Wolfgang Knorr – The Morality Trap

Climate activists need community – and spaces for dialogue and discussions

Wolfgang Knorr is a climate scientist, consultant for the European Space Agency and guest researcher at the Department of Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University

Cross-posted from Wolfgang’s Substack Climate Uncensored

The longer I look at the climate issue, the more it reminds me of the quantum physics problems I worked on at the beginning of my science career: Whenever I thought I’d understood something, it was an unmistakable sign that I was on the wrong track. As soon as I thought I had grasped the essence of it, I invested all my energies in this new realisation and started to derive everything else from it – and in this way lost sight of the bigger picture. The same now happens with my endeavors to get my head around the climate “problem”.

Although I didn’t know any climate researchers who thought it was possible to limit global warming to 1.5°C back in 2015, I welcomed the decision. It is a mark that, while not 100% safe, promised to limit the consequences of climate change to such an extent that we could live with it in the long term. Today, almost ten years after the Paris Agreement, I can see that even this well-intentioned resolution has turned out to be a trap.

I know no IPCC author who has not taken on this burden of unpaid work with the best of intentions. Writing the report requires an enormous amount of diligence and coordination with colleagues, and authorship generally doesn’t further your career because it is not considered original research. (I myself contributed to the third report.) However, despite of, or maybe due to its good intentions, the IPCC itself has a morality problem. Like the proverbial road to hell, the road to climate collapse is paved with good intentions.

The IPCC’s morality problem

Current global mitigation science, as defined by the IPCC’s Working Group III’s (WGIII) 6th Assessment Report (AR6), Chapter 3, presents itself with the following problems:

• Facilitation of delay by radically downplaying the scale of the challenge of mitigation through reliance on unproven “sci fi” scenarios, such as global net negative emissions through massive deployment of carbon dioxide removal

• A general unwillingness to engage with concepts that deviate from business-as-usual, such as supply-side management of carbon emissions, non-monetary allocation principles such as rationing of fossil fuels, energy or other goods, degrowth, or widening of the scope of the commons

• The unfairness of the scenarios used where the rich remain rich and the poor poor, post-colonial power structures are maintained, and scenarios of convergence of living standards are sidelined.

• The enormous potential for land grab, ecosystem destruction, water and food system disruption due to massive deployment of bioenergy and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) in the promoted scenarios.

• The democratic deficit in secret datasets and limited community engagement on a research issue impacting citizens’ futures world-wide, with real impact on policy.

If the whole climate issue proves to be such a minefield, what is there left to do or say? Firstly, I believe there are a number of well-established facts that can serve as an anchor in this sea of daunting complexity. Here, I’d like to list the essential ones:

1. The Earth’s CO2 content and temperature have always risen and fallen together in the geological past, so the two are clearly linked.

2. The climate problem is an extreme example of a collective problem: because greenhouse gases mix rapidly in the atmosphere, we can only solve the problem globally and together.

3. If we continue to burn oil, gas and coal until supplies are exhausted, the earth will warm by well over ten degrees, making agriculture impossible and large parts of the earth directly uninhabitable due to the humid heat.

4. Rapid global warming of several degrees Celsius has only occurred once in the known history of the earth, but the pace of warming today is believed to be at least ten times faster.

5. On the other hand, at the end of the last ice age, the climate did warm at a similar rate to today, but only regionally, and before the widespread introduction of agriculture and the associated rapid increase in human population. Since then, the Earth’s climate has been extremely stable – an era that has now finally come to an end.

6. Decades of warnings, appeals, good intentions and climate policy have done nothing to change the fact that we are continuing to heat up our planet at an increasing rate.

But what does that mean, is there anything I can learn from this? What dawns on me is that we are conducting a monstrous collective experiment together – with vastly differing degrees of complicity – with an almost entirely uncertain outcome. The best analogy I can find is the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Just as the apprentice thought it was important to be good at magic, we still think that the most important thing is to understand the climate system or to develop the right technologies. And that is the reason why, to this day, climate scientists – or tech-fantasizing billionaires – are the main people consulted on climate issues.

If it is the case that we will only react to the climate crisis when we all, right up to the richest and most powerful, feel the negative consequences directly, then it is completely irrelevant how dangerous climate change actually is. We will simply continue on our current path until the system breaks1. And at the moment, it doesn’t look as if we are collectively in a position to escape this diabolical mechanism of self-destruction.

For me personally, the main conclusion I can draw is to look at my own motivation. And there, I make some interesting observations: on the one hand, I always had maintained that climate science tends to oversell its own importance, that there was far more uncertainty out there than what is usually admitting and there was usually an unwillingness to confront one’s own failures and complicity – but on the other, I also have it in me that I want to show off as an ‘expert’.

It is precisely this assumption of knowing or understanding more than others, this sense of academic privilege, that makes climate scientists like myself fall into the morality trap time and again.

