Riders on the Storm E-Book

Alastair McIntosh

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2021 for Writing on Global Conservation Climate change is the greatest challenge to humankind today. While the coronavirus sheds a light on the vulnerability of our interconnected world, the effects of global warming will be permanent, indeed catastrophic, without a massive shift in human behaviour. Writer, scholar and broadcaster Alastair McIntosh sums up the present knowledge and shows that conventional solutions are not enough. In rejecting the blind alleys of climate change denial, exaggeration and false optimism, he offers a scintillating discussion of ways forward. Weaving together science, politics, psychology and spirituality, this guide examines what it takes to make us riders on the storm.

Leseprobe

Alastair McIntosh is an independent writer, broadcaster, activist and honorary professor at Glasgow University. A human ecologist, he speaks widely on the challenging questions of our time including climate change, globalisation, land reform, community empowerment and nonviolence – with an emphasis on psychological and spiritual depth. He is the author of the bestselling Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (Aurum), described by George Monbiot as ‘a world-changing book’, and Poacher’s Pilgrimage: An Island Journey (Birlinn), reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘fascinating, provocative and, occasionally, very funny’.

First published in 2020 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alastair McIntosh 2020

ISBN 978 1 78885 268 5

The right Alastair McIntosh to be identified as Author of this work hasbeen asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any formor by any means without permission from the publisher

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryTypeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

To my dear mother, Jean Patricia McIntosh,who when I was a child encouraged meto write stories.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1  A Walk Along the Shore

2  Impacts on the World of Ice and Oceans

3  Climate Change on Land and Human Life

4  Containing Global Warming to Within 1.5°C

5  Sceptics and the Psychology of Denial

6  Rebellion and Leadership in Climate Movements

7  To Regenerate the Earth

8  The Survival of Being

9  The Rainmakers

Acknowledgements

Glossary of Acronyms

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

T. S. Eliot

‘Into this house we’re born,’ as Jim Morrison’s strange prophetic ballad had it. In part we lack a choice because ‘into this world we’re thrown’. Climate change is simply where we’re at. It is where the evolution of conscious life on earth has brought the planet to.

But we can make choices as to where we go now. Both individually and collectively we can choose to evolve culturally. It is with the dignity of life on earth, and our human part in it, that the passion of this book is concerned.

I wrote it in the Scottish city of Glasgow, a mile away from where the United Nations hope to hold their climate change summit with world leaders, known as COP 26. Originally, it was planned for November 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic led to its rescheduling to November 2021.

While there is no obvious way in which the coronavirus is directly linked to climate change, the situation that it precipitated remains enfolded in the greater and emergent planetary crisis caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Lessons learned from one about fragility, and the need to build resilience into our social and economic systems, will transfer over to the other.

My zest in writing this work has been to go beyond the outward science, policy and politics of climate change. Most certainly, I want to summarise and honour those. They are our starting points. But I want to use them as a springboard into the deeper question of being itself: a wake-up call, as it were, that quickens to the nature and survival of our deepest humanity.

In the first four chapters, I summarise in plain language, for readers who might need and want it, the current science, context and proposed remedies surrounding global warming. This will stick closely to the peer-reviewed publications of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If such science and the technological possibilities are not your forte, please feel free to skim over these parts should I fail to entice you in.

In the mid chapters, I explore both the psychology of climate change denial, and alarmism that exceeds the scientific consensus over such debates as near-term human extinction. The contrasting dangers of denial and alarmism are not symmetrical. Denialism has done far more harm than alarmism, and its political drivers differ. However, if we yearn for social justice and environmental sustainability, we must be ‘critical friends’ towards our own movements. I will therefore round on leadership questions in activism in particular. This has implications that go well beyond climate change alone.

From here, I move to looking at what the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary (or wider ‘vernacular’) sector can contribute in the necessarily rapid move towards a zero-carbon world. This will touch on and critique a range of possible technical interventions such as carbon dioxide removal, the realm of corporate innovation and ethics, the fraught and yet potentially liberating debate around population and consumption levels, and the policies and politics of green new deals. All of a sudden, the latter has found fresh impetus under the ravishes of COVID-19, and with it the pressing need to think through forms of global economic stimulation that don’t merely multiply our problems. Here is the opportunity to produce enduring fruit from a new-found public recognition that resilience is not a luxury.

Readers of my other works will know that my approach is far from conventional. Buyer beware! In case such a style is not for you, be warned that I love few things better than moving from hard science to spiritual reflections by a Hebridean sea loch. This is not a how-to book that tries to replicate all the others that do a better job on recycling rubbish, changing light bulbs, or technology and governmental policy options. My interest is to invite my reader on a journey into the survival and thriving of being – the being of both human and all other forms of life on earth.

In my closing chapters, I therefore enter further into depth psychology and beyond. To the best of my limited abilities, I examine what it takes to reconnect with the earth, with spiritual life and with one another. With soil, soul and society.

I approach this through a shift into storytelling mode. In a case study, I give an account of going back, in 2019, to my home village on the Isle of Lewis with a delegation of community leaders from West Papua – a province of Indonesia in western New Guinea. The experience shed some astonishing light upon our predicament. It illustrated both the deepest traumatic drivers of the world into which we’re thrown, and pointed to some thrilling paths of resolution.

