Global
heatwave is symptom of early stage cycle of civilisational collapse
Welcome
to a 1C planet: the precursor of an 8C catastrophe in 82 years if we
keep burning up fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow
Nafeez
Ahmed
1
August, 2018
The extreme weather events of the summer of 2018 are not just symptoms of climate breakdown. They are early stage warnings of a protracted process of civilisational collapse as industrial societies face some of the opening symptoms of having already breached the limits of a safe climate. These events are a taste of things to come on a business-as-usual trajectory. They elicit a sense of how industrial civilisational systems are vulnerable to collapse due to escalating climate impacts. And they highlight the urgent necessity of communities everywhere undertaking steps to achieve a systemic civilisational transition toward post-capitalist systems which can survive and prosper after fossil fuels.
Climate ‘doom’ is already here
Droughts
threatening food supplies, floods in Japan, extreme rainfall in the
eastern US, wildfires in California, Sweden and Greece.
In
the UK, holiday-makers trying to cross the Channel tunnel to France
faced massive queues when air conditioning facilities on trains
failed due to the heatwave. Thousands of people were stranded for
five hours in the 30C heat without water.
In
southern Laos, heavy rains led to a dam collapse, rendering thousands
of people homeless and flooding several villages.
Most of
the traditional media did not report these incidents as symptoms of
an evolving climate crisis.
None
at all acknowledged
that these extreme weather events might be related to the fact that
since 2015, we have essentially inhabited a planet that is already
around 1C warmer than
the pre-industrial average: and that therefore, we are already, based
on the best available science, inhabiting a dangerous climate.
Figure 1: 2015 is likely to set a new record for being the warmest year in more than 11,000 years. Black lines indicate…climateanalytics.org
The
breaching of the 1C tipping point — which former NASA climate
science chief James Hansen pinpointed as the upper limit to retain a
safe climate — was followed this March by atmospheric carbon
concentrations reaching, for the first time since records began, 400
ppm (parts per million).
Once
again, the safe upper limit highlighted by Hansen and
colleagues — 350 ppm — has already been breached.
Yet
these critical climate milestones have been breached consecutively
with barely a murmur from either the traditional and alternative
media.
The
recent spate of catastrophic events are not mere anomalies. They are
the latest signifiers of a climate system that is increasingly out of
balance — a system that was already fatally struck off balance
through industrial overexploitation of natural resources centuries
ago.
What would you say if I told you that the climate crisis already happened? That real-world ecosystem collapse takes…extranewsfeed.com
Our sense-making apparatus is broken
But
for the most part, the sense-making apparatus by which we understand
what is happening in the world — the Global Media-Industrial
Complex (a network of media communications portals comprised of both
traditional corporate and alternative outlets) — has failed to
convey these stark realities to the vast majority of the human
population.
We
are largely unaware that 19th and early 20th century climate change
induced by industrial fossil fuel burning has already had
devastating impacts on the regional climate of Sub-Saharan Africa;
just as it now continues to have escalating devastating impacts on
weather systems all over the world.
The
reality which we are not being told is this: these are the grave
consequences of inhabiting a planet where global average temperatures
are roughly 1C higher than the pre-industrial norm.
Sadly,
instead of confronting this fundamentally existential threat to the
human species — one which in its fatal potential implications
point to the bankruptcy of the prevailing paradigms of social,
political and economic organisation (along with the ideology and
value-systems associated with them) — the preoccupation of the
Global Media-Industrial Complex is at worst to focus human mind and
behaviour on consumerist trivialities.
At
best, its focus is to pull us into useless, polarising left-right
dichotomies and forms of impotent outrage that tend to distract us
from taking transformative systemic action, internally (within and
through our own selves, behaviours psychologies, beliefs, values,
consciousness and spirit) and externally (in our relationships as
well as our structural-institutional and socio-cultural contexts).
Collapse happens when the system is overwhelmed
These
are the ingredients for the beginning of civilisational collapse
processes. In each of these cases, we see how extreme weather events
induced by climate change creates unanticipated conditions for which
international, national and local institutions are woefully
unprepared.
