The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing the World's Climate

 

Adam McKay, director of Don't Look Up, points out what should be obvious but is easy to ignore.

Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.

All of these distortions have robbed us of the most critical element people need to understand a threat and adjust their actions accordingly: context.

And make no mistake, when it comes to how much time we have, the data and the geological record are crystal clear. 

For some badly-needed context, the last three years, likely for the first time in over 100,000 years, have averaged above the Paris Accords’ “do not cross” 1.5 degrees celsius planetary warming. Only ten years ago, that was considered catastrophic, but now mainstream news tells us it’s just a number.

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Let’s do the context thing again: 2C will mean we have completely left the stable climate period known as the Holocene. This is the 11,000-year-old era that has given us large-scale crop and livestock agriculture, which gave us cities, written language, modern science and medicine, and warm beds and showers.

Before that, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. 

The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.

That is what we stand to lose. In fact, if our institutions, news and elected officials continue to feed and water the oil company-conceived mega-falsehood that climate breakdown is something just “our great-grandkids need to worry about,”  human civilization as we know it will collapse and billions could die. And we’re not talking about the far distant future. We are talking about collapse within years, not centuries. For real.