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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...nd-on-olive-imports-from-april-scientist-says
Extreme weather blamed for plunge in country’s olive harvest – the worst in 25 years – that could leave the country dependent on imports by April
Extreme weather events have been the “main driver” of an olive harvest collapse that could leave Italy dependent on imports from April, a leading climate scientist has warned.
A 57% plunge in the country’s olive harvest – the worst in 25 years – sparked protests by thousands of Italian farmers wearing gilet arancioni – orange vests – in Rome earlier this month.
Olive trees across the Mediterranean have been hit by freak events that mirror climate change predictions – erratic rainfalls, early spring frosts, strong winds and summer droughts.
Prof Riccardo Valentini, a director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center for climate change, said: “There are clear observational patterns that point to these types of weather extremes as the main drivers of [lower] food productivity.”
He added: “Freezing temperatures in the Mediterranean are anomalous for us. In any direction the extremes are important and indeed, they are predicted by climate change scenarios.”
Several reports by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) “all point to these climatic extremes as one of the major impacts of climate change”, he said. “We know there will be more extremes and anomalies in the future.”
Valentini said that sudden extremes in any direction – warming or cooling, freezing or drying – can harm plant development. “Three or four days of 40C temperatures in summer, or 10 days without rain in spring – even two days of freezing temperatures in spring – are more important than the average for the year,” he said.
Average temperatures in the Mediterranean have already risen by 1.4C above pre-industrial levels – compared with a global average of about 1C – and precipitation has fallen by 2.5%.
In the past 18 months, Italy has experienced summer droughts, autumn floods and spring ice waves.
Olive trees are weakened by these kinds of weather shocks and, even if they recover, are left more vulnerable to outbreaks of the xylella fastidiosa bacterium and olive fly infestations, which have hit farmers in Italy and Greece, Valentini said.
Italy’s Coldiretti farmers’ union estimates that the cost of the olive oil collapse this year has already reached €1bn.
“The government promised a solution but it has not given any more resources for the olive farmers,” a Coldiretti spokesman said, adding there was “no plan for [addressing] climate change and olive oil production either.”
He said: “We have had demonstrations in front of parliament already and we are waiting for government action.” The spokesman added that if it did not materialise, “there could be more protests”.
Beyond Italy, the European commission has projected 2018-19 olive harvests to drop by 20% in Portugal and 42% in Greece, although industry sources said final figures there could be significantly worse.
Greek farmers were devastated by extreme drought and then heavy rains, which acted as a “trigger event” for olive fly infestations, according to Valentini.
Vasilis Pyrgiotis, the chair of the Copa Cogeca farming union’s olives working group, said: “the big issue is not necessarily the quantity but the quality. Most Greek olive oil is considered ‘extra virgin’ but it is not certain, as time goes by, that this will continue.”
Olive oil has to meet organoleptic criteria (such as acidity levels) before it can be classed as extra virgin, and these are affected by growing conditions.
“The problem this year was because of fly attacks but also the gloeosporium olivarum fungus,” Pyrgiotis said. “This year’s olives are not as good as they used to be. In the longer term, we face the possibility that they may not be considered as extra virgin oil because of analysis issues.”
Olive trees follow a pattern known as alternate bearing, with bad years routinely followed by good. This year, the EU expects Europe’s overall olive basket to be saved by a surge from its biggest producer, Spain.
A trend there towards super intensive plantations may partly mitigate climate change impacts, according to Valentini – but at a cost to traditional farming and biodiversity. Fast-growing, high-density olive plantations might be more drought-resistant but water resources could also be limited by these plantations, he said.
“It will change the rural landscape from older growth olive trees to more intensive plantations,” he added. “People in the south of Italy are beginning to move in that direction. I don’t like it but I understand it is an adaptation.”
A Met Office spokesman said that in future, the combined effect of pests, disease and climate change on global agriculture could be “potentially devastating”.
Extreme weather blamed for plunge in country’s olive harvest – the worst in 25 years – that could leave the country dependent on imports by April
Extreme weather events have been the “main driver” of an olive harvest collapse that could leave Italy dependent on imports from April, a leading climate scientist has warned.
A 57% plunge in the country’s olive harvest – the worst in 25 years – sparked protests by thousands of Italian farmers wearing gilet arancioni – orange vests – in Rome earlier this month.
Olive trees across the Mediterranean have been hit by freak events that mirror climate change predictions – erratic rainfalls, early spring frosts, strong winds and summer droughts.
Prof Riccardo Valentini, a director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center for climate change, said: “There are clear observational patterns that point to these types of weather extremes as the main drivers of [lower] food productivity.”
He added: “Freezing temperatures in the Mediterranean are anomalous for us. In any direction the extremes are important and indeed, they are predicted by climate change scenarios.”
Several reports by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) “all point to these climatic extremes as one of the major impacts of climate change”, he said. “We know there will be more extremes and anomalies in the future.”
Valentini said that sudden extremes in any direction – warming or cooling, freezing or drying – can harm plant development. “Three or four days of 40C temperatures in summer, or 10 days without rain in spring – even two days of freezing temperatures in spring – are more important than the average for the year,” he said.
Average temperatures in the Mediterranean have already risen by 1.4C above pre-industrial levels – compared with a global average of about 1C – and precipitation has fallen by 2.5%.
In the past 18 months, Italy has experienced summer droughts, autumn floods and spring ice waves.
Olive trees are weakened by these kinds of weather shocks and, even if they recover, are left more vulnerable to outbreaks of the xylella fastidiosa bacterium and olive fly infestations, which have hit farmers in Italy and Greece, Valentini said.
Italy’s Coldiretti farmers’ union estimates that the cost of the olive oil collapse this year has already reached €1bn.
