The great climate silence: we are on
the edge of the abyss but we ignore it
Clive Hamilton
We continue to plan for the future as
if climate scientists don’t exist. The greatest shame is the absence of a sense
of tragedy
Friday 5 May 2017 02.32 BST Last modified on Sunday 7 May
2017 22.04 BST
After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5
billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the
Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the
kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink in.
Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is
unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways
that threaten our survival. Yet in the face of these facts we carry on as
usual.
Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our
intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking; and some influential voices declare
that nothing at all is happening, that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet the
evidence tells us that so powerful have humans become that we have entered this
new and dangerous geological epoch, which is defined by the fact that the human
imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it
rivals some of the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of
the Earth system.
This bizarre situation, in which we have become potent
enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves,
contradicts every modern belief about the kind of creature the human being is.
So for some it is absurd to suggest that humankind could break out of the
boundaries of history and inscribe itself as a geological force in deep time.
Humans are too puny to change the climate, they insist, so it is outlandish to
suggest we could change the geological time scale. Others assign the Earth and
its evolution to the divine realm, so that it is not merely impertinence to
suggest that humans can overrule the almighty, but blasphemy.
Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is
unfolding ... yet we carry on as usual.
Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do
not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on
their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans
engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as
we please.
The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and
humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality
derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle
that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.
It is true that grasping the scale of what is happening
requires not only breaking the bubble but also making the cognitive leap to
“Earth system thinking” – that is, conceiving of the Earth as a single,
complex, dynamic system. It is one thing to accept that human influence has
spread across the landscape, the oceans and the atmosphere, but quite another
to make the jump to understanding that human activities are disrupting the
functioning of the Earth as a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality
comprised of myriad interlocking processes.
But consider this astounding fact: with knowledge of the
cycles that govern Earth’s rotation, including its tilt and wobble,
paleo-climatologists are able to predict with reasonable certainty that the
next ice age is due in 50,000 years’ time. Yet because carbon dioxide persists
in the atmosphere for millennia, global warming from human activity in the 20th
and 21st centuries is expected to suppress that ice age and quite possibly the
following one, expected in 130,000 years.
If human activity occurring over a century or two can
irreversibly transform the global climate for tens of thousands of years, we
are prompted to rethink history and social analysis as a purely intra-human
affair.
How should we understand the disquieting fact that a mass of
scientific evidence about the Anthropocene, an unfolding event of colossal
proportions, has been insufficient to induce a reasoned and fitting response?
For many, the accumulation of facts about ecological
disruption seems to have a narcotising effect, all too apparent in popular
attitudes to the crisis of the Earth system, and especially among
opinion-makers and political leaders. A few have opened themselves to the full
meaning of the Anthropocene, crossing a threshold by way of a gradual but
ever-more disturbing process of evidence assimilation or, in some cases, after
a realisation that breaks over them suddenly and with great force in response
to an event or piece of information in itself quite small.
Beyond the science, the few alert to the plight of the Earth
sense that something unfathomably great is taking place, conscious that we face
a struggle between ruin and the possibility of some kind of salvation.
So today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of
the tragedy. The indifference of most to the Earth system’s disturbance may be
attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem
inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss.
How can we understand the miserable failure of contemporary
thinking to come to grips with what now confronts us? A few years after the
second atomic bomb was dropped, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a novel about the people
of Nagasaki, a novel in which the bomb is never mentioned yet whose shadow
falls over everyone. The Anthropocene’s shadow too falls over all of us.
Bookshops are regularly replenished with tomes about world
futures ... as if climate scientists do not exist.
Yet the bookshops are regularly replenished with tomes about
world futures from our leading intellectuals of left and right in which the
ecological crisis is barely mentioned. They write about the rise of China,
clashing civilizations and machines that take over the world, composed and put
forward as if climate scientists do not exist. They prognosticate about a
future from which the dominant facts have been expunged, futurologists trapped
in an obsolete past. It is the great silence.
I heard of a dinner party during which one of Europe’s most
eminent psychoanalysts held forth ardently on every topic but fell mute when
climate change was raised. He had nothing to say. For most of the
intelligentsia, it is as if the projections of Earth scientists are so
preposterous they can safely be ignored.
Perhaps the intellectual surrender is so complete because
the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilised place – personal
freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth
paving the way to its destruction. The powers we most trusted have betrayed us;
that which we believed would save us now threatens to devour us.
For some, the tension is resolved by rejecting the evidence,
which is to say, by discarding the Enlightenment. For others, the response is
to denigrate calls to heed the danger as a loss of faith in humanity, as if
anguish for the Earth were a romantic illusion or superstitious regression.
Yet the Earth scientists continue to haunt us, following us
around like wailing apparitions while we hurry on with our lives, turning
around occasionally with irritation to hold up the crucifix of Progress.
This is an edited extract from Clive Hamilton’s Defiant
Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene, available now through Allen
& Unwin. Clive Hamilton will be speaking at The School of Life in Sydney
and Melbourne in June 2017
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