Why the urgency?

Humans are a very clever species, but haven’t so far been quite clever enough to deal with global warming. Our brains are very good at helping us confront and overcome immediate dangers, but not so hot when the threat is insidious, invisible and long-term. To a certain extent, we’re simply not equipped with the right evolutionary mental baggage to undertake a task as large as this – and that’s why progress so far has been so depressingly slow. That doesn’t mean that solving the problem is impossible, but it does mean that it’s going to take tremendous effort.

When an oil tanker hits the rocks and tar-coated birds die on beaches it’s pretty easy to see cause and effect in action. Not so with climate change: there’s nothing intuitive linking someone’s car exhaust pipe with an early spring or unseasonably heavy rain. Similarly, the long time delay between cause and effect further confuses us. The earth system has huge thermal inertia, so emissions from fifty years ago are still heating the planet today. If we want to make sure that the world in 2050 isn’t overheating, we need to cut back on emissions now, not in five decades’ time.

The frog in water metaphor is a cliché, but an apt one. (For those who haven’t heard it, the story is that a frog put in cold water, which is then slowly boiled, will never reach a point where it decides to jump out.) The world is heating up all around us – of that we are sure, thanks to modern science – but how hot is it going to get? How hot can we tolerate it getting? And how long will it take for the effects to become clear? For these questions, there are no agreed answers even from scientists, and so the greenhouse gas experiment in our atmosphere continues.

Indeed, because of the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change on both our species and wider natural biodiversity, the day-to-day decisions we make today – whether to take that flight to Miami, whether to drive to work each morning – will have cascading effects for thousands of years into the future. When it comes to driving species like the polar bear to extinction, the effects will last forever. That’s not easy to keep in mind for people trying to get the kids to school each morning.

Moreover, we’re not talking about a simple technological change such as removing CFCs from refrigerators to save the ozone layer. Greenhouse gases are much more difficult to get rid of, because the fossil fuels that produce them underpin the entire energy basis of industrial society. Each year the world consumes the equivalent of 400 years’ worth of solar energy in the form of fossil fuels that were captured as carbon via plant photosynthesis many millions of years ago, and later transformed into coal, oil and gas by geological processes. It’s a huge energy subsidy from the past, and now we’ve got to reduce our energy consumption from 400 years’ worth of ancient sunlight to just one year of current sunlight. That’s what weaning ourselves off fossil power and onto renewable power actually means.

We have a natural tendency as humans to blame our problems on someone else – preferably outsiders. Many people feel that global warming is happening because George W. Bush is bad, and Exxon-Mobil is greedy. But which of us is entirely innocent on the greenhouse gas front? Hence the need for us all to take personal responsibility for our emissions, and to do so urgently.

About half of all carbon emissions in the UK come from activities which we as individuals have direct control over: personal transport, and use of energy in the household for heating, cooking and electricity. Despite the daunting challenge of re-engineering our entire economy to make it carbon-free in coming decades, some of the steps that individuals can take are surprisingly easy. It takes just a few minutes to switch to a renewable provider of electricity, for example. Many changes – such as better insulating your house – can have financial benefits too. Walking or cycling instead of driving improve health and fitness as well as reducing pollution

One of the reasons people frequently cite for failing to take action is their own sense of powerlessness when confronted with a problem as huge as global warming. They also know that their own perceived sacrifice is rendered meaningless by other peoples’ profligacy. Why should I give up my car if someone in America is about to buy a Hummer? This illustrates the need for individual action to be part of a collective effort. When people act collectively it sends a message to governments that the constituency for climate change action is growing, and that its voice is getting ever more powerful. Marching on the street is important too, but first we need to put our own houses in order.