"There is no single solution to the climate crisis. But neither is there an inevitable outcome."

"Coming decades are going to be unimaginably difficult, and as societies and cultures struggle to transform themselves some will succeed better than others."

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/library-end-world-bradley/

The Impending Collapse

• Climate Scientist Joelle Gergis, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report (due for release in 2022) - suggested that "Previous climate models have seriously underestimated the sensitivity of the Earth's systems. Temperatures could rise much faster and much higher than previously thought. According to these new models, in the worst case scenarios Australia could warm by a previously unthinkable seven degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100."

  The implications of this are unimaginable - we may witness planetary collapse far sooner than we once thought... How could we not understand that life as we know it is unravelling before our eyes? That we have unleashed intergenerational warming that will be with us for millennia?

• the failure to take climate action sooner also means that much of the changes caused by global warming are unavoidable, because the planet will continue to warm to matter what we do.

• Stephen Pyne, pyrohistorian, writes:

  So dire is the picture that some observers argue that the past is irrelevant. We are headed into a no-narrative, no-analogue future. So immense and unimaginable are the coming upheavals that the arc of inherited knowledge that joins us to the past has broken. There is no precendent for what we are about to experience, no means by which to triangulate from accumulated human wisdom into a future unlike anything we have known before.

• Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University said:

  We are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse... That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system.

• Simon Beard, Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, suggests we are close to a "global systems death spiral"

  You get food security collapsing, political systems collapsing and then rising levels of environmental destruction. With this many people, that could be genuinely devastating for humanity.

• Jem Bendell, a Professor of Sustainability at England's Cumbria University argues that "we need to let go of the idea our world might be saved, and instead reframe our approach to the problems we face in ways that acknowledge reality instead of denying it, a conceptual frameowrk he dubbed 'Deep Adaptation'

• Jason D. Moore Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015) argues that capitalisms success is underpinned by the availability of "cheap nature" - which is the equiviland of cheap labour, but natural. The problem is, capitalism has colonised the entire planet

  the likely demise of cheap nature today therefore signals the exhaustion of a civilisational model, punctuated by the rise of negative-value. Capitalism will give way to another model - or models - over the next century.

  • but, whether the "exhaustion of cheap nature leads to a better model, that remains to be seen

Framing the Collapse

• When looking back to societal collapses of the past (Roman Empire, for example) "we might just as easily celebrate such transformations as examples of successful adaptation and change"
• Guy D. Middleton in Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths (2017) states that "the way we frame and interpret events frequently says more about our own anxieties than it does about historical reality"
• The emphasis upon decline and collapse obscures the relationship between the climate and human activity. It is more complex then that. Narratives focusing on collapse are potentially paralysing, instead of calling to action.
  • Degroot: "There will be winners and losers in the the struggle with climate change, just as there are today, there will be in the future"

Humanity and the Collapse

• Recent studies show that people respond to adversity with kindness rather than cruelty.
• Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Remarkable Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009) she observes that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, most people did not turn on each other:

Young men who took it upon themselves to supply water, food, diapers, and protection to the strangers stranded with them, to people who sheltered neighbours, to the uncounted hundreds or thousands who set out in boats — armed, often, but also armed with compassion — to find those who were stranded in the stagnant waters and bring them to safety, to the two hundred thousand or more who colunteered to house complete strangers, mostly in their own homes, via the Interenet site hurricehousing.org in the weeks after, more persuaded by the pictures of suffering than the reumours of monstrosity, to the uncounted tens of thousands of volunteers who came to the gulf coast to rebuilt and restore

often the worst behaviour in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From 1906 San Francisco to 2005 New Orleans, innocents have been killed by people who believed that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order.

DeGroot observes:

The past tells us that when climatic trends make it impossible to live in the same city, grow food in the same way or continue existing economic relationships, the result for a society is not invariably crisis and collapse. Individuals, communities and societies can respond in surprising ways, and crisis – if it does come – could provoke some of the most productive innovations of all. Those responses, in turn, yield still more transformations within evolving societies. If that was true in the past, it is even more true today, as seismic political and cultural changes coincide with the breakneck development and democratisation of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and other revolutionary technologies.

• "The politics of fear and catastrophism will not produce the clarity necessary to face the challanges ahead"