Climate Code Red Part 6

It seems as if there are two great tectonic plates - scientific necessity and political pragmatism - that meet, very uneasily, at a fault line. Some examples may help to ill.u.s.trate the tensions and compromises that result from trying to balance the two factors: * In 1996, the European Union's Environment Council ignored advice from the advisory group on greenhouse of the World Meteorological Organisation, the International Council for Science, and the UN Environment Programme that an increase in the global average temperature of greater than 1 degree above pre-industrial levels 'may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage' [emphasis added]. Instead, they advocated a 2-degree cap, even though that figure was described as an upper limit 'beyond which the risks of grave damage to ecosystems, and of non-linear responses, are expected to increase rapidly'.

* The Stern Review identified a need, based on its reading of the science, for a 450-parts-per-million (or 2-degree) cap of carbon dioxide levels, but then said that this would be too difficult to achieve and advocated a 550-parts-per-million (or 3-degree) cap instead.

* In 2007, under Kevin Rudd, the Australian Labor Party's pre-election climate-policy statement effectively supported a 3-degree cap, despite data quoted in the statement itself that unequivocally demanded a much lower target.

* The IPCC has not called for climate modelling stabilising temperatures at less than 2 degrees, despite the evidence that the safe zone is much lower. Although the IPCC says its role is to simply represent the science, not to advocate policy, this seems to be a case of the IPCC allowing political norms to limit the scope of the research that it encourages or reports.

* Many climate and policy researchers, while privately expressing the view that the 2-degree cap is too high for a safe-climate world, have, nevertheless, publicly advocated less effective goals, because they perceive them to be more acceptable. Their argument is that they 'wouldn't be listened to' if they said what they really thought.

* Some climate-action advocates speak of the need to occupy the 'middle ground', or to be at least 'heading in the right direction', because 'it is always possible to go further later on'. This stance turns risk-aversion on its head by failing to consider worst-possible outcomes. At the same time, it is politically advantageous because it obviates the need to talk about preventative actions that are currently perceived to be 'extreme'. As a result, much advocacy aims for a direction-setting minimum requirement, rather than for a clear statement of what is needed.

* During 2007, the position of the Australian Conservation Foundation was that emissions should be cut '60 to 90 per cent' by 2050 (a 60 per cent cut would leave emissions in 2050 at four times the level required of a 90 per cent reduction). Yet, in a 2008 preliminary report, economist Ross Garnaut told the new government that a 90 per cent cut may be necessary, and that 60 per cent was far from enough.

In all these examples, we see a reluctance on the part of organisations and people to go beyond the bounds of perceived acceptability. The result is advocacy of solutions that, even if fully implemented, would not solve the problem. We have a sense that many of the climate-policy professionals - in government, research, community organisations, and advocacy - have established boundaries around their public discourse that are guided by a primary concern for 'reasonableness', rather than by a concern for achieving environmental and social sustainability.

Many people whose work centres on climate change have been struggling for so long to gain recognition for the problem - having had to cope with a lack of awareness, conservatism, and climate deniers - that they now have deeply ingrained habits of self-censors.h.i.+p. They are concerned to avoid being dismissed and marginalised as 'alarmist' and 'crazy'. Now that the science is showing the situation to be far worse than most scientists expected only a short while ago, this ingrained reticence is adding to the problem.

A pragmatic interdependency links many of these players in a cycle of low expectations and poor outcomes. Here is an outline of the concerns of some of these key players, based on conversations and correspondence we have had with them. The cycle is a merry-go-round, so it matters little where it starts.

Under pressure to stick to the science and avoid expressing an opinion, a climate scientist may take the view that society needs to make the judgement about what it determines to be dangerous climate change: 'It's not for me, as a scientist, to tell you what's dangerous or what the political target ought to be. I try to inform the debate by explaining what the risks actually are at these various levels, and by offering policy options that society could consider.'

Community-based climate-action groups, often lacking detailed technical knowledge, will respond by saying that they are not about to doubt the views put forward by the science professionals, which they hear from the media and from the IPCC: 'We have to trust in their abilities to lead us. They are the ones who know - we can't say things that they haven't, and we can't speculate on what a few scientists might be saying, if it isn't in the IPCC reports.'

