Nick Breeze (NB): Thinking back to the beginning of the Potsdam Institute, and where we are today, how do you feel society has responded to the threat of climate disruption?

John Schellnhuber (JS): It is actually paradoxical: society, in the beginning, was more attentive of climate change and global warming, than it is today. I recall very well, in 1988 I was a visiting professor at the University of California, and in the Spring of 1988 there was a famous Senate hearing in the US where Jim Hansen said, ‘this is 99 percent due to anthropogenic global warming’.

At that time it made headlines all over the planet because it was a distant threat. It is a threat where you can play around a little bit. ‘Wouldn’t it be terrible if it happened?’ Today we are in the midst of global warming. You can see it everywhere, and because it is so overwhelming, people just try to push it out of their consciousness.

And this is the problem, actually. We have waited so long to tackle it that we now seem to be overwhelmed and we declare defeat, and this is the worse thing that can happen because still, we can, not solve the problem, but we can minimise it to something that we can still manage.

If we now find reasons to give up, when it will turn into an outright catastrophe, and now I know as a scientist based on the papers we have published in the last two or three years, that we really face the question of whether human civilisation can be sustained over the next century.

NB: You have said that we are in a position where we can manage the situation, but on the flip-side, we are questioning whether civilisation can be sustained. There is a very stark difference!

JS: Okay, if we get I wrong, do the wrong things, policy, economics and psychology, in science, then I think there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years. I am pretty sure.

NB: What sort of timeframe would you put on that?

JS: Oh, it can happen pretty soon and pretty quickly, because, you see, if a minor conflict in Syria is sending so many shockwaves, through migrants for example, to Europe, so, it is all about nonlinearity. 

It’s the nonlinearity stupid, huh?

This goes in both ways. On the one hand, we can have climate disruptions coming very soon, but in the medium term, clearly, if we don’t do a lot now, we will send the Greenland ice sheet into irreversible collapse, and so on, you talk about all of these.

So, the nonlinearities are our biggest enemy when it comes to the Earth System. On the other hand, why I am still optimistic, is that in society, you also have nonlinear dynamics. Tipping points that are social, economic and psychological. 

You know the German feed-in tariff was a tiny little law which was done at the margins of this government. It instigated a landslide development in renewable energies. So we are currently writing a paper where we identify eight or ten socioeconomic tipping points, and if we transgress these lines, we can instigate a nonlinear dynamic which will deliver change, reducing emissions within the next thirty years.

So, you see, you have good nonlinearities and bad nonlinearities, and the question is, if we use our policies and our imagination wisely, the good nonlinearities will win!

NB: And this is the management side isn’t it? How we overcome this horrible situation?

JS: Yeah, you have to identify a portfolio of options, you know, disruptive innovations, self-amplifying innovations. You cannot predict precisely. You need to look into whether there are high nonlinear potentials, whether it is in electric cars, construction for wood instead of concrete, instead of cement, and so on. 

Then you have to bet… say you identify twenty horses, you then have to send all of them into the race, and maybe three of them will make it across the finishing line. But they will instigate the change you need.

The other thing which is very important, the conventional economist will want to be efficient but efficiency is the enemy of innovation. You have to strand assets, you have to waste capital, because you invest into the wrong things, because you cannot know beforehand. But you also invest in the right things.

So I would say that we somehow trapped in this efficiency thing, and we dig deeper and deeper. So we have to have the courage to squander money. To throw money at things that have potential.

It is venture-capital at a global scale we have to muster. We cannot efficiently get ourselves out of this predicament. So we have to save the world but we have to save it in a muddled way, in a chaotic way, and also in a costly way. That is the bottom line, if you want to do it in an optimal way, you will fail.

NB: A moment ago you said that ignoring climate change is the worst thing that could happen, but when news comes out that the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia, are denying the latest climate science, a lot of people get very angry and say what’s the point?! What would you say to them?

JS: Sure, I will very silently work behind the scenes to maybe influence that, through my friends in science and so on. Let’s see what happens. But you see, giving up is not an option. Why? Let me give you an example: I have a ten years old boy and let’s assume he has an accident and the doctor says, ‘okay, we might save his life if we do this type of surgery but there is only a five percent chance otherwise he will die!’ Would you say, ‘no, we don’t do it’? Of course, you will do it.