While this is not a book of optimistic platitudes, neither is it counsel for despair. Climate change can press us all to deeper layers of reflection than we might ever have entertained before. Such is our basic call to consciousness. Here might be the freeing up of long-blocked wells, and this for the survival of being in us all. To open up the flows of what gives life.

A crisis is too good a chance to waste. There is a gift, as well as dread, in living through these times. The world on us depends, which begs a question. How can we be riders on the storm?

ALASTAIR MCINTOSHGovan, Glasgow, 2020

1

A WALK ALONG THE SHORE

There are places you can go from where the whole world passes by. Little corners, from which to dig from where we stand. Vantage points from which, in a single glance, one can witness some of the key effects of climate change in a landscape, and glimpse the scientific complexity that plays out through space and time. Occasionally in such places, the very stones laid on the ground can tell a story that, as we will see later in this book, can shed a striking light upon geopolitics of our time.

It was April of 2019. I had led a delegation to my home village of Leurbost (roughly pronounced leu-er-bost) on the Isle of Lewis, the most northerly of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. We were some twenty people, including our local hosts. Our skin colours ran full spectrum, from lily white through shades of honey to burnished ebony. These improbable visitors had just arrived from Papua and West Papua, two provinces in the western half of New Guinea that are legally part of Indonesia. My connections with that corner of the world and specifically with neighbouring Papua New Guinea in the east, went back to the 1970s and ’80s. Then I had spent four years as a VSO volunteer, teaching down on the coast amongst the Elema people, and setting up small-scale hydroelectricity systems in a couple of the mountain settlements of the Kamea people.

As village leaders, the Papuans had come to Lewis to study land reform trusts and community empowerment. There were reasons why they needed to do this in Scotland. Suffice to say that the visit built on earlier work that my wife, Vérène Nicolas, and I had carried out with civil servants and legislative council members around climate change, land use and collaborative leadership. On this occasion, and working not with officials but with the grassroots, our theme was Healthy Community, Healthy Land: rediscovering the art of community self-governance.

Ecology is the study of plant and animal communities. Communities are about relationships. Just as you can have mouse or giraffe ecology, so human ecology studies interactions between the social environment and the natural environment in which we live; you could say, between human nature and natural nature. Anthropogenic climate change – that which has its ‘genesis’ or origins in the ‘anthropos’, or human domain – can only be understood in such a framework. That’s what the Papuans had come both to explore and to share with our island communities from their own tough-wrought experience.

A Study Tour of Home

Our visit took place on a sunny afternoon. Vérène and I had set it up with ‘Rusty’, the village blacksmith and chair of the Historical Society. He and I had known each other since our first day at the local primary school in 1960. We gathered at the head of the long arm of the sea that is Loch Leurbost. The wind had dropped down to a breeze. Behind us, the village homesteads stretched out along the road, most of them with narrow strips of arable croft land that ran down to the sea.

We were headed out across the river, over to a rugged stretch of hills inset with gaunt north-facing cliffs that were scraped bare by the last ice age. The heather moors this early in the year were devoid of any hint of floral colour, but one spot stands distinctively apart. In the far sheltered corner where the sharp slope breaks, a bright green sweep of pasture runs on down to the shore. Nestled there upon it are ruins of what we’d call a clachan, a cluster of what once had been some four to six small homesteads. These had been constructed in the dry-stone manner, where skill made up for want of mortar.

This whole area was our childhood playground. In the river we’d catch brown trout with our homespun bamboo rods. Off the rocks in early autumn we’d get the ‘cuddies’, small ocean-going fish that made a tasty fry, and somehow it was always Alex George Morrison who’d catch the codling. Nearby we’d gather shellfish by the gallon bucket to cart home on our handlebars to feed our families, and in the ruins of the clachan, we’d play amongst the tumbled stones and take our shelter from the frequent shrapnel squalls of driving rain. The thatch and rafters of these ‘blackhouses’, as they’re known, had long since settled back into the soil. ‘Just something from the old days,’ we’d be told, on rare occasions when we’d even think to ask about abandoned places such as this.

We’d timed our visit for the falling tide. That would let our Papuan guests, neither used to icy streams nor equipped with rugged footwear, to ford it at the shallows where it braids before it slips into the sea. So it was that we splashed across and wandered on towards the bright green swathe. Evelyn Coull MacLeod from the village had brought a huge enamel yellow pot that was filled with kindling. She carried it by one handle with her friend, Catherine Mary Maclean, on the other. As we walked, I pointed out to everyone the undulations in the land. Every three or four metres the ground rose and fell in ridge and furrow, and streaked down the hillside to the shore in long and curving parallel rows.

These are the feannagan – the fee-an-a-gan or ‘lazy beds’ of raised-bed agriculture. Once they would have bristled come the summer with crops of potato, barley and oats. Their soil was made by sweat and brawn. Heaped up in ridges, the infertile peat gave both depth and drainage. Each spring, it was enriched with animal dung and rotted seaweed for fertility. The roofs of old were without chimneys. Smoke percolated through the thatch. When that required replacing, it too was dug into the land. So it was that, wasting nothing, even nutrients in the soot were captured and recycled. When tin roofs came in, some folks saw them as a mark of poverty. They were so cold before the days of insulation. I can remember an old man just across the road from where we’d walked down with the Papuans complaining to me of that cold. They were noisy, too, when it rained, especially in the hailstorms. And how was a tin roof going to give fertility back to the land?

