Climate Crisis: Cause & Effect

There's a threat to the future inherent in the language we're using--and not using--about the climate crisis.

For those of us sounding the alarm 20 or even 10 years ago, the climate crisis was something that was very likely to happen in the future if we didn't take steps to address it in the present.  Those steps--the various choices that might have made a difference--were mostly not taken.

Now we see the climate visibly, palpably and in various ways obviously changing.  Scientists tell us that these changes aren't going to change back for a very long time, if ever.  But they also tell us that there might be time to forestall even more severe, even much worse changes in the farther future, that might doom human civilization and end life on Earth as we know it.  There might be time--but not a lot of time--for humanity to finally understand the urgency, and take effective steps.

So now, the climate crisis is a two part crisis.  It is a crisis of the present-to-near future, and a crisis of all of the future.

The greatest danger to that future is that we refuse to see the relationship of the "climate change" of the present and the mortal danger to the human future.

That refusal is happening now, and our scientists and political leaders are letting it happen.  Some leaders are doing so deliberately, and the others--especially those who support efforts to address both parts of the climate crisis-- are making it easier for them.

This past weekend the New York Times published a long story called "Climate Change's Bottom Line."  It begins by quoting the chairman of a large midwestern food conglomerate:

"Mr. Page is not a typical environmental activist. He says he doesn’t know — or particularly care — whether human activity causes climate change. He doesn’t give much serious thought to apocalyptic predictions of unbearably hot summers and endless storms. But over the last nine months, he has lobbied members of Congress and urged farmers to take climate change seriously."

How is it possible for someone not to know or care what causes climate change, and yet urge others to "take climate change seriously"?

It is possible because of the murkiness and misdirection in the language that nearly everyone uses now to describe what we're up against.

Since it became clear that we are dealing with two parts to the climate crisis, two words to describe what we need to do to address each of them have become standard.  Efforts to cut greenhouse gas pollution by various means, including using alternate energy forms, in order to forestall worse consequences to the climate of the future--these go by the title of "mitigation."  Efforts to address flooding, sea level rise, drought and so on where these have become more likely because of "climate change," are called "adaptation."

There are several things very wrong about these words.  As language, they are fuzzy abstractions that are virtually interchangeable.  Maybe environmentalists, public works officials, some scientists etc. can tell them apart, and remember which applies to which set of problems, but for most other citizens, they are almost meaningless--hard to remember, and hard to tell apart.  That alone has political consequences.  At the very least, it doesn't exactly lend urgency to either set of tasks.

The words are weak and not even accurate.  Do we really want to "mitigate" future ruining of the climate and human civilization, species extinction and the creation of a immensely hotter planet?  Or do we want to do what we can to stop it?  Do we want to "adapt" to drought and floods or fix what we can in our social organization, our infrastructure, management, policy and planning?

But the most consequential feature of these words is that they have no relation to each other.  Yet the two parts of the climate crisis do.  And the future depends on keeping that in mind.

Of course there are words that make that relationship clear, and unbreakable.  They are simple words that everyone understands.  The words are "cause" and "effect."

Greenhouse gases are the cause of  climate change.  If they are allowed to continue their access to the atmosphere at current or greater rates, they will continue to cause greater and greater climate change.  Anything that reduces these gases, or that otherwise slows the progress of global heating, addresses the causes.

The effects of "climate change" are sea level rise, flooding, drought, and a host of further problems that can well include higher food prices and the spread of tropical diseases.

But the way we talk about climate does not make this cause and effect connection.  This failure to make that connection is even now aiding those who very much don't want the connection made.

For some corporate leaders (perhaps like this ag guy) and public officials (like those who emphasize "disaster preparedness" without mentioning climate), obscuring the cause and effect relationship is a political dodge, a way of getting support for efforts to deal with effects, even from those who don't accept the causes.

The vagueness of the preferred term "climate change" plays into this, since it can mean the climate change that's happening or is part of a discernible trend (though we don't know why), or it can mean the climate crisis in full.

There's a certain utility in this vagueness, as it doesn't overtly push denier buttons (or at least that's the hope.)  But in the long run it's dangerous.  Because sooner or later some smart Republican is going to say something like what the ag guy said: I don't know and don't care what causes it, what we need to do is deal with these  drought and flooding problems.

It would not surprise me to hear words like this coming from the ample mouth of Chris Christie.  As governor of New Jersey, he witnessed the devastation wrought by the storm called Sandy.  His state is in fact very actively working to deal with such effects.

Some polls are telling Republican presidential candidates that all-out denialism is a loser.  Christie or Jeb Bush could split the difference, talk about adapting to climate change and yet fail to support efforts to dramatically slash carbon and dramatically increase non-carbon spewing energy.  And all other efforts to address the cause.

They might even get away with it.  Why?  Because Democrats, environmentalists and advocates on this very issue won't talk about the relationship, the cause and effect relationship.  Which by now could be clear in the minds of most voters and even the media.

It's not that these advocates were unaware of this possibility of political opponents hijacking the issue in this way.  They've dealt with it in the past by conspicuously avoiding any talk about dealing with effects.  They wanted to emphasize dealing with the causes to such an extent that they talked way too optimistically about how soon dealing with causes would be successful.  Al Gore talked about "solving" the climate crisis.

Now most of them know that we can only solve problems resulting from global heating, and solve problems on how to reduce future global heating.  The climate crisis isn't going away.  For all of us now alive, even just born, the climate crisis is permanent.  And to some degree it will be for many future generations.  We don't really know how bad it might get, and how soon.  But we do know that if we keep injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at our ever-increasing rate, there is an ever-decreasing chance of human civilization surviving more or less intact.

It is still possible--and so easy--to start talking about this sensibly, to start making the connection in every policy statement on every level, by talking about the causes and the effects, thereby linking them together and making them inseparable in the public mind.