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No quick climate techno-fixes at Cop28

Posted on November 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

November each year sees the annual gathering of the Conference Of the Parties, or Cop, to discuss and agree steps at Intergovernmental level to address climate change. This year’s set piece conference, Cop28, took place in the oil-rich state of the United Arab Emirates. I filed the below piece as the first in a short series for the Irish Examiner just ahead of the opening of the Dubai meeting.

EARLIER THIS week, amid media fanfare, a jet aircraft left London’s Heathrow Airport for New York, a journey that would, according to the UK’s Department for Transport, make guilt-free flying a reality.

This is the first such flight, powered entirely by ‘sustainable aviation fuels’, a combination of technologies the industry hopes will help to clean up its image as a major polluter and allay growing public disquiet over sky-high aviation emissions.

The flight was fuelled by around 50 tonnes of substances including tallow and cooking oil, and its timing, just ahead of the opening of the Cop28 intergovernmental climate conference in Dubai on Thursday, was no coincidence.

With 2023 already almost certain to be the hottest year in recorded history and quite probably the hottest in around 125,000 years, and devastating extreme weather events being witnessed all around the world, the heat is on corporations as well as governments to show that they are, finally, getting serious about tackling the unfolding climate emergency.

In that sense, the Heathrow flight is the perfect metaphor for where we now stand. All the sustainable aviation fuel available worldwide would, in total, provide barely one tenth of 1% of the fuel needed for global aviation, and scaling this up dramatically is, experts believe, next to impossible.

But what really matters here are the optics. Images and articles about this supposed breakthrough have been published all around the world, allowing the industry to claim that technology will solve the problem of ever-expanding aviation.

You will hear a lot of talk over the coming days from Dubai about techno-fixes for our most acute climate, ecological and biodiversity problems, yet how many sectors are prepared to address the central reality, which is that humanity is over-consuming finite resources and, in the process, heating up the planet dangerously while creating an epic global pollution crisis?

Confidence in this year’s Cop process has not been improved by the fact that the meeting is being hosted by a major oil exporter, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has appointed Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as president of Cop28.

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has mandated countries to agree measures leading to an overall 43% reduction in emissions by 2030 (Ireland remains an international laggard, on track for only 29% cuts at most) it has been revealed that the UAE intends to sharply ramp up its oil production in the coming years.

This is hardly the most promising of backdrops for the hosts of Cop28 to be guiding global climate talks. And in recent days, plans by the UAE to use its role as host of the conference to negotiate new oil and gas deals were leaked to the BBC, leaving the distinct impression that the climate fox is now in charge of the henhouse.

The extent to which the global fossil fuel industry is a massive obstacle to climate action is underlined by the recent revelation that just 1% of global investment in renewable energy comes from this sector, despite its vast wealth and energy expertise.

Last year, amid war in Ukraine and soaring energy prices, the fossil fuel industry reported record revenues of $5 trillion, while welching on previous ‘green’ promises. The irony for oil-rich countries such as the UAE is that, if climate action fails, much of the Middle East is projected to be too hot for human habitation later this century.

Despite these formidable setbacks, the Cop process, which has been running every year since 1995, is still critically important in the battle to tackle the climate emergency. This annual meeting is by far the largest intergovernmental gathering, and it serves to put climate change firmly on the political and media agenda at least once a year.

While some Cops produce little of substance, there are also breakthrough years. The last and most significant was in 2015, with the signing of the Paris Agreement. This saw the nations of the world commit to keeping global warming to ‘well below’ the dangerous 2C level, and to work to limit the increase to 1.5C.

These new and much lower emissions limits reflect advances in scientific understanding around the sensitivity of the global climate system to even seemingly minor temperature increases.

One of the key instruments created in Paris was the ‘global stocktake’, a mechanism to assess each country’s progress towards meeting its emissions targets. The first formal evaluation takes place as part of Cop28, and will be used to shape new and more ambitious ‘nationally determined contributions’ from each country.

A United Nations report published in September confirmed that the world is still not on track to meet the Paris Agreement targets on limiting emissions. While this might suggest that the Cop process is a pointless annual jamboree on the scale of Electric Picnic, in reality it has made some concrete achievements.

A decade ago, the IPCC calculated that the world was on track for calamitous warming in the range of around 4C by 2100. This, in simple terms, would be apocalyptic for humans and most of nature. This warming estimate has since been reduced to around 2.5C as a result of actions and commitments made since Paris in 2015.

Without doubt, this remains an extremely dangerous level of global warming, but it is still much less severe than previously feared. Without the Cop process, it is almost inconceivable that progress on this scale could have been achieved.

However, the hellish extreme weather conditions experienced this year across multiple continents, with average global temperatures this year at just under 1.5C, underline how much risk lies ahead as temperatures ratchet to beyond 1.5C and towards 2C in the coming decade and more.

Rising temperatures combined with extreme weather are already pummelling global food production, with around one third of output at risk in the coming decades, according to recent research. For the first time, this year’s Cop will have a full day dedicated to food, water and agriculture.

Global food systems are also among the chief drivers of climate breakdown, with impacts accounting for at least a fifth of total global emissions. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is expected to call for significant cuts in meat and dairy production and consumption in wealthier countries such as Ireland.

No less than cutting fossil fuels, the massive hoofprint of the livestock sector, in terms of land use change, nitrogen pollution and methane emissions has to be significantly trimmed if crucial climate stabilisation and biodiversity goals are to be met. As with the global energy sector, a formidable agri-industrial lobby has to be faced down in the process.

While success can be difficult to gauge in international climate negotiations, what we know for sure is that we cannot afford Cop28 to fail.

Posted in Global Warming, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged COP28, Dubai, IPCC, Livestock, Paris Agreement, Sultan Al Jaber | Leave a comment

An ill wind that blows no good

Posted on November 25, 2023 by John Gibbons

Cast your mind forward two decades and into the 2040s, what might Ireland be like by then? Let’s just hope it’s nothing at all like the hellscape vividly painted in Irish author Daniel Mooney’s new novel, which I reviewed for the Business Post in November.

LAST WEEK saw the latest round of near-apocalyptic warnings from the United Nations on the trajectory of climate change, with a hellish 3°C average temperature rise later this century now on the cards.

The problem with warnings about future calamities is that we find it all too easy to slough them off as just more distant thunder. As long as this future remains out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

Limerick-based author Daniel J Mooney has been to hell to reconnoitre the terrain, and the bitter fruits of his odyssey are presented in The 14th Storm, a dystopian novel set in Ireland in 2043.

Our once-green and pleasant land is no more. The first of the devastating storm seasons rolled in over the winter of 2026, and laid waste to much of the west coast. The storms returned, year after year, crushing every attempt to rebuild.

Riots, starvation and political chaos quickly followed as Ireland, largely cut off from the world, descended into a brutish new medieval era where every day is first and foremost about finding a way to survive.

The old world of broadband, central heating, foreign holidays and commuting has been scrubbed from view and consigned to a corner of the collective memory known as the Before. Our long-abandoned, half-flooded motorway network is now an ambush zone for unwary travellers.

Government of a sort does still exist in Dublin, but its influence doesn’t extend far beyond the Pale. The remains of cities such as Limerick (with its power from the still-functioning Ardnacrusha generator) and Galway function more as local fiefdoms, complete with strongmen and militias.

The most feared people in the land are the agents employed by the Department of Environmental Justice, known as Doejays. They move swiftly and purposefully through the ruined landscape in search of their prey: climate deniers. Summary justice is dispatched with a knife through the chest.

Mooney’s novel follows the travels of two Doejays, Malley and Broderick. They wade through the blood of strangers to track down their targets. The simmering anger, rage even, propels them forward.

The world of plenty is gone forever. But it didn’t magically evaporate. It didn’t vanish, Malley muses. “We didn’t wake up from a dream. It was taken. It was torn from us. And the people who stole it are walking among us”.

Malley is the survivor of a vicious assault and carries deep scars. She is propelled by a sense of justice and has become a ninja-like master of violence. Her Doejay partner Broderick, son of climatologists who tried in vain to raise the alarm, lusts after bloody vengeance against everyone who lied about the climate crisis.

Is it far-fetched that people who denied climate change might be hunted down like war criminals for their collusion in bringing about our collective ruin? At first I found the premise tenuous in the extreme, but within the bleak, brutal landscape Mooney has painted, it did satisfy that most human of urges: to find a scapegoat, and to make them pay.

The setting is suffocatingly local, as if the world beyond our shores had ceased to exist, appearing only in brief allusions. Stories about people’s blood boiling in their veins by the equator, and the hordes of refugees moving like vast seas of people, seeking colder climes, seeking something more than endless misery; these must surely be exaggerations.

Mooney’s novel nods in the direction of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s grim classic, but finds its distinctive voice. The fight scenes (there are many) are visceral and bruising, yet oddly compelling, amid swirling dervishes of fists, knees and blades. The storm itself is portrayed as another menacing character, taunting and howling like a vengeful banshee.

Yet, for most people inhabiting this future Ireland, “there was no more energy left to give life, save for that expended on not dying every day”.

While the storyline is clunky and somewhat disjointed in places, Mooney’s characterisation of his chief protagonist, Malley, in particular, is vivid and memorable. She stayed in my mind long after I’d finished reading, as did the vision Mooney had painted of once-familiar landscapes: our own paradise lost, never to be regained.

