The Increasing Urgency of The Emergency

It’s hard to disagree with anything in Extinction Rebellion UK’s latest announcement:

[D]espite the blaring alarm on the climate and ecological emergency ringing loud and clear, very little has changed. Emissions continue to rise and our planet is dying at an accelerated rate.

Their latest plan to have 100,000 people occupy the UK Parliament in April is bold. And for the life of me, I can’t think of a reason not to try.

Despite Extinction Rebellion actions, despite Greta Thunberg, despite marches all around the world, despite countless governmental declarations of a climate emergency, despite climate technologies springing up, despite some news organizations finally giving climate change a serious look, what progress have we really made?

Global emissions are still rising, our carbon budget is still being spent at an alarming rate, social inequality is still growing.

The maddening thing is that many of us would change career in a heartbeat if doing so could make a difference. Most of us would choose a better way of life if the choice was made available. All of us would pull the right levers if we only had the means and power to access them.

I buy LED lightbulbs, I avoid eating meat, and I drive electric, but really, it’s not what every single one of us does that will make a difference, it’s what governments and businesses do.

Don’t Look Up Is Not Supposed To Be Good

I watched Don’t Look Up on Netflix recently. It’s taken me a while to digest the movie and I’ve been struggling to put my thoughts into words. I still don’t know whether it’s all well-formed in my mind, but I do know that I would regret waiting any longer and remaining silent. After all, the climate is one of the things I spend the most time thinking about, and certainly one that I’m the most vocal about online. Honestly, I just don’t want to look back later and see that I failed to underline what is happening.

There are already plenty of good reactions out there for you to read, so I don’t intend to bore you with my take on the movie itself. If you’re curious how serious climate activists feel who have been begging the world to do something for 40 and more years, George Monbiot’s piece in The Guardian is a good place to start.

What I would like to do instead is take a step back and consider whether a movie about a civilization-ending catastrophe is supposed to be good in the first place.

The fact that critics don’t like the movie is completely irrelevant. Some things are just not meant to be evaluated and ranked. This isn’t meant to be a great film in the artistic sense. Criticizing its artistic value is like criticizing a real life event. Of course the characters’ reactions don’t make sense. Of course the plot is incredibly frustrating. That’s the whole point. Because what it portrays is what we are doing right now in real life. As the climate crisis becomes ever more dire every week, what gets media focus doesn’t make sense, and the people trying to raise the alarm feel incredible frustration.

Don’t Look Up is holding up a mirror and asking us to take a good long look at ourselves. If you have any doubt about that, the very fact that we are criticizing the movie is itself a meta reflection of the satire portrayed in the film.

Don’t shoot the messenger, the saying goes. In this case, it would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic that we are debating the artistic value of the messenger, instead of debating what to do about the message itself.

That mirror the movie is holding? Guess what, you’re not going to like what you see in it. Yes, many times while watching I felt like grabbing the closest object—the remote, the dog, the Christmas tree—and throwing it at the TV. It made me sweat, it made my heart race, it made me want to scream. And in that sense, Jennifer Lawrence’s character made perfect sense to me. If you care at all about what we’re doing to the Earth, this isn’t a comfortable movie to watch. You’re not supposed to enjoy watching it. If you do, you don’t get it and we sincerely hope a light goes on in your head. Because a sensible reaction would be to ask yourself questions. A good start is something along the lines of “what the fuck are we doing? What is wrong with us?!”

Questions. There are lots of them. I found myself wondering about the movie’s effectiveness. Is this the right movie for right now? If the goal is to wake people up—at the very least the oblivious people who are just cruising along while our way of life destroys the very air, water and soil we depend on—does it succeed at doing that?

The plot is definitely Americanized, the rest of the world being mentioned in passing with a lot of hand waving. Of course, considering the unprecedented craziness and navel-gazing we have witnessed coming out of the United States over the last 5 years, it’s arguably fair and well-deserved. But in this age of siloed Facebook nonsense, how many polarized people will actually be touched by such an angle? How many people will choose to sit through an anxiety-inducing watching experience, except those who are already sold to the magnitude of the problem?

I hope it’s more people than I think. Climate activism is very much about grinding away at the problem, in the same way that wind and water very gradually erode hard rock. Gaining traction is a slow process. Today we are nowhere near where we want to be in terms of mass awareness and societal action, but there has been constant progress nonetheless. If you had told me 10 years ago that the climate crisis would now be mainstream news instead of the purview of tree huggers and niche groups, I would not have believed you. Yet here we are considering a Hollywood movie on the matter.

