Making Climate Real: Climate Consciousness, Culture and Music

Simon Kerr and Chrisrtine Parker are known for their
work through the muscical group, "Music for a Warming World."

Our world is in deep trouble. We face an existential emergency from ‘rapid climate disruption’¹1 This term is from Dahr Jamail’s 2019 book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (The New Press 2019).View all notes and it is now clear that continuing with business as normal will not provide a safe or viable future for humanity. This disruption is not limited to humans but is also contributing to what has been called the ‘sixth extinction’.²2 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury 2014).View all notes This rapid decline in biodiversity³3 Jeff Tollefson, ‘Humans are Driving One Million Species to Extinction’ (2019) 569 Nature 171.View all notes is part of a tangled web of profound challenges to planetary boundaries, what Rockström and colleagues call a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity.⁴4 Johan Rockström and others, ‘A Safe Operating Space For Humanity’ (2009) 472 Nature 461.View all notes We have already exceeded the estimated safe operating space for six of the nine planetary boundaries, with two, biochemical flows and biosphere integrity, in the high risk category. In response to these challenges a number of jurisdictions are declaring climate emergencies akin to the sort of social and economic mobilisation that took place in Britain during the Second World War.⁵5 See eg ‘Call to Declare a Climate Emergency’ <https://climateemergencydeclaration.org/> accessed 6 June 2019.View all notes Following the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their 2018 report on staying under 1.5°C.⁶6 Myles Allen and others, ‘Summary for Policymakers’ in ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C 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’ (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018) <www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15_SPM_version_report_LR.pdf> accessed 10 June 2019.View all notes With uncharacteristic bluntness the report stated that this would require the world’s economies to reach net zero emissions by 2050. On the current level of emissions reduction commitments the planet will warm by 3.1 to 3.7°C.⁷7 See eg ‘2100 Warming Projections: Emissions and Expected Warming Based on Pledges and Current Policies’ (Climate Action Tracker, 11 December 2018) <https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/> accessed 6 June 2019.View all notes Reducing emissions to net-zero is a challenging task, given the denial, obfuscation and resistance towards effective action to date. Some commentators argue that if the world’s carbon emissions do not begin to fall by 2020 then ‘the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable’.⁸8 Christiana Figueres and others, ‘Three years to safeguard our climate’ (2017) 546 Nature 593.View all notes If that is the case, and it seems likely, then warming of 2°C would produce, in the words of Princeton University Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Michael Oppenheimer, a ‘totally different world … It would be indescribable, it would turn the world upside down in terms of its climate. There would be nothing like it in the history of civilisation.’⁹

Read the article from the Kings Law Journal by Simon Kerr and Christine Parker - “Making Climate Real: Climate Consciousness, Culture and Music.”