“The government promised a solution but it has not given any more resources for the olive farmers,” a Coldiretti spokesman said, adding there was “no plan for [addressing] climate change and olive oil production either.”
He said: “We have had demonstrations in front of parliament already and we are waiting for government action.” The spokesman added that if it did not materialise, “there could be more protests”.
Beyond Italy, the European commission has projected 2018-19 olive harvests to drop by 20% in Portugal and 42% in Greece, although industry sources said final figures there could be significantly worse.
Greek farmers were devastated by extreme drought and then heavy rains, which acted as a “trigger event” for olive fly infestations, according to Valentini.
Vasilis Pyrgiotis, the chair of the Copa Cogeca farming union’s olives working group, said: “the big issue is not necessarily the quantity but the quality. Most Greek olive oil is considered ‘extra virgin’ but it is not certain, as time goes by, that this will continue.”
Olive oil has to meet organoleptic criteria (such as acidity levels) before it can be classed as extra virgin, and these are affected by growing conditions.
“The problem this year was because of fly attacks but also the gloeosporium olivarum fungus,” Pyrgiotis said. “This year’s olives are not as good as they used to be. In the longer term, we face the possibility that they may not be considered as extra virgin oil because of analysis issues.”
Olive trees follow a pattern known as alternate bearing, with bad years routinely followed by good. This year, the EU expects Europe’s overall olive basket to be saved by a surge from its biggest producer, Spain.
A trend there towards super intensive plantations may partly mitigate climate change impacts, according to Valentini – but at a cost to traditional farming and biodiversity. Fast-growing, high-density olive plantations might be more drought-resistant but water resources could also be limited by these plantations, he said.
“It will change the rural landscape from older growth olive trees to more intensive plantations,” he added. “People in the south of Italy are beginning to move in that direction. I don’t like it but I understand it is an adaptation.”
A Met Office spokesman said that in future, the combined effect of pests, disease and climate change on global agriculture could be “potentially devastating”.
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment...ange-will-be-marked-as-truants-principals-say
Schools are threatening to mark students as truants if they strike for climate change, with one principal calling it "wagging" that won't make a difference.
Thousands of students plan to strike across New Zealand next week as part of a global campaign urging politicians to treat climate change as a crisis, and act now to protect students' futures from its effects.
Christchurch strike organiser Lucy Gray, 12, said students were striking for their future.
"Teachers, they strike all the time to get what they want and that's just money. We want our future; I think that should be allowed."
But Secondary Principals Association president and Pakuranga College principal Michael Williams said students' impact on climate change would be "probably zero".
"If my environmental council students came to me and said they wanted to strike, I'd say 'What's it going to achieve?'," he said.
"We're concerned that students are wasting good learning time."
Christchurch principals said the strike should have been held on the weekend, not on Friday afternoon.
On advice from the Ministry of Education, they have adopted a unified stance that students must have their parents' permission to attend, and will be marked "unjustifiably absent" if they do not. Anyone who attends without their parents' permission will be marked as truant.
A template letter sent to local parents said schools "do not support students attending this event".
"Our understanding is that the event has no recognised, official body organising it. Plans for management on the day, if they do exist, have not been brought to our attention."
Gray could not be reached for comment about principals' concerns on Wednesday.
In an earlier interview with Stuff, she said the strike was a way for students who weren't able to vote to have a voice on issues that mattered to them.
Canterbury West Coast Secondary Principals' Association president Phil Holstein said schools supported students' commitment to the cause.
But approving a student strike would set a worrying precedent, he said.
"On the list of things we can justify [student absences for], a strike is not one of them.
"We would have liked to have some kind of notice before it was just imposed on us. Just on the basis of health and safety for students ... we couldn't take responsibility for that."
Steven Mustor, director of Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery in Christchurch said the school would be "100 per cent supportive" if its students wanted to attend the event, although he wasn't aware of any who did.
"We would make it into a learning opportunity for them."
However, any "more serious action" would not be sanctioned, Mustor said. The school learned how to deal with student activism when several Unlimited students chained themselves to a fountain to protest the redevelopment of Cashel Mall in 2007.
"We didn't take any action against those guys – the police did."
The Strike 4 Climate Change movement started with 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who skipped class to sit outside government buildings for three weeks last year.
Following Greta, children across Europe and Australia held their own demonstrations, and the worldwide strike next week involves youth from more than 50 countries.
In Wellington, school leavers Isla Day and Sophie Handford, both 18, said they were expecting hundreds to attend their strike in Civic Square.
Day said students could learn more going to Parliament for the strike compared to a day at school, and Handford said they'd had more support than criticism.
"If I think about the burden of truancy and then I think about the burden of the catastrophic consequences of climate change - what's more significant?" Handford said.
"We only have a small window for change and this is really important, I really hope parents will support that."
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said climate change is something the next generation cared about deeply.
"We've seen that globally, and what I'd like to think is in New Zealand there is less cause for protest, we are certainly trying to do our bit."
Minister for climate change James Shaw said he completely understood why students were pressing for action on climate change.
"How principals choose to respond is entirely up to them. But I learnt, when I was at school, that it is never wise to try and tell the principal what to do."
Student action was already making a difference, Shaw said.
"They have put politicians on notice that we need to get moving and get our climate change response plan right."
The Zero Carbon Bill being pushed through this year was partly influenced by the work of campaigning by the youth movement, Generation Zero.
"The concerns and influence of young people is already making a difference to what the Government is doing."
Climate change strikes on March 15
Dunedin - Expected to start with a march down George St at noon on March 15, followed by a rally in the Octagon.
