The current period reminds me of the period of Perestroika (openness) in the old Soviet Union in the late 1980’s, which instigated media and intellectual freedom, a process put in place by then President Gorbachev to help open up and modernize Soviet society. This ran far beyond what the communist leadership had intended, helping to invalidate the regime as the scale of its crimes, lies, and inconsistencies were laid bare for all to see [1]. The door of media and academic freedom can only be opened a little before uncomfortable truths and realities fundamentally threaten the status quo.
With our current media and academic institutions controlled by the elites[2] [3], there will be no imminent Perestroika event, but rather a slow and painful tearing away of the legitimacy of the ruling class. An example of this painful process is the exposure of the oil industry’s 50-year campaign to cover up and misrepresent the truth about climate change[4]. Elite legitimacy is also being eroded by extreme levels of economic inequality that show the majority that society is only set up to benefit the “1%”. The ability of the elites to manage modern democracies is dependent upon the effectiveness by which they can ‘manufacture’ the consent of the majority for their own benefit, through such things as media control and general socialization[5] [6] [7]. As they lose legitimacy this becomes progressively undermined, and the management of society becomes much less effective.
Actual events, and more recent research, point to the possibility of a much faster transition of the climate system than is generally assumed. The Arctic Ocean is on an exponential trend towards little or no sea ice in September by the early 2020’s, and in July by perhaps 2030[8]. As more open water is exposed closer to the peak of summer, greater and greater amounts of the sun’s energy will be absorbed (open water absorbs about 80% while the white ice reflects about 80%) – significantly adding to climate change and changing weather patterns. The ability of the now open surface waters to mix with the warmer, lower water layers may produce an additional acceleration in warming and ice melting. Hopefully the warming waters will not release the vast amounts of methane trapped in frozen graves beneath the Arctic Ocean floor.
Work by Hansen and others point to the possibility of an exponential rise in sea levels that may start to be irrefutable a decade or so from now[9]. The acceptance that coastal cities will be flooded (New York, Shanghai, London, Miami, Vancouver …) within a few decades will tear through society as asset values collapse, vast chunks of societal infrastructure is invalidated, the financial system is strained to breaking point, and hundreds of millions of residents struggle with their future. The effects on the North Atlantic area will be exacerbated as vast amounts of melting ice create a year-round cold zone south of Greenland. Surrounded by much warmer waters, this will create the “Storms of My Grandchildren” that Hansen has previously written about[10] – only they may be more storms of his children depending upon the assumed melt-rate doubling period. The last few years of floods in the United Kingdom may become a fond memory compared to what will be in store. At the same time the reality of the epic droughts within the sub-tropical areas of the planet may also become irrefutable[11], with the residents of metropolises such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, and large swathes of North Africa and the Middle East, coming to accept their fate.
All of the above provide the fuel for a social explosion, just waiting for a spark. Seemingly about every 15 years, a super El Nino arrives to boost worldwide temperatures. What if another arrives in 2032? The current one jumped global temperatures to a level 1.5°C above pre-industrial times[12], at the current rate of warming it is conceivable that the next one pushes the global temperature increase above 2°C. The abject failure of the elites to meet their own temperature “line in the sand” will be there for all to see. An empty Hoover Dam, a Miami headed under the waves of the Atlantic, a global financial crash without recovery, unprecedented ‘freak’ storms hitting the eastern U.S. and Europe, and a summer solstice with an ice-free Arctic, may be testaments to that failure. With the future for themselves and their children looking much dimmer than they had previously assumed, the reaction of the majority may start out as depression, but may quickly transform into anger and vengeance toward those seen as misleading them toward a dystopian future.
At the very point that the elites will require legitimacy to manage the huge social changes and sacrifices required, they may have squandered it to keep their comfortable privileges for just a few more years. With the hegemony of neo-liberalism having destroyed the alternative of a “left-wing” option, the only alternative may be the right-wing populism, racism and xenophobia that won out in 1930’s Germany. With passions rising rapidly, some sacrificial lambs and general elite mea culpas may be required to facilitate a semblance of collective cohesion. The need to do “something” to assuage the passions and demands of the many, may lead to panicked decision-making for large geo-engineering attempts and other ill-fated and wasteful projects. International cooperation may be a victim of such a panic, as the drive to punish “the other” in order to transfer blame and achieve social cohesion ramps up xenophobia and war mongering,
The conundrum that faces the current elites is that any version of Perestroika in the present is extremely threatening to them. Possibly damned if they do in the present, and definitely damned if they don’t in perhaps the not too distant future. They are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. As they come to accept that climate change may have a significant impact much sooner than currently assumed, the taking of risks in the present may become more amenable to a growing portion of them. The need to throw some of their own “under the bus”, for the survival of the rest, could also become more evident and acceptable. If started now, there is at least the possibility of rational, informed decision-making. In the chaos post the “Panic of 32”, social unrest and political instability may rapidly escalate and run out of control, threatening everyone and disabling societies from making rational choices.
References
[1] David Remnick (1993), Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire, Random House
[2] Robert McChesney (2015), Rich Media, Poor Democracy: New Edition, New Press.
[3] Henry A. Giroux (2015), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Critical Interventions: Politics, Culture, and the Promise of Democracy), Routledge
[4] CIEL (2016), Smoke And Fumes, CIEL. Accessible at https://www.smokeandfumes.org/#/
[5] Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky (1988), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon
[6] Robert McChesney (2015), Rich Media, Poor Democracy: New Edition, New Press.
[7] Michel Foucault & Paul Rabinow (1984), The Foucault Reader, Pantheon
[8] Wipneus (2016), PIOMAS Monthly Average Arctic Ice Volume, Arctischepinguin. Accessible at https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas/grf/piomas-trnd2.png
[9] James Hansen et. al. (2016), Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming is highly dangerous, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 15, 20059–20179, 2015. Accessible at http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/acpd-15-20059-2015.pdf
[10] James Hansen (2009), Storms of My Grandchildren, Bloomsbury
[11] James Hansen & Makiko Saito (2016), Regional climate change and national responsibilities, Environmental Research Letters 11 (2016) 034009. Accessible at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034009/pdf
[12] Damian Carrington & Michael Slezak (2016), February breaks global temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount, The Guardian. Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/14/february-breaks-global-temperature-records-by-shocking-amount. Note that 0.3°C has be added to the average for 1951-80 used in the article to get the rise since pre-industrial times targeted by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC).
