The IPCC Report and Climate Nihilism
NAMRATA KANTAMNENI
Climate change has become an omnipresent threat in our lives.
Over the past 2 years we’ve seen everything from fires in Australia, California, Greece, and Siberia to freak winter storms in Texas to hurricane after hurricane along the East Coast to record flooding in India to heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, and on and on and on. It’s frankly exhausting to follow, especially since the solution is both simple and complex. We know change needs to occur, and yet determining how to do so is convoluted.
Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth assessment report outlining the urgent nature of climate change, particularly the 1.5-degree Celsius marker, which is a tipping point threshold for how much heating can occur before the damage is irreversible, meaning that further heating becomes locked in past that temperature. The report said that “...emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.”
Damage of this scale doesn’t just mean the heating of the Earth, though that will be one of the most obvious impacts of climate catastrophe. It also means more extreme weather of all sorts, including “...more intense rainfall and associated flooding, more intense drought in many regions, coastal areas to see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, the amplification of permafrost thawing, ocean acidification, among many others.”
The alarm bells are sounding
They are not phone calls, ringing across the room
They are not school bells, ringing across the hall
They are loud, blaring alarms, trying desperately to wake us from complacency
Each day that we do not act to halt climate change, the closer we get to the breaking point and the worse our own quality of life becomes. It’s easy to think that climate change is something distant, that it affects plants and animals but not humans. But climate change will also affect our own health, by making it harder to grow food, get fresh water, and breathe fresh air.
There are five key points in the IPCC report highlighting the severity of climate change:
Global surface temperature was 1.09C higher in the decade between 2011-2020 than between 1850-1900
The past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850
The recent rate of sea level rise has nearly tripled compared with 1901-1971
Human influence is "very likely" (90%) the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic sea-ice
It is "virtually certain" that hot extremes including heat waves have become more frequent and more intense since the 1950s, while cold events have become less frequent and less severe
So what should we as a society be doing about it? The Paris Climate Agreement was signed approximately five years ago, and it’s been ineffective at curbing emissions. Even the pandemic only provided a temporary drop in carbon emissions before they rose again. There have been warnings and signs, even from the U.N. itself, about climate change. Yet humanity is still consuming more, emitting more, throwing away more.
Humanity's hand in Earth’s slow and agonizing death is like a ruthless, steady homicide at the hands of a serial killer. Here, the perpetrator is humanity and eventually, the victim will also be humanity.
And this brings me to climate nihilism.
Climate nihilism, in the simplest form, is a sense of acceptance of the current state of the world. That nothing matters, that the current state of events cannot be changed. People, especially young people, are afraid. They are fearful of the future, of the quality of life their children will have. In a series of qualitative research surveys conducted since 2010, 83% of respondents said people have failed to care for the planet, 64% said their government is lying about the real impact of climate policies, and nearly 39% said they are hesitant to have children due to climate change.
And it’s justifiable to be afraid. When the entire world, including the rich, feel the effects of climate change, it’s rational to be fearful of the unraveling of civilization.
The sad thing is, things have already started breaking.
Supply chains are slowly breaking down due to climate disturbances.
Younger generations are less likely to have kids because of future climate change.
Extreme weather is affecting food supply for the whole world.
So what can we do?
It seems really strange, but now is the time to dig deep and work harder than ever. This is our World War III, except now it’s humanity against unsustainable social systems we’ve built. We need to act, both on a large scale systemic level as well as a small scale individual level.
On a systemic level, we need to advocate for clean energy. Emphasize measures for sustainable transportation such as bicycles and public transportation which take up far less road space than SUVs and other large vehicles, allowing for less bulldozing of the environment to build 10-lane highways. Change laws to allow homes to have smaller lawns and more sustainable lawn alternatives such as natural landscaping using existing plant species, so that natural ecosystems can be maintained while requiring less water and less energy for mowing. Change building codes which mandate minimum parking spots and minimum lot sizes, so that we can build smaller and human-scale infrastructure with smaller carbon footprints. Change single-family zoning so that we can live closer to our schools, work, and places of worship and not have to create such a large carbon footprint through long daily commutes. Tax petrol and subsidize clean energy, such as nuclear energy. These are just a few things we can do on a systemic level.
And on an individual level? We can’t all work on systemic changes, but we can work to reduce our own impacts. We can buy our food and other products from local farmers markets instead of big box stores to minimize emissions from transport. We can ride our bicycles and walk to work, or buy smaller cars (which have fewer emissions) if alternative forms of transport are unavailable. We can teach children that fixing the environment is possible.
Our biggest, most pressing problem is climate change. And it’s up to us to fix it.