Climate Mission Impossible

December 8, 2015

Does anybody else find the ongoing conversation about the temperature goal curious?

The growing number of supporters of a 1.5°C long-term temperature goal is bizarre. Simply stated, 1.5°C is impossible at this point in time. If you ask any serious climate modeler without shoving a microphone in their face, they will tell you that there is no longer a reasonable pathway to 1.5°C (on a time scale that is relevant for humanity). On record, the scientists squirm and say things like “an extremely slim chance,” (CICERO’s Glen Peters) or “technically feasible” (Andy Wiltshire at the UK Met Office). But what they mean is that there is simply no way you can bridge the gap between unrealistic, overly optimistic model assumptions (e.g., peaking this decade, 50% reductions over the next 15 years, massive negative carbon emissions) and the real constraints of decarbonization (including the anticipated growth of coal power in India and China).

Even the good old 2°C goal seems like quite a stretch at this point, unless “a little miracle” happens in 2030, as a colleague of mine put it yesterday. The current INDCs – if implemented fully – give us a decent chance (not certainty) to end up somewhere between 2.7°C and 3.5°C with an option of bending the curve to 2°C after 2030 with a fast phase-out of fossil fuels and even faster scaling up of negative emissions technologies (something our R&D budgets have been neglecting, btw.).

Nevertheless, the question whether or not to aim for 1.5°C has become one of the fundamental issues at COP 21 – a kind of litmus test for your moral worth: are you with the most vulnerable countries or not? Although I suspect I will make myself unpopular saying this, I believe that this is not only an unproductive framing of the necessary conversation about an appropriate goal for the Convention. It is also a dangerous path to set the climate regime on.

Here’s a very brief history of the temperature target:

• One of the few important results of Copenhagen was a political agreement that established 2°C as a long-term goal to keep the world safe from “dangerous” climate change in accordance with Art 2.1 of the Convention.
• AOSIS has always fought for 1.5°C, but acceded to the Copenhagen Accord as better than nothing. However, here in Paris, the AOSIS chair has called the lower temperature goal a “moral threshold”.
• In 2014, the LDCs started to campaign for 1.5°C. Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate and Development, offers a reason for this renewed focus on the temperature target: the difference between a 1.5°C and 2°C ‘is roughly 1.5 million people who will fall through the cracks and most of them will be in vulnerable and developing countries.’ The more ambitious target – even if not achieved – would make these climate impact victims visible. Some island states and African least developed countries now have a joint voice for 1.5°C in Climate Vulnerable Forum. 
• A part of the NGO community, including youth and climate justice organizations, are also in favor of the more ambitious goal, as CAN keep stating in their ECO newsletter.
• Galvanized by this momentum and media attention, Santa Lucia reintroduced 1.5°C into the negotiation text last week (thank you, New York Times, for a very well-timed piece on the disappearance of the Marshall Islands).
• Saudi Arabia is resisting any mention of the temperature target, or even the summary report of 2013-2015 review process. This report made some critical observations about the expected climate impacts of 2°C warming, raising the question whether that would actually prevent ‘dangerous’ climate change.
• In a meeting last week Wednesday, when parties discussed requesting the IPCC to draft a special report on the impacts of 1.5°C warming, India had the guts to spell out what other (mainly developed) countries are probably only thinking: regardless of achievability, it might simply be too expensive to aim for 1.5°C.
• Regardless of the pessimism sown by Saudi Arabia and India, COP 21 president Francois Hollande made a pitch for 1.5°C “if possible.” Germany’s lead negotiator followed suit - a bit awkward, given that Germany’s pavilion is all about 2°C. Flasbarth’s differentiation between making 1.5°C the long-term goal and finding some way to insert the number into the language of the Paris agreement turns out to be an important one.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

• Over the weekend, something must have happened. On Monday the statements of support for 1.5°C kept rolling in one after the other, making the story weirder by the hour:
• The EU said it was “open” to a 1.5°C target.
• Canada’s Environment and Climate Minister McKenna announced on Sunday that she supports 1.5°C – a stunning turn-around of the Canadian government, reflecting the shift from the Harper era to Trudeau’s liberal government. She buffered that statement a day later, saying Canada supports language on 1.5°C rather than making it the single long-term goal under the new agreement.
• The US’s Todd Stern said “We are working with other countries on some formulation that would include 1.5°C,” – again, some formulation, not the ultimate goal. Secretary of State, John Kerry, shed some more light on this position when he said “I think we should embrace it as a legitimate aspiration, … [b]ut I don’t think we can make it the embraced targetable goal because we lose people when we head that way.” Alright, so we are sympathetic to the idea but we won’t actually aim for it?
• China followed suit with an - as always - interpretable statement on supporting developing countries.
• India was a bit wobbly on the issue, having voiced its doubts about the affordability of 1.5°C last week, but seems to be coming around too. “Why not 1°C, why 1.5°C,” asked Ashok Lavasa, India’s lead negotiator. Yesterday Susheel Kuman commented that India had no problem with 1.5°C target if the required emission cuts were made by the developed countries (while India’s growing GHG emission increasingly cancel out those cuts).
• Finally, in a move that still boggles my mind, a group of business leaders issued a statement in support of 1.5°C.

