The team of the environment section of the newspaper The Guardian had a very good idea: survey hundreds of climate experts in order to collect their predictions on global warming and their feelings about the future. Unsurprisingly, the 380 respondents paint a very gloomy portrait, both empirically and in terms of affects.
The respondents have all played a key role in producing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports since 2018. Among them, 70% believe that warming will exceed the 2.5 degree mark per year. compared to the pre-industrial era by the end of the century. Nearly half of these scientists (42%) believe that we could even exceed 3 degrees of warming and only 6% still said they believed that it is possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees — the threshold set during the Paris Agreement in 2015.
It goes without saying that the feelings expressed go hand in hand with the darkness of these scenarios: despair, anger, anguish, sadness, dejection. Particularly strikingly, the words of the scientists interviewed firstly evoke the human suffering that we will invariably witness in the years and decades to come.
Drama, violence, uprooting
The natural disasters we are witnessing today – heat waves, floods, storms, landslides, famines, fires – are already causing their share of drama, violence and uprooting. All this while we are barely approaching the 1.5 degree threshold. What will a world 2.5 or even 3 degrees warmer look like?
It will be, above all, a violent world, very violent, predict the experts interviewed. A world where hundreds of millions, even billions of people, will be pushed into exile, because it will no longer be possible to inhabit large swathes of territory. In this world, food systems will collapse, entire cities will be swallowed up by water, pandemics will multiply and take lives.
The sequence of testimonies is dizzying; the tone, the certainty that we are already on the path to such a future. A near, palpable future like this: we will see it in our lifetime, and the younger generations will have an existence radically different from ours.
An element which emerges from the impressions transmitted to the Guardian by the scientists interviewed is the idea that this terrible fate remains intimately linked to political action. The violence of the future will, in many ways, be exacerbated, or on the contrary, tempered, by the political response to the climate crisis.
Now, as we know, the tone, here as elsewhere, is at best that of silly optimism. We still find reason to rejoice in minimal commitments, cosmetic solutions or uncertain promises, while fundamental upheavals are upon us. From the carbon tax to the mirages of the development of the “battery sector”, the total absence of leadership to develop real climate resilience is astonishing. An anonymous survey respondent summed it up this way: “ We live in an age of fools. »
There is also a profound moral bankruptcy here, especially in the countries of the global North, where it is still possible either to ignore crises, or to face them in relative comfort, thanks to the resources that we monopolize. Obscene inequity in the very possibility of adapting to climate change is also what will mark our century.
As pointed out in Guardian Stephen Humphreys, professor at the London School of Economics and one of the lead authors of the IPCC special report on the 1.5 degree warming target, the calculation made today by decision-makers in countries like the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or other oil-producing countries, is surfing a trajectory that relies on the sacrifice of the populations of the Global South. “A world in which the most vulnerable will suffer, while the better off will hope to keep their heads above water,” he concludes.
A rise in anti-refugee discourse
While we observe, on the scale of our small province, a clear rise in anti-refugee speeches under the pretext that we have already made our share of efforts in welcoming the misery of the world, we say to ourselves that the calculation is indeed this one: walling ourselves in our relative abundance, jealously protecting our proclaimed right to survival, to the detriment of those less fortunate.
We must question the foundations of this policy of letting people die, and propose other options that envisage a real sharing of possibilities for adaptation to climate change. Catastrophic events are now inevitable, but we still have control over the humanity of our response to crises — that is, over the intensity of violence and injustices that we will allow to be unleashed on the most vulnerable populations. affected by climate change. There is perhaps a glimmer of hope there. We will necessarily face, relentlessly, the loss, the suffering, the many mournings of what the world has been; will we succeed in refusing to sacrifice our humanity?