Such was a living human ecology, a remnant of those intimate relationships between the human environment and the natural environment that much of modern life seems almost to have made redundant. Here was a system of subsistence agriculture with closed nutrient loops that had endured sustainably for hundreds, and in some parts of the island, even thousands of years. It was the old indigenous ‘permaculture’, no need here to have such notions imported from Australia. As so often in ecology, our way works best for our place.

On its own, peat is soft and mushy, and the underlying layer of gritty boulder clay is thick and hard to work. The bedrock of ancient, crystalline Lewisian gneiss gives grudgingly of its few nutrients. And yet, these rimples of feannagan sport quite the loveliest of soils. Fine and crumbly, as if a dark volcanic loam enriched with humus, they’re turbo-charged with potash and trace elements. They’re also high in lime from seashells that came with the basketfuls of seaweed. Even into my childhood, the food that they produced augmented diets of dairy, meat and fish for many families. At primary school, what elsewhere calls half-term to us was the October ‘potato holiday’. No holiday it was for grassroots families. You’d see even the youngest children helping out their parents, digging up the crop by hand and putting it in winter store – the big ones for the people, the small to feed the cow and hens.

While such work was back-breaking, just as pounding sago palm would be for the Papuans, ample testimony speaks to an essential wholesomeness of these ecologically attuned ways of life. In the 1930s, Dr Weston Price of the American Dental Association conducted surveys to compare indigenous communities around the world. He reported on ‘the superb health of the people living in the Islands of the Outer Hebrides . . . characterized by excellent teeth and well formed faces and dental arches.’ In one place that had no shop to import modern foods, he found just one cavity per hundred teeth examined, and of the isles in general, formed this conclusion: ‘Life is full of meaning for characters that are developed to accept as everyday routine raging seas and piercing blizzards representing the accumulated fury of the treacherous north Atlantic. One marvels at their gentleness, refinement and sweetness of character.’1

Reading an Eroding Landscape

I am certainly not going to suggest that we all go back to black-houses for a bygone ecotopia. But in coming here I would ask you to make a disturbing observation. There ought to be little if any natural erosion at the head of a long, narrow and sheltered fjord like Loch Leurbost, that has a stream depositing fresh sediments. But these days, the ends of the feannagan are sharply truncated. Bare earth spills from each ridge, as if a row of little dumper trucks are tipping their spoils away into the sea. The coast looks bitten, as if in some dystopian dream sent to confute the praise of Dr Price a giant set of rotting teeth had taken an avenging bite. Each full tide nibbles at the rich black soil. It hurts me knowing what comprised the making. In places where it’s all gone, one sees a sight most unexpected. Resting on the clay laid down at the termination of the last ice age, is a ghostly forest of ancient tree stumps.

Once, stands of pine had covered much of the island; indeed, much of the far north of Europe. Typically, bog wood from locations such as this dates back around 5,000 years. It seems that the decline was partly caused by human impact, but as the scientists say, ‘most likely triggered by climate change’.2 A relatively rapid change to wetter weather and waterlogged soils caused the pines to struggle on flat or lower ground. It favoured sphagnum moss with shrubs and heather. These built up in time as peat, that in its turn engulfed and then preserved the remnants of the trees. If their wood is dried and cut, it still burns brightly on the fire, and with a resinous aroma as good as any fancy-fangled bathroom spray.

How does one read such features in a landscape? What brings the shifts that makes an ancient forest first to die, and then to see its remnants start to slip beneath the waves? At Leurbost, one can even see the intricate patterns of the finer roots. They weave a floral knotwork on the sheets of mud exposed at just below the high tide mark. As for the feannagan, they’re like barometers of latter-day erosion, black earth in place of silver mercury. What factors are at play here? What of the climate, past, present and future, might such sites teach? And as we will examine later, what might the human ecology that cries witness from this place teach about the politics of climate change today? First, to get our bearings, we must set out some principles of science and measurement.

Greenhouse Effect and Carbon

The earliest and simplest forms of life began within a billion years of the earth’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago. It was not for another 4 billion years – bringing us to just over 500 million years before present – that advanced life burst into a dizzying array of evolution in the so-called Cambrian Explosion. Throughout that time, what had been a toxic atmosphere was transformed by life itself. From the most primitive microscopic species upwards, plants and animals captured and stored carbon in limestones, coal, oil and gas strata, and in the living skin of forests and their soils. James Lovelock called this process Gaia, named after a Greek goddess of the earth. When we burn these to release the pent-up energy of ancient sunshine, or when we heat limestone to make cement (which accounts for up to 8 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions),3 we are unravelling aeons of the planet’s housekeeping work. Carbon gases have a molecular structure that trap heat. Acting together with water vapour, they serve like a blanket wrapped around the earth that prevents the sun’s heat from escaping back out to space.