Christchurch - 1pm at Cathedral Square with music, guest speakers and cultural showcases from schools.
Wellington - 10am at Civic Square followed by a walk to Parliament down Lambton Quay, including speakers.
Auckland - from noon at Aotea Square, with performers, speakers and music.
Events are also planned for Nelson, Raglan, Russell, Hamilton, Lower Hutt, Kāpiti, Palmerston North, Whanganui, New Plymouth, and others.
Schools are threatening to mark students as truants if they strike for climate change, with one principal calling it "wagging" that won't make a difference.
Thousands of students plan to strike across New Zealand next week as part of a global campaign urging politicians to treat climate change as a crisis, and act now to protect students' futures from its effects.
Christchurch strike organiser Lucy Gray, 12, said students were striking for their future.
"Teachers, they strike all the time to get what they want and that's just money. We want our future; I think that should be allowed."
But Secondary Principals Association president and Pakuranga College principal Michael Williams said students' impact on climate change would be "probably zero".
"If my environmental council students came to me and said they wanted to strike, I'd say 'What's it going to achieve?'," he said.
"We're concerned that students are wasting good learning time."
Christchurch principals said the strike should have been held on the weekend, not on Friday afternoon.
On advice from the Ministry of Education, they have adopted a unified stance that students must have their parents' permission to attend, and will be marked "unjustifiably absent" if they do not. Anyone who attends without their parents' permission will be marked as truant.
A template letter sent to local parents said schools "do not support students attending this event".
"Our understanding is that the event has no recognised, official body organising it. Plans for management on the day, if they do exist, have not been brought to our attention."
Gray could not be reached for comment about principals' concerns on Wednesday.
In an earlier interview with Stuff, she said the strike was a way for students who weren't able to vote to have a voice on issues that mattered to them.
Canterbury West Coast Secondary Principals' Association president Phil Holstein said schools supported students' commitment to the cause.
But approving a student strike would set a worrying precedent, he said.
"On the list of things we can justify [student absences for], a strike is not one of them.
"We would have liked to have some kind of notice before it was just imposed on us. Just on the basis of health and safety for students ... we couldn't take responsibility for that."
Steven Mustor, director of Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery in Christchurch said the school would be "100 per cent supportive" if its students wanted to attend the event, although he wasn't aware of any who did.
"We would make it into a learning opportunity for them."
However, any "more serious action" would not be sanctioned, Mustor said. The school learned how to deal with student activism when several Unlimited students chained themselves to a fountain to protest the redevelopment of Cashel Mall in 2007.
"We didn't take any action against those guys – the police did."
The Strike 4 Climate Change movement started with 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who skipped class to sit outside government buildings for three weeks last year.
Following Greta, children across Europe and Australia held their own demonstrations, and the worldwide strike next week involves youth from more than 50 countries.
In Wellington, school leavers Isla Day and Sophie Handford, both 18, said they were expecting hundreds to attend their strike in Civic Square.
Day said students could learn more going to Parliament for the strike compared to a day at school, and Handford said they'd had more support than criticism.
"If I think about the burden of truancy and then I think about the burden of the catastrophic consequences of climate change - what's more significant?" Handford said.
"We only have a small window for change and this is really important, I really hope parents will support that."
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said climate change is something the next generation cared about deeply.
"We've seen that globally, and what I'd like to think is in New Zealand there is less cause for protest, we are certainly trying to do our bit."
Minister for climate change James Shaw said he completely understood why students were pressing for action on climate change.
"How principals choose to respond is entirely up to them. But I learnt, when I was at school, that it is never wise to try and tell the principal what to do."
Student action was already making a difference, Shaw said.
"They have put politicians on notice that we need to get moving and get our climate change response plan right."
The Zero Carbon Bill being pushed through this year was partly influenced by the work of campaigning by the youth movement, Generation Zero.
"The concerns and influence of young people is already making a difference to what the Government is doing."
Climate change strikes on March 15
Dunedin - Expected to start with a march down George St at noon on March 15, followed by a rally in the Octagon.
Christchurch - 1pm at Cathedral Square with music, guest speakers and cultural showcases from schools.
Wellington - 10am at Civic Square followed by a walk to Parliament down Lambton Quay, including speakers.
Auckland - from noon at Aotea Square, with performers, speakers and music.
Events are also planned for Nelson, Raglan, Russell, Hamilton, Lower Hutt, Kāpiti, Palmerston North, Whanganui, New Plymouth, and others.
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...r-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy
The author with the "Deep Adaptation" paper. Photo by VICE
On average, three people read an academic paper. At least 100,000 have read this—and a lot of them haven't taken it very well.
What if I told you there was a paper on climate change that was so uniquely catastrophic, so perspective-altering, and so absolutely depressing that it's sent people to support groups and encouraged them to quit their jobs and move to the countryside?
Good news: there is. It's called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy." I was introduced to it via an unlikely source—a guy formerly in advertising who had left his job to become a full-time environmental campaigner. "We're fucked," he told me. "Climate change is going to **** us over. I remember thinking, Should I just accept the deep adaptation paper and move to the Scottish countryside and wait out the apocalypse?"
"Deep Adaptation" is quite unlike any other academic paper. There's the language ("we are about to play Russian Roulette with the entire human race with already two bullets loaded"). There's the flashes of dark humor ("I was only partly joking earlier when I questioned why I was even writing this paper"). But most of all, there's the stark conclusions that it draws about the future. Chiefly, that it's too late to stop climate change from devastating our world—and that "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term."
How near? About a decade.
Professor Jem Bendell, a sustainability academic at the University of Cumbria, wrote the paper after taking a sabbatical at the end of 2017 to review and understand the latest climate science "properly—not sitting on the fence anymore," as he puts it on the phone to me.
