#i feel like throughout his (un)lifetime he had to gain that kind of motivation somehow | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kayla1993-world · 5 years

Text

“It is now too late to stop a future collapse of our communities because of climate change.” These are not the words of a tinfoil hat-putting-on preparer. This is from a paper delivered by senior maintenance theoretical at a leading business school to the European Commission in Brussels, earlier this year. Before that, he delivered a related message to a UN audience: “Climate change is now a planetary emergency presenting a concerned threat to people.” In the age of climate confusion, the collapse of culture has moved from being a fringe, illegal issue to a more mainstream concern.

As the world reels under each new outbreak of seriousness—record heatwaves across the Western region, terrible fires across the Amazon rainforest, the slow-moving Hurricane Dorian, extreme ice melting at the poles—the question of how bad things might get, and how soon, has become more important. The fear of collapse is obvious in the framing of movements such as ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and in impressive warnings that business-as-usual means heading toward an unfit planet.

But more experts not only point at the standing near possibility that human culture itself is at risk; some believe that the science shows it is already too late to prevent collapse. The result of the debate on this is obviously critical: it throws light on whether and how communities should change to this uncertain view. Yet this is not just a scientific debate. It also raises hard moral questions about what kind of action is warranted to prepare for, or attempt to avoid, the worst. Scientists may disagree about the timeline of collapse, but many argue that this is completely beside the point. While scientists and politicians argue over timelines and half measures, or how bad it'll all be, we are losing valuable time. With the valuables being a total collapse, some scientists more arguing that we should basically change the structure of the organization just to be safe.

Jem Bendell, a former consultant to the United Nations and longtime Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria’s Department of Business, delivered a paper in May 2019 explaining how people and communities might “change to climate-caused disruption.” Bendell’s argument is not only that social collapse due to climate change is on its way, but that it is, in effect, already here. “Climate change will disrupt your way of life in your lifetimes,” he told the audience at a climate change discussion organized by the European Commission.

Terrible results, like “the down-flowing effects of public and repeated harvest failures” are now inevitable, Bendell’s paper says. He argues this is not so much a terrible picture as a case of waking up to reality so that we can do as much as we can to save as many lives as possible. His recommended response is what he calls “Deep Adaptation,” which needs going beyond “mere changes to our existing business system and support, to prepare us for the breakdown or collapse of traditional social functions.”

Bendell’s message has since gained a mass following and high-level attention. It is partly responsible for motivating the new wave of climate protests echoing around the world. In March, he launched the Deep Adaptation Forum to connect and support people who, in the face of “unavoidable” social collapse, want to explore how they can “reduce suffering while saving more of community and the natural world.” Over the last six months, the Forum has gathered more than 10,000 people. More than 600,000 people have downloaded Bendell’s paper, called Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy, published by the University of Cumbria’s Institute of Leadership and Sustainability (IFALS). And many of the key organizers behind the Extinction Rebellion (XR) battle joined the protest movement after reading it.

“There will be a near-term collapse in community with serious results for the lives of readers,” ends that paper, released in 2017. Trouble is “probable,” it adds, and destruction “is possible.” Overcoming at least 20 years, we will see the increasing hits of the coal pollution we have already pumped into the atmosphere and oceans. Even if we stopped discharges tomorrow, Bendell argues, the latest climate science shows that “we are now in a climate emergency, which will more and more disrupt our way of life… social collapse is now unavoidable within the lifetimes of readers of this paper.”

Bendell puts a rough timeline on this. The collapse will happen within 10 years and cause disruptions across nations, involving “increased levels of hunger, starvation, disease, civil conflict, and war.” Yet this analysis opens up far more questions than it answers. I was left wondering: Which communities are at risk of collapsing due to climate change, and when? Some societies or all societies? Together or in sequence? Why some rather than others? And how long will the collapse process take? Where will it start, and in what part? How will that impact others' parts? Or will it take down all sectors of societies in one fell swoop? And what does any of this suggest for whether, or how, we might prepare for collapse?

In trying to answer these questions, I spoke to a wide range of scientists and experts and took a deep dive into the hidden but appearing science of how societies and cities collapse. I wanted to understand not just whether Bendell’s forecast was right, but to find out what range experts from climate scientists to risk analysts were digging up about the possibility of our societies collapsing in the coming years and at least 20 years. The newly-visible science of collapse is still, unfortunately, an early field. That's because it's combined science that includes not only the incredibly complex, interconnected natural systems that contain the Earth System but also has to make sense of how those systems interact with the complex, interconnected social, political, business, and cultural systems of the Human System.

