Must We Pretend?

An article at countercurrents.org said this recently:

«A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions»
—Global Warming and Food Security: The Impact on Crop Diversity

Are we not sufficiently at the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous?

I'm starting to perceive the weather/climate distinction less as a matter of scientific certainty and more as an excuse to delay action for a long time. Here that distinction seems to be actively working against the cause of human survival by delaying what seems a truly obvious conclusion, and in doing so giving cover to inaction.

We already have a many year trend that shows things getting pretty steadily worse year over year, with not much backsliding, so it's not like we realistically have to wait 10 years to see if this surpassing 1.5°C is going to magically go away on its own. Indeed, by the time we get that much confirmation, these effects we fear will have seriously clubbed us over the head for too long.

«“The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024,” António Guterres said in his New Year message, stressing that humanity has “no time to lose.”»
—2024, Hottest Year on Record, Marks ‘Decade of Deadly Heat’

I keep seeing reports (several quoted by me here below) that we averaged above that in 2024, so I find this predication on a pipe dream highly misleading.

Even just wordings suggesting that the crossing of some discrete boundary will trigger an effect, but that not crossing it will not, is misleading. It's not like 1.49°C will leave us with no loss of diversity, but 1.51°C will hit us with all these effects.

What needs to be said more plainly is this:

Significant crop diversity is being ever more lost in real time now, and this loss is a result of global average temperatures that are dangerous and getting moreso. That they are a specific value on an instantaneous or rolling average basis gives credibility and texture to this qualitative claim, but no comfort should be drawn from almost-ness nor from theoretical clains that action could yet pull us back from a precipice that there is not similarly substantiated qualitative reason to believe we are politically poised to make.

Science reporting does this kind of thing a lot. Someone will get funding to test whether humans need air to breathe but some accident of how the experiments are set up will find that only pregnant women under 30 were available for testing so the report will be a very specific about that and news reports will end up saying "new report proves pregnant women under 30 need air to breathe", which doesn't really tell the public the thing that the study really meant to report. Climate reporting is full of similarly overly specific claims that allow the public to dismiss the significance of what's really going on. People writing scientific reports need to be conscious of the fact that the reporting will be done in that way and that public inaction will be a direct result of such narrow reporting.

In the three reports that I quote below, the Berkeley report at least takes the time to say "recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met." We need more plain wordings like this, and even this needs to have been more prominently placed.

There is a conspiracy, intentional or not, between the writers of reports and the writers of articles. The article writer wants to quote the report, but the report wants to say something that has such technical accuracy that it will be misleading when quoted by someone writing articles. Some may say it's not an active conspiracy, just a negative synergy, but the effect is the same. Each party acts as if it is being conservative and careful, but the foreseeable combination of the two parts is anything but conservative or careful.

References
(bold added here for emphasis)

«The global annual average for 2024 in our dataset is estimated as 1.62 ± 0.06 °C (2.91 ± 0.11 °F) above the average during the period 1850 to 1900, which is traditionally used a reference for the pre-industrial period. […] A goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial has been an intense focus of international attention. This goal is defined based on multi-decadal averages, and so a single year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) does not directly constitute a failure. However, recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met. The long-term average of global temperature is likely to effectively cross the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) threshold in the next 5-10 years. While the 1.5 °C goal will not be met, urgent action is still needed to limit man-made climate change.»
—Global Temperature Report for 2024 (Berkeley Earth)

«The global average surface temperature was 1.55 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis of the six datasets. This means that we have likely just experienced the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.»
— WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level

«NASA scientists further estimate Earth in 2024 was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century average (1850-1900). For more than half of 2024, average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline, and the annual average, with mathematical uncertainties, may have exceeded the level for the first time.»
— Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This grew out of an essay I posted at Mastodon, and a haiku (senryu) that I later wrote as a way to distill out some key points.

Still imaginable

“Don't wear your heavy coat yet,” my mom used to warn me. “You'll need it when it's colder.” She knew I had no heavier artillery for holding the cold at bay and felt somehow it was best to have a sense of proportion.

I mention that because news reports are describing Hurricane Helene's aftermath described as “unimaginable.” It's not. It's very, very painful to imagine because all death and destruction is painful, but we can imagine this much if we try.

Of course, if you have to go through it, even a single death—a single building falling in, a single shooting, a single cancer—is, in some sense, unimaginable. Words will never capture the horror. But, collectively, when doing news reporting, we don't use the word “unimaginable” for that. And it's not because it isn't severe. It's just because, horrifying as each individual bit of death and destruction is, we still need words left over to describe bigger events, those with more people, those that will take communities a longer time to recover from, if at all.

Maybe let's dial the language back. We probably shouldn't use up these extreme words yet. Save them for later. Climate's wrath has barely even given a hint of where it's going, and it's not going to relent until we start taking meaningful action. So far we're still mired in denial and daring Climate to do its worst.

So, yes, every death matters, and I hope not to trivialize a couple hundred deaths. What Helene did was horrible. And yet… And yet, let's be clear: The possibility of billions of deaths hangs now tangibly in the balance, or should. If you don't see that as a possibility, consider that you might be engaged in Climate denial.

