No. Not smothered, but they certainly take time to break through. We just need to keep banging away - we have no choice. My 2022 book Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant's Guide was a best seller, so some people at least are taking notice.
Thank you for honest and well-written article. I have a lot of empathy for climate scientists, because social change is not your job. In a sensible or rational society, scientists would have sounded the alarm in the nineties and then the task would have passed firmly into the realm of political debate, where historians are the experts in how social change happens. As a scientist whose mission it is to understand and describe the world as it is -- a key role in society -- you should not have to be agonizing over this. So we should look at the reason why you are in this position: Climate Denial. We all know the story of how industry funded climate denial. This created a dialectical need for someone to assert the truth: it is happening. Naturally a scientist is better positioned to do that, but it is frustrating and tiresome work when what you are really interested in science. I would suggest that denial was such a persistent and successful strategy because it confined the debate to your realm and firmly away from the professional revolutionaries. Because climate change is fundamentally a challenge to capitalism; the physical manifestation's of Marx's "contradictions" that he predicted would bring down the system. So the capitalists are scared but they've found a strategy to keep the issue within the domain of Science. They want you as the opposition, because you will cite focus group statistics rather than organize the workers to take down the real culprits, who are the same culprits for every other crime being committed right now: the capitalist elite.
The reason people are paralyzed by the truth, especially if the truth is hopeless, is because Industry has successfully placed the blame for climate change on the consumers' shoulders. We are made to feel constant responsibility and guilt for our carbon footprint. But we live in a world that the capitalist elite created, designed, to revolve around fossil fuels. We live in a world where the capitalist elite sacrificed our future on the pyre of anticommunism during the cold war. If the blame and anger for climate change was shifted to reflect class lines, we would more quickly get to a post-carbon petrocommunist society.
People don't become terrified until disaster is in their face. It's how we're made. Your message and those of other climate scientists are smothered by popular culture, mainstream media not being responsible, the struggle for average people to simply make ends meet, and sheer ignorance. I have been writing on climate change for the last few years. I'd be swimming in money if I wrote about virtually anything else.
I'm a member of the public not a scientist but can relate to all these dilemmas Bill. I've been through all possible approaches in trying to communicate with people and none of them have worked in any immediate way - emergency truth-telling, softly-softly, positive-inspirational etc. I wonder if sometimes we can't always know the impact we have. I remember a couple of years before I really woke up to the emergency, I read a post on-line, and felt strongly that the writer was trying to warn me. That they had no agenda other than an urgent desire to warn their fellow humans. This feeling made a strong impression, but I returned back to my usual way of thinking. Then in 2022 the heatwave hit and I woke up to things with a sudden jolt. But that earlier warning was probably doing some underground work in my psyche, preparing the field for a fuller realisation later on. So we need to keep on trying, realising that we might not know the consequences of our efforts.
I'm no climate scientist, but I do know enough science to understand the emergency. That is why I support protestors in court: people of all ages who, until recently, never imagined they would ever see the inside of a court.
This is how I see our future, in Britain. Please tell me if there's a flaw in my logic.
In the summer of 2022 we had our first day of 40°C. That day London not only had more fire brigade call outs since the Blitz, but we also had rail tracks bending and tarmac melting. In one day.
In summers to come, few disagree we will have higher temperatures: 41,42°C - certainly several days together over 40°C. More bent rail tracks. The first truck to pick up melted tarmac on its tyres will get motorways closed. All land transport will deminish significantly on that day.
That will affect supermarket shelves. That will cause panic buying. They will be empty that night.
Then, imagine if someone puts on social media that a person at a given address has been stockpiling food for the last 6 months. How long would their front door last? Whether it was true or not. How could police respond on sticky tarmac?
Before 2030.
In OUR lifetime, not just in our children's lifetime or their children's. Our's!
Law and Order - civilisation - gone in 3 days! Bloodshed in the streets. Each family will be in survival mode.
The people at that front door would say, "I was just trying to feed my family!" Because care for our family is our major concern. We'd face the fact that we would kill to prevent them starving.
I did say, "In summers to come", but El Niño is starting up again this summer, bringing warmer weather. Is "Before 2030" being a bit optimistic?
My question is: why aren’t climate scientists running for office? It would seem that you guys have logistical and moral authority over the next 20-30 years of human life. If you're frustrated with the two-bit attorneys and real estate barons who currently run the global empire most responsible for this looming catastrophe, then YOU have a moral imperative to challenge their power. You cannot lead a movement at the scale necessary from a lab or by writing papers. If you think you're unqualified for politics, I assure you that you're not. There are no qualifications and many elected officials are barely literate. If this is a political movement, it requires political action. You and your colleagues need to be willing to get your hands dirty or else you're just bystanders too.
Thank you for this great reflection, Bill. Completely in line with what other scientists like Chamkaur Ghag and Charlie Gardener have brought up in the CMP climate distress campaign and beyond: https://climatemajorityproject.com/climate-anxiety-campaign/
Hi Bill; in August 2021 you were one of the co-signatories to this Letter in the UK Press:
COP26 needs to agree on a comprehensive framework
(In climate-terror) - do you still support this, or is it all just too late now?
