Editor’s note: “75 of the world’s largest 114 fossil fuel companies have now made net zero by 2050 commitments, yet not a single fossil fuel company has committed to phasing out oil and gas production by 2050 nor have any committed to ending exploration for new oil and gas fields or halting the extraction of existing reserves.”
“Real Zero, not greenwashed ‘net zero,’ is essential. As the Corporate Accountability report concludes, it’s time to reject the big polluters’ agenda and implement programs that rapidly phase out fossil fuels and truly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.”
We “obsess” over getting to “Net Zero” yearly CO2 increases in the atmosphere. The Moderates in Climate Science THEORIZE that when this happens, the GMST will IMMEDIATELY stop going up and will level off.
DOES IT LOOK LIKE “NET ZERO” is going to happen?
If your child is born this year, they are likely going to live through +1.5°C of warming by the time they are 25. A fact that is likely going to cause a 40% to 50% drop in the global food supply and a reduction of 2.5 billion — 4 billion in the global population by 2050, at a minimum.
The overshoot myth of bargaining: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
Record breaking fossil fuel production, all time high greenhouse gas emissions and extreme temperatures. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pan of water, we refuse to respond to the climate and ecological crisis with any sense of urgency. Under such circumstances, claims from some that global warming can still be limited to no more than 1.5°C take on a surreal quality.
For example, at the start of 2023’s international climate negotiations in Dubai, conference president, Sultan Al Jaber, boldly stated that 1.5°C was his goal and that his presidency would be guided by a “deep sense of urgency” to limit global temperatures to 1.5°C. He made such lofty promises while planning a massive increase in oil and gas production as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
We should not be surprised to see such behaviour from the head of a fossil fuel company. But Al Jaber is not an outlier. Scratch at the surface of almost any net zero pledge or policy that claims to be aligned with the 1.5°C goal of the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and you will reveal the same sort of reasoning: we can avoid dangerous climate change without actually doing what this demands – which is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry, transport, energy (70% of total) and food systems (30% of total), while ramping up energy efficiency.
This is also not surprising given that net zero and even the Paris agreement have been built around the perceived need to keep burning fossil fuels, at least in the short term. Not do so would threaten economic growth, given that fossil fuels still supply over 80% of total global energy. The trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets at risk with rapid decarbonisation have also served as powerful brakes on climate action.
Overshoot
The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.
To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on.
Our co-editors commission long-form journalism, working with academics from many different backgrounds who are engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
A key element of overshoot is carbon dioxide removal. This is essentially a time machine – we are told we can turn back the clock of decades of delay by sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. We don’t need rapid decarbonisation now, because in the future we will be able to take back those carbon emissions. If or when that doesn’t work, we are led to believe that even more outlandish geoengineering approaches such as spraying sulphurous compounds into the high atmosphere in an attempt to block out sunlight – which amounts to planetary refrigeration – will save us.
The 2015 Paris agreement was an astonishing accomplishment. The establishment of 1.5°C as being the internationally agreed ceiling for warming was a success for those people and nations most exposed to climate change hazards. We know that every fraction of a degree matters. But at the time, believing warming could really be limited to well below 2°C required a leap of faith when it came to nations and companies putting their shoulder to the wheel of decarbonisation. What has happened instead is that the net zero approach of Paris is becoming detached from reality as it is increasingly relying on science fiction levels of speculative technology.
There is arguably an even bigger problem with the Paris agreement. By framing climate change in terms of temperature, it focuses on the symptoms, not the cause. 1.5°C or any amount of warming is the result of humans changing the energy balance of the climate by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This traps more heat. Changes in the global average temperature is the established way of measuring this increase in heat, but no one experiences this average.
Climate change is dangerous because of weather that affects particular places at particular times. Simply put, this extra heat is making weather more unstable. Unfortunately, having temperature targets makes solar geoengineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures. But it does this by not reducing, but increasing our interference in the climate system. Trying to block out the sun in response to increasing carbon emissions is like turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.
In 2021 we argued that net zero was a dangerous trap. Three years on and we can see the jaws of this trap beginning to close, with climate policy being increasingly framed in terms of overshoot. The resulting impacts on food and water security, poverty, human health, the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems will produce intolerable suffering.
The situation demands honesty, and a change of course. If this does not materialise then things are likely to deteriorate, potentially rapidly and in ways that may be impossible to control.
Au revoir Paris
The time has come to accept that climate policy has failed, and that the 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead. We let it die by pretending that we could both continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid dangerous climate change at the same time. Rather than demand the immediate phase out of fossil fuels, the Paris agreement proposed 22nd-century temperature targets which could be met by balancing the sources and sinks of carbon. Within that ambiguity net zero flourished. And yet apart from the COVID economic shock in 2020, emissions have increased every year since 2015, reaching an all time high in 2023.
Despite there being abundant evidence that climate action makes good economic sense (the cost of inaction vastly exceeds the cost of action), no country strengthened their pledges at the last three COPs (the annual UN international meetings) even though it was clear that the world was on course to sail past 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. The Paris agreement should be producing a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but current policies mean that they are on track to be higher than they are today.
Editor’s note: DGR knows that “renewable” technologies are not sustainable and that the only transition will be to a future that does not include civilization.
We do not deny that significant progress has been made with renewable technologies. Rates of deployment of wind and solar have increased each year for the past 22 years and carbon emissions are going down in some of the richest nations, including the UK and the US. But this is not happening fast enough. A central element of the Paris agreement is that richer nations need to lead decarbonisation efforts to give lower income nations more time to transition away from fossil fuels. Despite some claims to the contrary, the global energy transition is not in full swing. In fact, it hasn’t actually begun because the transition demands a reduction in fossil fuel use. Instead it continues to increase year-on-year.
And so policymakers are turning to overshoot in an attempt to claim that they have a plan to avoid dangerous climate change. A central plank of this approach is that the climate system in the future will continue to function as it does today. This is a reckless assumption.
2023’s warning signs
At the start of 2023, Berkeley Earth, NASA, the UK Met Office, and Carbon Briefpredicted that 2023 would be slightly warmer than the previous year but unlikely to set any records. Twelve months later and all four organisations concluded that 2023 was by some distance the warmest year ever recorded. In fact, between February 2023 and February 2024 the global average temperature warming exceeded the Paris target of 1.5°C.
Currently we cannot fully explain why global temperatures have been so high for the past 18 months. Changes in dust, soot and other aerosols are important, and there are natural processes such as El Niño that will be having an effect.
But it appears that there is still something missing in our current understanding of how the climate is responding to human impacts. This includes changes in the Earth’s vital natural carbon cycle.
Around half of all the carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere over the whole of human history has gone into “carbon sinks” on land and the oceans. We get this carbon removal “for free”, and without it, warming would be much higher. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in the oceans (making them more acidic which threatens marine ecosystems). At the same time, increasing carbon dioxide promotes the growth of plants and trees which locks up carbon in their leaves, roots, trunks.
All climate policies and scenarios assume that these natural carbon sinks will continue to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. There is evidence that land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, removed significantly less carbon in 2023. If natural sinks begin to fail – something they may well do in a warmer world – then the task of lowering global temperatures becomes even harder. The only credible way of limiting warming to any amount, is to stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in the first place.
Science fiction solutions
It’s clear that the commitments countries have made to date as part of the Paris agreement will not keep humanity safe while carbon emissions and temperatures continue to break records. Indeed, proposing to spend trillions of dollars over this century to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, or the myriad other ways to hack the climate is an acknowledgement that the world’s largest polluters are not going to curb the burning of fossil fuels.
Over the following years we are going to see climate impacts increase. Lethal heatwaves are going to become more common. Storms and floods are going to become increasingly destructive. More people are going to be displaced from their homes. National and regional harvests will fail. Vast sums of money will need to be spent on efforts to adapt to climate change, and perhaps even more compensating those who are most affected. We are expected to believe that while all this and more unfolds, new technologies that will directly modify the Earth’s atmosphere and energy balance will be successfully deployed.
