Stolen Future, Broken Present Stolen Future, Stolen Future, Broken Present Argues That We Are Virtually out of Time to Ward Off Severe, Irreversible Climate Change

Stolen Future,Stolen Present Broken Stolen Future, Broken Present argues that we are virtually out of time to ward off severe, irreversible climate change. As a result, our future is in doubt and, with it, the entire purpose of our present activities. All of our projects – personal, familial, political, religious – are disabled at their core; the challenge is thus to Stolen Future, Broken Present create an ethics of the ruins. The Human Significance of Climate Change Written with uncompromising lucidity, David Collings’Stolen Future, Broken Present argues that we have not yet undergone the ethical and David A. Collings philosophical shifts necessary to cope with the temporal dissonance associated with climate change. This is a deeply necessary book at a time when many of us have already become numb to predictions of environmental disaster. – Anne C. McCarthy, Penn State University Collings’ book is a timely and necessarily provocative exploration of the intersection between climate change’s volatile history, and an overdue re- reading of Romanticism and poetics. This book will open a new mode of thinking for the humanities of the twenty-first century. – Penny Fielding, University of Edinburgh David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (1994) and Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848 (2009). He co-edited Queer Romanticisms with Michael O’Rourke (2004-2005) and Romanticism and Disaster with Jacques Khalip (2012). Cover Image by Valerie Hegarty – Bierstadt with Holes, 2007, Foam core, paper, paint, wood, Collings glue, gel medium, plexiglass, 103 x 85 x 7 cm (close up) Series: Critical Climate Change Stolen Future, Broken Present The Human Significance of Climate Change Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibil- ity of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of deple- tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re- alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor- phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo- political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Stolen Future, Broken Present The Human Significance of Climate Change David A. Collings OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of Michigan Publishing University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 2014 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12832550.0001.001 Copyright © 2014 David A. Collings This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may have different copyright restrictions. Cover Image Copyright © 2007 Valerie Hegarty, all rights reserved. ISBN-13 978-1-60785-314-5 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents Introduction 7 1. Climate Change Will Happen to You 23 2. What We Could Do 41 3. Time's Up 58 4. The Impossible Revolution 74 5. The Stolen Future 94 6. The Ruins to Come 103 7. The Broken Present 114 8. A Slow and Endless Horror 121 9. Infinite Responsibility 136 10. Making Reparation: Offset Your Life 159 11. Bear No Children 173 12. The God of the Whirlwind 188 Appendix 207 Acknowledgments 226 Works Cited 229 Introduction Lately the news about climate change hasn’t been good. Once upon a time, not long ago, the scientific consensus held that the northern polar ice cap, under the pressure of global warming, would melt eventually—”in the latter part of the 21st century.”1 That estimate, released in 2007, appeared around the same time as Al Gore’s documen- tary, An Inconvenient Truth, and reaffirmed a widespread sense that if we did not act soon to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases, the worst effects of climate change could be dire indeed—but would transpire some decades into the future.2 The threat from that ice melt, and from climate change more generally, was real but not absolutely imminent: we had time to fight for change through the familiar processes of public debate, the gradual formation of public opinion, the eventual forging of a coalition for Congressional action, and the patient negotiation of an international treaty. That estimate turned out to be much too optimistic. Only two years later, new estimates suggested that the Arctic Ocean would be free of ice in the summer as soon as 2030 or 2040.3 Thanks in part to the blister- ing pace with which global economies were emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the climate was reacting far more quickly than most researchers had previously projected. That shift in the forecast—along with similar shifts all across climate science—had immense implications for anyone who hoped to preserve the biosphere in anything like its present state into the future. The threat no longer loomed far off, near the end of the century, but was only two or three decades away. In the wake of this and other developments, those following the science on climate change felt a greater sense of urgency, knowing the international community bet- ter act immediately to ward off severe changes to the global climate. That imperative strained against the limits of national and international political traditions, raising difficult questions. How could scientists bring this 8 Introduction news to bear on the thinking of leading politicians, who for the most part still used the estimates and targets set in the early 1990s? Furthermore, how could nations alter their fossil-fuel economies so dramatically in such a short period? What could possibly break through the impasse? But as it now appears, even that estimate has turned out to be too optimistic in its turn. Three years later, the stunning melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2012 prompted scientists to rethink those earlier studies and to propose instead that the Arctic might be ice-free in late summer before 2020. Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, who researches the thickness of Arctic sea ice, now estimates that the Arctic will become ice-free in the summer well before the end of this decade, and perhaps as early as 2015 or 2016.4 So in five years, the threat of that dire event moved up from the last half of the century to the latter part of this decade, almost obliterating the opportunity for serious action. The year 2020, it seems, is the new 2100. So much for having time—even minimal time—to address this cri- sis. The questions instantly multiply: What are we supposed to do now?5 What political actions are even feasible? And how exactly are we to alter our economic systems to meet this challenge in time? The news about the Arctic sea ice is bad enough: it tells us that a mas- sive transformation in the climate of the northern hemisphere is well on its way. As the Arctic warms, the difference in temperature between the far northern zone and the temperate regions decreases, causing changes in the jet stream, which now moves more slowly and more often zig- zags on its course to the east. As a result, it might swing over Texas, then pull warm air straight north over the Dakotas, causing midwinter warm spells all across the Midwest, or pull Arctic cold down into the Carolinas or even Florida, freezing areas that in the past hardly experienced such frigid weather. Furthermore, because it is moving more slowly, it can stall over certain regions and cause them to be hit with weather over longer periods—leading to longer spells of rain or snow and thus to more flood- ing or harsher winter storms. The same situation applies all across the northern hemisphere. Such is the “new normal” of our time.6 But that is not all. Much worse news awaits. The melting of the Arctic sea ice will lead to substantially higher temperatures in the sea itself, high enough potentially to melt methane clathrates—frozen remains of Introduction 9 organic life—deposited on the seabed on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and cause the resulting methane gas to escape through the sea and into the open air.

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