Planetary Ruin

Apocalyptic talk about global warming has stirred the sediment of old fears – the mushroom cloud has returned to haunt us. But, Thornton McCamish writes, the last great fright was a little different from the new one.

LAST year felt a bit like Armageddon all over again. It began on TV. Jericho was first: the sinister snickering of geiger-counters, the ICMBs flaming across the American evening sky. Then came Heroes, in which one of the characters, who can paint prophetic images, starts depicting New York under nuclear attack. On the latest 24, the terrorists upgraded to A-bombs.

It spread to literature. One of last year’s most celebrated novels, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is an awesomely bleak epic set in the ashen aftermath of what seems to be a nuclear war.

The Bomb was back, like the ghost at a banquet of anxiety. And it wasn’t just explicit imagery that evoked nukes. It was all the stuff about the world ending. From Al Gore to the International Panel on Climate Change, everyone had grim news for the planet.

At the leading edge of climate pessimism, the prognoses were frankly apocalyptic. “Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic,” predicted James Lovelock, a renowned environmental scientist.

In his book The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery puts aside his essential optimism for long enough to write: “If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilisation due to climate change becomes inevitable.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that when planetary destruction is on the mind, we start seeing nukes again. Climate change has stirred the lees of old fears.

It makes sense that the mushroom cloud, the great spectre of the 20th century, would return to spook the 21st. Bill McKibben, author of a foundation text of the climate change era, The End of Nature (1990), explicitly links the last great fright to the new one. Climate change is “the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century”, he wrote last year.

Some don’t buy any of this “climate porn”, as a UK think tank recently described such talk. Al Gore’s movie is “bullshit from beginning to end”, according to Ray Evans, a former Western Mining executive and author of the Lavoisier Group’s Nine Facts About Climate Change (2006). For Evans and many others, man-made climate change panic is a bugaboo, perhaps even a hoax.

Either way, the debate over climate change is now about fear. How afraid should we be? It’s a valid question, because a sensible reaction to any threat begins with fear. Fear can help propel us towards solutions, as it did in the case of ozone-depleting CFCs. But we don’t want to respond to a threat with asymmetric alarm.

Unfortunately, allowing the old threat of nuclear war to haunt our anxiety about climate change is not going to help, for the simple reason that the nuclear holocaust never happened. This happy fact tends to foster a blithe optimism about the past: look — nuclear doomsday was a beat-up! This is false logic, of course. The fact that we survived the nuclear threat doesn’t mean it was always inevitable that we would. But people believe it, nonetheless, and you can see why they’d want to.

This is the age of dire prophecy, after all. If it’s not melting icecaps, it’s a terrorist mega-strike, an avian flu pandemic or collision with a titanic near-Earth object. Yet you look up from your paper and there are the family photos, still on the shelf; outside the sun’s still coming up, the fridge still hums. We haven’t had any of these catastrophes yet, so there’s not much point getting worked up about the next one. For those in the ostrich position, the pairing of nuclear apocalypse and climate change risks by a climate Cassandra like McKibben is therefore more reassuring than anything. In 1999 I saw an article on the Y2K bug by an American columnist, Charles Krauthammer, in which the author scoffed at the “efflorescence of millennial panic” triggered by the escalation of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s.

Pondering the relative calm on the eve of the millennium, he suggested that every generation has only one millennial panic in it, and with nuclear hysteria we’d “already shot our wad”.

Apart from sounding weirdly like nuclear porn, this is just too breezy. It’s an error of tone, as much as anything; it denies the sheer horror of atomic weapons. So do most of the TV shows currently featuring nukes.

Jericho is entertainment, of course, not science. Even so, the producers only make a token stab at capturing the fantastic destructiveness of nuclear war. In this end-of-the-world soap opera, the bombs just provide the (radioactive) atmosphere for the standard small-town dramas.

TO COMPARE the threat of climate change with the threat of nuclear war is to make a category error. The nuclear threat was unique. We never formed a proportionate fear response to nuclear weapons, because no level of fear was equal to the sickening intensity of the threat. This is the second reason why our reaction to the Bomb shouldn’t guide us on our climate change anxiety: fear didn’t get us anywhere.

Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t everywhere. Most people over 30 can probably remember the moment when they first intuited the full meaning of atomic war. “I know exactly what happened to me,” Martin Amis wrote in his memoir, Experience. “When I was a child, my form-master regularly told me to get down on the floor and hope that my desk lid would protect me from the end of the world; I sensed violence and absurdity that lay beyond contemplation, and I expelled it from my conscious mind.”

My nuclear awakening also came at school. In year 8 English, my teacher was Mr Grey, an intriguingly out-of-place Englishman who had the richest speaking voice I’ve ever heard. One day in 1984, he lined us up at the window and urged us to focus on the tip of the post office tower in Shepparton, eight kilometres away across the flat paddocks, and to imagine an atomic bomb detonating directly over it, the mushroom, the supernova heat. We might, he said, with leering relish, “have just enough time to see our skin falling off our bodies before our eyes melted and ran down our cheeks”.

This was mild as far as Cold War trauma goes. Compare the experience of the six-year-old New Yorker, described in Joanna Bourke’s book, Fear: A Cultural History, who in 1951 told a classroom visitor that she had to wear an ID tag “so that people will know who I am if my face is burned away”.

I think Mr Grey just wanted to shake up our adolescent complacency. He certainly had our attention. If anything, I was grateful for the heads-up.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.