Is it too late?

Back in 1947, a group of scientists associated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists started up something called the Doomsday Clock to measure how much closer the human species is getting to perilous catastrophe each year. The original threat was nuclear war, and the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight – midnight being the hour of human annihilation. The clock has moved back and forth 24 times – further away after the end of the Cold War, and much closer with increased awareness of the inevitability of the climate crisis. Today it stands at just 100 seconds to midnight.

For most of humanity the idea of planetary doom remains ‘incomprehensible’. Back in the day, ‘It’s the end of the world!’ would have been a line you might have found in cartoons in magazines like The New Yorker. Some idiotic guy (women had better things to do with their time) with a long beard dressed in a white robe, carrying a sign proclaiming our collective demise. No more. In this era of Covid-19 (with its toll of close to six million lives, and counting) death is never far from either the headlines or the human psyche. Our usually rambunctious and self-assured species is showing an awareness of its own frailty that is both refreshing and alarming. The situation cries out for modesty on our part, given the mounting discontents of the humandominated Anthropocene era with its addiction to growth no matter the cost to our physical and mental wellbeing – to say nothing of the fate of other species.

The new normal

After all, it’s not like there is no evidence of impending doom – with extreme weather events mounting year on year. In 2021 alone, northwestern North America and Australia have had a record rise in temperatures, resulting in alternating – and equally deadly – wildfires and flooding. Strange weather events like killer tornados have increased their range and intensity throughout the US midwest. Overall, July 2021 was measured as the hottest month in world history. Floods in eastern Belgium and western Germany drowned 240 people and caused $43 billion worth of damage – one of a record four $20 billion-plus weather disasters in 2021.¹

As usual, the planetary crisis is at its sharpest where human frailty and vulnerability join hands, by-and-large, in the Global South. It is difficult sometimes to identify the effects of climate shifts and their impact on the all-important jet streams that shape weather patterns. In the industrial North we have, until relatively recently, been able to ignore them because change is incremental and without significant disruption yet of everyday life for most people. In the Global South, the problem is somewhat the opposite. Disruption caused by vulnerability, whether it’s the food supply or natural disasters, has been commonplace for decades.

But it is definitely getting worse. Extreme weather in 2021 brought together typhoons of record intensity hitting the southern Philippines (Ria) and southeastern Africa (Eloise), killing hundreds and displacing thousands. Then there was the worst sand storm in a decade to hit Beijing, making air in the Chinese capital almost unbreathable and calling attention