Category Archives: Climate emergency

Fossil Fools Day, 2023

On this first day of April we celebrate foolishness. There is none greater than burning your own home because you like the pretty flames. It’s not even as clever as peeing in your pants to keep warm at the start of winter, as they say in the Nordic countries. So we throw more coal, peat, forests, petroleum and natural gas on the fire because it’s convenient right now. But the effects, as Al Gore and Greta Thunberg have pointed out, will be not just inconvenient but deadly.

Too many fires are making too much carbon dioxide too quickly. This traps the sun’s heat on Earth, warming the oceans and melting the ice of the poles. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land. In its bed are a trillion tonnes of frozen methane, which is already bubbling to the surface, and methane is much better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Moreover, in the frozen lands around about are another trillion tonnes of methane, held in frozen peat and organic soils. This is already leaking out as the ice lands melt and rot.

So what will happen when global heating pushes the Arctic beyond whatever tipping point keeps it in the deep freeze? Of course the answer is an immense pulse of methane. That’s the big show that could finish us off. Carbon dioxide is only the warm-up act. And when might that happen? All the signs suggest around the middle of this century. Are we ready for this, and do we even know what ‘being ready’ means? Are we even trying seriously to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions? We still churn out scores of billions of tonnes of the stuff every year, and save only a thousandth part of that. So the answers are: not yet!.

We seem inclined to keep putting things off. But with a mid-century deadline looming from the Arctic methane if nothing else, putting things off is really daft. Even if the sums are wrong and it’s really the 2080s rather than the 2050s when the Arctic methane hits the fan, that’s still not very long. We need to get a grip. And that means putting away the jester’s bladder and getting serious. So what to do instead of acting the Fossil Fool?

I could rattle off a list, but here are a couple. First, we should vote only for leaders who will tax carbon emissions radically and enable ferocious and fair investment in decarbonising our economies. And second, we should make sure that rewards from investment are highest when emissions are avoided soonest. With special merit points for those that also help protect and restore nature, and that promote human wellbeing and community solidarity. This would make working with local communities to prevent harm to all our remaining high carbon-density natural ecosystems the maximum top priority everywhere on Earth.

The simple fact in this emergency is that a tonne of emissions avoided now has much more survival value than a tonne of emissions avoided years from now. So that should be the starting point of all our policies, and it should shape all our efforts, incentives and disincentives. Any proposal to decarbonise anything should be met by the question: how much carbon saved how quickly? And be closely followed by another: and with what co-benefits?

These questions will lead not only to the best nature-based and community-based solutions, but to the best technological ones as well. The point is that every potential investment should be made to answer the same questions, so we can compare them. Talking up innovative and imaginative solutions is OK, but only if they are supported by evidence-based reasoning that lets us pick the most cost-effective ways to avoid global catastrophe. Survival value, precaution and co-benefits should be the watchwords. The time is over for Fossil Fool governments that fail to protect us, our children and the biosphere. No to more foolishness! Happy All-Fools Day.

Buying time to avoid Earth system breakdown

In this talk at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, Julian Caldecott warns of tipping points driven by global heating in the Arctic and other complex Earth systems. These systems have been under stress for decades, due to the heat-trapping effects of excess greenhouse gases. Using the case of the Arctic sea ice ‘death spiral’ since 1979, Julian explains how complex systems under this kind of stress tend to resist change before suddenly tipping into new forms. He then uses his knowledge of government climate aid programmes to show how being aware of mid-century deadlines can help us make better choices in mitigating climate change. Having a dated reference point would make it easier to calculate the true mitigation value of investments, thus helping to buy us time to build a safer and fairer world, one with peace with nature at its heart. But peace with nature needs ecosystem thinking, and this must quickly become normal if system change is to occur. Julian asks challenging questions about ‘business as usual’ climate aid, and offers new solutions in this most vital area of public policy.

Watch the video, or read more …

Some of the thinking in the talk is new and unorthodox. It treats Earth systems as complex and assumes that, like other complex systems, they can tip suddenly from one state to another after they have been under stress for a long time. Julian argues that just such a stress is the trapping of heat in the biosphere by greenhouse gases at a concentration in the air above 300 ppm CO₂, which has been the case since about 1950. Its direct consequences include rising heat content of the world ocean and increasing global mean surface temperature (GMST). Its indirect consequences include declining polar sea ice volume, melting glaciers, marine and terrestrial heatwaves, weakening ocean currents and changing weather patterns that are often experienced as environmental chaos and usually described as climate change (CC).

