Dear Joao,

Your note to Don contains a sentence that got me thinking. You wrote about “an undertone of catastrophism in your post. I recommend Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now as a healthy counterpoint to all that.”

IMHO, Pinker’s (2018) Enlightenment Now is not an antidote. It is a panacea, perhaps a placebo. The problem is not that Pinker is wrong in many of the facts that he chooses to see as milestones in human progress. The problem is that the context has changed, and many of these promising signs will be irrelevant in the face of larger trends.

The problems on our horizon now are of the kind that change the context. Take the likely impact of catastrophic climate change on one problem alone: refugees. 

The world barely managed to cope with the impact of 6,600,000 refugees seeking shelter in the wake of the conflict in Syria. This has created problems across the Middle East, and even problems in Europe where roughly 1,000,000 Syrian refugees fled. The effects have been immense for the immigration and social support systems of the European nations that welcomed refugees, and these had follow-on effects for finances, taxes, and finally political change.

Catastrophic climate change is likely to bring about the motion of hundreds of millions of refugees struggling to flee one part of the world for another. As much of a disaster as six million refugees seem to be — along with as many people displaced inside Syria — this is minor compared to the likely displacement of climate refugees.

A study by Charles Geisler and Ben Currens (2017) used then-current projections from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to predict the likely impact of rising sea levels on the low-elevation coastal zone. In 2000, roughly 630,000,000 people lived in low-elevation coastal zones threatened by rising sea levels. Most of these people are at risk of displacement. Current estimates suggest population growth in this zone to 1,400,000,000 (1.4 billion) people by 2060. (Geisler and Currens 2017: 323). With oceans rising further by the end of the century, Geisler extrapolates the number of possible climate refugees to as many as two billion people, one fifth of the human population. According to Geisler,

“The colliding forces of human fertility, submerging coastal zones, residential retreat, and impediments to inland resettlement is a huge problem. We offer preliminary estimates of the lands unlikely to support new waves of climate refugees due to the residues of war, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary productivity, desertification, urban sprawl, land concentration, ‘paving the planet’ with roads, and greenhouse gas storage zones offsetting permafrost melt.” (Friedlander 2017.)

There is simply no enlightened way to deal with the consequences of this kind of crisis. Several populations turned angry, electing right-wing nationalist and populist governments in the wake of the refugee problems created by the Syrian Civil War. I cannot believe that people will react in an enlightened way to the crises that will emerge in the wake of three hundred times as many refugees (300). The only way to avoid this kind of disaster is to take effective action to reduce anthropogenic climate change. This is unlikely to happen on the kind of time scale we require to prevent hundreds of millions of deaths. The social, economic, and human disruptions that we will soon face deform and reshape civilisations. We cannot conceive in emotional terms the problems we will face.

This is why Don writes, "My post did not have an undercurrent of catastrophism: it had a raging flood of catastrophism.”

Stephen Emmott's (2013) book Ten Billion explains why Pinker is irrelevant rather than wrong. Physician Kate Saffin (2013) summarised Emmott’s conclusions in a book review: 

“[Emmott] rather (obviously) proposes that the options to improve use of resources – and therefore to accommodate the population increase – are to either develop technology or instigate radical behaviour changes. He doesn’t think that either will work out, because the technologies aren’t being developed properly and because behaviour change at such a scale would need the help of governments and he rightly doesn’t see any evidence that that will happen. He reminds us of the various UN committees charged with protecting the planet, to little effect, and of the international summits that fail to secure meaningful pledges and commitments. Emmott also discusses the charge of consumerism and the nature of corporations built for unending growth as crucial parts of the problem, and it is really his despondency that politicians are unwilling to seem unpopular and that a ‘radical transformation of corporate culture’ is very unlikely to happen that leads him to one of his final sentences: 'I think we’re f*cked’.”

These problems are obvious to most of us, despite Pinker’s cheerful assessment.

A couple years back, I wrote an editorial in She Ji to summarise the situation (Friedman 2018). Since this article provides complete evidence for my views, I provide it as a reasoned counterargument to Pinker’s optimism. [I attach the article to this post.]

The article offers careful evidence from other writers on pages 203-205. There are many scientists among them. On pages 207-208 I discuss the experience of Jørgen Randers’s report to the Norwegian Parliament and the public referendum on Randers’s actionable and reasonably costed proposals to mitigate catastrophic climate change in a nation long noted for environmental awareness. The politicians and the public voted against the proposals. Randers, a co-author of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, reached a sad conclusion. Rather than act on climate change, “People would rather go shopping.” 

My article (Friedman 2018) provides links to much of the evidence. Just download it, read the article, and use the links to decide for yourself whether the counter-argument to Pinker makes sense. There is a short quote from an article by Nathaniel Rich (2018) explaining why we are not likely to avert the coming catastrophe, despite all that we know. Rich interviewed John Sununu, chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush. Sununu helped to prevent the United States from signing an enforceable climate treaty in the early 1990s. When Rich asked him why, Sununu explained it — and he explains why political leaders take the same positions today:

“… the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the [climate] policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources .… Frankly that’s about where we are today.”

With little likelihood of change, we will face global disruptions far larger than the problems that led to the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the Black Death, or the earlier disruptions that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Anyone with a sense of history or an understand of the social sciences would have to question Pinker’s good cheer in the face of what’s apparently coming.

Yours,

Ken

References

Emmott, Stephen. 2013. Ten Billion. New York: Vintage Books. 
From Amazon.com: 
https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Billion-Stephen-Emmott/dp/0345806476

Friedman, Ken. 2018. “The Earth Will Be Here. Will We?” She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, Vol. 4, No. 3, Autumn 2018, pp. 203-208. [Attached to this post.] DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2018.07.002

Friedlander, Blaine. 2017. "Rising seas could result in 2 billion refugees by 2100.” Cornell Chronicle, June 19, 2017. Unpaged. URL: 
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/06/rising-seas-could-result-2-billion-refugees-2100

Geisler, Charles, and Ben Currens. 2017. “Impediments to inland resettlement under conditions of accelerated sea level rise.” Land Use Policy, Vol. 66, July 2017, pp. 322-330. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.03.029

Pinker, Stephen. 2018. Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason Science Humanism and Progress. New York: Viking Penguin.

Rich, Nathaniel. 2018. “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” The New York Times Magazine, August
1, 2018. URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losingearth.html.

Saffin, Kate. 2013. “Book Review: 10 Billion by Stephen Emmott.” London School of Economics Book Blog. URL:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/11/19/book-review-10-billion/






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