So this is the situation we have now. I think we have more than a five percent chance of succeeding but it is definitely less than 50 percent, in my view. But what is the option? If we have a final chance to save our culture and our civilisation, I am just compelled to do it.

Here, clearly for the planet, there is no alternative. We definitely have a chance which is above zero, as I said, definitely we have no chance whatsoever if we want to be optimal. Optimality is the completely wrong paradigm for the situation we are in!

This Author

Nick Breeze is a climate change journalist and interviewer posting also on envisionation.co.uk. He is also organises the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series (climateseries.com) where Professor Schellnhuber will be speaking on 21st February 2019. Follow Nick Breeze on Twitter at @NickGBreeze

The world was shocked by the viral video of fifteen year-old Jamal, a Syrian refugee who was pushed to the ground and had water poured over his face. As his GoFundMe page reaches more that £150,000 in donations, the public outcry is keenly felt.

However, the question still remains, why did no one come to his aid when so many people were present at the attack?

Research into “the bystander effect” might help us to understand this phenomena in its wider psycho-social context. 

Bystander effect 

An article published in March of 1964 can shine some light. The article was printed in The New York Times and reported on the death of a 28-year-old woman called Kitty Genovese. Kitty was stabbed outside of her home in Kew Gardens, New York. The article claimed that 38 neighbours witnessed the attack but none of them contacted the police or attempted to help her.

In spite of some inaccuracies, the article inspired decades of research into what turned out to be one of the most replicable phenomena in social psychology: “the bystander effect”.

The bystander effect is the idea that the more people present at an emergency situation, the less likely people are to offer help to a victim. A study by Latané and Rodin staged a situation in which  participants heard an investigator trip and then call out that she had hurt her ankle. When individuals were alone, 70 percent of them attempted to help the woman, however when another bystander was present, only 40 percent offered support.

This behaviour pattern has since been replicated many times in modern day settings, such as when individuals are a witness to cyber bullying. Many factors have been shown to contribute to the bystander effect, such as ‘diffusion of responsibility’ – when an individual assumes that other people are responsible for taking necessary action, and ‘ambiguity’ – when there is an element of uncertainty surrounding the situation.

IPCC report

The bystander effect evidently played a role in the sad story of Jamal. However, could it also be having an impact on a disaster happening on a far wider scale?

In 2018 we witnessed flooding in India, heatwaves across Europe, hurricanes in the United States, fires in Portugal and cyclones in the Philippines. The scientific reality was spelled out 8 October 2018: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report – its stark message leaving no space for doubt and the false comfort it provides.

Climate change is often spoken about as an issue that will wreak havoc for our children and grandchildren, but the IPCC’s report revealed that if we continue on our current trajectory, we will reach 1.5 degrees of global warming as early as 2030. This level of warming would bring a high risk of floods, drought, extreme heatwaves and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

The IPCC report outlined that if we want any chance of preventing climate breakdown we need fossil fuels emissions to peak as early as 2020 and to reach net zero by 2050.

What is clear from the report is that the threat outlined demands a response. Jim Skea, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III, warned: “Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics, but doing so would require unprecedented changes”.

Climate inaction

While some climate change campaigners spoke of experiencing anxiety, depression and grief following the release of the report, the considerable majority of the UK population went about their days pretty much as usual. It will probably seem strange to our children that there was more commotion about why the singer Ariana Grande broke up with comedian Pete Davidson. 

It is possible that our inaction on the issue of climate change is the outworking of the bystander effect on a global scale.

Ambiguity has spread as the scientific consensus is watered down by many media outlets. A diffusion of responsibility has also intensified as the UK government promises to tackle the issue, while at the same time virtually banning onshore wind power, scrapping solar subsidies, promoting fracking, cancelling zero carbon homes and reducing subsidies for electric cars.

The global community of bystanders remains unresponsive, while climate change has already taken many populations victim around the world and imminently threatens to take many more.

However, now is not the time for inaction. The question we need to ask ourselves is what am I doing to tackle climate change, or are we a symptom of the bystander effect – just standing by, watching as the tragedy unfolds?

