The Fork in the Road

The third and final issue of volume 14 (2018) of Journal of Global Ethics contains articles by Ali Benli, by Loren King & Michael Blake, by Toby Svoboda, Peter Irvine, Daniel Callies & Masahiro Sugiyama, and by Kenneth Shockley. The current crop of papers happens to concern ethical questions that all, in one way or another, relate to the emerging reality of the Anthropocene, our new geological age shaped by humans. Some of the aspects of the new age, which are addressed in this issue, are refugee migrations (Benli), inequalities and urbanization (King/Blake), and climate change (Svoboda et al., and also Shockley). This is a good opportunity to reflect on where the Anthropocene is heading, and to take stock of this past year’s events.¹

If one observes human development through the lens of world-wisdom (Weltweisheit), then the biggest change in 2018 compared to past years is the alarm in the scientific community over the environmental trajectory civilization is on.² Warnings about this trajectory are not new, of course. Prominent voices in the scientific community have emphasized the dangers already for years if not decades. These long-standing dangers are the overshoot of bioproductivity, visible in species loss and declining soils, and the overload of environmental services such as the carbon cycle, visible in climate change (see the editorial of Journal of Global Ethics from a year ago, issue 13.3, for a swift introduction to that subject).

But three events happened in 2018 that went beyond the familiar warnings. The first was a publication in a leading scientific journal (PNAS) in August. Its authors (Steffen et al, 2018) concluded that the Earth System has arrived at a fork in the road.³ (The Earth System is the interplay of atmosphere, biosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere.) The world’s climate is approaching a phase change. A little bit more global warming, and the world’s climate will likely flip into a ‘hothouse’ state that will make parts of the planetary surface uninhabitable.

The second event, the policy response by the United Nations in a report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC SR15 2018) in October, complemented the first.⁴ It argues that civilization has reached the last off-ramp before heading into the direction described in the scientific paper. We have about a decade left to take the exit before planet Earth will start moving into the hothouse state. The IPCC issued policy recommendations for a worldwide plan of decarbonization. Its first stage needs to be completed by 2030, and its second stage by 2050. Following these recommendations would allow us to take the exit ramp and avoid the hothouse. Ignoring them would turn climate change into a runaway phenomenon. Climate change would then gather a momentum of its own, and mitigation efforts would not rein it in anymore. A delay of decarbonization past the target date is likely to trigger feedback loops that would drive global mean surface temperatures higher even if CO₂ emissions were then to cease in their entirety.⁵

The third event concerns the decline of biodiversity. It complements the other two events as well, because global warming is a driver of this decline, and because this decline enhances the likelihood of the climate system flipping into a ‘hothouse’ state. 2018 saw the publication of studies showing that the decline has gained a new facet, the thinning of populations of non-endangered species, and that its scope is now comparable to the largest extinctions in geological history. The alarm raised by the new understanding of the decline concerns the interplay with other parts of the Earth System, which has come into view only recently. Biodiversity decline is not only a loss of species and a thinning of populations, but also a weakening of biosphere integrity. This poses two problems. For one thing, the decline threatens the safety of world food supply, as a new study (the first of its kind) by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes.⁶ For another, biosphere integrity and climate change are ‘highly integrated, emergent system-level phenomena.’⁷ Biodiversity works like a buffer, which cushions the climate system from external forcings. But as the biosphere is being stripped of life and diversity, this buffer weakens, with the result of enhancing the sensitivity of the climate system to human emissions. Biodiversity decline intensifies climate change.

In this editorial, I would like to highlight key leverage points of the three events and explore some implications for global ethics, specifically as regards the obstacles that stand in the way of choosing what is obviously the better road. Steffen et al. persuasively argue that the so-called two-degree guardrail is no more. The Paris Climate Talks in 2015 had resulted in the agreement to stabilize warming at a range of 1.5-2°C above the preindustrial baseline, with 2°C as the upper boundary. Since current global mean surface temperatures are 1°C higher than they had been before the Industrial Revolution got underway in 1750, it seemed in 2015 that civilization was still 1°C under the limit.⁸ The 2018 findings, however, put us only 0.5°C away from the threshold before feedback loops drive temperatures up despite mitigation measures. So, there is now a 1.5-degree guardrail, and this is the new boundary of the safe operating space of humankind. Breaching it may trigger a slide to a new climate regime, in which civilization at current population- and development-levels cannot be sustained anymore.