What’s more, some of these technologies may need to operate for three hundred years in order for the consequences of overshoot to be avoided. Rather than quickly slow down carbon polluting activities and increasing the chances that the Earth system will recover, we are instead going all in on net zero and overshoot in an increasingly desperate hope that untested science fiction solutions will save us from climate breakdown.
We can see the cliff edge rapidly approaching. Rather than slam on the brakes, some people are instead pushing their foot down harder on the accelerator. Their justification for this insanity is that we need to go faster in order to be able to make the jump and land safely on the other side.
We believe that many who advocate for carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering do so in good faith. But they include proposals to refreeze the Arctic by pumping up sea water onto ice sheets to form new layers of ice and snow. These are interesting ideas to research, but there is very little evidence this will have any effect on the Arctic let alone global climate. These are the sorts of knots that people tie themselves up in when they acknowledge the failure of climate policy, but refuse to challenge the fundamental forces behind such failure. They are unwittingly slowing down the only effective action of rapidly phasing out fossil fuels.
That’s because proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the air or geoengineer the climate promise a recovery from overshoot, a recovery that will be delivered by innovation, driven by growth. That this growth is powered by the same fossil fuels that are causing the problem in the first place doesn’t feature in their analysis.
The bottom line here is that the climate system is utterly indifferent to our pledges and promises. It doesn’t care about economic growth. And if we carry on burning fossil fuels then it will not stop changing until the energy balance is restored. By which time millions of people could be dead, with many more facing intolerable suffering.
Major climate tipping points
Even if we assume that carbon removal and even geoengineering technologies can be deployed in time, there is a very large problem with the plan to overshoot 1.5°C and then lower temperatures later: tipping points.
The science of tipping points is rapidly advancing. Late last year one of us (James Dyke) along with over 200 academics from around the world was involved in the production of the Global Tipping Points Report. This was a review of the latest science about where tipping points in the climate system may be, as well as exploring how social systems can undertake rapid change (in the direction that we want) thereby producing positive tipping points. Within the report’s 350 pages is abundant evidence that the overshoot approach is an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with the future of humanity. Some tipping points have the potential to cause global havoc.
The melt of permafrost could release billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and supercharge human-caused climate change. Fortunately, this seems unlikely under the current warming. Unfortunately, the chance that ocean currents in the North Atlantic could collapse may be much higher than previously thought. If that were to materialise, weather systems across the world, but in particular in Europe and North America, would be thrown into chaos. Beyond 1.5°C, warm water coral reefs are heading towards annihilation. The latest science concludes that by 2°C global reefs would be reduced by 99%. The devastating bleaching event unfolding across the Great Barrier Reef follows multiple mass mortality events. To say we are witnessing one of the world’s greatest biological wonders die is insufficient. We are knowingly killing it.
We may have even already passed some major climate tipping points. The Earth has two great ice sheets, Antarctica, and Greenland. Both are disappearing as a consequence of climate change. Between 2016 and 2020, the Greenland ice sheet lost on average 372 billion tons of ice a year. The current best assessment of when a tipping point could be reached for the Greenland ice sheet is around 1.5°C.
This does not mean that the Greenland ice sheet will suddenly collapse if warming exceeds that level. There is so much ice (some 2,800 trillion tons) that it would take centuries for all of it to melt over which time sea levels would rise seven metres. If global temperatures could be brought back down after a tipping point, then maybe the ice sheet could be stabilised. We just cannot say with any certainty that such a recovery would be possible. While we struggle with the science, 30 million tons of ice is melting across Greenland every hour on average.
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are being affected by global warming. Pexels from Pixabay, CC BY
The take home message from research on these and other tipping points is that further warming accelerates us towards catastrophe. Important science, but is anyone listening?
It’s five minutes to midnight…again
We know we must urgently act on climate change because we are repeatedly told that time is running out. In 2015, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the UN special adviser and director of The Earth Institute, declared:
The time has finally arrived – we’ve been talking about these six months for many years but we’re now here. This is certainly our generation’s best chance to get on track.
In 2019 (then) Prince Charles gave a speech in which he said: “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.”
“We have six months to save the planet,” exhorted International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol – one year later in 2020. In April 2024, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said the next two years are “essential in saving our planet”.
Either the climate crisis has a very fortunate feature that allows the countdown to catastrophe to be continually reset, or we are deluding ourselves with endless declarations that time has not quite run out. If you can repeatedly hit snooze on your alarm clock and roll over back to sleep, then your alarm clock is not working.
Or there is another possibility. Stressing that we have very little time to act is intended to focus attention on climate negotiations. It’s part of a wider attempt to not just wake people up to the impending crisis, but generate effective action. This is sometimes used to explain how the 1.5°C threshold of warming came to be agreed. Rather than a specific target, it should be understood as a stretch goal. We may very well fail, but in reaching for it we move much faster than we would have done with a higher target, such as 2°C. For example, consider this statement made in 2018:
Stretching the goal to 1.5 degrees celsius isn’t simply about speeding up. Rather, something else must happen and society needs to find another lever to pull on a global scale.
What could this lever be? New thinking about economics that goes beyond GDP? Serious consideration of how rich industrialised nations could financially and materially help poorer nations to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure? Participatory democracy approaches that could help birth the radical new politics needed for the restructuring of our fossil fuel powered societies? None of these.
The lever in question is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) because the above quote comes from an article written by Shell in 2018. In this advertorial Shell argues that we will need fossil fuels for many decades to come. CCS allows the promise that we can continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid carbon dioxide pollution by trapping the gas before it leaves the chimney. Back in 2018, Shell was promoting its carbon removal and offsets heavy Sky Scenario, an approach described as “a dangerous fantasy” by leading climate change academics as it assumed massive carbon emissions could be offset by tree planting.
Shell is far from alone in waving carbon capture magic wands. Exxon is making great claims for CCS as a way to produce net zero hydrogen from fossil gas – claims that have been subject to pointed criticism from academics with recent reporting exposing industry wide greenwashing around CCS.
But the rot goes much deeper. All climate policy scenarios that propose to limit warming to near 1.5°C rely on the largely unproven technologies of CCS and BECCS. BECCS sounds like a good idea in theory. Rather than burn coal in a power station, burn biomass such as wood chips. This would initially be a carbon neutral way of generating electricity if you grew as many trees as you cut down and burnt. If you then add scrubbers to the power station chimneys to capture the carbon dioxide, and then bury that carbon deep underground, then you would be able to generate power at the same time as reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, there is now clear evidence that in practice, large-scale BECCS would have very adverse effects on biodiversity, and food and water security given the large amounts of land that would be given over to fast growing monoculture tree plantations. The burning of biomass may even be increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Drax, the UK’s largest biomass power station now produces four times as much carbon dioxide as the UK’s largest coal-fired power station.
Five minutes to midnight messages may be motivated to try to galvanise action, to stress the urgency of the situation and that we still (just) have time. But time for what? Climate policy only ever offers gradual change, certainly nothing that would threaten economic growth, or the redistribution of wealth and resources.
Despite the mounting evidence that globalised, industrialised capitalism is propelling humanity towards disaster, five minutes to midnight does not allow time and space to seriously consider alternatives. Instead, the solutions on offer are techno fixes that prop up the status quo and insists that fossil fuel companies such as Shell must be part of the solution.
That is not to say there are no good faith arguments for 1.5°C. But being well motivated does not alter reality. And the reality is that warming will soon pass 1.5°C, and that the Paris agreement has failed. In the light of that, repeatedly asking people to not give up hope, that we can avoid a now unavoidable outcome risks becoming counterproductive. Because if you insist on the impossible (burning fossil fuels and avoiding dangerous climate change), then you must invoke miracles. And there is an entire fossil fuel industry quite desperate to sell such miracles in the form of CCS.