This is the so-called greenhouse effect. It was long assumed that the first person to confirm it experimentally was John Tyndall at London’s Royal Institution in 1859. However, in 2010 the earlier work of an American inventor and women’s rights campaigner, Eunice Newton Foote, was by chance rediscovered. She found that a jar filled with carbon dioxide, left in the sunshine with a thermometer inside, became very much hotter and held the heat for very much longer than one filled with ordinary air. Her paper was read on her behalf in 1856 by a senior male professor at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She clearly saw the implications that accounted for the earth’s atmospheric temperature, and this was reported at the time in Scientific American. Thereafter, until her recent rediscovery, the mother of global warming science was forgotten.4

The year 1750 is often taken as a rough-and-ready date to mark the start of the Industrial Revolution, but 1850 is now used as the benchmark from which to distinguish between pre-industrial and later temperatures as this, still quite early in the era of industrial emissions, was when more reliable instrumental measurements became available.5 In our present, evolved form as Homo sapiens, human beings have roamed the planet for only about 300,000 years, and ice cores show that throughout this time, and prior to the twentieth century, CO2 levels stayed well below 300 parts per million (ppm).6 As of January 2020 and as recorded at the global monitoring observatory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, it stood at 414 ppm.

Those who deny climate science sometimes say that that’s a tiny amount. It’s only 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere, less than a twentieth of 1 per cent. How could that do harm? Well, picture it like this. Scotland’s alcohol limit for driving is 50 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. As alcohol has a lower density than blood, that sets the drink-drive limit at just below 0.04 per cent by volume. Our whisky is quite the best, but at 414 ppm, you’re banned.

For the first half of the industrial era, the UK as both industrial pioneer and imperial power was the world’s largest CO2 emitter. It was overtaken by the US in 1888, and China took the lead in 2006.7 Of cumulative anthropogenic (or human-caused) CO2 in the atmosphere that built up from 1750 to 2017, the USA accounts for 25 per cent, the nations of the EU (including the UK historically) 22 per cent, and China under 13 per cent.8 Today, based on 2016 figures, China’s CO2 emissions on a ‘consumption’ basis – attributable to its own citizens – were 14 per cent lower than as measured on a ‘production’ or ‘territorial’ basis. The latter counts in emissions from the balance of imports and exports. It is used for international carbon accounting for target setting to avoid double counting between nations. Put simply, the Chinese make our stuff but get blamed for our consumption. In contrast, the UK’s consumption-based emissions were 40 per cent higher than its production emissions.9 We shuffle paperwork while China does the heavy lifting.

On a production basis, the average CO2 emissions per person in the world were 4.8 metric tons in 2017. China stood at 7.0 tons per capita. Some European countries were surprisingly low, with Sweden at 4.2, France 5.5 and the UK 5.8. Germany was a big hitter at 10.9 because, while exiting nuclear power, it burns a lot of coal. Bigger still was the USA at 16.2, Australia 16.9 and Saudi Arabia 19.3. Qatar topped the league at 49.2, which shows what people can get through if allowed the chance. At the other extreme, Malawi, Chad and Niger have a miniscule 0.1. Kenya has just 0.3 and even oil-rich Nigeria only 0.6. Papua New Guinea stands at 0.9, both India and Indonesia, 1.8, and both Brazil and Egypt, 2.3.10

But wait. Is there not something suspicious in those figures? How come the UK seems so low? It depends on what is being counted and how. Add in what the UK imports, and the CO2 ‘consumption’-based figure jumps up 40 per cent. Add in the methane mainly from agriculture, nitrous oxide from vehicles and fertilisers, and industrial greenhouse gases such as hydrofluorocarbons used in refrigeration, and then express those as CO2eq – that is to say, as CO2equivalents for their potential to force global warming – and the ‘true’ figure gets a lot more complicated to calculate. The British government’s environment department, DEFRA, made a commendably honest attempt to do so in 2019. The uncertainties involved forced it to designate the findings as ‘experimental statistics’. It found that the UK’s total ‘consumption’-based CO2eq emissions were 784 million tons using 2016 figures. Divide that by the UK population of 65.7 million as it was then, and the consumption-based per capita carbon footprint comes out at 11.9 tons CO2eq.11

To sum up. On the minimalist measure of ‘production’-based CO2 alone, the UK can boast a carbon footprint of only 5.8 tons per capita. On the maximalist measure that is both ‘consumption’-based and CO2eq, it bangs in at 11.9 tons per capita. The difference is a factor of 100 per cent, with a spectrum of positions that lobbyists and politicians can play with in-between. Darrell Huff, who wrote How to Lie with Statistics in 1954, will be rejoicing in his grave. For us remaining mortals, God made experts for a reason.

Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold

By the start of the twentieth century, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere had exceeded the highest levels of the past 800,000 years.12 The 300 ppm threshold was crossed in 1910. By the early 1970s it was increasing by 1 ppm per annum. By the start of the new millennium, this had doubled. By 2016 it had exceeded 3 ppm and was still rising relentlessly. The 400 ppm concentration, as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, was crossed in 2015.13 Globally, three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels and industrial processes such as cement-making. Agricultural practices, such as forest felling, burning and peatland destruction account for most of the balance.14 It is one thing to make progress on decarbonising the electricity supply. In the UK, for instance, renewables accounted for 29 per cent of generation in 2017, with nuclear at 21 per cent and fossil fuels at 50 per cent.15 But even in such a renewables-rich country, electricity accounted for only 18 per cent of primary energy consumption by fuel type. The higher-hanging fruit remained the fossil fuels used in transport, industry and heating.16