Large climate-group and environment managers often join the conversation, suggesting that they agree with strong goals and urgent action, but they are worried that if they promote them, their lobbying wouldn't be taken seriously: 'It is more important to agree and campaign on targets that are heading in the right direction, than that we have discussions about what the targets should be. It is always possible to go further, or call for more, later on.'

The consequence is that even those politicians who are climate friendly feel constrained: 'I can't go further than the environment movement. I'd look extreme if I did.' And: 'I know our party's position will have to be strengthened because the science has changed, but that can't happen until after the next election. Our policy is now set. I wish we could go further, but some people are worried that I will look too extreme in the electorate.'

Deep inside public administration, where climate policy is processed, there is an avoidance of the political: 'Although our climate-science manager agrees with your targets ... she has to stick to using scientists, not lobbyists, and science, not policy. She needs to be persuaded that setting targets and trajectories is fundamentally a climate-science issue, not a political one. If, on the other hand, we can find a scientist to make the case for real targets that you have made, this would help a lot, but the scientists say that target-setting is political, and outside their terrain.'

Businesses, meanwhile, remain constrained by their commercial interests: 'You might well be right that 60 per cent by 2050 is not enough, but the people I talk to wouldn't believe anything tougher. Our business is one of the good ones - we know that this is a big problem, but if we are going to engage the wider business community, we can only go so far.'

It seems that everyone is waiting for someone else to break the cycle. But how can this be done? Part of the problem seems to be fear: those who might become the first to move to a tougher position are worried about becoming isolated or losing credibility. This could be overcome if a broad range of players agreed to move together. Another approach would be to start with the question, 'What do we need to do to achieve a safe-climate future?' rather than, 'How far should we move from our existing position?' To the best of our knowledge, no advocacy group, government, or political party in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Australia has ever asked scientific researchers to prepare a safe-climate scenario, or a 'what if ' plan. Such a plan would allow various climate advocacy activists and lobbyists to get a tangible feel for what needs to be done, before having to commit to a specific plan, or advocating challenging new goals for action. Once safe-climate scenarios have been developed and supported by a range of the leading climate-policy players, they can be taken to a wider audience for discussion. In this way, we can overcome the 'credibility' blockage. Without a doubt, people and organisations that are sufficiently confident in their views to raise difficult questions can more easily explore the 'what if ' strategy.

Reticence on the part of advocates to push for serious action also stems from the pervasive view in politics that everything is subject to compromise, and that trade-offs are the norm: argue less for what you really want than for what seems 'reasonable' in the give-and-take of normal political society. And when some brash advocates do argue for what really needs to be done, it is simply a.s.sumed that they are making an ambit claim: an initial demand put forward in the expectation that the negotiations will prompt a lesser counteroffer and will end in compromise.

While this mindset is widespread, there are domains from which it has been banished. When it comes to public safety, society knows that compromise and negotiable trade-offs must not apply: bridges, buildings, planes, large machines, and the like must be built to risk-averse, high standards, which are applied rigorously. If standards are not met and structures fail, corporations, governments, and regulatory bodies are held to account. We have learned from trial and error that a 'no major trade-off ' policy in public safety is necessary to avoid death or injury to our citizens.

With global warming, however, we do not have the luxury of learning by trial and error. We have left the climate problem unattended for so long that we now have just one chance to get things right by applying a 'no major trade-off ' approach without a trial run. It will be a particular challenge for decision-makers who have grown up in a political culture of compromise.

Because the last emergency mobilisation on this scale was during World War II, few people today have any direct experience of a situation like this; however, there is plenty of history from which to learn, and expertise available, to plan for such a scenario.

Because time is short, we need a 'no major trade-offs' rebuilding of the economy, and we need to quickly develop the skills and know-how to implement similar, broad-scale decision-making about climate change. Continuing to use negotiation and management methods that routinely result in major compromise and failure will not help.

Past government inaction has also habituated an acceptance of lowered expectations, which has continued to hinder serious climate action. An Australian non-government organisation (NGO) staff member, reflecting on her experiences, said that it has become increasingly clear to her how constrained the environmental organisations are: 'It's a legacy ... they've all come to expect so little environmental responsibility from government, so they don't ask for much in the hope of a small gain. [It's] a very unfortunate situation.'