Four suggestions
Humanity has enough problems right now, what we need are solutions. This is the response we sometimes get when we argue that there are fundamental problems with the net zero concept and the Paris agreement. It can be summed up with the simple question: so what’s your suggestion? Below we offer four.
1. Leave fossil fuels in the ground
The unavoidable reality is that we need to rapidly stop burning fossil fuels. The only way we can be sure of that is by leaving them in the ground. We have to stop exploring for new fossil fuel reserves and the exploitation of existing ones. That could be done by stopping fossil fuel financing.
At the same time we must transform the food system, especially the livestock sector, given that it is responsible for nearly two thirds of agricultural emissions. Start there and then work out how best the goods and services of economies can be distributed. Let’s have arguments about that based on reality not wishful thinking.
2. Ditch net zero crystal ball gazing targets
The entire framing of mid and end-century net zero targets should be binned. We are already in the danger zone. The situation demands immediate action, not promises of balancing carbon budgets decades into the future. The SBTi should focus on near-term emissions reductions. By 2030, global emissions need to be half of what they are today for any chance of limiting warming to no more than 2°C.
It is the responsibility of those who hold most power – politicians and business leaders – to act now. To that end we must demand twin targets – all net zero plans should include a separate target for actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We must stop hiding inaction behind promises of future removals. It’s our children and future generations that will need to pay back the overshoot debt.
3. Base policy on credible science and engineering
All climate policies must be based on what can be done in the real world now, or in the very near future. If it is established that a credible amount of carbon can be removed by a proposed approach – which includes capture and its safe permanent storage – then and only then can this be included in net zero plans. The same applies to solar geoengineering.
Speculative technologies must be removed from all policies, pledges and scenarios until we are sure of how they will work, how they will be monitored, reported and validated, and what they will do to not just the climate but the Earth system as a whole. This would probably require a very large increase in research. As academics we like doing research. But academics need to be wary that concluding “needs more research” is not interpreted as “with a bit more funding this could work”.
4. Get real
Finally, around the world there are thousands of groups, projects, initiatives, and collectives that are working towards climate justice. But while there is a Climate Majority Project, and a Climate Reality Project, there is no Climate Honesty Project (although People Get Real does come close). In 2018 Extinction Rebellion was formed and demanded that governments tell the truth about the climate crisis and act accordingly. We can now see that when politicians were making their net zero promises they were also crossing their fingers behind their backs.
We need to acknowledge that net zero and now overshoot are becoming used to argue that nothing fundamental needs to change in our energy intensive societies. We must be honest about our current situation, and where we are heading. Difficult truths need to be told. This includes highlighting the vast inequalities of wealth, carbon emissions, and vulnerability to climate change.
The time for action is now
We rightly blame politicians for failing to act. But in some respects we get the politicians we deserve. Most people, even those that care about climate change, continue to demand cheap energy and food, and a constant supply of consumer products. Reducing demand by just making things more expensive risks plunging people into food and energy poverty and so policies to reduce emissions from consumption need to go beyond market-based approaches. The cost of living crisis is not separate from the climate and ecological crisis. They demand that we radically rethink how our economies and societies function, and whose interests they serve.
To return to the boiling frog predicament at the start, it’s high time for us to jump out of the pot. You have to wonder why we did not start decades ago. It’s here that the analogy offers valuable insights into net zero and the Paris agreement. Because the boiling frog story as typically told misses out a crucial fact. Regular frogs are not stupid. While they will happily sit in slowly warming water, they will attempt to escape once it becomes uncomfortable. The parable as told today is based on experiments at the end of the 19th century that involved frogs that had been “pithed” – a metal rod had been inserted into their skulls that destroyed their higher brain functioning. These radically lobotomised frogs would indeed float inert in water that was cooking them alive.
Promises of net zero and recovery from overshoot are keeping us from struggling to safety. They assure us nothing too drastic needs to happen just yet. Be patient, relax. Meanwhile the planet burns and we see any sort of sustainable future go up in smoke.
Owning up to the failures of climate change policy doesn’t mean giving up. It means accepting the consequences of getting things wrong, and not making the same mistakes. We must plan routes to safe and just futures from where we are, rather where we would wish to be. The time has come to leap.
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Dozens of once-pristine rivers and streams in Alaska’s Brooks Range are turning an alarming shade of orange. The discoloration, according to a new study published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, is likely caused by the thawing of permafrost, which is exposing previously frozen minerals that are now leaching into the waterways.
The research team, led by ecologist Jon O’Donnell from the U.S. National Park Service, documented 75 locations across a vast area of northern Alaska where the crystal-clear waters now appear heavily stained. Using satellite imagery and field observations, the scientists determined that the onset of this discoloration coincided with a period of warming and increased snowfall in the region over the past decade.
Permafrost, which is ground that remains frozen year-round, acts as a storage vault for various minerals. As rising temperatures cause this frozen layer to thaw, these minerals are exposed to water and oxygen, triggering chemical reactions that release iron and other metals into the groundwater. This metal-rich water then makes its way into rivers and streams.
“Our recent study highlights an unforeseen consequence of climate change on Arctic rivers,” study co-author Brett Poulin, an environmental toxicologist from the University of California, Davis, told Mongabay. “Arctic environments are warming up to four times faster than the globe as a whole, and this is resulting in deterioration of water quality in the most pristine rivers in North America.”
Map of orange stream observations across Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network (ARCN) parks in northern Alaska. Picture inserts show aerial images of select iron-impacted, orange streams. Map created by Carson Baughman, U.S. Geological Survey. Photos by Kenneth Hill, National Park Service. Public domain.
Impacts of iron mobilization in a stream tributary of the Akillik River located in Kobuk Valley National Park, Alaska. These images were taken two years apart. The clear picture was taken in June 2016 and the orange picture was August 2018. Photos by Jon O’Donnell, National Park Service.
Water samples collected from the affected streams revealed lower pH levels and higher concentrations of sulfates and trace metals compared to nearby unaffected waterways. In some cases, the pH levels dropped to 2.3, similar to the acidity of vinegar. The presence of elevated levels of iron, zinc, nickel and copper is the primary cause of the color change.
The ecological consequences of this phenomenon could be significant. At one site in Kobuk Valley National Park, researchers observed the disappearance of fish species and a decline in aquatic insect diversity shortly after the appearance of orange water. Juvenile Dolly Varden trout (Salvelinus malma) and slimy sculpin (Cottus cognatus) were among the fish species that vanished from the stream.
“Many of these affected streams serve as important spawning grounds and nurseries for salmon and other fish species that are crucial to the ecosystem and local subsistence fisheries,” study co-author Michael Carey, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a statement. “Changes in water quality could have effects throughout the food web.”
Human communities in the region also rely on these rivers and streams for their drinking water supply and subsistence fishing. As permafrost thaw accelerates and more minerals are released into the waterways, the safety and reliability of these resources could be impacted. Poulin emphasized the need for further research to understand the long-term implications for humans.
A tributary of the Kugororuk River runs orange in 2023. Photo by Josh Koch, U.S. Geological Survey. Public Domain.
“Our larger research effort aims to identify where the minerals are located that are the source of the metals and identify which rivers are most sensitive,” Poulin said. “With those two pieces of information, we will be able to accurately assess risk to the ecosystem and humans.”
Poulin also highlighted the uniqueness of these observations, noting that while gradual changes in water quality due to permafrost thaw have been documented in other parts of the Arctic and in high elevations of the Rockies and European Alps, the abrupt changes in water chemistry seen in the Brooks Range are particularly concerning.
“The rivers impacted by this phenomenon span the length of the Brooks Range” — about 1,100 kilometers, or 680 miles — “and involve some of the most pristine rivers in North America that are in protected lands and far from mining sources,” Poulin said.
As scientists work to better understand the complex interactions between thawing permafrost, mineral release and aquatic ecosystems, the study underscores the far-reaching consequences of climate change in the Arctic.
Banner image satellite imagery by Ken Hill, U.S. National Park Service.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff journalist for Mongabay. She has written about science and environmental issues since 2012 and holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Tulane University where she studied the microbiomes of trees.