What he found terrified him. "The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war," he writes in the paper. "Our norms of behavior—that we call our 'civilization'—may also degrade."
"It is time," he adds, "we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today."
Even a schmuck like me is familiar with some of the evidence Bendell sets out to prove his point. You only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have occurred since 2000. Scientists already believe we are soon on course for an ice-free Arctic, which will only accelerate global warming. Back in 2017, even Fox News reported scientists' warnings that the Earth's sixth mass extinction was underway.
Erik Buitenhuis, a senior researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, tells me that Bendell's conclusions may sound extreme, but he agrees with the report's overall assessment. "I think societal collapse is indeed inevitable," he says, though adds that "the process is likely to take decades to centuries."
The important thing, Buitenhuis says, is to realize that the negative effects of climate change have already been with us for some time: "Further gradual deterioration looks much more likely to me than a disaster within the next ten years that will be big enough that, after that, everybody will agree the status quo is doomed."
"Jem's paper is in the main well-researched and supported by relatively mainstream climate science," says Professor Rupert Read, chair of the Green House think-tank and a philosophy academic at the University of East Anglia. "That's why I'm with him on the fundamentals. And more and more people are."
Read's key disagreement with Bendell is his belief that we still have time to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, saying, "I think it's hubris to think that we know the future." But that doesn't mean Bendell's premise is wrong: "The way I see it, deep adaptation is insurance against the possibility—or rather, the probability—of some kind of collapse," says Read. "'Deep Adaptation' is saying, 'What do we need to do if collapse is something we need to realistically plan for?'"
When I speak to Bendell, he tells me he thinks of "Deep Adaptation" as more of an ethical and philosophical framework, rather than a prophecy about the future of the planet. "The longer we refuse to talk about climate change as already here and screwing with our way of life—because we don't want to think like that because it's too frightening or will somehow demotivate people—the less time we have to reduce harm," he says with deliberation.
What does he mean by harm? "Starvation is the first one," he answers, pointing to lowering harvests of grain in Europe in 2018 due to drought that saw the EU reap 6 million tons less wheat. "In the scientific community at the moment, the appropriate thing is to say that 2018 was an anomaly. However, if you look at what's been happening over the last few years, it isn't an anomaly. There's a possibility that 2018 is the new best case scenario."
That means, in Bendell's view, that governments need to start planning emergency responses to climate change, including growing and stockpiling food.
He minces his words even less in his paper: "When I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you won't have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbors for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won't know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death."
Should people start building bunkers and buying bulletproof vests? "There's no way of getting through this unless we try together," he says. "We need to help people stay fed and watered where they live already to reduce disruption and reduce civil unrest as much as we can." Of the Silicon Valley financiers prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand, he says: "Once money doesn't matter anymore and the armed guards are trying to feed their starving children, what do you think they'll do? The billionaires doing that are just deluded."
Bendell wasn't always this gloomy about the state of the world. He once worked for WWF, one of the biggest environmental charities in the world, and in 2012 founded the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for his work. So how did he end up writing a paper that determined that civilization—and environmental sustainability as we currently understand it—is doomed?
"Since the age of 15, I've been an environmentalist," he tells me. "I've given my life professionally and personally. I'm a workaholic, and it was all about sustainability." Once he sat down with the data, however, he realized that his field was quickly becoming irrelevant in the face of oncoming climate catastrophe. "It would mean not getting super excited about the expansion of your recycling program in a major multinational," he says. "It's a completely different paradigm of what we should be looking at."
What he didn’t expect was for the paper to take off online. "It was aimed at those people in my professional community and why we're in denial," he says. "When I put it out there, I didn’t expect 15-year-olds in schools in Indonesia to be reading it with their teachers." He says that "Deep Adaptation" has been downloaded over 110,000 times since it was released by IFLAS as an occasional paper. "Someone in the alternative economics and bitcoin crowd told me, 'Oh, everyone's talking about deep adaptation in London at all the dinner parties,'" he laughs.
Researchers from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), an established progressive think-tank, consulted Bendell's paper in the process of writing its new report, "This is a crisis facing up to the age of environmental breakdown." Laurie Laybourn-Langton, its lead author, told me via email: "I appreciated the frankness of the report in facing up to issues that so many in research and policy communities seem unwilling to. We don't subscribe to the view that social collapse is inevitable, however."
He explains: "This is partly because it's so hard to predict the outcomes of the complex and uncertain process of environmental shocks interacting with social and economic systems. We simply don't know. That said, they shouldn’t be disregarded as a potential outcome, and so we are calling for greater levels of preparedness to these shocks."
Not everyone was so taken with the paper. Bendell submitted it to a well-respected academic journal for publication, with little success. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) told me that the paper was in need of "major revisions" before it would be ready for publication. Bendell ended up publishing it through IFLAS and his blog. "The academic process is such that I took that as an effective rejection," he explains, saying that the reviewers wanted him to fundamentally alter his conclusions. "I couldn't completely rewrite the paper to say that I don't think collapse is inevitable. It was asking for a different paper."
Emerald, the scholarly publisher that owns SAMPJ, says it takes issue with how Bendell frames its reception of its paper on his blog: "the study on collapse they thought you should not read—yet." A spokesperson told me: "The decision was arrived at based on the merit of the submitted article and the double blind peer review process integral to academia and the advancement of knowledge. SAMPJ, and [editor Carol Adams] are proud members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adhere to the highest ethical standards in publishing. We see no evidence that the decision of Major Revision was politically motivated.
"Emerald requested the author correct their blog post to reflect the facts. This request was unfortunately ignored. The post continues to imply the paper was rejected because it was deemed too controversial. The paper was not rejected, and was given a Major Revision due to the rigorous standards of the scholarly output of the journal."