Timidity, constraint, and incrementalism have, generally, characterised recent federal and state government approaches to environment issues in Australia, and the consequence is that low expectations have become embedded in the relations.h.i.+p between lobbyists and government. When opportunity knocks, or changing evidence demands urgent and new responses, imaginative and bold leaders.h.i.+p does not always emerge with solutions that fully face up to the challenge. When, in late 2007, evidence emerged of accelerated climate change, it appeared to have little impact on the climate targets advocated by most of the peak green organisations, which said that their position was 'locked in' till after the election.

Ken Ward, an environmental and communications strategist and former deputy executive director of Greenpeace in the United States, believes that the people who lead environmental foundations and organisations can play a critical part in reconstructing the issue as a climate and sustainability emergency - one that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise.

With the rapid loss of the Arctic summer ice cover, a climate catastrophe is now in full swing; but Ward says that the opportunity for these leaders to adjust their position is narrow, and this is due, in some part, to the deliberate decision, a decade ago, by environment organisations to downplay climate-change risk. He says: [They did so] in the interests of presenting a sober, optimistic image to potential donors, maintaining access to decision-makers, and operating within the constraints of private foundations, which has blown back on us. By emphasizing specific solutions and avoiding definitions that might appear alarmist, we inadvertently fed a dumbed-down, Readers Digest version of climate change to our staff and environmentalist core. Now, as we scramble to keep up with climate scientists, we discover that we have paid a hefty price.

For those who have, in the past, downplayed the risks, changing position is now a matter of urgency, because what now needs doing cannot be done incrementally. The desperate measures required to advance a functional climate-change solution at this late date, says Ward, 'can only be conceived and advanced by individuals who accept climate change realities and [who] take the less than 10-year time-frame seriously'. He believes that we need to confront the terror of the situation before we can come to a real solution. 'We are not acting like people and organisations who genuinely believe that the world is at risk. Therefore, we cannot take the measures required, nor can we be effective leaders.'

CHAPTER 18.

The Gap Between Knowing and Not-Knowing.

Why are many powerful organisations, and people in positions of power, so un-terrified, so unwilling to recognise, or advocate, the extent of action now required? The closer decision-makers get to the apex of political and bureaucratic power, the greater the public denial of the need to act at full scale and at great speed.

Much of this incapacity is simply a result of the way power is exercised in societies in which a corporate agenda is the default mode. In the most extreme cases, governments have glued themselves to the fossil-fuel lobby and done almost nothing, even as other significant sectors of business have demanded more action on climate. In his 2007 book, High and Dry, former government staffer Guy Pearce doc.u.mented the influence of the Australian coal industry and the way that big polluters and their lobbyists wrote the Howard government's climate policies to ensure that there was no real plan to reduce emissions.

In politics, 'plausible deniability' has become an art form - a process which ensures that there is no evidence to be found that a person knew, or could have been expected to know, something that may come back to haunt them. A corollary is the pressure for advisors, consultants, and administrative departments to tell a minister or senior official only what they want to hear, or to tell them only the minimum necessary to make a pragmatic decision in the short term.

How many environment or climate ministers in national governments would be able to give an informed and reasonable answer if they were asked to explain the policy relevance of the impending rapid loss of the Arctic sea-ice and its effects on Greenland and sea-level rises?

It is as though people half-recognise the problem, and then deny it if the necessary solutions are beyond their professional boundaries or their perception of 'reasonableness'.

Political leaders now accept that climate change is a problem, and now eagerly embrace small-scale schemes such as changing light globes. Taking the drastic action necessary to turn climate change around, though, is too far outside their political ambit to even consider. Policy a.n.a.lyst George Monbiot noted this limitation: 'When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist ... everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move.'

Psychological denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge the existence, or severity, of unpleasant events or thoughts and feelings: the person keeps on acting as if the event has not occurred. Generally, it is a.s.sociated with an event or thought whose memory is stressful, so that denial, as a defence mechanism, seems like a good practical strategy; the more dramatic the event, the stronger the denial.

Stanley Cohen, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, has pointed to the paradox of denial: to deny something, you first have to recognise its existence to some degree, so denial is a state of 'knowing and not-knowing'. It can take a number of forms, including outright denial; seeking scapegoats (blaming China, for example); shutting out or suppressing information (so the story is only half-recognised); denying responsibility ('Nothing we can do in this country will make any real difference.'); denying personal power ('No one else did anything, so I didn't either.'); and projecting anxiety (displacing fears onto other issues).