The 14th Storm, by Daniel J Mooney; Legend Press, €13.99

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Psychology | Tagged Business Post, Cli fi, Daniel Mooney | Leave a comment

What economists get wrong about climate

Posted on November 20, 2023 by John Gibbons

Whether or not you believe that the dangerously foolish advice issued by climate economists will in fact kill billions of people this century, there is little doubt that we have been poorly served and grievously misled on the true costs and risks associated with climate change by the economics profession, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in November.

WHILE NOT YET over, 2023 has already delivered some of the most extreme weather conditions in human history. This year is virtually certain to be the hottest since records began. In all probability, 2023 is the hottest year on Earth in about 125,000 years.

While the deterioration in global weather conditions is in line with scientific projections, what is now becoming apparent is that our societies and ecosystems are more vulnerable to even small changes than expected previously, and so the damages are worse. That’s according to climate attribution specialist Dr Friederike Otto.

Given this unremitting torrent of bad news from the scientific community, you may be surprised to hear that, in fact, everything is fine, and that economic growth means humanity as a whole will be wealthier, healthier and no doubt happier by the end of the 21st century.

This news came via an article on the website of Chartered Accountants Ireland. Author Cormac Lucey, a finance lecturer and former political adviser to Progressive Democrat leader Michael McDowell, decrying the “public hysteria” surrounding the climate debate.

As Lucey recently explained, scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today’s welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this to 434%.

In other words, climate change is no more than a slight bump on the road towards our ever-improving golden era of human prosperity.

On the one hand, climate scientists warn we face a near-term future of deadly heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extreme flooding, coastal inundation, mass migration, freshwater shortages, more dangerous storms and major threats to global food production.

Climate economics

On the other hand, climate economists insist there is essentially nothing to worry about, and economic growth will continue even as the world burns, ecosystems fail, the ice shelves collapse, and the global weather system goes haywire.

The fact politicians, media and corporations are far more likely to take their advice from economists than scientists means the dominant messaging being listened to is that yes, climate is an issue, but no, it’s absolutely not a crisis.

Either the scientists or the economists have got this horribly wrong, and no less than the fate of human civilisation is at stake.

The field of climate economics has long been dominated by Prof William Nordhaus and his integrated assessment models have been largely incorporated into the IPCC’s reports, and his influence reaches into universities, financial institutions and boardrooms around the world. His glittering career was capped off with the Nobel prize in economic sciences in 2018.

Yet, in a nutshell, Nordhaus is dead wrong. About almost everything, in fact. According to the IPCC, the world should aim to keep global warming to well below 2C, ideally close to 1.5C, to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, including multiple irreversible tipping points.

Ignoring the physical sciences, Nordhaus argues the global economy reaches what he calls “optimal adaptation” at between 2.7C and 3.5C, an argument that it does not make economic sense to try to prevent climate change until it has reached these near-apocalyptic levels.

Any first-year science undergrad will understand that if Nordhaus optimal world of temperatures rising 3C and more versus pre-industrial comes to pass, it would mean global immiseration, with dying oceans and runaway sea level rise, while famines, conflict and disease sweep away countless millions.

If this is so plainly obvious, how can an eminent climate economist and his many professional acolytes not see it too? As far back as over 30 years ago, a report on graduate education in economics in the US warned the system was turning out “too many idiot savants economists, skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues”.

Put simply, they are mathematically gifted but know or care almost nothing about how the world beyond their spreadsheets actually functions.

Bizarre assumptions

The model that Nordhaus developed is known as DICE, and it makes some truly bizarre assumptions. It completely excludes climate impacts from 87% of all economic activity on the grounds that it takes place in “carefully controlled environments”, i.e. indoors.

Vast sectors of economic activity, from manufacturing to transport, real estate, communications and services are therefore assumed to be completely untouched by climate impacts.

To illustrate how grossly mistaken this is, consider that the Panama Canal, one of the world’s most important trade routes, is sharply cutting down the number of ships it can carry, due to record low water levels in Gatun Lake, which is vital for its operation.

While acknowledging that agriculture is highly vulnerable to climate change, Nordhaus argues that since it ‘only’ accounts for 3% of US economic output, a collapse in food production would not be a major crisis. The fact that without adequate food supplies, societies quickly degenerate into economic and social collapse and political chaos did not seem to have occurred to him.

Another key error involves calculating the GDP of a particular location based on its temperature; this fundamentally confuses weather with climate. This is, according to journalist Christopher Ketcham, in The Intercept, “foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model”.

There are other, equally egregious failings in this DICE model, leading Nordhaus’s feted climate projections to be “wildly wrong” according to former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.

He co-authored a recent paper with Nicholas Stern, author of the famous Stern Report for the UK government, which concluded that the models Nordhaus uses are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk”.

Bizarrely, the way Nordhaus calculates the relationship between rising temperatures and GDP is calculated using a quadratic, which means the relationship is smooth, whereas in reality, at certain temperature thresholds, tipping points can be crossed with devastating non-linear consequences.

Pollyanna future

These risks are nowhere to be found in the modelling that economists, financial journalists, pension fund managers and actuaries depend on to calculate the likely costs of climate change. This explains how commentators are able to confidently project a Pollyanna future of endless economic growth and prosperity, and dismiss “climate hysteria” even as the conditions for life on Earth are rapidly unravelling.

Prof Steve Keen of University College London has long been a critic of neoclassical climate economics. The gross negligence of economic modelling by influential figures like Nordhaus “will end up killing billions of people”, he told The Intercept.

Meanwhile, there were renewed warnings from scientists this week that the Amoc, the vast marine current that gives Ireland and north-west Europe its mild climate, may be approaching collapse. Such a scenario would be unimaginably disruptive and dangerous.

Yet, unbelievably, as recently as 2016, a study by three economists pitched the positive benefits of such a catastrophe for the European economy. One of the authors, Richard Tol, was formerly an ESRI economist and is a protege of Nordhaus. Tol argued in a 2009 paper still available on the ESRI website that “Ireland has little to fear from climate change”.

There are some climate economists who truly grasp the gravity of our situation, but their voices have been largely drowned out by the Panglossian chorus of experts who, as Oscar Wilde once put it, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sceptics | Tagged Cormac Lucey, DICE, economics, Friederike Otto, Joseph Stiglitz, Panama Canal, Richard Tol, Steve Keen, William Nordhaus | Leave a comment

Mitigation, adaptation – or suffering

Posted on October 31, 2023 by John Gibbons

Years and decades of dithering, denial and inaction mean that the remaining options open to humanity grow more limited and more unpalatable by the day. I explained in this Irish Examiner piece in late October the crucial differences between climate mitigation and adaptation.

“WE BASICALLY have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering”. This is how Barack Obama’s energy advisor, Dr John Holdren, in 2007 memorably set out the stark choices ahead.

However, rather than acting to mitigate the impacts of climate change by urgently reducing emissions, in the 16 years since Holdren’s comments, global levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), the powerful heat-trapping gas, have risen by one-tenth. In little more than half a century, one species has fundamentally altered the chemistry of an entire planet.

Atmospheric levels of CO2 are now at their highest in at least three million years. At that time, during the Pliocene Epoch, global sea levels were more than 15 metres higher than today. Earth system inertia has shielded us from the impacts – for now. Nor has humanity any serious intention to slow down or reverse course any time soon.

If you needed any further confirmation that the vague promises being made by governments and corporations about being “net zero by 2050” are meaningless, consider that oil giant Chevron has just paid $50bn to buy out a rival.

This, according to the Financial Times, means Chevron is doubling down on its bet that demand for fossil fuels will remain robust for decades to come.

The direct impact on our weather systems of the oil, gas, and coal being burned to power global civilisation is no longer mysterious or abstract. A new branch of science called climate attribution allows experts to calculate in almost real-time the degree to which a specific extreme weather event has been influenced by climate change.

Take, for instance, last month’s deadly flooding event in Libya which claimed at least 11,000 lives. The explosive rainfall that drove this disaster was found to be 50 times more likely to occur than would have been the case in a world without human greenhouse gas emissions, according to analysis by World Weather Attribution experts.

Mitigating climate change is politically unpopular, as it means carbon taxes on fuels, restrictions on flying, and heavy taxes on SUVs, red meat and other energy-intensive but non-essential sectors protected by powerful lobby groups.

As research released this week by the Environmental Protection Agency underlines, most Irish people still think that others, including people living in other countries, as well as future generations, will suffer the most.

In short, while we tell pollsters that we support climate action, in reality, we are not yet prepared to trade our present comfort and convenience for the safety or even survival of others, even if it seems that those others are in reality our own children or grandchildren

However, as the recent extreme flooding in the Cork area has reminded us, there are no free lunches when it comes to climate mitigation. If we collectively choose not to limit our high-emissions lifestyles for the common good and our government actively promotes major polluters like the livestock and transport sectors, then the price to be paid is in devastating climate-fuelled events.

While climate mitigation can be thought of as turning down the spigot to limit future damage, adaptation means investing in coping with the dangers we can no longer avoid. For Ireland, flooding is the number one climate risk we face, whether as a result of coastal inundation from rising sea levels or severe flooding events as a result of a supercharged atmosphere.