Bendell says he did reply to Emerald's request to amend his blog post—but only if they would consider telling him the decisions of those who reviewed his paper. (Under the double blind peer review, reviewers' decisions are anonymous.) "That title can be read in a number of ways," he says. "It is a paper that the reviewers didn't want you to read. They didn't want it published."
Climate gloom and doom is nothing new—doomsday preppers have been stockpiling their freeze-dried food rations for decades now. But Bendell's paper appears to have hit a unique nerve, especially given that the average scientific paper is estimated to be read by only three or so people. Rupert Read tells me that he was sent it simultaneously by three other academics when it was published. But it hasn’t trended on Twitter. It hasn't been pushed by a celebrity. It was briefly mentioned in a Bloomberg Businessweek article, but that's it.
"Deep Adaptation" is that unique social phenomenon: an academic paper that has gone viral through word of mouth.
Nathan Savelli, a 31-year-old high school life coach from Hamilton, Canada, was recommended the paper by a local environmental activist. Reading it sent him spiraling into depression. "I guess in some ways it felt like I was diagnosed with a terminal illness," he tells me. "If I'm being honest, it was a mix of heartbreaking sadness and extreme anger."
Savelli felt so low that he sought help from a climate grief support group organized by 350.org, the global grassroots climate movement. "I had attended counseling in the past for other issues, but never a group session, and thought it might be something helpful for me," he tells me. Did it help? "I'm not sure I'd say it alleviated my grief, but it was definitely comforting to be around people who understood what I was feeling."
And therein lies the problem with "Deep Adaptation:" if you accept that the paper is entirely correct in its prediction of collapse, how do you move on with your life? How do you even get out of bed in the morning?
"I'm aware of what difficult emotions it triggers," Bendell acknowledges. "I do believe that if you’ve come across this [paper], then absolutely some grief and despair is very natural. Why isn't that OK? We all die in the end. Life is about impermanence." On his blog, he lists several sources for psychological support, including several groups on Facebook and LinkedIn that discuss collapse and offer help to those struggling to come to terms with the conclusions of his paper.
But, Bendell adds, reading the paper has been "transformative" for some. "People find a new boldness about living life on their own terms—actually connecting to their heart's desire. How do they wish to live, and why don't they live that way now rather than postponing it?"
In one case, it even helped prompt one high-ranking academic to quit her job and the city.
In December of 2017, Dr. Alison Green left her post as the pro vice-chancellor of Arden University. She had read the IPCC report warning that the world is nowhere near averting global temperature increases, as well as the 1,656-page National Climate Assessment on how climate change is now dramatically affecting our lives—and then she read Bendell's paper.
All three combined to put her on the road to a drastic life change. "My desire is to get out of academia and to get out of the city. I tell people I’m heading for the hills," she tells me over the phone. "My plan is to get a smallholding and live more closely to nature."
Reading the paper, she says, helped to crystallize her increasing uneasiness about the pace and scale of climate change. "What was really striking about this paper is that a social scientist was saying—not just the wacky fringe, this is a professor at an established institution, with a track record—saying that he believed that collapse was inevitable."
"That," she adds, "had a profound effect on me."
She's not the only one. Bendell himself says that he is still working out how much he can reconcile his job as an academic with his newfound conclusions about the state of the future.
"I think the reason why my framing and my paper took off is that it’s maybe the first time a social scientist was saying these things categorically," he says. "We are seemingly in denial. It's time to break that taboo and have serious conversations about what we do now."
The author with the "Deep Adaptation" paper. Photo by VICE
On average, three people read an academic paper. At least 100,000 have read this—and a lot of them haven't taken it very well.
What if I told you there was a paper on climate change that was so uniquely catastrophic, so perspective-altering, and so absolutely depressing that it's sent people to support groups and encouraged them to quit their jobs and move to the countryside?
Good news: there is. It's called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy." I was introduced to it via an unlikely source—a guy formerly in advertising who had left his job to become a full-time environmental campaigner. "We're fucked," he told me. "Climate change is going to **** us over. I remember thinking, Should I just accept the deep adaptation paper and move to the Scottish countryside and wait out the apocalypse?"
"Deep Adaptation" is quite unlike any other academic paper. There's the language ("we are about to play Russian Roulette with the entire human race with already two bullets loaded"). There's the flashes of dark humor ("I was only partly joking earlier when I questioned why I was even writing this paper"). But most of all, there's the stark conclusions that it draws about the future. Chiefly, that it's too late to stop climate change from devastating our world—and that "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term."
How near? About a decade.
Professor Jem Bendell, a sustainability academic at the University of Cumbria, wrote the paper after taking a sabbatical at the end of 2017 to review and understand the latest climate science "properly—not sitting on the fence anymore," as he puts it on the phone to me.
What he found terrified him. "The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war," he writes in the paper. "Our norms of behavior—that we call our 'civilization'—may also degrade."
"It is time," he adds, "we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today."
Even a schmuck like me is familiar with some of the evidence Bendell sets out to prove his point. You only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have occurred since 2000. Scientists already believe we are soon on course for an ice-free Arctic, which will only accelerate global warming. Back in 2017, even Fox News reported scientists' warnings that the Earth's sixth mass extinction was underway.
Erik Buitenhuis, a senior researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, tells me that Bendell's conclusions may sound extreme, but he agrees with the report's overall assessment. "I think societal collapse is indeed inevitable," he says, though adds that "the process is likely to take decades to centuries."
