More Than Just 'Carry On' Surviving the loss of normalcy requires new approaches.

• Author: Kayyem, Juliette
• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

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.

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...