Climate Change is…Simple

Back in 2012, a “thought leader”/blogger named David Roberts put together a TEDx talk called “Climate Change is Simple.” I enjoy David Robert’s writing and his self-deprecating and wry sense of humor, and I especially love this talk; it manages to strike just the right tone of frank and serious, but unpatronizing. It is alarming, but also edgy and humorous, and yes, he keeps it simple (if you can believe it). While one of the main undertakings of this blog is to spend a lot of time exploring in detail how complex everything surrounding Climate Change is, especially in our heads, David Robert’s idea that Climate Change is simple is dead on. Further, I think being crystal clear about how simple Climate Change is is essential to keep us moving forward. If you don’t want to spend the 15 minutes watching David Robert’s version (which I highly recommend), keep reading. Otherwise check him out here.

Here’s my version:

Despite how complex it is, yes, Climate Change is straightforward in at least one key way. To get there, let’s first list a few key things we can say quite simply. Specifically, it is simply true that:

1. Our climate is in the process of changing from one state to a new state.

2. The extent to which our climate will change before it stabilizes is unknown.

3. Nearly every consequence of climate change that we know of, significantly worsens 1 our collective quality of life (i.e. by the creation of more floods, more droughts, less predictability of weather, rise of sea level, acidification of oceans, desertification, and especially all the “human ills” that accompany these disasters).

4. Climate Change is almost exclusively due to our various behaviors, past and ongoing.

5. Due to our ongoing contributing behaviors, the extent to which our climate will change is also unwritten, and is being written as we move forward in time.

6. Therefore, we are presently in the process of determining the extent of Climate Change by our collective behaviors.

7. The degree and speed at which we transition away from the behaviors that cause and exacerbate Climate Change, will the be degree and speed at which we lessen the very serious costs of it.

Check each of these again to see if you agree. To the best of our ability to understand anything, each point is just true, right?

In other words: You don’t have to get lost in the complex scientific details to know that Climate Change is serious, and seriously bad. Further, it is serious enough to behoove us to pause in our lives for a moment and engage with the problem in a proportionately serious way, lest our collective anemic reaction exacerbate the problems it brings.

To echo David Robert’s punchline, he basically acknowledges that there is lots and lots of complexity surrounding Climate Change, but that the simple fact is that it is terrifying for its implications about the future of life on planet earth, and you shouldn’t need to know much more than that to be motivated to do something. To do more. However, he points out, while the implications of Climate Change are unthinkable, the things we need to do to avert its worst disasters seem correspondingly impossible. Impossible because they would require the kind of massive, intelligent, and coordinated global action the likes of which none of us has ever seen. He concludes in his talk with the following call to arms: “Whoever hears this, your job, for the rest of your life, is to make the impossible possible, in order to prevent the unthinkable.”

I think he’s profoundly right.

So as we go forward, I want to keep our eye on that ball. The logic of engaging more deeply with Climate Change is clear and simple. Climate change is real, it is bad, and it is worsening with time and “we” can’t react fact enough.

Our time in this community—the Me, This, Now community—is to be spent on how to make that happen, and that’s where all the complexity—social, psychological, political, personal—kicks in.

While I could spend weeks examining what “Climate Change is…” I think it is time to move on to Marshall Ganz, Movements and the Three Stories. Until next week : )

Family friends Solvay and Ben. Photo by Phara Charmchi

1. “Significantly worsens” is a complete euphemism here. Increasingly the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports warn of society-level collapse under current emission scenarios. ↩︎