Reading the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will not cheer you up.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
While part of Australia is flooded, and the embers are barely cooled in British Columbia, the approximately 270 experts who sign this document paint a portrait of the future that awaits our children and our grandchildren. And that future, it’s more bright orange and black than pink.
This should not surprise us. What once seemed like distant threats, even the far-fetched scenario of a disaster movie, is now unfolding before our eyes: extreme heat, droughts, fires, coastal erosion, loss of biodiversity, endangered animal species of disappearance, air pollution, rising water levels… We are already witnessing all this on a daily basis. However, despite the deafening sound of alarm bells, we continue to turn a deaf ear.
What this IPCC report, which details the consequences of climate change for each part of the world, tells us is that things are not going to get better. Our efforts are no match for global warming. And since life is often unfair, it is the poorest, those who consume and pollute the least, who will suffer the most.
Over the next few years, we can therefore expect to see an increase in the movement of climate refugees with the political, social and economic destabilization that comes with it.
With regard more specifically to North America, the IPCC experts identify several concrete impacts: food supply and security problems, floods, water shortages, economic consequences in large urban centers… Their report identifies another effect that we had perhaps underestimated: the repercussions of these upheavals on our mental health. Indeed, insecurity will do its work on our minds unaccustomed to adversity, if we compare ourselves to certain populations in Africa or Southeast Asia.
This report – which UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called an “atlas of human suffering” – is the most detailed and disturbing of all the reports published by the IPCC to date. However, it is clear that despite the many warnings, the message still does not get through.
In 2019, the Brookings Institute identified factors that stand in the way of the fight against climate change: the lack of public trust in governments, the lack of scientific education, the absence of consequences for polluting companies …
The IPCC authors identify another factor wreaking havoc in North America: misinformation. The denial of climate change, the refusal to recognize the action of human beings and all the hazy theories peddled over the years by climate skeptics are all obstacles to environmental action.
“Disinformation and the politicization of climate issues are obstacles to the adoption of concrete measures that could make a difference”, insist the experts. And the defense of acquired rights helps to deny the urgency of the situation.
Add to this that by politicizing the fight against climate change, climate emergency deniers impose a twisted and binary vision of reality: you are pro-ecology, critical of excessive consumption and the use of the car ? Here you are labeled elitist, anti-economic growth go-left militant and troublemaker.
At the other end of the political spectrum, it seems that the choice to drive a polluting vehicle (light trucks represented 71% of vehicles sold in 2020!), to over-consume, to fly excessively and to contribute to the urban sprawl have become fundamental individual rights that can no longer be questioned for fear of being labeled “enemy of the people”. We hardly caricature.
This is the result of the politicization of climate issues. A Manichean vision of the world that prevents us from moving forward and that risks leading us to our downfall.
The fight against climate change should, however, be an objective shared by all political parties, regardless of their ideological position. It is our survival as a species that depends on it, nothing less. Five years ago, writing this would have seemed dramatic. Today, it’s just common sense.
We never wondered if wanting to cure cancer was right or left, progressive or conservative. It should be the same when it comes to healing the planet.