The impact of extreme precipitation is made worse by land use changes, such as drained bogs and degraded uplands. For Ireland, effective adaptation has to start at source. Overgrazing by sheep and deer of our uplands as well as bog cutting and burning of vegetation leads to rainfall cascading rapidly off mountains and overwhelming lowland settlements.

Similarly, many of our rivers have lost their floodplains to “improvements”, either for poorly located housing developments or drained land for farming. Decades of arterial drainage schemes overseen by the OPW may have been well-intended, but many of these modifications now make us far more prone to flooding disasters as water no longer has the space to harmlessly disperse.

In our warmer, wetter future, this problem will only get worse. While it may be tempting for Irish authorities to look inwards and put all our focus on local solutions such as adapting to manage flooding events, this is only at best a stop-gap approach.

Research published this week states that the giant west Antarctic ice shelf is undergoing accelerated melt. Its complete loss would raise global sea levels by five metres, leading to the abandonment of many of the world’s major coastal settlements and river basins.

Only concerted intergovernmental action on climate mitigation, including a decisive shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables as well as mainly plant-based diets and more modest lifestyles for those of us in wealthy countries like Ireland, gives us any chance of altering this devastating trajectory.

The choice that now confronts us all is how much climate mitigation we are prepared to support, even if it means some pain in higher costs in the short term. We will also be forced to spend ever more of our available budgets on adaptation and cleaning up the mess when it fails.

Make no mistake: the alternative to strong climate action now is endless suffering later.

Posted in Energy, Extreme weather, Global Warming | Tagged adaptation, mitigation, West Antarctic, World Weather Attribution | Leave a comment

Climate impacts hitting home

Posted on October 28, 2023 by John Gibbons

The below piece ran as full pages in the Irish Mirror and Irish Daily Star in late October, to mark the UN’s International Day Against Climate Change.

IT IS ALMOST certain that 2023 will be the hottest year globally since records began. In fact, scientists believe this is very likely the hottest year on Earth in the last 125,000 years.

The planet has been racked in a seemingly never-ending sequence of devastating extreme weather events, from record-smashing wildfires in Canada to deadly heatwaves and flooding events.

Up until just last week, many people in Ireland may have believed that extreme weather was not really our problem. Then came Storm Babet, and in its wake, torrential downpours in the Cork area that left the centre of Midleton under water, with over 100 properties damaged.

This all happened because a month’s worth of rainfall fell in less than 24 hours. There is simply no time for the deluges of water to drain away harmlessly. Thankfully, there has been no loss of life. Many other areas have not been so lucky.

Torrential flooding last month killed at least 11,000 people in Libya, while flooding events this year in dozens of countries, including Greece, Turkey, Italy, Serbia, Brazil, Slovenia and Mexico saw multiple fatalities.

Last year was almost as bad. For instance, floods in Germany and Belgium in July 2022 killed more than 220 people and destroyed entire villages.

Scientists have long warned that unless greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning of fossil fuels, were not sharply reduced, the global climate system would begin to become dangerously unstable.

Despite all the political promises, emissions continue to rise, and so too do the incidence of wild weather events. For every one degree rise in global temperatures, the atmosphere can hold an extra 7% of moisture.

This year is set to be 1.5C over pre-industrial temperatures, meaning it’s likely there is around one tenth more rainfall in the skies than half a century ago, and what goes up, must surely come down.

Tomorrow (Oct 24) is International Day Against Climate Change, an event organised by the United Nations (UN), and never has it felt more urgent than this year. As July 2023 was confirmed as the hottest year ever recorded, UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres declared that the era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived.

“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning”, Guterres added. Heatwaves have not been confined to land. This year saw a massive marine heatwave covering more than 40 million square kilometres in the North Atlantic, with many of the world’s oceans also experiencing heatwave conditions.

Apart from the threat to marine life, these ocean heatwaves also provide the energy to fuel dangerous storms. Given Ireland’s location, we are potentially in the eye of ever more powerful Atlantic storms making landfall.

The situation is dire, but not yet hopeless. The only way we can avoid seeing ever more intense heatwaves, droughts, storms and flooding events is for wealthy countries like Ireland to take strong action to reduce our high level of emissions.

Ireland now has a higher share of SUVs in its fleet than any other European country; we also fly more than almost any other country on Earth. Many of our homes are poorly insulated and are heated by oil, gas or solid fuels.

Our livestock-based food system is among the most polluting and emissions-intensive forms of agriculture. Most of what our farmers produce is for export markets, while much of what Irish people eat has to be imported, along with huge amounts of fertilizer and millions of tons of animal feed.

As global food production is hit by weather extremes, more and more countries are restricting food exports to ensure they can feed their own populations.

Were Ireland unable to import millions of tons of food, we would have a major crisis, as our current farming system is simply unable to feed our own population.

Ireland has fantastic resources in renewable energy, especially offshore wind, yet many people still don’t seem to understand the urgent need to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to renewables.

Bafflingly, numerous planning applications for solar farms have been rejected by county councils this year, despite their offering a good income to landowners and clean energy for the community.

Maybe this year’s International Day Against Climate Change marks the day you decided to join in the fight for a greener, cleaner and safer future for all?

Posted in Extreme weather, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged flooding, Irish Mirror, Storm Babet | Leave a comment

Nature holds key to tackling flood risks

Posted on October 26, 2023 by John Gibbons

Flooding remains Ireland’s top climate vulnerability, and it once again came home to bite in county Cork in October 2023 when the town of Midleton and some surrounding areas were inundated, with millions of euros in damages, but thankfully, no loss of life this time. I filed the below comment piece for TheJournal.ie in the wake of this event.

NATURE, TO BE commanded, must first be obeyed. This is a lesson that the citizens of a once-notorious flooding blackspot in North Yorkshire took to heart, and it has paid off dramatic dividends.

Between 1999 and 2007, the town of Pickering was flooded four times, with the damage running in to many millions of pounds. The town was refused a £20 million flood defence scheme on the grounds of the cost being too high to protect a limited number of people.

In any event, the large concrete works being proposed would have been an eyesore in a town that depends on tourism income. Instead, they brought in academics and environmentalists as well as experts from the UK Environmental Agency and Forestry Commission to study the root cause of the repeated flooding: water rushing off the nearby hills and dales.

A series of nature-based solutions were developed, including hand-built leaky dams made of logs and branches, as well as planting woodlands and other measures, such as preventing uplands being burned, to slow down and trap rainfall.

The total cost was £2 million, or one tenth of the cost of the proposed concrete wall for the town centre and the project has been a roaring success. Pickering has remained dry as other towns in the region have been repeatedly inundated by increasingly severe rainfall, fuelled by climate change.

The success of this intervention has since been replicated in other communities in England and Scotland. A project to restore natural Culm grasslands in Devon has for instance seen the land’s ability to retain water increase five-fold.

The initial reaction to the flooding disaster in country Cork in recent days has been to focus on “hard” engineering solutions, including demands by some politicians to reform the planning system, ostensibly to prevent objections to flood relief schemes.

It is noteworthy that many of the local politicians blaming the planning system for failing to deal with the kind of flooding that has devastated their local areas can often be found to ignore the advice of their own engineers and vote in favour of rezoning land in flood plains for housing.

While there is undoubtedly a role for flood relief schemes in specific areas where high value infrastructure needs to be protected, the political and media clamour to “do something” after the latest flooding disaster sees nature-based solutions being ignored or even blamed as mega-engineering projects are instead rushed through.

As the examples of Pickering and elsewhere have clearly shown, the only truly sustainable long term solution to flooding is to tackle it at source. By the time tens of millions of litres of flood waters are rushing into your town or village, it’s usually too late.

Nature provides the answer

Climate minister Eamon Ryan at the weekend stated that a critical part of how Ireland responds to the worsening threat of extreme rainfall and flooding is to change how we manage our land, including paying farmers to develop new practices that will reduce the amount of excess rainfall sweeping off farmlands and uplands and swamping local towns and communities.

Some of the methods he proposed included planting different species of grasses with deeper root systems that are better able to absorb flooding, as well as developing native forestry and allowing some rewilding.

“It is going to be a case of paying and making sure we have the right incentives so that in the upper catchments particularly you slow the water down, and in that way, reduce the problem in our towns and villages and cities”, Ryan told the Green Party conference at the weekend.

Ireland’s peatlands form excellent natural sponges to absorb torrential downpours, especially in the flood-prone midlands. However, decades of industrial peat extraction have damaged and degraded much of this natural bulwark against flooding.

The government’s Climate Action Plan 2023 identifies peatland rehabilitation as offering increased natural capital, enriched biodiversity and improved water quality and flood attenuation.

The overall target is to rehabilitate 77,600 hectares of boglands by 2030. The absolute value of this work in terms of reducing the likelihood of devastating flooding events should become clearer over time.

For many decades, the Office of Public Works (OPW) has implemented arterial drainage schemes, which have included dredging and straightening rivers and tributaries and “protecting” farmlands in flood plains from being routinely inundated.