Weight-for-weight, CO2 accounts for three-quarters of the mix of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, because most of the other greenhouse gases are more potent, this represents only two-thirds of emissions-related global warming since the Industrial Revolution began. Specifically, as calculated in the US government’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index for 2018, CO2 accounts for 66 per cent of emissions-related global warming, methane for 17 per cent, nitrous oxide 6 per cent, and other mainly industrial gases – a surprisingly considerable 11 per cent.17 It is the combined effect of all of these that has caused the average temperature of the world to increase by at least 1°C since the pre-industrial era. Two-thirds of that warming has taken place since 1980.18 A single degree might not sound a lot, but if the human body’s temperature is elevated by that amount above its 37°C norm it is considered to have a fever. The planet is less sensitive than the body, yet it is salutary that during the last ice age the global average temperature was only about 5°C below what it is now, and that life thrives within a ‘goldilocks zone’ of not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

At which point, we can come back round again to those pine stumps at the head of Loch Leurbost. Let me assume that they, like many similar stands, date back around 5,000 years. With the caveat that the science of reconstructing climates after the last ice age is incomplete, what is the history that unfolds before us here?19

CO2, Methane and Prehistoric Climate Change

The chemical composition of air bubbles trapped in ice cores drilled from the Antarctic gives a timeline of the earth’s past atmospheric composition. The gradually unfolding picture suggests that anthropogenic climate change may have started considerably further back in history than was once thought. At the end of the last ice age, back to about 12,000 years ago, resurgent plant life began to draw down carbon from the atmosphere. Photosynthesis turns carbon dioxide into wood and other fibres, and these in turn build up in forest soils. The result of such carbon capture and storage is that the levels of the two main naturally occurring carbon-based greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane, steadily declined. But around 7,000 years ago an unexpected anomaly kicked in. CO2 levels went into reverse and started rising.20 Then methane levels followed suit around 5,000 years ago.

Produced by decomposing vegetation, methane is the major component of swamp gas. Formed in wetlands, it bubbles up when one walks across a bog. Once released into the atmosphere it has a half-life of only seven years before breaking down into CO2 and water. That is to say, half of what is left of it at any given time will degrade within the next seven years. However, such is its potency as a greenhouse gas that, while it’s still around, its ‘global warming potential’,21 as measured over a twenty-year time horizon is 84–87 times that of CO2. Over the more usually considered timeframe of a hundred years, this drops to 28–36 times.22 Research suggests the possibility that the CO2 rise may have been caused by Neolithic hunter-gatherers beginning to fell and burn the forests of Europe and Asia. Subsequent herding of cattle, sheep and goats may have stopped the forest regrowth. The methane burst is even more interesting. One school of thought suggests it to have been caused by the rapid spread of irrigated paddy-field wetlands for growing rice across China and South East Asia at that time. This, but probably not this alone, may account for the shift to wetter conditions on the Atlantic north-west of Scotland. It is salutary to think that the loss of the forest at Loch Leurbost and elsewhere might have had some link to agricultural innovation not so very far away from where the Indonesian Papuans originated.

There is, however, a silver lining to this theory, which is called the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’ and was first set out by the University of Virginia climatologist William Ruddiman.23 Ice age cycles of around 100,000 years are the planetary norm in recent geological history and are caused by rhythmic changes in the earth’s orbit relative to the sun. The warm interglacial periods that bring each cycle to a close are brief exceptions to the frozen norm, and usually last for just over 10,000 years. The rise in greenhouse gases 5,000–7,000 years ago may have played some part, together with complex interactions in the earth’s orbital cycles, in averting the next big chill.24 That doesn’t sanction colossal fossil fuel emissions, but it does invite the thought that although Loch Leurbost lost its pines, at least it hasn’t gone back to semi-frozen tundra.

Sea Level Rise and Storm Effects

It’s one thing for the pines to have died and for peat to have grown up around their stumps, but why their disappearance, now slipping beneath the high-water mark, and the loss of the feannagan? Global sea levels are rising, caused mainly by the expansion of a warmer ocean in addition to enhanced meltwater runoff from glaciers and polar icecaps. The rate of rise is escalating. From 1901 to 1990 the average was 1.4 mm per year.25 From 1993, when accurate satellite measurements began, to 2019, the average rate of increase has risen to 3.3 mm and, most recently, to 3.6 mm.26 In my lifetime, since the mid twentieth century, average world sea levels have risen by about 150 mm, or 6 inches. We see here in global absolute mean sea levels one reason that explains the changes visible at Leurbost.27 However, there are at least three other complex factors to take into account when reading such a shoreline, all of which shed light upon the intricacies of unravelling climate science.

