Tag Archives: global warming

“A bullet fired through the head can have an adverse effect on brain function”. This is the sort of language in which the risks from climate change are sometimes discussed.  In other circles the language of catastrophe is preferred, with the possibility of human extinction sometimes thrown in.

Those of us who are concerned about global warming and other environmental threats have various motivations. For some, the injustice of what rich-world carbon emissions have inflicted on other countries is paramount. For some, a deep love of the natural world and a perception of environmental vandalism comes top. I feel both those things strongly but, most of all, I feel that human civilisation at its best is glorious and remarkable but fragile. We seem in danger of throwing it away by our lack of concern for the biosphere that supports it. I fear a possible future in which much of the world is rendered uninhabitable, civilisation has broken down and most of human life is nasty, brutish and short. That’s what I call catastrophe.

The received wisdom, at least until recently, seems to have been that it’s counter-productive to talk about global warming in apocalyptic terms. That may be right but it risks our under-estimating the damage that climate change could cause. From the evidence I have encountered, I simply can’t rule out the possibility of a global catastrophe resulting from climate change.  That possibility is amplified by the fragility of some of our political systems and hence of our civilisation.

Looking at regimes governing some of the most populous countries in the world, not to mention politics in the USA and the UK, I can’t feel confident that catastrophe will be avoided.