Max Bazerman of Harvard University has asked why societies fail to implement wise strategies to prevent 'predictable surprises' - a term he coins to describe events that catch organisations and nations off-guard, despite necessary information being available to antic.i.p.ate the event. Think of 9/11, or the failure of American strategy in Iraq. Or climate change.

Bazerman identifies five psychological patterns that help to explain the failure to act on climate: [P]ositive illusions lead us to conclude that a problem doesn't exist or is not severe enough to merit action ... we interpret events in an egocentric, or self-serving, manner ... we overly discount the future, despite our contentions that we want to leave the world in good condition for future generations ... we try desperately to maintain the status quo and refuse to accept any harm, even when the harm would bring about a greater good [and] we don't want to invest in preventing a problem that we have not personally experienced or witnessed through vivid data.

Bazerman suggests that many political leaders will not want to act until great, demonstrable harm has already occurred.

He also identifies organisational and political explanations for the failure to act on climate: organisational divisions that fail to integrate data, responsibility, and responses; the corrupting power of powerful lobbyists and political donations; and deliberate campaigns to confuse people about the evidence - a tactic long-employed by the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries.

George Marshall, founder of climatedenial.org, says that denial cannot simply be countered with information, because denial is, as Cohen described it, a normal state of affairs for people in an information-saturated society. He also says that the lack of visible public response is part of a self-justifying loop that creates a pa.s.sive-bystander effect: [People often won't] spontaneously take action themselves unless they receive social support and the validation of others. Governments in turn will continue to procrastinate until sufficient numbers of people demand a response. To avert further climate change will require a degree of social consensus and collective determination normally only seen in war time, and that will require mobilisation across all cla.s.ses and sectors of society.

A paradigm s.h.i.+ft is also required. We settle into ways of thinking and working that get the job done 'well enough'. As new ideas and changing circ.u.mstances challenge our mental model of the world, we may either adapt and change, or stick with what we know and slowly drift away from understanding the world. Even when global warming challenges conventional ways of working, a group of people working together with similar, unrevised mental models will often be able to maintain a degree of social competence and operate effectively with each other. This can be the case even though their collective behaviour no longer fits so well with the conditions of the physical world. Their other, more adaptive, option is to critically re-understand a changing environment, and start to shape and share a new social worldview.

The eminent physicist Max Planck famously observed that 'a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it'. With climate change, however, we don't have the option of waiting this long.

The complexity and seriousness of climate and sustainability problems makes our current political world of trade-offs, compromises, and decision-making obsolete, along with most of our experience about how to act effectively. This is an extraordinary challenge, because our acc.u.mulated skills in the art of compromise become less useful. Perhaps the best way through is to adopt, whatever one's age, a youthful willingness to live with uncertainty and to view the prevention of climate catastrophe as an invigorating process of innovation, learning, and imagination.

Some of the ways that we currently make decisions and plan for the future will also pose big challenges, when our aim is a safe-climate future. An example is how we think about safety itself. Our society has built administrative structures for safety at the micro level - for example, in building design and construction, and in the design and manufacture of aircraft and other vehicles - but no such structures exist for ensuring the safe 'design and development' of the economy, or of our use of resources as a whole. Rather than spending money to test actions in advance, we have considered it more efficient to wait until there are clear signs of a real problem before we take preventive or remedial action. The consequences of this approach are manifest in today's sustainability and climate crises: we fish till the fish run out, irrigate till the rivers run dry, and burn coal till the weather turns hot.

Paradoxically, the more that a society is committed to innovation and to increasing economic output, the more it needs effective processes to ensure sustainability; otherwise, the economy just becomes a machine for testing what we can endure, and we discover what we can't endure only when it is too late to prevent disaster.

Our discussion has been confined to proposing some of the structural and social reasons that people and organisations simultaneously 'know' about the global-warming challenge, but 'don't know' about the speed and depth of action required. This incapacity may be manifested in what we have termed 'blocking': in beliefs that stand in the way of developing necessary solutions. Here are six sets of 'blocking' responses that we have encountered while engaging with people about the sustainability emergency.