The IPCC revised the upper boundary downwards in accordance with this discovery in SR15 (2018). Making the appropriate adjustments would amount to bold action, since about 80% of global energy needs are presently being met by fossil fuels. To avoid breaching the 1.5-degree guardrail, CO₂ emissions must be cut by 55% at 2010-levels before 2030 and reach 0% by 2050.⁹ This is daunting, and before 2018 was out, specialists had already dubbed SR15 the ‘doomsday report’.¹⁰ A wiser way of looking at the recommendations is to find that we have been handed an ultimatum, and that we have a choice. Speaking through the scientific community, the Earth System—the ensemble of environmental cycles and balances—has issued a categorical demand to the world’s policymakers on what needs to be done to preserve our collective prospects.

The existential significance of the third event, biodiversity decline, is predicated on the recently identified integration of biosphere and climate. One aspect of this event was reported in late 2017, in the so-called Krefeld Study, which concerned the disappearance of flying insects from state parks in Germany.¹¹ In early 2018, the Krefeld findings made waves in the scientific community.¹² In November, the waves made headlines in the mainstream press.¹³ The Krefeld Study showed that flying insect populations have declined by 75-82% in less than thirty years. Other recent and concurrent studies showed that the decline of insects is not an isolated event but a worldwide phenomenon, which has begun to cascade through the food web in places as diverse as Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, England, and Singapore.¹⁴ Some places, such as wilderness preserves in Puerto Rico, are hit especially hard. There, a 2°C rise of forest temperatures over the past thirty years has been identified as ‘the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web,’ with a 98% ground-level arthropod decline from 1976 to 2012 and ‘synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat arthropods’.¹⁵ In retrospect, this event puts the earlier bee colony collapse disorder in perspective as a harbinger of things to come.¹⁶ It also explains the marked reduction of song birds from the northern hemisphere. Biologists suspected that land conversion had been the cause but now realize that song birds (who tend to feed on insects) are simply starving.¹⁷

The London Institute of Zoology and the World Wildlife Fund released a study in September that puts the ‘insect apocalypse’ (New York Times 27 Nov 2018) in context. Insects are the tip of the iceberg, because this ‘Great Thinning’ has now spread beyond insectivorous birds to all vertebrates—birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. The 2018 zoological study shows a 60% decline of vertebrate population sizes since 1970 in the northern hemisphere and a 90% decline since 1970 in the tropics.¹⁸ This decline is no mere measure of biodiversity loss, counted in species, but instead a measure of biosphere integrity, counted in biota, measured in biomass. Technical papers refer to this trend as ‘defaunation’ or ‘biological annihilation’.¹⁹

One problem with biodiversity decline, as suggested, is the climate connection. Biosphere integrity and climate stability hang together. Destabilizing the integrity of the biosphere, through biodiversity decline, enhances the sensitivity of the climate system to external forcings such as greenhouse gas emissions. That is, the discovered prospect of flipping into a hothouse state—the first event mentioned—cannot be separated from the unfolding reality of biodiversity decline—the third event mentioned—because biosphere integrity stabilizes the climate system just as biodiversity decline destabilizes it. This also connects to the second event mentioned, the policy response by the United Nations, and it raises the possibility that there may be even less time than the UN announced in fall 2018.²⁰

Another problem with biodiversity decline is the climate connection in the other direction. Not only does biodiversity decline drive climate change, but climate change also drives biodiversity decline. It does so in multiple ways. Climate-induced habitat changes drive some biota at the bottom of the food chain, such as insects, into extinction, and their absence drives to extinction animals higher up on the food chain that depend on them as primary food sources. In addition, global warming can literally sterilize organisms, with similarly cascading effects. Climate change causes heat waves, whose longer duration, stronger intensity, and greater frequency in the past three decades have begun to impair plant and insect fertility. ²¹ Climate change drives biota loss by affecting reproduction. Since plants and insects are at the bottom of the food web, their lowered reproductive rates cascade through the web of life. This cascading loss is poised to inflict changes on the world’s ecosystems, with consequences on food security; hence the 2019 warning of the FAO.²²

If we pull back from the three events and look at the bigger picture, a shift in the relationship of human civilization and natural environment becomes visible. That humans alter the environment is not new, of course, but the rate and scale of the alterations are. One illustration of both is the human footprint on the terrestrial surface. By an estimate based on data up to 2018 and released in 2019, ‘just 5% of Earth’s landscape remains untouched’.²³ The most comprehensive previous estimate, in 2016, based on data the preceding years, had made it appear that 19% had remained untouched.²⁴ From 19% to 5% in less than five years? Seriously? Impacts at such rate and of such scale show what this shift is about. Before, the human-nature interface involved transformations of the biosphere. Now, it involves ‘changes in the structure or functioning of the Earth System.’²⁵ Land conversion, biodiversity decline, and climate change are feeding into one another, and all of this puts the Earth System on the hothouse trajectory.

