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Monday, February 17, 2025

No obituary for Earth: Scientists fight climate doom talk

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1050 days ago
20220404
FILE - Icebergs float in a fjord after calving off from glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet in southeastern Greenland, Aug. 3, 2017. Climate change is going to get worse, but as gloomy as the latest scientific reports are, including today’s from the United Nations, scientist after scientist stress that curbing global warming is not hopeless. The science says it is not game over for planet Earth or humanity. Action can prevent some of the worst if done soon, they say. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

FILE - Icebergs float in a fjord after calving off from glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet in southeastern Greenland, Aug. 3, 2017. Climate change is going to get worse, but as gloomy as the latest scientific reports are, including today’s from the United Nations, scientist after scientist stress that curbing global warming is not hopeless. The science says it is not game over for planet Earth or humanity. Action can prevent some of the worst if done soon, they say. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

By SETH BOREN­STEIN | AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

 

(AP) — It’s not the end of the world. It on­ly seems that way.  Cli­mate change is go­ing to get worse, but as gloomy as the lat­est sci­en­tif­ic re­ports are, in­clud­ing to­day’s from the Unit­ed Na­tions, sci­en­tist af­ter sci­en­tist stress­es that curb­ing glob­al warm­ing is not hope­less. The sci­ence says it is not game over for plan­et Earth or hu­man­i­ty. Ac­tion can pre­vent some of the worst if done soon, they say.

Af­ter decades of try­ing to get the pub­lic’s at­ten­tion, spur ac­tion by gov­ern­ments and fight against or­ga­nized move­ments deny­ing the sci­ence, cli­mate re­searchers say they have a new fight on their hands: doomism. It’s the feel­ing that noth­ing can be done, so why both­er. It’s young peo­ple pub­licly swear­ing off hav­ing chil­dren be­cause of cli­mate change.

Uni­ver­si­ty of Maine cli­mate sci­en­tist Jacque­lyn Gill no­ticed in 2018 few­er peo­ple telling her cli­mate change isn’t re­al and more “peo­ple that we now call doomers that you know be­lieve that noth­ing can be done.” Gill says it is just not true.

“I refuse to write off or write an obit­u­ary for some­thing that’s still alive,” Gill told The As­so­ci­at­ed Press, re­fer­ring to the Earth. “We are not through a thresh­old or past the thresh­old. There’s no such thing as pass-fail when it comes to the cli­mate cri­sis.”

“It’s re­al­ly, re­al­ly, re­al­ly hard to walk peo­ple back from that ledge,” Gill said.

Doomism “is def­i­nite­ly a thing,” said Woost­er Col­lege psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Su­san Clay­ton, who stud­ies cli­mate change anx­i­ety and spoke at a con­fer­ence in Nor­way last week that ad­dressed the is­sue. “It’s a way of say­ing ‘I don’t have to go to the ef­fort of mak­ing changes be­cause there’s noth­ing I can do any­way.’”

Gill and six oth­er sci­en­tists who talked with The As­so­ci­at­ed Press about doomism aren’t sug­ar-coat­ing the es­ca­lat­ing harm to the cli­mate from ac­cu­mu­lat­ing emis­sions. But that doesn’t make it hope­less, they said.

“Every­body knows it’s go­ing to get worse,” said Wood­well Cli­mate Re­search Cen­ter sci­en­tist Jen­nifer Fran­cis. “We can do a lot to make it less bad than the worst case sce­nario.”

The Unit­ed Na­tion’s In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change just is­sued its third re­port in six months. The first two were on how bad warm­ing is and how it will hurt peo­ple and ecosys­tems, with to­day’s re­port fo­cus­ing on how the ex­tent of dis­rup­tion de­pends on how much fos­sil fu­els are burned. It shows the world is still head­ing in the wrong di­rec­tion in its fight to curb cli­mate change, with new in­vest­ments in fos­sil fu­el in­fra­struc­ture and forests falling to make way for agri­cul­ture.

“It’s not that they’re say­ing you are con­demned to a fu­ture of de­struc­tion and in­creas­ing mis­ery,” said Chris­tiana Figueres, the for­mer U.N. cli­mate sec­re­tary who helped forge the 2015 Paris cli­mate agree­ment and now runs an or­ga­ni­za­tion called Glob­al Op­ti­mism. “What they’re say­ing is ‘the busi­ness-as-usu­al path ... is an at­las of mis­ery’ or a fu­ture of in­creas­ing de­struc­tion. But we don’t have to choose that. And that’s the piece, the sec­ond piece, that sort of al­ways gets dropped out of the con­ver­sa­tion.”

Unit­ed Na­tions En­vi­ron­ment Pro­gram Di­rec­tor In­ger An­der­sen said with re­ports like these, of­fi­cials are walk­ing a tightrope. They are try­ing to spur the world to ac­tion be­cause sci­en­tists are call­ing this a cri­sis. But they al­so don’t want to send peo­ple spi­ralling in­to paral­y­sis be­cause it is too gloomy.

“We are not doomed, but rapid ac­tion is ab­solute­ly es­sen­tial,” An­der­sen said. “With every month or year that we de­lay ac­tion, cli­mate change be­comes more com­plex, ex­pen­sive and dif­fi­cult to over­come.”

