What is climate change to you?

This term's lectures have got me thinking about climate change as an abstraction and about how we individually try to make sense of it (or not).

I've spent a fair amount of time reading and thinking about climate change, but have always had the sense that there is more I could investigate but choose not to. For instance, I haven't watched 'An Inconvenient Truth' as I assumed it was meant to convert doubters and so wouldn't be so relevant to me. Whether that's true or not is rather beside the point, it was a rationalisation I made as a result of thinking I knew enough about climate change. Essentially, I thought that knowing more would just depress me. I was being, perhaps rationally, a coward.

I get the impression I'm not the only one who has done something like this: avoided reading or hearing any more about climate change because it is just such a vast and terrifying concept to process. Individually, such avoidance seems rational as individually we can do relatively little to alter the scale of climate change, even if we can imagine it. But collectively humanity has caused a quantity of greenhouse gas emissions that are altering the climate. In theory we must, as a species, be able to deal with this. There are a vast array of obstacles preventing us from doing so, and the first is understanding what climate change is.

I do not mean the science. (If you want a crash course on that, try here.) I mean the translation of that science into understanding, into policy, politics, culture, and everyday life. Climate change is a process, it has no fixed beginning or end. It is not directly priced, it has uncertain timescales, and it forces us to confront many difficult questions outside the objective sphere of science, about the future of our species, how we live, and what we value. It is intangible and locationally unspecific. It can be seen as a controversy, as a justification for specific policies, as an inspiration for the reinvigoration of civic society, or as a threat to security. Analogies can be drawn with terrorism or the hole in the ozone layer. Commentators from scientific, policy, economic, legal, and ecological fields interpret it very differently. Different sections of the media frame it in a variety of ways, to fit their particular agendas and narratives.

I am trying to overcome my previous complacency and come to my own understanding of what climate change means. What is certain in that humanity is emitting greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate. We are changing the composition of the atmosphere, and our climate scientists agree that this is changing the climate. Our current economies, lifestyles, and cultures are dependent on such emissions. If we are to reduce our emissions as radically as science tells us we need to, then the process of change in the climate will need to be mirrored by a process of transformative change in humanity.

There is as yet no popular narrative, no story or metaphor, that adequately explains this. Indeed, our popular culture and zeitgeist seem averse to any change that isn't technological. The developed world seems to expect that the current economic, political, and social rut will continue, except with better iPads. Perhaps the first step to confronting climate change is accepting change, full stop. The future needs to be different to the present, very different. I wonder to what extent the denial of climate change and attacks on climate science are provoked by a fear of any change.

I intend this to be the first in a series of posts discussing difficult questions about climate change, to try and clarify my own thoughts as much as anything. Here is the point from which I start, which will doubtless colour everything else I might say on the subject: I believe that anthropogenic climate change is the greatest challenge faced by humanity. We are collectively capable of summoning the intelligence, vision, and resources to confront it, but are equally capable of not doing so. And I agree with George Monbiot that, 'If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.'