Apocalypse Never: why we’ll never know when climate change has ‘arrived’

Climate change is often perceived as a single event that will happen at some point in the future, whereupon all the world’s weather systems will suddenly, simultaneously go haywire.  All the ice will melt, and sea levels will rise and instantly flood through our city centres;  tsunamis, hurricanes and forest fires will terrorise the coasts and countryside;  and we’ll finally know – once and for all – that this anthropogenic climate change thing scientists have been warning us about, was real all along.  

Except that won’t happen.  Climate systems are more complex than that, and changes will probably occur over long periods of time, and even rates of change won’t be constant.  We’re currently living through a period of gradual atmospheric shifts, witnessing the biosphere mutate around us.  But it’s very difficult to see this happening.  The interplay of different geological cycles and systems means we’ll never be able to draw a line in the sand and say:  “All past hurricanes were just bad weather.  This one, (and all those yet to come?) was a climate change hurricane.”  (Though some people, famously including the mayor of New York, have done just that.)  

This is dangerous, because if we’re always waiting for the ‘aftermath’ of some grand catastrophe, we’ll end up waiting forever, whilst the harmful consequences of global warming and unstable weather patterns continue to build incrementally around us.  There will be no ‘after’ – only an increasingly unpleasant ‘during’.  In order to take effective and timely action on climate change, we must build social movements that re-imagine the apocalypse.

Short-term human imagination

Why is it that we find it so hard to conceptualising gradual change over long periods?  Why do we think in terms of the ‘normal’ present, versus the post-apocalyptic future?  Why is it, to paraphrase Fredric Jameson, that we’re so readily able to imagine a future earth as an apocalyptic wasteland, but don’t have the imagination to avert this by re-thinking the way we organise our society in the present? 

It’s often suggested that humans are simply incapable of thinking in the timescales needed to avert long-term climatic change.  That our psychology is evolutionarily hard-wired to let us solve problems that will help us immediately – how to find food, shelter, etc – but doesn’t let us comprehend bigger, more abstract things like the future, quantum physics, and the popularity of Robin Thicke. 

But I’d argue that there are loads of everyday things that would be really useful to understand but we have no clue about how they work – like consciousness, and love.  On the other hand, there are loads of examples of humans having a very good grasp of phenomena that operate across huge scales of space and time.  We understand (pretty much) how stars work – how amazing is that?  And – under the right circumstances – people have conceived projects designed to last for centuries. 

Bazalgette’s London sewer system comes to mind (famously over-designed to accommodate a potential population boom in the capital), as does a lot of other Victorian civic architecture.  But even simple objects:  in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell regards a stone water-trough, which he claims was made at least 100 years ago.  He muses, “That country had not had a time of peace of any length at all that I knew of ... But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years”.  [OK, the water-trough is fictional - but you get my point.]

Media simplification

The mainstream press doesn’t lend itself well to long, nuanced, multi-stranded narratives.  A related but separate problem is that discussions around risk and uncertainty are very difficult to convey succinctly or punchily.  Scientific uncertainty is often misunderstood as meaning “scientists don’t know what’s going on”.  It’s also not usually possible to go into the detail of how scientific consensus is formed, or what it even means to say ‘scientific consensus’ in the first place – so when people say ‘scientists agree climate change is real’, it’s not always clear what that means. 

The media is happiest when it can explain a whole story in a single bombastic headline, then supplement this with some background detail to add a bit of colour.  Where there is room for debate in a story, it is generally presented in black-and-white terms, with two rent-a-quotes who are framed as being from two diametrically opposing camps, who say the opposite to each other in order to provide a sense of ‘balance’.  This echoes the archaic, adversarial traditions of debate so beloved by our law courts and parliament. 

[Of course, the above is an equally simplistic and unfair characterisation of journalism, and there’s a huge amount of variety and depth in the way that climate change and other stories are covered in the national media, depending on the news outlet, context, the format of the piece, etc.  But I do still think that these concerns remain a barrier to a better public understanding of climate change.]

This approach leaves limited room to air more subtle shades of critique between different parties.  It gives little scope to tease out the whole web of issues that usually underpin a story.  Questions as broad as climate change are particularly adversely affected by this style of reporting. 

In particular, it is the black-and-white (in fact black versus white) approach that seems to lend itself to arguments over whether climate change is happening or not.  Discussions over the extent of the capacity of oceans to absorb CO₂, or the pros and cons of different policy approaches to minimising deforestation, are too vague to make good headlines.  They’re also less suited to the topical immediacy on which most news items are pegged. 

