A Changing Climate Gives Us a Chance to Change the World

Talking about climate change in this weather is like bringing up liver failure in the queue for a nightclub. No one wants to be that guy. And yet, here we are. Sorry, lads, but we've got to talk about it. We’re all in deep trouble.

Last week, Professor Michael Mann at Penn State University, one the world’s most eminent climate scientists, told the Guardian that the heatwave we've been experiencing in the UK and throughout Europe is "the face of climate change". He added: "We literally would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change… The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle, we are seeing them play out in real time and what is happening this summer is a perfect example of that."

The current impacts of climate change are bad enough. Wildfires in California have killed at least five people and prompted 37,000 evacuation orders; Japan declared its heatwave to be a natural disaster as 65 people perished in a week and 22,000 more were admitted to hospital; in Greece, the death toll from wildfires has reached 91; and in India, three people were killed fighting over water. Even in the UK, 50 homes were evacuated during the Saddleworth Moor fire, and 40 more were evacuated in North Wales.

If we do nothing to address climate change (or even if we do something, but not enough), the impacts we’ve seen already will get a lot worse. And though the heatwave hasn’t had a serious impact on most Britons outside of sticky tube journeys, there is simply no way Britain can avoid climate catastrophe over the next century without action. To be clear: when I say, "climate catastrophe", I don’t mean that the weather will suddenly get really, really bad in Britain. I mean that increasing extreme weather across the world will have enormous political consequences that this country – in our globalised world – won’t be able to escape, even if we can adapt to the immediate problem of extreme weather.

Let’s take food as an example. We know that one of the impacts of unchecked climate change will be food shortages (in fact, prices are already going up as crops wilt) and it’s easy from news reports to assume that the worst consequence of this would be running out of potatoes at your local Tesco Metro. But food shortages usually lead to a dramatic rise in prices; and when significant numbers of people can no longer afford the basic necessities, they tend to get pretty pissed off. This is what happened in 2007, when there was a sharp spike in food prices as a result of drought, oil prices and political decisions. Large parts of Asia and Africa were affected, and there were riots, violence and demonstrations in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Indonesia, Senegal, Somalia and many other countries. It’s true that Britain is a wealthy country compared to many of these places, but it’s also true that we are already dealing with increasing inequality and stagnating wages. What do we think is going to happen if we chuck unaffordable food into that mix?

Then there’s migration. We know that if the world becomes 4°C warmer over the next century (which is what will happen without action), some of the world’s most densely populated regions will become uninhabitable. Many more places will technically be habitable but very arid. The people who live there now are not simply going to wait to die as the climate changes; they’re going to move – which is exactly what we would all do in that position. And it’s extremely likely that huge numbers of people will travel to one of the world’s wealthiest regions, which is going to be least affected by climate change. That place is Northern Europe. In other words: right here.

The most well-known (and contested) climate migration figure is from Professor Norman Myers, who says that climate change could cause 200 million people to be displaced by 2050. We’ve already seen the appalling and brutal treatment of migrants arriving on Europe’s borders in response to a relatively minor influx of refugees.

So far, the political fallout has largely been the rise of the far-right and an increase in authoritarianism. The refugee crisis that will result from unrestrained climate change will make this one look like a children's tea party. We need to start having conversations about what the political consequences of that will be, who will benefit from it and what kind of society we’ll have as a result.

See, the question of climate change isn’t just about the direct impact of extreme weather. It’s also about how our societies and political institutions will cope with a climate changing quickly and dramatically, year-on-year. Simon Lewis, a climate scientist who authored the book The Human Planet with Mark Maslin, says: "Looked at individually, any of these problems – food supply, migration, bio-diversity, automation – are solvable. But when all of these challenges are faced together, year after year, how will our political systems cope? That’s the big question."

This might sound far-fetched, but if you think about it, the average millennial has already seen significant changes to the climate in their lifetime: we didn’t have annual extreme floods and forest fires as children; we didn’t see several hurricanes sweep through the US and the Caribbean one after the other. Climate change in the future is more extreme versions of those changes, taking place more frequently. The heatwave is an indication of a new normal, but if we do nothing, that new normal will soon be replaced by another new normal, and another and another, as greenhouse gas emissions increase.

It’s a daunting prospect, but we’re far from doomed. "The barriers to solve climate change are not technical, they’re political," says Lewis. "Fossil fuels are valuable when they’re extracted, but they need to stay in the ground. So their value needs to be zero, and that’s a political question. How do we change their value? We could ban their exploitation; we could ban people from investing in them. These are all economic and political questions, not technological ones about how we power society, which can already be powered by renewable energy."

The problem in Britain is that both major political parties have been negligent on climate change to the point of immorality. The vast majority of the blame must go to the Conservatives, of course, as the party in power over the last eight years. They may talk the talk on climate change, but they’re giving the go-ahead for fracking, for a third runway at Heathrow (which means the airport will emit the same amount of carbon as the whole of Portugal, and last year pledged "unprecedented support" to the fossil fuel industry after it gave the party massive donations.

Labour’s policies on the environment are much better, with initiatives like a programme to build over a million zero-carbon homes, and factoring in climate change to economic forecasts. But as the country overheats, where is the biggest progressive political party in Western Europe? What are its leaders saying? How are they mobilising and educating their half-a-million strong supporter base on this existential threat? The Labour Party is simply not good enough on this issue.

Political leaders need to feel the same sense of urgency around climate as they do now around Brexit or the economy. They need to be scared of what populations will do if they fail to act. There are lots of ways ordinary people can pile on the pressure here. First, we can join one of the many campaigns around the country to make our towns and cities completely fossil free. This movement recently scored a massive victory after the whole of Ireland agreed to remove all of its investments from fossil fuel companies, the first nation on Earth to do so. Second, we can support the national movement against fracking, which also secured a huge win last year when it persuaded the Scottish government to ban the practice. We can write to our MPs to insist that they take climate change more seriously, and complain to broadcasters and newspapers when they cover extreme weather without talking about climate change. And finally, we can just keep talking about the issue with friends, with family and with colleagues.

Climate change is such a big deal that we’ll need to make some major decisions to deal with it properly. That’s scary, but it’s also a great opportunity to talk about the kind of society we want to build. Climate change offers us the chance to remake the world so that it is more democratic and equal. We know the world is going to change unrecognisably over the course of the next century. The big question of this moment is whether we, collectively, will decide what those changes are, or have them decided for us.

@MissEllieMae