Trying to Stay Sane in a World of Rapidly Accelerating Climate Collapse

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Some days are better than others. Some days, the dread, the anger, the sadness don’t begin until some time after I’ve woken up, but it never takes long, to be honest, until I remember that I’m living in a dying world.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I can only suggest that you’re not really paying attention to what’s happening. For at least 35 years, climate scientists have been warning, based on a forensic analysis of observable reality, that our obsession with burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) has been supercharging the atmosphere with greenhouses gases (carbon dioxide, methane and others) that are increasing temperatures worldwide to an alarming degree.

In 1992, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), drawing on the expertise of climate scientists worldwide, first began warning about the danger of ever-increasing greenhouse gas production, but it wasn’t until 2015, in Paris, that they were able to secure a commitment from most of the world’s governments to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”, and to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The Paris Agreement was meant to be legally binding, but was fundamentally unenforceable, as no International Climate Court exists to enforce compliance, and, by and large, the obsession with burning fossil fuels has continued unabated. As NASA explain in a briefing on its website, “Half of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the last 300 years has occurred since 1980, and one quarter of it since 2000.” In addition, “Methane concentrations have increased 2.5 times since the start of the Industrial Age, with almost all of that occurring since 1980”, and the most recent news is no less alarming.

As the world has continued to heat up, after the Paris Agreement, with 2016 a year of particularly monstrous heat, the IPCC increasingly recognised that the 2°C target was redundant, because “crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.” However, by September 2018, the IPCC was so alarmed by the lack of progress that they issued a report warning that we had just 12 years left (until 2030) to keep the 1.5°C dream alive. As their updated Paris Agreement page explains, “To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030.”

The IPCC’s warning alerted me to the severity of the crisis, unparalleled in human history, and helped to kick-start movements of resistance (Greta Thunberg’s School Strikes for Climate, and Extinction Rebellion) that succeeded in driving the climate crisis up the political agenda. National and local governments declared climate emergencies, but, as with the Paris Agreement, largely failed to follow up with any meaningful action to stem the continuing rise in emissions.

Meanwhile, just as forecast, temperatures have continued to rise. The last nine years (2014 to 2022) have been the hottest years recorded since records began in the 19th century, but as governments continue to preside over ever-increasing emissions, and, if concerned at all, seem to regard 2030 as some sort of last-minute deadline to be addressed at one minute to midnight on December 31, 2029, the reality of climate collapse is happening much quicker than expected.

We don’t have until 2030 to effect major systemic change

The devastating events of last summer, and even more so this summer — life-threatening heatwaves and droughts, vast self-igniting wildfires and unprecedented flooding — have made it clear that any notion we may have had that 2030 was still a viable deadline for meaningful change has been irrevocably shattered. If governments have been comforting themselves that they still have seven years to cobble together some sort of last-minute plan, the last two summers really ought to make them question how much of a viable planet for human existence will still be in place just two or three years from now.

What we’ve been seeing last summer and this summer is that, because of the superheating of the atmosphere, normal weather circulation patterns — in other words, patterns that have been more or less stable for hundreds or thousands of years — are suddenly collapsing, creating heat domes of unprecedented ferocity, testing the limits of human heat endurance, creating deserts out of formerly fertile farmland, and also creating the conditions for self-triggering wildfires without any external ignition.

In an equally unprecedented manner, this rapid climate collapse is creating ferocious and ever more frequent storms and hurricanes, bringing torrential rainfall, not only leading to the inundation of vast areas of previously fertile farmland, but increasingly to horrendous flash-flooding from which no country seems to be immune.

If you happen to live somewhere that you haven’t experienced any of the above this summer, then you can count yourself as extremely fortunate, although it is, to be blunt, only a matter of time before climate collapse catches up with you, because nowhere is safe, and the knock-on effects will, in any case, affect all of us sooner rather than later — through food shortages and water shortages, for example, both of which threaten the very basis of civilisation.

Beyond these visible signs of climate collapse, other deadly thresholds are also being breached. This year, the oceans, which have been functioning as a carbon sink throughout the profligate increase in our greenhouse gas emissions, were finally overwhelmed. Between 1971 and 2018, as the Guardian explained in May, the oceans took in so much heat that it was “the equivalent energy of more than 25bn Hiroshima atomic bombs”, but this year the rise in ocean heat has shattered all previous records, and given that the oceans are “a vital climate regulator”, because they “soak up heat, produce half Earth’s oxygen and drive weather patterns”, as the BBC explained last month, it’s unsurprising that, as the Guardian explained in a recent editorial, “high sea temperatures over recent months have led scientists to reiterate their warnings that we are moving fast into uncharted, dangerous territory.”

In addition, and related to the above, sea ice is also melting at an unprecedented rate. In June, scientists warned that it was “now too late to save summer Arctic sea ice”, noting also that “preparations need to be made for the increased extreme weather across the northern hemisphere that is likely to occur as a result”, and, even more alarmingly, Antarctic sea ice is also disappearing faster than ever before. As the BBC explained just last week, “Antarctica’s huge ice expanse regulates the planet’s temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun’s energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it.” As scientists explained, “Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth’s refrigerator to a radiator.”