This trajectory is unsustainable for civilization, of course, and the opportunity to jump off this train will end in a decade’s time. This is the big picture. Either civilization continues with business as usual and tips the Earth System into the hothouse state, with societal collapse to follow, or humankind assumes responsibility through stewardship governance, and guides the Earth System back to a warmer but stabilized state. A warmer but stabilized state would let the biosphere regain part of its integrity, and it would safeguard global human development during the second half of this century and beyond. This is the fork of the road reached in 2018.

Twelve years ago, the ecologist John Cairns predicted that civilization would be forced to co-evolve with the Earth System. Co-evolution is either hostile or mutualistic. Hostile co-evolution means that civilization pushes the planet into the hothouse state and the planet pushes civilization into collapse. Mutualistic co-evolution would be the achievement of sustainability. Achieving a sustainable use of the planet, Cairns argued then, is the ‘acid test’ of human intelligence and wisdom.²⁶ The transition to sustainability, he noted in 2007, is ‘partly a technical and scientific problem but is primarily a matter of … ethics.’²⁷

Interesting is how the statement has aged. In 2018, this transition is not a technical and scientific issue, not even in part. Scientifically, the last residual uncertainties over our trajectory have evaporated. There is no scientific debate anymore over the reality and causes of climate change, and neither is there any debate over consequential harms. Climate change is not at issue in science in the sense that we know that climate change is real, that its cause is human, and that its consequences will be increasingly harmful the longer we wait with mitigation.

It is not a technological issue either, and again, not even in part. Clearly, mitigating climate change requires decarbonization, and decarbonization requires a shift to energy sources such as sun and wind. The tools required for this shift are available. Technologies such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines are nowadays so efficient that they can replace fossil fuels. For example, Denmark produced 45% of its electricity consumption in 2017 by wind power alone (up from 2% in 1990) and expects to boost wind-produced electricity consumption to 70% by 2027.²⁸ Increasing wind power to meet 100% of electricity consumption involves political challenges in the context of a free market, but it does not pose technological difficulties. The same goes for the New World. Already in 2009, a study by the Earth Policy Institute showed that harnessing the wind energy present in only three U.S. states (North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas) with the then available technology would be sufficient to run the entire U.S. economy.²⁹ While approaches based on low-energy consumption, such as in the Global South, should by no means be slighted, it is noteworthy that available postcarbon technologies have made high-energy consumption compatible with climate change mitigation. The requisite tools are used in the European Union, the Nordic Countries, and especially in China (see the editorial of Journal of Global Ethics 13.3, 2018, for a summary of China’s standard-setting decarbonization). In short, there are no scientific and technical obstacles that stand in the way.

The second half of Cairn’s dictum, however, remains perfectly accurate. The choice to be made at the fork in the road is indeed primarily a matter of ethics. As such a matter, it is unambiguously Manichean. One path leads into darkness for life on Earth and into the night of humanity. Another path leads to a dawn for a recovering planet and to a new day for posterity. All this is obvious. Why, then, does the choice seem so hard?

The easy answer, of course, is that liberal democracies throughout the world consistently prioritize economic growth, so as to ensure social stability, and that the proximity of planetary boundaries such as the 1.5°C guardrail does not affect this economic reality. Changing economic realities would have to be a political decision.³⁰ This suggests an update to the dictum: the sustainability transition is partly an economic and political problem, but it is primarily a matter of ethics. This update raises a new question, in conclusion of this editorial essay: what are the political obstacles that stand in the way?

