Stop it with all the climate doomism in the news, it's worse than denial

If it's all hopeless, why bother doing anything? As Peggy Lee suggested, lets just keep dancing, let's break out the booze and have a ball.

The Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington recently wrote a long piece about how over half the scientists working on the IPCC reports think the temperature rise will exceed 3°C.

From experts in the atmosphere and oceans, energy and agriculture, economics and politics, the mood of almost all those the Guardian heard from was grim. And the future many painted was harrowing: famines, mass migration, conflict. “I find it infuriating, distressing, overwhelming,” said one expert, who chose not to be named. “I’m relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds,” said another.

I found all the “oh my god, we’re all gonna die” doomism in the Guardian to be deeply troubling, but I have written two books making the case that we can all do something in our lives and with our votes to fix this. The problem with doomism is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; why bother? Just cue up Miss Peggy Lee and sing:

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friend
Then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

The Peggy Lee strategy is what the fossil fuel industry wants us to do: get drunk and leave them alone. Perhaps that’s why Ontario Premier Doug Ford makes alcohol easy and roads fast. If it’s hopeless, why bother doing anything other than pumping more oil, getting a pickup truck and having a good time?

I have a section of my new book, The Story of Upfront Carbon (available now!), where I discuss this. Here’s an excerpt:

About a decade ago, climate journalist Dana Nuccitelli described the five stages of climate denial as the IPCC released its fifth round of reports. They were:

Stage 1: Deny the problem exists. We are well past that now, although a few flat-out deniers still exist in comments sections of newspapers.

Stage 2: Deny humans are the cause. There are still a few of these about, still blaming sunspots and claiming that the earth goes through natural cycles.

Stage 3: Deny it’s a problem. More CO₂ means more plants! More warming means more Canada!

Stage 4: Deny we can solve it. It’s too expensive; it will hurt the poor; it will trash the economy. This is the popular one right now with Lomberg and Shellenberger.

Stage 5: It’s too late. When Nuccitelli wrote these, he noted that “few climate contrarians had reached this level.” Today, the world is full of what author and climate scientist Michael Mann called “doomists.”

Exaggeration of the climate threat by purveyors of doom—we’ll call them “doomists”—is unhelpful at best. Indeed, doomism today arguably poses a greater threat to climate action than outright denial. For if catastrophic warming of the planet were truly inevitable and there were no agency on our part in averting it, why should we do anything? Doomism potentially leads us down the same path of inaction as outright denial of the threat. Exaggerated claims and hyperbole, moreover, play into efforts by deniers and delayers to discredit the science, posing further obstacles to action.

Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data recently raised the same point, suggesting that doomers were worse than deniers.

Climate deniers want us to choose to do nothing; that it’s not a problem and doesn’t require any action. Climate doomers tell us that we don’t even have a choice to do something; we’re already screwed and it’s too late to act. Follow either and we end up in the same place of inaction. That’s a place that we can’t afford to be.

Author Jonathan Franzen is a key “doomer,” as I prefer to call them, telling Australian radio that “We literally are living in end times for civilization as we know it. . . . We are long past the point of averting climate catastrophe.” Brynn O’Brien, executive director of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, responded and is quoted in the New Statesman:

The only people who fall for it are rich white people who think they will be spared until everyone and everything else is gone. His position is unscientific, morally careless (at best) and politically blinkered. Things are very bad and will get much worse. But scientifically and politically there are still so many choices we can and must make to avoid all-out catastrophe, to avoid “end times.”

The doomers were out in force when the annual Emissions Gap 2022 report from the United Nations Environment Programme was released just before COP27. Everyone piled on one sentence: “As climate impacts intensify, the Emissions Gap Report 2022 finds that the world is still falling short of the Paris climate goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place.” They all then proceeded to totally ignore the two sentences which directly followed:

“Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid an accelerating climate disaster. The report looks at how to deliver this transformation through action in the electricity supply, industry, transport and buildings sectors, and the food and financial systems."

The report then laid out what UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen called a “root and branch transformation” of our economies and societies, with many of the same “demand-side mitigations” called for in the IPCC report. The emissions gap between where we are and where we have to go can be closed with reductions in demand, living in smaller spaces, switching to lower-emitting modes of transport such as bikes and public transit, eating less meat, and building better buildings. These are again all about sufficiency.

In his book I Want a Better Catastrophe, Andrew Boyd tries to put the best spin on being a doomer, suggesting that people and organizations may be putting their best spin on bad news. Inger Andersen calls for a “root and branch transformation,” when she knows it is not happening. Is she just telling people the most hopeful version of the truth, as Boyd suggests? Boyd describes the process:

Try to be as positive and pragmatic as you can be. Tell the best possible version of events. Focus on the promise and potential of the moment. And fight like hell and hope for the best.

This is the position I have taken: that we know what to do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have much of a book here. It’s hard sometimes when we see so little progress. As I write this, I am trapped inside a cabin in the woods because the air outside is toxic, full of smoke from forest fires in Quebec. But I am still positive and pragmatic. I am not alone; Even Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, perhaps one of the direst climate experts, said in a recent interview:

“We are going to fail. We are going to go to 3 or 4 degrees Centigrade of warming and we will have to live through or die from all of the repercussions that that will have. That is a terrible prospect and one that I think we have to try everything to avoid. But the message of hope, if there’s any thread of hope in this, is that it is a choice to fail . . . we can choose a different way out of this. Now whether we can still hold to 1.5, it looks incredibly unlikely to me. But incredibly unlikely doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It is only impossible if we don’t try.”

Even the Guardian editorial page seems to think that Carrington’s article was too much, too doomist, and appears to have buried it on the climate page. They believe, as I do, that individual actions matter and can lead to bigger things. I will give them the last word:

Individual actions can seem futile, given the magnitude of the task. But they can also build collective awareness, a sense that change is possible and momentum for wider systemic progress. Just as climate tipping points exist, so do social tipping points. It is imperative to hit the latter as fast as we possibly can.

UPDATE: After I wrote this, Dr. Genevieve Guenther posted her take on the Guardian article and doomism in general.

“Finally, the third kind of doomer is the kind that I think many scientists in the Guardian article revealed themselves to be: the doomer who looks around and feels alone in their knowledge — sees the world blithely enacting business as usual, despite what they know — and miserably starts to give up hope, even though they know, at least in theory, that the world has the technological and political capacities to resolve the climate crisis. 
 
I suspect that everyone reading this newsletter has been this kind of doomer at one very low point or another. I know I have.”

Read it all here