A letter to my children

This is not an easy letter to write. You will have to bear with me.

Where to start? Perhaps by stating that on the journey to NZ, I finished reading a book by Dr James Hansen, who is a scientist working for NASA. He doesn’t help send people or things into space, but has been studying the Earth’s climate for many years. In the 1980s he testified before the US Congress about climate change. No one listened to him. The book is called “Storms of my grandchildren”.

It says on the front of the book, the headlines so to speak, “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity”. Sounds alarmist, does it not? Unfortunately, it seems to be all too true. All the real scientific research is supporting that statement.

I would not like you to think that I have just been influenced by reading some weird or fanatical book, and now am acting like some evangelist. When I first came across the notion of climate change, or global warming, some years ago, I became confused. There seemed to be a wide spectrum of opinion on the issue, and one often read very contradictory things – predictions of imminent disaster, and those who said it was all nonsense, some sort of conspiracy. So I determined to try to arrive at the truth of the matter, if that was possible. It has been quite a long journey, sorting the wheat from the chaff. At least my early scientific training stood me in some stead when trying to understand learned scientific articles and trying to distinguish between ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics’. I did not understand at first that there are special interest groups who go to great lengths, and spend a lot of money in deliberately trying to mislead people. Rather like the ‘smoking doesn’t harm you’ lobby a few decades ago (some of the same people, in fact, are now spreading lies denying climate change).

After all my research it is very clear to me that the next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years. And after that – god knows. I will venture to say that we are “ on a mass extinction course set by human action”.

Do you believe me? In one sense I do not want you to believe me, I haven’t raised you to accept blindly, I hope. I would prefer you to research it all out for yourselves, and if you are interested to do that I include some links below. But I know you are both busy with what is called ‘your lives’. And …… the issue is so very urgent, the prognoses for the future so very dire that …… but at this point I am feeling a need to explain why I am writing, why I haven’t written before (not that I haven’t mentioned the issues before) and my own state of mind about writing.

Remember the title of Hansen’s book, “Storms of my grandchildren”? It was the fact that he had two young grandchildren that finally convinced him to write, and took him out of his beloved laboratory into politics and activism. He said that he did not want his grandchildren to look back and say: “Opa understood what was happening, but he never made it clear.”

So like James Hansen, I also feel it is my responsibility to describe to you the likely prognosis for the planet and for human affairs. You may turn away from the facts, that is up to you. To say they are deeply disturbing is an understatement. I doubt that anyone else you know is going to seriously discuss these issues with you. Seems the world is in the grip of a mass denial of fact, and not just the facts of climate change (do you know how many Americans deny that evolution of life took place?). I doubt if your friends are unduly concerned. The media, if you read it, has other concerns – endless politics, the gossip of celebrities, sport, technology, entertainment, entertainment, entertainment.

But you have to know the truth. I am assuming it is better to know the truth than remain in ignorance. Perhaps truth is an absolute value in itself.

I am sorry that I have been too cowardly to write these things before. Perhaps even to write is cowardly, instead of discussing face to face. I hope we can do that. Perhaps one thing that has held me back is that I have no advice for you. I don’t really know how we should respond to the looming crises (actually looming is not the word; we ARE in crisis. 2010, with its many climate-related disasters, has especially revealed the path the world is charging head-on along.

Given your age, you have recently been branded as ‘ Generation Hot’. I quote:

“It’s now September, the end of summer, and my five year old has started kindergarten. It’s a huge transition, as every parent knows. Meanwhile, the oldest members of Generation Hot are embarking on their own huge transition. Now 21 or 22-years-old, they are leaving childhood behind for the adult world of work, marriage, and children.

But a third transition, just as huge, awaits each and every member of Generation Hot. One of the key facts of the 21^st century is that climate change is going to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it gets better. Like it or not, the kids of Generation Hot will have to learn how to cope with the consequences — not only for their health and economic prospects but their emotional well-being”.²

But I do not know about this “getting better”. There is no factual basis to think things will get better, all the facts point towards a downward slide of things getting much, much, worse. I’m sorry to have to write such things, my children. And I am sorry for all the children. But in fact Hansen’s book may well be mis-titled. All the indications since it was written is that things are deteriorating more quickly that expected. Not only his grandchildren but his children are likely to be profoundly affected by the consequences of climate change. The predictions of the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change under the UN), originally criticized as being extreme, are beginning to seem quite modest.

It is not a case of what might happen if we don’t act to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. We HAVE failed to reduce them, and irrevocable changes are already in the pipeline.

