{"id":20021999,"date":"2017-04-20T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thethirdpole.net\/?p=21999"},"modified":"2020-12-23T17:40:08","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T12:10:08","slug":"climate-change-the-case-for-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/climate-change-the-case-for-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate change: the case for hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, the threat of global nuclear annihilation was a constant feature of media discourse. When the classic movie on the topic, Dr Strangelove<\/a>, was made in 1964 by Stanley Kubrick, it was ahead of its time. By 1983, though, the topic was common enough to be the central peg in the teenager film War Games<\/a>, and was even the topic of the song, Russians<\/a>, in Sting\u2019s first solo album, The Dream of Blue Turtles<\/a>, which was released in 1985.<\/p>\n

Popular culture was steeped in the feeling of doom, while at the same time there was a realisation that global politics had reached a dead end. As Sting sang, \u201cThere’s no such thing as a winnable war\/It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore,\u201d the leaders of the US, the UK and the erstwhile Soviet Union began talks to scale down the nuclear threat. Before the end of the decade, the Cold War was over.<\/p>\n

Nuclear weapons have not disappeared, and are still a concern for us today. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan<\/a> would throw up 5 million tonnes of black carbon into the atmosphere, cause global famine, change rain patterns, shorten planting periods, and cause a global cool down for 25 years. This would be in a war involving 100 small nuclear devices, while there are 17,000 currently in the world. Nevertheless, today we do not live in a world dominated by the feeling of impending doom brought about by nuclear catastrophe. Instead we live in a world threatened by a climate change catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Severe, pervasive and irreversible<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)<\/a> released in 2014, made it clear that, unless steps were taken, manmade climate change carried \u201cthe likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.\u201d It is probable that the focus on severe and irreversible change \u2014 the thought of glaciers disappearing from the Himalayas, of the polar ice caps melting completely and leading to a warmer ocean, and up to 200 million people<\/a> being displaced \u2014 was the major factor that helped pave the way for the Paris Agreement. But to focus on only the risk may not tell the whole picture.<\/p>\n