The current 1.5 C goal, based on GMST, helps to focus public attention and mobilise action by governments. But it does not reflect the non-linear responses to be expected of a system as complex as the biosphere. The continuity of cause and effect over time, and the prospect of tipping points, challenge the realism of CC mitigation planning and investment assumptions. Improvements can be made by using an estimate of when Earth systems will, with current timing and heating trends, become irreversibly committed to transformational (‘tipping point’) change. This will pre-date the tipping point itself, so estimating when allows us to judge the effectiveness of CC mitigation investments in postponing it. Postponing tipping points is how we can buy ourselves time to make the changes needed for longer-term safety.

But such postponements may well become harder to do over time, as each system becomes steadily more inclined to transform itself. A relevant case is the ice-free Arctic Ocean, anticipated for September 2035 ± 5, which may already be unstoppable and could well drive a dangerous methane surge when it occurs. The mitigation value of delivering avoided net emissions would presumably decline in real terms as the commitment point is approached, either suddenly on its eve or more gradually in the preceding years. Uncertainties abound and call for precautionary thinking about the dates involved and the mitigation value of investments, including the unit value of mitigation returns on those investments. For these purposes, it is more realistic to reduce that value exponentially from now to the commitment point, rather than to assume a change from ‘valuable’ to ‘valueless’ the day before it.

Thus, a dated ‘deadline’ in mid century (2050 ± 10) might be chosen to represent the transformation commitment point of key Earth systems. This is based on the trajectory of change in sea ice minima in the Arctic Ocean, and on the rate and direction of change in other cryosphere (ice-world) and oceanic systems, and in major equatorial forest areas. Whatever the deadline chosen, precautionary investment plans would exponentially reduce the value of each expected mitigation unit as the deadline approaches. Such plans would therefore express all expected emission reductions not in tCO₂e but in tCO₂edmv, where ‘dmv’ stands for dated mitigation value. This would have the effect of valuing early net emission gains more highly than later ones. This is already in principle a common aim, but a standard metric would allow direct comparison of true cost-effectiveness between alternative investments in practice.

Julian tested the usefulness of this approach with data from projects funded by one EU member state in three developing countries, targeting: avoided deforestation; forest regrowth (also representing tree planting); wind farming (representing renewable energy, RE); and capacity building for economy-wide decarbonisation. Over 21 years with a constant 0.1 exponent used to depreciate mitigation value (such that 1 tCO₂edmv in year 1 = 0.41 tCO₂edmv in year 10 = 0.14 tCO₂edmv in year 21), returns were estimated at 0.90 tCO₂edmv/€ for capacity building, with least certainty; at 0.40 tCO₂edmv/€ for avoided deforestation, with moderate certainty; at 0.05 tCO₂edmv/€ for forest regeneration/planting, with moderate certainty; and at 0.01 tCO₂edmv/€ for wind farming, with most certainty.

Among the cases with moderate to most certainty, the much higher mitigation returns from avoided deforestation than from RE and tree planting investments offer a key lesson to mitigation planners. Variation in the certainty of returns is an important factor in choosing the right mix of investments for each location, but so too are the varied co-benefits (biodiversity, adaptation, human rights, sustainable development, etc.) available from different investment strategies. And the biggest risk of all is that transformation commitment points in Earth systems cannot be postponed (or will not, due weak precaution and/or weak leadership).

This all suggests that a key starting point for justifying the expenditure of public mitigation funds lies the calculation of tCO₂edmv/€. Once this is done, other factors such as expected co-benefits can be considered in detail. But the initial calculation would require an agreed deadline date (which could be moved by agreement later, if success is achieved), an agreed exponent for converting tCO₂e into tCO₂edmv, and attention to the comparative valuation of co-benefits for fine-tuning the justification of each investment.

Watch Julian’s talk and the Q&A afterwards here.

For Scottish independence

This essay was short-listed in the 2021 ‘YESsay’ competition run by the National on Sunday newspaper (the winning entry is here). It sought to answer the question ‘Why should Scotland be independent?’, with the aim of informing and swaying undecided voters in the direction of voting ‘yes’ in the next referendum on the subject. The Green-SNP alliance Scottish Government is seeking such a referendum by the end of 2023. This would be the second, the first being in 2014 when the real question was ‘should Scotland leave the EU as well as the UK?’ Now the issue is whether Scotland should leave the UK in order to be free to rejoin the EU, which is a very different matter. The text of my entry follows.

Independence means having the freedom as a country to decide what to do, and to take responsibility for the benefits and costs of doing it. Contemplating independence, it is natural to ask what one’s country could do with its freedom. In Scotland’s case, competing visions might include: re-joining the EU and being able to trade and travel more easily, participate in European affairs more fully, and promote climate emergency responses more effectively; or else, being impoverished by the withdrawal of English funding, and becoming vulnerable to capital flight.