The first set that we have often experienced in response to our emergency proposition includes claims that there is no point in taking action, because the climate situation is already a lost cause. Claims include: it's too late, the changes can't be made fast enough, people are too selfish and won't put the needs of others ahead of their own needs, or vested interest will block the necessary action. Other variations include the view that it's hopeless, because our efforts are a drop in the bucket or are insignificant; that people won't change their lifestyles; that governments won't do what is needed; and that people won't accept the government telling them what to do. Finally, there is the view that to succeed we must have action from China, India, Russia, and the US - and since they won't change, we shouldn't either.

These are absolutist arguments: they a.s.sume knowledge that n.o.body can have until after the event. We cannot know whether a mode of action will fail until it is tested, but these propositions, all based on the theme that trying is a lost cause, cut off all possible avenues of success on the basis of vague a.s.sumptions rather than detailed knowledge. In fact, recent international examples give the lie to this approach. We reacted quickly and we weren't selfish when the tsunami hit Asia in 2006, or when Burma and China were devastated in May 2008. Why is dealing with climate change more of a 'lost cause'?

The fact is that even vested interests have to operate on the same planet as the rest of us, and vested interests still have children, partners, lovers, friends, and grandchildren. All countries and all people will have reason to act, because climate change will damage them, as well as everyone else. India and China, for example, will suffer from rising sea levels; and the loss of the Himalayan glaciers will be highly disruptive to water supply, through the large rivers that support much of the agriculture in both countries. There is evidence, in other words, to dismantle the credibility of each of these a.s.sertions.

A second set of 'not-knowing' responses has been heard many times from leaders of organisations. These include their argument that they can't advocate a comprehensive safe-climate policy because they would lose credibility if they were to 'go out on a limb', or they would not be 'taken seriously' and would, thereby, become ineffective; or that they are 'too busy' to take action on the issue. One Australian non-government environmental organisation recently pioneered a useful way out of this dead end by adopting a two-strand approach. In its public advocacy, it aims for goals and targets that would result in a safe climate as fast as possible. When dealing with governments, though, or other bodies which have demonstrated that they can't yet relate to the safe-climate approach, the organisation will push these inst.i.tutions as far as they will go. Both strands are acknowledged publicly, and explained. The ultimate objective, with regard to government, is to help them get to a safe-climate goal, too.

In any case, the cost of being forthright is falling. The world's accelerating slide into demonstrably dangerous climate change is now creating new, more favourable dynamics for advocacy and leaders.h.i.+p. These days, if one takes a stand that is well based on climate science but which is currently seen as 'extreme', it will be only months, or a year or two at most, before consequences from the real world will show it to be reasonable and necessary. So we can expect that the uncomfortable feeling of being too far ahead of the pack will pa.s.s, before too long.

A third form of blocking centres around the proposition that, until we have complete certainty, we shouldn't act pre-emptively. But when time is running short, and the stakes are high, we simply have to take a risk-management approach and decide to act, despite the uncertainty.

A fourth set of blocking responses is to claim that we can't follow the emergency strategy until other people, or organisations, change their position. But other people and organisations are already changing their positions - as witnessed by the increasingly alarmed comments of public figures around the world.

A fifth set of responses revolves around the proposition that a solution to global warming is possible, but only after an unacceptable prior step - in other words, that without change in other significant parts of the system, the level of action required is impossible. Yet there are many examples, including countries going into war, or responding to large natural disasters, which demonstrate that most political systems can switch to an emergency mode when they perceive an urgent need to do so. Variations on this theme include sentiments such as, 'We'd need a huge disaster to happen before people would act', and 'We can't tell the whole truth: we mustn't disempower people.'

Rescuing the planet and getting back to a safe climate will require a huge deployment of physical and economic resources; so, for the duration, keeping jobs and the economy going should not be a problem. And we do not have to wait for a catastrophe - people in many parts of the world are already facing climate disaster. The issue is not whether people have the capacity to engage in powerful acts of the imagination, or foresight, but whether they will apply this capacity in the short amount of time left. Waiting for a climate disaster big enough to motivate action beyond the conventional mode is very dangerous, because by then it may be too late to prevent catastrophic events.