The important thing, Buitenhuis says, is to realize that the negative effects of climate change have already been with us for some time: "Further gradual deterioration looks much more likely to me than a disaster within the next ten years that will be big enough that, after that, everybody will agree the status quo is doomed."
"Jem's paper is in the main well-researched and supported by relatively mainstream climate science," says Professor Rupert Read, chair of the Green House think-tank and a philosophy academic at the University of East Anglia. "That's why I'm with him on the fundamentals. And more and more people are."
Read's key disagreement with Bendell is his belief that we still have time to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, saying, "I think it's hubris to think that we know the future." But that doesn't mean Bendell's premise is wrong: "The way I see it, deep adaptation is insurance against the possibility—or rather, the probability—of some kind of collapse," says Read. "'Deep Adaptation' is saying, 'What do we need to do if collapse is something we need to realistically plan for?'"
When I speak to Bendell, he tells me he thinks of "Deep Adaptation" as more of an ethical and philosophical framework, rather than a prophecy about the future of the planet. "The longer we refuse to talk about climate change as already here and screwing with our way of life—because we don't want to think like that because it's too frightening or will somehow demotivate people—the less time we have to reduce harm," he says with deliberation.
What does he mean by harm? "Starvation is the first one," he answers, pointing to lowering harvests of grain in Europe in 2018 due to drought that saw the EU reap 6 million tons less wheat. "In the scientific community at the moment, the appropriate thing is to say that 2018 was an anomaly. However, if you look at what's been happening over the last few years, it isn't an anomaly. There's a possibility that 2018 is the new best case scenario."
That means, in Bendell's view, that governments need to start planning emergency responses to climate change, including growing and stockpiling food.
He minces his words even less in his paper: "When I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you won't have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbors for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won't know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death."
Should people start building bunkers and buying bulletproof vests? "There's no way of getting through this unless we try together," he says. "We need to help people stay fed and watered where they live already to reduce disruption and reduce civil unrest as much as we can." Of the Silicon Valley financiers prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand, he says: "Once money doesn't matter anymore and the armed guards are trying to feed their starving children, what do you think they'll do? The billionaires doing that are just deluded."
Bendell wasn't always this gloomy about the state of the world. He once worked for WWF, one of the biggest environmental charities in the world, and in 2012 founded the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for his work. So how did he end up writing a paper that determined that civilization—and environmental sustainability as we currently understand it—is doomed?
"Since the age of 15, I've been an environmentalist," he tells me. "I've given my life professionally and personally. I'm a workaholic, and it was all about sustainability." Once he sat down with the data, however, he realized that his field was quickly becoming irrelevant in the face of oncoming climate catastrophe. "It would mean not getting super excited about the expansion of your recycling program in a major multinational," he says. "It's a completely different paradigm of what we should be looking at."
What he didn’t expect was for the paper to take off online. "It was aimed at those people in my professional community and why we're in denial," he says. "When I put it out there, I didn’t expect 15-year-olds in schools in Indonesia to be reading it with their teachers." He says that "Deep Adaptation" has been downloaded over 110,000 times since it was released by IFLAS as an occasional paper. "Someone in the alternative economics and bitcoin crowd told me, 'Oh, everyone's talking about deep adaptation in London at all the dinner parties,'" he laughs.
Researchers from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), an established progressive think-tank, consulted Bendell's paper in the process of writing its new report, "This is a crisis facing up to the age of environmental breakdown." Laurie Laybourn-Langton, its lead author, told me via email: "I appreciated the frankness of the report in facing up to issues that so many in research and policy communities seem unwilling to. We don't subscribe to the view that social collapse is inevitable, however."
He explains: "This is partly because it's so hard to predict the outcomes of the complex and uncertain process of environmental shocks interacting with social and economic systems. We simply don't know. That said, they shouldn’t be disregarded as a potential outcome, and so we are calling for greater levels of preparedness to these shocks."
Not everyone was so taken with the paper. Bendell submitted it to a well-respected academic journal for publication, with little success. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) told me that the paper was in need of "major revisions" before it would be ready for publication. Bendell ended up publishing it through IFLAS and his blog. "The academic process is such that I took that as an effective rejection," he explains, saying that the reviewers wanted him to fundamentally alter his conclusions. "I couldn't completely rewrite the paper to say that I don't think collapse is inevitable. It was asking for a different paper."
Emerald, the scholarly publisher that owns SAMPJ, says it takes issue with how Bendell frames its reception of its paper on his blog: "the study on collapse they thought you should not read—yet." A spokesperson told me: "The decision was arrived at based on the merit of the submitted article and the double blind peer review process integral to academia and the advancement of knowledge. SAMPJ, and [editor Carol Adams] are proud members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adhere to the highest ethical standards in publishing. We see no evidence that the decision of Major Revision was politically motivated.
"Emerald requested the author correct their blog post to reflect the facts. This request was unfortunately ignored. The post continues to imply the paper was rejected because it was deemed too controversial. The paper was not rejected, and was given a Major Revision due to the rigorous standards of the scholarly output of the journal."
Bendell says he did reply to Emerald's request to amend his blog post—but only if they would consider telling him the decisions of those who reviewed his paper. (Under the double blind peer review, reviewers' decisions are anonymous.) "That title can be read in a number of ways," he says. "It is a paper that the reviewers didn't want you to read. They didn't want it published."
Climate gloom and doom is nothing new—doomsday preppers have been stockpiling their freeze-dried food rations for decades now. But Bendell's paper appears to have hit a unique nerve, especially given that the average scientific paper is estimated to be read by only three or so people. Rupert Read tells me that he was sent it simultaneously by three other academics when it was published. But it hasn’t trended on Twitter. It hasn't been pushed by a celebrity. It was briefly mentioned in a Bloomberg Businessweek article, but that's it.
