We Are Not Even Beginning To Appreciate The Complexity Of How Climate Collapse Will Change Our World [View all]

Note: These comments are specific to the UK, but apply to us at the same fundamental level.

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Consider this in terms of kinds of adaptation measures that require multi-decadal planning: the planting of orchards and the initiation of reforestation projects, for instance. We literally don’t know whether our climate in the UK will be hotter or colder, by the time any trees we plant now mature. The core of any answer to this particular conundrum teaches us an exemplary lesson: Plant highly diverse species and varieties. It is certain that some (probably, many) trees and tree species will be knocked out by the coming global overheating with potential regional cooling (we don’t know which, yet). We of course need our ecosystems to remain relatively functional and resilient no matter which future comes. So in the UK we need to plant native species and varieties; and Mediterranean ones; and Scandinavian ones.

A shift in thinking such as this represents a profound change in how we view our role in shaping (and in being shaped by) the environment. We must move away from trying only to prevent change, and instead focus increasingly on actively shaping the — uncertain — biotic transformations that are now coming and that in one way or another are inevitable. In short, the challenges ahead demand that we think bigger, more diversely, and more proactively. We can’t afford to cling to outdated conservation strategies, for instance. Instead, we need to embrace a new approach, one that recognises the full spectrum of climate (and wider ecological) breakdown, and prepares our ecosystems to adapt, no matter what the future holds.

Policy-makers are to an astonishing degree missing the point about the situation we’re in: which is one of far greater uncertainty than most like to admit. Which only makes our situation more parlous, and genuine precaution more urgent. Consider a very pertinent example in the UK: the drive to decarbonise our electricity supply, one of the new Labour government’s flagship policies. Remarkably,there are no plans for the new pylons and power lines to be hardened against a colder future. Why? Because the powers that be and the National Grid are assuming that the future here will be hotter. Or take a more prosaic example: Consider a TV show like the BBC’s widely watched Gardeners’ World. The emphasis there is nearly all on ‘how we will cope with a warming climate’. This is encouraging insofar as it shows quotidian adaptation in the making. But as I’ve noted, some models now suggest that there is about a fifty-fifty chance that actually within the lifetimes of most of us, and possibly very soon, we could well have to be coping with a cooling climate, here in the UK.

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We are so badly unprepared for what may be coming. We badly need a major mindset — and practice — shift, towards strategic adaptation. Why has this kind of change, which is so utterly critical to how we adapt and prepare (and to our understanding of the degree to which we have, to use a technical term, f**ked up our climate), not yet been absorbed into public consciousness? I suggest that it’s because people (elites and the public alike) have only just started factoring in the epochal shift to genuinely thinking of our future in terms of a trend of dangerous overheating. It’s proving too much, for nearly everyone, so far, to make a big further shift, into the bitter truth: of wild uncertainty about what our future climate holds. The mind recoils at such uncertainty; it seems to leave so little to cling onto.

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https://www.desmog.com/2025/01/23/the-coming-climate-uncertainty-conundrum/