First, storm surges at ‘spring’ tides, these being the fortnightly very high tides at the full moon and dark moons. If, to cool it down, you blow too hard across a saucerful of hot tea, it spills over the far edge. Similarly, when waves reach landfall in a storm, water piles up and raises the tide above normal predictions. It is striking that tide tables for coastal ports are called tidal ‘predictions’. Oceanographers know that weather-related complicating factors can get in the way including, if the wind is blowing offshore, negative surges yielding tides lower than predicted. Local flooding from rivers and runoff can add to storm surges, also known as a skew surge because the reality skews the predictions. In addition, extreme low pressure associated with Atlantic storms reduces the weight of atmosphere pressing down on the sea. This causes a slight upwards bulging of the sea’s surface beneath the passing centre of the cyclone. As it faces south-east, towards the mainland, surges measured at Stornoway, just a few miles north of Loch Leurbost, are usually less than a metre.28 In contrast, on the Atlantic coast of the island, exposed (as in January 2005)29 to westerly gales of up to hurricane Force 12, and with gusts well in excess of 100 mph, the effect may be considerably higher.

Second, absolute sea level rise and storm surges are compounded by more powerful waves. Over the sixty-nine year period 1949–2017 the average height of winter waves in Scottish and Irish waters has increased by 10 mm a year, more than two-thirds of a metre in total.30 Big waves mostly wouldn’t affect the sheltered end of Loch Leurbost. However, such measurements do serve as a broad indicator of the increasing agitation of the sea. The combined effect is that incoming waves break closer in and penetrate further inland, exhausting their force on land not previously eroded. A sense of how real rising-wave effects are can be seen in how they worry the island’s ferry operator. They threaten lifeline services.31 Typical of anecdotal evidence would be a comment made by Captain Alex Morrison when he retired at the end of 2019, after forty-five years of skippering CalMac ferries of the Hebrides: ‘The weather is more unpredictable nowadays than it was in my younger days. There was more of a set pattern to climate at that time. If you had a depression coming in from the Atlantic it would pass through and the wind veered and eased off, but now it seems to have more of a sting in the tail . . . more vicious than there was in the past.’32

Third, absolute sea level rise around the world is one thing, but this can be modified locally to a relative sea level rise, the latter being adjusted for movements in the earth’s crust. It used to be said that although world sea levels are rising, Scotland was relatively safe because the land is continuing to rise after being pressed down into the earth’s mantle by the ice age. This rising effect is known as ‘crustal rebound’ or ‘isostatic equilibrium’, and with many coastal settlements built on raised beaches, is considered to be a good thing. However, it turns out that not all parts of Scotland are uniformly blessed. To simplify, consider a bowl of jelly. If a weight is placed in the middle, it will sink down but rise up at the edges. Remove the weight, and equilibrium is restored as the middle comes back up and the edges sink back down. The same is true of some areas on the edges of where the ice was thickest.

At Stornoway, measurements suggest that the mean annual rise in sea level is not 3.3 mm, as would be expected from the absolute sea level rise caused by warming across the world, but a disturbingly high 5.7 mm. This appears so, at least as measured over 1992 to 2007 being the period over which the study to which I am referring drew its data.33 While caution must be exercised in reading too much into observations from such a short time period, it does suggest that the edges of the ‘jelly’ are settling back down. Isostatic equilibrium in a downwards direction may, perhaps with other local factors, be adding up to 2.4 mm per annum to Stornoway’s relative sea rise – the global absolute rate adjusted to local conditions – thus accounting for what is probably by now a full 6 mm per annum of relative sea level rise, this being about an inch in every four years. Together with increased storminess leading to occasional slight flooding in low-lying parts of the town, this cause for concern increasingly finds expression in the local press.34

The Three Great Floods

At this point, it will be clear that the science of interpreting a landscape under change involves multiple factors. Expert help is needed to unravel them. One is always wrestling with inadequacies of data and baselines, but the bottom line is clear enough. All around the island and elsewhere in the world, land is being lost to rising sea levels. A factor like tectonic shift is outside of human control, but anthropogenic climate change is firmly inside our domain of responsibility.

In passing, I must ask my readers from elsewhere to forgive my frequent use of examples from my own bioregion. I speak from what I know best, but it will be plain that many of these points have wider parallels. We shall return to the importance of the Papuans’ visit in Chapter 8. Suffice for now to say that they too are worried by the same issues. Many of their villages perch on narrow shelves of land down by the shore. Mountains rise sharply up behind them. If the sea level keeps advancing, they’ll run short of ground to cultivate. At Leurbost, we were able to explain what they saw as being a combination of multiple factors. The ongoing restoration of equilibrium following the ice age may be one consideration. In Papua, with its abundant volcanic activity, shifts in the relative sea level may have different causes in the earth’s crust. It is striking that Indonesia has become the first country in the world to have announced plans to shift its capital city because of relative sea level rise. Jakarta, on the island of Java, will move to Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, because the old trading port is suffering from a rise in water levels by up to 28 cm a year in some neighbourhoods. While this is mainly caused by local subsidence in a city of 10 million that has sprawled across former swamps and relentlessly extracts fresh water from below, it is compounded by the rise in absolute sea levels globally.35

A few years ago, I was at an award ceremony for young crofters – small-scale farmers and fishers – in the Scottish Parliament. The winner was a fourteen-year-old girl from the Hebridean island of South Uist. She said that twice, in her few years of memory alone, her father had been forced to shift the fence where their land goes down to touch a sandy shoreline. On each occasion he’d moved it several metres further inland. Specialist mapping projections used by planners suggest that much of the arable land down the west coasts of Benbecula and South Uist will be below peak annual flood tide levels as soon as 2030. The sole protection in some parts is just a thin line of sand dunes that, when blown out in storms, must quickly be replanted with deep-rooting marram grass. The worst affected areas include the Isle of Berneray, population 138, where a young Prince Charles once used to go on holiday to plant potatoes incognito. By 2030, nearly half of its 1,000 hectares will likewise be below the flood tide peaks.36 On the day that a friend in Stornoway emailed me a link to the map that shows all this, I sent it to a friend in Edinburgh, who sent it to a friend in London, who sent it to his friend Rory in Benbecula, who came back and said they ‘had a storm surge two weeks ago that came a long way in’. It’s happening before our eyes.