At present, making the right choice at the fork in the road puts us in a moral dilemma. At one end of the global political spectrum is the Communist Party of China, whose updated ideology, Socialism with Chinese Characteristic for a New Era, seeks to create an Ecological Civilization. Domestic initiatives, from massive investments into solar and wind, to high speed rail and electric traffic, to centrally planned economic policies all show that the socialist goal of an ecological civilization is no mere rhetoric. Ecologically, this is as good as we can find, for an economy oriented towards growth. Foreign initiatives, from China’s Belt and Road Initiative to strategic land acquisition abroad, point to the underside of this societal evolution. China is certainly taking care of its own, and it prepares for the coming food insecurities by creating a web of dependencies that will give the Central Committee control over the lands of foreigners when its domestic fields and rivers fall victim to the deglaciation of the Himalayas.

At another end of the political spectrum is the pro-business and pro-growth approach of the current administration of the United States. Its current cant of populism and ethno-nationalism also displays alliance with political and religious leaders of evangelical profession. The Republican Party under the leadership of President Donald Trump, Vice-President Michael Pence, and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, is led by conservatives who identify as Evangelicals (Pence and Pompeo) or who make policy according to the Presidential Evangelical Advisory Committee (Trump). Science-based policy goals such as decarbonization, sustainability, and planetary stewardship are diametrically opposed to the stated policy goals of the Republican Party of America. US conservatives appear to treat such goals as mere leftwing rhetoric. Their disregard of the world system presents a narrow and short-term view of the economic interests of a state positioned to gain increasing share of the world oil market.

In Brazil, the Social Liberal Party under the leadership of President Jair Bolsonaro relies on the political support of Evangelical Protestant churches, many of which are funded by the U.S. Evangelical Alliance. Bolsonaro, elected in 2018 on a rightwing populist platform and sworn into office in 2019, identifies as an Evangelical and touts the virtues of the free market against the communist menace. For the hothouse trajectory of planet Earth, the outcome of the 2018 election was also grim news. Bolsonaro’s campaign promises included Brazil’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord, following the example of the United States; the demotion of the Department of the Environment to a section in the Department of Agriculture, inspired by the neutralization of the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA since 2016; and a U.S.-style rollback of regulations so as to open the Amazon to development. The climatologist Eric Holthaus sums up what this means: ‘The most horrific thing Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has planned is privatization of the Amazon rainforest. With just 12 years remaining to remake the global economy and prevent catastrophic climate change, this is planetary suicide.’³¹

Nothing should be easier than making the right choice at the fork in the road. One path is unsustainable and appears to doom us, in a mere 10 years, if the above report is to be given its due. Another path is sustainable and leads to a safe and promising future instead. The science is in, the technology is at hand, and the choice is a political decision over the type of economic development.

The first article of this issue, by Ali Emre Benli, is ‘March of Refugees: an Act of Civil Disobedience.’ The Syrian Civil War, which had started in 2011, flared up following the failure of the Kofi Annan peace plan in 2012. This multiplied the number of Syrian refugees from tens of thousands in 2011 to hundreds of thousands in 2012 and to millions in 2013. Most were displaced to neighboring countries, but a significant portion sought asylum in the European Union. Asylum seekers who had entered the EU via Turkey were held up in Hungary. Benli’s article concerns a 2015 incident arising at Hungary’s border with Austria. Hungarian police barred refugees from getting on Austria-bound trains in Budapest. Thousands of asylum seekers were stranded around the train station, and as living conditions in the camps deteriorated, hundreds eluded the police to march 100 miles to the Austrian border. Benli considers the march of these asylum seekers as an act of civil disobedience. Such a claim may appear paradoxical, as these individuals have as yet only applied to gain entrance to a society they protest against. Benli draws from Rawls, engaging with views on civil disobedience of Scheuermann, Brownlee, Celikates, and others to make his case, which points to the recognition of asylum seekers as political agents in an evolving framework of international refugee protection.

Loren King and Michael Blake, in ‘Global Cities, Global Justice,’ consider the ways in which an understanding of cities presents a challenge to the traditional statist-cosmopolitan dichotomy in political theory and global justice. King and Blake argue that statist and cosmopolitan approaches do not quite capture the associative-global dimensions of cities, especially those that play significant roles in a planetary network of exchange. A key dimension of justice concerns the circumstance that these so-called global cities are not only hotspots of entrepreneurship, but also magnets for immigration that produce stark inequalities in wealth, opportunities, and access to services. According to King and Blake, neither the Rawlsian framework in its successive modern formulations of Pogge, Caney, Buchanan and Føllesdal, nor the statist accounts of Walzer, Miller and Nagel account for the unique blend of elements that distinguishes the modern global city, which is best described as an ‘associative terrain’. This vindicates, King and Blake argue, the associative turn in thinking about global justice, which brings into view the spatial features of global cities that alter the status quo for race, class, and life chances, and help us frame problems over immigration and inequality in future-oriented ways.

