Fixing the Planet: have we finally got some concrete options?

Fixing the Planet: have we finally got some concrete options?

I’ve been to a few talks recently at the British Museum as part of their Out of this World exhibition, the general theme being science fiction and whether a lot of what we might think of as science fiction is really about to become science fact. So far this has been a debate on what the future might ’mean’ to us, the looming potential technological revolution and yesterday’s topic, whether we can solve the climate problem.

I’m probably going to post a few things about the series, which has so far been excellent, but this one’s going to focus on the climate debate. The premise of the talk was about whether we now have some ‘concrete’ options on how to save the planet from our scorching, super sea-levels, not enough food and ‘everybody has a fairly dreadful time of things’ apocalyptic future (on a sliding scale of shitness, depending on who you listen to). Not being amazingly up on current cutting edge climate-fixing technologies, I thought the event sounded like a good way to learn about some and hopefully coming out of it thinking a bit more that the answer would be “yes”, rather than the usual “we’re all fucked”.

The panel consisted of several prominent climate-based people, Chris Goodall, a notable climate scientist; Claire Faust, a climate activist; Craig Sams, the founder of organic chocolatiers Green & Black’s; Chris Turney, Professor of Climate Change at the university of New South Wales and the Chair, Mark Stevenson, a popular science writer and author of The Optimist’s Tour of the Future. I’ve not read The Optimist’s Tour... but it sounds pretty good – basically he travelled around the world asking really super-scientists about what they were up to and reporting back that generally it sounds like the future’s going to be pretty cool (which I think we all agree hopefully involves hoverboards). Stevenson had been on the panel of the week’s earlier events and generally I found his opinions and approach to science to be engaging and, well, optimistic, in a sense of both the celebration of the science itself but also of the overall outcomes. In part, his attitudes are kind of what I want to get into here, but we’ll get to that later on.

The climate debate started with an overview of the problem and a quick summary of the major routes possible solutions are taking. One of the major things under discussion was biochar, a method of recarbonising soil by producing a kind of charcoal from trees, which when mixed with the soil causes the earth to re-absorb carbon and return to being the carbon-rich kind of soil that we had in the days of yore (apparently, modern soil and its contents has like 10% of the carbon that it used to; carbon that’s now in the atmosphere).

The relative merits of biochar were debated heavily by the panellists, namely the likelihood it would work and exactly how much of it we’d need, which seemed to be a lot (like a “we’d need to dedicate a fifth of the world’s arable land to making it” kind of amount). Arguably, that could be justifiable if it was the ultimate answer but you’d clearly need to be so absolutely completely certain it would work or don’t even bother trying to convince anyone to even start taking it seriously. And so the debate went on for a bit, as well as about a few other likely candidates for our salvation, each panellist voicing opinions for or against nuclear power etc, but ultimately never really reaching much in the way of an agreement.

After a while, I started to think about the question posed by the event and whether I felt we were getting any closer to answering it – my conclusions were definitely heading towards the negative. I’d also made a few notes about things like dealing with climate change deniers, the overall negativity of climate science and the unreasonable expectations that some climate activists have (such as trying to bring down or radically change capitalism or global economics or calling for us all to return to our tribal roots and live in a yurt hunting rabbits). Sitting in that lecture hall listening to some really outstandingly knowledgeable individuals debate the options made just me think “if these people can’t decide what to do, then how the hell am I supposed to?”

Based on what I learned over the course of the event and on what I knew beforehand, I think we probably do have some serious options about fixing the planet; some of those options may still only be at the design stage, some may be more efficient or practical than others and any likely overall solution is likely to need to be comprised of many smaller ones rather than one big fix, but we definitely have some really strong ideas to start making progress. If that’s the case then why did I still feel as though we weren’t getting anywhere?

Climate change is a stone-cold proven fact and, although we might not be able to say for certain exactly what the consequences of it may be, we do know that they’re almost certainly going to be extremely serious and this is what made me realise that the question the event had set out to answer – do we have any concrete options to fix the planet – wasn’t the right question to be asking at all; what we should have been asking is “do we even have a concrete message about fixing the planet?”

