End of the world as we know it

This piece is about the end of the world as we know it. But this end is not as frighteningly personal as a global stock market crash that puts your Eid bonus at risk. It is also not as terrifyingly exciting as an impending nuclear holocaust that spawns metaphorical Stanley Kubrick-styled films. This “end,” is climate change.

And here it loses its charm, considering climate change is the least glamorous of all global disasters threatening to upend human civilisation. I can’t even get you to keep reading if I tell you there’s a new report out on global climate change which predicts global catastrophic changes in the next decade. Why? Because climate change reports are the new Trump tweets, they used to be frightening and intimidating but now there are so many of them they’re just a new devolutionary norm. The recent one in the line comes out of a panel of scientists working under the United Nations.

Things said by the United Nations are important not because they hold any intrinsic significance as coming from a powerful multinational body that can actually enforce change, no, things said by the United Nations are important because, well, there’s only so few of them. You see, the United Nations is the least likely organisation to take a strong stance on a particular matter, and say anything at all about the same, partially because the UN has to weigh the concerns and interests of almost every human being on earth, at least in theory, before it makes a claim but mostly because realistically some of these human beings are more equal than others for the UN and so the UN is hard-pressed not to take a position on any matter that is important to those “more-equal” citizens. Climate change is one of these matters where the UN is likely to face pressure from the “more-equal” citizens, mostly leaders of economies that rely heavily on industrial production. Most countries on the Security Council of the UN, which is an even more euphemistic euphemism for the “more-equal” euphemism, are economies that rely heavily on industrial production. China and the US are the world’s two biggest economies and rely heavily on manufacturing, while countries like Russia rely heavily on resources such as oil and coal. Industrial manufacturing and oil and coal production are some of the leading causes of climate change, and threaten to make this change irreversible. At the same time, any slowdown in the growth of these sectors spells significant trouble for the economies of nations on the Security Council and also for most developed and developing nations across the world. Which is why it is so hard for the UN, an organisation that sustains its most vital operations courtesy of the donations of these very economies, to take a strong stance on global climate change.

This is why the report is so significant. Because if the UN is taking a strong stance on climate change, and saying that we only have a decade or so before we face irreversible catastrophic changes, then this isn’t even the worst-case scenario, considering the UN by its inherently optimistic nature is mandated to work with best case scenario. Because if this is the best-case scenario, a decade or so before the world goes belly up, it’s terrifying to think what is actually going on.

The report of the UN is damning. Essentially what it says is that our previous worst-case scenario is now a best-case scenario, keeping in mind that the UN is prone to work with a best-case scenario, is the actual worst-case scenario even worse than the best-case scenario that we thought was the worst-case scenario before the report?

To simplify the last paragraph, here’s the context; Under the Paris Agreement signed by most countries of the world in 2015 it was agreed that the warming up of global temperatures would be restricted to 2°C by the year 2100. To simplify further, the recent global wave of extreme climate, including the punishing recent heatwaves that have killed hundreds if not thousands in Karachi, have been a result of a 1°C rise since preindustrial times. What the UN report says is that climate change will be exponential, which essentially means that if there’s a rise of 1°C, that will intensify global warming further and the effects of climate change will get severer as the climate warms, leading to a position where at the previous best-case scenario of 2°C, the world will experience catastrophic, irreversible change. Also, all this will happen in the next few decades, much before the stipulated deadline of 2100 as set in Paris. Also, if that wasn’t enough, the report claims that the catastrophic changes will begin to be experienced as soon as 2030. That’s 12 years from now.

Amongst other things, including the irreversible devastation of the earth’s forests, wildlife, resources, natural habitats and food chains, perhaps the most evident impact will be on sea level rises. With global warming, Arctic ice shelves will melt, as they are melting already, and contribute to sea level rise, which is also happening already. When the said sea level rise is significant enough, it could lead to major cities, including Karachi, Mumbai, Osaka, Shanghai, Miami and Rio being under water. Is the global catastrophe personal enough now?

Of course, there’s still much that can be done to contain global warming, but that statement shouldn’t give us any relief, considering it is only “containment.” The report suggests that climate change has already had effects which are irreversible and drastic measures are required to contain increases in the existing intensity of these changes. The report also talks about what can be done to stifle global warming, but there’s little point in talking about what can be done. The first thing to do, before deciding on things to do to contain climate change, is to acknowledge it, which is inexplicably rare, considering right-wing, populist politics is leading the fight against the acknowledgement of climate change in the first place and that the biggest economy in the world has already left the Paris Agreement under Trump.

So the world as we know it is about to end, human civilisation’s future is uncertain and yet that uncertainty is still not beyond cure, however, we can’t really get around to that cure because it’s an inconvenient time to acknowledge climate change, because, you know, that Eid bonus sounds just so great.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2018.

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