The Changing Climate?

It used to be called The Great Turning, the Turning Point.  Now it's The Swerve.  It is a definitive move towards addressing the climate crisis and the many complex questions that ensue, about how economics and politics are done, and how we factor and weigh the environment in the ordinary equation of public and private action.  Some prominent voices on the subject have been predicting it and waiting for it for years, even decades.

Is it happening now?  Robert Jay Lifton believe so, and says so in a New York Times opinion piece:

"AMERICANS appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming. I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly...Experience, economics and ethics are coalescing in new and important ways."

Why now?  Polls and attitude studies, Lifton writes, confirm that experience with catastrophic and traumatic effects is a big factor:

"The experiential part has to do with a drumbeat of climate-related disasters around the world, all actively reported by the news media: hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and wildfires, extreme heat waves and equally extreme cold, rising sea levels and floods. Even when people have doubts about the causal relationship of global warming to these episodes, they cannot help being psychologically affected. Of great importance is the growing recognition that the danger encompasses the entire earth and its inhabitants. We are all vulnerable."

People no longer have to imagine what the effects of the climate crisis might be--at least, some of the less complex effects, obvious in discrete events:

"The most important experiential change has to do with global warming and time. Responding to the climate threat — in contrast to the nuclear threat, whose immediate and grotesque destructiveness was recorded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — has been inhibited by the difficulty of imagining catastrophic future events. But climate-related disasters and intense media images are hitting us now, and providing partial models for a devastating climate future."

Lifton moves on to economics, where the awareness is dawning that all the theoretical financial assets represented by fossil fuels still to be unearthed are likely to remain "stranded" because of their deathly danger to the planet.

"In contrast, renewable energy sources, which only recently have achieved the status of big business, are taking on increasing value, in terms of returns for investors, long-term energy savings and relative harmlessness to surrounding communities...In a world fueled by oil and coal, it is a truly stunning event when investors are warned that the market may end up devaluing those assets. We are beginning to see a bandwagon effect in which the overall viability of fossil-fuel economics is being questioned."

Lifton sees the economics entwined with ethics.  Climate crisis effects begin to tip the balance against the free market values of extracting the fossil fuels that will end up destroying civilization.  People who insist on their predominance may be stuck with "stranded ethics."

Lifton, whose recent work involves comparing the climate crisis with the nuclear weapons threat concludes: "I have come to the realization that it is very difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue."

Lifton believes that increasing awareness provides the base support and also the energy and participation for a social movement to address the climate crisis.  He recalls the "nuclear freeze" movement of the 90s, and suggests a galvanizing phrase might be a "climate freeze."  I don't see that one working, but the first test of an emerging movement is coming up: The People's Climate March is scheduled for September 21 in New York City.  An impressive roster of organizations is involved, and the schedule includes a number of preliminary events.  Organizers are calling for the largest mass demonstration on behalf of the climate in US history, with global reach, since the march ends at the United Nations.

These preparations are underway as the climate news of the week was the conclusion of a study that posits that the slower than expected rise in global temperature is due to 30 year currents in the Atlantic Ocean that is driving heat into the deep ocean.  Other theories involved heat trapped in the ocean depths, but this suggests the mechanics of it.

  If it is true, the authors suggest, the current slow rise may continue until 2025 or so, even though carbon dioxide is being added to the atmosphere at an historically high rate.  This is both beneficial and dangerous.  It is beneficial in that it provides some time to start addressing causes and dealing with effects, with less climate-caused chaos than would otherwise exist.  It's dangerous if it leads to complacency, to any sense that it's not going to happen, or it's not going to be so bad after all. For when the ocean currents change, that heat will be released while new heat won't disappear into the ocean depths.  So temperatures will rise rapidly.

It's important to note that even with temperatures rising more slowly than they should be, the effects of global heating are increasing.  Deeper drought, more frequent fierce storms, fires, mudslides, etc.  In fact, as if to buttress Lipton's comparison of the climate crisis to nuclear weapons, last week a climate related disaster  happened when torrential rains led to landslides that killed as many as 100 and forced the evacuation of 100,000--in Hiroshima, which earlier this month marked the 69th anniversary of the city devastated by the first atomic bomb dropped on a populated place.  All the photos with this post are from there, not 69 years ago, but this past week.