A sixth type of obstacle is the view that a full solution is not possible, so we just have to live with partial failure and partial success. To this end, we've effectively been told: 'The perfect is the enemy of the good - your ideal 'safe-climate' strategy will not only fail but, if it is pursued as the main strategy, it will also block a less desirable, but feasible, outcome.' We are not aware of any credible evidence that a full solution is not possible, or that an attempt to achieve a full solution will make a partial solution impossible. The evidence suggests that the Earth is very close to a period of run-on warming, at which point any partial solution will, fairly rapidly, deteriorate into a much worse state; so, going for the apparently harder safe-climate target now, rather than later, looks like the only practical option.

All these forms of blocking lead to society accepting inaction, or insufficient action, as a solution to the problem. The alternative - to imagine, and plan for, a great transformation of our society in a way that is consistent with a safe-climate future - may be unsettling and challenging. It will require us to change the way we live and how we understand the relations.h.i.+p between our actions and our future on this fragile planet. But it is the only practical option.

CHAPTER 19.

Making Effective Decisions.

In seeking to overcome the advocacy dilemma - the gap between what is reasonable to propose and what needs to be done - four approaches stand out that are relevant not just to policy-makers and lobbyists, but to all of us when thinking about, talking about, and taking action to have the climate crisis recognised as an emergency.

Pursuing double practicality.

The actions that are proposed must be capable of being implemented and, when fully implemented, of fully solving the problem. For example, a 3-degree cap may be achievable logistically, but it will not solve the problem of climate safety; rather, it is very likely to result in global warming that is catastrophic and that would escalate beyond our capacity to control or reverse it.

If the world's political leaders work toward a goal that cannot deliver a safe climate, we face a serious environmental disaster. Investments made in good faith in new industrial, urban, and rural systems would also have to be abandoned partway through their economic life, to be replaced by another set of investments made at a time when the environment will be breaking down and the economy will, consequently, be in decline. At such a late stage, the second round of investment could well fail to rescue the situation. The 3-degree cap clearly fails the test of 'double practicality'.

Let's take another example: the idea that we should retrofit coal-fired power stations to run on gasefied goal as a long-term strategy to lower emissions. If a necessary goal for a safe climate is also the complete decarbonisation of electricity generation, this does not fully solve the problem, because it involves building new, large-scale infrastructure that will continue to emit carbon for its investment life. Similarly, proposing to replace gas hot water with gas-boosted solar hot water is not a full solution: greenhouse-gas emissions will still occur when the sun's energy is not enough to keep the water hot and the gas kicks in (on cloudy days, for example). A doubly practical alternative when replacing conventional hot-water systems would be to install a solar unit boosted by electricity from renewable sources.

At a broader level we recognise that, with today's high levels of technical innovation and economic growth, any problem that remains partly unsolved will simply be amplified as the economy grows. So the more committed a society is to economic development, the more it must be committed to fully solving environmental problems in an antic.i.p.atory way.

Facing brutal facts.

Problems cannot be solved completely if they are not understood completely. When a problem has trivial consequences, a misunderstanding will not matter. But a problem like climate change, which has life-and-death implications, must be understood fully, un.o.bscured by wishful thinking. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister during World War II, understood this. He knew that his strong and charismatic style of leaders.h.i.+p might inhibit people from telling him the truth about the progress of the war, so he set up an independent agency, the Statistical Office, to feed him the brutal truth in a constantly updated and completely unfiltered form. Equipped with an unshakeable goal, and a stark understanding of exactly how grim the situation was from moment to moment, Churchill rejected all wishful thinking: 'I ... had no need for cheering dreams,' he wrote.'Facts are better than dreams.'

The purpose of facing the facts is not to wallow in anguish, but to inform the creative process so that we can come up with solutions that have the maximum chance of solving the problems, no matter how bad they are. The worse a problem is, the more vitally important it is to know its real nature.

Moreover, we should face all the facts even if we don't, at the start, have all the answers. We do not need a final plan to justify urgent climate action, any more than we would expect a rescue team to have a finalised plan, or a guarantee of success, before they considered attempting a rescue.

Management researcher Jim Collins found companies that survived enormous challenges and continued to thrive were, without exception, the ones that not only had the knack for facing the reality of their situation, but were also driven by an enormously strong will to survive. This led them to develop creative solutions that were equal to the problems.

Collins drew lessons from the experience of Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking US military officer in the 'Hanoi Hilton' prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Observing his own strategies for survival, and those of his fellow prisoners, Stockdale concluded that 'you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be'.

