Is there a better way to write about the climate crisis?
I’ve been trying to formulate a way to write something about the climate crisis that doesn’t descend into fatalistic despair and to be honest, I’m not sure there’s an honest way to do that.
Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to learn more about what’s happening with the climate and how to prepare for the chaos to come. I’ve been reading books and listening to podcasts and watching documentaries all with a view toward becoming more informed and better able to advocate for the things we need. I knew we needed to act boldly, but I didn’t really have the knowledge base to back up my arguments. I’ve done my reading and well, it’s not looking good. I’m by no means an expert but you don’t need to be an expert to understand that humanity is facing a code red as the recent UN report said.
Somewhere along the way, I hit my personal climate change tipping point. I passed some invisible threshold where climate became the lens through which I see everything else. I think about my behaviour more - holding a plastic water bottle and cringing at how many decades it’ll be on the planet after me, thinking about air travel more, embracing second-hand things for my home (this is also because I’m thrifty!). I’m not saying that this is a wise or even a healthy approach, but it is what’s happened.
One gap in my knowledge has been about understanding the impacts on Ireland specifically. Much of what I’ve consumed comes from the US and is therefore informed by their experience with apocalyptic forest fires, tornados, hurricanes and other extreme weather events that produce very dramatic images. Ireland’s experience of the climate crisis is different. We have seen images of flooding and localised forest fires but it’s significantly less dramatic than the footage from other parts of the world. Of course that doesn’t mean that the impact of climate change won’t be catastrophic in Ireland, only that by the time those dramatic images are available, it’s likely to be too late.
Over the last few years of reading, I found myself in a familiar loop: the more I learn, the more I worry. And the more I worry, the less capable I feel at communicating the situation rationally. From there, it’s a short walk to paralysis, overwhelm and despair.
If there’s a moment where you transition from being a regular person with a cursory knowledge of what’s happening to our planet (carbon emissions and plastics = bad) and a climate evangelist, then I have passed it. And as righteous and correct as the evangelists are, I’m not sure that they’re the best people to communicate the crisis to those who will probably never read entire books on the chaos to come. The challenge of communicating something so enormous and so life-altering particularly in a country that enjoys a broadly temperate climate is one I think about a lot.
One study conducted by Irish scientists projected the following changes by mid-century:
Temperatures to increase by 1.0-1.6 degrees (relative to 1981-2000) with the largest increases in the east;
More frequent summer heatwave events, especially in the south;
Approximately 50 per cent fewer frost and ice days;
More variable precipitation, with more dry periods and more heavy precipitation events;
A decrease in snowfall of 50 per cent or more;
That all feels pretty flat and meaningless on the page. Imagining what it’d be like to live through it is almost incomprehensible, even to a person committed to understanding what it would be like.
It gets a little easier when there are visuals.
This map provides an approximation of what Dublin will look like by 2050. Red indicates the areas of Dublin that will be below annual flood levels. Portmarnock, Donabate, Swords, Howth, Malahide, Grand Canal Dock, Ballsbridge, Sandymount are all at risk. Throughout the rest of the country, parts of Cork, Wicklow, Wexford, Kerry, Limerick and Louth are also in trouble. The complete map, prepared by US-based non profit Climate Central, is available here.
The map is based on a global temperature increase of two degrees. According to the latest UN report, we are at imminent risk of hitting 1.5 degrees. More generally, we are on track for 3 degrees of warming, which means that these projections are likely to be significantly worse. Although it’s also worth noting that this map doesn’t factor in seawalls and levees so some areas could fare better than the map suggests. On the other hand, the map doesn’t account for extreme weather events like storms so it could be worse.
If you made it through that last paragraph, you’ve just seen another challenge in communicating the crisis.
It ‘may’ be X.
There’s a ‘risk’ of Y.
Z is ‘likely’.
Rather than saying that parts of Dublin are at risk, I want to say that they’ll be ‘under water’ but that’s not technically correct. Part of this, obviously, is my own ignorance. I’m a nerd who did the reading, but I’m not a scientist or a climatologist or anyone else who can speak with authority on the topic. If I understood it more (& I plan to keep learning), perhaps I could put it more forcefully though then, I think, you are further removed from the general reader. Hence the problem: the climate crisis is so severe that being rational also sounds alarmist.
It’s difficult to communicate the end of life as we know it. It’s difficult to tell a story that touches every part of human life. It is difficult to write honestly without sounding shrill, which is a horrible, sexist word but also an appropriate one. (Synonyms for ‘shrill’: howl, steam, screech and yell. All things I want to do when I read about climate!)
To refer to it generalically as ‘climate’ as I have just done is a mistake. You wouldn’t describe water coming through your front door as being because of ‘climate’, nor would you tell the doctor that you’re on the respiratory ward after decades inhaling traffic fumes because of ‘climate’.
So the question is, how can you tell a coherent story about something that touches every part of human existence without sounding like you’re panicking?
Perhaps the true block in communicating the climate crisis is in the reader’s mind, as opposed to on the page. The psychological incentive toward denying and ignoring the end of life as we know it is strong. Though it is true that as a person actively searching out information about the climate crisis, I’ve really struggled to find things that captured my attention.
Some exceptions: Jonathan Saffron Foer’s “We are the Weather”, anything featuring David Attenborough, Ezra Klein’s series on climate though this is definitely in the ‘nerd’ category. My favourite was about how human activity has changed the chemical composition of our oceans.
When the covid pandemic ravaged the world, there was some hope that the mass mobilisation of people toward a single goal (in that case, averting death) could be replicated by the climate movement. We passed peak oil and had concrete examples of how populations could adapt to challenging circumstances. From this perspective, that optimism appears to have been short-sighted, not least because vast cohorts of people refused to follow the science even when their own lives were immediately in danger.
So I guess we’re back where we started: despair. Well that and a commitment to keep learning, trying, writing, doing something if only to avert the feeling of sitting in a closed room as it fills with toxic gas.
Recommendations:
Bring back the nervous breakdown.
“I felt like I’d just been stabbed by someone I once admired and now he was demanding that I stop bleeding.” Saeed Jones on Dave Chapelle’s latest stand up special which I haven’t seen and probably won’t.
Following a horrific attack, listen to Izzy Kamikaze’s powerful victim impact statement.
File under: not at all surprising. Given the international data, this is also to be expected. And related, a truly horrific story that got almost no meaningful coverage.
Had complicated feelings about this.
Amazing wildlife photos. (+ the full gallery)
Interesting polling from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre on consent in Ireland. I joined the launch event and I think someone mentionned that the data relating to non-heterosexual participants hadn’t been analysed before the research was published, which is disappointing. But the presentations were interesting and are online here.