What I discovered caused a wide range of feelings. I was at times surprised and shocked, often frightened, sometimes relieved. Mostly, I was disturbed. Many scientists exposed flaws in Bendell’s argument. Most rejected the idea of unavoidable near-term collapse completely. But to figure out whether a near-term collapse picture of some kind was likely led me far beyond Bendell. Some world-leading experts told me that such a scenario might, in fact, be far more reasonable than ordinarily assumed. According to Penn State professor Michael Mann, one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, Bendell’s grab of climate science is deeply flawed.

“To me, this paper is a perfect storm of misguidedness and wrongheadedness,” he told me. Bendell’s original paper had been rejected for writing by the double-checked Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. According to Bendell, the changes that opinion reviewers said were necessary to make the article fit for publication made no sense. But among them, one referee asked whether Bendell’s presentation of climate data actually supported his end: “I am not sure that the long presentation of climate data supports the core argument of the paper in a meaningful way.”

In his response, sent in the form of a letter to the journal’s chief editor, Bendell wrote: “Yet the summary of science is the core of the paper as everything then flows from the end of that analysis. Note that the science I summarise is about what is happening right now, rather than models or explanations of the complex made systems that the reviewer would have preferred.” But in Mann’s view, the paper’s failure to pass fact-checking was not simply because it didn’t fit old theoretical behaviour, but for the far more serious reason that it doesn’t have scientific difficulty. Bendell, he said, is simply “wrong on the science and hits: There is no actual proof that we face ‘inevitable near-term collapse.’”

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is also world-famous, was even meaner. “There are both valid points and non-justified statements throughout,” he told me about Bendell's paper. “Model projections have not underestimated temperature changes, not everything that is non-linear is therefore ‘out of control.’ Blaming ‘increased nature from more energy in the atmosphere’ for anything is silly. The data for ‘inevitable social collapse’ is very weak to non-existent.”

Schmidt did not rule out that we are likely to see more events of local collapse events. “Obviously we have seen such collapses in particular locations connected with extreme storm hits,” he said. He listed off some examples—Puerto Rico, Barbuda, Haiti, and New Orleans—explaining that while local collapses in certain areas could be possible, it's a "much harder case to make" at a worldwide level. "And this paper doesn't make it. I’m not especially cheerful about what is going to happen, but this is not based on anything real.” Jeremy Lent, systems person and author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, argues that throughout Bendell’s paper he often slips between the terms “unavoidable,” “probably,” and “likely.”

“If he chooses to go with his gut feeling and end collapse is unavoidable, he has every right to do so,” Lent said, “but I believe it’s irresponsible to package this as a scientifically valid end, and in that way criticize those who understand the data otherwise as being in dealing.” When I pressed Bendell on this issue, he pushed back against the idea that he was putting forward a hard, scientifically-valid forecast, describing it as a “guess”: “I say in the original paper that I am only guessing at when the social collapse will happen. I have said or written that every time I talk about that time limit.”

But why offer this guess at all? “The problem I have with the argument that I should not give a time limit like 10 years is that not deciding on a time horizon acts as a mental escape from facing our situation. If we can push this problem out into 2040 or 2050, it somehow feels less pressing. Yet, look around. Already harvests are failing because of weather made worse by climate change.” Bendell points out that such results are already damaging more capable, poorer nations than our own. He says it is only a matter of time before they damage the healthy functioning of “most countries in the world.”

According to Dr. Wolfgang Knorr, Principal Investigator at Lund University’s Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in a Changing Climate Program, the risk of near-term collapse should be taken far more seriously by climate scientists, because so much is unknown about climate points: “I am not saying that Bendell is right or wrong. But the criticism of Bendell’s points in time focuses too much on the detail and in that way intensely tries to avoid the bigger picture. The available data points to the fact that some terrible climate change is unavoidable.” Bendell argues that the main trigger for some sort of collapse—which he defines as “an uneven ending of our traditional modes of food, security, pleasure, identity, meaning, and hope”—will come from speeding-up failures in the worldwide food system.

We know that it is a clear possibility that common multi-breadbasket failures (when major yield reductions happen together across farming areas producing staple crops like rice, wheat, or maize) can be triggered by climate change—and have already happened. As shown by American physicist Dr. Yaneer Ban Yam and his team at the New England Complex Systems Institute, in the years previous 2011, worldwide food price spikes linked to climate breakdown played a role in triggering the ‘Arab Spring’ efforts. And according to hydroclimatologist Dr. Peter Gleick, climate-caused aridity increased the hit of socio-political and financial running, causing farming failures in Syria. These drove mass movements within the country, in turn preparing for limited tensions that spilled over into a lengthy conflict.

