Humanity’s headstone is built, only its epitaph awaits 

Ineffable. One of few words that capture the sudden foreboding engulfing much of the world as our unnatural chemistry experiment on the planet begins, manifestly and in earnest, to backfire. 

For several harrowing weeks, the northern hemisphere has been freighted with preposterous, record-breaking heat. From the foothills of the Pyrenees to Rome and Beijing, millions have sweltered through temperatures regularly exceeding 40 degrees and beyond, with conditions in the near-Arctic region of Fort Good Hope in Canada’s faraway northwest eclipsing 37 degrees. 

Concurrent heatwaves in Africa have meanwhile seen the continent duly report its hottest night on record at 39.6 degrees, and in the background of all this, Canada’s months-long apocalyptic wildfires continue to rage unabated. Today, the haunting umbra of the wildfires’ plume not only continues to smother New York in smoke and ash but has also snaked its way into the distant skies of Spain and Portugal. 

Completing this pointillist panorama of despair was the second heat storm to savage southern Europe in a week, which has officially been dubbed Charon, after the ferryman for Hades.

It was against this eerie lament that people the world over suddenly and subliminally dispensed with speaking of climate change in the future tense, and when we learned the globe had just endured its hottest days “in about 125,000 years”. 

But like so many hints or signposts of climate breakdown, this banal description of fact utterly failed to reflect the premonitory grandeur it evoked. On any objective view, this was a profound moment — a glimpse, if you like, into the purgatory humanity has unleashed in its heedless desire to extract every last reservoir of carbon our fickle ice-age planet has forged in its crust since the dawn of life.  

This is particularly so given the summers of today will survive in the memories of the young as among the coolest of their lifetime. The unspoken implication of that broken heat record being, in other words, that the climate of the present moment has now stepped outside the confines of mankind’s evolutionary orbit, taking us — as the great American environmentalist Bill McKibben observed — to a “hinge point in [our] story if ever there was one”. 

More ominously still, the climate now confronting us is increasingly revanchist, with its conditions beginning to mirror those of the strange lost worlds of Earth’s prehistoric past. There’s now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any point in the previous 3 million years. Global temperatures have surged, visiting death on more than half the world’s coral reefs and causing some 28 trillion tonnes of sea ice to melt in less than three decades. 

The same global heating, of course, finds reflection in the punishing heatwaves currently gripping the northern hemisphere, and so too the heat bearing down on the world’s vast oceans. Indeed, the extent of recent warming in the oceans is so striking, so terrifying and profound, that it renders this startling New York Times graph on surface air temperatures from a few weeks ago decidedly tame by comparison. 

During April, huge swaths of the world’s oceans warmed by as much as a record-breaking two degrees above the 1971-2000 average. In places off the Pacific coast of South America, it was as much as five degrees, spelling almost certain death for coral reefs and much marine life. And some weeks later, a separate study echoing these same trends alarmingly revealed sea surface temperatures off the east coast of North America were nearly 14 degrees above their 1981-2011 average.  

This shouldn’t entirely surprise us, given around 90% of the heat caused by global warming to date has been absorbed by the Earth’s oceans. But in a world where a variation of just one or two degrees can mean the difference between the collapse of civilisation or an epoch-defining shift, scientists warn the full significance of such figures is festooned with untold misery for our future. 

One such possibility, hastened by the bizarre and totally unforeseen shrinking of Antarctic sea ice in recent months — where, instead of expanding as it normally does this time of year, an area the size of Western Australia has mysteriously disappeared — is a mass disruption to, or even collapse of, deepwater formation in the Southern Ocean.

Writing in January, scientists relegated such a possibility to the realms of 2050 or beyond, based on the entirely reasonable working hypothesis we will have failed in our mission to transition from a high-emission world. But they’ve since revised these estimates, after confirming in late May that the “conveyor belt” (which influences and stabilises both ocean temperatures and much of the world’s weather systems) has in fact already slowed by some 30% since the 1990s. Its impending collapse, they say, would be catastrophic. 

Adding to these intolerable woes, global warming is not only causing our deep oceans to become greener and more acidic, it’s also suffocating them, having deprived them of more than 2% of their oxygen since 1960. 

