We Are the Weather summary

Imagine your child is playing on a climbing frame. They lean out too far and look like they’re about to fall off a two metre ledge. What do you do? Chances are you dash towards the climbing frame with a speed you didn’t know you possessed! Now imagine that someone tells you that something called climate change could affect your child’s life to an unimaginable degree at some stage in the future. What do you do? Chances are, you will do nothing at all. 

Humans have evolved over millions of years to be able to deal with threats to their survival. We’re wired to deal with threats which are right in front of our faces, though, like children falling off climbing frames. We’re not designed to respond to abstract things which will affect us in the future, like climate change.

Even if you’re extremely motivated to fight toward preventing climate change, it’s hard to know where to begin. It doesn’t help that a lot of the information we’re given is incorrect or incomplete.  

Let’s start with incorrect information. There is evidence that major oil and gas companies, such as Exxon, already knew about the dangers of global warming in the 1950s, an incredible 70 years ago. However, the industry responded to this knowledge by creating a disinformation campaign and publishing false accounts that minimized the risks. 

What can we as individuals possibly do to fight climate change? Faced with such mammoth opponents as Big Oil, it can feel like anything we do will be useless. What can we achieve by waving a sign at a protest march? 

It’s understandable why people feel these doubts. After all, it’s now popular to say that individuals cannot fight against climate change, because it is the corporations who are responsible for the vast majority of the pollution that is causing it. However, that is a simplistic way of looking at it. Corporations, too, are made up of individuals. Furthermore, we as individuals support corporations and the way that they pollute when we buy their products.

When we imagine farms we usually think of cows frolicking in green pastures. We don’t typically think of them as being a source of pollution. So it may come as a surprise to learn that the animal farming industry is one of the main sources of harmful greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.  

Since the advent of what is known as “factory farming” in the 1960s, huge numbers of animals have been concentrated on enormous plots of land, with terrible consequences for the environment.  

The statistics about the environmental impact of animal farming are very alarming. However, on a positive note, they point to an achievable way that we really can slow the progress of climate change: eating less meat and fewer animal products like milk or eggs.

This is one of the fastest ways to fight climate change. Ending our reliance on fossil fuels is also very important, but it’s not something we can do quickly. Even if all the countries in the world held a summit tomorrow and miraculously agreed to abandon fossil fuels, it would still take more than 20 years to transition to using alternative energy sources. 

Planet Earth seems endlessly bountiful, but it in fact has finite resources which are being used up quickly. Essentially, we are running up a large debt to the Earth that we can’t possibly repay.  

Since the 1980s, we have been consuming natural resources at a rate that is much higher than the Earth can supply. Stripping the Earth of its resources, such as its forests, has knock-on effects for global warming as there are fewer left to absorb the massive amounts of greenhouse gases we are generating. This means that we are entering a phase of what is called “runaway climate change,” where positive feedback loops amplify the damage we’ve already caused in ways that we can’t control.