in three chance is four times better odds than Russian Roulette, unless he is talking about a different game (1 bullet, 6 chambers). Obviously maths isn’t Shellnhuber’s strong point. I wonder if a fundamental understanding of statistics is at all helpful in the climate change science. Perhaps he just looks at the pretty graphs!
Apologies to all those who have already pointed this out, couldn’t go through all the comments.
Of course the only “oh shit’ moment in this is in the possibility of this happening to us, in our lifetimes, and even for the young that won’t really be the case, according to the IPCC.
Overpopulation, far the greater problem and still the source of this climate change problem, has been ignored for far longer and is still ignored, and is much more likely to give us serious grief in this our lifetimes. Still, nobody (in the IPCC) is talking much about population growth. It is the very essence, the very beginning of just about every problem that humanity faces.
Climate change is a doddle in comparison.
But as with all difficult decisions, we will put it off until nature in its various guises makes the decisions for us.
It is very unlikely that homo sapiens will be wiped out, just a vast portion of it.
Here’s another OSM for the rest of you. Our current system of world and national political systems is not equipped to deal with this.
Never was, never will be. Take an OSM to work out what will replace it!
Keep doing that until you have another OSM.
Apologies again to those who have already pointed this out.
RE Kevin Cox, your main truth is that to solve the IMMEDIATE* climate crisis, MONEY IS ENOUGH. If we put the money (and incentives) in the right places, action *will* follow. And yes, there should be ways to get that money (especially capital) more available and at a relatively low cost, especially through governments, given the “greater good” to humanity AND the flow-on (trickle-down, multiplier) effects of this money through the economy (i.e. green power = more jobs per kwh than coal).
*Long-term, changing the root causes of the climate problem –consumerism, population growth, economic theory, etc — is a much bigger challenge.
RE Andrew Lewis and Russian Roulette, I think it was the odds of **surviving** that were being talked about (i.e. not the bullet, the other 5 chambers = 5/6 chance).
BUT agree population is important – although, population eventually becomes self-limiting (and obvious), but the full effects of climate change are somewhat delayed, and with the potential for strong positive and negative feedbacks, depending on all sorts of complicated interactions. Therefore we could have completely gone past the point of “no return” by the time we realise we need to turn back. And yes, it seems to be completely beyond what current political systems were designed to deal with and can deal with… Yes, it would be good to start moving towards a better system, whatever that might be…
“We have left the Holocene, and entered the Ohshitocene.”
I’m not sure when my OSM was. Over period of about ten years or so, I moved from “it’s not hapenning” to “It’s hapenning, but it’s not us”, to “it’s us, but it won’t be materially obvious for a long time” to “it’s us and it’s hapenning a lot faster than we thought, but there’s still time” to “it’s us, and there’s not a damned thing we’ll do about it”. For the last three, maybe four years, I’ve been in the last two categories.
Although AGCC was in my thought process for quite some time, it never really came to the fore until I ‘discovered’ Peak Oil (followed quickly by Peak Gas, Peak Coal, Peak Fertilizer, Peak Farmland, and so on). It was my reading into the ‘theory’ behind Peak Oil that led me finally to the realisation that we were not only conciously devestating our world, but that we would conciously continue to do so even when presented with the evidence.
Given the nature of the debate, there seems to be two broad schools of thought: Quick, or Slow. The ‘Quick’ faction see the looming Perfect Storm of disasters (Peak Everything, at the same time as we change our environment) as an untimately good thing, as a quick ‘dieoff’ will kill less people in aggregate and more quickly move to let the planet ‘breathe’ again. The Slow faction (derided, with some justification, by the Doomers as ‘Cornucopians’) see technological adaptation (windmills instead of Coal-fired power plants) and social change as all that’s necessary.
I suggest the ‘Slow’ faction is the larger of the two. Even most ‘green’ proponents argue ‘Business as Usual, but Green’, as the future. There is an implicit assumption we can continue our current way of life, but with ‘alternative’ power instead of digging for and sucking up perfectly well sequestered Carbon, EVs instead of ICEs, BioFuels instead of food, etc.
My reading into AGCC and Peak Everything has put me squarely into a frame of mind along the lines of ‘Cautiously Pessimistic’. That is, I think we can adapt/fix perfectly well, and keep AGCC within limits, but that we won’t. I occasionally move towards a “we’re freaking doomed!” attitude, which requires me to get off the computer for a week and read a good book.
The elephant in the room is not Peak Oil, or our choice of power generation, or even offshoring our manufacturing (emissions), but, rather, population. Even if we de-carbonised the economy tomorrow, we still have an ever-increasing population which will eventually come up against some other limit (probably fertiliser) in short order. Yet calls to control our breeding are met with outrage, even amongst those you would expect to support such moves: Green Left
I read ‘articles’ like this and can only think they’ve got a severe case of Cognitive Disonnance.
Our Governments don’t help (there’s the old argument that we elect the people we deserve). The Liberals, by and large, are still stuck somewhere between “it’s not hapenning” and “it’s hapenning, but it’s not us”. Any attempt to impose the counting of Externalities upon business must be as minimal as possible (witness the attempts to ‘negotiate’ the removal of the word ‘almost’ from the statement “The Labor ETS would give almost all the funds derived from the sale of Permits back to the polluters”).