To this one might add that the city, as a political entity, is tasked to lead the climate fight in the Anthropocene. As national mitigation efforts are lacking, visible in the emissions gap of the Anglophone hemisphere, global cities are taking up the slack in the low-carbon transition. In the U.S., the failure of climate mitigation on federal and state levels has turned municipalities into agents of change. The Mayors Climate Protection Agreement was launched by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in 2007, and had been signed by 1,000 U.S. mayors, representing 90 million Americans, by 2009. A global example is the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, founded by London Mayor Ken Livingstone in 2005, which, in 2018, is an association of 90 global cities representing 650 million people in the fight to save the climate.

 ‘The Potential for Climate Engineering with Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosol Injections to Reduce Climate Injustice,’ by Toby Svoboda, Peter Irvine, Daniel Callies & Masahiro Sugiyama, concerns the ethical dimension of solar radiation management (SRM). Atmospheric greenhouse gases trap solar radiation as thermal energy. Just as curbing emissions is one way of mitigating climate change, managing solar radiation is another. Such management aims at increasing the Earth’s albedo or planetary reflectivity. One technically viable proposal of SRM is to take advantage of a chemical property of the high-altitude atmosphere, a layer at about 30 km height of naturally occurring sulfur-rich particles caused by photochemical decomposition. These sulfate aerosols, sufficiently concentrated, can create a mirror-like effect, which would reflect solar radiation, prevent it from reaching the surface, and yield a global increase in albedo. High-altitude balloons could spray sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, increasing concentration to keep the global climate from tilting towards hothouse Earth. The authors explores the potential of stratospheric sulfate aerosol injections (SSAI) to reduce harms, and thus injustices arising from changing climate, which disproportionately affect the Global South. He concludes that this technology could reduce aggregate climate risks, and, prima facie, could reduce the injustice of climate change. The authors finds mitigation efforts at the emissions-side vastly preferable to geo-engineering, but since global warming is already an aspect of our current trajectories, this makes multi-prong approaches, including novel technologies, worthy of consideration.

Issue 14.3 concludes with a paper by Kenneth Shockley. ‘Sustainable Development Goals and Nationally Determined Contributions: the Poor Fit between Agent-Dependent and Agent-Independent Policy Instruments’ is a contribution to the discussions on climate action, such as was presented recently at the December 2018 climate talks at COP-24 in Katowice, Poland. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015 by the UN, is a list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to promote human flourishing. The Paris Climate Accord, adopted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in the same year, is a policy initiative to stay within the (since 2018 obsolete) two-degree guardrail, the upper limit of climate change still compatible with the realization of human flourishing. The Paris Accord’s primary policy tool involves the individual contributions of nation-states to combating climate change, the so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Integrated mitigation efforts will facilitate the reining in of global warming, so the integration of these distinct but mutually supportive policy instruments is an obvious priority. However, Shockley argues that integrating them presents a structural problem: since there is no mechanism as yet for punitive consequences for emission gaps in the Paris Accord, NDCs result from unilateral, subjective decision by national actors, whereas SDGs are based on multilateral, objective considerations of what constitutes human flourishing. This creates a poor fit, as Shockley calls it, between NDCs, based on the vicissitudes of state actors, and SDGs, based on the non-arbitrary needs of moral subjects. While Shockley underscores the value of integrating development efforts with climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, he contends that NDCs are not a suitable means for reaching the end of SDGs, whereas the SDGs might take priority over NDCs in policy consideration. Shockley concludes that ‘the focus of policy should be less on what nations are willing to do, and more on what needs to be done.’

ORCID

Martin Schönfeld http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3250-038X

Notes

1. For comments, I would like to thank my co-editor, Eric Palmer (Allegheny College); my colleagues at the University of South Florida in the College of Global Sustainability and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment: Joseph Dorsey, Sharon Hanna-West, George Philippidis, Greg Herbert, and Charles Stanish (Anthropology USF and UC Berkeley). Additional thanks go to Ivan Marquez (Philosophy, University of Texas), Jonathan Donges (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Princeton University), and Dieter Gerten (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Humboldt Universität).