This approach combines strategic optimism with tactical pessimism. There is a dogged determination to work for a positive outcome, coupled with an a.s.sumption that any number of things can go wrong, unless they are actively prevented.

Collins asks: How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn't motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision? The answer, surprisingly, is, 'No.' Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time ... If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events ... Yes, leaders.h.i.+p is about vision. But leaders.h.i.+p is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted.

Collins' finding is central to climate-policy advocacy: one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

To leave people who are facing a serious situation uninformed - when there is a possibility that preventive, or even adaptive, action could be taken - is to leave them living in a fool's paradise. If we do not allow people in on the secret that climate change, if left uncorrected, is going to have disastrous impacts, we get caught in a democratic trap. If political leaders keep problems quiet, they cannot put forward effective policies to solve them. It is doubly impossible for the bigger political parties to provide effective leaders.h.i.+p if many scientists, the main sources of objective information, do not emphasise the full range of possibilities, and if environmental and climate lobbyists propose policies that cannot solve the climate problem.

Fortunately, the digital age has helped counter these tendencies by enabling citizens to educate themselves about climate change with a wide array of online resources including dedicated reporting by newspapers and magazines, scholarly papers, videos, and blogs.

Failure is not an option.

When Apollo 13 mission-control flight director Gene Krantz insisted to his ground staff that 'failure is not an option', the meaning was unambiguous: get the imperilled crew home alive, solve every problem faced by the astronauts, and never give up on any life-threatening issue, even when they encountered a dead end. The more difficult a problem, the more effort and creativity needed to be applied, with every conceivable possibility explored until a breakthrough was achieved.

In the case of global warming, the mantra of 'failure is not an option' relates to a broader goal - achieving a safe climate to protect all people, all species, and all generations. Still, the approach is the same. No matter how difficult the problems, society must find a way back to a safe climate. The UK Government's 2006 Stern Review established a powerful justification for this approach when it found that the threat from climate change would become so large that no matter how much it might take to solve the problem, the cost of not controlling it was going to be worse.

Ultimately, this is a moral issue, because the fate of most people, and most plant and animal species, hangs in the balance -determined by whether we can devise and implement a path to a safe climate. We have to find a way to enable the economy to be physically transformed, in the shortest time possible, to safely bring our greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero, to strip excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and to take measures to cool the Earth directly, until a sufficient natural cooling is established. There is no other option that holds out realistic hope of achieving a safe climate.

Putting the science first.

In the case of climate change, facing the facts with brutal honesty requires us to put the science first - which means fully facing up to the ecological impacts of our actions.

Currently, climate policy has been framed as the task of solving the impa.s.se between 'the science' and what is 'politically possible' (which means: what is economically acceptable to governments around the world, who are largely captured by corporate and bureaucratic interests).

The mantra of the former Australian prime minister John Howard was that he would do nothing on climate change that would 'harm the economy', and that it was 'crazy and irresponsible ... to commit to a target when you don't know the [economic] impact'. He seemed not to understand that a failure to act would cook the planet. Asked about the impact of rising temperatures, Howard told an ABC interviewer that an increase of 46 degrees would be 'less comfortable for some than it is now'. This was a remarkable way of talking about catastrophic climate change. We have a clear responsibility to make politicians put the science first, in the process of framing goals to achieve a safe climate.

Compounding the reticence to take action now is our faith that technology will be able to solve all our problems, including global warming. Post-enlightenment delight at the progress and capacity of technology has produced a cultural impediment to climate action: a technological overoptimism, or determinism, that clouds our understanding that human behaviour needs to change, too.

Thinking beyond 'business as usual'

One of the things that makes 'business as usual' such a powerful mode of operation is the widely shared a.s.sumption that things will go on as they always have. However, given that history has seen many crises - including past climate change, wars and conflict, and the need to build and rebuild economies and societies - it is obvious that things don't always stay the same and that, indeed, we are capable of breaking out of our usual practices when we need to.

When our society has responded effectively to great threats and crises in the past, it has put aside the partial measures and limited possibilities of 'business as usual' and confronted enormous challenges with brutal honesty, finding feasible solutions and pursuing them with single-minded determination. Our preparedness to do so again, when we are confronted with the greatest threat in human history, will determine our success or failure.