As temperature records are broken around the world, some of the most senior ranking climate experts are quoted in mainstream media as expressing their grave concern. Because what is happening is worse than those climate experts predicted some years ago. They don’t say that though – misleading journalists to think that current temperature anomalies are not outside the projections from past IPCC reports. Many of them criticised and even vilified the more ‘alarmist’ readings of climate science over recent years. That includes my own Deep Adaptation paper, published 5 years ago this month. As I explain in Chapter 5 of my new book, now available as a free audio, the analysis in that paper aligns with observations of climate changes in 2023. In 2018 some NASA scientists privately agreed with me, before their bosses publicly dismissed my ‘alarmist’ conclusions after they had reached millions. Why is it that generalists like me were able to see what top climatologists would not express publicly? If we don’t inquire into the institutional and psychological reasons for their public reticence, then those same patterns will distort our future conversations on how to respond to the unfolding situation. That is not a minor concern, as psychological theories suggest that aversion to painful emotions and deference to incumbent power could become toxic to society.
As I explained to the attendees of my MEER Talk recently, there is no joy of vindication – this reality is to painful for that. Instead, I wish for more people to realise the damaging deference to incumbent power and ideology, as we seek to ascertain how to respond meaningfully in this new era of unfolding societal collapse. Otherwise we risk being the anxious idiots of the ‘disaster capitalists’ and defensive elites. Instead, it is time to replace doom-scrolling the latest climate news with better doom-sensemaking… and then better choices and activism.
I encourage you to listen to Chapter 5 of Breaking Together, where I outline some of the limitations of mainstream climatology and what the implications are for our lives. An excerpt follows below. Because this kind of analysis has been ‘shadow banned’ on Facebook and other platforms for at least 4 years, as well as ignored or vilified by most mainstream media, I have a request to make of you. If you think this analysis is worth discussing, then please email it to a few people – don’t assume that posting on social media will mean anyone sees your post (they won’t – that’s how shadow banning works).
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[The image of the Kintsugi Ice is from the Kintsugi World art project that accompanies Breaking Together].
Excerpt from Breaking Together, published by Good Works, 2023.
Measuring and modelling the whole of the Earth System is very complex, and leads to a wide variety of assessments and opinions, with what many scientists believe is an inappropriate confidence produced through processes of consensus at the IPCC.[i] Faced with that complexity, to understand what is actually happening in the environment, we can turn to one data point which reveals the outcome of the various interacting factors. That is global sea level rise. The IPCC was behind the curve on this due to their methodology. For instance, in 2007 the satellite data showed a sea level rise of about 3.3mm per year. Yet that year the IPCC offered 1.94mm a year as the lowest mark of its estimate for the range of future sea-level rise: “Yes, you’re right: that’s lower than what was already happening,” I wrote in the Extinction Rebellion handbook in 2019. “It’s like standing up to your knees in flood water in your living room, listening to the forecaster on the radio saying she is not sure if the river will burst its banks. It turned out that when scientists could not agree on how much the melting polar ice sheets would be adding to sea-level rise, they left out the data altogether. Yeah, that’s so poor, it’s almost funny. Once I realised that the IPCC couldn’t be taken as climate gospel, I looked more closely at some key issues.”[ii] In retrospect, I can see why a few months later, working through proxies, there was a coordinated effort by climatologists to cancel me as a commentator on climate issues.
But here I am. And it remains important to focus on how the speed of sea level rise is accelerating. It averaged about 1.5mm a year during the 20th century, then accelerated to about 2.5mm a year by the 1990s, and in the few years before this book was published it had reached over 3.9mm a year.[iii] As I wrote in my 2018 Deep Adaptation paper, that indicates that non-linear changes might already be occurring in the Earth System, whether to temperature changes in the ocean, the melting of ice on land, or both. Such non-linearity would indicate amplifying feedbacks are already occurring, which would mean humanity probably cannot significantly influence future climate change. Many people downplay the data on sea level rise because the phenomenon of sea level rise is in millimetres and is not currently affecting that many people—but that overlooks how it is a proxy for whole system change and telling us a frightening story.
Due the inertia in the climate system, the already-changed climate means that there will likely be 27cm of global sea level rise from melting on Greenland alone. It could even be 78cm if Greenland’s 2012 melt became normal. Other on-land sources mean that global sea level rise is likely double that. That’s before factoring in the committed warming in the system or the western Antarctic ice sheet, which could suddenly break off and cause far higher sea level rise.[iv] In any case, sea level rise is already beginning to have devastating local impacts, such as on small-island states. It will take decades to have a significant effect on human civilisation in general, and then continue for thousands of years beyond any potential stabilising or reduction of global average temperatures. Therefore, it is already certain that many coastal cities and agricultural lands will be compromised, even by the end of this century.[v]
…Independent analysis by many scientists of the editorial approach of the IPCC over the years has found that it systematically excluded some of the most concerning analyses.[xiii] That is why so many of its projections from 2007 have proven to be below what is occurring in the 2020s. Some analysts argue this approach from the IPCC was preferred by the officials in charge, as they wanted conclusions to seem workable for governments and their powerful industries. The reticence of the IPCC meant that many people, myself included, did not realise how worrisome the climate situation was becoming despite working for decades in the field of sustainability. That reticence has also meant that scholars who became known for going further than the IPCC, such as myself since 2018, have been dismissed as unprofessional, at best. Unfortunately, that keeps the lid on discussions that really need to be had in society.
