Earth 2100: Looking Forward from 2009 & Back from 2100 in 2021

 

20009 ABC News production

 

A tweet from Rick Perlstein. 

A tweet from David Wallace-Wells.

In response to a couple of tweets (above) I'd seen recently that remarked that no film or television presentation had triggered the response to the threat of climate change comparable to the effect that "The Day After" (1983) had upon popular perceptions of nuclear war. I can attest to the powerful effect "The Day After" had on me and the public at the time of its first airing. As a child of the Cold War and with the memory of the Cuban Missle Crisis etched permanently into my memory, I didn't need a push to comprehend that horrors that a nuclear war would entail. Indeed, about fifteen or so years before I viewed "The Day After," I'd seen "Dr. Stranagelove" (1964 release) and "Fail Safe" (1964 release). I didn't need any coaxing to appreciate the perils that we faced. (I still vividly recall my horror at the moment when I first experienced the screech in "Fail Safe.")

As the tweets indicated, perhaps the single most well-known and highly regarded film about climate change, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006), didn't catalyze public opinion the way that many--including me--would have hoped. Of course, it made a splash in some circles, and it won an Academy Award. But the circles that acknowledged its message were all too small. This was the time of the second W. Bush administration and climate change was off the list of approved topics for that administration.

Thus the wish for a "The Day After" for climate change.

But I contend that such a story was created and done well. The story that I'm referring to is "Earth 2100," produced and aired by ABC News in June 2009. In short, the program used a graphic story to tell the tale of "Lucy," born in the U.S. in 2009, as she lives her life through the effects of climate change. The graphic story about a possible future is interwoven with interviews of persons knowledgeable about the effects of climate change. Some of the names were (and are) unfamiliar to me while some were well-known to me at the time or since then. Interviewed participants include Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Van Jones, former Clinton chief of staff and Obama advisor John Podesta, Michael Pollen, Jeffrey Sachs, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and E.O. Wilson. And perhaps more importantly to me, I was introduced to three thinkers I'd not known of before: Thomas Homer-Dixon, who's become one of the most important thinkers about climate change in my library (I write about this first encounter here; later references to Homer-Dixon in my blog are too numerous to catalog); Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist, whose work The Collapse of Complex Societies provided a gold mine on that topic by way of careful theory and abundant empirical evidence; and James Howard Kuntsler. Kunstler's work is a bit more polemical and speculative than the other two I mention here, but his voice continues to demand attention. (See Kunstler's The Long Emergency (2005) & his update, Living in the Long Emergency (2020) and this interview about the newest work). (A full list of participants in "Earth 2100 is here.)

A quick brag: in writing about my "discovery" of Thomas Homer-Dixon via "Earth 2100" in 2009, I mentioned that "Earth 2100" reminded me of "The Day After," although I didn't name that title. I'm not a visionary, but I am consistent.

I highly recommend watching this 2009 special. (Watch here via Youtube.) Why watch a news special from 2009? Am I recommending watching something that could only be termed an historical curiosity? No.

In the story depicted and the interviews interspersed throughout the story, we encounter a severe drought in the U.S. southwest, armed violence over dwindling resources, an Atlantic storm that inundates and cripples New York City, and an outbreak of a pandemic respiratory virus (whose image looks an awful lot like a coronavirus to me). I'm not saying that this program "predicted the future." I'd rather buy a share in the Brooklyn Bridge or land in Florida before I'd buy that someone can predict the future out much further than a few days, at least without a lucky guess. But what we can do--and what this program does--is to postulate events that hold some substantial degree of probability given the circumstances then existing. The program's extrapolations and imagination prove prescient.

And, this being network news and a hot topic, the final segment is about how all of this needn't happen (true enough); it needn't because of our (then) current efforts to ameliorate climate change. But those efforts up to 2009 and all the efforts since then haven't proven sufficient to alter our dire trajectory. In short, many of the dire forecasts of what might happen are manifesting in reality today.

The danger in watching this 2009 program now is that it could lead to despair. The ability of the American political system to deal with big problems that will require us to make significant changes in our economy and culture is nearly nil; the good intentions of the Biden Administration and Democrats (and all too few Republicans) notwithstanding. It's a sobering thought, but then we as a nation, as a world, need to sober-up. In less than two hours of viewing, this program provides a great incentive to start creating the cure.

P.S. What a local (Colorado Springs) newspaper wrote about this program at the time. COS perhaps hasn't changed much (with some very happy exceptions).

Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells--Creating Hell on Earth (or not)

Usually, I write a book review to share a sense of joy or insights or pleasure that I've gained from reading a book. Not so with this book. I'm writing this book review in an attempt to purge the angst that I suffered from reading it, to turn the sense of dread and potential for despair I often felt while reading it into something more positive, into courageous action. Can I succeed? I hope so, for my sake and for the sake of any reader. 