While this may at one time have seemed like a good idea, the simple fact is that water has to go somewhere. If we prevent rivers from spreading into their natural floodplains during times of flooding, and if land management practices are degrading the ability of our uplands to retain rainfall, the water is instead being pushed downstream, with entirely predictable consequences.

The drainage of bogs and wetlands and the “improvement” of lands, as well as allowing housing to be built on floodplains is picking a fight with nature, and it’s a fight that we will lose, every time.

Farmers whose lands are likely to be flooded as a result should of course be compensated via agri-environmental schemes, but it is infinitely cheaper to allow water to spread into its natural floodplains than have it canalised and then smash into our towns and cities, with devastating consequences.

This is not a drill

In 2023, the planet has warmed by around 1.5C versus pre-industrial. This temperature shift means the atmosphere is now capable of holding around 10% more water than a century ago. This is the largest shift in the global hydrological cycle since the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.

Warming oceans are providing the fuels for powerful storms and the warmer atmosphere is now delivering more intense deluges, both in Ireland and across Europe and much of the world, than have been witnessed in centuries.

According to climate scientists at the Irish Centre for High End Computing, more flooding is probably the biggest change Ireland will experience by the 2050s.

Basing your entire flood defence strategy around building concrete barriers assumes you know exactly how much flooding you are trying to defend against.

If for instance tens of millions of euros are invested in building, say a town’s defences to cope with 2-3 metres of peak flooding, the scope for a tragedy should this town be hit by a 4-metre event that breaches these defences and places the people behind them at real risk of drowning.

As global temperatures continue to rise, these scenarios are already playing out, in real time, right across the world. The smart move is to work with nature, not against it, but are our politicians and engineers open-minded enough to listen?

Posted in Extreme weather, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged Climate Action Plan, Eamon Ryan, flooding, Midleton, OPW, Pickering | Leave a comment

Planetary lines we shouldn’t cross

Posted on October 25, 2023 by John Gibbons

I filed this piece with Village magazine in October, charting the growing number of critical planetary boundaries that have now been breached, and why this matters.

ON ANCIENT mariners’ maps, areas of uncharted waters were often marked with illustrations of dragons and other mythological creatures to signal to the unwary that dangers lay ahead.

The modern equivalent of ‘Here be dragons’ is a project which began in the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009, with the aim of graphically mapping the nine key “planetary boundaries” beyond which the dragons of ecological disaster lay in wait.

There have been two major updates on the original 2009 report, the latest of which was published this summer. The multidisciplinary team that carried out the research underpinning the report looked at climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, changes in the use of land and fresh water and the presence of the elements nitrogen and phosphorus.

Nothing was viewed in isolation; in dynamic Earth systems, every element interacts in complex and sometimes unexpected ways with every other element. “It’s pretty alarming: We are living on a planet unlike anything any humans have seen before”, according to Jonathan Foley, director of Project Drawdown, who was involved in the original research.

Briefly, this year’s update established that six of these critical boundaries for the maintenance of a stable climate system and overall integrity of the biosphere have now been breached, with two others approaching the red zone.

Only one of the nine boundaries is currently considered to be in stable and satisfactory condition, and ironically, this is global ozone. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, damage to the stratospheric ozone layer was first of all established theoretically, then by observations, leading to a huge public reaction and strong and concerted intergovernmental action.

This was spearheaded by the US, culminating in the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 and the rapid phasing out of CFCs, the seemingly inert man-made chemicals that were wreaking havoc in the upper atmosphere.

Make no mistake, we had a narrow escape. Had that action not been taken then, much of the southern hemisphere in particular would by now be bathed in deadly levels of ultraviolet radiation.

Among the most severely critical boundary breaches now occurring are as a result of the overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus, primarily as fertilizers. These chemicals are devastating many of the world’s waterways, leading to algal blooms and oxygen-free dead zones.

In Ireland, the toxic effects of nutrient overload into our waterways are becoming ever more apparent. Lough Neagh, the vast lake in Northern Ireland, is severely damaged as a result mainly of runoff from agriculture, as well as raw sewage and other contaminants.

Similar blooms are being reported across Irish lakes and estuaries, a situation that has notably worsened since the abolition of dairy quotas in 2015 and the subsequent rush to intensify industrial-scale dairying operations, using our political leverage at EU level to allow thousands of Irish farmers a derogation to exceed the EU’s scientifically established maximum safe limits for nitrates.

The overloading of the global atmosphere with powerful heat-trapping gases, mainly carbon dioxide and methane, means we have fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere of an entire planet, and this is playing out, as predicted, in ever more extreme weather events, from droughts, heatwaves and flooding events to more powerful storm systems.

The ferocious summer of 2023, which has seen devastating impacts across much of the northern hemisphere, is a harbinger of a far more dangerous future, with rising sea levels, coastal inundation and killer heatwaves and flooding disasters that force the permanent abandonment of entire regions.

While life is about to become much more precarious and difficult for many millions of people, human impacts have already laid waste to much of the natural world, pushing tens of thousands of species into extinction and drastically reducing both the numbers and range of millions more.

This is the planetary boundary known as ‘biosphere integrity’ and the world’s genetic diversity has been severely depleted as a result of human actions. The current extinction rate is thousands of times higher than the natural or background extinction rate. A key driver of extinction has been the destruction of ecosystems and their sequestration for agriculture, fishing, mining, fossil fuel extraction and commercial forestry.

Another boundary that has been smashed is termed novel entities. This innocuous phrase describes the witches brew of tens of thousands of toxic artificial chemicals, from plastics and pesticides to PFAs, the so-called forever chemicals that have been casually unleashed into the biosphere.

Even in the relatively well regulated European Union, around 80% of man-made chemicals are brought into use with little or no testing or true understanding of their long-term impacts.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, breaching one critical planetary boundary is unfortunate; to breach six is beginning to look like carelessness.

Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability | Tagged CFCs, nitrogen, ozone, PFAs, Planetary boundaries, Stockholm Resilience Centre | Leave a comment

When it gets too hot, things die

Posted on October 18, 2023 by John Gibbons

Heat is a silent, stealthy killer. As climate change accelerates, the regions in the world becoming too hot for human habitation or even survival are set to expand rapidly. US journalist Jeff Goodell has been on the climate beat for decades and I filed this review of his book for the Business Post in October.

THE HARSHEST truth about life on a rapidly heating planet is this: “as temperatures rise, a lot of living things will die, and that may include people you know and love”. This is how environmental journalist Jeff Goodell sets out his stall.

Heat is a stealthy but relentless killer. As temperatures rise, “the sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you. Plants look like they’re crying. Birds vanish from the sky, the air smells burned.”

Extreme heat, Goodell writes, is an entirely human artifact, “a legacy of human civilisation as real as the Great Wall of China” in publishing, timing is everything. His book, ‘The heat will kill you first’ has been propelled to the top of the US bestseller list as its release coincided with scorching temperatures worldwide. 2023 is on target to be the hottest year ever recorded globally.

There is a paradox at the heart of our relationship with heat. For those of us living in cooler climes like Ireland, the arrival of a heatwave is treated like an unofficial national holiday. News media persist in illustrating stories about dangerous heatwaves with images of people sunning themselves on the beach.

“The way we communicate about extreme heat is often distorted by nostalgia for a climate that no longer exists, Goodell’s eminently readable book argues. “Part of this distortion has to do with the simple fact that people love warm weather”.

For the last several thousand years, Earth has enjoyed a remarkably stable climate, which scientists describe as “Goldilocks” conditions “not too hot, not too cold”. This era is now at an abrupt end.

The benign conditions that allowed agriculture to flourish are also disappearing. As global temperatures rise, yields of food staples such as wheat and rice decline. Livestock are vulnerable too. In the summer of 2022, thousands of cattle in feed lots in Kansas died as a result of extreme heat.

The spectre of hunger is returning. In 2019, around 145 million people worldwide faced acute food insecurity. By last year, that number had almost trebled, to 345 million.

In the US, some 30 million acres of land is given over to growing crops to fuel cars and trucks, while globally, aquifers are being pumped dry, often to grow water-intensive crops such as alfalfa to feed to cattle.

Until relatively recently, it was considered impossible to establish whether any specific extreme weather event could be definitively linked to climate change. That is no longer the case. The new science of extreme event attribution allows almost real-time assessments to be made.

“Extreme event attribution is the first science ever developed with the court in mind”, according to climatologist, Dr Friederike Otto, a pioneer in this field. Asked if she thought companies like ExxonMobil could ever be held liable in a court for deaths in an extreme heat wave, Otto replied: “Not only can I imagine it, I believe it will happen sooner than you think”.

Higher global temperatures are a boon for many species humans regard as dangerous pests, such as mosquitoes, and with them, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue are sweeping northwards.

Pine beetles are thriving in warming climates. For them, “the heat was like guzzling Red Bull. Their metabolism revved up and they moved like a marauding army through thousand-acre stands of Jeffrey pines”.

For Goodell, who has spent decades covering the environmental beat and is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, global warming “is the great story of our time, one that I feel privileged to tell. Yes, it gets dark sometimes, but it is also endlessly inspiring”.

Goodell’s taut, accessible journalistic style infuses the narrative with urgency, sweeping the reader from crisis to crisis while also relating the human stories of the marginalised, such as migrants and farm labourers, who are bearing the brunt of the suffering as the mercury ratchets up relentlessly.

