At some point—finally—the full truth of what the climate scientists are saying breaks through all of our defences. We can no longer pretend the impacts of warming are too far off to worry about, or that the scientists must be exaggerating. We realise that our apathy is rooted in fear or that our hopes for a political upheaval are no more than wishful thinking. We concede that no technological marvel will arrive in time.
And the last and most insidious barrier of them all can no longer protect us—the wall that separates intellectual acceptance of climate disruption from the emotional meaning of a hot world. “Splitting” is a handy device deployed especially by the intellectual who boasts “Yes, of course, I am one of those who understands we face disaster, I have known it for a long time”, while all the time shutting off the horror of a world at 4, 5 or 6°C, a world in which progress ends and human survival is in doubt.
For some, the realisation creeps up as the true meaning of warming leaks into consciousness. For others, the breakthrough is sudden and overwhelming. It’s been called the “Oh shit” moment by Mark Hertsgaard, the instant when your whole world shifts and nothing is the same thereafter.
A few have described the trigger for their “Oh shit” moment: reading in the New Scientist about the collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet, looking at a climate projection showing your hometown will become unlivable, hearing James Hansen say we have 10 years to act and knowing it’s not going to happen, awakening to the system’s true priorities after the Global Financial Crisis, watching the disappearance of a local wetland, realising that China’s growth is unstoppable, and witnessing the breakdown that followed Hurricane Katrina.
My own moment came in September 2008 when I read an article by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows. With relentless logic they set out the world’s carbon abatement task before reaching a shattering conclusion. Even with optimistic assumptions about how soon global emissions can reach their peak, and how rapidly they could decline thereafter, we will be lucky if we can limit warming to 4°C this century. Four degrees!
Before then I knew we were in deep trouble. I knew that the Bali call for rich nations to cut emissions by 25-40% by 2020 was scientifically necessary but economically unprecedented. But I hoped for some great awakening that would prove it could be done, that our leaders would suddenly recognize how dire the situation is, or that the people would force governments to act.
Anderson and Bows’ analysis blew away my soggy hopes. If the top world leaders all had an epiphany and decided to force through, against overwhelming resistance, an economic transformation matched only in war-time, and did so in the next five years, we would still be on a path to four degrees of warming. Since September 2008, rather than signs of a climate epiphany, the political situation has deteriorated, not least with the failure of Copenhagen to galvanise international action.
Four degrees takes us past the big tipping points. Earth will be hotter than at any time for 15 million years. The climate will be radically transformed and out of our control. In short, we are stuffed and the expletive I wrote in the margin of the Anderson and Bows paper was stronger than “Oh shit”. I walked around in a semi-daze for weeks. How does one come to terms with such a realisation? After a year of thinking about it, I feel I made some progress as to how we can reconcile ourselves to the new reality. At the end of the last chapter of Requiem for a Species I encapsulate it with the slogan “Despair. Accept. Act”.
***Clive Hamilton is the author of Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (£14.99) published by Earthscan in April 2010. Read extracts and reviews by Jonathon Porritt, John Thackara and others, here.
Please share your 'oh shit' moment in the comments section.
