{"id":3467645,"date":"2017-07-26T12:26:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T12:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3467645"},"modified":"2017-07-26T12:26:25","modified_gmt":"2017-07-26T12:26:25","slug":"a-failure-of-imagination-on-climate-risks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2017-07-26\/a-failure-of-imagination-on-climate-risks\/","title":{"rendered":"A Failure of Imagination on Climate Risks"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an extract from\u00a0Disaster Alley: Climate change, conflict and risk<\/a><\/b>\u00a0published recently by Breakthrough.<\/em>
\n<\/a>
\nClimate change is an existential risk that could abruptly end human civilisation because of a catastrophic \u201cfailure of imagination\u201d by global leaders to understand and act on the science and\u00a0 evidence before them.<\/p>\n

At the London School of Economics in 2008, Queen Elizabeth questioned: \u201cWhy did no one foresee the timing, extent and severity of the Global Financial Crisis?\u201d The British Academy\u00a0answered<\/a>\u00a0a year later: \u201cA psychology of denial gripped the financial and corporate world\u2026 [it was] the failure of the collective imagination of many bright people\u2026 to understand the risks to the system as a whole\u201d.<\/p>\n

A \u201cfailure of imagination\u201d has also been identified as one of the reasons for the breakdown in US intelligence around the 9\/11 attacks in 2001.<\/p>\n

A similar failure is occurring with climate change today.
\n<\/a>
\nThe problem is widespread at the senior levels of government and global corporations. A 2016 report,\u00a0Thinking the unthinkable<\/a>,<\/i>\u00a0based on interviews with top leaders around the world, found that:<\/p>\n

\u201cA proliferation of \u2018unthinkable\u2019 events\u2026 has revealed a new fragility at the highest levels of corporate and public service leaderships. Their ability to spot, identify and handle unexpected, non-normative events is\u2026 perilously inadequate at critical moments\u2026 Remarkably, there remains a deep reluctance, or what might be called \u2018executive myopia\u2019, to see and contemplate even the possibility that \u2018unthinkables\u2019 might happen, let alone how to handle them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such failures are manifested in two ways in climate policy. At the political, bureaucratic and business level in underplaying the high-end risks and in failing to recognise that the existential risk of climate change is totally different from other risk categories. And at the research level in underestimating the rate of climate change impact and costs, along with an under-emphasis on, and poor communication of, those high-end risks.<\/p>\n

Existential risk<\/b><\/p>\n

An\u00a0existential risk<\/a>\u00a0is an adverse outcome that would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential. For example, a big meteor impact, large-scale nuclear war, or sea levels 70 metres higher than today.<\/p>\n

Existential risks are not amenable to the reactive (learn from failure) approach of conventional risk management, and we cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, or social attitudes developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Because the consequences are so severe \u2014 perhaps the end of human global civilisation as we know it \u2014\u00a0researchers say<\/a>\u00a0that \u201ceven for an honest, truth-seeking, and well-intentioned investigator it is difficult to think and act rationally in regard to\u2026 existential risks\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet the evidence is clear that climate change already poses an existential risk to global economic and societal stability and to human civilisation that requires an emergency response. Temperature rises that are now in prospect could reduce the global human population by 80% or 90%. But this conversation is taboo, and the few who speak out are admonished as being overly alarmist.<\/p>\n

Prof. Kevin Anderson\u00a0considers\u00a0<\/a>that \u201ca 4\u00b0C future [relative to pre-industrial levels] is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond \u2018adaptation\u2019, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable\u201d. He\u00a0says<\/a>: \u201cIf you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4\u00b0C, 5\u00b0C or 6\u00b0C, you might have half a billion people surviving\u201d. Asked at a 2011 conference in Melbourne about the difference between a 2\u00b0C world and a 4\u00b0C world, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber replied in two words: \u201cHuman civilisation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The World Bank\u00a0reports<\/a>: \u201cThere is no certainty that adaptation to a 4\u00b0C world is possible\u201d. Amongst other impacts, a 4\u00b0C warming would trigger the loss of both polar ice caps, eventually resulting, at equilibrium, in a 70-metre rise in sea level.<\/p>\n

