In August 2021, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that sent some climate change activists into a spiral of doom. They have every reason to feel that way.
Excerpted from "The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters" by Juliette Kayyem.
The advisory board wrote confidently that the temperatures are rising and that some effects of those changes are now irreversible. It was basing its assessment on newer data and improved modeling since its previous report in 2013. Everything is horrible, reporters and analysts said. It’s too late!
But it’s never too late. The report was much more sophisticated than that. While the IPCC may have first put into perspective the probability of some of the more extreme doomsday scenarios out there, with cold calculation, it has also bought us some time. This may not seem like much solace, but it puts these worst case outlier scenarios—the “tails” of scenario planning—into perspective. It gives us something to work with.
The IPCC didn’t stop there.
What was missing from any analysis was that the report also spoke of human agency we still have in this moment to combat climate change. We are, in fact, still only on Day One of this fight, it warned us, and so we must embrace our ability to mitigate the consequences of the harms to come. We can get better at our response with greater vigor, focus, and professionalism. The report was depressing, but not at all fatalistic: It is the first report of its kind that actually embraces the notion of consequence minimization—rather than prevention—as an imperative of the climate change agenda.
“Sometimes climate change is treated like the sky is falling, which implies a final crash,” said Peter Huybers, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. He was clear that there is plenty to be anxious about, but he viewed the defeatism that permeated so much of the commentary around the report as self-defeating. The sky, in other words, is always falling. The imperative is deciding what we are going to do now to protect ourselves.
Most of us are familiar with the slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.” It often appears on posters with the Tudor Crown, suggesting the monarch’s influence in the efforts of public messaging campaigns during World War II as Britain was peppered by Nazi bombs. The slogan has its variants—“Keep Calm and Call Me Maybe” or “Keep Calm and Marathon,” the latter an ode to Boston’s response to the Boston Marathon bombings.
We have created a whole mythology around it. It tells us, we think, that in the face of adversity, we just need a little British stiff upper lip. It tells us to brace for impact, as if everything is predetermined and, once hit by the boom, all we really need to do is pick up the pieces and carry on. That is not an inspiring message; we can and should do more than carry on. And it is a message that wasn’t even true at the time.
So here we are. Now. Both before the next and after the last boom, always. It can seem destabilizing. The problems seem so big. Too many of our institutions are careless, negligent, and greedy. True, we can’t solve those problems easily. We can, however, continue to learn to lessen their impact.
The poster was never actually part of any serious war effort. It was produced in 1939 as part of the World War II civilian defense program, but only a few copies were ever seen in public. It wasn’t really known about until 2005, five years after it was uncovered by Stuart Manley, a used bookseller from Northumberland, England, as he was rummaging through old boxes. He put one up on the wall, customers loved it, a few articles were written, and then “all hell broke loose,” said Manley, as the poster captured the attention of the world.
The British War Council never released the poster during the war. It sat in boxes. “Freedom Is in Peril” and “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” won out. So why was the “Keep Calm and Carry On” message held back throughout the war, even by Churchill?
There are a couple of theories, including that Churchill wanted to hold onto it should the British need it for when the country fell to Germany. That’s a very different way of looking at the poster. Nobody really knows the exact reason, but my preferred theory is a little simpler: It was a lie. It was too passive.
“Keep Calm and Carry On” is not what Churchill needed from the citizens during the literal boom. It was not an honest thing for citizens to hear. Churchill needed Londoners to engage and sacrifice. He needed them to understand that the war was for their lives. It was a fight. He needed the men to go to battle, the women to work in the factories, and children, often alone, to be sent to the countryside. There would be losses, but fewer losses if the British people took up the fight, took agency, and recognized that they had to deal aggressively with the devil.
To fight an enemy isn’t some mental Zen or a mood after impact. It isn’t drinking more tea. A war effort isn’t calm, and Churchill knew that. Churchill memorably told Parliament in 1940, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Less well remembered is the context for his words: Britain had just experienced a near total catastrophe. Its armies had been plucked at the last moment from the beaches of Dunkirk, in France, sparing them from annihilation. The country had surrendered irreplaceable military equipment, which meant it had no short-term prospect of conducting a counterstrike in Europe once it had retreated. And the Blitz was still to come. Churchill had just heard the boom.
So here we are. Now. Both before the next and after the last boom, always. It can seem destabilizing. The problems seem so big. Too many of our institutions are careless, negligent, and greedy. True, we can’t solve those problems easily. We can, however, continue to learn to lessen their impact. A victory of sorts, until the next time.
At the beginning of the 2020 lockdown, I found myself unable to balance the competing demands of being a professor, a consultant, and a media analyst urging action and response with the demands of, well, me. I suffered from insomnia and a short temper with the kids. I couldn’t find my bearings even though I was advising others to do so. I felt that if I could just put my head down and hunker through it that one day, we’d find ourselves on the other side of this hell and in a new normal. I just needed to keep calm and carry on, right?
I am not a religious person. I like to believe that I am spiritual, but it is not really a sophisticated thing. I am more likely to find peace of mind during a long run, in an intense Peloton class, or on a surfboard waiting for the next wave. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, find peace during those months. My friend the Reverend Jonathan Walton, the dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest University, found himself at the end of many of my despairing questions. How could we survive until the new normal?
Walton gave an online sermon, delivered alone from his iPhone, on the lawn of the North Carolina campus while the world was locked down. His message was clear: Don’t wait for the new normal, as it will never come. It is a delusion that struggle, disappointment, and deprivation have ever ended. Instead, as he titled his sermon, we must learn to live in the Now Normal.
Much of the sermon is about how we can try to ground ourselves in the moment. Perhaps that solace is some religious entity, a poetry book, the recommitment to a marriage or relationship, extra time with children, or, my personal favorite, a Luther Vandross soundtrack. I did a lot of running to Luther that spring and joked with Walton that he had unwittingly founded the Church of Vandross.
But it was Walton’s opening to the sermon that drew me in. He, too, has kids and a wife and all the pressures we found ourselves in through that year and beyond. He was surprised where he found the most comfort. It was his late father’s words that grounded him, he told the camera. I leaned in close to the screen. What were these wise words from the minister’s father? Would they solve everything? Could they, alone, give me ease?
“Life,” Walton quotes his father, “just sucks sometimes. Life just sucks sometimes.”
Yes. The devil never sleeps. But he only wins if we don’t do better next time.