Paradoxes of climate change

Humans have the unique ability, as also the desire, to generate surplus. Human existence is not just marked by a strict biogenetic programme, but in fact allows for a diversity of actions, an ability not found among other animals. This ability forms the basis for both human progress and regression. Not understanding that paradox and presenting tech progress as an elixir have now brought us to the brink of disaster.

As floods devastate large swathes of land in Pakistan, as Europe and parts of North America face record high temperatures, as Turkey, Greece, America’s west coast and Australia grapple with forest fires that studies have linked to climate change, global warming has become “the only truly global externality.”

Precisely for that reason the challenge is also truly daunting. It would appear that a problem of global scale should be able to garner global expertise and resolve. In reality, that is not the case. If anything, we are struggling to cope with it because of the global scale of the problem and because of myriad conflicting political and corporate interests.

This is not to say that the reality of global warming and the consequent climate change is being ignored. On the contrary the world has come a long way since the 1970s when the challenge of global warming first began to appear on the radar of experts.

Today, the states of the world, the United Nations and a plethora of expert bodies are seized of the issue. Fires, droughts, unprecedented heat waves, rains and floods have also made individuals and societies more aware of non-linear causal effects of certain activities.

Let me explain: if an industry is pouring effluents into a stream which is impacting the health of communities close to the industry and living astride the stream, it is easy to figure out the linear causality. Previous decades have seen many law suits against polluting industries. But no one really understood the causality between polluting activities in one part of the globe and their impact on certain other parts. That has changed.

It is now understood that emission of greenhouse gases in the northern hemisphere can have a bearing elsewhere. As an example, we can see the debate on how states like Pakistan, which is responsible for less than 0.5pc of global emissions, have become climate-vulnerable and are wracked by weather extremes.

Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says Pakistan has contributed less than 0.5 percent of heat-trapping emissions pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution while the US is responsible for 25 percent.

According to an 18 January 2022 report in Inside Climate News, the US military has been emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than entire countries like Denmark and Portugal since 2001. At the same time, the ICN report says “no one knows exactly how much, because the Pentagon’s reporting is spotty.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gets input from top-shelf experts from across the world. The IPCC “was created to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options”. It has since put out a number of reports, which “include assessment reports, special reports and methodology reports.”

Thus, the science of what’s happening, why and where it is leading us, is clear. The politics, however, is terribly complicated and messy.

So, what can be done?

An 18 February 2021 op-ed, The decarbonisation paradox, which appeared in Project Syndicate says, “Discussions about climate change contain two apparently contradictory messages. One is that it is almost impossible to decarbonise fully and fast enough to limit global warming this century to well below two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. The other message is that, given what is at stake, such rapid decarbonisation is inevitable.”

As writers Kemal Dervish and Sebastian Strauss stress, “Paradoxically, both statements may be true.” That’s because while “Achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050 is technically and economically feasible with existing and emerging technologies,” doing so will require “drastic shifts in behaviour and massive policy interventions, including a degree of international cooperation that will be very difficult to attain.”

This is the crux. The problem is so complicated and riven with so many paradoxes — technical and political — that humanity faces the danger of losing this race against time: i.e., it is impossible to decarbonise fully and fast enough and yet that is the only way to arrest the damage at the present level. And enough damage has already been done.

In a brilliant report for Brookings Institution, published September 23, 2019, The challenging politics of climate change, Elaine Kamarck begins by quoting Colin Jost from a Saturday Night Live skit. “We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to pay this dude back.’ But if you owe your bookie $1 million dollars, you’re like, ‘I guess I’m just going to die’.”

Kamarck identifies four factors that make it so difficult to get the world moving towards global consensus and action to arrest and mitigate the effects of global warming: complexity; jurisdiction and accountability; collective action and trust; and imagination.

Complexity is about non-linearity. As I noted above, it’s not just about an upstream polluter dumping its waste in a river or stream. The effects of that can be seen and understood. But how do you make people “see the connections between coal plants in one part of the world and hurricanes in another”?

Closely related to complexity is the problem of jurisdiction and accountability. Like cyber-attacks, the effects of global warming do not respect boundaries. Modern governments, as Kamarck notes, have relied upon the concept of jurisdiction – “territory within which a court or government agency may properly exercise its power.” Geography and governmental writ on its territories are “implicit in the concept of jurisdiction.” How does one establish jurisdiction when, for instance, US and Chinese polluting activities are impacting states far and away?

In other words, if we can’t establish jurisdiction, how can we “establish rules, laws, and accountability for adherence to the law–the three bedrock principles of modern democratic governance.” Even when we can attribute polluting activities to certain states, “attribution without enforcement mechanisms is only half the battle–if that. Nationally and internationally there is no legal architecture that allows us to reward and/or punish those who decrease or increase their greenhouse gas emissions.”

Then we have the problem of collective action and trust in government. Collective action problem or social dilemma is defined as “a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action.”

It becomes even more problematic when there’s a paradox built into it. For instance, in hot summer temperatures, people use air-conditioning. But as studies have shown, “air-conditioning is making cities hotter, not colder”. A report in Fast Company, a US business magazine, says “At night, waste heat generated by a city’s worth of air conditioners can raise the outside temperature by 1 degree Celsius.” So, the ACs raise the temperatures and because the temperature rises, we need more air-conditioning. That’s the paradox.

The collective action problem is that if X decides not to switch on her air-conditioning, how can she be sure that others are doing the same? And if others aren’t, why should she suffer the heat. So, the problem goes on. And if the government were to step in to regulate, we face the trust problem and with it the enforcement issues.

Imagination is the fourth aspect of what Kamarck calls the “final piece to the puzzle of why the political salience of climate change seems so out of step with the physical proof and urgency of the issue.” Where’s the story of where we are headed? In this she quotes Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh as saying that “climate change is even more absent in the world of fiction than it is in nonfiction.”

There’s a real problem here and even when we know and understand the science, we are hampered by many factors in addressing the creeping disaster. Is this the final century, as Prof Ilhan Niaz argues in his upcoming book, Downfall: Lessons for Our Final Century?It could well be, unless we overcome what Niaz calls the “Pangloss Effect”.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies