By John Pickard
Every activist in the labour movement should read Deep Adaption, an extremely pessimistic forecast of future social upheaval that will be brought on by climate change. Last summer, Jem Bendell, of Cumbria University, published the paper entitled Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. It has had more than a third of a million downloads and is available as a PDF here. It is undoubtedly a major motivational document for many of the activists of the Extinction Rebellion movement.
The point about the paper is that it is on the one hand extremely well sourced from current scientific papers, reports and articles – there are no fewer 97 citations at the end of the 36-page paper – but on the other hand it is extremely pessimistic, not to say gloomy, about the future of humanity. Bendell argues, correctly in our opinion, that climate change will not take place smoothly and gradually, year on year. Climate, like all other developmental processes in the natural world, proceeds in a non-linear fashion, that is to say, chaotically.
Periods of relatively small change are cut across by periods of sharp and dramatic changes with feed-back loops bringing on sudden lurches in development. It is a dynamic process, one that Marxists have always characterised as dialectical change.
The current relatively mild warming of the Earth’s atmosphere is capable of producing positive feed-back processes that could significantly reinforce the effects of warming, suddenly and catastrophically. Bendell’s paper has factored in these feed-back loops and the likely trajectory of climate change and extrapolated the results in terms of the losses in food production, sea-level rises and therefore in economic and social upheaval. The projected effects are nothing short of catastrophic: what Bendell calls “an inevitable near-term social collapse…with serious ramifications for the lives of readers”
What makes Bendell’s paper unique, is that while climate change is discussed in many scientific papers and reports, and of course in political articles, there is no discussion at all on the serious possibility (much less the probability) of social collapse arising from climate change. In a footnote, he adds, “A full text search of the journal database shows that the following terms have never been included in articles in this journal: environmental collapse, economic collapse, social collapse, societal collapse, environmental catastrophe, human extinction…” Bendell believes that his paper is one of the first in the sustainability management field, “to conclude that climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term and therefore to invite scholars to explore the implications.”
The implication, he argues, is for the readers of his paper to take time to step back and consider “what if” the analysis in the paper is true.
A ‘balanced’ discussion of climate change is meaningless
Bendell is critical of what appears to a fixation on putting a ‘balanced’ view of climate change, as if ‘positive’ (or ‘optimistic’) aspects on the issue have to be set against the ‘negative’ (or ‘pessimistic’) ones. It is one thing to highlight or to celebrate investment and progress towards carbon reduction, where it features in the media, but when these achievements are on an insignificant scale in relation to the real problem as it is now actually unfolding – as he argues it is – then ‘balance’ becomes meaningless. As he writes, ”Discussing progress in the health and safety policies of the White Star Line with the captain of the Titanic as it sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic would not be a sensible use of time.”
The science around global warming is accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists because the evidence is undisputable. The information on this is everywhere and is easy to access. Even the BBC has a very good feature, with interactive charts and maps, showing the increase in temperatures in recent times, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46384067
Bendall, nevertheless, repeats some of the information. Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001, and global temperatures have increased by 0.9°C since 1880. The most surprising warming, Bendell explains, is in the Arctic, “where the 2016 land surface temperature was 2.0°C above the 1981-2010 average, breaking the previous records of 2007, 2011, and 2015 by 0.8°C, representing a 3.5°C increase since the record began in 1900.” At one point in early 2018, he continues, “temperature recordings from the Arctic were 20oC above the average for that date”.
Positive feed-backs and the melting of the Arctic ice-sheet
Arctic ice normally acts as a reflective blanket, radiating the Sun’s heat that falls on that part of the Earth back into space. So the absence of the ice is an example of a positive feedback loop, reinforcing the warming effect. The arctic ice loss is massive, Bendell explains, equivalent by itself to “a quarter of the cumulative CO2 emissions of the last three decades.” The warming in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions is raising sea levels. According to Bendell, the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 280 gigatons of ice per year between 2002 and 2016.
Another positive feed-back process centres on the release of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is the gas we are all familiar with as ‘natural gas’, burned for domestic and industrial energy. Tonne for tonne, it is five times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, yet methane release into the atmosphere seems to get less publicity than carbon dioxide. Huge amounts of methane are produced by the billions of animals farmed for meat consumption. Unknown amounts of methane – but again, probably amounting to billions of tons – are leaked into the atmosphere in the extraction of the gas for energy use.
There are also natural reservoirs of the gas. Gigatons of methane trapped in the frozen tundra of Siberia and northern Canada and as much again is locked in the deep ocean: but all of this methane is in danger of being released into the atmosphere as a result of the warming of sub-Arctic soil and the world’s oceans. As Bendall points out, there is not as much of a consensus on the issue of methane as on human-produced carbon dioxide, but there is than a strong suspicion that it will become a major issue as another dangerous feed-back loop.
So how will the climatic effects pan out across human society? Already, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) “reports that weather abnormalities related to climate change are costing billions of dollars a year”, and such reports are “growing exponentially”. Insurers report in the language of dollars and cents – in this case billions of dollars – in relation to the cost of the Californian wild-fires of last year, for example. The reported climatic impacts today are all at the very worst end of the forecasts made in the early 1990s.
Global warming was never expected to manifest itself as a gradual and smooth increase in world temperatures, but in an increase in ‘anomalous’ weather events. What were considered to be ‘once in a century’ events will become ‘once in a decade’ events or even more frequent. Climate models suggest an increase in the number and strength of storms.
For ‘normal’ agriculture, it means a growing challenge in the production of the food necessary to feed the world’s population. What have been more or less established systems will be compromised leading to an inevitable decline in agricultural production. This will include the current mass production of grains in the northern hemisphere and rice production in the tropics. Forecasts – these are not guesses of Bendall’s but are cited scientific papers – include predicted declines in China in the yields of rice, wheat, and corn by 36%, 18%, and 45%, respectively, by the end of this century. Other cited forecasts are for declines in Indian wheat yields of anything up to 25% reduction by the 2080s.
“…starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war”
The dramatic collapses in food production will produce massive population shifts, completely dwarfing the movement of refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq in 2016. The World Bank reported in 2018 that preparations need to made for the internal displacement of over 100 million people due to the effects of climate change, in addition to millions of international refugees.
Yet even some of these forecasts are under-estimates, because, as Bendell explains, we are not even on the right path to limit the rising world average temperature to only 2 degrees, as the IPCC wanted. Even before the International Panel on Climate Change published this target, many scientists had already concluded that it was too late and that a 5oC rise was inevitable.
Bendell accepts that “We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change will be or where will be most affected, especially as economic and social systems will respond in complex ways…” But on the other hand, the broad scenario he outlines is as plausible as it is an extremely pessimistic one.
“We might pray for time”, he adds, “But the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war…But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.”
Bendell doesn’t offer any solutions, although he suggests that technological and political measures might ameliorate the coming collapse. His paper is a well-researched and comprehensive review of our current knowledge of the effects of climate change, but the conclusions are almost unbelievably sombre. It may well be that Bendell’s conclusions in deep-adaption are overly pessimistic – although Bendell would argue not. But certainly socialists should read his paper and take its warnings seriously and soberly.
April 22, 2019