The present path of greenhouse gas emissions commits us to a 4\u20135\u00b0C temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels. Even at 3\u00b0C of warming we could face \u201coutright chaos\u201d and \u201cnuclear war is possible\u201d, according to the 2007\u00a0The Age of Consequences<\/i><\/a>\u00a0report by two US think tanks.<\/p>\n

Yet this is the world we are now entering. The Paris climate agreement voluntary emission reduction commitments, if implemented, would result in the planet warming by 3\u00b0C, with a 50% chance of exceeding that amount.<\/p>\n

This does not take into account \u201clong-term\u201d carbon-cycle feedbacks \u2014 such as permafrost thaw and declining efficiency of ocean and terrestrial carbon sinks, which are now becoming relevant. If these are considered, the Paris emissions path has more than a 50% chance of exceeding 4\u00b0C warming. (Technically, accounting for these feedbacks means using a higher figure for the system\u2019s \u201cclimate sensitivity\u201d \u2014 which is a measure of the temperature increase resulting from a doubling of the level of greenhouse gases \u2014 to calculate the warming. A median figure often used for climate sensitivity is ~3\u00b0C, but\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0from MIT shows that with a higher climate sensitivity figure of 4.5\u00b0C, which would account for feedbacks, the Paris path would lead to around 5\u00b0C of warming.)<\/p>\n

So we are looking at a greater than one-in-two chance of either annihilating intelligent life, or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential development.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Clearly these end-of-civilisation scenarios are not being considered even by risk-conscious leaders in politics and business, which is an epic failure of imagination.<\/p>\n

Of course, the world hopes to do a great deal better than Paris, but it may do far worse. A recent\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0of 656 participants involved in international climate policy-making showed only half considered the Paris climate negotiations were useful, and 70% did not expect that the majority of countries would fulfill their promises.<\/p>\n

Human civilisation faces unacceptably high chances of being brought undone by climate change\u2019s existential risks yet, extraordinarily, this conversation is rarely heard.<\/p>\n

The Global Challenges Foundation (GCF) says that despite scientific evidence that risks associated with tipping points \u201cincrease disproportionately as temperature increases from 1\u00b0C to 2\u00b0C, and become high above 3\u00b0C\u201d, political negotiations have consistently disregarded the high-end scenarios that could lead to abrupt or irreversible climate change. In its\u00a0Global Catastrophic Risks 2017<\/i><\/a>\u00a0report, it concludes that \u201cthe world is currently completely unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of catastrophic climate change\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Paris emissions path (in blue), not accounting for \u201clong-term\u201d carbon-cycle feedbacks (Climate Interactive)<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n

Scholarly reticence<\/b><\/p>\n

The scientific community has generally underestimated the likely rate of climate change impacts and costs. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are years out of date upon publication. Sir Nicholas Stern\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report: \u201cEssentially it reported on a body of literature that had systematically and grossly underestimated the risks [and costs] of unmanaged climate change\u201d.<\/p>\n

Too often, mitigation and adaptation policy is based on least-drama, consensus scientific projections that downplay what Prof. Ross Garnaut called the \u201cbad possibilities\u201d, that is, the lower-probability outcomes with higher impacts. In his\u00a02011 climate science update<\/a>\u00a0for the Australian Government, Garnaut questioned whether climate research had a conservative \u201csystematic bias\u201d due to \u201cscholarly reticence\u201d. He pointed to a pattern, across diverse intellectual fields, of research predictions being \u201cnot too far away from the mainstream\u201d expectations and observed in the climate field that this \u201chas been associated with understatement of the risks\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2007,\u00a0The Age of Consequences<\/i><\/a>\u00a0reported:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur group found that, generally speaking, most scientific predictions in the overall arena of climate change over the last two decades, when compared with ultimate outcomes, have been consistently below what has actually transpired. There are perhaps many reasons for this tendency\u2014an innate scientific caution, an incomplete data set, a tendency for scientists to steer away from controversy, persistent efforts by some to discredit climate \u201calarmists,\u201d to name but a few\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For many critical components of the climate system, we can identify just how fast our understanding is changing. Successive IPCC reports have been reticent on key climate system issues:<\/p>\n