[Coral-List] 1.5 C not plausible anymore

[Peter Sale]

To: CoraL-LIST
Thank you, Franziska Elmer for reminding us that the world is not heading towards 1.5 degrees and that doing so is (or is rapidly becoming) an impossibility.

Over past decades, the coral reef community has tried doom and gloom.  And it has tried ocean optimism.  Neither approach has led to significant change in perspectives and action on the global environmental crisis.  Yes, lots of people have worked locally, or joined the global conversation, in an effort to change where we are headed, but little change has been achieved.  We have not even lowered the rate of increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I support signing the letter as Franziska suggests.  But I also think it is time for a new approach to communicating what we know of the likely future of this planet - a planet without any functional coral reefs and degraded in many other ways besides.  That new approach is called telling the whole truth, rather than just parts of the truth, or sugar-coated parts of the truth.

The whole truth, in my view, is that we have been deluding ourselves, since well before the days of the Rio Declaration, that it would be possible for an ever-increasing number of humans to raise their level of prosperity towards median advanced nation norms in an environmentally sustainable way.  This was not possible in 1992 and it is even less possible in 2022.  The extent to which we have already degraded the natural world is substantial.  The fact that we are eliminating coral reefs very rapidly through a combination of actions - warming of the planet, overfishing, inappropriate coastal management and pollution are the most egregious - is just the most conspicuous of many deleterious impacts.  These broader impacts range from deforestation, land use capture by agriculture, urbanization, over-production of biologically accessible nitrogen, and massive removal of glacial ice reserves to a whole host of other slights, such as the immense shift of biomass and energy flow into humans and their handful of food organisms.

Even if we rapidly transition away from use of fossil fuels, our degradation of the planet in these many other ways will continue.  As we simplify the natural world, we erode its capacity to be resilient and continue to supply the goods and services that sustain human life.  To pretend that we can address all these threats while also ensuring a march towards heightened quality of life for a rapidly growing number of us, and do this with only modest changes to lifestyles of those of us already fortunate enough to live on more than $2 per day has to be denounced as perhaps the biggest lie out there.  A lie in which those of us struggling to articulate the need to live within the means of the planet are (almost) as complicit as those others of us who maintain that the state of the planetary system is irrelevant to human progress.

I personally believe there is still a lot that humanity can do to lessen the impact of the Anthropocene.  But we will not get very far until we recognize that we and all other creatures share this planet and depend on it for our survival.  With that recognition, perhaps, we can mount the kind of all-out, global attack on the environmental crisis that has to happen, and which shows no signs of happening by itself.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor (emeritus)
sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca>
www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/>