This Author

Holly-Anna Petersen has a BSc in Biology, an MSc in Psychology and a Post Graduate Certificate in LI Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. She works in the field of mental health and delivers talks on the topics of empowerment and wellbeing. Holly-Anna is a trustee of charity Operation Noah and has eight years of experience working in the social justice and environmental fields.

Caroline Lucas recently warned that, 10 years on from the financial crisis of 2008, of the possibility of a “climate-induced financial crisis”. With banks’ significant exposure to climate-risk, the ecological shocks of climate breakdown may translate directly to shocks to the financial system. With that system foundational to the global economy in our neoliberal age, that’s kind of a big deal.

Many banks have billions of dollars tied up in fossil fuel assets. Continuing to exploit those assets will lead only to increasingly frequent and severe weather events like the fires that ravaged California this summer – predictably hitting the poorest hardest. As densely populated areas become increasingly unliveable, extracting fossil fuels will become even more apparently untenable.

These crisis moments will inevitably command commensurate responses, but with no guarantees of justice or sustainability. If these involve a sudden restriction of supply of fossil fuels, the value of much fossil capital could fall away abruptly.

Carbon bubble

When the housing bubble popped instigating the 2008 crisis, it was the poor who bore the costs of that crisis that the rich had spent years profiting from the cultivation of. The same story would be true of a climate-finance crisis if the carbon bubble pops.

Lucas’ response is to call for central banks like the Bank of England lead the finance sector in taking bold climate action. Her suggested reforms start with disclosures of the full extent of banks’ exposure to climate risk. She then proposes adapting regulations designed to avoid another 2008 to the challenges of climate change, alongside central banks guiding credit towards decarbonisation efforts. If the Bank of England lacks to bravery to take these reforms on voluntarily, politicians should force it to do so.

Our ambitions must extend beyond those central bank though. I’ve written about the opportunity that private banks like Barclays have to show climate leadership in this moment and laid out a roadmap for them to ditch all fossil fuels. However, we cannot cannot expect private banks to do so on their own.

The allure of short-term profit is too strong. Why exclude fossil fuels when there’s still money to be made? Its the rules of the game that need rewriting to allow banks to do all they must to contribute to decarbonisation.

Policy

We need strong policy to regulate the financial sector making future financial crises impossible, whether that’s a repetition of the events preceding 2008, or further exacerbation by banks of climate breakdown pushing the carbon bubble closer to bursting. The Labour’s party’s 2017 manifesto already commits to remaking the banking system. In Government, it will protect consumers by placing a ring-fence between investment and retail banking; break up RBS into local banks; and create a more diverse banking system, backed up by legislation.

As well as building a financial system that works for the many, not the few. Labour’s next manifesto must also seek to transform banking so it works for the climate too.

Labour should make it clear to banks that they are expected to:

• Disclose their exposure to climate risk and fossil fuels;

• Publish a Paris Agreement compliant time-bound plan to exclude all fossil fuels;

• Introduce policy immediately banning any new finance for fossil fuel companies or projects;

• Direct a significant portion of its investments towards research & innovation for decarbonisation or directly into renewables projects backed and approved by the government.

Banks’ long complicity in financing climate breakdown means they have surpassed the point of deserving a ‘carrot’ to incentivise this course of action. It must be all ‘stick’. If they fail to do abide by these regulations, a Labour government should be clear that their response will be to bring the banks into public ownership without compensation (they have stolen enough from us to not deserve any more), break them up, and directly mobilise those resources to finance just transition to a zero-carbon economy.

Our ambitions for our decarbonised economy should be grand – transforming society and economies both out of ecological necessity but also for the prosperity of the many and not the few – and that won’t come cheap! Its right that responsible for inflicting the climate crisis on us – banks, fossil fuel companies, etc – should pay for the transition. Assuming they won’t do so voluntary, its urgently time that we make them.

This author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of climate change campaigns at People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

A study by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) shows that over the last year, scientists have published at least 43 research papers looking at links between climate change and extreme weather events, of which 32 found that climate change made the events more likely or more intense.

Combining these numbers with findings from a similar report published last year shows that in the three years since the Paris Agreement, scientists have published 102 papers looking for a link, of which 73 found the fingerprints of climate change.

The figures suggest that the pace of investigation and the rate at which positive links are being uncovered are accelerating.

