The Climate Crisis Future

What Is This Future?

It's a big subject. What is the Climate Crisis future? What we've been learning for at least 20 years now, but especially in the last few years, tells us that the Climate Crisis will certainly be in the world's future for a long time (the new IPCC report summary says a millenium at least) and probably will drive what happens in the extent of future we can imagine.

But what is "the future?" I've been trying to start quantifying that in terms of what the Climate Crisis may bring and when, but it's a difficult project when one can't devote total attention to it. But we can say a few things, and more importantly, we can start thinking about what we should prepare for, in general if not specific terms.

A few things we can say: in the last period of time that "the future" was an absorbing topic, from the 1950s through the 1970s say, several frameworks were developed. Herman Kahn and his fellows at RAND who got lots of federal dollars to figure out what might happen to the U.S. should there be nuclear war, came up with the concept of "scenarios," which were outcomes of sets of causes organized as a story--the number of megadeaths, for instance, and who, if anyone, won. Before Kahn, "scenario" was a term of art in the theatre only.

The implication of "scenarios" based on "war games" was the not too surprising yet (to some people) revolutionary thought that there wasn't one single fated future, or even two possibilities. There were many. Now this revelation came to "science" once computers made it possible to figure out the outcomes of a lot of variables and their interactions. Of course, your literary types--including the writers of pulp science fiction for the past century or so--knew this already. But scientists formalized it as the doctrine of "alternative futures."

The idea that you could use science to figure out the future, or various possible futures, (which HG Wells had proposed in 1901, and then thought maybe not in 1904) left the land of RAND and entered academia (where computers were no longer so rare) in the 1960s, at the same time as the anxiety over how fast things were changing and how dangerous (or short) the future was looking, entered the popular imagination (through McLuhan, for one) and radical/cultural politics, with peace and environmental activists.

It was probably in the 1970s then, when Buckminster Fuller and other "futurists" were writing best-selling paperbacks and futurist organizations were springing up in Washington and everywhere in the world, and futures studies courses likewise, that the concept of "desirable alternative future" caught on. That is, figure out a future you want, and then figure out how to reverse-engineer it.

That turned out to be a task beyond human and computer ability at the time, so it floundered, but the idea is still there, and it's implicit in, for example, this response to the growing awareness over the Climate Crisis by Bruce Sterling on the Viridian Design Movement blog.

It is in fact pretty fascinating that the latest IPCC summary and leaks from the reports in progress have inspired both doomsaying and a certain energetic if not optimistic response.
In her extraordinary testimony about the IPCC summary before a Senate committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this: “You have opened a window into our future. Looking through that window, we see a future in which global warming will reshape our planet and society. We also see a future in which harsh consequences could be blunted by our prompt action."

This is the general hope: that "prompt action" of the right kinds can blunt the harshest consequences (although probably not all "harsh" ones.) But that's where the questions only begin. What most focus on as prompt action amounts to lessening the amount of greenhouse gas we spew into the atmosphere. That alone is a staggeringly large prospect, which would transform our economies and our lives. But that's not even the only set of technical challenges (there's reducing the CO2 already in the atmosphere, and especially mitgating the actual effects of global heating: terrible storms, floods, droughts, diseases, killer heat waves, food shortages, etc.)

And while the near-term politics of addressing the longterm Climate Crisis are shaping up nicely around the enormous benefits of clean energy, and new clean energy technologies and the businesses they can create, there are many more issues to be addressed, in terms of attitudes, conceptualization and addressing the dangers that the Climate Crisis future may well have in store.

We haven't even begun to address our original question, yet this is a necessary preliminary. When we begin to imagine the Climate Crisis future, we will be talking about possible futures, about alternative futures, and always about desirable futures, and what we can do now to get there. We'll begin playing with a few numbers, next time.