The Nationals seem to live by the motto “the river giveth and the river taketh away”, and assume this is all part of the natural cycle (and will loudly point to any ‘new’ evidence that supports their worldview, even if it’s nonsense and many-times debunked). My other halfs’ father’s father ran (but did not own) farming properties in NSW 50 years ago. He protested the removal of mulga-type scrub and the understory, but was overruled by the owners, who were convinced they could feed the scrub to the stock, and it’d ‘just grow back’. To his fathers disapointment, within years there were salt pans popping up everywhere, and no regroqth. Yet clearing continued. This is the attitude that seems to still pervade a large majority of Australian farmers: we need to subdue the land. No concept of natural limitations. The suggestion that we should do things like ‘tax’ cow farts (agriculture being the cause of roughly 1/3 of Anthropogenic emissions) is met with indignation, if not outright hostility.
Labor talks a lot, but has achieved almost nothing. The proposed ETS is little more than a case of taking money from polluters, dropping it into a bucket, then taking almost all of it out and giving it back to them. Where’s the incentive to change business practices? The mining and smelting industries are making a lot of noise about ‘job losses’, but the entire mining industry in Australia only employs (directly) about 100,000 people. Woolworths alone employs more. And the job losses aren’t really losses, but ‘delayed’ jobs. Most mining companies aren’t even local anyway (ie, don’t pay tax).
The Greens have come a long way. They now have a suite of well-rounded policies, a far cry from the days when they were the spokespeople for ‘trees and Mull’. At times, it seems only The Greens have any concept of promoting an ‘onshore’ economy beyond shopping centres and Finance. The Greens have this bizarre idea that we can actually have a real economy! Don’t they know that information is the future (we can replace food and fuel with information!…)? But even back in their heyday of ‘trees and Mull’, The Greens wouldn’t have been able to sucessfully propose a wartime economy devoted to reducing our impact on our ecosystem. Mores the pity, since we needed to start 20 years ago.
All of the above also believe in the ‘perpetual growth fairy’, where you can keep annual, compounding growth (of whatever kind you choose, be it economic, employment, population, whatever) going forever within a finite system. If we don’t push the Climate outside it adaptation limits, we’ll run headlong into Peak Oil/Gas/Coal, and if not that, it’ll be fertiliser, or potable water, or vacant (desirable) land, or some other Black Swan that economists don’t want to think about and the general public are unaware of.
I read a suggestion last week that I quite like: we should replace ‘biodiversity loss’ with ‘Holocene Mass Extinction’. Let’s see the 6PM newsreaders spit that one out the first time they read it off the teleprompter.
My “oh shit” moment was a few minutes ago, reading Stephen Moreland’s post #19, and realising that I’ve agreed with everything he said and have done so now for so many decades I’m numb.
Homo sapiens, it was a nice ride, but an aphorism I coined in the 80’s sums it up: “It’s all been downhill since the wheel”.
The ‘bump’ at the bottom of the hill is (very) rapidly approaching.
I learnt about climate change, and the possibility of a 70 metre or so rise in sea level at high school, around 1980. Even then I was persuaded that climate change would occur in the near future “on the balance of probabilities”. I was (and still am) science mad, and used to look at detailed topographic maps to see which regions of the world would be inundated first. No ‘oh shit”, just a detached fascination. Maybe it was my Aspergers Syndrome.
Around the same time I read the Club of Rome’s original “Limits to Growth”. I found the basic thesis highly persuasive. Human kind are allowing too many long term problems to grow for short term benefit. One or other sector of our society will always value some short term advantage that puts us all in long term jeopardy. Too many time lags are built into the system so that ultimately we will face a confluence of problems that will overwhelm our best efforts to avert disaster. Climate change is JUST ONE of these problems.
The Precautionary Principle would be nice, but most often we go for the “Catastrophe First Principle”. Think fish stocks, top soil erosion, depletion of water tables, population growth, weapons proliferation, etc etc. I’ve never had faith in human nature, so no “oh shit” moment there, just resignation, “oh well”. In truth there were some exceptions, like the reduction in CFCs in response to the ozone hole. Maybe there is hope?
Since then I’ve married and had a child and started caring more about humanity, especially the world my daughter will live in. Maybe things can be turned around. CFC’s were at least one example where change occurred before catastrophe.
IPCC reports came and went, glaciers melted, heat waves, hurricanes…then in 2007 Arctic sea ice cover fell to by far its lowest level in recorded history – probably the lowest coverage for more than 100,000 years. The Arctic melting was was much faster than even the most extreme estimates of climate scientists. There could not be a clearer message that climate change was real and now and dangerous. Surely this was the event that would provoke action, like the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole. But the reaction of world governments has been diddly squat. there is something of a Greek tragedy to human civilisation (if civilisation is the right word).
Climate change is real, is happening now, requires immediate action to avert disaster, and we are doing too little too late. Having lost some of my detatched fascination I can now manage an “oh shit”, together with “I knew this would happen no matter what I did.”
My main concern now is whether my country and especially my family can avoid the worst of the catastrophe that WILL engulf the planet. I hope the answer is not, “OH SHIT!”
I’ve had many OSMs over the last decade or so. Have read Diamond, etc and agree with many comments here. But Climategate is the last straw for me. That sceptics are demanding to effectively redo climate change science is a political masterstroke that will satisfy an urge for witchhunts and avoid any serious action at all.
Douglas Adams was right. We truly are the descendants of the B ark.
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