Below we italicise each question and the name of the person asking the question and cite a range of publications we deem relevant per question. For expanding on Katharyne Hayhoe’s views on climate change, see a sample of her public talks here and here, interviews here and here, and newspaper articles here and here. We love one of the titles of her newspaper articles “A thermometer is not liberal or conservative”. A spanish version of this article and interview has been published in the February 2021 issue of the magazine Quercus.
Climate change has some localised, short-term, specific benefits (9). One example is increased access to oil and gas resources in a melting Arctic (10). This temporarily profits oil and gas industries, provides some financial benefit to local communities in Greenland and Alaska short-term, and harms both them and everyone else in the long term. A book called Windfall by Mackenzie Funk describes who is “profiteering” from climate change, and how.
Overall, however, climate change already harms the majority of people today. The poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized are affected first and foremost. Since the 1960s, for example, climate change has increased the gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world by as much as 25 per cent. In 2019, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, warned that climate change “threatens to undo the last 50 years” of development, global health and poverty reduction.” (11)
And while the rich may be able to temporarily “buy their way out of rising heat and hunger”, as Alston put it, the truth is that we all live on this planet, no matter how wealthy and influential we are. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and all the resources we use come from our shared home.
Climate change threatens the ability of our planet to support human civilisation as we know it. It is a threat multiplier, attacking our health, our economy, our resources and even our security. As climate change intensifies and economic markets crumble and refugee crises surge, even those who may temporarily benefit from a warmer world will be negatively impacted by these changes long-term.
That’s why it makes so much sense to take practical steps to limit carbon pollution now. Many of these actions also provide us with short-term benefits that can be quantified in economic terms: like energy savings through efficiency, cheaper electricity from renewables, more jobs, better public transportation, and even faster cars (like Tesla). Climate action also provides less tangible but arguably even more important benefits: cleaner air and water, better health, poverty reduction, and a host of other co-benefits that substantively move us towards meeting key UN Sustainable Development Goals.
To care about climate change, we don’t have to be a certain type of person or live in a certain place or vote a certain way: all we have to be is a human living on this planet, and we’re all that.
ConservationBytes.com 
The very worn slur of “neo-Malthusian”
7 09 2021After the rather astounding response to our Ghastly Future paper published in January this year (> 443,000 views and counting; 61 citations and counting), we received a Commentary that was rather critical of our article.
We have finally published a Response to the Commentary, which is now available online (accepted version) in Frontiers in Conservation Science. Given that it is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), I can repost the Response here:
In their comment on our paper Underestimating the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future, Bluwstein et al.2 attempt to contravene our exposé of the enormous challenges facing the entire human population from a rapidly degrading global environment. While we broadly agree with the need for multi-disciplinary solutions, and we worry deeply about the inequality of those who pay the costs of biodiversity loss and ecological collapse, we feel obligated to correct misconceptions and incorrect statements that Bluwstein et al.2 made about our original article.
After incorrectly assuming that our message implied the existence of “one science” and a “united scientific community”, the final paragraph of their comment contradicts their own charge by calling for the scientific community to “… stand in solidarity”. Of course, there is no “one science” — we never made such a claim. Science is by its nature necessarily untidy because it is a bottom-up process driven by different individuals, cultures, perspectives, and goals. But it is solid at the core. Scientific confluence is reached by curiosity, rigorous testing of assumptions, and search for contradictions, leading to many — sometimes counter-intuitive or even conflicting — insights about how the world works. There is no one body of scientific knowledge, even though there is good chance that disagreements are eventually resolved by updated, better evidence, although perhaps too slowly. That was, in fact, a main message of our original article — that obligatory specialisation of disparate scientific fields, embedded within a highly unequal and complex socio-cultural-economic framework, reduces the capacity of society to appreciate, measure, and potentially counter the complexity of its interacting existential challenges. We agree that scientists play a role in political struggles, but we never claimed, as Bluwstein et al.2 contended, that such struggles can be “… reduced to science-led processes of positive change”. Indeed, this is exactly the reason our paper emphasized the political impotence surrounding the required responses. We obviously recognize the essential role social scientists play in creating solutions to avoid a ghastly future. Science can only provide the best available evidence that individuals and policymakers can elect to use to inform their decisions.
We certainly recognise that there is no single policy or polity capable of addressing compounding and mounting problems, and we agree that that there is no “universal understanding of the intertwined socio-ecological challenges we face”. Bluwstein et al.2 claimed that we had suggested scientific messaging alone can “… adequately communicate to the public how socio-ecological crises should be addressed”. We did not state or imply such ideas of unilateral scientific power anywhere in our article. Indeed, the point of framing our message as pertaining to a complex adaptive system means that we cannot, and should not, work towards a single goal. Instead, humanity will be more successful tackling challenges simultaneously and from multiple perspectives, by exploiting manifold institutions, technologies, approaches, and governances to match the complexity of the predicament we are attempting to resolve.
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Tags: commentary, complex adaptive system, consumption, critique, human population, Malthusian, neo-Malthusian, over-population, overshoot, Population
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, climate change, demography, economics, education, Endarkenment, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, food, governance, human overpopulation, poverty, science, societies, sustainability