Dear Editor:
Stop and take a moment to consider how last week’s heatwave impacted your life. Did you sacrifice your savings for AC? Did you obsessively refresh the B.C. Wildfires online dashboard, wishing, as I did, that our homes would be spared from incineration? Chances are, you never want to experience that kind of heat again.
Yet, as human activities warm the planet, heat waves such as last week’s become exceedingly more likely to occur. While many are beginning to take action on climate change, the window to prevent the worst of it is rapidly closing. We will have more heatwaves, but the frequency and severity with which they occur will be dictated by our actions today. So, the question remains: what kind of future do we want?
If we don’t significantly decrease our greenhouse gas emissions now, there will be devastating consequences. Already, global temperatures have increased on average by an estimated 0.8 to 1.2 degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution. To prevent the worst of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urges that temperatures be kept to below 1.5 degrees relative to pre-industrial levels, and especially below 2 degrees. Frankly, it’s unlikely we’ll meet that target. In a world where warming exceeds 2 degrees, billions will be displaced due to heat and rising sea levels; locally, we can expect more severe heatwaves, significantly extended fire seasons, mass loss of our glaciers, and more. Of course, these disasters are already unfolding. Climate change will not be one single event. As climate scientist Kate Marvel says, “Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.” We have slid quite a lot already, but how much farther do we want to go? Every inch counts.
Climate change is happening now, and our actions today dictate how much worse it will get. While I will discuss potential solutions in future letters, I want to sit with these feelings of fear for now. Climate change is a real existential threat, and it makes sense for us to be afraid. To relieve that fear, most of us seek hope, but please remember this: hope is something we earn through action; we cannot keep using baseless optimism to justify our inertia, nor can we continue to deny the reality of global warming. If we are to get serious about addressing this disaster, we all need to be aware of what’s at stake if action is further delayed.
Kate Watt, Fairmont Hot Springs
Your letter contains an important fact – ““Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.” This highlights some fallacies later in the letter – “I want to sit with these feelings of fear for now. Climate change is a real existential threat, and it makes sense for us to be afraid.”.
Climate change is real but not an existential threat and fear and panic are not in any way healthy or helpful. Changes need to be made, certainly. But the actual facts on the ground do not require us to adopt moral panic and terror. Think about the children who live in actual fear as a result of apocalyptic hand wringing such as this authors. It breaks one’s heart, this is actual terror being sewed.
Technology solutions will be forthcoming, people and cities will adapt. Climate change is a problem to be solved. But fear mongering about the literal end of existence for humanity (that is what people mean by existential after all) is useless and cruel.