Vulnerable countries 

Commenting, report author Richard Black, director of the ECIU, said: “The rising incidence of extreme weather events was one of the factors in the minds of ministers who concluded the Paris Agreement three years ago – and since then, evidence for a link to climate change has undeniably grown.

“The studies that we document here show a climate change fingerprint on events including heatwaves, droughts and storms on every continent except Antarctica, confirming people’s real-life experiences of events like this summer’s North European heatwave.

“As the impacts of the changing climate are increasingly felt on people’s doorsteps around the world, this detailed understanding is going to become more and more important.”

Climate Analytics’ Bahamas-based climate researcher and IPCC author Dr Adelle Thomas, who will also be speaking about the report at COP24 in Katowice on 11 December, said that climate attribution studies are particularly important for the most vulnerable countries:

“Attribution of extreme weather events to climate change is critical for small islands, which are already facing increased intensity of tropical cyclones, prolonged periods of drought and more severe coastal flooding.

“Improved scientific understanding of how a warming climate drives or amplifies these events shows that climate-related loss and damage is occurring now, and that vulnerable nations, like small island developing states, need support to address these escalating impacts.”

Climate change

Dr Friederike Otto, Acting Director of the Environmental Change institute at Oxford University and co-investigator on the international World Weather Attribution (WWA) project, said that attribution research will become increasingly important for businesses, investors and insurers: 

“Attribution science is becoming faster and more reliable all the time, and in the last few years we’ve seen a marked acceleration in the number of analyses being done.

 “And what this shows more and more clearly is that climate change is increasing the odds and the impact of many extreme weather events, in virtually every part of the world.

 “In the coming years we can expect the pace of analysis to pick up even further – and that will be of huge importance for policymakers, businesses, insurers and the public, in forming a realistic picture of what climate change is doing right now.”

This Article

This article is based on a press release from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. 

The impacts of climate change are felt more keenly by women, minorities and people living in poverty. But the majority of climate change research and negotiation is undertaken by men – the voices of those most at risk are the least audible. 

This is mirrored in climate change and eco-dystopian fiction, in which women often suffer the worst effects, but the heroic solution is driven by Western scientists. This narrative is also reinforced by climate change communication, which focuses on the technological and political changes driving the ‘fight’ against climate change. 

Indigenous and Third World actors are often cast as passive victims, or in some cases as the perpetrators of environmental degradation in their own lands.

Under Her Eye

Representing indigenous, non-western or oppressed groups and societies as either passive victims or environmentally naïve perpetrators is damaging and Western-centric.  It ignores the entrenched power structures and socio-political injustices that control human-environment interactions and allows these groups no agency either in their current situation, or in the design of their future under climate change.

Under Her Eye: Women and Climate Change was an international arts-science conference and festival run by Invisible Dust, an organisation that works with artists and scientists to explore different ways of communicating and responding to climate change. 

Under Her Eye was unique in that it featured only women speakers who were working to communicate, research or address climate change. Speakers included Caroline Lucas MP, Co-Leader UK Green Party; Hakima El Haité, Moroccan Minister for the Environment and COP22 Host; Laura Tenebaum, former Senior Science Editor, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab; Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economicsand Renegade Economist; Christina Figueres, former Executive Secretary if the UNFCCC; and Margaret Atwood, author and inspiration for the conference title. 

The aim of Under Her Eye was to give the platform of communicating and discussing climate change to those who are so often underrepresented in these discussions, namely women, activists, artists, and researchers working in the arts and humanities. 

The conference allowed topics such as carbon trading, seas and oceans, and health and wellbeing, to be addressed from drastically different viewpoints even when the topics covered were very similar. This highlighted that diverse people, disciplines and sectors all have important roles to play in the climate change conversation.

Hostile climates

Alongside the Under Her Eye conference, Invisible Dust ran a fellowship for fifteen young female artists, activists and researchers working with issues related to climate change or the environment. 

Theses women received training and the opportunity to be involved in the conference and associated artist workshops. 

Inspired by the passionate and enlightening discussion in the Under Her Eye conference, a few of the fellows decided to organise a second conference focussing on the exploration of marginalised voices and alternative perspectives on climate change in an academic context, focusing on the contributions of postgraduate and early career researchers.