Wallace-Wells undertakes two tasks in this book. First, he brings us up to date with the latest climate science and the most reliable prognostications about the effects of climate change. The works of thousands of scientists converge around a variety of hellscapes that would make Dante swoon. As Wallace-Wells points out, we've been conditioned to think that climate change is just rising sea levels or some warmer temperatures here and there. It's not nearly so simple. It's not "I don't live near the coast, so what's my worry," because the problem is manifold and ubiquitous. No one can escape. Yes, sea levels will rise. Temperatures will rise so that some areas to become nearly unhabitable, especially around the Middle East and India (and having lived in northern India, I have a sense of what extreme temperatures feel like). Droughts and floods will increase in frequency and severity. Wildfires, as Americans have seen within the past year in California and the Pacific Northwest, will increase in severity and frequency. Severe weather events, such as hurricanes and tornados, will proliferate and become stronger. Get ready for the designation of a Category 6 hurricane. Established diseases will spread (malaria, dengue fever, and zika will move north), and new pathological organisms will evolve in our hothouse atmosphere. Crops will fail and yields decline. Nature will survive, of course, but species and whole ecosystems will disappear. We'll see Nature altered in ways that we don't recognize and won't enjoy. Human beings will be forced to migrate to survive. And conflicts will proliferate and intensify, from domestic quarrels (and undoubtedly physical abuse) to wars and civil unrest. We seem intent on creating a perfectly Hobbesian world of the war of all against all. 

Is Wallace-Wells just another alarmist? Is this just a book with cheap thrills like a 50's horror flick? I wish. Wallace-Wells went into this research and writing project as someone who was cognizant of climate change, but who didn't hold it front and center of his concerns until, as a journalist, he saw an increasing flood of scientific papers that revealed a much more frightening future than most of the media was reporting. What Wallace-Wells discovered disturbed him and frightened him. But he hasn't given up hope, and neither should we. 

In fact, the second portion of the book, after establishing the likelihood of various varieties of hell that we humans are creating for ourselves--and we are creating it, and we are choosing it--Wallace-Wells turns to our responses and how individuals, societies, and nations may respond to the increasing pressures that we face. 

We humans, like most of our fellow creatures here on Earth, have three instinctive responses to threats: fight, flight, or freeze (even faint). I couldn't help but think along these lines as I read about reactions (or the lack of response) to our increasingly certain knowledge. As a whole, we've chosen to faint, to swoon at the thought of what we've wrought and then distract ourselves from our plight. We play mind games with ourselves to distract ourselves from the challenge at hand, and 21st-century consumer capitalism is most willing to enable us to do this. The Republican Party in Congress tries to pretend that the science is wrong and the problem unreal, 'another liberal plot" they say.  Some say its just "God's will" and take a fatalistic approach justified on some bit of Bible misreading. Others seek to flee through technological panaceas, some of which may prove useful, but none of which promise reliable remedy and none of which can be attempted without immense costs and tremendous uncertainty about unintended consequences. The super-rich investigate how to govern the bunkers they're building to try to escape the wrath of the masses who will seek both vengeance and access to the resources that the super-rich have squirreled away. (But the super-rich remain worried about how to keep their guardians from turning on them.) 

The last option is to fight (climate change, not my fellow humans), and that's the option I'll take. We'll suffer significant--if not devastating--dislocations. We'll continue to see all sorts of changes, natural, social, economic, political, and cultural. But as Wallace-Wells makes clear, we have options and the potential to dramatically reduce the suffering that the future holds for all humans if we don't take sufficient steps to alleviate our plight. And I believe--or at least I possess a ray of hope--that we humans can respond in time (and time is of the essence). Thomas Friedman recently quoted an elementary but valuable insight from economic thinker Eric Beinhoffer: "there are only two ways to cure political tribalism: 'A common threat or a common project.'” Friedman uses this point to recommend that we need to undertake a common project to repair the foundations of the middle class. I suggest that repairing the foundations of the middle class must be subsumed under the project of dealing with climate change, which is a common threat and can become a common project. Indeed, starting now, we must re-imagine our political structures, our political economy, our entire culture. We have the potential to use the impending catastrophes to attempt to build a more just society. We either seek a just and sustainable world, or we can expect increasing international strife and civil anarchy. The range of possibilities for political, economic, and cultural change is vast, from outcomes that will prove (reasonably) attractive to appalling possibilities for anarchy or totalitarianism (and every nightmare in between). 

In listening to a couple of interviews of author David Wallace-Wells (The Ezra Klein Show & The Joe Rogen Experience), I was relieved to learn that he has an infant daughter, born while he was researching this topic. This fact reinforces his fundamental commitment to strive for the best possible outcome of our climate challenge, and it lets readers know that his hopeful words (there are some) don't represent publisher mandated pablum for readers. Wallace-Wells has to believe that we can take effective action to reduce our suffering and that of those who will come after us. 

One final comment: Again, from interviews, suggestions have been made that millennials will face this problem and must live with the consequences. Of course, this is true. But we baby-boomers have overseen an almost obscene increase in carbon in the atmosphere in the period since Al Gore released "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006). We bear the burden of responsibility for addressing our planetary illness. Alleviating the devastation of climate change must be a cross-generational project. We must begin the think in Burkean terms: society is a contract among generations past, present, and future. (If only there were more true conservatives!) 

Please, read this book and ponder your response. What shall we choose?  

Stephen Walt on the Top Ten Events of the Past Decade (Political Affairs Edition)

Stephen Walt dodges on predictions (wise him) and reflects on events of the past decade. Worth considering. Ponder this? What if Al Gore, who won the popular vote, had been inaugurated president? Where would the U.S. be now? In Iraq? Doubtful. In Afghanistan? Maybe. I doubt we would have avoided 9/11 or at least some similar calamity. And we do our very best to ignore global weirding. What if Gore had been president, would we awaken sooner from our lethargy?