So my path initially led from climate science to what we commonly call activism. Only to realise that exact same fallacies apply there, too. A good example are the often repeated warnings from scientists about an impending climate catastrophe, which I myself took part in. It is seldom asked: What is my motivation here, who am I communicating with and what is the message? The problem with such warnings is that they are usually launched in such a way that they come across as warnings to the general public. However, the lack of any real influence that ordinary citizens could exert is usually ignored, making the warnings appear elitist and arrogant. It would therefore be more honest if we as climate scientists were to go on strike and occupy the Ministry of the Environment or Economics. But we usually don’t dare to do that, and so the effect fizzles out and the communicated emergency situation immediately seems much less urgent.

A lack of honesty also comes in the way when I think I have to appeal to the common sense of my fellow human beings. Do I really know what motivates either me, or my fellow human beings? When I listen to myself, I find a longing for harmony and closeness to nature on the one hand, but also a lot of anger, powerlessness and despair. And this anger, I sometimes feel, can also be directed against nature or my fellow human beings. What if dominance over nature – and the climate crisis is just one expression of this – stems from a deep-seated anger, a despair that is fuelled by this very alienation from nature? Then perhaps appeals to people’s self-interest will backfire. Because it feels in their self-interest to destroy and vent their anger.

And so, neglecting the unspoken, subliminal messages can easily backfire. If I define myself as an activist and make demands on the existing authorities, then I am taking part in an unspoken collective agreement that creates these authorities in the first place. The moment nobody believes in them anymore, they no longer exist as authorities. And so, as an activist, I automatically take part in a social game that further cements the existing power structures.

The Nigerian philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé has described this situation as a ‘death spiral’. The failure of our imagination – that more can go wrong in the climate crisis than the IPCC is telling us, or that we don’t realise what we want – is only leading us deeper and deeper into this spiral. We are so attached to our privileges, to the existing power structures, and can imagine so little radical change that we end up being more afraid of new ideas than of the impending climate and ecological catastrophe. But the radical changes will come, either through climate change itself or through our response to it.

In a situation like this, only crazy ideas that call everything into question can help. Akómoláfé calls this ‘trickster energy’, the power of the magician, and talks about ‘post-activism’. For me, this means three things above all: moving away from a purely rational approach and giving the immediate experience its rightful place; saying goodbye to the idea that something has to stay the way it is at the moment; and realising that nothing and no one exists completely separately.

I came much closer to my first goal than I had hoped for, when I was caught up in the worst extreme rainfall event ever recorded in Europe, in September 2023. At that time, it rained as much in just over 24 hours on the Greek peninsula of Pelion as it usually does in an entire year. I had just arrived from Germany with my then eight-year-old daughter when we realised that we were cut off from the rest of the family for days. The stench from thousands of decaying animal carcasses that had spread along the route home is still etched deep into my memory. It was then that I realised that I also suffer from climate anxiety.

And then there are those things that seem to be immovable and never change, but which prevent us from finally breaking out of the death spiral. At the top of my personal list is the way climate scientists communicate with the public. The approach always seems to be the same: Experts, and above all the IPCC, warn of the impending catastrophe, but then follow up with a positive message that if we just try hard enough, we can still make it

But do climate scientists have to take on the role of parents who have to tell off their children but at the same time protect them from messages that are too frightening? How about turning citizens into experts and scientists into listeners? The founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, once warned that many climate scientists suffer from ‘Betriebsblindheit’ (professional blindness) and are therefore unable to recognise the true dangers associated with the climate crisis. People who have recently been victims of climate disasters are perhaps much better qualified to do this. What if we had suitable public fora in which such an exchange, which is unusual for us, could take place regularly?

And that brings me to my third and final point: we should overcome the many divisions that separate us humans in the climate crisis. For example, the division between those who know and those who have to learn, or between the enlightened ones and the doubters. And if I’m completely honest, my indignation at those who have the ‘wrong’ views is always hypocritical, because there is always something of the ideas, values and feelings of the others als in me. I’m also, secretly, tempted by the prospect that net-zero declarations could still work in the end. And somewhere inside me there is also the angry anti-establishment climate denier, the doubter of expert opinions, or the enthusiastic or angry activist.

I believe there is a need to overcome the boundary between climate activists and other citizens, to define the concept of climate activism much more broadly. It is also climate activism when we campaign for more citizen participation and democracy. Or when we take care of local issues and directly experience how we and others react to and deal with problems. In my case, this has meant putting my energies where I carry immediate responsibility: towards my family, the land we farm here in Greece.

What remains is the feeling of powerlessness in the face of a task that far exceeds my strength. But it is precisely this kind of doubt that is rooted in the erroneous assumption that we are dealing with a question of individual responsibility. Which is why we need community – and spaces for dialogue and discussions. Several years ago, we provided such spaces to academics who felt powerless, as part of Faculty for a Future, which I co-founded – but such spaces rarely ever exist at scientific conferences. What gives me hope, however, is that more and more such spaces are emerging in many places, as part of citizens’ assemblies or grassroots movements.

The climate crisis is not only an extreme case of a collective challenge, but also an extremely complex one. Conventional notions of expertise and specialisation are therefore failing. The essence of radical honesty is to recognise this failure of our conventional ideas and to draw lessons from it.

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