Making Climate Real: Climate Consciousness, Culture and Music.

Our world is in deep trouble. We face an existential emergency from ‘rapid climate disruption’¹ 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’.² This rapid decline in biodiversity³ is part of a tangled web of profound challenges to planetary boundaries, what Rockström and colleagues call a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity.⁴ 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.⁵ Following the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their 2018 report on staying under 1.5°C.⁶ 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.⁷ 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’.⁸ 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 piece from the Kings Law Journal by Simon Kerr and Christine Parker -  “Making Climate Real: Climate Consciousness, Culture and Music.”