one, a headache for the twenty-first century, when in fact the bulk of the rise in temperature and practically all sea level rise produced by any given amount of cumulative emissions will hang on – if it is left to the earth system to work out the consequences – for at least the next 10,000 years, the seas potentially peaking at a level around 50 metres higher than today. Much of this can still be avoided. That possibility supercharges our moment with time. ‘The next few decades’, the team concludes, ‘offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.’16 An eternity is determined now.
For every year that total decarbonisation of the world economy is postponed – not to speak of every year when emissions are stable or increasing – the shadow of committed warming extends further into the future.17 For every such year, more impacts become unavoidable. There have already been many years of that kind. Hence, a string of scientific papers coming out in 2014 and 2015 indicated that the main section of the West Antarctic ice sheet has been pushed over its tipping point and is destined to undergo irreversible meltdown, while, even more spectacularly, an equally large glacier on the eastern part of that continent – long believed to be safe from warming – may likewise be sliding towards the sea.18 ‘Whatever we do now’, popular magazine New Scientist announced, probably with some exaggeration, ‘the seas will rise at least 5 metres’.19 The motion of glaciers being proverbially slow, the scientific consensus has long held that it would take several millennia for a sea level rise of such a scale to materialise, but one of the most sensational papers in recent years contends that ice equivalent to ‘several meters’ could, in the worst-case scenario, plunge into the oceans already this century, much of it during the lifetimes of plenty of young people now in streets near shorelines.20 With all of these figures, constantly revised and updated, scientists seek to represent the assault from some past curse or ancestral sin ever more difficult to escape. Lerner’s protagonist imagines the city soon underwater.21
Some history, then, is back: the panic that climate change so easily induces is really a panic in the face of history, our reaction when it dawns on us what they – those who once lit the fossil fires, spread them and still keep them burning – have done to us and our children. Sometimes that history makes a lunge at the present. In December 2015, at the conclusion of COP 21 in Paris, the leaders of 195 nations declared with much fanfare that they would limit the temperature increase to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and ‘pursue efforts’ to stop it at 1.5°C.22 That year was the first to reach the landmark of 1°C.23 Hardly had the leaders stopped cheering and congratulating themselves on their achievement and flown home from Paris before the warming took a sudden leap: in February 2016, the average temperature on earth stood at an estimated 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – exactly where it should not be, according to the pledge of two months earlier.24 Scientists were left scrambling for superlatives to convey the bizarre weather. In the northernmost Arctic, anomalies of 6°C were detected, adding to the impression that the climate system was careening deep into the heat COP 21 had vowed to forestall.25
Come July 2016, Nature published a paper claiming to demonstrate that both Paris targets were likely beyond reach. Some of the heat generated by an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere is drawn down by the oceans and stored in their depths for several decades before being released into the air, and because of this time lag, the full realisation of the warming commensurate to any CO2 concentration is deferred. With current levels – even if no more CO2 were ever to be emitted – the planet is already doomed ‘to a mean warming over land greater than 1.5°C’ and quite possibly ‘greater than 2.0°C’, according to this particular study.26 Come November, December and the first anniversary of the Paris agreement, temperatures in the Arctic were no longer 1.5 or 2 or 6 but a dizzying 20 degrees hotter than normal.27 2016 ended as yet another hottest year on record, on average 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels in one estimate, 1.1°C in another.28 Clearly, the world was already brushing the threshold set up one year earlier in Paris. Now, none of these developments were in any way the products of what happened immediately after COP 21. The stunning heat records of 2016 were not due to emissions made in the meantime, but the delayed detonation of fuels burnt much earlier. If the Paris pledges were so quickly ground to dust, as it seems at the moment of this writing, it was indeed the past that overtook the present, in a manner that seems rather like the new normal; by the time this book is printed, these records will in all likelihood be obsolete, and so on.
More storms, then, are to be expected. On the cover of E. Ann Kaplan’s thoughtful study Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, a red-haired woman stares at a large cyclonic system rolling in from the horizon. Before turning to the flood of apocalyptic films inundating screens in recent years, Kaplan tells the story of how she herself was caught up in Hurricane Sandy and at one point, as she tried to return to her apartment by climbing dark stairs, suffered a panic attack. The experience led her to develop the syndrome of ‘pretrauma’ – not the usual post-traumatic stress disorder, in which people suffer past wounds, but rather ‘fear of a future terrifying event of a similar kind’. Our culture as a whole, Kaplan suggests, is now developing pretrauma. With more and more film, television, literature, journalism inflected by the creeping insight that catastrophic climate change is approaching, consumers of popular culture make up ‘a pretraumatized population, living with a sense of an uncertain future and an unreliable natural environment’. In the film from which the cover shot is taken, the protagonist has a series of nightmares and violent hallucinations about monster storms, descends into a spiral of angst and lashes out at his friends: ‘“There’s a storm coming and not one of you is prepared for it.”’ If this growing genre is obsessed with the future, it is only, Kaplan argues, on the basis of an ‘awareness of a traumatic past’ that has stacked the deck against the time to come.29 That past, about which nothing can by definition be done, is the source of the future storm.
Now contrast this with Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodernity as a condition of synchronic space devoid of time and nature. There is no synchronicity in climate change. Now more than ever, we inhabit the diachronic, the discordant, the inchoate: the fossil fuels hundreds of millions of years old, the mass combustion developed over the past two centuries, the extreme weather this has already generated, the journey towards a future that will be infinitely more extreme – unless something is done now – the tail of present emissions stretching into the distance … History has sprung alive, through a nature that has done likewise. We are only in the very early stages, but already our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural responses, even our politics show signs of being sucked back by planetary forces into the hole of time, the present dissolving into past and future alike. Postmodernity seems to be visited by its antithesis: a condition of time and nature conquering ever more space. Call it the warming condition.
SOME TASKS FOR THEORY
The history circling back in the warming condition is not of the buoyant modernist kind, not a bristling flow of events linked by purpose and direction, anything but a bandwagon to jump on: rather it is frozen. Nor is the nature now returning of the intact variety Jameson finds in the interstices of modernity: rather it appears to be melting. Yet history and nature they seem to be, and society looks like it is beginning to reel under them. The warming condition is still, however, far from constituting a total ‘cultural logic’ in Jameson’s sense. Indeed, climate fiction (or cli-fi) in film and literature notwithstanding, one might argue that most culture still ignores the facts of global warming and that denial is the real hallmark of the present, stretching from the quotidian suppression of the knowledge of what is going on, across the topographies of social life up to the man who won the United States presidential election in November 2016, just as Arctic temperatures went completely off the charts. As for politics in advanced capitalist countries, climate change is utterly overshadowed by issues of immigration and the nation. We shall save some words on that order of priorities for later. As for the panoply of cultural expressions, it would be a tough assignment to