2023: the year that catastrophic climate collapse has become a reality

Given all of the above, 2023 is, by any objective measure, the year that catastrophic climate collapse has become a reality, and, to anyone paying attention, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest and most alarming story of all our lifetimes — yes, really: bigger than the Second World War, bigger than 9/11 and the “war on terror”, bigger than our families, our relationships, our jobs, our wealth, our status, our sense of entitlement, our holidays, and the ceaseless egotism of celebrity culture.

And yet, our political leaders and, for the most part, the mainstream media, still refuse to take the crisis seriously.

As a result, those who recognise the gravity of the situation, as well as being in a state of permanent incredulity (as climate scientists have been in for decades), are obliged to somehow cope with the relentless feelings of dread, anger and sadness that I mentioned at the start of this article, and — if they can avoid despair, the deadly killer of hope — are caught in a permanent struggle to raise awareness in a world that doesn’t seem to care, and that, in many ways, is actively conspiring to suppress even their limited efforts to sound the alarm.

In the UK, in Germany, in Australia and elsewhere, disruptions aimed at raising awareness — blocking traffic, throwing paint at the glass protecting revered works of art, and disrupting well-attended cultural and sporting events — are increasingly criminalised through punitive new protest laws, disproportionate prison sentences, and even pre-emptive arrest and imprisonment.

To their credit, activists remain largely undeterred. 600,000 people gathered in 60 countries around the world last weekend for the Global Fight to End Fossil Fuels, while tens of thousands of activists in the Netherlands endured water cannons for several days as they peacefully blocked a motorway, leading, astonishingly, to over 3,000 arrests, and in the UK this week Channel 4 broadcast an extraordinarily powerful programme by the well-known conservationist Chris Packham, ‘Is It Time to Break the Law?’, in which, in a gripping and searingly honest manner, he asked where the acceptable lines of protest and direct action are, and whether they should be crossed, when the very future of humanity and a habitable planet is at stake.

As Jack Seale explained in a Guardian review, the film “follows him as he deals with a profound dilemma about how to live his life, and what that life is for, and it tells us that this is a decision we at home must also now make.” He added, “The climate apocalypse is here and, despite fires and floods around the world, there is still — maddeningly — little sign of the change needed to avert the deeper catastrophe that is coming. Voting hasn’t worked. Peaceful protest hasn’t worked. Rational debate hasn’t worked. What now?”

What now, indeed? Was Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam right to tell Chris Packham that “a revered public figure being ‘banged up’ could be the tipping point the movement needs”?

I think it probably wouldn’t, because, unfortunately, I doubt that the severity of the crisis can be properly understood by the required number of people to effect a “tipping point” until politicians and the mainstream media “tell the truth”, as Extinction Rebellion first urged at their founding five years ago. Until people are mobilised out of their stupor, paralysis or denial by those who claim to provide leadership, it will remain a profoundly uphill struggle to convince the majority of people that a climate apocalypse is imminent, that no one is coming to help us, and that, the longer we pretend it isn’t happening, the more devastating the outcomes will be.

In daily life, I find it disconcerting to see the majority of people behaving as though the already unfolding collapse isn’t happening. It may sound harsh, but, in my own upwardly mobile neighbourhood, I often feel a twinge of profound sorrow as the coffee shops swarm with new mums, cooing over their babies as though the future is as dependable and immutable as the past, when that is clearly not the case. A metaphorical tsunami looms over everything and everyone, and yet no one wants to acknowledge it, even though I’m sure that, deep down, many of these mums are not members of that alarmingly large minority of people who continue to insist that climate change is a hoax.

In the mainstream media, even my daily visits to the website of the Guardian, whose coverage of the climate crisis is better than most media outlets, involves wading through a barrage of irrelevance and distractions to find the truth — wading, in other words, through the mostly irrelevant minutiae of daily politics, and the increasingly hollow coverage of ‘lifestyle’ topics, fashion and culture, ceaselessly diluting the necessary focus on the imminent collapse of everything we know and hold dear.

The worst politicians ever

While most of the mainstream media, in a criminally negligent manner, refuses to accept its obligation to accurately report the existential threat posed by climate collapse, politicians have, in most cases, entered a new era of contempt for reality, revealing, more than ever, how they don’t actually represent the people, but only represent the interests of big business, and also revealing how, when they do think of the people, it is only to try to find ways to lie to them to get them to support them at the ballot box.

Britain, sadly, has been let down by its politicians to an unprecedented degree since the catastrophic EU referendum in June 2016, which unleashed an entire political class based on denying reality and claiming that Brexit has been a success, when there is not a single instance of this actually being the case, and the UK is, instead, both suicidally impoverished, and isolated and alone, cast adrift like a pariah state.

The biggest crime of its post-truth politicians, however, is to believe that, “freed” from the EU, post-Brexit Britain has also been “freed” from its laws and its history, a tabula rasa on which the overweeningly arrogant fantasists of this deranged party of fake patriotism can project whatever they want, unperturbed by any membership of any larger entity that might be able to point out that they are suicidally demented.

