Climate change:Surely 'they' - the unidentifiable, omnipotent scientists - will prevent climate change. George Monbioturges us to stop waiting for miracles and take action ourselves
A week before my book was meant to be finished, my daughter was born. I typed the last chapter one-handed while she sat on my thigh. As my mind switched from wind speeds to stomach gas and back again, everything I had been thinking about became, for the first time, real to me.
The position of a writer on subjects such as climate changes is an odd one. In order to achieve some grasp of the complex matters about which you care, you must withdraw from the world and enter a shadowland of graphs and tables, equations and projections. In doing so, you must cease to care. The ecosystems you consider become "carbon sinks" or "carbon sources", the people become data.
I have found the likely effects of climate change easy to catalogue but almost impossible to imagine. I can understand, intellectually, that life will not be the same in 30 years as it is today, that if global warming goes unchecked it could be profoundly and catastrophically different. But somehow I have been unable to turn this knowledge into a recognition that my own life will alter. The world might change, but I will not.
But this baby, this strange little creature, closer to the ecosystem than a fully grown human being - part pixie, part frog, part small furry animal - now 16 days old and curled up on my lap like a bean waiting to sprout, changes everything. I am no longer writing about what might happen to "people". I am writing about her. As she trembles on the threshold of life, the evidence of her mortality is undeniable. It seems far more real than mine. A world in which unrestrained climate change threatens the conditions that make human life possible is the world into which she might grow. Global warming is no longer a generalised phenomenon, its victims no longer abstractions. Among them might be my child. Or yours. Or you. Or even me. Of all the complex matters encapsulated in this subject, this, until now, has been the hardest to grasp.
I see, too, confronted by biological reality, that even while considering the direst predictions and navigating the granite straits of thermodynamics, I have somehow also entertained a chiliastic belief in salvation. At the back of my mind is the notion that, however real our predicament and the difficulties of escaping from it seem, they cannot possibly be true. Someone or something will save us. A faith in miracles grades seamlessly into excuses for inaction.
The first of these is the hope that many people place - that I sometimes catch myself placing - in unproven technologies. Surely "they" - the unidentifiable, omnipotent scientists who have taken the place of God and lurk always on the fringes of our consciousness - won't let the biosphere collapse. Within the necessary time frame, indeed, so our imaginations tell us, in the nick of time, they will deliver us from evil by inventing a device that harnesses nuclear fusion, artificial photosynthesis, "hydrinos" or solar power on the moon.
Every few weeks someone contacts me with a proposal for what is, in effect, a perpetual-motion machine. He (it is always a he) can demonstrate to my satisfaction that, unlike all the quacks and cranks and mountebanks, he really has solved the problem. He has a special catalyst, or a new equation, or a hotline to God, that demonstrates what all other physicists think impossible: that energy can be created. My only defence against these people is to ask them for an article in a peer- reviewed journal, whereupon I never hear from them again.
It would be unfair to suggest that all speculative technologies are equally unlikely. Energy from nuclear fusion has always been 35 years away, but we cannot be sure it always will be. But even with an emergency development programme it is hard to believe that a new form of energy can be identified, harnessed, adapted to all the uses to which we would need to put it - heat, electricity, land transport, flight - and, then, universally applied by 2030. To succumb to hope of this nature is as dangerous as to succumb to despair.
The second miracle of deliverance, or excuse for inaction, is related to the first one: a belief that a new technology will permit us either to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it has been released or to cool the planet artificially. Some people advocate scattering iron particles on the surface of the ocean, to stimulate the growth of plant plankton, or chemical scrubbers to extract carbon dioxide from the open air, or making clouds with seawater, or flooding the atmosphere with particles of metal or other materials. All these schemes are either ridiculously expensive or exceedingly dangerous. Iron fertilisation stimulates the production of methane and wrecks the ecology of the oceans; seawater spraying could cause droughts in the countries downwind; injecting reflective materials into the atmosphere could eliminate the ozone layer.
The third excuse for inaction is more mundane. This is the idea, now popular with the Irish Government, that we can keep buying our way out of trouble. "Carbon offset" companies promise to redeem the environmental cost of your emissions by means of intercession with the atmosphere, such as planting trees or funding renewable-energy projects in developing countries. Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could kill, fornicate and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can leave your windows open while the heating is on, and drive and fly without endangering the climate, as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences.
The problem is this. If runaway climate change is not to trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the global temperature rise must be confined to two degrees above pre-industrial levels. As the figures I have published in my book Heat show, this requires a 60 per cent cut in global emissions by 2030, which means a 90 per cent cut in the rich world. Even if our carbon-offset schemes meant that every developing country became carbon-free, we would still have to cut most of the carbon we produce at home. Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.
The carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and immediate, but the cuts caused by carbon offsets are both uncertain and delayed. Many schemes will succeed, others will fail, especially some of the disastrous forays into tree-planting that offset companies have made. More importantly, a tonne of carbon saved today is far more valuable, in terms of preventing climate change, than a tonne of carbon saved in 20 years' time. Even the projects that promise to retrieve our carbon emissions by giving people better stoves or energy-efficient light bulbs take time to work. At best they merely delay the point at which emissions are saved. At worst they allow us to believe that we can carry on polluting, just as, before the Reformation, the sale of absolutions encouraged people to believe they could carry on sinning. I cannot think of a more effective means of postponing the hard choices we need to make now.
I have sought to demonstrate in Heat that the necessary reduction in carbon emissions is, if difficult, technically and economically possible. I have shown how a combination of energy efficiency, better planning, renewable energy and a massive reduction in flights can bring about the necessary 90 per cent cut without destroying industrial civilisation. I have not demonstrated that it is politically possible. There is a reason for this. It is not up to me to do so. It is up to you.
Those of us who are already campaigning to reduce the impacts of climate change cannot do it by ourselves. Given that this is the greatest danger the world now faces, we are astonishingly few. It appears to be easier to persuade people to protest against the termination of a favourite theme tune, or against speed cameras and high fuel prices, than to confront a threat to our existence. There is an obvious reason for this: in those cases something is being done to us. In this case we are doing it to ourselves.
The campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests that have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people but also against ourselves.
• Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning is published by Penguin, €16.99