So in that sense, yes, definitely, every single little bit that chips away at the problem is welcome. It’s not one single thing that will trigger the wave of awareness and willingness to act that we need, it’s a lot of small repeated ones. And if Don’t Look Up contributes to that, then it’s A Good Thing.

I have wondered whether the movie is accurate in its portrayal. I don’t know that “accurate” is even the right word here, but let’s run with it. Is Don’t Look Up accurate enough? Does it show us the true science? Are the shallow TV hosts and narcissistic politicians too over-the-top? Some people, critics certainly, if not people in the media, think that Don’t Look Up is at worse an exaggeration, at best a satire of our reality. And sometimes I agree. But then, I don’t.

You only need to read the reactions of a few professional scientists and life-long activists to know that, for some of us at least, this is all too real and dire. These folks are worth listening to. Just like other great people in the past whose convictions brought change we now consider obvious.

An angle I didn’t see coming, in the movie, is the fact that technology is pitted against science. Tech is described as the “big guys” and scientists are considered amateurs. It’s a revealing angle that underscores how, overall, we don’t really—or not completely—value science. It’s the nerd we all knew at school. It’s the mad scientist who plots to take over the world in our stories. It’s never glorified. That is reserved for the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, our tech lords. But tech would not exist without science. Tech is only how science manifests itself in our daily life. And too many people don’t know that.

The treatment that the scientific method gets in the movie is especially frustrating. The scientific method is absolutely vital and central to everything that science represents, the very least as a tool for continually refining and polishing ideas. So the fact that the layperson doesn’t know about it, as mirrored in the movie, points to an important lack in our communication of what science is and how it benefits us. Maybe it’s time to realize that science is not the enemy.

In retrospect, I was reminded of Tomorrowland, the movie. At the end, David Nix from the future reveals that they tried to warn people of what was coming. But the people gobbled up the apocalypse with a large bowl of popcorn, and asked for more. That is an effective criticism of our love of catastrophe stories, but few people paid attention to that message.

Is Don’t Look Up a good movie then? No, not in that sense. But is it what we need? Is that how far gone we are? Well, maybe it is.

The Making Of Climateer

Climateer is an app that I recently released in the iOS App Store. As the tag line says, it’s an attempt at making climate change something you can see, something you can monitor to make up your own mind about what’s happening. Whether that will prove to be successful is still up for grabs, but I thought it would be interesting to explain the story behind it.

I started working on bits of code that eventually turned into Climateer about 3 years ago. I was tinkering with a much smarter form of social media where each post could be programmed to be interactive and to perform actions. That is itself an idea that merits its own post, but for now let me just say that one of the ideas was that a post could fetch data and display it graphically.

I had done a proof of concept of a post that, given:

A URL to a source of scientific data.
A regular expression describing the data format.

Would download the data and display it in a graph. That was all good and exciting but the smarter social media idea itself required more resources to pull off than I could put together and that effort just sat there unused.

A little while later, I was preparing for an upcoming climate march. Increasingly feeling like something has to be done to communicate the importance of what is happening, I was trying to think what I could do. And I thought of the smart post proof of concept in which I had used the CO₂ data from the NASA Vital Signs site.

I just wanted people to see the CO₂ level. I thought I’d just make a quick app that displayed the creeping CO₂ level in a Twitter-like timeline. So I wrote code that downloaded the historical data, extracted the data points, and displayed each one as a “post”. Reusing the graphing code from my proof of concept, I even made it possible to tap on each one to view the full CO₂ level graph.

I went to the climate march with this app in my pocket. I don’t know what I was expecting. I had put it together at the last minute so there had been no time to make it a shippable product, let alone submit it to the App Store for review. I also chickened out from showing it to anyone there because it seemed silly to show it to people who obviously already understood the urgency of the situation.

So I came home and continued working on it.

I added support for the global sea level data. I also did some UI work like adding pull to refresh to update the timeline.

And that was nice so of course I didn’t ship it. I added support for RSS feeds, not because it was super important, but just because parsing RSS feeds in Swift using XMLCoder is so much fun and displaying an RSS article in a WKWebView is so easy.

And then I realized it didn’t make sense for all these data sources to be built into the application. Oh the horror of having to ship an update each time I wanted to display something from a new source. So of course I created a JSON file on my web site that listed all the data sources, and modified the app to dynamically update its internal list from there.