This conference, titled A Hostile Climate? Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change, aims to interrogate and respond to the meaning of ‘hostile climates’ in diverse and receptive ways, hearing from scholars across the humanities, sciences and beyond as they contribute to engaging discussion on the topic. 

Like Under Her Eye, we will explore the many different facets of climate change and related environmental catastrophes through the lens of different academic and artistic disciplines. The floor will be given to PhD students, early-career researchers and artists who are producing new and innovative work on the topic. 

Keynote speakers

We welcome contributions from all genders, and aim to keep the focus on a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities and disciplines, in order to allow the voices of a range of demographics to be heard more strongly than they currently are in climate change discourse and debate.

The keynote speakers chosen for the conference are Professor Julie Doyle and Dr David Higgins. Professor Julie Doyle is based in the School of Media at the University of Brighton. Her work examines the role of media, communication and culture in shaping understandings of, and responses to, climate change. 

Professor Doyle’s work focuses on visual communications, and examines the limitations and successes of visual communications in helping make climate change a relevant issue and inspiring engaged and effective action. Professor Doyle is the author of the book Mediating Climate Change, and has been a key figure in establishing the genre of environmental communication.

We (the conference organisers) first met Julie Doyle during the Under Her Eye fellowship, when she ran a seminar inspired by her research and recent. This seminar became one of the core inspirations for the organisation of A Hostile Climate, and it is very fitting that Julie Doyle will be one of the keynote speakers. 

Mediating change

Dr David Higgins is an Associate Professor based in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Coming from a background in Romantic literature and ecology, within recent years Dr Higgins’ work has included the book British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2017), which considers the monumental eruption of Mt Tambora in 1815 and the global crisis that followed. 

This book was part of a broader AHRC-funded project, which culminating in the international conference Mediating Climate Change at the University of Leeds, which brought together scholars from across the humanities to discuss the problems of communication, representation and comprehension that we encounter when considering climate change. 

Dr Higgins also currently works on the AHRC-funded project Land Lines: British Nature Writing, alongside colleagues from St Andrews and Sussex University. In 2018 Dr Higgins won the ASLE-UKI/Orkney Science Festival lecture prize for his lecture ‘Frankenstein on a Changing Planet’, which discussed the failure of Victor Frankenstein to take responsibility for his creation in relation to contemporary debates about anthropogenic impact on our planet. 

Dr Higgins’ work is increasingly focused on engaging wider audiences with environmental issues, and he is currently developing new public collaborations around culture and climate. 

Conference themes

The themes covered in A Hostile Climate include (but are not limited to):

•           The risks of climate change for those living on the margins of society, and how these may be apprehended or mitigated
•           How communities across the globe experience climate change, in a radically different way to those on mainland Europe and the US
•           How technology, entrepreneurship and science could provide benefits for humanity in a climate-changed world OR the possible negative ramifications of reliance on technology in attempting to solve these issues 
•           Non-Western, Indigenous and grassroots approaches to (and understandings of) climate change and related environmental issues
•           Understanding and responding to climate-changed environments through music, art and performance  
•           Climate change and migration: the risks and realities of hostility towards migrants in a climate-changing world, or alternative responses to possible climate change-induced migration

In addition to the conference presentations, we will be holding a small art exhibition instead of the more common academic poster exhibition. This exhibition will display works by young artists relating to climate change, environmental issues, and the inequities and inequalities that cause and arise from such issues. 

Embracing connections 

By including both artists and researchers in the sciences and humanities, we are encouraging attendees to view their research from a perspective beyond their normal purview, and to examine the social and scientific connections between their work and the work of others. 

As Under Her Eye fellow and conference organiser Claire Cooper stated: “One of the greatest difficulties that climate researchers often face is how troublesome it is to disentangle the science from the social impacts. 

“Perhaps the solution is not to further the separation between a work of research and its consequences, but to embrace the connections between the theoretical, the empirical, and the artistic exploration of the questions we ask”.

These Authors

Isabel Cook, Lucy Rowland, Rosamund Portus and Claire Cooper are doctoral researchers exploring climate change and environmental catastrophes from varying perspectives such as archaeology, environmental humanities, and geology. They are Under Her Eye fellows and the organisers of A Hostile Climate conference. More information on the conference can be found on the conference website.