William Barnes and Nils Gilman
[A different version of this paper is published as “Green Social Democracy or Barbarism: Climate Change and the End of High Modernism,” in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, eds., The Deepening Crisis: Governance Challenges and Neoliberalism, Volume 2 in the Social Science Research Council’s series Possible Futures, NYU Press, June 2011.]
As the present volume documents, the early 21st Century is a sea of icebergs, full of hazards, threats, and crises-in-the-making, whose obscured bulk we are just beginning to fully appreciate and map. Atmospheric carbon, accumulating out of sight for 200 years, is a mega-berg, one with the potential to sink modern civilization by itself. The exploding and enduring presence of climate destabilization, now inescapable, promises to exacerbate other crises and hazards, turning this mix into a thousand-year “perfect storm.” The long-term futures of societies all over the planet will be shaped in large part by their experiences of and responses to the destructive ramifications of climate change, especially as those ramifications intersect and interact with other burgeoning problems and crises. It is already too late to avoid a cascade of local and regional “natural” disasters in the medium term (i.e. by mid-century), and heroic near-term action will be required to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if a longer-term civilizational catastrophe of world historical proportions is to be avoided. This, in combination with the panoply of other system-threats and crises covered in this volume, is humanity’s playing field going forward – like it or not.
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