“Number is as fundamental as the other three cardinal metaphors,
space, time, and matter because it is an interrelated aspect of the
divide-and-conquer metaphor which extends and diversifies the primal unity.” – Roger S. Jones, from Physics As Metaphor
where’s the pleasure
when everything’s measured,
and why isn’t water declared
a national treasure,
because everything’s tallied
by numbers in a ledger
monthly bills with
amounts of water,
oil, natural gas, and electricity
the measurement’s diminishing the felicity
it’s mean (literally)
and pretends to be green
the opposite of grist to the mill,
the commodification machine
the commodification machine
with Midas touch
but what you gonna eat
when you touch your burger
and it’s no longer meat
the selfishness is in the word, “mine”
mine for copper, mine for nickel,
mine for lithium, mine for gold
but alchemy is turning cucumber into pickle
grains of sand
and stars in the sky,
too many to count
but at least the stars
they can’t commodify
where’s the pleasure
when everything’s measured,
why isn’t land declared
a national treasure,
because everything’s tallied
by numbers in a ledger
the destruction and deadly side-effects
of divide-and-conquers
proves that disregarding primal unity
is totally bonkers
raindrops, snowflakes,
blades of grass, wildflowers,
too many to count
even with countless hours
it’s mean (literally)
and pretends to be green
the opposite of grist to the mill,
the commodification machine
Editor’s note: Climate change can not be addressed without stopping the extinction and plastics crisis. Every day, an estimated 137 species of plants, animals and insects go extinct due to deforestation alone. Microplastics have been detected in more than 1,300 animal species, including fish, mammals, birds, and insects. A global plastic treaty will only work if it caps production. Bangladesh is about to implement its existing law regarding plastic usage by strictly banning single-use plastic and, gradually, all possible plastic uses.
Scientific models can never account for all of the interconnected relationships within planetary systems’ boundaries. That is one reason why catastrophe predictions are always being pushed ahead.
There is simply no way the current economic system can persist indefinitely on a finite planet. Unfortunately, COP16’s primary goal is critical to striking a sustainable balance between human civilization and the natural world. That is an impossibility. We must tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, large-scale infrastructure projects, and monoculture tree plantations, basically civilization.
It is time to end civilization. Everything that claims existence must lose it; this is the eternal law. Power never gives up power willingly; it can only be broken with struggle. Nature is struggling to survive; we should help it.
Wildlife, climate and plastic: how three summits aim to repair a growing rift with nature
By the end of 2024, nearly 200 nations will have met at three conferences to address three problems: biodiversity loss, climate change and plastic pollution.
Colombia will host talks next week to assess global progress in protecting 30% of all land and water by 2030. Hot on its heels is COP29 in Azerbaijan. Here, countries will revisit the pledge they made last year in Dubai to “transition away” from the fossil fuels driving climate breakdown. And in December, South Korea could see the first global agreement to tackle plastic waste.
Don’t let these separate events fool you, though.
“Climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are not isolated problems,” says biologist Liette Vasseur (Brock University), political scientist Anders Hayden (Dalhousie University) and ecologist Mike Jones (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).
Earth’s fraying parasol “How hot is it going to get? This is one of the most important and difficult remaining questions about our changing climate,” say two scientists who study climate change, Seth Wynes and H. Damon Matthews at the University of Waterloo and Concordia University respectively.
The answer depends on how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases like CO₂ and how much humanity ultimately emits, the pair say. When Wynes and Matthews asked 211 authors of past reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their average best guess was 2.7°C by 2100.
“We’ve already seen devastating consequences like more flooding, hotter heatwaves and larger wildfires, and we’re only at 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels — less than halfway to 2.7°C,” they say.
There is a third variable that is harder to predict but no less important: the capacity of forests, wetlands and the ocean to continue to offset warming by absorbing the carbon and heat our furnaces and factories have released.
This blue and green carbon pump stalled in 2023, the hottest year on record, amid heatwaves, droughts and fires. The possibility of nature’s carbon storage suddenly collapsing is not priced into the computer models that simulate and project the future climate.
However, the ecosystems that buffer human-made warming are clearly struggling. A new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) showed that the average size of monitored populations of vertebrate wildlife (animals with spinal columns – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians) has shrunk by 73% since 1970.
Wildlife could become so scarce that ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest degenerate, according to the report.
“More than 90% of tropical trees and shrubs depend on animals to disperse their seeds, for example,” says biodiversity scientist Alexander Lees (Manchester Metropolitan University).
“These ‘biodiversity services’ are crucial.”
The result could be less biodiverse and, importantly for the climate, less carbon-rich habitats.
Plastic in a polar bear’s gut
Threats to wildlife are numerous. One that is growing fast and still poorly understood is plastic.
Bottles, bags, toothbrushes: a rising tide of plastic detritus is choking and snaring wild animals. These larger items eventually degrade into microplastics, tiny fragments that now suffuse the air, soil and water.
“In short, microplastics are widespread, accumulating in the remotest parts of our planet. There is evidence of their toxic effects at every level of biological organisation, from tiny insects at the bottom of the food chain to apex predators,” says Karen Raubenheimer, a senior lecturer in plastic pollution at the University of Wollongong.
Plastic is generally made from fossil fuels, the main agent of climate change. Activists and experts have seized on a similar demand to address both problems: turn off the taps.
In fact, the diagnosis of Costas Velis, an expert in ocean litter at the University of Leeds, sounds similar to what climate scientists say about unrestricted fossil fuel burning:
“Every year without production caps makes the necessary cut to plastic production in future steeper – and our need to use other measures to address the problem greater.”
A production cap hasn’t made it into the negotiating text for a plastic treaty (yet). And while governments pledged to transition away from coal, oil and gas last year, a new report on the world’s energy use shows fossil fuel use declining more slowly than in earlier forecasts – and much more slowly than would be necessary to halt warming at internationally agreed limits. The effort to protect a third of earth’s surface has barely begun.
Each of these summits is concerned with ameliorating the effects of modern societies on nature. Some experts argue for a more radical interpretation.
“Even if 30% of Earth was protected, how effectively would it halt biodiversity loss?” ask political ecologists Bram Büscher (Wageningen University) and Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield).
“The proliferation of protected areas has happened at the same time as the extinction crisis has intensified. Perhaps, without these efforts, things could have been even worse for nature,” they say.
“But an equally valid argument would be that area-based conservation has blinded many to the causes of Earth’s diminishing biodiversity: an expanding economic system that squeezes ecosystems by turning ever more habitat into urban sprawl or farmland, polluting the air and water with ever more toxins and heating the atmosphere with ever more greenhouse gas.”
Editor’s note: As humanity, we’ve come so far as to consider – after having wreaked havoc on a perfectly functioning ecosystems on a flourishing planet – that producing clouds from seawater is a good idea. It sounds too bizarre to be true and even hilarious – but it’s deeply sad.
There are indeed scientists who get paid for researching not in a laboratory but in real life situations, how millions of aircrafts and ships can bring tons of aerosols into the sky to prevent the sun from doing what she does: shining to provide sunlight.
It seems as if some start-up youngsters with a hangover after pulling an all-nighter came up with that idea. But no, the proponents are adult scholars and they mean it.
With this sci-fi scenario we witness a degenerate humanity completely in denial over what is actually happening. A cut from the living and breathing world around us, inducing the immersion into minds of madness, who try to techno-fix us into oblivion.
It’s like hiring a beautician to put makeup on a person that is bleeding out, while the doctor stands there doing nothing.
It’s like calling a friend when you’re in an emergency situation instead of calling the ambulance.
It’s like breathing in while being under water.
Can we please stop rivaling the sun? Thanks.
Not a Bright Idea: Cooling the Earth by Reflecting Sunlight Back to Space
The United Nations Environment Assembly this week considered a resolution on solar radiation modification, which refers to controversial technologies intended to mask the heating effect of greenhouse gases by reflecting some sunlight back to space.