There is a legend of the Hebrides, a prophecy, that tells about the three great floods. The first was the primordial inundation of the Book of Genesis, before God had separated the dry land from the oceans, ‘and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep’.

The second was, of course, the flood of Noah, brought on because as Genesis informs us, ‘the wickedness of man was great in the earth . . . and the Earth was filled with violence’.37 The truth of this account is proven, or so inferred the storytellers of old, by the presence of animals like hares and deer upon the Hebrides. As the ark went about its long perambulations, it grounded on the peak of Uisgneabhal Mòr in North Harris. Some of the animals two-by-two got off before Noah got the boat refloated on the high tide and carried on to a less important summit, called Mount Ararat.38

Then, there will be the third great flood, and that, they say, has yet to come. In this, as an old woman in South Uist told a folklorist in 1869, there will be an ‘overflowing of the Atlantic and the submerging of certain places’, until a time will come to pass when ‘the walls of the churches shall be the fishing rocks of the people’ and amongst the resting places of the dead ‘the pale-faced mermaid, the marled seal and the brown otter shall race and run and leap and gambol – like the children of men at play’.39

In this flood too, another version tells us, the oceans will sweep over, ‘and drown all the islands . . . but Iona will rise on the waters and float there like a crown; and the dead who are buried in her will arise dry and so be easily recognised at the Last Day.’40

The story is so ridiculous, but its metaphors so redolent and its beauty so profound when understood beneath the surface, that we will leave it there until a brief reprise much later. For now, over the next three chapters, let us address the fundamental science of climate change.

2

IMPACTS ON THE WORLD OFICE AND OCEANS

What counts as science? In this and the next two chapters I want to lead into the most recent comprehensive scientific reports. But first, that crucial question, and its context of how we know what we think we know about climate change.

In general, science consists of making observations about the world, setting up hypotheses to explain them and then trying to disprove that same hypothesis by gathering further evidence that might change the picture. If a hypothesis (or theory) proves resistant to being knocked down, the science is said to be ‘settled’ or robust. If it gets knocked down, because the evidence base no longer backs it up, then it ain’t no longer science. If that’s persisted with, it’s pseudoscience.

Mostly, we only know what we think we know about climate science because of the climate science. Just as we wouldn’t go to a neurosurgeon to get the car fixed, or to a mechanic for brain surgery, so climate science depends on reputably published work. This can’t be learned by sitting in an armchair with Wikipedia. When somebody challenged the atmospheric physicist Michael Mann on Twitter, making out that climate science was just an easy way to earn a buck, he replied: ‘It’s really simple. Just double major in Math & Physics, get a masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics, post-doc for a few years, get a faculty position, get tenure, publish a couple hundred articles & a few books . . . Easy cash!’1

Science or Pseudoscience?

Precisely because climate change poses deep challenges to all our lives, a powerful industry has been spawned of ‘sceptics’ or ‘deniers’. Lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry use methods reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s denial of the link with cancer.2 Amongst statesmen, Donald Trump has tweeted: ‘The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.’3 As he eyed up political office, he’d have known that jobs win votes more easily than austerity.

And yet, to get our heads around the science is challenging, even with the benefit of a well-rounded education. Separating good science from weak science and denier or alarmist pseudoscience is not easy. If we are not experts, how might we tell what merits trust, or doubt, if looking at a scientific report? Some indicators might help. We can look at an author’s or team’s qualifications, past track record, funding sources and the institutions to which they are affiliated. We can look at impact factors, these being academic measures of how often a paper, journal or an author is cited by recognised authorities in a field. We can look for signs of poorly supported reasoning or referencing that would imply weak peer review. We can look at the reputation of an author’s publisher to try and filter out vanity journals – these have all the airs and graces of real scientific publications, including fancy websites and claims of peer review, but authors pay a fee to publish what has probably been rejected elsewhere. We might be wary of lone wolves if hard-hitting scientific claims are being stridently asserted. And wary likewise of those the trade calls ‘silverbacks’ – older and once eminent men (as they usually are), who still pronounce with a head-of-department authority on matters over which they’re either out of touch, or aren’t within their field. Some failings are, alas, not necessarily malevolent, but all too human.

More widely, the complexity of climate science requires us not to cherry-pick a few reference papers, or the latest shock finding to hit the press headlines, but to assimilate thousands of studies across multiple disciplines. That’s why there is no substitute for the mutually peer reviewed and consensus work of professional associations. These synthesise bodies of knowledge and present summaries in forms digestible for balanced public understanding. We might think that we know better. We might plough a dogged furrow shouting, ‘Galileo proved them wrong!’ But if we’re not a Galileo, then the fallacy named after him draws us into pseudoscience; and that draws any who might follow us into unreality.

