Climate Change: On the Beach, or Going to Holland?

Climate news ranges from serious to depressing to "It's 'Game Over' For Humanity As We Know It." People pose the question: "shouldn't we just party on with the time we have left?"

In Nevil Shute's post-atomic-war On the Beach, Australian survivors of World War III wait for a cloud of radiation fallout to arrive. While waiting for certain doom, some of them attempt to lead normal lives, planting gardens that they will never see. Others in similar scenarios might turn to religion and mysticism; denial; hedonism; or contemplation of fate, possibly through the arts. Others may simply give up and surrender to despair.

Climate change does not mean certain doom for humanity. Our world will change, and we must accept its changes, but the changes do not automatically mean the end of the world. Compare being on the beach with going to Holland. This short, beautiful parable was written by the parent of a child born with a disability, analogizing it to a dream vacation in Italy. Instead of going to Italy, you learn you're going to Holland. You're angry and disappointed...until you see that Holland has tulips and windmills. It's not worse than Italy. It's just different. For the rest of your life, you will face the loss of that dream:

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Two recent reports illustrate the stark difference between choosing to live on the beach of business as usual and going to Holland.

The United Nations Environmental Programme Compendium 2009 could be summed up as Climate worse than we thought. A lot worse. Even if we enact an economy-wide cap on carbon and other countries stick with their plans to reduce carbon, we are still likely to see global temperatures rise between 1.4 and 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100, with an equilibrium of 2.4 degrees Celsius, which will likely trigger three tipping points. The mainstream media reported that temperatures will rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (but, oddly, missed the tipping point of the UNEP report).

Separately, a British conference tackled the consequences of life at 4 degrees Celsius at 2060. Computer modeling shows wildly uneven impacts all over the globe. Large parts of the inland United States would warm 10 to 12 degrees C. An average of four degrees C masks the worst increases; for example, southern and western Africa and the Arctic could each see rises of 10 degrees C. Water supplies for half the world's population would be threatened, and up to half the world's animal and plant species would die. This "plausible worst case scenario" arises from business as usual in which carbon emissions are not sharply curtailed.

Nevertheless, hope lives.

Betts said: "It's important to stress it's not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon." Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

In a business as usual scenario, the usual businesses continue to prosper until we all end up on the beach: game over, watching football, drinking, praying, despairing, or carrying on as if nothing has changed. We can, instead, choose to go to Holland. In Holland, we acknowledge the changes we have wrought in the world while mourning the loss of our old way of life. In Holland, there are no polar bears, and humans will be displaced by rising seas. However, Holland has tulips, and windmills, and -- most important -- polders, low lying tracts of land enclosed entirely by dikes. The ever-present threat of sea level rise has led not only to engineering marvels, but also the political marvel of the polder model, emphasizing cooperation despite differences in the face of a common natural enemy.

The choice is stark.