"Deep Adaptation" is that unique social phenomenon: an academic paper that has gone viral through word of mouth.
Nathan Savelli, a 31-year-old high school life coach from Hamilton, Canada, was recommended the paper by a local environmental activist. Reading it sent him spiraling into depression. "I guess in some ways it felt like I was diagnosed with a terminal illness," he tells me. "If I'm being honest, it was a mix of heartbreaking sadness and extreme anger."
Savelli felt so low that he sought help from a climate grief support group organized by 350.org, the global grassroots climate movement. "I had attended counseling in the past for other issues, but never a group session, and thought it might be something helpful for me," he tells me. Did it help? "I'm not sure I'd say it alleviated my grief, but it was definitely comforting to be around people who understood what I was feeling."
And therein lies the problem with "Deep Adaptation:" if you accept that the paper is entirely correct in its prediction of collapse, how do you move on with your life? How do you even get out of bed in the morning?
"I'm aware of what difficult emotions it triggers," Bendell acknowledges. "I do believe that if you’ve come across this [paper], then absolutely some grief and despair is very natural. Why isn't that OK? We all die in the end. Life is about impermanence." On his blog, he lists several sources for psychological support, including several groups on Facebook and LinkedIn that discuss collapse and offer help to those struggling to come to terms with the conclusions of his paper.
But, Bendell adds, reading the paper has been "transformative" for some. "People find a new boldness about living life on their own terms—actually connecting to their heart's desire. How do they wish to live, and why don't they live that way now rather than postponing it?"
In one case, it even helped prompt one high-ranking academic to quit her job and the city.
In December of 2017, Dr. Alison Green left her post as the pro vice-chancellor of Arden University. She had read the IPCC report warning that the world is nowhere near averting global temperature increases, as well as the 1,656-page National Climate Assessment on how climate change is now dramatically affecting our lives—and then she read Bendell's paper.
All three combined to put her on the road to a drastic life change. "My desire is to get out of academia and to get out of the city. I tell people I’m heading for the hills," she tells me over the phone. "My plan is to get a smallholding and live more closely to nature."
Reading the paper, she says, helped to crystallize her increasing uneasiness about the pace and scale of climate change. "What was really striking about this paper is that a social scientist was saying—not just the wacky fringe, this is a professor at an established institution, with a track record—saying that he believed that collapse was inevitable."
"That," she adds, "had a profound effect on me."
She's not the only one. Bendell himself says that he is still working out how much he can reconcile his job as an academic with his newfound conclusions about the state of the future.
"I think the reason why my framing and my paper took off is that it’s maybe the first time a social scientist was saying these things categorically," he says. "We are seemingly in denial. It's time to break that taboo and have serious conversations about what we do now."
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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They take marijuana. So they think crazy things like global warming.
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Good call. Teach those little marijuana smoking younglings some manners, no pun intended.
fitpOsitive
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These students are wiser than you Mr Principal.
Go ahead children.
Go ahead children.
Pakhtoon yum
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It makes all the difference. More power to the students
Stop your stereotypes, boi
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https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/school-lessons-increasingly-a-target-for-climate-skeptics-1.4324511
As climate change becomes a hotter topic in American classrooms, politicians around the country are pushing back against the scientific consensus that global warming is real and man-made. (skynesher/IStock.com)
HARTFORD, Conn. -- A Connecticut lawmaker wants to strike climate change from state science standards. A Virginia legislator worries teachers are indoctrinating students with their personal views on global warming. And an Oklahoma state senator wants educators to be able to introduce alternative ideas without fear of losing their jobs.
As climate change becomes a hotter topic in American classrooms, politicians around the country are pushing back against the scientific consensus that global warming is real and man-made.
Of the more than a dozen such measures proposed so far this year, some already have failed. But they have emerged this year in growing numbers, many of them inspired or directly encouraged by a pair of advocacy groups, the Discovery Institute and the Heartland Institute.
"You have to present two sides of the argument and allow the kids to deliberate," said Republican state Sen. David Bullard of Oklahoma, a former high school geography teacher whose bill, based on model legislation from the Discovery Institute, ran into opposition from science teachers and went nowhere.
Science education organizations and climate scientists have blasted such proposals for sowing confusion and doubt on a topic of global urgency.
"These efforts are dangerous and require vigilance in the academic community to make sure that they don't succeed," said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
He said the proposals reflect bad-faith efforts to undermine scientific findings that "prove inconvenient to vested interests, be they the fossil-fuel lobby or fundamentalist religious groups."
Some climate science skeptics have cast the debate as a matter of academic freedom.
James Taylor, a senior fellow at Heartland, an Illinois-based group that dismisses climate change, said it is encouraging well-rounded classroom discussions on the topic. The group, which in 2017 sent thousands of science teachers copies of a book titled "Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming," is now taking its message directly to students. A reference book it is planning for publication this year will rebut arguments linking climate change to hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather.
"We're very concerned the global warming propaganda efforts have encouraged students to not engage in research and critical thinking," Taylor said, referring to news reports and scientific warnings.
Neither Discovery nor Heartland discloses the identities of its donors.
Instruction on the topic varies widely from place to place, but climate change and how humans are altering the planet are core topics emphasized in the Next Generation Science Standards, developed by a group of states. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards, and 21 others have embraced some of the material with modifications.
Still, a survey released in 2016 found that of public middle- and high-school science teachers who taught something about climate change, about a quarter gave equal time to perspectives that "raise doubt about the scientific consensus."
Climate skeptics have endorsed approaches taken in the fight that began decades earlier over teaching evolution, in which opponents led by conservative Christians have long called for teaching both sides of the issue.