Various adaptations are being explored in a bid to cope with rising temperatures, from air conditioning to moving food production under glass, but Goodell cautions that unless we drastically cut the fossil fuel emissions driving this crisis, all will ultimately be in vain.

“In the end, there’s no getting around the laws of physics and biology. When it gets too hot, things die. That’s just how it works”.

The Heat Will Kill You First
By Jeff Goodell
Little, Brown, $29

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Business Post, Friederike Otto, Jeff Goodell | Leave a comment

Green shoots of climate progress appear

Posted on October 15, 2023 by John Gibbons

Budget 2024 was announced in mid-October and was, by any stretch, a very good day for the Greens in government. Despite being the perennial butt of political and media jokes, they have by and large kept their heads down and beavered away quietly on delivering an ambitious change agenda. I filed this comment piece for the Irish Examiner.

THE TRUE significance of Budget 2024 from an environmental point of view may be best understood by looking at our recent past. Over the last two decades, Ireland’s collective response to the emerging climate and biodiversity crises has been, at best, piecemeal and at worst, recklessly negligent.

This can be most clearly illustrated by considering the fate of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), the agency charged with managing all the State’s extensive natural amenities, as well as policing crimes against wildlife. In 2008, its budget was 46.6 million, but the Fine Gael-led coalition gutted the organisation as part of its post-crash austerity programme, with funding falling by 70% to just 14 million by 2011.

While the NPWS was by no means the only State agency to see its funding slashed, the severity of the cuts were indicative of an indifference bordering on hostility to nature protection that seemed to have been the zeitgeist of the time.

This was best captured by then agriculture minister, Simon Coveney’s declaration in April 2015 that aggressive expansion plans for the Irish dairy sector should not be constrained by petty concerns over emissions or pollution. “Nobody in the Irish administration ever suggested that agriculture was going to reduce emissions long term”, as Coveney’s remarkably candid assessment at the time.

Elections matter. The arrival of a cohort of 12 Green Party TDs into government in 2020 was on the back of the huge climate marches of the previous year and indicated that public anxiety about environmental issues had nudged from the fringes and was moving slowly towards the heart of political decision-making.

The centrepiece of Budget 2024 from an ecological standpoint is undoubtedly the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund, which is due to reach 14 billion by 2030, rising in annual increments of 2 billion, using a portion of our windfall in corporate taxes.

Within this fund, according to finance minister, Michael McGrath, there is a climate and nature component worth over 3 billion, which will be available for projects between 2026-2030. The funds will be invested and managed by the National Treasury Management Agency and subject to State audit.

By any standards, this is a massive win for the Greens, who had watched much of the progressive environmental agenda developed during their first stint in government from 2007 to 2011 being quickly eviscerated. Recession-proofing this fund and placing it beyond the whims of the next minister or administration is seen as a way of firewalling major climate investment projects well into the next decade.

“This could be the turning point we’ve waited for”, commented ecologist Pádraic Fogarty. “This is serious money, over the longer term, to deliver real changes, for farmers and for communities”.

In introducing the government’s climate measures, it was heartening to see Minister McGrath frame them in their wider context. “In recent weeks and months, we have again seen the devastating impact of climate change on communities across the globe. Extreme heatwaves, droughts and wildfires have swept many parts of the world, and 2023 is now virtually certain to be the warmest year since records began in the mid-1800s”.

It is doubtful that many of the TDs who gathered to listen to the budget speech can have remembered heading into the Dáil in their shirt sleeves in mid-October as temperatures remained eerily high in recent days, well above 20ºC in a month where the average high temperature is just 13ºC. However pleasant, an October heatwave in Ireland is as ominous as it is unexpected.

Despite what the naysayers would have us believe, the green transition is in fact gathering pace in Ireland. Last month, fully electric cars were the single biggest seller in Ireland, with over 26% of sales, outselling either diesel or petrol models for the first time. This trend is only going in one direction, and the budget extended VRT relief on EVs up to the value of €50,000 until the end of 2025.

A few years ago, the idea of solar panels being commonplace on Irish homes would have sounded fanciful. However, a combination of high electricity prices and the recent removal of VAT on solar panels has seen their uptake more than double in 2023.

The budget also doubled to €400 the amount of tax-free income a homeowner can earn by selling surplus electricity back to the grid, as well as sensibly removing VAT on solar panels for schools. Apart from producing free electricity, school solar installations could present a valuable practical learning opportunity for children on the clean energy transition.

The government’s budget for energy transformation, including retrofitting, is now approaching half a billion euros, including €380 million for residential and community schemes operated by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI).

This cost is fully funded by carbon tax revenues. Like them or not, carbon taxes really do work. By gradually raising the price on highly polluting products and using the revenues to make cleaner, greener alternatives affordable, they ease the pain of the energy transition while sending a clear longer term signal to the market that clean energy is the only game in town.

Environment and climate minister, Eamon Ryan describes Ireland’s home retrofitting plan as “one of the most ambitious in Europe” with around 40,000 home energy upgrades due to be completed this year. Assuming the momentum is maintained and even modestly increased, this could see half a million Irish homes receive a significant energy upgrade in the next 10 years or so.

Ireland’s big opportunity over the next decade is in rapidly scaling up our renewable energy production, including onshore and offshore wind as well as solar power.

Fossil fuel interests are fighting an intense rear-guard action to try to scupper this transition. They are dangling such nebulous prospects as ‘clean gas’ and HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) as alternatives to oil and gas.

In reality, these create more problems than solutions, and are little more than a distraction from the serious business of electrifying transport, home heating and much of our industrial sectors.

While it tends to grab fewer headlines, the scale of changes being rolled out mean that key bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the SEAI, NWPS and the Department of Environment and Climate need not just funding but also the skilled staff to ensure that political plans get implemented.

And, after years of chronic underfunding and political neglect, nature and heritage protection has come roaring back. Junior minister Malcolm Noonan secured €166 million for built and natural heritage, which included a €67.5 million budget for the NWPS, up 28% on last year, and more than quadrupled since the dark days of a decade ago.

For a country that trades internationally on its ‘green’ reputation, the political hostility to nature and biodiversity protection and willingness to coddle vested interests has long been a source of national shame. We can and must do better, much better.

Long after Budget 2024 is a footnote in the history books, it’s likely that the visionary and potentially game-changing Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund will be what it’s best remembered for.

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged Eamon Ryan, Malcolm Noonan, NPWS, retrofitting, Solar energy | Leave a comment

The hazards of homicidal pragmatism

Posted on October 7, 2023 by John Gibbons

Whatever you may think of the Catholic Church (I’m certainly not a fan), it’s hard to dispute the fact that the current pope is unlike any of his predecessors. As I explained in the Irish Examiner in October, he has once again emerged as a genuine global leader on demanding action on the climate emergency, and, this time out, has even socked it to climate deniers, so what’s not to like?

IN HIS YOUTH, Pope Francis was an accomplished amateur boxer. And, with a master’s degree in chemistry, the science-literate pontiff has brains as well as brawn.

The first-ever pope from the global south, Francis also brings the perspective of the colonised and the dispossessed to the job, something that had been notably missing from the corridors of power.

Eight years ago, he published a 200-page encyclical, titled Laudato Si. It was a hard-hitting appeal for urgent action to address the global climate and biodiversity crisis, to arrest what he called the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem”.

He also roundly rejected bare-knuckle capitalism and trickle-down economics as a “failed theory”. His ecological plea came wrapped in a warning: “Destroy creation and creation will destroy us”.

While it can be difficult to gauge the precise effect of such an intervention, it was timed to influence the COP15 climate conference in Paris.

Whether or not it was a coincidence, the Paris Agreement in late 2015 was the biggest breakthrough in climate diplomacy in the last two decades.

Now, Francis is back in the ring. His new encyclical, titled Laudate Deum (Praise God) pulls no punches in setting out the scale of the existential crisis we now face, while ripping into those who have stymied decisive action on the climate emergency, putting humanity in grave danger in the process.

“The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point” he stated, deploying a clarity of language rare among world leaders, but striking a similarly strident tone as that being adopted by UN secretary-general, António Guterres.

The timing of his latest intervention is an unapologetic attempt to influence the COP28 climate negotiations being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a petro-state.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident”.

He singled out the corrosive role of climate denial: “In recent years, some have chosen to deride these facts. They bring up allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had, and will have, periods of cooling and warming” to misrepresent the science.

“In order to ridicule those who speak of global warming, it is pointed out that intermittent periods of extreme cold regularly occur”, Francis noted.

The 86-year-old pontiff’s grasp of scientific nuance and understanding of detail around the climate emergency would put many a newspaper editor, political correspondent or senior broadcaster to shame.

Striking to the nub of the issue, he stated: “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time”.

The pope’s timing is serendipitous. The release of his encyclical coincided with news that September 2023 has been confirmed as the hottest September ever recorded, a record it now shares with June, July, and August of this year.

Worse, the sudden spike in September temperatures, rising an unprecedented 0.5C over the previous record, has stunned even climate scientists.

University of Reading climatologist, Ed Hawkins summed up the general reaction among experts as follows: “Surprising. Astounding. Staggering. Unnerving. Bewildering. Flabbergasting. Disquieting. Gobsmacking. Shocking. Mind boggling”.