Many other scenarios are possible, but before a decision on independence is made they will all be speculative. For instance, neither the terms by which Scotland and England would part ways, nor the terms on which Scotland would re-enter the EU (or even whether it would apply to do so), can have been agreed bindingly before the vote. The most anyone can do is to promise to try to achieve certain outcomes if conditions allow, and if they remain desirable.

But circumstances constrain probabilities so, for example, Scotland is very unlikely to be able to re-join the EU in the next decade or so without independence. As a ‘Brexit migrant’ from England, one of my dreams is to obtain a Scottish EU passport before my British EU passport expires in 2026, and this affects how I think about independence. Considering the general catastrophe of Brexit, many Scots will have a similar ambition.

Such simple hopes may help to guide us through a turbulent campaign, in which narratives will proliferate as the vote approaches. Potential voters will seek as much clarity as they can get on what the various parties intend, and from whatever calculations of risk, opportunity and probability have been done by credible analysts. Here the problem, as with Brexit, is that a tsunami of contradictory promises, analyses and lies will overwhelm everyone’s ability to sort fact from fiction.

Then, on the day, people will vote according to their gut feelings, and these are only partly determined by reason and certainty. Even the 2014 independence campaign is a poor guide, since back then the choice was about whether or not to leave a stable EU member state, but now, depending crucially on how you look at it, the choice is whether or not to leave either a ‘sinking ship’ or a ‘reborn UK’.

This leaves us with the quest for independence itself, which here and now concerns only the desire for a degree of national freedom greater than that possessed by Scotland as a semi-autonomous region of the UK. This essay therefore targets desire, by highlighting some inherent benefits of achieving independence. These are based on my understanding of transformative events that result in greater collective freedom, and also the specific circumstances of Scotland’s quest for independence.

Thus, one benefit would be that for the first time in our lives we’ll be free to think about what we want to do. So ‘a young black girl’ said to Herbert Marcuse (in An Essay on Liberation, Allen Lane, 1969), in answer to the question of what newly-free people would actually do. Her reply implies that until you are free, and responsible, you can’t think freely or choose your way, or even really know what being free means.

Responsibility for yourself and others is hard, but so is life and growth. We seek freedom even if we’re afraid, because we must. There are many ways to feel more or less free, but there is nothing like freedom itself. And it always involves other questions: free from what, free for what, and with what compromises? But freedom is not about an absence of compromises. It’s about deciding what to do and what to accept.

In any case, there are at least three other inherent benefits to independence in current circumstances. The first is that breakup of the UK now seems necessary and inevitable. Union had advantages in the past, for many stakeholders and for a long time, but the mutual advantages have shrunk with the UK’s global role. Moreover, the direction of travel of England’s dominant culture is diverging from Scotland’s, and from those of the core nations of the EU.

Brexit changed everything, and England has a Brexiter government that is promoting and weaponising myths of owner-class entitlement and national exceptionalism. It is encouraging and enabling the most selfish and least cooperative elements, thus polarising English society. And polarisation is what destroys democracies by eroding the shared visions and values upon which they depend. Thus, whatever the speculative risks of independence, there is the real risk of being tied to a country that is sliding towards breakdown and extremism.

This brings me to the second factor, that England could benefit from being hit on the nose with a two by four. The shock of Scottish independence might help the English to retreat from the brink of the dumb, femicidal, piratical and isolationist values of Henry Tudor and Donald Trump. Most English have not yet fallen to the Dark Side, and they could still be energised by something that really drives home the enormity of the danger they’re in. We should remember that it was the shock of defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas campaign that broke the power of Argentinian fascism in the 1980s. Saving England by leaving the Union could be the only path that leads to sharing the whole archipelago with benign partner countries.

But timing is key. As Martin Luther King wrote in his last book, Chaos or Community? (Penguin, 1969), “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.” And he stresses this again later: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’” For Scottish independence, this probably implies the sooner the better.

Timing is also and doubly relevant to the third factor, that the breakdown of global climate and ecology will kill us all in a few years without massive and sustained change. The human future is now bounded by catastrophic mid-century uncertainty. To survive means building a sustainable, inclusive, equitable economy with peace rather than war with nature at its heart, sustained by trade and communion with like-minded societies.