In Leslie Hook’s interview piece with John Kerry (Report, July 21), the US climate envoy said of climate funding that “President Biden is trying to figure out what to do”. He added: “We can’t be doing less than a totally fundamental, basic level of acceptance and responsibility.”
As cosignatories to the Byrd-Hagel resolution, both Biden and Kerry know this, as the resolution insisted that all countries accept either emissions reduction or limitation commitments. It was passed 95-0 by the US Senate in June 1997. Later that year, at the COP3 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the resolution fed into what was very widely known as contraction and convergence (C&C), which the US introduced into the final debate — supported by China, India and the Africa group of nations — not least to ensure “emissions-trading” was included.
It is fundamental to note that the US delegation specifically accepted the simple basis of “entitlement” as converging on the global per capita average of emissions under a global cap on emissions. They asked the Global Commons Institute to advocate for this framework as widely as possible, especially in China, which GCI duly did.
There was widespread acceptance of this principle after COP3. It even became the basis of the UK Climate Change Act in 2008. At COP15 in 2009 China carefully distinguished between actual emissions and emissions entitlements, pointing out that differences between emissions above and below the average could and should, as “credits and debits”, be traded or taxed away.
Sadly, squandering all these precedents, we have now wasted 24 years since COP3 as the global annual output of CO2 emissions has now doubled to about 14bn tonnes a year of carbon and in Kerry’s words elsewhere, we are now writing humanity’s “suicide note”.
In his Reith lectures Mark Carney, UN special envoy on climate action and finance, described C&C as the first best option, at the same time adding that it was never going to happen.
But that begs a question: so, what framework, if not C&C, will COP26 deliver which is better? Are we to have a comprehensive framework-based market, or just another hit-and-miss market based framework?
Colin Challen Former Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change
Robin Stott Executive member, UK Climate & Health Alliance
Bill McGuire Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards
Fear is a strong motivator, but I am starting to think it has to be physically experienced rather than imaginatively generated. Your book was excellent, and I was glad of it's release and hoped it would change the landscape.
My 2023 book, FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe, goes a step further and walks people through the actual experience of being smashed by climate chaos. Like Hothouse Earth, people loved it, but I've witnessed more than a few readers still slide back into hopium filled delusions.
No. Not smothered, but they certainly take time to break through. We just need to keep banging away - we have no choice. My 2022 book Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant's Guide was a best seller, so some people at least are taking notice.
Thank you for honest and well-written article. I have a lot of empathy for climate scientists, because social change is not your job. In a sensible or rational society, scientists would have sounded the alarm in the nineties and then the task would have passed firmly into the realm of political debate, where historians are the experts in how social change happens. As a scientist whose mission it is to understand and describe the world as it is -- a key role in society -- you should not have to be agonizing over this. So we should look at the reason why you are in this position: Climate Denial. We all know the story of how industry funded climate denial. This created a dialectical need for someone to assert the truth: it is happening. Naturally a scientist is better positioned to do that, but it is frustrating and tiresome work when what you are really interested in science. I would suggest that denial was such a persistent and successful strategy because it confined the debate to your realm and firmly away from the professional revolutionaries. Because climate change is fundamentally a challenge to capitalism; the physical manifestation's of Marx's "contradictions" that he predicted would bring down the system. So the capitalists are scared but they've found a strategy to keep the issue within the domain of Science. They want you as the opposition, because you will cite focus group statistics rather than organize the workers to take down the real culprits, who are the same culprits for every other crime being committed right now: the capitalist elite.
The reason people are paralyzed by the truth, especially if the truth is hopeless, is because Industry has successfully placed the blame for climate change on the consumers' shoulders. We are made to feel constant responsibility and guilt for our carbon footprint. But we live in a world that the capitalist elite created, designed, to revolve around fossil fuels. We live in a world where the capitalist elite sacrificed our future on the pyre of anticommunism during the cold war. If the blame and anger for climate change was shifted to reflect class lines, we would more quickly get to a post-carbon petrocommunist society.
People don't become terrified until disaster is in their face. It's how we're made. Your message and those of other climate scientists are smothered by popular culture, mainstream media not being responsible, the struggle for average people to simply make ends meet, and sheer ignorance. I have been writing on climate change for the last few years. I'd be swimming in money if I wrote about virtually anything else.
I'm a member of the public not a scientist but can relate to all these dilemmas Bill. I've been through all possible approaches in trying to communicate with people and none of them have worked in any immediate way - emergency truth-telling, softly-softly, positive-inspirational etc. I wonder if sometimes we can't always know the impact we have. I remember a couple of years before I really woke up to the emergency, I read a post on-line, and felt strongly that the writer was trying to warn me. That they had no agenda other than an urgent desire to warn their fellow humans. This feeling made a strong impression, but I returned back to my usual way of thinking. Then in 2022 the heatwave hit and I woke up to things with a sudden jolt. But that earlier warning was probably doing some underground work in my psyche, preparing the field for a fuller realisation later on. So we need to keep on trying, realising that we might not know the consequences of our efforts.
