So it’s going to be sort of like this. Around the year 2030, catastrophic weather events will befall a significant portion of the world’s population. A fire will devastate the Scandinavian and Siberian, Canadian and Quebec boreal forests, throwing a cloud of smoke over the entire northern hemisphere, depriving us of sunlight for one or two seasons. Or a quarter of world cereal production will collapse, causing food scarcity and high prices, followed by hunger riots. Or the monsoon will jump three consecutive years in Southeast Asia, pushing hundreds of millions of people to migrate for food. Probably a mixture of the three scenarios.
(Good news lovers, this column is not for you.)
This is where social science experts take over from climatologists. The scale of disasters will trigger a global mental click. We Earthlings will simultaneously understand three things: first, that our situation is now frightening; second, that everything that is dear to us is seriously at risk; finally, that it is too late to avoid even greater calamities. At this tipping point, “the institutional and social order begins to disintegrate as people everywhere come to an inescapable conclusion: only those who are ready to fight will survive.” We then enter, at varying speeds depending on the continent and region, in the era of Mad Max.
I confess. In anticipation of the COP26 in Glasgow, I spoke to Cassandre. I read it, too. Cassandre is Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the greatest intellectuals in the country, a specialist in systems and crises. I have been reading his work since he published his 2002 Challenge of the imagination, a masterpiece of erudition. Last year in Commanding Hope, he tries to imagine a way out (scoop : he does not really find any).
Struck by the gloomy nature of his predictions, I tried in an interview to extract some reasons, at least local, to fuel hope. For example: the impact of global warming on the jet stream caused the west of our continent to suffer extreme heat last summer. But the east, including Quebec, will remain the place cool of the continent for a long time, right? “I wouldn’t build my life plan on that assumption,” he replies. The heat dome that fell over the West is the result of a temporary disruption caused by the warming of the Arctic, a disruption whose configuration can change very quickly, hitting tomorrow what it spared yesterday. Yes, but, in this deterioration of the social order, our democracy is robust, more than in many places in the world, right? May be. But the rush for toilet paper and flour at the start of the pandemic is a harbinger of beggar-thy-neighbor, which would become widespread when the climate north winds. Then Homer-Dixon apologizes for being so creepy, but according to him, “Canada’s main political problem ten years from now will be the emergence of a right-wing autocracy in the United States.”
The Middle East, first affected
Elsewhere in the world, “one can imagine the emergence of a series of authoritarian, insular and cruel regimes which dominate their own territories and which compete for control – sometimes through war – of fairly large areas where a mixture of crises, weak states, ethnic conflicts and economic and social disintegration left behind only barbarism and anarchism ”.
Science fiction? This summer, several cities in the Middle East recorded temperatures of over 50 degrees. This was also the case in India and the United States. If the humidity is high, the human body cannot tolerate this heat for more than a few hours. Foreign Policy reports that the constant increase in heat, lack of water and therefore sometimes hydropower are the key factors that caused riots in Iraq and Lebanon last summer. The Middle East is warming twice as fast as the world average. A recent CIA report adds these countries to the list of the first victims of the disaster: Afghanistan, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Myanmar, North Korea, Nicaragua and Pakistan.
“I’m not ready to throw in the towel,” says Homer-Dixon. With the energy of desperation, he works with his colleagues at the Cascade Institute in British Columbia on solutions that would have major positive ripple effects. But even great and immediate discoveries would do nothing to avoid the pessimistic development he describes for the next few decades. According to him, these trends are already inevitable, consequences of CO emissions.2 of the past, not of the present or the future.
I forgot to ask him if he was a reader of Asimov and his flagship work Foundation and Empire, of which AppleTV is currently offering an adaptation. We meet there scientists (called psychohistorians) convinced that civilization is on the verge of collapse and that it is therefore urgent to plant the seeds of its future rebirth. By focusing too much on the heavy trends that are darkening the near future, we can be led to conclude that, unless we quickly work towards our food and energy sovereignty and equip ourselves with a national reserve of toilet paper and flour, that’s essentially what remains for us to do.
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