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Doomsday deadlines, he argued, can foster a kind of “heroic hope” - the idea that “if we only fight hard enough against climate change, we will win.” Both supporters of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution and activists with the Extinction Rebellion, who use the fear of a 2030 “climate breakdown” to spark political change, have successfully whipped up that sentiment.īut according to Cambridge University researcher Shinichiro Asayama, heroic hope comes with downsides, including offering ammunition for climate skeptics to disregard those warning of the apocalypse as alarmists. “As long as humans have been alive, we’ve been thinking about the end times and the apocalypse,” said Per Espen Stoknes, environmental psychologist and author. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. And it can motivate extraordinary action. This apocalyptic thinking does make it seem like climate change is all-or-nothing: Either we fix it, or we’re done.
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According to teenage activist Greta Thunberg, “We are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in front of a crowd in New York City in January, was more blunt, saying: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2018 report illustrating that the world’s nations would have to act swiftly to prevent warming exceeding from 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) - which it estimated would happen around 2030 - protesters and politicians alike have seized on the idea that we are close to a point of no return. What Franzen’s piece unwittingly does is tap into broader questions about the place of apocalyptic rhetoric in today’s climate discourse. As a result, global warming isn’t zero-sum. Tipping points are notoriously hard to predict, and there are deep, inherent uncertainties in any assessment of large-scale dynamic changes in the climate. “Once the point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming.” “In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees,” Franzen writes. (Both occurrences would cause tremendous sea-level rise.) And Franzen is only the most recent person to fall victim to this fallacy many of those shaking their fists at his words have been ensnared in the same trap.
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It was conflating a long-term policy goal - keeping average global temperatures from warming by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) - with catastrophic tipping points, such as the breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet and massive thawing of Arctic permafrost. Admitting that it may be unavoidable seems fatalist at best, obstructionist at worst.īut it wasn’t prematurely admitting defeat that was the primary flaw in Franzen’s argument. This sentiment has infuriated many, including climate scientists and activists after all, scores of people around the world are devoting their lives to preventing possible catastrophe. The novelist and essayist, author of The Corrections and The End of the End of the Earth, wrote a meandering article titled “What If We Stopped Pretending?” The gist: Owing to our progress on climate change thus far (minimal, slow), and the problems of human nature (selfish, easily distracted), we are unlikely to “stop” or “solve” the “climate change apocalypse” before it’s too late. Readers of The New Yorker woke up last Sunday morning to find that Jonathan Franzen - the infamous bird-watcher previously pilloried for arguing that concern about climate change distracted from conservation - was at it again.