It’s true 2% is a figure liable to provoke indifference in some. But like-variations in oxygen during Earth’s ancient past have been linked to radical moments in life’s history, such as the Cambrian explosion of 530 million years ago, or the truly trippy nirvana that was the Carboniferous period some 200 million years later, when giant dragonflies the size of seagulls roamed the planet.

On the other hand, anoxic spasms or events, like those underway now, have been tied to some of the most devastating mass extinctions of all time. And yet, like so many things global warming-related, climate’s fickleness — its violent propensities at the hint of provocation — are for so many concealed by what some have exquisitely described as our “short civilisational memory and remarkably good fortune”.  

The reality is humanity today at best stands on the precipice of a radical destabilisation of life as we know it, where the ties of civilisation inexorably begin to unravel. At worst, it has already commenced this descent into the deep maws of the unknown.

In answer to our warming world, for instance, recent weeks have visited devastating and almost historically impossible flooding to Vermont on the United States east coast. Around the same time, comparable though deadly flooding occurred in China and Japan, despite their heatwaves; in Spain, where gushing waters disappeared cars and “disrupted normal life”; and in New York’s Hudson Valley, in recent weeks, where at least one person perished. 

All this — the predictably unpredictable — comes with compliments from a heating planet, where warm air holds more water vapour than cold. 

Notwithstanding this, those expressions of denial and unrealistic hope that have long bookended our experience of global warming endure. In recent days, tourists have flocked, like insects to fire, to Xinjiang’s Turpan Depression and California’s Death Valley to take photos and smiling selfies of themselves next to giant thermometers displaying readings of 80 degrees and 56 degrees respectively.

Elsewhere, some have written on the dangers of climate determinism and giving way to despair, while others have suggested there remains slivers of hope in the prelude to the new climate’s dark ages. Psychological denial, of course, is nothing new or unusual, but here it’s anchored to a climate that no longer exists. 

One possible reason for collective denial, aside from its comforting sense and inuring repeated warnings of crisis, is that rapid and profound change is more or less alien to most. It clashes with our perceptions of self and sense of imponderable time. The problem, though, is our understanding of time in truth scarcely corresponds with the span of human civilisation, let alone all of recorded geological time. 

If we dare zoom out a little, the reality that all of human civilisation has existed during a tiny window of relative climate stability is cast in sharp relief. Zoom out a little further still, and you’ll see this period is but one “peak in a mountain range”. 

“Each summit”, Peter Brannen has written, represents “an interglacial springtime” and each valley floor a “deep freeze” or “punishing ice age”. Contrary to our ingrained perceptions, then, the seeming permanence of our stable climate is, and always was, gravely false.  

Adding to this is the growing realisation that global heating is accelerating, and that’s even when variations such as the current El Niño climatic event are allowed for. “We are headed into new climate territory,” renowned climate scientist James Hansen said last week, “[one] not seen in the past million years”. 

This, it would seem, isn’t surprising, given the temperature records shattered in our oceans in recent months, and not least in light of the fact humanity is currently emitting carbon dioxide at a rate 10 times faster than during the most extreme period in the age of mammals. 

After all, there is only so much heat the atmosphere and oceans can absorb from global warming before the planet’s various positive feedback loops — such as melting sea ice, the slowing of ocean currents and the awakening of permafrost — cascade and crash into one another, striking out for something approaching equilibrium against the altogether unnatural conditions mankind has unleashed. 

And so there it is. The hubris of man has immutably altered the course of evolution. Some scientists say our contribution to the geologic record, such as it is, warrants the label the “Anthropocene epoch”. Others believe this would play into the profound conceit of man that ours is an existence somehow exceptional and therefore assured, whatever the ravages of deep time. 

In truth, we’d be fooling ourselves if we chose to believe our governments are deaf to the wrath of what the late climate scientist Wally Broecker called Earth’s “angry beast”.

On the contrary, it’s purely that their vassalage to the fossil fuel sector mandates an inscription on the geological gravestone of mankind that lacks even the chiselled grace of having tried.

What action must be taken to reverse the effects of the climate crisis? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.