2. Weltweisheit is the word for ‘philosophy’ used by German pioneers of the Enlightenment. It suggests a different style of philosophy, as illustrated by Thomasius, Leibniz, and Wolff. Its aspiration is what we would now call nexus thinking. Its goal is to connect the dots, in the spirit of wisdom, and bearing the interests of humanity in mind.

3. Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Tim Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin Summerhayes, Anthony Barnosky, Sarah cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 115 (2018): 8252-8259, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115. Future references to this paper will be Steffen et al., 2018.

4. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (Geneva: WMO/UNEP, 2018). Future references to this report will be IPCC, SR15 (2018).

5. One such feedback loop is methane outgassing from permafrost. Global warming disproportionately affects the Arctic, and its land-locked permafrost is at risk of thawing. This frozen soil consists of partially decomposed organic materials. If and when the soil thaws, the material liquifies, resumes its decomposition, and releases methane (which, molecule by molecule, is twenty times as effective a greenhouse gas). Methane outgassing has started locally. If civilization drives temperatures a bit higher, the outgassing will become systemic. If it becomes systemic, the methane pulse would then go on until the organic material is decomposed even if civilization’s carbon pulse were to cease. In Earth history, this phase change has occurred before (with CO₂ from volcanic eruptions triggering CH₄ release from seafloor clathrates), and the results are known (the Permian-Triassic extinction, 250 million years ago).

6. J. Bélanger & D. Pilling (eds.), The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture. FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Assessment (Rome: FAO, 2019).

7. Will Steffen, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström et al., ‘Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet,’ Science 347.6223 (2015): 1259855 (10 p.), doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855.

8. In SR15, the IPCC summarized that for the decade from 2006 to 2015 the average global temperature was 0.87°C higher than temperatures had been in 1750; cf. Myles Allen et al., ‘Technical Summary’ (25 pp.), p. 4, loc. cit. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported in December 2018 that for the decade from 2009 to 2018, the average global temperature was 0.93°C above the pre-industrial baseline; cf. State of the Global Climate in 2018: WMO Provisional Statement (Geneva: WMO/UNEP, 2018), 12 pp., p. 1: ‘The 20 warmest years have all occurred in the past 22 years,’ and ‘the past four years—2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018—are … the four warmest in the series’.

9. ‘In model pathways with no or limited overshoot of 1.5°C, global net anthropogenic CO₂ emissions decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 … reaching net zero around 2050.’ Cf. Summary for Policymakers; section C ‘Emission Pathways and System Transitions consistent with 1.5°C Global Warming’; paragraph C1, p. 15, in IPCC SR15 (2018), loc. cit.

10. David Wallace-Wells, ‘Time to Panic,’ The New York Times, 16 Feb 2019.

11. The so-called Krefeld Study is Caspar A. Hallmann et al., ‘More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas,’ PLoS One (2017), doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0185809.

12. Gretchen Vogel, ‘Where have all the insects gone? Surveys in German nature reserves point to a dramatic decline in insect biomass. Key members of the ecosystem may be slipping away,’ Science 356 (2017): 576-579, doi: 10/1126/science.aal1160.

13. Brooke Jarvis, ‘The insect apocalypse is here—what does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?’ New York Times feature article (16 pp.), 27 Nov 2018.

14. For a bibliography of country-specific studies about this decline cascading from insects to birds, cf. Bradford C. Lister and Andres Garcia, ‘Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web,’ PNAS 115.44, E10397-E10406; doi/10.1073/pnas.1722477115, esp. the studies listed on p. E10406 by Stratford (1999), Castelletta (2000), Berlanga (2010), Faaborg (2013), and Hallmann (2014).

15. Bradford C. Lister and Andres Garcia, ‘Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web,’ PNAS 115.44, E10397-E10406. The citations are from the abstract, p. E10397; the percentage decline refers to arthropod dry weight biomass captured; cf. p. E10398: ‘The catch rate for the ground traps fell 36 times, from 473 mg per trap per day in July 1976 to 13 mg per trap per day in July 2012, and approximately 60 times, from 470 mg per trap per day to 8 mg per trap per day, between January 1977 and January 2013.’

16. Dennis Van Engelsdorp, Robyn M. Underwood, et al., ‘An estimate of managed colony losses in the winter of 2006-2007: a report commissioned by the apiary inspectors of America, American Bee Journal 14 (2007): 599-603; Dennis Van Engelsdorp, Jerry Heyes, Jr., et al., ‘A survey of honey bee colony losses in the U.S., fall 2007 to spring 2008,’ PLoS One [Public Library of Science One] 3 (2008): e4071, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004071.

