Make one "flabbergasting" heat headline the turning point

“Surprising. Astounding. Staggering. Unnerving. Bewildering. Flabbergasting. Disquieting. Gobsmacking. Shocking. Mind boggling,” wrote Ed Hawkins, climate scientist at the University of Reading, after looking at the huge increase in average global temperature observed in September.

The optimistic view is that, if climate scientists are this alarmed, it will prove to be a wake-up call for people and politicians to act even more urgently. The pessimistic view is that, if all the record-breaking extreme weather events until now haven’t done it, there is little chance another exhortation based on facts will lead to the kind of change needed to deal with the climate crisis.

Neither perspective is incorrect, per se, but both are the wrong way to think about the future. That’s what author and BBC journalist Richard Fisher argues in his recent book, The Long View. Fisher says a quick read of history shows that humans are pretty poor at forecasting, a record that only gets worse the further out on the timeline we try to go. It’s better, Fisher notes, to appreciate how much power we still have over the coming reality.

“Living in the age we do, we have never before had such leverage to shape the trajectory of the future, with so little collective recognition of that fact,” he writes.

Fisher argues that a combination of forces have pushed affluent Western society into a much more blinkered view of the future. It’s not capitalism’s fault, or democracy’s or the media’s — but the flavor of capitalism, democracy and media that reward more short-term thinking than we need as a society. We need to break out of that pattern.

One way is to take the long view. Think about the moral case for caring about the future of the billions and perhaps trillions of people yet to be born. They do not currently have a vote in shaping the politics of the day, but the choices we make today can make a major impact on their lives.

“Ensuring that we don’t hand future people a warmer world is giving them more choice,” Fisher says. A planet that is 3C hotter than pre-industrial levels presents future humans far fewer choices for progress than a world where warming is kept below 1.5C. The hotter future will have much higher sea-level rise, more extreme weather, lower agricultural productivity and so on.

It's easy to think of the hotter world and feel like doom is nigh. It's one reasons why young people around the world are becoming more fatalistic about the ability to tackle climate change. But consider the generations who faced the plague in Europe in the 14th century or, much more recently, the prospect of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War in the 20th century. In a crisis, Fisher observes that “every step forward is hard and every setback can make oblivion feel closer, but amid such struggles the long view offers fortitude and perspective.” Humans today live more than twice as long as those in the 14th century and have managed to avoid a nuclear winter so far.

Crucially, Fisher argues that thinking about a better future can be a healthy exercise. Situating ourselves in the long arc of human progress provides a much clearer picture of what’s to come. It can put the present in the right perspective, which might lead to a healthier media diet. While writing the book, Fisher reviewed the front page of the BBC from Feb. 24, 2009, and realized that none of the featured stories had any relevance in this decade.

Fisher says climate change can be categorized as “slow violence” — that is, where harm is accumulated over a long time. It’s the kind of phenomenon he says news media has a tendency to under-cover. But thousands of discrete and disparate weather events add up to much greater harm than knife crimes or mass shootings, which get more attention. If journalists keep one eye on the longer view, they’ll realize that climate change ought to be covered much more than the treatment it currently gets.

Imagine yourself in 2033 looking at an archive of today’s front page of The Guardian, featuring the September heat record. Unlike Fisher’s experience reflecting on the top headlines of early 2009, you are likely to find a headline about “Out of control” warming relevant still — either because humanity heeded the warning and deployed the solutions we have to slow down climate change, or because we ignored the long view and continued to destroy the planet.

Akshat Rathi writes the Zero newsletter, which examines the world’s race to cut emissions. His book Climate Capitalism, which explores successful deployment of climate solutions globally, will be published next week.