ATHENS — The climate news for October was most discouraging, especially coming as it did on the heels of the inspiring People's Climate March in New York City at the end of September.
The month's depressing lowlights included the announcement by NASA that August was the hottest month globally since records began to be kept in 1880. This was followed shortly thereafter, moreover, with an update that September had beat that record, and that 2014 was right on track to become the hottest year on record.
And as if this weren't enough, carbon emissions continued to increase, rising this year to record levels.
All of this news assumed more alarming proportions when a study published in New Scientist found that scientists have greatly underestimated the extent of global warming because temperature readings from the southern hemisphere oceans were inaccurate.
“One could say that global warming is ocean warming,” noted two authors of the study from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Quantifying how fast and where the ocean is warming is vital to understanding how much and how fast the atmosphere will warm, and seas will rise.”
This discovery means that the world is warming faster than we thought.
But arguably the most disheartening news was the report from the World Wildlife Federation that the Earth's vertebrate wildlife populations have halved over the past 40 years because of biodiversity loss. Specifically, there are now 52 percent fewer mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians than there were in 1974.
As Professor Ken Norris, director at the Zoological Society of London, observed, “The scale of biodiversity loss has reached critical levels, and damage to the very ecosystems that are essential to our existence is alarming. The damage is a consequence of the way we choose to live.”
At a time when scientists are increasingly warning that “[w]e have five minutes before midnight” (Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and that we're in the “Zero Decade” and must get it right very soon if we are to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic and irreversible climate change, October was not reassuring.
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It's not a question of what we can do: there are many things we can do, even now, at this 11th hour, to avert climate catastrophe.
As we demonstrated with the Marshall Plan after World War II, and the Apollo effort to put a human being on the moon, we're capable of harnessing the financial and technological resources required to undertake enormous projects. Nothing less than a similar effort must be initiated for the climate, right now.
Rather, the question is, are we as a people willing to do what needs to be done to avoid a global crisis that threatens societal collapse and species extinction?
Are we capable of making the necessary sacrifices around our consumerist way of life for the sake of our children and grandchildren, not to mention the remaining half of the vertebrae population, as well?
Can we act this selflessly?
And what exactly needs to be done? Solar panels and cargo bikes, community gardens and farmers' markets are commendable, but obviously they and other individual lifestyle changes have no measurable effect on the system change we need to make in our burning of fossil fuels.
In his now-classic article for Rolling Stone, “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math”, Bill McKibben pointed out that in order to have any chance of keeping the increase in global temperatures below 2 degrees Centigrade, which has been generally agreed as the red line that we can't cross (we're currently at 0.9 degrees), we could “safely” burn only 565 of the 2,795 gigatons of carbon already contained in the proven coal, oil, and gas reserves in the ground.
In short, we'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid disaster.
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This means the big oil companies have to walk away from the billions of potential profits represented by that 80 percent that would remain in the ground. Whatever else they do, like converting to renewable energy companies, they can no longer be fossil-fuel companies. They will have to put the rest of life before their bottom line, instead.
It also means that, at least for those of us who have enjoyed the material abundance afforded by the age of oil during the last 150 years, we will have to accept a much-more-modest lifestyle. (No, there is no green version of the fossil-fuel economy, which is based on the continued extraction of finite resources to feed the insatiable appetite of infinite growth.)
Quite simply, we're going to have to give up the kind of life we now take for granted.
But more yet, if we're to survive climate change, we as a species must move beyond the insufferable hubris that we've exhibited toward the rest of life for 10,000 years that began with the dawn of agriculture and accelerated exponentially with the so-called “Enlightenment,” Industrial Revolution, and the discovery of fossil fuels.
This is the defining characteristic of Western civilization, an approach and attitude that views us as both independent of, as well as superior to, the rest of nature. It is this original power relationship - humans over the rest of life - that has allowed us to oppress, abuse, exploit, and otherwise visit upon other living beings, including our own kind, the violence of mindlessness - the rule of heartlessness - as if those beings were not an integral part in the web of life. This must change as well.
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As daunting as all of this might appear in the context of our times, this challenge also represents an unprecedented opportunity for our species to finally get it right.
Necessity could be the midwife of virtue in this instance, simply because if we want to realize a successful transition to a sane and viable post-oil world, we have no choice but to be the truly enlightened, civilized species we've always claimed to be. This is our no-choice moment.
As much as climate change is about changing the source of our energy, it is even more about changing the values we choose to live by. Moral courage, personal integrity, and selfless love, all of which we've demonstrated a capacity for at moments throughout our history, need to now be practiced with an everyday constancy, supplanting the greed, violence, self-aggrandizement, and disrespect for the sacredness of life that has led us to our present dilemma.
Can we do this? Of course we can.
It's just a question of whether we will.