Proponents argue the technologies will limit the effects of climate change. In reality, this type of “geoengineering” risks further destabilising an already deeply disturbed climate system. What’s more, its full impacts cannot be known until after deployment.
The draft resolution initially called for the convening of an expert group to examine the benefits and risks of solar radiation modification. The motion was withdrawn on Thursday after no consensus could be reached on the controversial topic.
A notable development was a call from some Global South countries for “non-use” of solar radiation modification. We strongly support this position. Human-caused climate change is already one planetary-scale experiment too many – we don’t need another.
A risky business
In some circles, solar geoengineering is gaining prominence as a response to the climate crisis. However, research has consistently identified potential risks posed by the technologies such as:
the infringement of human rights across generations – including, but not limited to, passing on huge risks to generations that will come after us.
Here, we discuss several examples of solar radiation modification which exemplify the threats posed by these technologies. These are also depicted in the graphic below.
A load of hot air
In April 2022, an American startup company released two weather balloons into the air from Mexico. The experiment was conducted without approval from Mexican authorities.
The intent was to cool the atmosphere by deflecting sunlight. The resulting reduction in warming would be sold for profit as “cooling credits” to those wanting to offset greenhouse gas pollution.
Once started, this stratospheric aerosol injection would need to be carried out continually for at least a century to achieve the desired cooling effect. Stopping prematurely would lead to an unprecedented rise in global temperatures far outpacing extreme climate change scenarios.
Heads in the clouds
Another solar geoengineering technology, known as marine cloud brightening, seeks to make low-lying clouds more reflective by spraying microscopic seawater droplets into the air. Since 2017, trials have been underway on the Great Barrier Reef.
The project is tiny in scale, and involves pumping seawater onto a boat and spraying it from nozzles towards the sky. The project leader says the mist-generating machine would need to be scaled up by a factor of ten, to about 3,000 nozzles, to brighten nearby clouds by 30%.
After years of trials, the project has not yet produced peer-reviewed empirical evidence that cloud brightening could reduce sea surface temperatures or protect corals from bleaching.
The Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy. Scaling up attempts at cloud brightening would require up to 1,000 machines on boats, all pumping and spraying vast amounts of seawater for months during summer. Even if it worked, the operation is hardly, as its proponents claim, “environmentally benign”.
The technology’s effects remain unclear. For the Great Barrier Reef, less sunlight and lower temperatures could alter water movement and mixing, harming marine life. Marine life may also be killed by pumps or negatively affected by the additional noise pollution. And on land, marine cloud brightening may lead to altered rainfall patterns and increased salinity, damaging agriculture.
More broadly, 101 governments last year agreed to a statement describing marine-based geoengineering, including cloud brightening, as having “the potential for deleterious effects that are widespread, long-lasting or severe”.
Balls, bubbles and foams
The Arctic Ice Project involves spreading a layer of tiny glass spheres over large regions of sea ice to brighten its surface and halt ice loss.
Another proposed intervention is spraying the ocean with microbubbles or sea foam to make the surface more reflective. This would introduce large concentrations of chemicals to stabilise bubbles or foam at the sea surface, posing significant risk to marine life, ecosystem function and fisheries.
No more distractions
Some scientists investigating solar geoengineering discuss the need for “exit ramps” – the termination of research once a proposed intervention is deemed to be technically infeasible, too risky or socially unacceptable. We believe this point has already been reached.
Since 2022, more than 500 scientists from 61 countries have signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering. Aside from the types of risks discussed above, the letter said the speculative technologies detract from the urgent need to cut global emissions, and that no global governance system exists to fairly and effectively regulate their deployment.
Calls for outdoor experimentation of the technologies are misguided and detract energy and resources from what we need to do today: phase out fossil fuels and accelerate a just transition worldwide.
Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity, and global responses have been woefully inadequate. Humanity must not pursue dangerous distractions that do nothing to tackle the root causes of climate change, come with incalculable risk, and will likely further delay climate action.
James Kerry is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, James Cook University, Australia and Senior Marine and Climate Scientist, OceanCare, Switzerland, James Cook University.
Aarti Gupta is a Professor of Global Environmental Governance, Wageningen University.
Terry Hughes is a Distinguished Professor, James Cook University.
Editor’s Note: A polycrisis is a situation where multiple interrelated crises hit at the same time, similar to the geopolitical, ecological and social crisis that we are witnessing now. In this piece, Micheal Lerner explains the concept of polycrisis while introducing some of the systems to understand the polycrisis and a possible way to deal with it. This piece was written in July, 2023. Recent changes, namely the Israel-Palestine war, are not mentioned here.
How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis.
What happened?
What Is the Polycrisis?
First, let’s roughly define the polycrisis. Some claim it is nothing new. We believe the polycrisis is new. We believe a confluence of environmental, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and power. We believe these unpredictable interactions are causing future shocks of ever greater frequency and amplitude.
Because the polycrisis looks different, feels different, and is explained differently everywhere, there won’t be any single understanding of it. Think of the polycrisis as a global weather system. Weather everywhere is deeply interrelated, but local weather looks different in each place.
The polycrisis has many names—cascading crises, the metacrisis, the permacrisis, the great unraveling, the great simplification, “the end of the world as we know it” [TEOTWAWKI], and more. In Latin America it’s called “eco-social collapse.” The French call it “collapsologie.” Or one can simply call it turbulent times or a rapidly changing world.
It doesn’t matter much what we call the polycrisis. What matters is whether we recognize that it is real, that we are living in it, and that it is changing our lives. If we accept that much, we will recognize that we have to navigate it—and that good maps are essential to skillful navigation.
Navigating the Great Unraveling
Our friends Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute and Resilience.org use this powerful phrase for the task ahead for all of us: “Navigating the great unraveling.” Resilience.org is focused on energy, economy, environment, food and water, and society. Its tagline is “insight and inspiration in turbulent times.” In my judgment, Post Carbon Institute and Resilience.org are among the best and most accessible polycrisis resources in the United States.
At every level, we must learn to navigate the polycrisis. We have no choice. The only choice is whether we prepare to navigate it consciously—or just let it unfold and respond as it does.
“The future is already here,” the great science fiction writer William Gibson has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.” We know that all over the world millions of people have lived under polycrisis conditions for a very long time. The polycrisis is not new to them. It’s just now coming home to roost everywhere.
What Are the Best Maps and Charts of the Polycrisis?
Let’s look at how some experts are seeking to understand and map the polycrisis. I will be using three overlapping terms to describe these maps. The first is world view maps. The second is systems analysis maps. And the third is narrative maps. These are very crude concepts since all the maps tend to include all these elements in different ways.
The comprehensive worldview maps include orientations like techno-optimism, neo-Marxism, critiques of colonialism and imperialism, religious or spiritual understandings, and many more. It matters whether you believe in an enlightened spiritual future or a future that belongs to the powerful. It matters whether you think we will be governed by humans or trans-humans or algorithms. It matters whether you see the future as hopeful or tragic or perhaps both.
Then there are the systems analysis maps. Unlike worldview maps, systems analysis maps seek to be analytically neutral—albeit there are often deeply embedded biases.
The concerned capitalists of the world and their powerful friends gather annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos to opine on the state of the world. Their Global Risks Report 2023 is extensive and their prognosis dire. They offer a top 10 list of global risks for the next two years and the next ten years, along with a global risks landscape map. An additional Global Risks map puts global risks at the center surrounded by natural ecosystems, security, human health, economic stability, and digital rights. The outer circle then lists perhaps one hundred specific issues.
Kate Raworth’s “Donut Economics” is a highly influential systems map. “Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend—such as a stable climate, fertile soils, and a protective ozone layer. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century.”
The elegant donut diagram has an outer circle of an ecological ceiling for nine sectors (climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution and the like.) It has an inner circle of social foundation that lists human needs by sector (food, water, health, education and the like). The map elegantly allows her to show where we have already exceeded the ecological ceiling and where we have undercut the social foundation of human needs.