Having had to endure Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, both of whom are disasters of such epic proportions that they make a black hole look friendly, it turns out that Rishi Sunak is as startlingly inept and mendacious as both of his predecessors. A hollow human being to an unprecedented degree, Sunak has just rowed back on Britain’s climate targets, delaying the planned 2030 phase out of all new petrol and diesel vehicles until 2035, and risibly inventing non-existent ‘green’ policies to ban — including “taxes on eating meat”, “new taxes to discourage flying”, “sorting your rubbish into seven different bins” and “compulsory car sharing” — in a profoundly shameful and almost certainly counter-productive effort to attract support from anyone beyond the rump of Conservative Party voters — that Trumpian constituency of miserable, backwards-looking haters — who love Brexit, hate refugees and also love their cars, almost certainly more than life itself, with a fanatical and unswerving devotion.

Sunak’s idiocy will no doubt backfire, just as his “small boats” debacle did this summer, because a maximum of 29% of the registered British electorate — and almost certainly less — are actually people who wouldn’t look out of place at a Trump rally, but, more importantly, his U-turn has also led to unprecedented anger from car manufacturers, energy suppliers and other representatives of big business, who are already investing billions of pounds in the transition to greener transport and energy, and who require, above all, leaders who can demonstrate consistency, not flip-flopping at the whim of the fossil fuel-backed ‘think-tanks’ of Tufton Street, who increasingly dictate government policy.

The endgame

In some ways, dismal little Rishi Sunak is an outlier, as the greenwards drift of business’s response to his U-turn shows, but throughout the western world, where emissions remain the highest, governments of all persuasions continue not only to let fossil fuel companies expand their homicidal operations; they also continue to subsidise them financially to the tune of billions of dollars, pounds and Euros.

As the Guardian reported last week, “The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership”, followed by Canada, Russia, Iran, China, Brazil and the UAE, and with significant contributions from Australia, Norway and the UK. As was also reported at the same time, in 2022 the World Bank “poured billions of dollars into fossil fuels around the world last year despite repeated promises to refocus on shifting to a low-carbon economy”, and in August the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established that, in 2022, fossil fuel companies “benefited from record subsidies of $13m (£10.3m) a minute”, as the Guardian explained, “despite being the primary cause of the climate crisis.”

Clearly, the dread, anger and sorrow experienced by those most sensitive to climate collapse is going to continue to be felt until all new oil, gas and coal extraction is stopped, although there are signs of progress — beyond the encouraging fact that car manufacturers and energy suppliers have turned on Rishi Sunak with the venom he deserves.

As the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported last week, “The world’s demand for oil, gas and coal will begin to decline this decade in ‘the beginning of the end’ of the fossil fuel era, as the Guardian described it, adding that the “global energy watchdog” had “projected for the first time that fossil fuel consumption will peak before 2030 and fall into permanent decline as climate policies take effect”, although with the caveat that “the forecast downturn is still ‘nowhere near steep enough’ to put the world on a path to limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrialised levels.”

Viewed optimistically, a turning point can still be reached, because renewable energy  is increasingly affordable, and is increasingly a sound investment, and banks — ever in search of profits — are increasingly taking notice. However, their investments in renewables are still overshadowed by their investments in fossil fuels, and as the UN reported two weeks ago, in the first “global stocktake” under the Paris agreement, prepared for the next UN climate summit, COP28, which will be held in Dubai in November, time has run out for any further evasion.

For the first time — cutting though oil-rich countries repeated objections — the UN report spells out that “unabated” fossil fuel use must be phased out, as well as scaling up renewables, ending deforestation, and tackling the alarming rise in methane emissions. especially from oil and gas operations.

As the Guardian’s environment editor, Damien Carrington, explained, “The report does not shy away from the scale of the challenge. ‘It is essential to unlock and redeploy trillions of dollars to meet global investment needs’, it says. In other words, it requires reengineering the global financial system”, and “[s]topping the fossil fuel investments and vast subsidies that are throwing fuel on the climate fire is critical.”

COP28 will almost certainly not deliver, but those of us seeking ways to foment the revolutionary changes needed to have a change of salvaging a liveable future can at least be reassured that the UN report spells out, unambiguously, that we must “unlock and redeploy trillions of dollars” to have a chance of succeeding. Scientists and advisers to the world’s governments have managed to point out that the global financial system as we know it — 21st century capitalism, in other words — must completely shift all its priorities if a habitable planet is to survive.

It won’t particularly help me tomorrow morning, as I grapple once more with the dread, the anger and the sorrow, but it will, hopefully, be sufficient to keep the despair at bay.

And if I can, I’ll try to find the patience to keep watching as the signs of climate collapse grow ever stronger — as they certainly will — and to believe that, sooner rather than later, and long before 2030, the shrill hysteria of the deniers will ring ever more hollow until it collapses under the weight of its own malignant emptiness, and the genocidal CEOs of the fossil fuel companies will be ever more clearly exposed until the change we need becomes inevitable.

What else can I do?

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.