In my own work, I found that the Syrian conflict was not just triggered by climate change, but a range of intersecting factors—Syria’s domestic oil production had peaked in the mid-90s, leading state funds to bleed as oil production and exports lowered. When worldwide climate disorder triggered food price spikes, the state had begun cutting domestic fuel and food payments, already upset from the hit of financial running and crime resulting in huge deficit levels. And so, a large young population flooded with unemployment and made bold by 20 years of political control took to the streets when they could not afford basic bread. Syria has since collapsed into endless war. This is a case of what Professor Thomas-Homer Dixon, University Research Chair in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, describes as “continuous failure”—when multiple, interconnected things increase over time before triggering self-reinforcing returns which result in them all failing at the same time. In his book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, he explains how the resulting coming together of problems puzzles different political, economic and regulatory functions, which are not designed for such complex events.

From this lens, climate-caused collapse has already happened, though it is worsened by and increases the failure of many human systems. Is Syria a case-study of what is in store for the world? And is it unavoidable within the next ten years? In a major report released in August, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that hunger has already been rising worldwide due to climate hits. A senior NASA scientist, Cynthia Rosenzweig, was a lead author of the study, which warned that the continued rise in carbon discharges would drive a rise in worldwide average temperatures of 2°C in turn starting a “very high” risk to food supplies toward mid-century. Food shortages would hit weak, poorer areas, but rich nations may also be in the firing line. As a new study from the UK Parliamentary Environment Audit Committee ends, fruit and vegetable imports to countries like Britain might be cut short if a problem breaks out.

When exactly such a problem might happen is not clear. Neither reports suggest it would result in the collapse of culture, or even most countries, within 10 years. And the UN also wants everyone to understand that it is not too late to turn away these risks through a move to organic and agro-conditional methods. NASA’s Gavin Schmidt admitted “increasing results from climate change on worldwide food production,” but said that a collapse “is not prophesied and certainly not unavoidable.”

A few years ago, though, I discovered first-hand that a terrible collapse of the worldwide food system is possible in the coming 20 years if we don’t change course. At the time I was a visiting research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, and I had been invited to a steering board meeting for the Institute’s Global Research Observatory (GRO), a research program developing new models of global change. One particular model, the Dawe Global Security Model, was focused on the risk of another global food crisis, almost the same as what triggered the Arab Spring. “We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual path based on ‘do-nothing’ trends—that is, without any returns that would change the hidden course,” said institute director Aled Jones to the group of people in the room, which included UK government leaders. “The results show that based on reasonable climate courses and a total failure to change course, the worldwide food supply system would face terrible losses, and a never before seen disease of food riots. In this picture, the global community actually collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”

Jones was at pains to clear up that this model-run could not be taken as a forecast, especially as reduction policies are already rising in response to concern about such an issue: “This situation is based on simply running the model forward,” he said. “The model is a periodical model. It’s not designed to run this long, as in the real world courses are always likely to change, whether for better or worse.” Someone asked, “Okay, but what you’re saying is that if there is no change in current courses, then this is the end?”

“Yes,” Jones replied quietly. The Dawe Global Security Model put this potential change twenty years from now. Is it unbelievable that the force might happen much earlier? And if so why aren’t we preparing for this risk?

When I asked UN disaster risk advisor Scott Williams about a near-term worldwide food situation, he pointed out that this year’s UN fleet worldwide disaster risk estimate was very much aware of the danger of another global "multiple breadbasket failure. A projected increase in extreme climate events and a more mutual food supply system model a threat to global food security,” warned the UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction released in May. “For instance, local shocks can have lots of effects on global farming markets.”

Current farm modelling, the UN report said, does not adequately account for these complex interconnections. The report warns that “climate shocks and following crop failure in one of the worldwide cereal breadbaskets might have knock-on effects on the global agricultural market. The disturbances are increased if more than one of the main crop-producing countries suffers from losses together.” Williams, who was a coordinating lead author of the UN global disaster risk evaluation, put it more directly: “In a nutshell, Bendell is closer to the mark than his masters.”

He pointed me to the second chapter of the UN report which, he said, expressed the following risk to worldwide culture in a “necessarily politically less sensitive” form. The chapter is “close to stating that ‘collapse is inevitable’ and that the methods that we—scientists, modellers, academics, etc—are using are totally failing to understand that nature of complex, uncertain ‘transitions,’ in other words, collapses.” Williams fell short of saying that such a collapse situation was definitely sure, and the UN report—while setting out a dangerous level of risk—did not do so either. What they did make clear is that a major global food change could explode unexpectedly, with climate change as a key trigger.

0 notes