Mommers - How Are We Going to Explain This? : Our Future on a Hot Earth

JELMER MOMMERS is a climate journalist based in Amsterdam. He knows most people prefer not to talk or even think about climate change and that is exactly why he wrote this book. Denial and despair are not the only possible responses to the climate crisis.

Five years in the making, How Are We Going To Explain This? became a bestseller in the Netherlands. With this revised and updated translation, including responses to the corona-pandemic, Mommers brings his characteristic blend of realism and hope to the wider world.

As a journalist, Jelmer Mommers has broken important stories about how we got in our current climate mess; as a thinker, he shows us there may still be some ways out, if we move with grace and speed. A fine account of where we stand, and where we could go if we wanted to! Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist and activist

Our future on a hot earth

JELMER MOMMERS

Translated by Laura Vroomen and Anna Asbury

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com

First published in the Netherlands by De Correspondent, entitled

Hoe Gaan We Dit Uitleggen

Copyright De Correspondent, 2020

English language translation copyright
Laura Vroomen and Anna Asbury, 2020

This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 493 1
eISBN 978 1 78283 674 2

Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

I wont lie: climate change is a disaster. Ive been working on it continuously for five years now and it still makes me recoil in horror. So if you hesitated to pick up this book, I completely understand.

To begin with theres the word climate. The problem isnt so much its technical meaning: the average weather over a period of at least thirty years. The term was thought up to enable people to make general claims about the weather in a particular place. The Netherlands, for instance, has a more moderate, cooler climate than India. For most people and for most of our recent history the climate has been a given, about as exciting as the slow flow of glaciers or the composition of the air we breathe. Background. Fodder for experts.

But we all know that the word climate currently has completely different connotations. Threat. Danger. In recent years the experts have been telling us in ever starker language that the climate is changing drastically due to human influence. Not in one place, not in the Netherlands or India, but everywhere at once. Theyre telling us that the earth is warming up, that rising sea levels are threatening coastal cities, that heatwaves are becoming more ferocious, that the global food supply is under pressure. Theyre telling us that continuing on our current path will almost certainly lead to worldwide catastrophes and is already doing so.

On my computer I have a folder where I collect news and studies about the changing climate. Its an expanding invitation to despair. At least once a month another article comes along to make me think, its even worse than I thought! Just as Im getting over the shock of one extensive study stating that this century hundreds of millions of people will suffer water shortages due to melting ice in the Himalayas,

No one knows if it will come to that. Its also possible that temperatures will rise slower than currently expected and that well adapt better than seems possible in our wildest dreams. But we have no guarantee whatsoever of those outcomes, and theres no alternative earth.

The truth of the matter is, were in unbelievably deep shit. Mankind has never experienced the warmer climate were heading for. Local droughts, local flooding, local extreme weather conditions were used to all that, but nothing in history has prepared us for worldwide climate disruption, with many consequences that are unpleasant in themselves and disastrous when combined.

Were entering completely new territory. The longer we continue on our current path, the more devastating the results.

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But first, lets talk about the corona-crisis for a minute, because you might wonder why read a book about climate change when we are still suffering from the consequences of Covid-19. Is it really the right time to take on another disastrous subject? Is it necessary?

I think so. In this book, I will write about the political, technological, financial and societal forces that are giving us a shot at keeping the earth habitable. Yet right now, the strength and persistence of each and every one of these forces is tested by the outbreak of the corona-pandemic in late 2019.

The societal and economic repercussions of this crisis are only starting to emerge as I write this, yet its clear they will be momentous. Will our economies be strong enough to continue investing in green energy, or will we fall back on old-fashioned fossil fuels? Will we return to flying and driving as if nothing were the matter? Will Covid-19 fuel nationalism and xenophobia or will it boost solidarity and cooperation? It all seems possible.

But there will be a day when this crisis, or at least the worst of it, is behind us. And as we recover, we need to focus on climate change once more. If there is one thing that the new coronavirus showed us, its that the future is unpredictable, and that we are vulnerable. If theres one space where that insight needs to be applied, its the climate debate.

Of course, the warming of the world and the corona-pandemic are very different crises. Though it may not feel like it right now, climate change is certainly bigger and more consequential as this book will show you. The most important difference, however, has to do with time. Whereas the dreadful consequences of the virus outbreak could be felt in a matter of days, those of climate change accumulate much slower, over a period of years and decades, with reverberations through centuries. And while measures taken today to prevent the spread of the virus may have an effect in a week or two, those taken to counter climate change will only be felt in a decade or two. Thats just one of the reasons why climate change is such a wicked problem. And why, like the corona-crisis, it so desperately needs our involvement to be addressed.