I was happy with that. Did I ship it? Of course not. Greta linked to the Global Footprint Network and off I was adding overshoot days as my next pet feature. However this one was not a simple x/y data set, so I had to devise a new mechanism to describe it in my JSON source file in a way that the app could display.

That totally worked. My app was now able to handle different types of data sources while having minimal knowledge of them built-in. The next logical step then was to not ship it and implement the ability to extrapolate the data for cases where the available data did not extend all the way to today.

Obviously I could have polished what I had built up to that point and submitted it to the App Store. But there is so much climate information out there, each one more tantalizing than the previous one. This time I set my sight on the MCC carbon clock. Because displaying how much time we have left until doom was obviously a hard requirement to make this a shipping product. And at this point the app is agnostic, so I had to invent yet another way to describe this to the app without hardcoding it in.

This rigmarole of adding features went on for over two years. These episodes were interspersed with periods of polishing work that consisted partly of me repeating that if I can just finish x then I can ship it. But then I another possible feature caught my attention. This process is of course a very important part of software engineering that many developers out there who work on personal projects will handily recognize.

Over time I added support for entering personal notes, iCloud syncing, displaying country flags, showing temperature data, running the app on iPads, running the app on macOS, properly attributing data to their original sources, exposing customization settings, navigating the timeline with a scrub bar, displaying explanations of the data, and accepting donations. I also made countless iterations on the user interface. Not mentioning the making of an app icon that I thought I could stand looking at every day.

As time went on, the added complexity was not helping my case. Implementing features and moving to others without completely finishing the previous ones is rarely a recipe for success. The more features you have to polish, the more daunting the shipping effort seems to be. There was also the added anxiety that while I was doing this, climate change was continuing to get worse.

All that to say you sometimes have to just go for it. There is a ton of polish I feel is still missing in Climateer version 1.0. Better onboarding. Better UI. Better graphs. You name it. But at the end of the day, I’m happy it’s out there and I really hope some people find it useful.

The False Narrative of Changing our Behaviour to Fix the Climate

The Guardian published the results of a 10-country survey on behavioural changes people are willing to make to combat climate change. Foretelling the authors angle, two of the titles in the study presentation are “Accelerating behaviour change for a sustainable future” and “Sharing the responsibility for climate action”.

The implication from this form of phrasing is that we as individuals are responsible for climate change. We are not. And going down this path is buying into a narrative that has been peddled for years by business and industry with the specific intent to clean their hands of that responsibility.

We saw it with recycling. We were led to believe that if we recycled, things would get better. They did not. And the reason for this is that we are not responsible for materials being overproduced and wasted. Individuals don’t mass produce goods. Businesses do.

The premise of the study is therefore incorrect and the results void of any usefulness. A more sustainable future cannot come by asking people to change their behaviour. Expecting that this will happen is, in effect, saying that businesses are waiting for consumers to change, and if consumers don’t change, businesses won’t either, and therefore we’re all fucked and it’s our fault.

The madness in repeating this narrative is infuriating. Primarily because it’s entirely backwards. We are part of a system, so change has to come from the top down. Governments must put laws and incentives in place, businesses will then change how and what they produce, and finally consumers will automatically make the more sustainable choices.

Some of the survey questions frame the problem using “I” in a way that are immediate non-starters.

I don’t think there is an agreement among experts on the best solutions to preserve the planet

I disagree with the question. There is no set of solutions that will fix everything. We don’t need the best solutions and debating which ones are the best is pointless. We need all the help we can get and so we should apply all solutions. If a solution gets us one drop in the ocean closer to our goal, we should use it.

I lack information and guidance about what to do

I think I’m more informed than the average person, but again, the problem is not that every single citizen needs more information in order to solve the climate crisis. We do not hold the levers that can make these changes happen. I don’t have a billion dollar chequebook and I don’t control an oil multinational. Do you?

I believe environmental threats are over estimated

What I believe does not matter. If the captain of the ship says we’re about to hit an iceberg, what I personally believe has absolutely no bearing on what needs to be done. It’s not our job as citizens to decide what is the level of threat. We are seeing first hand during this pandemic the terrible damage that occurs when individuals unilaterally make societal decisions. We cannot ask the patient to decide on a course of treatment. That’s the doctor’s job.

Of course we do have to change our habits. Some of us don’t know it yet and that is fine. Because the problem is not us. We only consume the products and services that are offered to us. The idea that businesses are waiting to offer cleaner or more sustainable products until consumers start buying them is ridiculous. If the only car available is an electric one, that’s what people will buy. Businesses have to offer cleaner products and services. And it’s the government that has the power to force them to do it.