anthropogenic climate change will occur in the coming decades. Which in itself is worrying (Read and O’Riordan 2017a). What is known, however, is that the large swings in temperature between ice ages and warm periods, bringing about temperature changes of up to 6°C peak to peak (Hansen et al. 2013), did not happen gradually – as the climate model runs underlying the above study suggest – but in bursts and bouts (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2005). Those climate oscillations were approximately as rapid as the warming we are seeing today and were created by various climate feedbacks, or tipping points. Then, about 10,000 years ago, a much more stable climate established itself. Some scholars argue that before this point, agriculture was impossible due to rapid climate fluctuations, but afterwards more or less unavoidable (Fagan 2004; Staubwasser and Weiss 2006).
In a recent commentary, prominent scientists have warned that tipping points and feedbacks similar to those that made the climate hostile to agriculture may have already been set in motion by the rapid increase in CO2 levels (Lenton et al. 2019). During times of change, rapid collapse rather than gradual change is quite common for both ecosystems (Cooper, Willcock and Dearing 2020; Williams and Lenton 2010) and societies (Fagan 2008; Lee 2009). This suggests a triple threat to human civilization: agriculture has never existed in a strongly fluctuating climate; it also has never existed in climate states resembling distant geological warm period; and complex systems, such as human societies, can collapse even more rapidly than the ongoing speed of climate warming.
Recognizing the severity of the threat and following on from increasingly vocal and civilly disobedient climate protesters, several countries and countless organizations – from local councils to universities – have recently declared a state of climate emergency. Among those is the European Parliament, the first parliamentary representative of a major global emitter of greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, if this state of alertness exists, it has not been followed up by actions. Human emissions of CO2, which had just started to pick up during the time of Arrhenius, continue to rise, apart from a decline due to the recent pandemic likely to be temporary (Le Quéré et al. 2020). Continuing investments in fossil fuel exploration and production (Tong et al. 2019) and continuing subsidies for fossil fuels make it unlikely that the situation will change any time soon (Farand 2018; ODI 2019; Trinomics 2018). Using past climate records and with some minimal use of climate models, it has been inferred that if we burn all fossil fuels, most of the earth will become uninhabitable for humans (Hansen et al. 2013). That’s one reason for the name of the climate and ecological activism movement ‘Extinction Rebellion’.
The remainder of this chapter will lay out the case that, when it comes to global heating, there is still no sign of any action that would resemble a true case of emergency. It will then be devoted to the question of why the gravity of the climate threat has largely been ignored or downplayed, even by many climate scientists themselves (Spratt and Dunlop 2018).
The root of denial may be found in the workings of climate science
The ownership of a story can best be judged by the prevailing news cycle. When it comes to global heating, there are three instances when the news machinery responds: publication of some groundbreaking scientific result, a climate policy decision or major climate policy meeting, or mass protests. Of the three groups that can trigger such news alerts – the scientists, the policy makers and the activists – only the first, at best, can generate news without the help of at least one of the others. Climate policy generally revolves around resolutions of the IPCC, a body of climate scientists (and politicians and civil servants). Climate protesters repeatedly cite scientific evidence to further their case. Therefore, rather than seeing climate heating as a symptom of industrial society and overconsumption, a framing many others could take part in, society typically views climate as an issue ‘owned’ by natural scientists.
The way in which the scientific community has approached the problem of global heating is therefore of primary importance for understanding the failure of climate policy to date. Physical scientists tend to see their role as to gain and ascertain new insights about the physical world we live in. Correspondingly, there are two principal ways for a scientist to rise in esteem: either being the first to make a significant discovery, or, something which can be much longer lasting, the first to propose a new theory that later withstands repeated attempts at proving it wrong.
Being disproven or having to retract a finding, on the other hand, is associated with a significant penalty in terms of loss of professional esteem. Consequently, scientists have been trained to be cautious before accepting new evidence or, even more so, new theories. This constitutes a certain type of ‘precautionary principle’: there is a certain fear of being seen to be exaggerating findings and promoting the possibility of less likely outcomes. ‘False positives’ are seen as worse than ‘false negatives’. Unfortunately, this precautionary principle tends to point in the exact opposite direction from the needs of broader society: from, in other words, the Precautionary Principle proper (Read and O’Riordan 2017b). For, in ‘post-normal’ science, where the stakes for the broader society are high, ‘false positives’ are much less bad than ‘false negatives’.3 It is much worse for society if scientists fail to warn of an existential threat than if they end up sometimes having cried wolf.
When it comes to climate heating, the fear of being a scientist who goes well ahead of the pack has generally, and very unfortunately, proven stronger than the fear of catastrophic consequences of human-triggered climate change itself (Hansen 2007). How this mentality affects the way results are presented in major scientific assessments of societal threats is now well documented; it leads to a tendency to ‘err on the side of least drama’ (Brysse et al. 2013), i.e. to report only those threats where the scientist is fairly sure not to be refuted by his or her peers.
Ethical guidelines of certain professions, as for example emergency department physicians, can teach us what actions are required in a true emergency situation (Peacock 2018). The central piece of the applicable code of conduct is the application of the precautionary principle without delay, always with an eye on the worst-case outcome for the many, not just the few – for all those with a stake in the matter, not just those with a professional interest to defend. This type of precautionary principle works then, as we have said, in the exact opposite direction to the one followed by the scientific community; it demands being more tolerant, in particular where the stakes are high/existential, to erring strongly on the side of ‘maximum drama’, rather than the opposite (Read and O’Riordan 2017a; Taleb et al. 2014).
Some processes that climate scientists study, such as the physics of atmospheric motion, of the earth’s planetary energy balance or the chemistry of CO2 dissolving in ocean water, are fundamentally understood, and we can safely assume that the same principles will apply in a warming/chaoticizing climate. But other processes, such as the melting and eventual collapse of ice sheets, or the reaction of crops and ecosystems to drought and warming and their possible collapse, are much less understood. There are often no analogues from the past, very limited experiments of necessarily small scale and computer models trained on severely limited data. It is thus a matter of precaution to rely mostly on theories and observations that are well established, that leave open the possibility of unforeseen developments where we know little, and that seek to implement ‘no-regrets’ policies of protection and precaution (and adaptation). The description of the current state of climate science given in the previous section therefore emphasizes the unknown character of even our immediate future and limits itself to what we know about past climate changes and a few findings that make use of climate model simulations in a limited way.
In order to tackle the problem of global heating, the United Nations instituted the IPCC and tasked it to provide regular comprehensive assessments of the state of climate science. The scientists writing those assessments are confronted with at least two big problems. First, that their normal model of conducting science contradicts the ethics of emergency situations; and second, that there are reasons to believe large parts of climate science necessarily remain speculative, for lack of known precedents or experimental techniques. Single plants or a small plot of land can be subject to artificially altered climates, but not entire societies or ecosystems.
But if predicting