Taylor says totalitarian states can’t solve climate change---that’s existential.

On the other side of the Atlantic, and more or less at the same time as Wallace-Wells was getting attention too, David Bendell (2018) generated controversy with a paper and subsequent edited book on what he called deep adaptation (Bendell and Read 2021). When the paper was rejected by a journal he self-published it online, arguing that contemporary trajectories, especially melting permafrost and methane releases in the Arctic, were happening much faster than conventional analyses were suggesting. The acceleration of climate change suggested to Bendell that conventional assumptions about climate adaptation were underestimating what was coming and that civilization was unlikely to cope without dramatic social and economic change. These he saw as unlikely to transpire in a timely manner, hence societal collapse looms in the near term future. Some of these arguments were influential with parts of the Extinction Rebellion movement in Britain in particular.

One notable point in Bendell’s argument is that his paper was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t engage the contemporary social science literature. But, he argued, that was his point; conventional social science assumes that the future will be more or less the same as the present, hence it doesn’t generate the kind of material that Bendell is concerned about, a rapid climate transition that is outside what conventional projections, and economic analyses in particular, are assuming. Not surprisingly there wasn’t much of a social science literature for him to engage! While Bendell doesn’t use Michael Albert’s (2020) formulation of social science as committed to “continuationism”, the argument is loosely consistent with the use of this term. Projections into the future assume that social patterns change gradually, not abruptly.

The case of international relations as a discipline failing to anticipate the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s suggests linearity and persistence as key assumptions in security studies. What both Wallace-Wells and Bendell suggest is that current trajectories are likely to lead to non-linear responses, both in terms of natural change and in terms of social change. Gradual linear changes are what one assumes if market mechanisms and technical innovation form the policy framework for tackling climate change. But, and this is a key point, it’s mostly rapid severe and unexpected shocks, and tipping points in natural and social systems, that worry people thinking about climate as a security problem.

Failure to respond appropriately and in time to indications of likely future risks may indeed lead to catastrophe. In security studies at least, histories of war suggest that militaries are usually preparing to fight previous wars, or at least frequently find themselves ill equipped for novel circumstances. This was the case most recently when the United States fought the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11 mostly with an organization and armaments which had been designed to fight the Soviet Union decades earlier (Dalby 2009a). Likewise it seems that the military now are ill equipped to deal with the challenges that climate change and biodiversity decline present. As noted earlier, Daniel Deudney (1990) pointed out at the beginning of the environmental security discussion that given its training, missions and equipment, the military is hardly the appropriate institution to tackle ecological matters. Its equipment is frequently useful in responding to disasters, but the huge use of fossil fuels involved in military transport, frequently not counted in greenhouse gas emission calculations, is part of the problem (Belcher, Bigger, Neimark and Kennelly 2020). Prevention is key; drastic reactions after the fact are an indication of failure. To paraphrase the key argument from classical Chinese strategist Sun Tsu, if you have to fight your strategy has failed. In the case of climate change this adage is directly applicable; avoiding catastrophic climate change is the only security strategy that is feasible, and a functional civilization of many billion people in a radically destabilized climate system is simply not possible.

There is a very considerable social science literature engaging with the dangers of environmental collapse and the lessons that might be learned from historical cases of empires and societies disappearing as a result of calamities, some of which they brought upon themselves. Jared Diamond’s (2005) volume Collapse is an especially high profile example. What is new in the case of Wallace-Wells and Bendell is the projections that climate change and radical disruptions caused by humanity will be the likely cause of civilizational collapse in coming decades. While much of the discussion about historical cases of societal collapse has focused on naturally occurring climate change, or in many cases on the exhaustion of agricultural resources by either ill-considered farming and irrigation practices or natural limitations in particular ecosystems, the current apocalyptic framing doesn’t focus on resource shortages or direct poisoning by pollution. The 1970s discussion of the Limits to Growth too focused on resource shortages as a cause of the collapse of industrial civilization (Herrington 2021). The formulation of environmental security derived from Our Common Future likewise suggests that resource shortages are a key problem. But now, with both the extinction crisis and climate change, the discussion is focused on the opposite argument: the consequences of too much economic growth based on the dramatic expansion of firepower in the period of the great acceleration.

In contrast climate disasters are projected as the indirect result of disruptions caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and the response of such things as melting permafrost and the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and, in Bendell’s case, alarm about collapsing marine methane clathrates which might cause a huge spike in methane in the atmosphere with disastrous rapid global heating as the outcome. At the worst these disruptions and the failure to deal with them might, so these narratives of doom suggest, lead to the elimination of humanity in toto. Science fiction writers have explored these scenarios too. John Barnes in Mother of Storms offers a cautionary tale of rapid heating caused by military action; Frank Schatzing’s nightmare scenario in his novel The Swarm focuses on other dangers from clathrates but cautions against military attempts to destroy environmental threats. While both are excellent entertainment, there is little in the scientific literature to suggest that disintegrating ocean bed clathrates offer immediate threats of destabilizing the earth system.

A failure to anticipate such concerns with possible dramatic destabilizations of the earth system in time, or instigate actions to slow climate change and make societies much more adaptable, might lead to elites struggling to maintain control, in the process leading to major wars. If they went nuclear, which given the number of nuclear arsenals currently in existence is quite possible, then once again nuclear winter raises its head as civilization’s fate. Glikson (2017) makes the argument that we might better term present circumstances the Plutocene, because of the future persistence of plutonium and the long lasting isotopes that it generates. In this context the concerns raised by the delegates at the 1972 conference in Stockholm about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons as part of any serious attempt to grapple with global environmental issues seem prescient, even if they were dropped from the sustainable development discourse once the cold war ended.