We appear to be perilously close to a drastic shift in the Earth’s climate system or, as the pope put it, there is “the real possibility that we are approaching a critical point”, adding that while we are now unable to halt the “enormous damage we have caused, we barely have time to prevent even more tragic damage”.

While addressing climate and biodiversity issues is often framed in technocratic terms, in reality it is in essence a moral question.

Humans have unleashed god-like power with which to lay waste to much of the natural world, but the carnage is often hidden.

“The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion”, Francis says.

Without a revolution in thought that re-frames humanity as a part of nature and operating within its boundaries, there is little hope of avoiding an epic global tragedy. The current dependence on techno-fixes is, he added, “a form of homicidal pragmatism”.

He noted that those who speak up for nature are derided by the powerful and “subject to ridicule by economic interests”, but they are nonetheless on the right side of history. He faces “dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions, even within the Catholic Church”.

This is certainly borne out in Ireland, where some of the most strident attacks on environmental defenders and climate activists comes from commentators and politicians who make great play of their Catholic faith, while feeling free to discard the Pope’s teachings when it conflicts with their own ideology.

The ecological crisis is an existential emergency, challenging everything it means to be human, and profoundly questioning our place in the world.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, if any, what Francis has to say has never felt more urgent.

Posted in Global Warming, Politics, Psychology | Tagged climate denial, Ed Hawkins, Laudato Si, Pope Francis | Leave a comment

What happens when the law no longer protects us?

Posted on September 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

Imagine you could somehow project yourself 10 or 20 years into the future, and were looking back at the world in the 2020s, in full knowledge of the slow-motion catastrophe that was unfolding. What would you have done differently? I suspect most of us probably would have major regrets, but this knowledge doesn’t make putting your neck on the line today any easier, as I wrote in the Irish Examiner in September.

IF YOU KNEW for certain that something unimaginably terrible was going to happen, yet the only possible way it could be prevented is by breaking the law, would you do it?

And, if by taking this action, you were likely to face public vilification, prosecution, and possible imprisonment, would you still do it? This is the dilemma facing many people in today’s environmental and climate movement.

As British climate activist and broadcaster Chris Packham put it last week: “We are sleepwalking to an apocalypse”. Just hours before his documentary, titled Is it Time to Break the Law? was aired on Channel 4, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak did a pre-election U-turn by abandoning a series of key environmental pledges.

It was perhaps the perfect curtain-raiser to the programme, helping to dispel any lingering notion that today’s political classes have the slightest interest in taking the kinds of courageous (and unpopular) decisions necessary to avert disaster.

We are, Packham noted wryly, “starting here from a point that if we don’t do something, we are doomed”. While groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have engaged in a series of mildly disruptive actions, none have come even close to crossing the line into violence.

Most of the great social and political struggles, from the suffragette movement to abolishing slavery and the 20th-century civil rights, anti-colonial, and anti-Apartheid movements, have all entailed violent direct action.

British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested seven times, enduring beatings and solitary confinement. As she said during her trial in October 1908: “We are here not because we are law-breakers. We are here in our efforts to become law-makers”.

Other suffragettes also engaged in arson and vandalism, with Emily Davison killed after throwing herself under the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Who now still argues that these extreme actions, in the face of intractable discrimination, were not justified?

Today, climate activists are “depicted as dangerous radicals, yet the truly dangerous radicals are the countries and firms continuing to burn fossil fuels”, in the words of UN secretary general António Guterres.

There have been multiple reports of climate protesters engaged in peaceful actions, such as sit-ins on roads, being assaulted by members of the public, as well as being arrested and imprisoned.

The UK government’s new Public Order Bill, not dissimilar to repressive legislation in Russia, has effectively criminalised peaceful protests as innocuous as holding up a poster.

Other groups in society, from farmers to trade unionists, occasionally engage in disruptive street protests, but it is almost unheard of for them to be physically assaulted in the process.

Anger against climate protesters in the UK “has been fuelled by right-wing media”, Packham observed. “The public has been conditioned to hate them”.

Media coverage frequently employs loaded language like ‘zealots’ and ‘fanatics’ to stoke public antipathy against peaceful protestors who are acting not for their own gain but to draw attention to a dire ecological emergency that is becoming more apparent with every passing month.

For those involved in climate activism, these are dark, dark days. “I’ve been part of a generation of conservationists who’ve completely failed to protect the thing they’re meant to love”, Packham said.

Having been involved for years in peaceful campaigning, signing petitions, and going on marches, he is left with the stark reality that “none of it has worked; perhaps I have to take another route. Is it time for me to break the law?”

Packham’s experience mirrors my own, and doubtless, that of many other campaigners. We are losing badly, and every day of inaction takes us a day closer to irreversible climate breakdown and an unspeakable global tragedy.

We all do whatever we can. As a journalist, I have written hundreds of articles explaining the crisis and pleading for urgent action, attended numerous meetings and protests, and taken part in countless talks and interviews.

Yet, like Packham, I remain haunted by the sense that our best efforts are hopelessly inadequate.

Other than a couple of youthful indiscretions, I have remained on the right side of the law, and am grateful to live in a democratic country with a police force and judiciary that is broadly trusted. My climate activism likewise has been within the law, yet it is manifestly failing to make a difference.

In an era of climate breakdown, with our planetary life support systems unravelling before our eyes, the only truly radical action is to do nothing and meekly accept our fate.

“I’ve reached a point where I consider [breaking the law] the ethically responsible thing to do,” Packham concluded. Or, as civil rights activist Martin Luther King memorably put it: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”.

If the law seems more concerned with shielding polluters and coddling lobbyists, then yes, maybe we have to fight back. Frankly, what other choices do we now have?

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Politics, Protest, Psychology, Sustainability | Tagged Chris Packham, Emmeline Pankhurst, Extinction Rebellion | Leave a comment

Is insurance the first climate domino to fall?

Posted on September 14, 2023 by John Gibbons

While most economists and much of the financial system is still living in la la land when it comes to failing to account for the climate emergency, one sector where the impacts are already piling up is the global insurance industry. It in turn underpins national and transnational commerce as well as being a vital component of the housing sector. No insurance, no mortgage, as I explored in the Irish Examiner in September.

FOR MOST OF us, most of the time, insurance is just another bill that drops on the mat once or twice a year for our home or car. And while sometimes it might be tempting not to bother renewing, the nagging possibility, however slight, of being financially wiped out by a catastrophe, such as a house fire or major flood damage, means we keep on paying those annoying annual premia.

Typically, it is assumed that in any given year, a small number of claims will be made per 1,000 vehicles or homes covered. The pooled income then allows a few big payouts to be made. What happens, however, if a city is hit by a storm or extreme flooding event that destroys thousands of cars and houses?

The home insurance market in particular is beginning to rapidly unravel in parts of the world as extreme weather events ratchet up. In the first eight months of 2023 in the US, there have been 23 ‘natural disasters’ where damage has exceeded $1bn, making it already the worst year on record, with almost four months remaining.

“Climate change is the number one long-term risk out there“, according to Jerome Haegeli, chief economist with re-insurance giant, Swiss Re.

Calculating insurable risk depends on complex mathematical modelling, but for all their sophistication, almost all models have a fundamental flaw in that they base current and future risk on what has happened in the past.

Accelerating climate change means the risks are increasing, in scale, frequency and in unpredictability. Last May, State Farm Insurance, the largest insurer in California halted all its new home policies in the state due to what it described as “growing catastrophic exposure” wildfire risk in particular.

In the last six years, California alone has experienced more than $30bn in insurable losses as a direct result of wildfires fuelled by rising temperatures. In March, Eric Andersen, president of Aon PLC stated that climate change has created “a crisis of confidence around the ability to predict loss”.

Ominously, Anderson added that “just as the US economy was over-exposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is over-exposed to climate risk”. Hurricanes, wildfires and flooding disasters have pushed insurers into crisis and bankruptcy in several US states, with homeowners struggling to get cover at almost any price.

The situation in Europe is also growing critical. According to the European Commission, losses directly attributable to climate change cost EU states some €145bn over the last decade, with Ireland ranking the third-highest country in per-capita climate related losses. These losses are expected to rise exponentially in the years and decades ahead, with dire implications for the insurance industry.

In parts of Cork, including Glanmire, there are already households that are unable to get insurance dating back to a major flood in the area over a decade ago. The inability to get insurance means people cannot get mortgages, with obvious knock-on effects into the wider economy.

Climate risk

In August 2022, Ireland’s Central Bank launched a consultation on climate change risk for the insurance sector, upgrading climate from “emerging risk” to “key risk”, and advised all insurers to closely monitor their exposure to climate risks.

“The stakes are high, not just for the future viability of the insurance sector, but for society as a whole”, according to Central Bank governor, Gabriel Makhlouf. A survey it conducted in 2021 found that only one in five insurers fully integrate climate risk into their risk management frameworks, with less than half the firms surveyed having conducted stress testing around climate risks.

This laid-back attitude to emerging climate risk is by no means confined to Ireland. Research published earlier this year revealed shocking levels of ignorance and complacency across the financial sector.

The study, involving the University of Exeter and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that many leading financial institutions simply didn’t understand the models being used to project the economic cost of climate change.

