Climate Chaos and Sustainability Ethics

The scientific evidence for climate change is now overwhelming. Almost every day we hear news of yet another study that documents the actual changes to our formerly predictable long-term weather patterns and biophysical processes. We all now see and read about the economic, health and psychological impacts of the changes happening to our climes and ecosystems.

There are places on earth where climate change is happening so rapidly that people have new words to describe the shock of change in what was once a reasonably reliable and predictable context. The Inuit of the Arctic have applied a word, uggianaqtuq, which has connotations of a “friend acting strangely” or unpredictable behaviour to the way climate change is impacting on culture[i]. Our world is beginning to act in strange ways but what is even stranger is that in the face of such change, we are not acting quickly enough to counter the prospect of catastrophic risk to all future activity in our economies and our cultures.

You might have thought that the ethics of actually changing the global climate would have been on the top of the agenda in all of the recent talkfests on long-term climate change policy. After all, what is at stake with increasing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming is the future environmental security of all beings on the planet and in particular, the ability of humans to cope with massive and largely negative changes to every aspect of their lives.

In a world operating under complex and unstable conditions, adaptation to the impending changes will be largely futile because all current forms of planning are based on data and predictions linked to the past. However, in the brave new world, there will be many surprise events in the emergence of complex non-linear complex systems acting under new factors driving their evolution. Such system unpredictability will render useless many of the institutions and methodologies created to manage risk in our economic systems. The institution of insurance, for example, will be one of the first to fail as actuarial analysis will not be able to cope with emergent non-linear systems in the form of an array of hugely damaging unnatural events. In a world characterised by chaos, all that was friendly and familiar will be uggianaqtuq to us.

In such a world, genuine chaos will make ethical responses to change virtually impossible. The war of all against all will be fought, as Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia) has predicted, on the barren rocks of Antarctica ... the last habitable place on earth. The ethical dilemma of big investment in mitigation of greenhouse gases Vs adaptation to negative change is easily resolved. Adaptation is relentless since with continually rising greenhouse gases, we will all have to cope with ever more chaotic and dangerous changes to the parameters of life. The end game of this scenario is too ugly to contemplate any further. With mitigation to 'safe' levels of CO2e, we live happily ever after.

In general, the ethical issues associated with climate chaos are quite clear and can be easily understood within the principles of sustainability developed over the last 20 years in the international community. A key ethical issue is equity or the distribution of benefits and burdens of climate change.

The intra-generational equity issues associated with climate change are highlighted by the fact that some human communities have already had their lives directly and negatively affected by rising sea levels and melting glaciers. In the Pacific, low lying, inhabited islands are being inundated by the sea, leading to the world’s first climate chaos refugees. As suggested above, in the Arctic, melting permafrost and glacier retreat have already made life difficult for the Inuit people as they can no longer rely on a foundation of solid ice for safe travel, secure buildings and for sources of traditional food such as seals. The people of Himalayan countries such as Bhutan have already experienced catastrophic floods from glacial lakes that form, then burst under the rising flow of glacial melt water. These floods destroy in-stream hydro-electric power generation and the lights go out in Bhutan.

If we add the increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, wild fires and droughts on humans, then another layer of huge climate chaos impacts is being imposed on current generations. Climate change is already increasing disease incidence and causing excess death rates due to, for example, heat stress in human populations worldwide. Extreme heat is also affecting the mental health of people in many parts of the tropical and sub-tropical world.

The impacts of warming on biodiversity can be considered under the umbrella of interspecies equity. In both the Arctic and the Antarctic, impacts on biodiversity have now been documented with sea ice melt causing Polar Bear habitat to shrink and more snow causing negative impacts on Caribou and Moose. The world over, there is mounting evidence that as warming occurs, biodiversity or the variety of life, is rapidly being displaced and is disappearing. The disappearance of many frog species has now been partially linked to warming and many other species including the Mountain Pygmy Possum of Australia are under threat as they run out of suitable habitat. Both wild and domesticated animals suffer from heat stress and mass death due to this cause occurred in January 2006 in the intensive poultry industry in Eastern Australia.

Although the concept of inter-generational equity might seem abstract to some, to deliver into the hands of future children and grandchildren a world that will be in major and prolonged crisis is not a difficult ethical issue to contemplate. It is simply unacceptable to sit on our seats of power, board or conference tables and deliberately do nothing or too little to give children the experience of a beautiful, secure and predictable future world. After all, a major reason why most humans work so hard and burn so much energy is … to give our children a better world to live in.

The potential impacts of climate chaos that we are imposing on future generations of humans are so great that one would have thought that leaders of all countries would have them at the very top of their agendas. But no, the prospect of escalating warming delivering epidemics of infectious diseases, catastrophic failure of agricultural systems, failure of fresh water supplies, massive coastal damage due to storm and tidal inundation and other unpredictable changes as a result of climate chaos has not yet bothered them. They are much more willing to act decisively on the fiscal rather than the arctic meltdown even though the impact of climate chaos on the global economy will dwarf the credit crisis.

The level of scientific knowledge we have about climate chaos issues has reached the point for urgent and extensive action. Right now, we have firm scientific evidence that global warming has been escalating since the industrial revolution, that it is linked to historically unprecedented increases in the levels of carbon dioxide and other human produced gases in the atmosphere, that the sea level is rising at twice the rate of the previous one hundred and fifty years and that it is the human industrial activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels that is responsible for all of the above.

Even if hard evidence of the effects of climate chaos was not available to us, the application of another foundation of sustainability ethics, the precautionary principle, or the idea that we ought to minimise risk or possible harm to current and future generations before actual scientific proof of harm is before us, should be on top of political and policy agendas. Failure to even consider the precautionary principle marks the current generation of political leaders as willing to operate in an ethical vacuum.

Many politicians, commentators and business leaders have continued to make Faustian bargains with the fate of the earth in an effort to secure the impossibility of infinite economic growth in a finite world. The tragedy of climate chaos represents a failure to seek long overdue reconciliation with the limits of planet earth and it is to be hoped that the purveyors of the infinite growth hubris will realise the critical importance of a sustainability ethic that recognises the global dimension of our impacts long before they realise that the time to respond to the climate crisis was yesterday.

[i] IOL, Effects of climate change seen in the Arctic,
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=qw1144790291815B224
(accessed 11/09/2006)