Children and grandchildren are certainly important, but what about a mention for the entire animal kingdom?
I'm no climate scientist, but I do know enough science to understand the emergency. That is why I support protestors in court: people of all ages who, until recently, never imagined they would ever see the inside of a court.
This is how I see our future, in Britain. Please tell me if there's a flaw in my logic.
In the summer of 2022 we had our first day of 40°C. That day London not only had more fire brigade call outs since the Blitz, but we also had rail tracks bending and tarmac melting. In one day.
In summers to come, few disagree we will have higher temperatures: 41,42°C - certainly several days together over 40°C. More bent rail tracks. The first truck to pick up melted tarmac on its tyres will get motorways closed. All land transport will deminish significantly on that day.
That will affect supermarket shelves. That will cause panic buying. They will be empty that night.
Then, imagine if someone puts on social media that a person at a given address has been stockpiling food for the last 6 months. How long would their front door last? Whether it was true or not. How could police respond on sticky tarmac?
Before 2030.
In OUR lifetime, not just in our children's lifetime or their children's. Our's!
Law and Order - civilisation - gone in 3 days! Bloodshed in the streets. Each family will be in survival mode.
The people at that front door would say, "I was just trying to feed my family!" Because care for our family is our major concern. We'd face the fact that we would kill to prevent them starving.
I did say, "In summers to come", but El Niño is starting up again this summer, bringing warmer weather. Is "Before 2030" being a bit optimistic?
My question is: why aren’t climate scientists running for office? It would seem that you guys have logistical and moral authority over the next 20-30 years of human life. If you're frustrated with the two-bit attorneys and real estate barons who currently run the global empire most responsible for this looming catastrophe, then YOU have a moral imperative to challenge their power. You cannot lead a movement at the scale necessary from a lab or by writing papers. If you think you're unqualified for politics, I assure you that you're not. There are no qualifications and many elected officials are barely literate. If this is a political movement, it requires political action. You and your colleagues need to be willing to get your hands dirty or else you're just bystanders too.
Thank you for this great reflection, Bill. Completely in line with what other scientists like Chamkaur Ghag and Charlie Gardener have brought up in the CMP climate distress campaign and beyond: https://climatemajorityproject.com/climate-anxiety-campaign/
Hi Bill; in August 2021 you were one of the co-signatories to this Letter in the UK Press:
COP26 needs to agree on a comprehensive framework
(In climate-terror) - do you still support this, or is it all just too late now?
In Leslie Hook’s interview piece with John Kerry (Report, July 21), the US climate envoy said of climate funding that “President Biden is trying to figure out what to do”. He added: “We can’t be doing less than a totally fundamental, basic level of acceptance and responsibility.”
As cosignatories to the Byrd-Hagel resolution, both Biden and Kerry know this, as the resolution insisted that all countries accept either emissions reduction or limitation commitments. It was passed 95-0 by the US Senate in June 1997. Later that year, at the COP3 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the resolution fed into what was very widely known as contraction and convergence (C&C), which the US introduced into the final debate — supported by China, India and the Africa group of nations — not least to ensure “emissions-trading” was included.
It is fundamental to note that the US delegation specifically accepted the simple basis of “entitlement” as converging on the global per capita average of emissions under a global cap on emissions. They asked the Global Commons Institute to advocate for this framework as widely as possible, especially in China, which GCI duly did.
There was widespread acceptance of this principle after COP3. It even became the basis of the UK Climate Change Act in 2008. At COP15 in 2009 China carefully distinguished between actual emissions and emissions entitlements, pointing out that differences between emissions above and below the average could and should, as “credits and debits”, be traded or taxed away.
Sadly, squandering all these precedents, we have now wasted 24 years since COP3 as the global annual output of CO2 emissions has now doubled to about 14bn tonnes a year of carbon and in Kerry’s words elsewhere, we are now writing humanity’s “suicide note”.
In his Reith lectures Mark Carney, UN special envoy on climate action and finance, described C&C as the first best option, at the same time adding that it was never going to happen.
But that begs a question: so, what framework, if not C&C, will COP26 deliver which is better? Are we to have a comprehensive framework-based market, or just another hit-and-miss market based framework?
Colin Challen Former Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change
Robin Stott Executive member, UK Climate & Health Alliance
Bill McGuire Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards
Aubrey Meyer Director, Global Commons Institute
Fear is a strong motivator, but I am starting to think it has to be physically experienced rather than imaginatively generated. Your book was excellent, and I was glad of it's release and hoped it would change the landscape.
My 2023 book, FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe, goes a step further and walks people through the actual experience of being smashed by climate chaos. Like Hothouse Earth, people loved it, but I've witnessed more than a few readers still slide back into hopium filled delusions.
Do you still support this: - https://www.ft.com/content/5ae96bc5-67c4-49cb-9b20-deafcbbd80dc
Do you still support this: - https://www.ft.com/content/5ae96bc5-67c4-49cb-9b20-deafcbbd80dc