Models developed by economists that fundamentally misunderstand climate risks, including tipping points and compound events, are being used by financial institutions to estimate their own exposure to climate risks, and these are in many cases profoundly inaccurate.

‘Hothouse world’

For instance, a number of major financial institutions in the UK bizarrely reported that they would be unaffected or even do better in “hothouse world” climate scenarios that will lay waste to civilisation.

The most egregious example of this occurred in 2018, when famed economist, William Nordhaus in his address on receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics stated that an average 4C global temperature rise would represent the “optimal” balance between costs of climate change versus climate action.

As climate science has long confirmed, a 4C world would in reality be a hellish dystopia of famines, desertification, forced migration, political and economic chaos, ecological collapse and global immiseration. Indeed, at just 1.2C, the world is already experiencing ever-worsening and increasingly dangerous extreme weather events, as the ferocious summer of 2023 has so forcefully underlined.

The notion that the world’s food production system alone could withstand 4C global temperature rise is considered wildly unrealistic by scientists, yet many economists and the financial institutions they influence often appear to exist in a parallel reality where the physical limits of Earth systems do not apply.

As a case in point, an assessment of likely impacts on global GDP in a “hothouse” world of +3C carried out by a group comprising 114 central banks and financial overseers somehow managed to entirely omit “impacts related to extreme weather, sea-level rise or wider societal impacts from migration or conflict”.

If at this point it seems fanciful that some of the world’s highest-paid and ostensibly smartest people could really have gotten something this big so completely wrong, cast your mind back to the financial collapse of 2008, where greed, self-delusion and magical thinking on the part of major banks and investment companies came within a hair’s-breadth of triggering a total collapse of the global economy.

If they were this unable to grasp financial risk back in the early 2000s, is it really so difficult to imagine that the same people and institutions are any less blinkered today on climate risks?

On a positive note, many major insurers are now refusing to provide cover to new oil and gas exploration, having finally twigged that the fossil fuel industry is destroying the stable climate system that the insurance industry’s business model depends on.

While the only effective long-term defence against climate change is to drastically cut carbon pollution, in the interim, we also have to spend heavily to strengthen our infrastructure against threats such as rising sea levels.

To get a sense of just how unprepared the Irish public is for what lies ahead, Dublin City Council spent half a million euros in 2018 to lower a newly constructed sea wall as it slightly obstructed the sea views of motorists.

This change was demanded by local residents, even though these same residents may well face having their homes inundated as sea-level rise continues. The penny may not yet have dropped for many, but that too will change as the climate crisis comes crashing against our shores.

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Sustainability | Tagged Central Bank, insurance, Swiss Re, William Nordhaus | Leave a comment

Dispatches from a young eco-activist

Posted on August 20, 2023 by John Gibbons

I filed this review of ‘It’s Not Just You’, by Tori Tsui for the Business Post in August. While it makes a few interesting points, overall it fails to escape the dense tangle of eco-jargon and will be a struggle for all but the most committed to complete. You can, on the other hand, get a flavour of what it’s about by reading on…

THERE WAS a time when the young were largely free to get on with the job of growing up, while older, more experienced adults managed the serious business of looking after the future.

Lately, this natural order has been upended, with some youthful activists now finding themselves thrust into the unforgiving glare of the global media spotlight as the climate emergency deepens.

Most famous of all is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist who burst on to the world stage as a shy yet fiercely determined 16-year-old speaking truth in the plainest possible terms to the world’s political and business elite on whose watch climate change has deteriorated from being a managerial challenge into a dire existential crisis.

Thunberg is, however, one among many tens of thousands of young climate activists who have thrown themselves into the fight, often at huge personal cost. “I felt like I forfeited my youth, play and innocence to become an adult, to become a professional so that my voice is heard”, in the words of youth activist, Katie Hodgetts.

“I felt like the reward of stepping up to be a custodian for the planet and for people was poor mental health and burnout”, she told Tori Tsui, for her new book, It’s Not Just You. Tsui, a Hong Kong-born activist, has conducted extensive interviews with young climate activists and her book chronicles the heavy price being paid by these youthful campaigners, many of whom now also face criminalisation simply for trying to raise public awareness about the climate emergency.

Tsui explores a near epidemic of eco-anxiety sweeping through younger people. She defines it not as a pathology but rather as “a rational response to irrational circumstances”.

Many of these young activists face a dual burden. They are grappling with their own fears about a climate-ravaged future, as vividly illustrated throughout the chaotic summer of 2023, as relentless waves of record-smashing extreme weather events racked much of the northern hemisphere. In addition, many are buckling under the burden of being expected to somehow be the climate ‘saviours’.

“A lot of young people have so much pressure on their shoulders”, activist Dominique Palmer says. “People say: ‘You give us hope, you will change the world, you are more progressive and radical. If you won’t do it, who else will?'”

This intense pressure of expectation leaves Palmer feeling “burnt out and traumatised” and resentful of the idea that a handful of exhausted volunteer campaigners are “the answer to all of the world’s problems”.

While the concept of climate anxiety is relatively new, in the Global South, which has been at the sharp end of worsening climate impacts for which it is not culpable for decades, this has long been a worry, not about the future, but rather the bitter everyday reality.

“My ethnic group is being displaced across West and Central Africa due to climate change and conflict, but ‘climate anxiety’ is something only reserved for the rich and white”, observed Abdourahamane Ly, an activist from Guinea.

“My people are dying in the [English] Channel and stopped from entering fortress Europe while famines are sweeping the continent, but the focus is always on the feelings of those least affected”.

A high-profile campaigner, Tsui details the heavy toll climate anxiety has taken on her own mental health, with the Covid pandemic adding to the collective distress. “It’s a weird existence going from being an eco-conscious climate nomad who sailed the high seas to a traumatised, jobless twentysomething confined to a dingy shoebox of a flat” by the pandemic.

Tsui delves deeply into the links between mental health and issues including climate justice. “The climate crisis is making us unwell, and attempting to address it is my form of therapy, even if one suffers in the process”, she observes.

Tsui’s book suffers from a surfeit of jargon, with terms like “unpacking” and “intersectionality” used to excess. At times the author seems unclear if she is writing for an academic or general audience. As a result, some entire early chapters feel like they have been culled from a Master’s thesis.

It’s Not Just You will appeal to committed young climate activists, especially eco-feminists but it will struggle to win over a wider public audience beyond the eco-converted.

It’s Not Just You, by Tori Tsui, Simon & Schuster UK, €18.20

Posted in Global Warming, Protest, Psychology | Tagged Business Post, Greta Thunberg, Tori Tsui | Leave a comment

Your time is precious: spend it wisely

Posted on August 17, 2023 by John Gibbons

While the big ticket changes to move the dial on the climate crisis are generally beyond the reach of most people, that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do. How we choose to spend our time, including our choices around who we do and don’t work for, carry real weight too, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in August.

GIVEN THAT apathy, cynicism, and outright denial still dominate how our political system, corporations and much of our media are reacting to the unfolding climate emergency, it is easy for us as individuals to feel as helpless as the situation feels hopeless.

Giving up is, however, not an option, so at least for now, it’s up to us: you and me. The most valuable commodity we possess is our time; how we choose to spend it is a decision we must each make for ourselves, but more and more people are coming to realise that, in a world on fire, it makes little sense to simply carry on with our lives and careers as if nothing has changed.

The global oil and gas industry is already feeling the pinch; the number of US business school graduates opting for careers in this dirtiest and most destructive of industries has slumped by over 40% in the last decade or so.

“Good people don’t want to work for a bad company”, according to Kerryman Bernard Looney, then chief executive of energy giant, BP. His total pay in 2022 was around $12 million, amid spiralling energy bills, great hardship for consumers, and a profit bonanza for the oil majors.

Meanwhile, BP scrapped its stated target of cutting emissions by 40% by 2030. “At the end of the day, we’re responding to what society wants”, was how Looney explained this u-turn. Society also wants a stable, liveable climate and secure global food system, though.

Most people want their values and actions to be broadly in alignment. With more and more now waking up to the twin crises of biodiversity collapse and climate breakdown, maybe now is the time to consider whether your current job or career can make a positive contribution to help build a safer, cleaner future for everyone.

As UN secretary general António Guterres told a group of new college graduates last year: “You hold the cards. Don’t work for the climate wreckers. Use your talents to drive us towards a renewable future”.

For those with technical, managerial, or engineering skills, the renewable energy sector in Ireland is growing rapidly. Onshore wind, domestic and industrial solar power, and the upcoming boom in offshore wind will see the creation of thousands of new positions for a wide range of skills in an industry in which you can be doing good as you do well.

As Ireland rapidly transitions towards the electrification of home heating, transport, and energy, there will be winners and losers. Traditional car mechanics, for example, will need to re-train as the uptake of electric vehicles will render their existing skills redundant.

On the other hand, many of those trained to work in offshore oil and gas exploration are finding their skills in demand to help create and maintain new offshore wind farms.

Threat to health

The World Health Organisation has identified climate change as the greatest threat to human health this century. The most obvious risks arise from extreme weather events, but deteriorating air quality plus the spread of infectious diseases, food insecurity, and reduced access to clean water are all on the increase.

