Beyond Climate Change Alarmism: The Crisis Both Sides Are Missing

A recent spiked article argues that “eco-hysteria” around climate change poses a greater threat to humanity than climate change itself. Like many critiques of climate change alarmism, it contains a kernel of truth wrapped in a much larger misunderstanding.

Climate change has become so dominant in environmental discourse that it now crowds out almost every other ecological concern. Environmental problems are routinely reduced to carbon emissions; solutions are measured in terms of “net zero”; every flood, drought, wildfire, or heatwave is interpreted through the lens of climate change. The spiked article I reference is responding to the alarmism in the media from the recent European heat wave (which, by the way, killed thousands of people.)

It is hardly surprising that many people have become skeptical. They’ve watched governments promise that vast wind farms, solar arrays, electric cars, and heat pumps would solve the climate change crisis, while energy costs have risen, landscapes have been devastated, and fossil-fuel use globally has continued to grow alongside renewable energy.

Understandably, many conclude that the whole enterprise has been oversold. I’ve written before about the backlash to net zero, and the spiked article is a good illustration of exactly that backlash.

Observing the hyperbole about heat waves and alarmism about climate change, critics such as spiked follow up by making a profound mistake. They assume that if climate change alarmism has exaggerated its case, then either there is no broader ecological crisis, or that the broader ecological crisis must be exaggerated too.

It is not.

The real problem is that nearly everyone has mistaken climate change for the entire story. (This wasn’t always the case, but corporations hijacked the environmental movement and converted it from concern about the natural world into concern about the climate in order to sell more products.)

Climate change is not the environmental crisis. It is one symptom of a far larger predicament: ecological overshoot.

For centuries, humanity has expanded its population, consumption, and technological power by drawing ever more heavily on the Earth’s living systems. We have converted forests into farmland, wetlands into housing estates, rivers into reservoirs, oceans into industrial fisheries, and fossil carbon into unprecedented economic growth. The result has undoubtedly been remarkable material prosperity for billions of human people.

It has also come at an extraordinary cost.

We have caused wildlife populations to collapse across much of the world through exploitation and habitat destruction. We have destroyed and fragmented natural habitats all over the planet. We are making species extinct at rates rarely seen in Earth’s history except during prior mass extinction events. We have polluted the entire planet with persistent chemicals, plastics, pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial waste that now reach from the deepest ocean trenches to the tops of the tallest mountains to all human bloodstreams, and presumably all wildlife bloodstreams, too. We are depleting fertile soils faster than they can regenerate. We are drawing down freshwater aquifers at catastrophic rates. We are making the oceans increasingly acidic and less able to support marine life, while simultaneously overfishing at ruinous levels. We are doing all of this.

None of these crises disappears if we imagine away climate change.

Had atmospheric greenhouse gases somehow remained stable over the past century while all these other trends continued, we would still face a profound ecological crisis.

This is why the debate between climate change alarmists and skeptics feels strangely disconnected from reality. Both sides treat climate change as though it were the central question.

One argues that solving climate change will solve the environmental crisis.

The other argues that because climate change risks have been exaggerated, environmental concern itself is misplaced.

Both are arguing over a symptom while paying insufficient attention to the disease.

Ecological overshoot simply means that humanity is using more energy, materials, land, water, and biological productivity than the Earth can regenerate indefinitely. Climate change is one inevitable consequence of that overshoot. The world-wide habitat destruction and wildlife holocaust we’ve unleashed in the process of overshoot mean collapsing fisheries, disappearing insects, declining bird populations, PFAS contamination, deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and freshwater depletion.

The entire biosphere is being destroyed by our way of life and all the alarmists and skeptics seem to see is CO2 emissions. I (and others) call this carbon tunnel vision and both sides—alarmists and skeptics—suffer from this affliction:

Climate change debates are often framed as though every problem has a technological answer. Corporations have convinced institutions and governments that we can simply replace fossil fuels with renewables, electrify transport, build more transmission lines, install more batteries, and decarbonize everything. Note who benefits from this propaganda: the corporations who get to sell us all of this technology—technology that will simply make the predicament worse.

As I described previously in my article about the net zero backlash, history tells a different story. New energy and materials sources rarely replace old ones outright. More often, they are added to humanity’s growing energy and materials supply, allowing total consumption to expand still further. As long as economies pursue perpetual growth and efficiency, use more materials, and find new ways to harness energy, we accelerate overshoot.

At the same time, dismissing climate change concerns is equally mistaken.

Consider air conditioning,

As temperatures rise, particularly during heatwaves, air conditioning can save lives. Denying vulnerable people access to cooling in the name of reducing emissions would be callous. As the spiked article says:

To agitate against AC even in a heatwave is to exhibit a staggering misanthropic disregard for one’s fellow humans, especially the vulnerable ones.

This is true. But widespread air conditioning also requires more energy, more mining, more infrastructure, and more waste heat—more ecological and atmospheric destruction, in other words.

This is the nature of a predicament. Predicaments do not have solutions. More AC is not a solution to global warming, not even if somehow all that AC is powered by so-called renewable energy. More AC makes overshoot worse and hastens the collapse of the natural world, no matter how it’s powered.

That is perhaps the hardest lesson for modern societies to accept. We have become accustomed to thinking that every problem can be solved through sufficient ingenuity, investment, and innovation. But ecological overshoot is not a technical problem awaiting a clever invention. It is the cumulative consequence of millennia of growth, extraction, and expansion.

The spiked article claims that “the elite panic about modernity is far deadlier than modernity itself.” This is a remarkable statement. It is possible to criticize exaggerated climate change rhetoric without becoming blind to the immense ecological consequences of industrial civilization.

Modernity has brought extraordinary advances in medicine, sanitation, food production, communication, and knowledge. It has also presided over one of the most rapid transformations of the living world in Earth’s history. These are not mutually exclusive truths. We have created this modern world by liquidating the natural world, and in the process created a predicament that has no solution.

Tom Murphy created a Likes/Dislikes diagram on his blog Do The Math that describes what we traded for the things we like about the modern world—things like medicine, sanitation, food production, communication, knowledge, and so on—with the consequences we dislike, including climate change and pollution. The diagram is a vast simplification of the real world, of course, but it deftly illustrates how we can’t have what we like, without also getting what we don’t like:

Likes/Dislikes by Tom Murphy, Do the Math

As Tom writes:

“Modernity offers many alluring perks that act like monkey traps: we grab the banana and won’t let go, even to our detriment. The hidden costs become too great to bear, in the end. … This anomalous period of rapid inheritance spending in a one-time draw-down of ecological health has given us the false impression that we can do anything we want—that it’s all a matter of choice. We therefore live in a fleeting fantasy world in which our mental models don’t match the broader reality.”

By focusing on exaggerated claims about climate change, and concluding that “the elite panic about modernity is far deadlier than modernity itself,” spiked completely ignores the bigger picture illustrated by Tom’s graph: that modernity is unsustainable by any measure.

The greatest danger is neither climate change alarmism nor complacency, but rather this failure to see the bigger picture. We fail to see that bigger picture because we live in the fleeting fantasy world Tom describes.

As long as we continue arguing over whether climate change is everything or nothing, we will overlook the reality that encompasses both positions: humanity has long exceeded the ecological limits of a finite planet and initiated the sixth mass extinction that will mean the premature end to our own species along with many others. As long as we continue to insist on having our likes (like AC and fossil fuels) we’ll have to live with the dislikes (climate change, pollution, and ecological collapse) until the Earth just can’t take it anymore.

Climate change is one alarm bell of many. If we silence that bell without listening to the rest, we will have learned nothing at all.