Things aren’t looking good. A generous understatement, you might say. So where to look for hope?
Certainly not to the ashes of Paradise, California, a grim preview of a new reality that could slash up to a tenth off US GDP by the end of the century. And certainly not to the Arctic circle, where the indigenous Sami people are demanding state aid to help prevent their reindeer herds from starving to death as a result of unprecedented drought and wildfires.
For hope you must turn to movements such as Extinction Rebellion, founded less than a month ago and already making positive headlines for peaceful, meaningful protests. Or 2017's March for Science, which was attended by more than one million people in around 600 cities around the world all sharing a clear message: don’t fuck with our planet. The age of climate indifference is over. And it’s been a change of public opinion almost as fast as rising sea levels.
Before the current deluge of fake news, there was one misinformation campaign that refused to die: global warming. Man-made climate change, we were told by everyone from newspaper columnists to politicians and business leaders, was a hoax dreamed up by unscrupulous scientists, the Chinese or Hollywood.
Despite unrelenting and terrifying evidence to the contrary – from deadly wildfires to record-breaking hurricanes – the climate change conspiracy theory has proven to be an especially pernicious piece of fake news. The success of the lie has, according to evidence obtained by protest groups and research institutes, been in part driven by misinformation campaigns funded by organisations who stand to lose out if humanity divests away from fossil fuels.
That, as the overwhelming body of scientific evidence has shown, is one of the most wantonly idiotic examples of shortsightedness in human history. Profits and corporate might in the short term at the expense of pretty much everything. The consensus is now on the side of truth.
The slight fly in the ointment? A climate change conspiracy theorist is currently installed as leader of one of the world’s more powerful nations. And so, in November 2019, the United States will – unless the current administration has a sudden change of heart – withdraw itself from the only global accord aimed at tackling climate change.
Yet political will, or lack thereof, can only do so much. And where those in power still believe in climate change conspiracy theories, it’s been left to the rest of us to dodge around them and get the work done regardless.
The signing of the Paris Agreement will be a moment in time taught to our great grandchildren in history class. It remains to be seen whether it will be viewed as a landmark moment of success or an early, optimistic blip in humanity’s unstoppable death spiral. A moment of essential altruism or the ultimate betrayal. History, so the saying goes, is what you choose to make it.
At WIRED, we choose to be optimists (heck, sometimes you just have to be). Technology and science, those two great drivers of rapid and at times terrifying change, (partly) got us into this mess – now we need to deploy them with infinitely more intelligence to save the only home we have.
Since the Paris Agreement was signed, the Netherlands and Norway have pledged to ban all sales of petrol- and diesel-powered cars by 2030 and 2025 respectively; four million electric vehicles have been sold worldwide – and adding the next million will only take another six months; Germany has launched the world’s first hydrogen-powered train; France has pledged to no longer use coal to produce electricity after 2022, and in the United States, cities including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions goals of 80 per cent or higher by 2050. It’s a start, but there’s a lot of work to do.
This week, we’ll be going in-depth on a selection of remarkable people and projects tackling climate change in innovative ways. From the struggle to suck CO2 straight out of the air and bury it in the ground to the race to genetically engineer a less flatulent cow, we’ll show how humanity is rallying together to ensure its future – and using pretty amazing science and technology along the way.
This article is part of our WIRED on Climate Change series. From the urgent race to make cows fart less to the battle over deep sea mining, we're taking an in depth look at the technologies and ideas at the forefront of our crucial mission to reverse the effects of global warming.
– Reusable coffee cups? Tote bags? Here's the truth about what you can do to be more climate-friendly
– Richard Branson on his dreams for the future of hyperloop travel
– How passive smoking can help fix London's filthy air pollution crisis
Follow the hashtag #WIREDonClimateChange on Twitter for all of our coverage.
Follow the hashtag #WIREDonClimateChange on Twitter for all of our coverage.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