The IPCC’s Assessment Report 6 (AR6), issued in 2023, demonstrates that mainstream climatology has caught up with nearly everything I wrote in the Deep Adaptation paper of 2018—a paper that was considered by some vocal establishment climatologists, professional environmentalists and journalists as being too ‘alarmist’ at the time. For instance, I was correct to argue that despite there not being sufficient peer-reviewed studies on the phenomenon of sea level rise, it was higher than past IPCC projections and there were even signs of the rate of rise increasing. AR6 now recognises that recent rates are unprecedented over the past 2,500 years and have increased rapidly. I was correct to point out that many of the carbon sinks like forests were turning into carbon sources, making the prognosis worse and less able to be controlled. I was correct to observe that the impacts on the cryosphere, oceans and ecosystems, were already more intense than had been projected for this period in history and with this level of global warming. It was also reasonable to warn that self-reinforcing feedbacks looked likely to soon create tipping points that would take the situation beyond our control. Unfortunately, my statement that the world would not cut emissions towards staying within the carbon budget for 2 degrees global warming also remained accurate five years later.[xiv]
Looking back, the most important break with the mainstream narrative in 2018 was that I argued that the impacts of climate change were already here and everywhere, rather than just affecting other species, faraway lands and future generations. Emphasising that climate change is becoming a near and present danger to all my readers, through a range of direct and indirect impacts, is no longer unusual. When speaking of the implications of the IPCC reports, the UN officials now always make that argument. The difference is that in my paper I concluded that societal collapse had become inevitable. I gave an estimate of time frame, when I wrote that “human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress.” As I was new to the topic and somewhat in shock, I did not explain much about what societal collapse would involve. My understanding was that it would involve damage that was irreversible and so we would not continue like before. It was interesting for me to read that in AR6 the IPCC notes for the first time that “impacts with irreversible consequences are occurring on all continents.” An irreversible change is not a setback—it is a fragment of a collapse. I now observe that our societies already experiencing disruptions to their basic functioning due to climate stress, and conclude that collapse had already begun when I was doing my research, for a range of reasons of which climate is both a symptom and contributor.
What I did not quite realise about my paper in 2018 was that I had revealed the level of evasion and denial not only by environmentalists but by many climate scientists themselves. I was not aware of the extent of analysis already of the methodological and institutional reasons for their scientific reticence. I was not aware of unscientific reasons for the over-emphasis on computer modelling in climatology. I had not realised the lack of cultural self-awareness had led them to avoid more critical questioning. So when the Deep Adaptation paper and conversation exploded around the world, the environmental establishment didn’t just shoot the messenger. They went nuclear. The criticisms, that I was lacking rigour and ethics, were coordinated and designed to cancel me as a commentator on climate change, so the growing anticipation of societal collapse could be marginalised. Many of their criticisms were simply untrue. For instance, in the few years prior to 2017 global temperatures were rising so fast that they exceeded even the upper bounds of projections from climate models. I stated that in the Deep Adaptation paper and was incorrectly dismissed by some establishment climatologists who preferred to claim the climate models were very reliable. Many critiques misrepresented the paper’s views on methane (which we will come to below), on nuclear meltdowns (I did not claim they would happen), and near-term human extinction (I simply concluded it was becoming possible). Some critiques even implied I might be racist, by misquoting my encouragement that we learn from indigenous cultures who had had to face societal collapse in the past (something we look at in Chapter 9).[xv]
There was a lot of mainstream media support for criticisms of the anticipation of societal collapse. Some climatologists who agreed that collapse was likely, and that deep adaptation had a place in the palette of responses, were instructed by their collaborators and funders to cut any association with the idea, and with me. That negativity penetrated activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, as they became infected with a middle-class deference to the establishment—something anathema to its initial impetus. As I wrote at the time, there would be no pleasure in vindication, as for everyone’s sake, including my own, I’d like to turn out to be wrong. Looking back, I wonder what damage that backlash may have done to people’s engagement in the climate issue, including within the activist community. If you were affected by that effort to get you to dismiss this analysis and delay your processing of it for the last few years, then there could be something to gain from reflecting on what it was about you that allowed that to happen. That way you might be able to reduce how much you are susceptible to current and future forms of manipulation. That is important, as the more of us who can sense how officers of the establishment work with the interests of capital within a culture of Imperial Modernity to entice us to not be radicalised, then we will be better able to uphold universal values in an era of collapse—something I will explore in the second half of the book.
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[i] There is an extensive literature critiquing the processes of the IPCC, including in peer reviewed journals. The following study cites a range of that literature: Spratt, D. & Dunlop, I. (2017). What Lies Beneath? The Scientific Understatement of Climate Risks. Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-09-07/what-lies-beneath/
[ii] The longer version of the chapter “Doom and Bloom” can be read at: Bendell, J. (2020). Adapting deeply to likely collapse: an enhanced agenda for climate activists? Jembendell.com. https://jembendell.com/2020/01/15/adapting-deeply-to-likely-collapse-an-enhanced-agenda-for-climate-activists/
[iii] NASA (2022). Tracking 30 Years of Sea Level Rise. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-years-of-sea-level-rise
[iv] Box, J. E.; Hubbard, A.; Bahr, D. B. et al. (2022). Green ice sheet climate disequilibrium and committed sea-leave rise. Nature Climate Change, 12, 808-813. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01441-2
[v] Noted in: IPCC (2023). AR6 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers Headline Statements. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements/
[xiii] Brysse, K.; Oreskes, N.; O’Reilly, J. & Oppenheimer, M. (2013). Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama? Global Environmental Change, 23(1), 327-337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.10.008
[xiv] IPCC (2023). AR6 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers Headline Statements. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements/
[xv] After a couple of years of misrepresentations, I finally decided to start asking for retractions, for instance with the New Internationalist magazine: Swift, R. (2022). Is it too late to stop climate collapse?. New Internationalist. https://newint.org/features/2022/04/04/it-too-late
Prof Jem Bendell 
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