A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

The Despair of the Climate Scientists

Where would we be without the future? The ability to predict what lies ahead of us is one of the things that separates animals from humans. Unlike cats, say, we can set ourselves personal or societal goals and use the future to measure our progress. We can also take action to prevent or prepare for the negative futures we might imagine. In effect, the future provides us with a blank screen of unknowability onto which we project our hopes, expectations, and sometimes our worst fears.

In the wake of 9/11, military and security thinktanks in the US and Britain conducted war games and ‘future-planning scenarios’, many of which which used 9/11 as a narrative starting point to imagine the threats the future might contain. Today, defence departments draw up budget wish-lists to prepare for war with Russia, Iran, or China in five or ten years time.

The future also serves more benign purposes. Parks, hospitals, and protected natural spaces are all gifts to the future as well as the present. When a scientist spends years working on a cure for cancer, they don’t necessarily expect to see the results of their work in their own lifetime, but the knowledge that their research might help someone someday is enough motivation.

Similarly, when we honour soldiers who died for ‘our freedom’ or for ‘the nation’, we are praising them for sacrificing their lives for a world they knew they would not see. Some might think this kind of future-talk is a little grandiose. But millions of us live with it all the time. We want our children and grandchildren to have a future worth living in, and we hope that the world they inherit should be at least as good as the one we lived in, and hopefully, even better.

But what happens when the future appears so terrible that no one would want to live to see it, let alone pass it on? To put it another way, how do we continue to live, individually, and collectively, faced with a future that everything we know tells us may be infinitely worse than the present? I pose these questions, in the light of last week’s Guardian questionnaire, which asked 380 climate scientists what they felt about the future. Their responses make grim, and if you think about too much, terrifying reading. 77 percent of respondents predicted that that global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C within a few decades. 42 percent thought that temperatures were more likely to be higher than 3C - the nightmare scenario that will make the planet unliveable for millions of people, most of whom live in the global South.

Only 6 percent of respondents believed that the current aspirational target of 1.5C would be reached. The world, in other words, is burning up, and humanity faces a catastrophic future that threatens life on earth, because of what humans have done. These predictions aren’t a novelty in themselves. As far back as in 1972, the Club of Rome’s ‘Limits to Growth’ report issued a pretty stark warning:

That our planet is physically limited, and that humanity cannot continue to use more physical resources and generate more emissions than nature is capable of supplying in a sustainable manner. In addition, it will not be possible to rely on technology alone to solve the problem as this would only delay reaching the carrying capacity of the planet by a few years…that it is possible, and even likely, that the human ecological footprint will overshoot the carrying capacity of the planet, further explaining that this would likely occur due to significant delays in global decision making while growth continued, bringing the human footprint into unsustainable territory.

In 1992, 1,700 leading international scientists, including a number of Nobel laureates, wrote an open ‘warning to humanity’ which argued that:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

Those fundamental changes haven’t taken place. Environmental conferences have come and gone. Targets have been set and missed. Agreements have made, broken, and then made again. Warnings have been issued and ignored. In 2019, 15,000 scientists called on governments to make serious and rapid changes to high-emitting economic systems or face ‘untold suffering’ worldwide. And last year another international team of scientists wrote in the journal Biosciences:

We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered. As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023.

Rising temperatures and record low levels of sea ice, the scientists argued, constituted further evidence that human activity was ‘pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability’. As a result, an incredible 6 billion of the Earth’s almost 8 billion inhabitants could find themselves ‘in regions that are no longer habitable’.

Predictions like these point towards calamities that are difficult for the mind to comprehend, and they flit in and out of media and political discourse on a routine basis. But the novelty of the Guardian piece was the despair expressed by so many of its respondents:

From experts in the atmosphere and oceans, energy and agriculture, economics and politics, the mood of almost all those the Guardian heard from was grim. And the future many painted was harrowing: famines, mass migration, conflict. “I find it infuriating, distressing, overwhelming,” said one expert, who chose not to be named. “I’m relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds,” said another.

The Age of Fools

One South African scientist predicted ‘a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south. The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.’

I felt for these scientists, many of whom have spent their careers patiently accumulating the data to persuade governments and the public of the seriousness of what is happening, whilst also fending off cynical and well-funded attempts to undermine or discredit their findings, because who needs experts nowadays? It’s quite something when you read a scientist saying they would have been better off working as a night club singer, and another saying how relieved she was that she wasn’t having children.

I sometimes come across people - many of them far too young - expressing this kind of pessimism. But when you hear it from scientists who tend to rely on facts rather than emotion, you know - if you didn’t know it before - that you are in a very serious situation.

