The Great Disruption (15 page)

But collectively, we are in the “denial breaking down” stage, and this really matters a great deal because this is what's holding back change. This is an understandable stage, where people recognize the problem to some extent but hold back from full acknowledgment to prevent the emotional and practical impact true recognition would entail. So the views are things like “it's bad but not
that
bad”; “it's serious, but it's about the future so we have time”; “it's a global problem and we can't do anything about it locally.” Another one is that yes, it's a serious problem, but it's caused by someone/something else (large companies, China, America, rich countries, population growth in poor countries—anyone but us). Denial is an amazing thing to watch and experience!

This collective stage will pass at some point relatively soon. Then we'll move through collective despair and fear and into full acceptance. Acceptance in our context becomes a source of empowerment. Big call? Not really. Let me explain why.

Let's look at climate change again as an example. The same principles apply to the whole of the Great Disruption, but climate brings the idea into sharp focus. I like to think of climate denial as a massive dam. Right now, there's some pretty big cracks in that dam. And before long they are going to rip right open. When a dam collapses, it happens suddenly and the water comes through thick and fast. This is how it will be with climate attitudes and, as a result, climate action. There's so much pressure built up that once the dam of denial breaks, the flood of acceptance will sweep away any remaining denial.

To understand this, it's important to recognize the
social
psychology of our response to climate. At the moment, the majority of people are in “denial breaking down”—they don't yet fully acknowledge the problem. This means that those who do get it are isolated and tend to talk to each other differently from the way they talk to those who aren't there yet. This is why as I sat in the café crying with my wife, I couldn't imagine explaining to those around me what I was thinking. This process reinforces the collective avoidance of full acceptance, because people feel strange talking about it for fear of ridicule. But once the change starts to kick in, this social phenomenon changes from being the biggest hindrance to the biggest accelerator. This reality, of group and social dynamics, is one reason change happens slowly at first and then incredibly fast.

So, yes, perhaps you're thinking, “I can see how it could happen in theory, but what would possibly trigger such a shift?”

When I discuss these issues with people who are in full despair, the response is usually along the lines of, “But you're telling me it's going to be really, really bad; how will we possibly cope?” I've been there myself frequently, so I know that feeling well!

Ironically, it's just this point—that the situation is going to be really, really bad—that gives me such confidence that it will turn, and the social dynamic referred to above, combined with the enormous back pressure behind the dam, means there's going to be a flood when it does.

I call what is coming the Great Awakening, a term I first heard used in this context by Professor Jorgen Randers.

Let me start explaining this from the point of the counterargument, generally referred to as “the boiling frog problem.” This refers to the idea that a frog put into boiling water will jump out, whereas a frog put into cold water that is then slowly heated will stay there and boil to death.
2

Some people argue that as humanity slowly slides toward disaster, we'll stay in ever more fanciful denial until it is too late and we are overwhelmed—that we will slowly boil to death.

There are three reasons this is wrong and why instead the Great Awakening will occur and we'll suddenly find ourselves in a completely new world, albeit a challenging world and one requiring a lot of work.

First, it will come upon us hard and fast when it does. The risk of collapse will soon be in our faces. This is incredibly clear from the science, and anyone who looks at it once out of denial draws that conclusion. While it's a much broader issue than climate change, the climate science gives it all a sharp focus. When it hits, it will hit economically, and then people at large will pay attention because it will affect them directly. Denial will then evaporate virtually overnight.

Second, we can respond quickly when we choose to, and this is fortunate because we consistently respond late. There are many indications in history and human behavior that this is actually standard operating procedure—late and fast. We wake up, then take whatever action is necessary to fix it. If an epitaph were to be written to characterize our generation, it might be: “They did it. They were slow, but not stupid.”

Third, we will be capable physically and technically of turning the situation around at that point, because that point will be soon, and we are capable, when the alternative is collapse, of making an absolutely remarkable turnaround. This last point is key, because people won't end denial until they believe there is a solution.

Let me go through each of these in a little more detail.

First, we are not boiling frogs and will not stand by observing our decline. The reason I am so sure about this is that the momentum for change we have built into the earth's climate system is like a fast-moving heavy train hurtling toward us. We are standing on the train line, in heavy fog. The fog will lift, or the train will be so close we can see it and feel it, even in the fog. Then we will jump. We will most certainly not just stand there and watch it hit us.

The scientific evidence for the accelerating speed of the train is now all around us. Those with good senses can already feel its rumble. The critical recent shift in this evidence is that we can see the beginning of what John Collee argues with his medical analogy: The system will resist change and appear to be doing okay and then break down rapidly. The difference here, of course, is that we are not a “body” and as such cannot die. But we are now seeing rapid acceleration in the rate of change as the various uncertainties in climate and ecosystem science, like changes to the marine ecosystem, are all starting to tip the wrong way. There will be more examples in the coming years.

Clive Hamilton considers the question of denial deeply and concludes that the fog won't lift in time. He notes that accepting the personal loss of the death of an individual is harder when there is room for doubt about the death or where it can be blamed on someone else—both being present in the climate question. The question of blame is a vexed one, and I'll talk about how that might play out later. On the question of doubt, I agree that we won't wake up until we really feel it. Solid theory and science just aren't enough. But crucially, we're about to feel it like never before.