Human extinction looms over this discussion and has led to more recent systematic discussions of this possibility, and a larger scholarly engagement with the question of long term human survival (Bostrom 2013). This now provides the largest scale contextualization for security studies, and in terms of how environmental security might be rethought, is an essential part of the discussion for a discipline that has survival as its core concern. But this isn’t just a matter of human extinction: earth system trajectories in motion suggest that fossil fueled civilization is already causing the sixth overall extinction event in the planet’s history (Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017). The potential for major biosphere disruption because of ocean acidification looms over much of this discussion too. This is now the key context for engaging with environmental security, rather than the narrow focus on resource shortages as putative causes of conflict in the Global South.

EXTINCTIONS, AND MERE CATASTROPHES

While there are some technical arguments about what counts as a global extinction event and whether we are living in the sixth one at the moment, conventional wisdom counts five major extinction events in the geological record. As noted in Chapter 3, the most famous is the episode ending the age of the dinosaurs, with a massive asteroid collision with earth being a key part of this story. Reconstructing such episodes is key to stratigraphy, the study of the layers of rocks that tell the story of the planet in the history of sediments and volcanic episodes, and paleontology, the study of fossil life that charts the rise and demise of forms of life in the biosphere, the living part of the planetary system. The major periods of earth history are designated in terms of the dominant forms of life that lived in those times. Now the dominant form is human, the Anthropos is us; hence we now live in the Anthropocene.

The discussion of the Anthropocene highlights the simple but profound fact that humanity is now causing geological scale transformations of the earth, something that is not intuitively obvious to most people, and something that is clearly well beyond the scope of many politicians to grasp, and also beyond most efforts, at least so far, at global governance. While climate change is mostly discussed in terms of more extreme weather, potential violence and the costs of storms and floods, that larger context is more fundamental once one considers the long term fate of humanity. Hence the growing use of terms such as existential crisis, even if it is frequently far from clear precisely whose existence is threatened and hence what kind of security policy is needed for whom where. The David Wallace-Wells (2017) article posed the question of whether all of humanity might be eliminated by climate change and the disruptions likely to follow from failures to anticipate what might be coming and act in time to prevent calamity. His subsequent book (Wallace-Wells 2019) may have been less apocalyptic in tone, but the question hangs over the discussion of climate change, and work in the field of environmental security simply has to confront it even if conventional international relations analyses have been slow to engage these larger questions.

Because one thing is clear: the prior climate history of the planet demonstrates that popular journalistic and policy maker assumptions of gradual climate changes, of slowly rising temperatures and weather patterns shifting in predicable trajectories towards the poles, are unlikely to be correct (Barnosky, Hadly, Bascompte et al. 2012). While clearly climate systems will move, and where soils can accommodate plants from distant places, agricultural opportunities may open up (Xu, Kohler amd Lenton 2020), the newly ice free parts of Greenland being a case in point, assuming that these transitions will be either smooth progressions or predictable sequences has long been recognized as assuming too much (Alley 2004; Schneider 2004). These possibilities are key to thinking about global security, a very different set of assumptions than those that have long populated economic risk analyses relating to climate, with linear projections far into the future (Keen 2021), and implicit assumptions of the inevitability of economic growth.

One particularly worrisome scenario that has engaged popular culture is the matter of the dangers of the Gulf Stream stopping, or at least slowing noticeably (Caesar, McCarthy, Thornally et al. 2021). If substantial meltwater from Arctic ice changes the density of water in the North Atlantic then it will not sink as it has been doing since the end of the last glaciation. If this occurs, in technical terms the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) stops, then the global circulation of ocean currents would stop, and this would have numerous ecological effects. Should that happen, then European climates are likely to be very substantially cooler in the short run (farmers in Greenland will have their hopes disappointed) and agriculture there will be disrupted. (This too has been presented in hugely exaggerated form in the 2004 Hollywood disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.) If the AMOC slows or stops it might temporarily slow melting in Greenland, but presumably heating would intensify further south as the warm waters no longer move heat to higher latitudes. More than this, the various crucial parts of the earth system that may be destabilized as the earth heats are not independent, and if one crosses a tipping point and begins to operate differently, others may follow (Wunderling, Donges, Kurths and Winkelmann 2021). Cascade disruptions make predicting these interactions difficult, and because there is lack of clarity in terms of what amount of heating is required for tipping points to be crossed, predictions are difficult. But that doesn’t mean these dangers aren’t foreseeable, and if rapid decarbonization of the global economy is set in motion, they might be avoided.

The crucial point in all this is that regional consequences are likely from global climate change, and average temperature changes over the whole system aren’t helpful as indications of how conditions in particular places are likely to be affected. All of which means that risks to specific places, as with specific economic systems, need to be evaluated in much more detail, and in the case of supply chains in the global economy, points of vulnerability identified. Policies over the next few decades need to grapple with the disruptions, extreme weather and heat waves that are likely, rather than assume a smooth transition to a future stable state (Albert 2020). The key question for consideration specifically of security is whether states, societies and economies with production systems, and crucially infrastructure designed for one set of circumstances, will be flexible enough to handle disruptive transitions.