In
order to respond, massive new expenditures are involved, including
emergency mobilisations as well as new spending to try to build more
robust adaptations that might be better prepared ‘next time’.
But
the reality is that we are already failing to avert an ongoing
trajectory of global temperatures rising to not merely a dangerous 2C
(imagine a doubling intensity of the sorts of events we’ve seen
this summer happening year on year); but, potentially, as high as 8C
(the catastrophic impacts of which would render much of the planet
uninhabitable).
We need a people’s movement to mobilise for ecological regeneration and systemic transformationmedium.com
In
these contexts, we can begin to see how a protracted collapse process
might unfold. Such a collapse process does not in itself guarantee
the ‘end of the world’, or even simply the disappearance of
civilisation.
What
it does imply is that specific political, economic, social, military
and other institutional systems are likely to become increasingly
overwhelmed due to rising costs of responding to unpredictable and
unanticipated climate wild cards.
It
should be noted that as those costs are rising, we are simultaneously
facing diminishing economic returns from our constant
overexploitation of planetary resources, in terms of fossil fuels and
other natural resourcs.
In
other words, in coming decades, business-as-usual implies a future of
tepid if not declining economic growth, amidst escalating costs of
fossil fuel consumption, compounded by exponentially accelerating
costs of intensifying climate impacts as they begin to erode and then
pummel and then destroy the habitable infrastructure of industrial
civilisation as we know it.
Collapse
does not arrive in this scenario as a singular point of terminal
completion. Rather, collapse occurs as a a series of discrete but
consecutive and interconnected amplifying feedback processes by which
these dynamics interact and worsen one another.
Earth
System Disruption (ESD) — the biophysical processes of climate,
energy and ecological breakdown — increasingly lead to Human
System Destabilisation (HSD). HSD in turn inhibits our capacity to
meaningfully respond and adapt to the conditions of ESD. ESD,
meanwhile, simply worsens. This, eventually, leads to further HSD.
The cycle continues as a self-reinforcing amplifying feedback loop,
and each time round the cycle comprises a process of collapse.
This
model, which I developed in my Springer Energy Briefs study Failing
States, Collapse Systems,
demonstrates that the type of collapse we are likely to see occurring
in coming years is a protracted, cyclical process that worsens with
each round. It is not a final process, and it is not set-in-stone. At
each point, the possibility of intervening at critical points to
mitigate, ameliorate, adapt, or subvert still exists. But it gets
harder and harder to do so effectively the deeper into the collapse
cycle we go
Insanity
One
primary sympton of the collapse process is that as it deepens, the
capacity of the prevailing civilisational configuration to understand
what is happening becomes increasingly diminished.
Far
from waking up and taking action, we see that the human species is
becoming increasingly mired in obsessing over geopolitical and
economic competition, self-defeating acts of ‘self’-preservation
(where the ‘self’ is completely misidentified), and focused
entirely on projecting problems onto the ‘Other’.
A
key signifier of how insidious this is, is in yourself. Look to see
how your critical preoccupations are not with yourself or those with
which you identify; but that and those whom you oppose and consider
to be ‘wrong.’
At
core, the critical precondition for effective action at this point is
for each of us to radically subvert and challenge these processes
through a combination of internal introspection and outward action.
In
ourselves, the task ahead is for each of us to become the seeds of
that new, potential civilisational form — ‘another world’
which is waiting to be birthed not through some far-flung
‘revolution’ in the future, but here and now through the
transformations we undertake in ourselves and in our contexts.
We
first wake up. We wake up to the reality of what is happening in the
world. We then wake up to our own complicity in that reality and
truly face up to the intricate acts of self-deception we routinely
undertake to conceal ourselves from this complicity. We then look to
mobilise ourselves anew to undo these threads of complicity where
feasible, and to create new patterns of work and play that connect us
back with the Earth and the Cosmos. And we work to connect our own
re-patterning with the re-patterning work of others, with a view to
plant the seed-networks of the next system — a system which is
not so much ‘next’, but here and now, emergent in the fresh
choices we make everyday.
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