Last night I went to an excellent talk on climate science communication. One of the questions afterwards, though, contained a trope that made me really grumpy. It wasn’t my talk, or my place to grab the microphone and throw scientific hands, so I’m using my own platform to do so, because it’s actually a very common piece of escapist fantasy:
“I grew up under the threat of nuclear war. Carl Sagan told us it was inevitable. It didn’t happen, and we’re not worried about nuclear war anymore, so obviously panicking about climate change is the same – in a few years we’ll realise there was nothing to be scared of. It’s not the crisis we think it is.”
I completely understand the attractiveness of this theory. “We are under threat. That’s scary. But we were under threat before and that turned out to be nothing, so this one will too, right? RIGHT? PLEASE??”
Who wouldn’t want to believe that? If you look climate science full in the face, it’s terrifying, and very clear that we need to act fast.
Given that fear, of course the soft, beguiling, soothing idea that it’s all an overblown panic that will sort itself out without drastic action on our part is hard to resist.
There’s a really significant difference, though, between nuclear war and climate change.
The threat of nuclear war was, in essence, a human threat that we thought might happen. We were afraid people would do dumb things. Actually, it wasn’t an unfounded threat, but it turned out ok. People are unpredictable, and they weren’t as dumb as we feared. Yay. People are weird, we got through it, all good.
The threat of climate change, though, is a physical threat. It is pure physics. It’s happening right now. The evidence is all around us, and has been for a long time. Eunice Foote did the science in the 1850s that showed that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere would change the climate.
The catastrophic fires, hurricanes, floods, and droughts that are now pummelling the world with increasing frequency are the inevitable outcome of that simple fact of physics. This isn’t about predicting whether some fool will push a button and trigger nuclear war. This is about the atmosphere already being physically damaged. We can’t fix it completely, but we could stop damaging it further.
You can’t argue with physics. You can’t hope it won’t happen. You can’t persuade it to take its finger off the button. We’ve already pressed the button. This threat is not going away. We need to understand that. It’s real, it’s present, and it’s happening now. It’s time to act. As the saying goes, the best time to act was years ago. The second best time is now. We can do this. We have to do this. But it takes political courage. We have to direct every vote, every time, to the folks who will actually take action.
(And by the way, AI won’t save us. AI has never solved a single problem we didn’t already understand. We have successfully taught AI to identify certain types of cancers in scans. To spot diseases in crops. To create plausible sentences. Problems we already know how to spot, and to solve. We have not created AI that can solve problems itself, and there is no evidence that we ever will. Sure, we might, but we might also figure out how to turn lead into gold. I wouldn’t want to bet my lunch money on it, much less my children’s future!)