Groups such as Irish Doctors for the Environment are helping spread awareness about the dire health risks posed by climate breakdown, including threats to mental health.

The 300,000 people working in healthcare in Ireland are trusted voices who can help raise awareness among colleagues and patients about the climate emergency. This could include discussing the health and climate benefits of largely plant-based diets.

Those of us in media and communications have the privilege of having access to an audience. This should include the responsibility to include relevant ecological framing in how stories are presented. A new runway, for example, isn’t just a ‘business’ or ‘travel’ story. There are also climate costs and implications to be considered.

Media also need to be ever vigilant about the growing tide of corporate greenwash being produced to bamboozle the public. If you have legal training, environmental law is a fast-growing discipline where you can put your skills to good use in fighting such deceptive practices.

If you’re one of the almost 70,000 teachers in Ireland, why not make regular space in the classroom to discuss the environment? Many schools have access to a garden space or polytunnel. Primary school children will love to get their hands dirty while learning about nature and food.

As recently as a generation ago, many homes had a “kitchen garden” where much of the fruit and vegetables for the family were grown. These disappeared with the advent of cheap, mostly imported, produce. However, food is never truly cheap, and knowing how to grow and preserve it is a vital skill that has been largely lost.

If you are a farmer, do consider horticulture, ideally organic. This is, by some distance, the most efficient way of producing food for human consumption, even using limited space. Moving production under glass helps to buffer your crops against damaging weather extremes. People need to eat every day. Soon enough, you will struggle to keep up with demand for your produce.

Even if you just have access to a garden or neighbourhood allotment, now is the time to pull on your gloves and get growing. Visit the Grow It Yourself website (giy.ie) to help set you on the right path. In previous times of emergency, communities dug ‘victory gardens’ to secure local food production and avoid hunger. The trick to being prepared is to start now.

The climate emergency will, in time, see the end of cheap food and may even lead to supermarket shelves emptying. Ireland imports nearly all of its fruit and veg, including from areas that are fast becoming too hot to produce food. It takes time to learn the basic skills we are all going to need as things become ever tougher, so the sooner we start, the better.

DIY courses

This is also a great time to sign up for a DIY course. A basic understanding of carpentry and electrics could one day prove invaluable. Solar panels could help offset future disruption to imported energy sources. Our grandparents’ generation got by on very little, wasted nothing, and were skilled at making and mending. We need to rediscover their thrifty ways as the era of global hyperabundance is now effectively over.

If you can possibly afford it, insulate your home and add solar panels and, ideally, a heat pump too. These will be an invaluable buffer against possible future disruption to imported energy sources.

‘Meitheal’ is an old Irish term describing how neighbours would come together to help in the saving of crops or in other shared tasks. In the turbulent times ahead, we will likely need to once again look to our extended families and local community for support, security and solidarity.

True wealth in the future will be measured in ‘social capital’ rather than money. Invest wisely.

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Psychology, Sustainability | Tagged Antonio Guterres, Bernard Looney, BP, DIY, greenwashing, Horticulture, Irish Doctors for the Environment | Leave a comment

Lifting the omerta on speaking plainly

Posted on August 15, 2023 by John Gibbons

Let’s be honest for a moment. We have collectively pussy-footed around the climate and biodiversity emergency for years, decades in fact. Despite the scientific evidence piling ever higher week by week, it has long been taken as read that stating this bluntly would be either alarmist or would simply cause the public to tune out or even give up altogether. I’ve never been convinced by this line of reasoning, and explored it in some depth in a piece for the Irish Times’ climate and science page in August.

IF THE POWER of positive thinking could be parlayed into action, it’s likely the global climate emergency would have been dealt with a long time ago. Instead, after years, even decades of upbeat pronouncements from can-do politicians and business leaders, the situation has never been more ominous.

The drastic escalation of the climate emergency this year has been signalled with record-shattering temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere, including simultaneous heatwaves on three continents. July 2023 has been confirmed as the hottest month on Earth on the instrumental record, and likely the hottest in at least 120,000 years based on palaeoclimatological evidence.

So extreme have conditions been this summer that UN secretary general, António Guterres declared: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” This is in stark contrast in both language and tone to previous can-do pronouncements from politicians and public officials. The omerta on speaking bluntly about the climate emergency may have been finally lifted.

The early optimism on the ability and willingness of the global community to come together and act in line with the science has now largely evaporated. During three decades of intergovernmental climate action more heat-trapping greenhouse gases have been ejected into the global atmosphere than in all of human history pre-flight.

Despite this manifest failure the dominant messaging within mainstream climate communications has been to keep it positive. This was brought home forcefully some years back during a talk to a group of environmental activists. While outlining the stark reality of rising emissions and policy failure I was interrupted from the floor by a seasoned campaigner saying they were “sick of hearing all this negative stuff”.

The understandable desire to shut down ecological bad news involves focusing on the wafer-thin silver lining while ignoring the giant black clouds. This is as pervasive as it is common, even in environmental circles.

The tendency to look on the bright side appears to be hard-wired into our species, and in the context of the climate emergency the argument now most frequently deployed is that optimism is necessary in order to stave off fatalism and doomism, the growing sense among many that it is already too late to avert a global catastrophe.

This was tested in a study in the journal Climatic Change in July titled Fanning the Flames or Burning Out, which set out to test the various hypotheses on how people react to threatening or frightening climate messaging.

The fact that the tone and frequency of media messaging on a given topic can impact people’s beliefs and emotions and even behaviour is not in doubt. The researchers set about testing this in relation to climate messaging.

They reported that in the short term exposure to gloomy media coverage led to increased fear and a reduced feeling of hope among participants. However, a more surprising effect was then detected when a second, longer term study was carried out. Here the results were reversed.

“People’s efficacy beliefs increased over time”, according to lead author, Christofer Skura of Penn State University. “The more exposure people had to these threatening news stories each day they were increasingly likely to think they could make a difference in addressing climate change”.

What is critical here is what the researchers call the “agenda-setting effect”. When people only see climate coverage sporadically in the media they assume it’s a fringe issue. “What may be more important for motivating them to take action is that they see coverage of it on a daily basis” said study co-author Jessica Myrick.

Dublin-based psychologist Dr Eoin Galavan is vice-chair of the Psychological Society of Ireland’s group on the climate and environmental emergency. He rejects what he calls the binary notion that either pessimism or optimism are necessarily the correct responses. “What I think is needed is a balance between our capacity to bravely, creatively and constructively meet challenges around the climate crisis and the recognition of the peril that we are in and the damage we’ve already done”.

The research on the role played by fear and anxiety in how humans respond to the emerging climate threat is, he suggests, mixed. “There’s enough research to suggest that it’s important that the peril that we’re facing, which can evoke fear and anxiety, is a significant ingredient in climate messaging”, Without the public being aware of the true nature and scale of the risks, he believes we will not be successful in getting people to engage in pro-environmental behavioural change.

What has yet to happen to effect dramatic change on both an individual and societal level is that we shift into what’s called “emergency mode”. When someone says their house is on fire, “we don’t get worried about whether they are being optimistic or pessimistic, we ring the fire brigade, we move into action” he adds.

Dr Galavan cites the recent Covid pandemic as a case study in what happens when there is such an overwhelming focus on a clear and present danger that all the usual political and social considerations, including the concerns of vested interests, are put to one side and the focus is on tackling the emergency, at almost any cost. “I don’t remember people saying should we be optimistic or pessimistic about how we talk about Covid; we just said it’s dangerous, it’s going to kill us, so here’s what we have to do to protect ourselves”, Dr Galavan added.

A 2020 study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication found that while excessive pessimism in climate messaging could lead to people becoming paralysed with anxiety, an unduly optimistic spin tended to lead to complacency.

Participants exposed to more negative scenarios reported higher levels of emotional arousal, which in turn led to heightened risk perception. Interestingly, in people self-identifying as conservative, emotional arousal as a result of pessimistic messaging had the biggest impact in terms of changing their views around climate change.

Those reporting greater emotional arousal also felt more inclined to believe they could make a positive impact on tacking the climate emergency. While it has many downsides, fear is a potent emotion when constructively harnessed.

The idea that optimism can induce complacency was also examined in a 2017 study exploring ‘belief in a favourable future’. Behavioural scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy school reported that “ironically, our findings indicate that this belief in a favourable future may diminish the likelihood that people will take action to ensure it becomes a reality”.

Decades of self-help mantras and upbeat business slogans have trumpeted the idea that we can, though the power of positive thinking, shape our lives and perhaps even bend reality to our will. Pessimism has been seen as negative and unhelpful yet it can be also extremely valuable.

People known as defensive pessimists worry deeply about stressful events such as exams or job interviews, but they tend to do better as a result, as they work harder, prepare better as they overestimate their likelihood of failure.

Professional pessimism, after all, saves lives. It leads engineers and scientists to check and recheck their calculations, or pilots to conduct more rigorous pre-flight checks. To borrow an old phrase: if you can keep your head about the climate emergency when the scientists around you are losing theirs perhaps you just haven’t been paying attention?

Posted in Global Warming, Psychology | Tagged Antonio Guterres, Eoin Galavan, Irish Times, Psychological Society of Ireland, psychology | Leave a comment