“The big mes­sage we’ve got (is that) hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties got us in­to this prob­lem and hu­man agency can ac­tu­al­ly get us out of it again,” James Skea, co-chair of Mon­day’s re­port, said. “It’s not all lost. We re­al­ly have the chance to do some­thing.”

Mon­day’s re­port de­tails that it is un­like­ly, with­out im­me­di­ate and dras­tic car­bon pol­lu­tion cuts, that the world will lim­it warm­ing to 1.5 de­grees Cel­sius (2.7 de­grees Fahren­heit) since pre-in­dus­tri­al times, which is the world’s agreed up­on goal. The world has al­ready warmed 1.1 de­grees Cel­sius (2 de­grees Fahren­heit). And ear­li­er IPCC re­ports have shown that af­ter 1.5 de­grees, more peo­ple die, more ecosys­tems are in trou­ble and cli­mate change wors­ens rapid­ly.

“We don’t fall over the cliff at 1.5 de­grees,” Skea said, “Even if we were to go be­yond 1.5 it doesn’t mean we throw up our hands in de­spair.”

IPCC re­ports showed that de­pend­ing on how much coal, oil, and nat­ur­al gas is burned, warm­ing by 2100 could be any­where from 1.4 to 4.4 de­grees Cel­sius (2.5 to 7.2 de­grees Fahren­heit) above pre-in­dus­tri­al times, which can mean large dif­fer­ences in sick­ness, death and weath­er dis­as­ters.

While he sees the in­crease in doom talk as in­evitable, NASA cli­mate sci­en­tist Gavin Schmidt said he knows first-hand that peo­ple are wrong when they say noth­ing can be done: “I work with peo­ple and I’m watch­ing oth­er peo­ple and I’m see­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion. And peo­ple are do­ing things and they’re do­ing the right things for the most part as best they can. So, I’m see­ing peo­ple do things.”

Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty cli­mate sci­en­tist Michael Mann said sci­en­tists used to think Earth would be com­mit­ted to decades of fu­ture warm­ing even af­ter peo­ple stopped pump­ing more car­bon diox­ide in­to the air than na­ture takes out. But new­er analy­ses in re­cent years show it will on­ly take a few years af­ter net ze­ro emis­sions for car­bon lev­els in the air to start to go down be­cause of car­bon be­ing sucked up by the oceans and forests, Mann said.

Sci­en­tists’ le­git­i­mate wor­ries get re­peat­ed and am­pli­fied like in the kids’ game of tele­phone and “by the time you’re done, it’s ‘we’re doomed’ when what the sci­en­tist ac­tu­al­ly said was we need to re­duce or car­bon emis­sions 50% with­in this decade to avoid 1.5 (de­grees of) warm­ing, which would be re­al­ly bad. Two de­grees of warm­ing would be far worse than 1.5 warm­ing, but not the end of civ­i­liza­tion,” Mann said.

Mann said doomism has be­come far more of a threat than de­nial­ism and he be­lieves that some of the same peo­ple, trade as­so­ci­a­tions and com­pa­nies that de­nied cli­mate change are en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple who say it is too late. Mann is bat­tling pub­licly with a re­tired Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona ecol­o­gist, Guy McPher­son, an in­tel­lec­tu­al leader of the doom move­ment.

McPher­son said he’s not part of the mon­e­tary sys­tem, hasn’t had a pay­check in 13 years, doesn’t vote and lived off the grid for a decade. He said all species go ex­tinct and hu­mans are no ex­cep­tion. He pub­licly pre­dict­ed hu­man­i­ty will go ex­tinct in 2026, but in an in­ter­view with The As­so­ci­at­ed Press said, “I’m not near­ly as stuck on 2026,” and men­tioned 2030 and changes to hu­man habi­tat from the loss of Arc­tic sum­mer sea ice.

Wood­well’s Fran­cis, a pi­o­neer in the study of Arc­tic Sea ice who McPher­son said he ad­mires, said while the Arc­tic will be ice free by the sum­mer by 2050, McPher­son ex­ag­ger­ates the bad ef­fects. Lo­cal Arc­tic res­i­dents will be hit hard, “the rest of us will ex­pe­ri­ence ac­cel­er­at­ed warm­ing and sea-lev­el rise, dis­rupt­ed weath­er pat­terns and more fre­quent ex­treme weath­er. Most com­mu­ni­ties will adapt to vary­ing de­grees,” Fran­cis said. “There’s no way in hell hu­mans will go ex­tinct by 2026.”

Hu­mans prob­a­bly can no longer pre­vent Arc­tic Sea ice from dis­ap­pear­ing in the sum­mer, but with new tech­nol­o­gy and emis­sions cuts, Fran­cis said, “we stand a re­al chance of pre­vent­ing those (oth­er) cat­a­stroph­ic sce­nar­ios out there.”

Psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Clay­ton said “no mat­ter how bad things are, they can al­ways be worse. You can make a dif­fer­ence be­tween bad and worse... That’s very pow­er­ful, very self-af­firm­ing.”

___

As­so­ci­at­ed Press writer Frank Jor­dans con­tributed from Berlin.

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