To be alive or stay truly alive
Human history is speeding up. Seismic events that mark a before and an after in the world system are happening with unprecedented regularity. The Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war and the genocide of Gaza all in the past few years. In much of the world, politics has become more volatile, at times more violent — and living standards for the majority are falling. We know we live in a time of historical flux.
But geologic time, our planet’s deep history, is also speeding up — and alarmingly so. For about the past 12,000 years — pretty much all of known human history — we’ve lived in the Holocene geological era. It has provided an unusually stable climate in which human society expanded dramatically. It gave us our assumptions about nature: the pattern of the seasons, the migration of animals and the temperature. But that era is over and it is moving to something else rapidly.
We’ve known this for 16 years now. In 2008, the August Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London published a report presenting evidence that the Holocene was over and we were now in an era “without close parallel” in the previous many millions of years.
One of the key factors in bringing on these tremendous, literally epochal, shifts is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to warmer air and water temperatures. For almost all of the Holocene, the concentration was around 260-280 parts per million. That’s the pre-industrial level. In 2008, it was already 385. The forecast for 2024 is 424. Up and up it goes.
Geological history is moving at an unprecedented pace. Human history sits on top of that underlying planetary history. Humanity makes its own history, but not in circumstances of its own choosing.
Yesterday, we reached a new milestone in these circumstances. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that the previous 12 months had been more than 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
Just nine short years ago, the world’s governments agreed in Paris that they would limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees. “1.5 to stay alive” was the mantra. They failed in record time.
The latest science suggests that at 1.5 degrees of warming major tipping points - thresholds that trigger large, accelerating and likely irreversible changes, like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet — become “likely”. Our climate, nature, the environment — whatever we call it — is set to change a lot and disrupt harvests, supply chains, political systems and our assumptions about the world.
But, counter to the failed slogan for the failed COP process for world leaders, we will stay alive. Humanity will continue to exist on this less stable, less understood and rapidly changing planet we call home.
The end isn’t nigh, it has already happened. We have left one epoch and a new one is being established. Dramatic change is coming: people, agriculture and cities will move. But one important truth will ring out: the system of rule that puts the wealth and power of a tiny few ahead of not only the material comfort and the dignity of the vast majority but the very planetary systems on which we all rely cannot continue. It must be overthrown and replaced.
Humanity is on a bumpy road — and it will get bumpier still — but however dangerous and frightening that road becomes, we can navigate it — and even enjoy the ride — only if popular, democratic forces forcibly take the driving seat.
It’s not 1.5 to stay alive. It never was. The people must rise, together, to be truly alive.
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
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by csloh@substack