This requires people to understand ecology and to be responsible and accountable for their own decisions on land tenure and environmental management. It also requires systematic investment and public mobilisation in decarbonisation and new forms of social venture, business, technology and industry. All of this will be very hard to do without a high degree of local autonomy, and impossible for a subject people against resistance by a conservative, uncooperative, or hostile hegemon. Thus, from the point of view of helping to save the world, Scotland must be free in order to lead.

So there are ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom for’ aspects to this, as there always are with freedom. But there are also more subtle positives. Imagine Scotland as a complex system. As I explain in my book Surviving Climate Chaos (Cambridge, 2021), all systems behave according to the nature of the entities within them and the relationships among those entities. In any country, these entities and relationships are shaped in deep time by geology and evolutionary biology, and in recent time by ecology, land use, language, myths and values.

All contribute to the froth of the immediate culture, which is stirred by currents from the depths and by breezes from near and far. Amongst the bubbles are determinants of hope and fear, desolation and purpose, colonies of energy and idea that shape everyone’s life experience. Sometimes a malign spore settles and grows, to infect part of the froth with a dark meme, ones like: you have NO purpose, so why not have a drink or shoot up? That one comes from the drug dealers. Or else: you HAVE a purpose, and it’s to grab and defend your own personal property in competition with everyone else, at any cost to them, and only if you fail will you be truly worthless! That one’s from capitalism.

Healthy systems have immunity to these parasitic memes, which aim to create vulnerability by fomenting purposelessness, or by distorting values so that the individual can never be fulfilled. Unconstrained, their effect is like one of those Cordyceps fungi in Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life (Bodley Head, 2020), that get into the brains of ants and make them climb high before dying to scatter spores on other ants below.

There are many places where peoples have died from the shock of contact with new cultures and dispiriting memes – the Americas and Australia are full of them – but we often forget the victims of the past in the dazzle of the present. More moving is to see a society that is withering under attack by squirming multitudes of parasites, the last old people bewildered and alone amidst new values and incomprehensible languages. Hundreds of cultures have died like this in my lifetime, and hundreds more, from the Highlands to the Amazon, are casualties in the annals of anthropology.

But here and there are societies that have survived. The Iban and Kelabit of Malaysian Borneo, the Balinese of Indonesia, and others, seem to manage by rooting themselves in themselves and the life-energy of their homelands, holding some core sense of identity close and having the confidence to use outsiders for their own purposes. And then there are those, like the Makushi of Guyana, the Zoque of Mexico and the Welsh, Basques and Catalans, who have managed to rebuild a sense of place and identity, where the infection has been halted, the language saved, solidarity and belonging re-established, and despair banished.

Part of it is blind luck, but luck without determination and cleverness is not enough. The Zoque, for example, started by bribing conquistadores with gold and were lucky enough to find one who left them alone in return. They kept on paying gold with the same purpose to successive governments, through independence from Spain and the Mexican revolution, until modern land surveyors mapped their ‘Chimalapas’ homeland as a community territory, the largest in Mexico. They also welcomed Amerindian genocide survivors, who were given land, adopted as Zoque, and helped to defend the area.

This worked for several hundred years, showing the value of creativity in seeking what’s really important: land tenure and a sense of identity, belonging, and a long-term purpose that means something. All of this is relevant to Scotland, which has striven to find its way back from a complex and damaging past as a vibrant, viable and renewed country. It is now easy to imagine Scotland as a green, healthy, creative and sociable nation with English and Gaelic as official languages, and maybe Doric and Scots too.

Which brings me to the last reason why I would vote for independence: that Scots are lucky enough to have the chance to be free. Many peoples never had this chance. Seizing the opportunity is important because people need hope and/or purpose or we get depressed and give up. We can do without one of them but not both: one or other will prevent feelings of desolation, and the degradation of self-harm. Being responsible for a local, familiar ecosystem and local, familiar people is an excellent way to nurture feelings of purpose. The sense of security from being surrounded by healthy ecosystems and trusted acquaintances is an excellent way to nurture feelings of hope.

Freedom and responsibility are gateways to these sources of hope and purpose for everyone. Scotland needs freedom for Scots to be hopeful and purposeful. And the world needs hopeful, purposeful Scots if it is ever to be free of injustice and humanity’s failed war with nature.

So, there are many useful things to do whatever the outcome of a vote on independence, and there are risks and opportunities in any course of action. But choosing independence would have the following inherent benefits:

achieving freedom itself, and the responsibilities that come with it;
reducing political risk, by leaving an England that is on a dangerous path;
shocking England back to sanity, by leaving the Union after Brexit;
helping to save the world, through wise social and environmental policies;
building hope and purpose among the peoples of Scotland; and
taking advantage of good fortune and the opportunity to be free.