I felt that although no one at the talk doubted the validity of climate change or the relevance of climate science I felt that if someone had spoken up against it, they would have derailed the whole conversation, certainly for a good while, and this is really where the problem lies: people who speak out against climate change are taken just as seriously or at least given an equal platform as those who try and raise our awareness, regardless of how qualified they may be to comment on the issue. Why isn’t Jeremy Clarkson dragged kicking and screaming into the news more often for voicing his idiotic and naive opinions, just as he would if he’d suddenly jumped on the homophobe bandwagon? Why do we allow oil companies who clearly have a vested interest in denying climate change to voice theirs?

In my opinion, climate science needs to wake up. Anyone with half a brain can work out that we’re doing awful things to the planet, so why do we allow that message to get denied, subverted or derailed by those with other agendas (which are now agendas on a rapidly decreasing timescale unless they stop acting like dicks, by the way)? The problem is that a massive part of the population is just not exposed to the facts in an engaging and educational way; it’s probably not the job of actual scientists to directly engage the public in the majority of subjects – they certainly don’t have to on this scale for most other topics (apart from maybe stem cells and GM foods) – and frankly I think their time is better spent doing what they do best, but what we need is for the scientific community to find a better way of putting their message across; more Brian Cox celebrating the science and less the University of East Anglia being dragged around by it, if you like.

Climate science also needs to get away from its obsession with declaring incomprehensible facts, the public isn’t equipped to deal with the data in the same way scientists are – “so what if the sea rises ten centimetres in ten years, ten centimetres is nothing”, “so we’re only putting an extra tenth of the carbon into the atmosphere that occurs naturally, how can only a tenth make a difference?” - the numbers themselves aren’t what’s important, it’s the impact of those numbers. Telling people about the sea level rise is one thing, telling them that a billion climate refugees might arrive at their doorstep in ten years is another.

The public are the key; convince them and you start convincing governments that come election time, they’d better start pulling out their green guns; convince the public and you start getting them to want to buy products that they know are economically and environmentally sustainable; do that and companies and corporations are going to change their policies; after that follows the markets and so on. In some respects it’s already happening - look at how many zero-carbon and electric cars have just come on the market – that’s great but it’s obvious - cars are the first thing people think of that burns fossil fuels, so an obvious status symbol for the greener citizens – let’s build on that and start pushing for zero-carbon energy companies and the like.... well, maybe it’s not quite as simple as that but you get the idea. If the public care then it’s a shorter walk until everything else starts to have to.

We also need to start helping to protect our climate scientists. The vast majority of them are doing incredibly complex work that requires the kind of skills that most of us will never have, to try and solve what may be the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. They’re not working to create an apocalyptic climate smokescreen just so that they can stay in their jobs; I would imagine most of them would love to be able to empirically prove that climate change wasn’t real as, not only would it immediately make them the world’s most famous scientist, but they’d be extremely relieved in the knowledge that we might actually make it into the next century. Unfortunately, for them, all the results that come back show that climate change is very real and very serious. What I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t allow those with opposing agendas to interfere with the science. If scientists can’t work because they’re bombarded with Freedom of Information requests, or feeling threatened about simply being honest, then we need to ensure that our legislation and media are doing the job of condemning the instigators, rather than the scientists that suffer.

The last thing I’m going to say is that climate change is sold as about the single most depressing subject ever, pretty much wall to wall doom and gloom. Perhaps it’s time we started getting away from the negativity of the apocalyptic future and start looking at the positive and pro-active things that can be done to avert or change it. Humanity’s next biggest challenge is surviving its own achievements; it’s about growing up rather than growing fat; it’s about progress in maturity rather than progress in greed. Let’s phrase the question like you would to a child: what do you want to be when you grow up? The first answer everyone gives is “alive”.