So, what is going on? What is this collective denial of science all about? Is there a rational reason for this newly found support for the most vulnerable? Are moral emotions taking over in the face of heartbreaking realities? Let’s see if political and cognitive science can shed some light on this puzzle.

Reason & Rationality

International relations theory would suggest that states act in their national interest, understood as a rational assessment of costs and benefits. That neatly seems to explain the position of small island states and maybe some LDCs, who face existential threats (the actual threat of death or disappearance) to their statehood (because of the loss of their territory), their nationhood (in case their people disperse and change) and their culture. Given the higher chance of preserving these ultimate goods in a 1.5°C warming scenario, it is absolutely in the interest of AOSIS to insist on this goal. Cognitive science tells us that islanders’ minds work hard to reject the impossibility-argument, clinging to the remaining slivers of hope and an ‘overshoot and return’ option as long as there is territory left to defend from climate death. You might argue with Slate’s Eric Holthaus that they might be better off negotiating for real money (loss and damage) rather than unreal warming goals. But in extreme cases like this, human beings do not trade-off sacred values for money. The mind uses what is called deontological reasoning when it comes to matters of survival – a principled (and highly emotional) question of right or wrong rather than (im)possibility or (un)affordability. And even if they eventually acknowledge that 1.5°C is unachievable, the formal goal enshrined in the Paris Agreement would give them a much stronger argument to claim financial support for their action.

A rational explanation for the LDCs is a little different, but also not that hard. Pursuing 1.5°C makes a lot of tactical and strategic sense in the negotiations. A more ambitious temperature target would strengthen their claim for finance, technology transfer and capacity building support – more ambition requires more action; more action requires more support. And even if 1.5°C turns out to be unachievable, having the goal formally established in the Paris Agreement would lay the foundations for strong Loss and Damage claims once the world passes this temperature threshold. Like CBDR in the Convention, this reference would be here to stay and certainly do a lot of work for the developing world in the years and decades to come.

Alright, we’ve got AOSIS and the LDCs covered. But what about those not in danger of losing statehood, homeland, culture, livelihoods and lives? Pursuing an impossible goal is hardly in their national interest. Or is it?

Maybe they are taking the science really seriously, and have come to a new understanding of their national interest in the light of climate tipping points. Two tipping points (coral bleaching and Greenland melting) are becoming more likely when the global temperature passes 1.5°C. Maybe the major emitters want to reduce mitigation (and adaptation costs, because mitigating earlier and faster (the necessary conditions for a 1.5°C scenario) is cheaper than postponing action. Or they realize that sea-level rise is not just a problem for small island states. However, nothing in their statements or behavior so far points to this explanation.

Norms, Justice and Emotion?

But rationality and risk assessment might not be all that matters. Some theories of international relations tell us that ideas and norms – especially norms of justice – matter. The moral norms invoked by small island states are not backed up by economic power, yet, they have a funny way of taking hold of people and processes. In addition, cognitive science suggests that all ideas – especially norms of justice – are accompanied by a set of powerful emotions, that can motivate our actions.

So maybe, it’s not just the vulnerable, who make emotional demands for justice, but the powerful who cannot deny the moral power of those who stand to loose everything? Maybe high emitters find it hard to admit to the victims of their (growing) prosperity that they have messed up. Taking responsibility for somebody else’s ultimate loss might simply be impossible, especially when trivial benefits in one part of the world have catastrophic costs in another. Wrong doesn’t begin to cover it.

Don’t do it.

Regardless of the reasons, formalizing the impossible in an international treaty is not a good idea. You might argue that it can’t do any harm to aim high and fall a little short – better than aiming low and getting there. But there are serious drawbacks to establishing a Climate Mission Impossible, even if it’s just a façade with the purpose to comfort those whose loss will be immeasurable. For one, the psychology of goal achievement tells us that setting unrealistic (rather than ambitious) goals usually leads to resignation – you don’t even try to achieve the impossible. Second, the UNFCCC would lose credibility when real temperature records show that it has engaged in wishful thinking. Third, the parties would lay the foundations for a set of future contestations over the responsibility for failing to achieve a shared goal, and linked to that loss, damage and the much-dreaded idea of compensation. Fourth, they are missing out on an opportunity to establish a more sensible goal to begin with, one that could be measured while we are working on it (e.g., GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, or decarbonization of economies and societies.) rather than with a lag time inherent in the climate system.