A third systems analysis comes from Thomas Homer-Dixon and his colleagues at the Cascade Institute in British Columbia. Homer-Dixon is among the foremost analysts of the polycrisis. In books like “The Upside of Down” and “Command Hope,” he has explored the polycrisis in depth. His thinking is deeply influential in Canada and internationally. I can’t point to a single map because Cascade Institute has produced multiple maps. In my judgment Homer-Dixon shows what sophisticated scholarly study of the polycrisis looks like—and why governments and others around the world should invest in it.
A fourth systems map comes from the Fan Initiative which also has a strong team of scientific experts behind it. The Fan has an influential categorization of twelve “blades” of the fan that interact. They include toxification, soils, population, oceans, health, governance, freshwater, energy, economy, climate, biodiversity and behavior.
There are academic centers focused on variants of the polycrisis like the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Their research interests include biotechnology, artificial intelligence, technology risks more generally, environmental risks, and justice risks. Unlike the other projects above, they are less comprehensive on the polycrisis and more focused on explicitly existential risks to human survival.
Another outstanding contributor to polycrisis understanding is Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification and his podcasts, Frankly. His tagline is “people, society and earth’s systems midway through the carbon pulse.” Here’s an example of his thinking: “How do the catalysts triggering the SVB collapse compare to the 2008 financial crisis? What might world financial market reactions indicate as we move closer to The Great Simplification?.. One thing I’m pretty confident of: world governments and central banks are gonna need bigger boats as more and more entities require bailouts and guarantees. Eventually that ‘boat’ may become so large that it will be ‘Too Big to Save.’”
A major recent development in the field is the United Nation (UN) Foundation’s Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment. “The UN Foundation announced today the new Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), to be led by Ruth Richardson as its inaugural Executive Director. The three-year initiative is designed to contribute to the emerging field of systemic risk analysis with particular attention to helping leaders and practitioners—especially those in the public sector—better understand, assess, and incorporate sensitivity to systemic risks into their decision-making. It will work closely with practitioners, multilaterals, academics, the public and private sectors, as well as other partners across institutions, sectors, and geographies.”
Historically, one of the most influential of all systems analyses of the polycrisis came from Donella Meadows and her colleagues in their report to the Club of Rome, “Limits to Growth” in 1972. What is remarkable about their model is that it has proven highly accurate for fifty years.
These are simply examples. What they have in common is their effort to understand the underlying drivers of the polycrisis and their interactions in some systematic way.
Narrative Maps
There is another way of thinking about the polycrisis that we might call narrative maps. We are taking this approach in our Omega Resilience Awards project, which focuses on exploring polycrisis maps with younger leaders in the Global South.
This approach focuses on exploring different narratives of the polycrisis as they are understood in different places and different situations. These are not necessarily systematic maps. This is story telling or meaning-making in a vast variety of forms.
Many contemporary commentators offer us narrative maps—though these maps are also often systematic. The Columbia historian Adam Tooze, the New York Times contributor Ezra Klein and the Financial Times Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolff are analysts whose ongoing analyses of different dimensions of the polycrisis are widely respected.
Science fiction—or speculative fiction—offers another influential example of a narrative approach. “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson is a brilliant example of the genre of speculative utopian fiction that examines in detail how the climate crisis could actually be resolved.
Poets, novelists, film-makers, artists, and video game producers are among the many creative people who are telling stories and making narrative maps of the polycrisis.
A Map of Ten Top Polycrisis Drivers
What I offer below is a phenomenological map focused on issues as they emerge in the informed public media. This map is designed to change as the global polycrisis “weather system” changes. It is a kind of “polycrisis weather report.” My map is a mix of a worldview, systems and narrative map.
My starting point is the question I posed at the start. Why did the polycrisis explode into global awareness this year? I suggest that the polycrisis emerged as three principle drivers accelerated in sequence—climate, COVID, and the Ukraine war.
First, public attention was focused on the climate emergency. Then COVID turned the world upside down. Then a completely unexpected land war erupted in the middle of Europe. That war forced a great power confrontation, scrambled alliances around the world, and accelerated the last phase of the breakdown of American global hegemony. These three developments unfolding in sequence are, I believe, what brought the polycrisis to global attention.
Once the polycrisis was firmly established in the informed media and public mind, new developments kept confirming the increasing pace of global change and the reality of the polycrisis.
The new United States-China cold war is a classic example of the inevitable conflict between a rising power and a declining hegemon. The United States—unwisely from a geopolitical perspective—undertook to confront both Russia and China at the same time, hence driving these two great powers into alliance.
The new breakout developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are again transforming the world. Bill Gates has likened this new technology to the development of the computer in terms of its significance.
Almost every few months, a new salient polycrisis driver seems to emerge. You can’t fully grasp this process with abstract systems maps alone. You need a “changing global weather systems” map that tracks the phenomenological developments in the public media and public mind.
The Polycrisis Pop Charts
What I attempt here is a phenomenological map of what informed Western media are throwing up the “Polycrisis Pop Charts.” I borrow the “pop charts” analogy from popular music where the pop charts track the popularity of different songs. Polycrisis drivers are like pop songs that move up and down the polycrisis pop charts of public attention. Some stay at or near the top for long periods of time. Others enjoy only a brief stay.
Here are seven diverse candidates to add to a potential high level public awareness threat matrix for a “Polycrisis Top 10.” (climate, COVID, and conflicts without end are already on the Top Ten list.)
The end of American hegemony. The multi-centric geopolitical realignment of the world is taking place rapidly. Russia, China, Iran and other countries have aligned against Western domination. India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, and other countries are asserting their own independent interests, often playing both sides off against each other. The end of American hegemony is coinciding with the end of 500 years of Western domination of the world. It also coincides with the end of Western colonialism and imperialism. While these interlinked forms of dominance have been eroding for decades, the rapidity of developments now is astonishing
The resurgence of autocratic regimes. The western democratic model of free markets and representative democracy has never worked everywhere. (One can argue it never worked anywhere, but that is a different conversation.) Newly empowered by technologies of mass surveillance, a growing number of autocratic leaders of “illiberal democracies” and more totalitarian regimes are asserting themselves. They are far less constrained today by eroding democratic norms. They are far less concerned about American or Western disapproval. They regard the Western democracies as weak and decadent. They are more assertive of shared cross-ideological interests. In many places, the autocrats have strong, or at least majoritarian, support from their home populations. It may be true that the impulse toward freedom is universal. But that aspiration must be measured against other goods provided by regimes that meet essential human needs—for food, energy, shelter, economic progress, health, education, safety and the like. China is an excellent example. In a polycrisis world, it is an open question as to what forms of governance will actually work best in the interests of the people of different nations.
The explosion of AI technologies. Brought to public awareness by GP-Chatbox, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and others, the developers of AI technologies have abandoned caution—even as hundreds of scientists signed a letter urging a moratorium based on potentially catastrophic risks. A survey of AI scientists found them estimating a 10% chance that AI could ultimately wipe out human life on earth. AI is not alone. Biotech, nanotech, and robotics are what Bill Joy famously called the three “technologies of mass destruction.” The difference between these technologies of mass destruction and weapons of mass destruction, Joy said, was that the weapons required a large industrial base while the technologies could be cooked up by someone working out of their bedroom and posted to the Internet. This category is actually a stand-in for all the explosive technological developments transforming our world literally beyond understanding.
Global financial system chaos. Economic researchers warn that the global debt overhang may soon be “too big to avoid failure.” The likelihood of a global recession, or worse, is believed to be increasing. The fight to control inflation without ending growth puts central banks in a quandary. On the other hand, ending conventional growth as we know it is essential to a better future. The dollar as the dominant global currency may well be coming to an end. It is overdue in historical terms.