By early February, the Oakland, California-based non-profit National Center for Science Education flagged over a dozen bills this year as threats to the integrity of science education, more than the organization typically sees in an entire year.
Several of them -- including proposals in Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota -- had language echoing model legislation of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which says teachers should not be prohibited from addressing strengths and weaknesses of concepts such as evolution and global warming.
Similar measures became law in Louisiana in 2008 and Tennessee in 2012. In states where they may not be feasible politically, Discovery has urged legislators to consider nonbinding resolutions in support of giving teachers latitude to "show support for critical thinking" on controversial topics. Lawmakers in Alabama and Indiana passed such resolutions in 2017.
Discovery officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Florida state Sen. Dennis Baxley is pressing legislation that would allow schools to teach alternatives to controversial theories.
"There is really no established science on most things, you'll find," the GOP legislator said.
Elsewhere, lawmakers in Connecticut and Iowa, which both adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, have proposed rolling them back. Connecticut state Rep. John Piscopo, a Republican, said he wants to eliminate the section on climate change.
"It's one-sided, totally one-sided. The teachers are not able to teach," said Piscopo, a Heartland Institute member. "I want students to have the freedom to understand it's a scientific debate."
Other bills introduced this year in such states as Virginia, Arizona and Maine call for teachers to avoid political or ideological indoctrination of their students.
"If they're teaching about a subject, such as climate change, and they present both sides, that's fine. That's as it should be. A teacher who presents a skewed extension of their political beliefs, that's closer to indoctrinating. That's not good to kids," said Virginia state Rep. Dave LaRock, a Republican.
As climate change becomes a hotter topic in American classrooms, politicians around the country are pushing back against the scientific consensus that global warming is real and man-made. (skynesher/IStock.com)
HARTFORD, Conn. -- A Connecticut lawmaker wants to strike climate change from state science standards. A Virginia legislator worries teachers are indoctrinating students with their personal views on global warming. And an Oklahoma state senator wants educators to be able to introduce alternative ideas without fear of losing their jobs.
As climate change becomes a hotter topic in American classrooms, politicians around the country are pushing back against the scientific consensus that global warming is real and man-made.
Of the more than a dozen such measures proposed so far this year, some already have failed. But they have emerged this year in growing numbers, many of them inspired or directly encouraged by a pair of advocacy groups, the Discovery Institute and the Heartland Institute.
"You have to present two sides of the argument and allow the kids to deliberate," said Republican state Sen. David Bullard of Oklahoma, a former high school geography teacher whose bill, based on model legislation from the Discovery Institute, ran into opposition from science teachers and went nowhere.
Science education organizations and climate scientists have blasted such proposals for sowing confusion and doubt on a topic of global urgency.
"These efforts are dangerous and require vigilance in the academic community to make sure that they don't succeed," said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
He said the proposals reflect bad-faith efforts to undermine scientific findings that "prove inconvenient to vested interests, be they the fossil-fuel lobby or fundamentalist religious groups."
Some climate science skeptics have cast the debate as a matter of academic freedom.
James Taylor, a senior fellow at Heartland, an Illinois-based group that dismisses climate change, said it is encouraging well-rounded classroom discussions on the topic. The group, which in 2017 sent thousands of science teachers copies of a book titled "Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming," is now taking its message directly to students. A reference book it is planning for publication this year will rebut arguments linking climate change to hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather.
"We're very concerned the global warming propaganda efforts have encouraged students to not engage in research and critical thinking," Taylor said, referring to news reports and scientific warnings.
Neither Discovery nor Heartland discloses the identities of its donors.
Instruction on the topic varies widely from place to place, but climate change and how humans are altering the planet are core topics emphasized in the Next Generation Science Standards, developed by a group of states. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards, and 21 others have embraced some of the material with modifications.
Still, a survey released in 2016 found that of public middle- and high-school science teachers who taught something about climate change, about a quarter gave equal time to perspectives that "raise doubt about the scientific consensus."
Climate skeptics have endorsed approaches taken in the fight that began decades earlier over teaching evolution, in which opponents led by conservative Christians have long called for teaching both sides of the issue.
By early February, the Oakland, California-based non-profit National Center for Science Education flagged over a dozen bills this year as threats to the integrity of science education, more than the organization typically sees in an entire year.
Several of them -- including proposals in Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota -- had language echoing model legislation of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which says teachers should not be prohibited from addressing strengths and weaknesses of concepts such as evolution and global warming.
Similar measures became law in Louisiana in 2008 and Tennessee in 2012. In states where they may not be feasible politically, Discovery has urged legislators to consider nonbinding resolutions in support of giving teachers latitude to "show support for critical thinking" on controversial topics. Lawmakers in Alabama and Indiana passed such resolutions in 2017.
Discovery officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Florida state Sen. Dennis Baxley is pressing legislation that would allow schools to teach alternatives to controversial theories.
"There is really no established science on most things, you'll find," the GOP legislator said.
Elsewhere, lawmakers in Connecticut and Iowa, which both adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, have proposed rolling them back. Connecticut state Rep. John Piscopo, a Republican, said he wants to eliminate the section on climate change.
"It's one-sided, totally one-sided. The teachers are not able to teach," said Piscopo, a Heartland Institute member. "I want students to have the freedom to understand it's a scientific debate."
Other bills introduced this year in such states as Virginia, Arizona and Maine call for teachers to avoid political or ideological indoctrination of their students.
"If they're teaching about a subject, such as climate change, and they present both sides, that's fine. That's as it should be. A teacher who presents a skewed extension of their political beliefs, that's closer to indoctrinating. That's not good to kids," said Virginia state Rep. Dave LaRock, a Republican.
Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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