The Anthropocene – A Big Idea in the Making

The Anthropocene – A Big Idea in the Making

Recently, much of my research has focused on the Anthropocene. I'm wondering, and have been investigating, what people mean when they talk about the Anthropocene, and what they imagine when they think about it. Given the current excitement about this new and big idea, I want to track some of my observations concerning conceptual developments, diversifications of meaning, and struggles to determine what the Anthropocene is not.

1. (Re)Defining the Anthropocene

Paul Crutzen is often credited with coining the term Anthropocene in a famous short paper in the journal Nature in 2002. In another paper he made the argument that 

Human activities have grown to become significant geological forces, for instance  through the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds, land use changes, deforestation and fossil fuel burning. 

He seemed to suggest that the big A has to do with geology - the traceability of the collective human impact on the planet in its rock layers. Note that Crutzen used the word "significant" to describe the nature of the human impact on Earth. Soon, other scholars would use much stronger terminology, such as profound and dominant.

In a paper in 2010, one of the most eminent Anthropocene experts, Will Steffen, offered his definition: 

The behavior of the Earth System over the past two centuries has been dominated, by the rapid rise of human activities as a significant geophysical force at the global scale. 

Rather than focusing on geological traces of human activity only, he's worried about the planet's geophysical systems, for example the climate and atmosphere, hydrology and oceans. Neill Powell and others offer another angle in 2014, conceiving of the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene as a tipping point: 

The Anthropocene articulates a systemically compelling picture of an earth system that has flipped from a regime governed by natural drivers to one governed by human agency. 

The pieces of the definition that all of these scholars seem to agree on is the global scale of the human trace. It's not enough that an oil spill in the Arctic causes birds to die in Antarctica. The effect has to be a persistent change in some global system,  affecting the planet systemically, potentially reaching into the deep future. 

The human footprint at 3250m; Hintertux Glacier, Austrian Alps (photo credit: Manjana Milkoreit)

2. The Anthropocene Campus - Much More than Geology and Deep Time
 

In November 2014 I was part of a nine-day event called the Anthropocene Campus, organized by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. About 120 young scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds took part in a series of interdisciplinary seminars and cultural experiences to explore the meaning of the Anthropocene. The rich personal experiences of the Campus have been described elsewhere, but I was struck by the fact that the event seemed to knock Mr. Crutzen's definition of its pedestal without intending to do so or acknowledging that it did. But rather than replacing the geological definition of the big A, the group added a whole bunch of conceptual elements to it. Instead of a single, authoritative, scientific definition, suddenly the Anthropocene became a collection of ideas, proposals, possibilities, representations, challenges, and even emotions. 

I followed the Campus as a researcher, asking whether and how the event would affect the thoughts and future research plans of its participants. The key cognitive change I was able to observe through surveys and interviews was what I would call cognitive-emotional destabilization. While Mr. Crutzen's idea was still very much alive by the end of the Campus, participants left Berlin with a wealth of new ideas, images and questions that they struggled to integrate into their cognitive architecture. It would take a while – weeks, maybe months – to fit these new pieces together into a new, coherent system of meaning. 

The Campus had triggered what creativity experts call a process of divergent thinking: producing lots of different ideas and increasing the pool of definitional source material to chose from. What should follow at some point is a phase of convergent thinking – developing agreement about the best or most valuable ideas out of the pool. But I think we – the scholarly community – are far from done with divergence. The public hasn't even gotten started. 

3. The Good Anthropocene

 
In January 2015 I was invited to a workshop on "Bright Spots - Seeds of a Good Anthropocene" in Stockholm. (It seems that Europeans have a greater taste for funding events on the An thropocene than the rest of the world). The workshop was again interdisciplinary and international, but focused on particular types of ideas: those that could lead to a good Anthropocene. But what does that mean? Adding the word good – innocent and likable as it seems – opens a big can of worms. Suddenly we need to make value statements about the kind of future we want, the kinds of societies we want to live in, the pieces of nature we want to protect and those we are willing to sacrifice, and the pathways to get into from here to one of those good Anthropocenes. Who gets a say in what is good and bad? And what about conflicting or even mutually exclusive value sets? Does the Anthropocene mean that we all have to share at least a part of the future? Or do we all get to pick our own – individually, locally, nationally? Do plant and animal species get to vote? Mountains (those rocks we're layering with plastic and radioactive isotopes), forests, and oceans? What about the people or non-human beings who will live in the future? 