The problem is that Climate is bigger. It's hard for us to see, but if there were a thousand deaths, even a million, that could still be comparatively small compared to what is very likely coming. Implicitly, by using superlative terms like “unimaginable” we send the subtle cue “this is it, this is finally an example of what we've been talking about.” It is not. A thousand instances of a million people dying is closer. Or a million instances of a thousand people dying. Or ten million situations like Hurricane Helene if it helps you visualize the magnitude of the pain—if it helps you imagine it.

We'd be alarmed about a thousand traffic accidents—we'd have trouble imagining even that because we'd want that to be an upper bound. But a couple hundred people dying due to a climate-related event (a storm, a flood, a fire, a famine, etc.) is not an upper bound on how bad things can get. It's not even a rounding error. I'm not saying it's small if you're living it, but I am saying Climate is big in a way that we're not used to talking about. So that's why I'd like to hold a few words in reserve. Otherwise, we'll be reaching for phrases like “unimaginable squared“ to compensate for the wasteland of available terminology.

We'll look back and wish for events so small as Helene, if there are any of us left to look back. Even that is not clear. If there is something for which the term unimaginable is warranted, it is that. And yet even for that, we must try to imagine it, because otherwise we're not going to fear it enough. We already don't.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay began with a post on Mastodon. On a first pass, I did very light editing here, mostly to add fonting and a graphic, a few small wording changes. Later in the day, after publishing and before doing any broad advertising, I decided to expand this a little, so this version ended up more elaborated than the original.

I'm worried people will interpret my remark about 20 million such events literally. It might be fewer but larger events. They might not be hurricanes but floods, fires, famines.

The graphic was produced at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was “Draw an image of a meter that is a semi-circle with a range of measurement that is normal, a range that is marked in yellow as indicating concern, and a range that is marked in red as an active problem. Show the meter pointing into the yellow area.”. Using Gimp, I made some adjustments to the image it generated, removing some lettering and changing where the dial pointed to.

Plutocratic Denial

First sea level came for the islanders, and I continued to deny—
   Because “those people” are poor, and this is their lot in life.

Then hurricanes took out some coastal cities, and I continued to deny—
   Because I had business elsewhere, so got in my jet and steered clear.

Then fires came for rich homes in California, and I continued to deny—
   Because I was conservative, and California was full of liberals.

Then the heat took farms and spiked food prices, but I continued to deny—
   Because this was why one hoards cash, to weather rough times.

Then, finally, no one came to my dinner parties.
   Too busy “just surviving” they said,
      those with the good manners to return an RSVP.
      What was the world coming to?
   In this moment I had an epiphany—
      This might actually involve me!
      How inconvenient, this sudden wave of truth.

By the time it all came tumbling in on me, supply chains had folded
      and there was no one left even to bribe.
   Was I the last? Would anyone read this? No way to know.
   But, I smiled, neither anyone left to deny
      that this had been just a bad run of weather.
   Nothing more.

 

---

Inspired in form and spirit, of course, by Martin Niemöller's post-WWII poem “First they came...”

That Creeping Feeling

Some horror films, especially those with half a dozen sequels, are very melodramatic in style, presenting one or more people walking into a situation where the audience knows danger to lurk but the characters have no inkling of that danger, or haven’t admitted it. Scene by excruciating scene, the plot unfolds, the author having arranged matters so that the helpless characters cannot see ordinary safety unraveling all about.

Climate change is like that. It unfolds slowly, patiently, its plot never moving in a straight line, making sure that there’s every reason for most of the characters to to feel comfortable. As with a good melodrama, a few characters are aware of the problem and they struggle to warn the others, but always to no avail as a gruesome ending becomes increasingly inevitable.

The sick plot twist here is that we are the authors and we are the ones arranging for our own complacency, even in the face of the clues our fellow characters have discovered. It feels sometimes like the people who know what’s really going on are locked in a sound-proof plexiglass room, able to see out clearly, watching it unfold, but powerless to stop it or even to just get a message out.

Would that it were just a sci-fi or horror movie, or even a simple nightmare from which one could awaken.

* * * * *

Cancer is a subtle enemy. It presents itself in such small ways, almost imperceptibly. We may see signs, but hope we don’t. It creeps. Worst of all, it accelerates.

We want to control its rate, to force it to be linear, measured, paced. But try as we might, we cannot hold it still. It resists commands.

We seek to impose onto it, by force of will, by clutching at every definition and argument we can lay our fingers upon, that it must move, change, or grow only when we say.

We command of it a cartoon physics that says it will not bite us until we look, and then we steadfastly refuse to look.

As with all things Death, we are skilled at ways of looking away from it, hoping that if we don’t meet its direct gaze, it won’t come for us today. We hope it will simply walk past, taking no notice, our apparent indifference having saved us.

Climate change is like that, too.

* * * * *

Author's Notes:

These are just my subjective impressions. Please comment accordingly.
(We'll do objectivity another day.)

Originally published November 8, 2010 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): acceleration, accelerates, creeping, creepy, death, denial, pace, cartoon physics, cancer, novel, mystery, escape, melodrama, warning, warn, cassandra, paradigm, sense, feeling, emotional, emotion, visualization, analogy, metaphor, global warming, climate change, politics