It is important to recognize that this will hit not just environmentally but economically. For all the reasons we discussed earlier, this will translate not just into local economic impacts, but into global ones as well, including the end of economic growth as we know it. People will then “feel” the issue in a new and directly personal way. Even those not personally affected will be able to relate to it. Terrorism was a powerful example of this. Even though few were directly affected by the 9/11 attacks, people around the world felt an emotional engagement with those who did. As a result, enormous political and economic changes were accepted from new airport security measures to changes to legal rights to two wars—because people could relate to the issues in a new way.

So the train hurtling toward us will become clear as the fog lifts, forcing us to jump rather than be hit. We will explore how this will unfold in the next few chapters.

Second, we need to remember that this type of response is normal for our species. We wait until the last minute and then we jump. We respond dramatically. You can argue this is stupid, but that doesn't change it. We wait until a crisis is imminent and then respond. This applies to our personal health, our business management, our economies, and our societies. It usually takes a heart attack, a financial crisis, or an invasion of Poland to get our serious attention. But then we respond dramatically. Slow, but not stupid.

This leads to the question I am most often asked on this matter: What will be climate change's “9/11”? What will trigger the shift? A hurricane hitting Wall Street? A typhoon in Tokyo? What is the climate equivalent of Hitler's invasion of Poland?

The answer is unsatisfying. While I am certain we will respond, it probably won't actually be triggered by a single event, although historians will probably agree on one after we've turned, to explain it. I'm sure of this because in reality we already have sufficient evidence, including unprecedented physical events, that if we wanted to believe, we would. The urge to deny unwelcome reality allows people to ignore any amount of data that challenges them—until they are ready to change. Then the evidence is obvious and accepted. So while facts are necessary, they are not sufficient. We will respond not when we accumulate an overwhelming amount of evidence—we already have that—but when we stop denying the significance of the evidence we already have.

Then there will be a tipping point when denial ends, and the reality that we face a global, civilization-threatening risk will become accepted wisdom, virtually overnight. At that point, we will respond dramatically and with extraordinary speed and focus. This moment, when it finally arrives, will be the Great Awakening. It won't be consistent or smooth, but this will be the overall direction.

But why is Lovelock wrong? Why will the crisis at that point not overwhelm our response? Why won't the risk of tipping points in the earth system drive us into the ground?

This is the third reason the Great Awakening will occur. When under great pressure, humanity is capable of extraordinary, imaginative transformation and political shifts that will in this case be capable of bringing us back from the brink and delivering a safe climate at the end of the crisis. This is very important to the end of denial. Unless we believe we can fix the problem, we will deny its existence.

Because little work has been done on dramatic CO
2
reduction strategies that actually fix the problem, this is a key area I have focused on for this book, with my colleague Professor Jorgen Randers. I detail our results in chapter 10. What it shows is that we are clearly capable of reducing atmospheric concentrations of damaging greenhouse gases at a scale and speed incomprehensible in the context of the debate today. Based on this, I am also confident that the same principle applies to other sustainability issues. This means whether the critical issues prove to be forests, peak oil, water, food supply, or pollution, we will still be capable, at a late stage, of physically and technically turning the situation around. We won't be able to prevent great damage or avert the crisis, but we will be able to prevent the collapse that Lovelock predicts.

The conclusion Jorgen Randers and I came to after doing this work was this: The change required to deliver a safe climate and sustainable economy is clearly not limited by our economic, physical, or technical capacity. In fact, taken in their relative contexts, the economic and technical difficulties of the actions we need to take to address our challenge pale in comparison with those faced and achieved in World War II.

So the only question is the willingness to act and the resulting decision to do so.

Making such a decision simply requires society to believe we face a crisis. Not just a normal crisis, but a serious crisis. This will be defined not by the arrival of the physical crisis, which has already happened, but by the moment when denial ends and we accept that the risk we face is not a less pleasant environment or dirty cities or the loss of some charismatic megafauna, but the loss of everything we have come to accept as “normal.” It will be when we face head-on the risk of collapse.

Collapse is used a bit loosely in much of the discussion in this area, so we should consider what it means in some detail before we go on. I don't think we will actually see collapse but we need to understand the risk of doing so if we are to avoid it. The term has been popularized by the excellent work of Jared Diamond in his book
Collapse
, which looked at how environmental challenges have led to the collapse of past societies and civilizations. Collapse in the context we now face would not mean the end of humanity as a species. It would, however, mean the end of society as we know it. It would mean the breakdown of our political structures and the complete lack of coherent global governance, even by today's poor standards. It would mean the end of our current way of life and all the assumptions we make in the West, and in many parts of the developing world, about security and personal safety, food and energy supply, material quality of life, and advanced medical care. It would also mean a rapid decline in personal security, perhaps even a return to Thomas Hobbes's state of nature.

Diamond's work and that of others is enough to show that great civilizations can be brought to their knees by nature and that we must “choose” to survive. One of the societies analyzed by Diamond, the Maya of Central America, is also studied by Brian Fagan in his book
The Great Warming
. Fagan looked at the global effect on human societies of the medieval warm period between AD 800 and 1300. This period, when global temperatures were in some areas up to one degree warmer, brought down not only the mighty Mayan civilization and saw them abandon their temples on the Yucatán, but also the Cambodian civilization with its center at Angkor Wat and the largest preindustrial city in the world, and forced the relocation of the entire Puebloan or Anasazi cultures of the American Southwest.

One might suspect we are better resourced to deal with such challenges today. This is true, but it is worth remembering that the climate changes that brought down these people often resulted from just one degree of warming. Our challenge will be much greater and, more important, much faster than the natural processes that drove those shifts.