The future

Prompted largely by the arrival of my son in my life two years ago, I have been trying to understand as best I can how the rest of this century is likely to pan out. In other words, the world in which my son is going to live his life.

It seems to me that whatever happens, we are going to see very major changes. The big question is whether we are going to deal effectively with climate change. If we don't, we are headed for catastrophe. But even if we do, we are headed for very, very difficult times. The Leonard Cohen song with the same title as this post talks about how "things are going to slide in all directions ... the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overcome the order of the soul." I think he's right, and I think the "soul" in question is primarily at the collective level.

Recent work by Jim Hansen of NASA suggests that we must get the CO2 concentration in atmosphere back below 350 parts per million as soon as we possibly can. We are currently at about 386, rising at 2 ppm per year, and the longer we stay above 350, the more chance that trends like the melting of polar ice and the release of methane from bogs in Siberia will accelerate and turn into unstoppable positive feedbacks. I've heard the following metaphor for the way we're messing with the climate: we're driving a fast car in thick fog near the edge of the cliff; we don't know quite where the edge is, so we'd better stop before we drive over it. But if Hansen's right, that's inadequate. We're already so near the edge we can hear the cliff crumbling away beneath us, so that just stopping isn't enough: we need to reverse away from the edge as quickly as we possibly can, knowing all the while that at any moment, even after we've finally come to our senses and begun to act accordingly, the whole thing could give way and plunge us into the sea.

Meanwhile James Lovelock of Gaia hypothesis fame has been writing about his new model, which takes account of feedback between living organisms and non-life processes, in a way that mainstream models (on which the IPCC projections are based) do not. Lovelock's model predicts that at some point, if we keep raising CO2 levels or fail to reduce them, the climate will suddenly flip into a state 6 degrees centigrade warmer than the present. We can't at the moment tell when that will be or at what concentration, but the danger is ever-present. And if such a big rise happens, we're done for, certainly as a civilisation and perhaps even as a species -- mass extinctions will then certainly take place, and in any such event, it tends to be the large creatures at the top of the food chain that are most vulnerable.

I don't think any of this is unduly alarmist. Events especially in the polar regions since 2007 have been right at the upper end of previous predictions. Scientists from Britain's Meteorological Office presented a keynote talk this week at an international conference called "four degrees and beyond". It all suddenly looks much, much more serious and urgent than it did before (and it was pretty urgent even a while ago, in my opinion). So the UN Copenhagen conference in December is crucial. We simply must have a deal, to reduce emissions and get concentrations down, and fast. And we need to let our politicians know we absolutely require them to safeguard humanity's future.

If we do manage to do that (and I have to say I'm not optimistic), and if the climate responds favourably, then we are likely before too long to face another kind of challenge: that envisaged by the "peak oil" theorists like Kunstler and Greer. The oil "peak" will actually be of our own making -- we cannot use all the oil in the ground, even the easily-available stuff, without pumping far too much CO2 into the air. But when fossil fuel use starts to decline, for whatever reason, it's going to affect everything. We will have to decide collectively how to apportion energy sources between growing food, keeping warm (or cool), building/making stuff and travelling around. If we simply let the market decide there will be mass famine and chaos on a scale far beyond anything the world has ever seen. Unlike the climate switch which could happen suddenly (a decade or so) at any time, the kind of civilisational decline envisaged by the peak-oilers is likely to be gradual -- maybe a couple of centuries -- but enormous nevertheless. Modern technology will cease to be widespread. No mass travel, no mass media, no internet, no mass publishing, no reliable electricity or gas. It is likely to look much more like the middle ages or even the dark ages than the modern era.

It seems to me there are therefore three sorts of things worth putting one's energy into.

The first is to make as much noise as possible to persuade the powers that be to limit climate change as far as possible. This autumn is the key time for that, if it is not already too late.

The second is to plan for a future in which this effort is successful. What do we really think is worth preserving from our culture, and how are we going to do it? What skills should we be passing on to our children? What spiritual traditions, and how? Practically, how are we going to preserve what's best about the world's learning? Computer discs and CDs will be unreadable. Paper rots after a century or two. Can we distill what's really valuable to a level that people will be willing to copy by hand?

And the third (perhaps also needed for the second) is to plan for the climate-mitigation effort being unsuccessful. Then we face mass death and possibly extinction. What meaning does it then have that each of us is on this earth at such a time? Is it possible to speak of a purpose to life in such circumstances? Perhaps not, if you have a purely this-worldly perspective. But if you believe in some form of survival, the picture changes, or so it seems to me. In any event, "being with" our culture then shifts into a mode analogous to a vigil for the dying. Quite a challenge, to put it mildly, and one I am only starting to try to get my head around.