The upshot is that climate change debate is often limited to the question “Is it happening or not?”  Or at best, demanding to know exactly what concentrations of atmospheric CO₂ will cause specific temperature rises, and what precise meteorological effects these will correlate with.  (Spoiler:  we can’t predict it that accurately.)

Missing middle, but no end

In the face of an oppositional discourse where climate advocates are pitted against climate deniers, we end up with all the climate campaigners focusing solely on the most harmful effects of climate change – the devastating end-times that humanity must strive to avoid – just in order to get the public and policy-makers to take it seriously enough to act.  But in only telling the end of the story, we lose all the action in the middle, and skip straight to the denouement in the final chapter. 

The trouble is, if we wait to witness a disaster before we’re satisfied that climate change is real and problematic, it will not only be too late to mitigate its causes, but we may not even notice it going on all around us.  If we’re searching for an ‘aftermath’, we’re never going to find it – because we’ll forever be living in the present. 

Linear narrative

I suspect the media question isn’t just about presentation of climate stories, but the way we’re trained to process narrative itself.  The way culture is produced and consumed often relies on being able to sell a simple linear narrative arc, with a beginning and end, and often with goodies and baddies.  Books, films, and TV series all leave us with the expectation of a resolution, to end on a perfect cadence.  (Of course there are exceptions to this rule, like The Prisoner – but they are indeed exceptions).  Likewise, when we engage with narratives on climate change through these same media, we’re presented with a view that has to be easily packaged into the standard format. 

If our brains are trained to think in terms of rigid narrative arcs, with a beginning and end, it’s more difficult to think in terms of a never-ending process that will continue to play out indefinitely.  We’re always searching for a mental milestone to signify where the story ends.  (Even if there’s a sequel planned for afterwards).

Disaster movies and hell on earth

Climate change is imagined as an impending disaster (which it pretty much is).  We’re already very familiar with what disasters look like, because we’ve seen them in hundreds of films.  Disasters look great on the big screen, because they come with big explosions, a lot of human suffering, and often a topical moral message. 

The trouble is, disaster movies almost always portray the apocalypse as a one-off, traumatic event.  But climate change is a bit more like 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with successive generations of a village living through years and years of small, cumulative disruptions and developments.  This makes climate change very hard to put on screen.

Films featuring the aftermath of epic, world-changing phenomena such as nuclear winters and zombie outbreaks, are our main fictional frames of reference for imagining post-crisis landscapes, which means that when climate-perturbed futures are mapped onto these expectations, something gets lost in translation.  Films featuring individual extreme weather or geological events (Perfect Storm, Twister, etc) maybe relate to some of the local disturbances that could be thrown up by climate change, but they don’t give the whole picture of everyday life.

There aren’t a lot of fictional films explicitly dealing with anthropogenic climate change and its effects (The Day After Tomorrow is one), though a few touch on general themes of ecological collapse (Wall-E springs to mind).  The Day After Tomorrow depicts climate change as a singular event – a tipping point that creates instant global devastation at a single stroke presumably – due to the constraints of Hollywood narrative requirements mentioned above.  But it seems unfair, and almost beside the point to pick this one example – we’ve already learned, through exposure to decades of apocalyptica, to think about time by dividing it into epoch-defining moments of crisis.

In modern Britain, beliefs in traditional notions of Hell – an eternity of literal fire and brimstone – are less prevalent than they once were.  However, it has been suggested by some that Hell is a concept that has not been lost, but secularised.  It has migrated to Hollywood cinema screens depicting floods, explosions, and wastelands;  to crudely constructed, orientalist portrayals of regions in the world that suffer armed conflict, genocide, and famine.  

Yet these secularised visions of ‘Hell on earth’ retain something of the transcendent;  the abject;  the infinite and unknown, that have always characterised Hell as an unsettling concept.   Perhaps by tapping into this portion of some cultural subconscious, disaster movies speak to some buried anxiety of eternal devastation brought about by our own wrongdoing, closely aligning with the same visions of moralising and hellfire preached by many in the environmental movement.  [Not that there's some homogenous, universally held version of Hell, but I do think a hazy conception of Hell is recognised widely enough to carry significant resonance for many people.]