At least you would know it, if anyone reported it. But apart from the Guardian, no one did. The Radio 4 Today program presenters briefly mentioned the questionnaire, before chuckling at its ‘gloomy vibes’. No one else even got that far. Other matters were more pressing: the Gaza massacre; the Met Gala; Stormy Daniels and was Hazza snubbing the king?

Unbearable irresponsibility is the least of the charges you could aim at our shallow and puerile media, and the culture of endless distraction that it nurtures on a daily basis. But even if journalists, politicians, policymakers and the public choose to ignore it, climate breakdown will not go away - we are staring into a future that looks increasingly like a gun aimed at humanity’s head. And our collective failure to act on what we know is a bleak indictment of our species and also of the dominant global economic system - capitalism - that has driven the Anthropocene for the last two hundred years, and brought the world to the brink of a disaster it may not be able to come back from.

My generation grew up living with the possibility that people twice our age might turn the world into a smoking nuclear ruin, inhabited by mutants and cockroaches. None of us felt that we had any control over this outcome. We weren’t the ones with the codes and our fingers on the ‘nuclear button.’ That was the grown ups - the ones who had to step up to the plate each election and reassure the doubters that they weren’t lily-livered pinkos, and that they too would incinerate entire cities if push came to shove.

Such nobility of spirit, and there is still plenty of it.

That was the future then. Or at least we thought it might be. Millions of us marched to prevent it. In the end we learned to live with it, apart from the occasional moments - the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cruise Missile deployments of the 1980s, Chernobyl - when the possibility of a nuclear war or a nuclear attack plunged us into a paroxysm of terror, or galvanised us into action once again. Mutual assured destruction did not happen - more by luck than design. But the bombs never went away. They’re still with us - like monsters in the basement, except that they now seem almost like domesticated pets compared to the terrifying futures that are hurtling towards us as a result of climate change.

Nuclear weapons were a very specific creation of the military-industrial complex and a state-system that had experienced two world wars, and then launched itself into another frozen conflict which had the potential to annihilate all life on earth.

But climate change is rooted in what all of us do: what we eat and consume; where and how we travel; the energy we use. It’s rooted in the everyday workings of societies that have believed for too long that nature is an inexhaustible resource, in a system recklessly pursuing endless growth on continual ‘growth’; in urban societies whose inhabitants have forgotten that they are not separate from nature, but part of it.

The pandemic briefly reminded us of this connection - almost - but that insight has too quickly been yawned away. And now we are contemplating the prospect of a 3C temperature rise after a series of record hot summers. How many heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extinctions and dyings, storms, floods, and hurricanes does it take to make us realise that the climate crisis is the deadliest threat that humanity has ever faced?

The fact that we have allowed this to happen when we had the chance to take remedial action is a monumental moral and political failure. It makes our politics obscene, our arts pointless, and our species ridiculous. It is an unforgiveable dereliction of duty that so many politicians still insist on growth as a solution for every socioeconomic problem, regardless of its environmental consequences. We should be disgusted by the libertarian sociopaths, the billionaires and corporations that who burn rain forests, joke about wildfires, and global warming and species depletion into ‘anti-woke’ wedge issues and feeble-minded conspiracy theories about fifteen minute cities.

So it’s not at all surprising that scientists should now feel that their efforts have been pointless. But their despair should galvanise us to anger, and to action. We can’t allow the futures that were presented to us last week to numb us into a fatalistic resignation.

It may be - it is entirely conceivable - that humanity taken as a whole, will not be able to live up to its best hopes and its best members, and cannot unite to live up to the responsibilities that our accidental curatorship of this astonishing planet imposes on us. Humans aren’t gods. We might lose this earth. Maybe we aren’t worthy of it. But we don’t have to be spectators of our collective downfall. Do we really want to become what Elon Musk calls an ‘interplanetary species’, and seek our future on a planet that is as barren and desiccated as he is?

That really would be a future fit for an age of fools, and only fools would seek it. So we should acknowledge the despair of the scientists and concentrate our efforts on preventing the dire outcomes they predict. We must build the networks and movements that really can bring about ‘fundamental changes’, and reject the nihilistic politics that are leading us to disaster.

Alternatively, we can shrug our soldiers, and dismiss the climate scientists as agents of wokery or a globalist conspiracy to take away our ‘freedom.’ But that way madness lies. Better to find a way to protect and heal this wounded planet on which our collective survival depends, and extend ties of solidarity to the people who are most at risk from our collective idiocy.

We may fail. But doing nothing means that failure is guaranteed. Because the one certain thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet, and that means that there is still a chance - however faint - to avert, or at least prepare for what is coming.