Of course the workshop couldn't answer these questions, but we started to think about the difference – if there is any – between a ‘good Anthropocene’ and sustainable development. Both concepts are concerned with the future of humanity and global environmental change. Both seek to understand and maybe redefine the relationship between humans and nature. So, what's the difference?

Returning to the definitions of the Anthropocene, we start with the ideas of global scale, human impacts on earth systems (rather than ecosystems at other scales), and a profound cognitive change – a new way of thinking – that builds on and requires a complex-systems view of the world. 

Are we on a good track?

CAN YOU IMAGINE?

- Helping the Mind Deal with Climate Change Futures

Brigitte Pawliw-Fry & Manjana Milkoreit

Climate change is a problem that reaches far into the future. Although one could debate to what extent climate change impacts are observable today, scientists and most policy-makers have no doubt that the accumulated effects of humanity’s economic activity over the last 100 years will have consequences for centuries, even millennia to come. 

Most of the possible future changes in the climate system are very difficult to imagine. It seems even harder to think about the impacts climate change might force upon societies. At the same time, addressing climate change requires decision-making in the present. UN negotiators, national policy-makers, senators, voters, consumers. NGOs, business leaders and investors all need to have some kind of idea/understanding what the future will look like in order to make choices about their actions today – committing your country to GHG emission reductions, lobbying against such reductions, mobilizing your community to live more sustainably or investing in the Alberta oil sands. Unfortunately human beings struggle with making good decisions in response to climate change, and one of the main reasons for this weakness might be a general lack of imagination concerning the more distant future.

Evolution seems to have a lot to do with our inability to imagine what’s ahead. Initially humans’ most pressing concerns were survival, food and shelter today and left very little time to think about the next day, week or even year. In modern societies our planning horizon has expanded to cover a number of years, maybe a decade. But although our life expectancy is approaching 100 years, and our grandchildren might see the year 2150, we rarely think beyond the year 2020. And we have absolutely no idea what 2080 might look like.

So what do we do about that? What tools can help us imagine our changing planet in the years to come? It turns out that scientific knowledge is pretty useless for painting a picture of the future that the non-scientific mind can actually see. Our brains need help to transform science into images of more and less likely realities in the form of visuals, stories, ideas, and emotions – we need art and culture to help us see, feel and experience possible worlds before they have come to pass.

An emerging literary genre known as climate fiction, or cli-fi for short, is trying to do exactly that. Writing stories about scientists, college students, corporations and politicians, who live in a significantly changed future due to climate change, they try to introduce us to the things to come. Well-known authors, including Margaret Atwood and Nathaniel Rich, are part of this new trend that might prove to be the missing link between climate science and climate action. 

When writing the cli-fi novel Back to the Garden, a story set around the end of the century, author Clara Hume was motivated by her desire to change people’s minds about climate change here and now:

I tried to imagine a credible future that would paint a picture different than our current world—in hopes that people would be inspired to respect nature now, given that a dystopian future would not be desirous. … I hope to entertain people with a good story about characters who are in the midst of being lost in a new world and who must work out their own losses, personal demons, and redemptions. The other hope is that readers will think harder about the choices we make today that will affect the planet tomorrow, and really are already affecting the planet.

Bridging the present and the future with a work of fiction is not an easy task. Asked about the importance of science for her writing, Hume emphasized that she used current scientific knowledge for her imagination, and also consulted scientists and experts who live in the place where she locates her story. Making a novel’s future scenario scientifically viable could be important if cli-fi authors seek to have social-political impacts. However, it is not hard to imagine that data – and the permanent desire for more scientific certainty – might get in the way of creative writing.

Hume seems at ease with uncertainty, which gives her and probably most creative writers a real advantage over scientists and policy-makers, who tend to worry about the not-yet-knowable. Here is what Hume thinks about the most likely trajectory of humanity and planet Earth:

So many variables will contribute to our future that it's tough to imagine exactly what it will be like. I use science news articles and books to understand the current thinking on the path of climate change. Combine this with our rapid resource extraction (including oil sands), natural resource depletion, pollution, erosion, dying fisheries/oceans, and human desire for wealth and convenience, I don't see any other destination than a far different world in the future. It will be bad in that many people will probably die due to starvation, disease, and other maladies caused by climate change and reduction of healthy natural resources, including water, air, forests, and land. Eventually, the positive might be that surviving humans might learn how to live within the limits of our ecological webs and nature might rebuild herself.

This is a pretty grim picture, yet, Hume remains optimistic that her book can make a difference:

I hope that I've written this book in such a way that people will come away not afraid but encouraged to do the right things for our planet.

We hope she is right. But does it work? Will a good summer read help us make better decisions about climate change? Can a story give you a sense of urgency? If you have read one that does, tell us about it!

We thank Clara Hume for answering our questions.