Borderlands and D-Days

Naomi Klein’s theory of the Shock Doctrine – the creation of perpetual emergency, a present moment that is permanently ephemeral and ‘now’, as a mechanism of domination – is partly reflected in the quick-fix lifestyle interventions necessary for consumer capitalism.  So-called retail therapy;  comfort eating and crash-dieting;  get ripped in 4 weeks;  the ‘before and after’ shot. 

The notion of there being an ‘after’ to take an ‘after shot’ of, is significant.  It’s an everlasting, effortless ‘after’ that follows a single burst of energy needed to create a dramatic, one-off change that will not relapse.  The greener pastures promised by lifestyle-advertising repeatedly create in our minds miniature milestones in our lives, on the other side of which lies a blissful ‘after’, a future of release.

Of course, in reality there is no ‘after’ a diet, where you can stop working and revert to your presumably slovenly, primordial, default state.  You have to keep it up indefinitely.  This is why the very concept of ‘going on a diet’ is problematic – because although it might be possible to moderately adjust to a healthier lifestyle, who could face going on a permanent diet?  (And how could you sell it?) 

The same consumer logic of one-off crash diets and quick fixes is well suited to the attraction of climate technofixes, where one catastrophic singularity is mitigated by another, one-off intervention of high technology, without addressing any of the interconnected underlying problems of energy production and consumption, resource depletion, social inequality, etc.  Our tangled global crises are instantly solved with the same simplicity of Bruce Willis nuking an asteroid.

That isn't to say we should reject technology altogether - but we need to think about what technology we deploy, who controls it, and whose priorities it serves.  To return to Fredric Jameson (sort of), why is it that many individuals and governments are prepared to accept the validity of madcap geo-engineering schemes, but dismiss large-scale solar and wind energy generation, and global emissions treaties, as implausible?  

Re-imagining capitalism and re-imagining the climate

Nina Power once said in a talk she gave for Auto Italia that the anti-capitalist revolution isn’t going to be a ‘grand rupture’.  This is the revolution figured as the ‘glorious day’, as imagined by so many on the left, and captured exquisitely in the romanticism of Silver Mt Zion’s lyrics about barricades, and the grand ‘parade’ that repeatedly serves as the metaphor for their insurrection.

Power didn’t mean that a revolution wouldn’t entail great upheaval.  She meant that the world the day afterwards wouldn’t look so very different to how it did the day before.  Our personal relationships, our streets, will still feel just as they did the previous Tuesday.  Even following times of major transition, the everlasting questions remain, ‘What do we do now?  How do we build from here?’

These questions can’t just be asked after the event.  Although many find romanticism in ideas of grand, radical upheavals that suddenly uproot centuries-old systems of inequality, real, peaceful and lasting change must come through slowly building social movements that can address these challenges.  And in fact, most of our daily experiences of participating in politics – however radical – are not about planning for some far-off glorious revolution, but are about small actions – raising awareness of particular issues;  holding debates;  staging demonstrations that don’t expect to immediately bring the government to its knees, but that hope to challenge institutions to behave a little bit better, or will inspire others to take more small actions of their own. 

This slow-burning, building impetus, for me offers hope for ways in which we might seek to re-imagine approaches to climate change.  Because climate change also requires a radical sea-change in the way society operates, but won’t manifest itself suddenly and completely.  It therefore requires solutions that are visionary and groundbreaking to create a new, different, more liveable world, but that don’t expect to see these changes take place over night. 

Having earlier mentioned Godspeed You Black Emperor’s ‘parade’ revolutionary aesthetic, their daughter band, Silver Mt Zion, offer a different vision of resistance in the title of their 1999 album, “Slow Riot for a New Zero Kanada”.  I can’t pretend to know the sentiments that lay behind this name, but for me it speaks of a sustained but powerful response to a late-capitalist, brutal world order that has created a landscape where – in the words of Wikipedia’s translation of the biblical quote in the liner notes –

“The earth… was waste and void…

There was no man, And all of the birds of the heavens were fled... 

The fruitful field was a wilderness,

And all the cities thereof were broken down… 

The whole land shall be desolate,

Yet I shall not make a full end.”

*****

Climate change is indeed a real and serious problem.  Although it won’t make its full effects known in a single day, its impact will be enormous – and ongoing.  Likewise, we need to develop solutions to re-organising the economy, society, and politics, that can’t happen overnight, but do need to be profound and radical – and sustainable in the long-run.  There will be no ‘after’ – only an endless ‘during’.  We need a slow riot.