17. Lister and Garcia, ‘Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance,’ loc. cit., p. E10399, explain the methodology of this finding for the La Verde study site in Puerto Rico: ‘To explore trends in avian abundance, we analyzed mist netting data … from 1990 to 2015 … Under the same yearly sampling effort, there was a significant decline in total insectivorous birds captured per year between 1990 and 2005, with captures falling 53% from a high of 137 birds in 1990 to 64 birds in 2005. During this period, seven of the eight most common [insectivorous] bird species … experienced reductions in numbers … If the declines in arthropod resources negatively impact avian abundance, then species with primarily granivorous or frugivorous diets should suffer smaller declines than those consuming a greater proportion of insects. For example, the ruddy quail dove … which eats grains and fruits almost exclusively, showed no decline in abundance … while … the Puerto Rican tody, whose diet is composed entirely of insects, experienced a 90% reduction in catch rate.’

18. M. Grooten and R. Almond, eds., Institute of Zoology (London), and World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2018: Aiming Higher (Gland, Switzerland: WWF, 2018), p. 7-10; cf. also chapter 3, pp. 88-107.

19. Rodolfo Dirzo et al., ‘Defaunation in the Anthropocene,’ Science 345.6195 (2014): 401-406, doi: 10.1126/science.1251817; Gerardo Ceballos et al., ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines,’ PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] 114 (2017): E6089-E6096; doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1704949114. The expression ‘the great thinning’ was coined by Michael McCarthy in The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

20. The reason for this possibility is that the policy recommendations by the IPCC in fall 2018 were drafted in response to the hothouse trajectory discovered in summer 2018 and not—or not yet—in response to the biodiversity decline, whose full scope only came into view in fall and winter 2018.

21. Research on climate change and impaired plant fertility has focused on crop species; e.g., cf. Anida Mesihovic et al., ‘Heat stress regimes for the investigation of pollen thermo-tolerance in crop plants,’ Plant Reproduction 29 (2016): 93-105, which shows that mild to severe heat stress impairs pollen development. For a summary vis-à-vis global food security, cf. Jerry L. Hatfield, John H. Prueger, ‘Temperature extremes: Effect on plant growth and development,’ Weather and Climate Extremes 10 (2015): 4-10. In late 2018, worrisome experimental evidence of impaired insect fertility induced by climate change was released; cf. Kris Sales et al., ‘Experimental heatwaves compromise sperm function and cause transgenerational damage in a model insect,’ Nature Communications 9 (2018): 4771 doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-072723-z (11 pp.). If the modelled insect-climate link is confirmed by field work, civilization will be in jeopardy.

22. Bélanger, Biodiversity (2019), loc. cit.

23. Christina M. Kennedy et al., ‘Managing the middle: A shift in conservation priorities based on the global human modification gradient,’ Global Change Biology 2019: 1-16 (early pre-publication view), doi 10.111/gcb.14549. For a map, cf. ibid. p. 5, sec. ‘Results,’ figure 1. For a summary, cf. Andrew Freeman, ‘Just 5% of Earth’s landscape is untouched,’ Axios 10 Jan 2019.

24. O. Venter et al., ‘Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation,’ Nature Communications 7 (2016): 12558, doi 10.1039/ncomms12558; J. E. Watson et al., ‘Catastrophic declines in wilderness areas undermine global environment targets,’ Current Biology 26 (2016: 2929-2934; cf. Kennedy, loc. cit., ‘4. Discussion,’ p. 9.

25. Steffen (2015), loc. cit., 93.

26. John Cairns Jr, ‘Sustainable co-evolution,’ International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology 14.1 (2007): 103-108; cf. p. 108.

27. Cairns (2007), loc. cit., 105.

28. Government of Denmark, Environmental Report 2018: Environmental report for Danish electricity and CHP for 2017 status year (Energinet, 2018), p. 4.

29. Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York/London: Norton, 2009), p. 109-117, esp. 111.

30. For a model example of the parameters for such a decision, see Robert Costanza et al. ‘Building a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature.’ Worldwatch Institute (eds) State of the World 2013 (Island Press, 2013), pp. 126-142.

31. Eric Holthaus, 28 Oct 2018, twitter.