The migration crisis. Over 100 million forcibly displaced people are desperately seeking refuge as barriers to safe havens go up everywhere. The number will continue to grow exponentially. The migration crisis is among the greatest human tragedies of the polycrisis. No one has compassionate solutions that are politically acceptable in the West—or elsewhere for that matter. But mitigation strategies are profoundly important—curbing climate change, improving food production, reducing conflict, making home countries safer, aiding those caught at frontiers, and much more.
The risk of a nuclear accident or tactical nuclear arms use. The focus is Ukraine, but the risk is global. So is the risk of the use of dirty bombs or the deliberate targeting of nuclear plants by terrorists or a nuclear meltdown caused by an electric grid going down from a terrorist attack or other causes.
World food, water, work and safety deficits. Billions of people around the world are at increasing risk for the basics of life. This is more an outcome measure than a primary driver, except that this outcome drives all kinds of other feedback loops.
This list is, as I said, highly arbitrary. My list is heavy on the end of American hegemony, the rise of new autocracies, financial chaos, the migration crisis, nuclear risk, and the global food, water, and safety deficits. I add these seven to the list that set off polycrisis awareness—climate, COVID, and conflict without end.
What seems incontrovertible is that the number of polycrisis drivers keeps increasing and their interactions are every more rapid, unpredictable, and powerful.
Disaster Capitalism and Other Opportunities
The other side of any global threat matrix list consists of the global opportunities for advantage that countries, corporations, communities, and non-state actors are exploring on all sides. Whether it is disaster capitalism, opportunities for criminal gangs, cybercrimes, or legitimate new markets, the opportunists are enlivened everywhere. Likewise there are truly hopeful developments. We have to keep in mind breakout developments on the upside. Whatever the future brings, there will be winners and losers—even if the winners inhabit a devastated planet of universal scarcities.
The Thucydides Trap–the Prospect for U.S.-China War
The Chinese-mediated detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia has underscored China’s new role as a global power broker.
French President Macron was criticized by allies for his China visit and his explicit push for European geopolitical and economic autonomy. But many other European Union leaders think along Macron’s lines. Europe has no intention of giving up trade with China. Volkswagen and the chemical giant BSF are planning major expansions in China to offset the high cost of operating in Europe. The better European environmental regulations, the more attractive markets and manufacturing bases like China become.
Both Europe and China have lasting strategic reasons to build economic and political ties that lessen the threat to both an unreliable and fading global hegemon. Both China and Europe are caught for now balancing their conflicts over the Ukraine and Taiwan against their long-term interests in economic ties and strategic autonomy. But in the longer run, both know the Ukraine war will end, the Taiwan conflict will resolve, and they need each other in the new multi-polar world.
The Biden administration’s call for a global alliance of democracies against authoritarians rings increasingly hollow to people around the world. There is too long a history of what 500 years of Western hegemony has wrought. There is too much awareness of America’s classic hegemonic descent. The U.S. has wasted blood and treasure in foreign wars, devastated counties in the name of defending democracy, overturned democratic governments that threatened U.S. interests, and moved from soft power supporting shared interests to hard power for increasingly nationalistic goals. This is the well known trajectory of fading hegemons.
The U.S.-China confrontation is also the classic “Thucydides Trap.” In 12 of 16 past cases, the confrontation between a ruling power and a rising power led to war. The world has a great deal at stake in avoiding it.
A Multi-Centric Sci-fi Future?
The world simply isn’t buying the American narrative any longer. There are too many persuasive counter-narratives emerging from the Global South, from neo-Marxism, from post-colonial writers, and indeed from the internal critiques within the Global North and within America—to say nothing of counter-narratives from right wing nationalist parties, which appeal to very large numbers of people in countries around the world.
Yet, in a multi-centric world, it’s hard to see how the narrative we need—for new global governance structures that bring us together in the urgent global cause—will attract sufficient support.
It looks more and more to this observer as if the future will be a multi-centric world of ever-shifting alliances in which hybrid warfare and lower level conflicts among state, corporate, and non-state actors will launch us into an entirely unpredictable sci-fi future. That’s only one scenario, but in my mind it is the most likely one.
Archipelagos – Linking Islands of Coherence in a Sea of Chaos
There are hopeful trends. Many of the global stressors have substantial upsides. Systems theory makes it clear that we can create virtuous cascades as well as endure negative ones. This is a central thesis of Homer-Dixon’s work at the Cascade Institute.
At a recent Commonweal conference with leaders of our Omega Resilience Awards hubs in India, Nigeria and Argentina, Mark Valentine mentioned Ilya Priogene’s observation on the power of “islands of coherence” in a complex system in chaos. Here’s the quote:
“Ilya Priogene demonstrated scientifically that when complex systems are far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence can shift the entire system to a higher order.”
We liked this concept of focusing on creating “linked islands of coherence” at the grassroots level and at every possible level. It’s doable, achievable, and hopeful. Many of the Nordic countries are engaged in conscious efforts to create societal resilience in the polycrisis. So is Switzerland, so is New Zealand. They may become islands of coherence that offer hope and models for others.
Local communities, grassroots social movements, service organizations, and local governments are slowly coming to grips with the reality of the polycrisis. And they are crafting solutions. New economy theorists and practitioners are imagining ways to strengthen resilient local economies based on self-help, local currencies, and more.
Polycrisis Thinking as a Lens for Exploring Resilience
We believe the polycrisis cannot generate a single strategic agenda. Unlike the climate emergency, or the fight against hunger, the polycrisis doesn’t lend itself to universal shared objectives and solutions.
Rather, polycrisis awareness is a lens through which we can assess the most effective strategies for whatever we are working on. As one colleague put it, “if you don’t factor in the polycrisis, your strategies are far more likely to fail.”
For example, imagine that the power grid goes down whether from a cyberattack or other causes. Or imagine that the food system breaks down leaving people dependent on local food resources. Or imagine a financial collapse takes place and we enter a new global depression. Who would be prepared to respond—and how?
One of the lessons from past disasters is how rapidly the structures that sustain life can collapse. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to think about these questions. Their survival needs or personal concerns are too urgent. But it helps if in every community or organization at least some people think this way.
Cultivating a “Polycrisis Eye”
It is entirely possible to cultivate a “polycrisis eye” that enables you to watch developments across many spheres and witness the unfolding of the polycrisis in all its complexity and unpredictability. When I read the news I am constantly tracking these intersections.
If Russian gas is cut back in the EU, Norway becomes the bloc’s primary supplier despite cries of anguish from its environmental community. Likewise Biden breaks a pledge and allows new oil development in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Germany closes its last three nuclear plants which makes it more dependent on fossil fuels and renewables. The constant eruption of new developments continuously reconfigures whatever sector they appear in and those changes flow out to other sectors as well.
So it’s not just the polycrisis world view maps, the polycrisis systems maps, and the polycrisis narrative maps that help us navigate. It’s cultivating a “polycrisis eye” with which to watch as this accelerating global weather system evolves, changing local weather conditions everywhere. A “polycrisis eye” refines our ability to use a “polycrisis lens” to understand and navigate this turbulent time.
A Caveat
Though I have continuously referenced polycrisis analyses emanating from the Global South and the emerging multicentric world, this essay has drawn primarily from Global North examples of polycrisis maps and thinking. The principal reason is that while the Global South and the multi-centric world have experienced by far the greatest burden of the polycrisis,the polycrisis analysis has developed primarily in Europe (where the term first emerged) and the United States. That said, one of our principle goals at Omega and the Omega Resilience Awards is to support polycrisis analyses and narratives emerging in Africa, India and Latin America. Those analyses will be the subject of later essays.
A Crown of Feminine Design
We can hold the ultimate hope—the real hope—that we will emerge from this time of chaos and peril to build a better world. It might ideally be, as Randy Hayes, the founder of Rainforest Action Network proposes, a world of continental networks of bio-regional economies.
The critical question for global governance is whether a new set of global institutions can emerge to replace the Bretton Woods institutions from World War II. There may be a remote possibility that this will happen—as it does in “Ministry for the Future.” But in a polycentric world of widely diverse interests, it will be hard to achieve.