The IPCC and Contested Science

All this is why, for most policymakers, the gold standard of settled science in climatology are the reports of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Set up in 1988 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, its remit is to advise governments on ‘the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation’.4Mitigation means action that can be taken to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation means action that can be taken to live with the consequences of mitigation’s failure.

The IPCC does not carry out its own research. Instead, it collates the published work of hundreds of teams of leading scientists of governments, universities and other institutions across the world. It issues special reports and, every seven years or so, a major assessment report that synthesises the consensus findings of its specialist working groups. In 2008, when Birlinn published Hell and High Water, my earlier and very different book on climate change, I based the science on the Fourth Assessment Report of the previous year. By the time of the fifth report in 2014 – often cited as AR5 – the science had massively refined, but most of the conclusions remained unchanged.5

I am very well aware that the IPCC’s science, like all science, will always be out of date, and that my reliance on its work will be criticised on that account. IPCC cut-off dates for literature submission are usually at least a year before a report is produced to allow time for assimilation into the process.6 Furthermore, it probably took one to three years for completed scientific work to have been through peer review and have been published in the first place. What can be presented as relatively ‘settled science’ will therefore be at the very least two years old, and probably more like three to five years old. In the meantime, new work will all the time – especially if it is dramatic – have been splashed across social and mainstream media. However, my personal view is that unless we are recognised specialists in the field concerned we should be very careful how we use new publications.

In the past year at the time of writing I have seen top-level publications suggesting, on the one hand, that the Antarctic ice sheet is more likely to collapse than had previously been thought, and on the other, that collapse is less likely. That’s probably not because one or the other team of researchers is wrong. More likely, conflicting conclusions come from looking at things with different methodologies producing different data around processes that remain only partly understood. How to decide between them? By the volume of media noise? Or is the only honest layperson’s approach to bite our lips, and wait for the next balanced expert panel appraisal to come round? Mostly, but not always, I choose the latter.

With three decades of history behind it, how well have IPCC forecasts mapped on to later outcomes? Since 1990, with the first of five assessment reports to date, studies of the early scenarios for surface temperatures on earth have shown close adherence to the models. Most appear to work. One review, published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2019, compared a range of models of global surface temperature changes that had been produced between 1970 and 2007. (There was no point taking them from a later date, they’d not have had long enough to run). It found that these had been adept at predicting changes, ‘with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations’.7 But forecasting temperature is the easy bit. The impacts get more complicated around such radical uncertainties as Antarctic ice shelf behaviour, the modelling of clouds and the prediction of extreme weather events. The latter, by definition, are historically rare. It’s hard to separate the signal from the noise, and therefore, to model and to forecast confidently.

The most thorough review of which I’m aware was the Copenhagen Diagnosis in 2009. Written in 2007, just after the Fourth Assessment Report came out, it found ‘that several important aspects of climate change are already occurring at the high end, or even beyond, the expectations of just a few years ago’.8 Specifically, the melting of polar ice, which early IPCC reports had downplayed in the absence of a robust evidence base, was now proceeding apace. Set against that, though of a much lesser order of magnitude, the same assessment report predicted the demise of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 ‘if the earth keeps warming at the current rate’. This was not based on adequately peer-reviewed science, is considered to be an overstatement and climate change deniers have relished it ever since.9 Error apart, the catch-22 for the IPCC is that if researchers over-predict from a weak evidence base, and the climate subsequently under-performs, so to speak, the overshoot will be seized on by politically influential deniers to hammer their credibility. The Fifth Assessment Report in 2014 subsequently corrected for the fourth’s under-prediction. However, this usually goes uncredited by those on the alarmist end of the spectrum, who claim that the IPCC plays down the ‘real’ degree of risk.

Note my recognition that the spectrum has an alarmist end, albeit very much more thinly tapered. Some say it’s better not to use such language, that it exposes to deniers, and the merely uninformed or confused, a flank of vulnerability. I disagree. If we are of the inclination that climate change is real and mostly anthropogenic, our task is not to hang out in a bubble with our friends. Our task is to reach out to the deniers and the honest doubters. Which way does that most effectively? Shouting in their faces about how wrong they are? Or opening conversations that can air where each view is coming from? By way of illustration, I have a peculiar sideline. For more than twenty years I’ve guest lectured to military officers in advanced training at the UK Defence Academy and other European schools of war. I’m asked to put the case for nonviolence.

I don’t get traction just by telling them case studies of what has worked. What gives legitimacy is acknowledging the fallibility of us all. I put it to them that we’re all at different posts dug in along a long front, that none of us have got a God’s-eye-view and that pacifism is not about being passive, it’s about sustained courage. ‘Never show fear, do show respect,’ as a Belfast shipyard worker once advised me about how to handle fearsome situations when unarmed. I tell case studies that show failures of nonviolence – for example, what appears to be the sorry role of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, as Burma is now called. They’re then open to the successes, like the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland or the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. And it’s a funny thing, but it can end up feeling like they want to help nonviolence to be effective. A few think it’s bonkers and will say so. Even then, there can be a bonhomie. But many have a kind of admiration and say, if somewhat ruefully, ‘We wish that it could be.’ They’ve seen war at close quarters and have come to understand the spiral of violence.