Sorry, I am not being very orderly in this letter. I was talking about the difficulty of communicating these issues. Quoting again:

“I had dinner with my grown children yesterday. They are successful, liberal, and well educated. Among the usual family chatter, a conversation about a ruined couch and another about the last time my younger daughter got drunk summarized the (lack of) consciousness or simple avoidance of the topic. I want a relationship with my children and conversation about the latest news on Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not welcome. These young adults know and ignore.”³

Not saying you are like that! But it is somehow hard to introduce these issues in ‘social occasions’. And one senses that people generally don’t like talking about such a terrible shadow that we are living under. There is a sort of …embarrassment. One of the problems is that the issue is …… but how can one find the words to meet such cataclysmic prospects for the future? How can one begin to really conceive of the human suffering to come, or the degree of destruction of the environment? It is all so gigantic. Human consciousness has never before had to live with the knowledge of such impending disaster, and perhaps it just cannot do so.

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Up to now I have been a bit light on specific facts. Perhaps deliberately so. Perhaps I fear your minds will just turn off. Perhaps they have already done so.

Once one starts making somewhat precise predictions for the future, immediately one is faced with uncertainty. But climate change is bringing:

• Increasing temperatures (but also lower temperatures in some places at some times).
• More violent storms due to increased water vapour in the atmosphere.
• More extreme weather of various sorts – dry areas becoming drier, wet areas becoming wetter.
• Rising sea levels (modest as yet), as warming oceans expand and ice melts.
• Changing climatic zones. Forests are dying, animals and plants are disappearing as their habitat changes.
• Great water shortages in many parts of the world, as the glaciers that feed rivers melt, as rivers evaporate, as drought becomes more common.
• More problems in feeding the world’s growing population.
• Acidifying oceans, with marine life in severe decline – including, perhaps worst of all, plankton. At any time in the future, instead of continuing to absorb carbon dioxide, the oceans may start to release it.

I have to explain that the greatest danger lies in “tipping points”. These are positive feedbacks which can quite quickly accelerate the rate of change, in completely uncontrollable processes. For example:

As the Arctic ice melts, it stops reflecting back heat to space, so Earth gets hotter, and more ice melts, and so on in a vicious circle.

As the Arctic permafrost melts (which it undoubtedly is) it releases methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, causing more warming, causing more release of methane, etc.

The same for the huge quantities of solid methane at present frozen on the Arctic sea floor. There is more carbon in the methane than in all the fossil fuels still unburned.

As the trees are destroyed, as is happening in parts of the world because of changing temperatures, draught, disease, insect attack and perhaps other reasons (see 4), they stop becoming carbon sinks, instead they start to release their stored carbon.

Sorry to present this science (why am I sorry?), but climate change IS a matter of observation and scientific fact, it is not a question of belief or ideology or opinion, as the climate ‘deniers’ present it.

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Extreme pessimism about the near future is not only a matter of the effects of climate change. There are plenty of other approaching crises that are going to stop you living the sort of life that you might otherwise want to. Oil is getting more scarce, and so more expensive, and basically our whole society is based on a plentiful supply of oil, for energy, transport, farm machinery, fertilizer, plastics. In many parts of the world, the supply of water is drying up, and with that comes food shortages. Which in turn probably means large uncontrolled displacement and migration of people.

There is a book you might care to read, by Jared Diamond, called “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed”. In that book Diamond outlines 10 distinct crises which could cause the collapse of society as we know it.

Enough. More than enough. I am wondering what you make of all this. Would be good to talk with you, and perhaps we can soon. As I said, I have no advice for you about meeting these crises. I myself do not know what to do about the grim future facing us. Just to be concerned with one’s own security does not seem an adequate response, even if there was such a thing. You are free to ignore the facts, or just hope ‘something turns up’. I cannot think what that something might be, although some people have a blind faith in the ability of science and technology to meet any problem. But that is proving rather hollow. I think it is clear that unless there is a fundamental change in human consciousness, we are not going to work together, not going to act with intelligence and real concern. And perhaps that is the only real pointer for action.

If someone told all the parents of the world that there was a 98 per cent chance that radical environmental changes in the next 10 – 50 years will wipe out half of all known life forms on earth, and that famine, plagues, floods, and droughts on a scale not seen in thousands of years would become routine for billions of people, you would think they would tell their kids. Well, most climate scientists in the world have been telling us that, but we don’t do anything about it.