At the community level, most disaster preparedness has common themes. Communities need to be able to meet basic human needs for food, water, clothing, shelter, energy, safety, communications, and the spirit and tools to rebuild a better way of life. Building this capacity builds resilient communities—islands of coherence that could shift the whole chaotic system toward a higher level of functioning.
We know what local and regional self-reliance and resilience look like. Less than a century ago, community self-reliance was a way of life all around the world. It is still practiced in many communities today. If we can remember those lessons we’ll have a better chance, come what may. This is what Nate Hagens envisions as “the great simplification.”
All around the world people are coming together in the face of all the challenges to create communities of hope and resilience. They work with the skills and tools available to them. The fight for a better world is never won. It goes on forever. We’ll do that best if we are clear-eyed about what we are facing.
Whatever happens, our consciousness will have a powerful impact on how we face whatever is coming. Like all great life crises, the polycrisis has the potential to awaken us to what really matters in our lives. Perhaps the polycrisis could even stimulate a great global awakening of what we all need to do together to create a more liveable world. It’s possible.
I close with this line from the great Indian saint Sri Aurobindo, “the future, if there is to be a future, must wear a crown of feminine design.” The structures of wealth and power that we have built in this world are mostly of masculine design. We might amend Aurobindo and say that the future, if it is to be a compassionate one, must honor Mother Earth and evoke the feminine in us all.
That’s a thought worth holding.
Michael Lerner is the president and co-founder of Commonweal, a nonprofit center in Bolinas, California. Commonweal works in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice with more than 40 programs. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. Michael received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983. He is co-founder and president emeritus of the Smith Farm Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, D.C. He is president of the Jenifer Altman Foundation. He is co-founder and chair emeritus of the Health and Environmental Funders Network. He lives with his wife and colleague Sharyle Patton in Bolinas and on Whidbey Island north of Seattle.
Editor’s note: Iran is mostly in the news for its nationwide protests against the Islamic Republic, and for its brutal treatment of women who refuse to cover their hair with a hijab. But there’s another crisis unfolding, not so much covered on the news – the ecological crisis.
In Iran we witness overshoot that leads to the land being uninhabitable in the future: water scarcity, loss of fertile land, overpopulation, government mismanagment, pollution, and poverty.
The oppression of women, gays and lesbians in a country ruled by Shariah – Islamic law based on the Quran – together with the denial of respecting nature, is a recipe for collapse.
Record temperatures, prolonged droughts, and the drying up of rivers and lakes are displacing tens of thousands of Iranians each year, experts say.
Many of the climate migrants are farmers, laborers, and fishermen who are moving with their families from the countryside to major urban areas in Iran in search of alternative livelihoods.
Iranian officials have blamed worsening water scarcity and rising desertification on climate change. But experts say the crisis has been exacerbated by government mismanagement and rapid population growth.
While the exact number of climate migrants is unknown, Iranian media estimated that around 42,000 people in 2022 were forced to migrate due to the effects of climate change, including drought, sand and dust storms, floods, and natural disasters. The estimated figure for 2021 was 41,000. Observers say the real figures are likely much higher. Experts say a growing number of Iranians are likely to leave rural areas as more areas of Iran — where most of the land is arid or semiarid — become uninhabitable every year.
“It is visible because Iran is very dry, there is little rainfall, and a significant part of the country is desert,” Tehran-based ecologist Mohammadreza Fatemi told RFE/RL. “As a result, the slightest change in the climate affects the population.”
Fatemi cited the drying up of the wetlands and lakes in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan as an example. The Hamun wetlands were a key source of food and livelihood for thousands of people. But as the wetlands have diminished, many locals have migrated to the cities.
“Many people lived there, [but] they all moved to [the provincial capital] Zahedan and [the city of] Zabol,” said Fatemi. Now, he adds, many are moving from these cities to other provinces.
Environmentalist Mehdi Zarghami from Tabriz University recently estimated that some 10,000 families have left Zabol for other parts of Iran during the past year due to drought and sandstorms.
Fatemi estimates that around 70 percent of migration inside Iran is driven by the effects of climate change. “We’ve entered the phase of crisis. The next level could be a disaster,” he said.
‘Water Bankruptcy’
Some Iranian officials have warned that many parts of the Islamic republic could eventually become uninhabitable, leading to a mass exodus from the Middle Eastern country.
In July, officials warned that more than 1 million hectares of the country’s territory — roughly equivalent to the size of Qom Province or Lebanon — is essentially becoming unlivable every year.
In 2018, then-Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said that drought and water scarcity could fuel “massive migration” and eventually lead to a “disaster.”
Iran is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the Middle East, which is warming at twice the global average.
Ahad Vazifeh of Iran’s Meteorological Center said in October that average temperatures in Iran had increased by 2 degrees in the past 50 years.
But experts say that climate change only partly explains the environmental crisis that Iran is grappling with.
Tehran’s failed efforts to remedy water scarcity, including dam building and water-intensive irrigation projects, have contributed to the drying up of rivers and underground water reservoirs.
Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that Iran’s “water bankruptcy” had been fueled by government mismanagement and the building of dozens of dams.
More on Iran’s water problem
“Iran’s consumption is more than its natural sources of water,” he said. “Therefore, [the authorities are] using underground sources of water. [In response,] the wetlands have dried up, rivers have dried up, and now climate change has added to this equation.”
“Temperatures are rising, there’s more dust, soil erosion will increase, and desertification will increase,” predicted Madani, a former deputy head of Iran’s Environment Department.
In this 2018 photo, a man walks his bicycle under the 400-year-old Si-o-seh Pol bridge, named for its 33 arches, that now spans a dried up Zayandeh Roud river in Isfahan.
The government’s mismanagement of Iran’s scant water resources has triggered angry protests in recent years, especially in drought-stricken areas.
Water scarcity has also led to conflict. Iran and Afghanistan engaged in deadly cross-border clashes in May after Tehran demanded that its neighbor release more upstream water to feed Iran’s endangered southeastern wetlands.
Social Problems
Some experts say rapid population growth in Iran has also contributed to the environmental crisis, although growth has slowed in recent years.
Iran’s population has more than doubled since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, rising from about 35 million to almost 88 million, with about 70 percent of the population residing in cities.
Climate migration has put a growing strain on infrastructure and created socioeconomic problems in Iranian cities, including rising poverty, homelessness, and overcrowding, experts say.
A dust storm hits Zabol in October.
Researcher Mohammad Reza Mahbubfar told the Rokna news site in February 2021 that Tehran was a major destination for many of the country’s climate migrants. “Contrary to what officials say — that Tehran has a population of 15 million — the [real] figure has reached 30 million,” he said.
Mahbubfar added that “unbalanced development” had “resulted in Tehran being drowned in social [problems].”
The influx has led some wealthier Tehran residents to move to the country’s northern provinces, a largely fertile region that buttresses the Caspian Sea.
“My mother, who has a heart problem, now spends most of her time in our villa in Nowshahr,” a Tehran resident told Radio Farda, referring to the provincial capital of Mazandaran Province.
“My husband and I are hoping to move there once we retire to escape Tehran’s bad weather and pollution,” the resident said.
Reza Aflatouni, the head of Iran’s Land Affairs Organization, said in August that about 800,000 people had migrated to Mazandaran in the past two years.
Local officials have warned that Mazandaran is struggling to absorb the large influx of people.
Copyright (c)2023 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
Map of orange stream observations across Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network (ARCN) parks in northern Alaska. Picture inserts show aerial images of select iron-impacted, orange streams. Map created by Carson Baughman, U.S. Geological Survey. Photos by Kenneth Hill, National Park Service. Public domain.
Impacts of iron mobilization in a stream tributary of the Akillik River located in Kobuk Valley National Park, Alaska. These images were taken two years apart. The clear picture was taken in June 2016 and the orange picture was August 2018. Photos by Jon O’Donnell, National Park Service.
