Doomist or realist? Meet the scientist who says the climate collapse has already begun

It was a moment of clarity and despair that led to Professor Jem Bendell’s transformation, leaving him at the heart of a contentious new global social movement.

Things were going swimmingly in Bendell’s life at the time. Back in 2012 he had been named by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. At Cumbria University, his career teaching and researching in sustainability leadership was taking off.

Jem Bendell speaks at an Extinction Rebellion event in London in 2019.

Just shy of 40 years old, he was made a full professor.

He was publishing papers in prominent journals, and his two books had been well received.

“I was living in a beautiful part of the world, the Lake District in the UK,” he recalls, speaking from his new home in Bali as he prepares to travel to Sydney for this weekend’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

Then, while preparing for his inaugural professorial speech, Bendell dived back into the scientific literature to check in on how quickly the climate was heating, and how well our efforts were going at cutting emissions to slow the process on rates of habitat and biodiversity loss.

What he read shattered him.

“I’d always thought, you know, we had the rest of the century to change; otherwise we would be in a pickle.”

He began to tuck the scientific papers and new stories that bothered him most into a folder. These were the sorts of stories many will remember. Stories about ancient frozen gasses burping from the Arctic tundra decades before scientists predicted such a thing might happen, weird heat spikes in the Pacific. They were stories about events he had read about, but not expected the world to see during his lifetime.

He came to believe that the scientific data was being played down, minimised or misunderstood. Even the UN’s review protocols watered down its analysis, he believed. Science communicators suggesting that the world still had time to arrest climate change were either plain wrong or for some reason unable to speak a truth he saw clearly. Large scale societal collapse was not just likely, but inevitable.

In 2017, Bendell took a year off to properly investigate his folder of horrors and wrote a paper, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. In dry academic language it laid out his case that “near-term social collapse” was locked in, and that there was a need within his field to address “the end of the idea that we can either solve or cope with climate change”.

It explored what he called the “semi-censorship” he attributed to the academic community, and the various types of denialism that he believed had taken hold within it. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Stanley Cohen, he described two distinct forms of denialism, “interpretive” and “implicative”. “If we accept certain facts but interpret them in a way that makes them ‘safer’ to our personal psychology, it is a form of ‘interpretative denial’. If we recognise the troubling implications of these facts but respond by busying ourselves on activities that do not arise from a full assessment of the situation, then that is ‘implicative denial’.”

Bendell submitted the paper to the journal Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy, whose reviewers demanded significant revisions that he was unwilling to make. Instead, he published it as an unreviewed paper on a university website, where it came to take on its own life.

Over the years, a million people downloaded the paper, which evolved into a movement known as Deep Adaptation, with Bendell at its heart. He left teaching – and the Lake District – and moved to Ubud in Bali, where he teaches permaculture and contributes to the growing online Deep Adaptation movement.

The paper heavily influenced the founders of the Extinction Rebellion movement, and Bendell addressed one of its early rallies in London in 2019.

“We gather and rebel not with a vision of a fairytale future where we have fixed the climate, but because it is right to do what we can,” he said. “To slow the change. To reduce the harm. To save what we can. To invite us back to sanity and love.

“The truth is we are scared, and we are brave enough to say so. The truth is we are grieving, and we are proud enough to say so. The truth is we are traumatised, and we are open enough to say so. We are angry, and we are calm enough to say so and invite others to join us.”

Many did, but many others rejected Bendell’s view, for reasons both scientific and political.

Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, one of the world’s best known climate scientists, dismisses the movement’s adherents as doomers, and describes them as dangerous and misguided.

In his 2021 book The New Climate War, he writes of doomism as another arm of climate denialism.

After all, if collapse is inevitable, what is the point of taking action at all?

“With many on the political right already opposed for ideological and tribal reasons, doomism provides a means for co-opting those on the left,” wrote Mann. “It is a brilliant strategy for building a truly bipartisan coalition for inaction.”

Even some of those scientists in XR circles rejected Bendell’s argument.

“Bendell’s brand of doomism relies heavily on misinterpreted climate science that undermines the credibility of his claims,” wrote three of them in a critical paper.

“In fact, ‘Deep Adaptation’ consistently cherry-picks data, cites false experts, puts forward logical fallacies, and disregards robust scientific consensus. Bendell defends himself by offering unsupported reasons for activists and the public to distrust mainstream climate science. In all of these regards, ‘Deep Adaptation’ mimics the practices that deniers of global warming have wielded for decades.”

To this day, it is the common view of climate scientists that warming will continue at a gradual though increasing pace until greenhouse gas emissions are stabilised and then cut, and that each 10th of a degree of warming that is avoided will have profound positive implications for the climate.

Bendell remains unrepentant. Indeed, in 2020 he updated his paper to assert that not only was societal collapse inevitable, but that it had already begun and was the cause of recent reductions in life expectancy in some Western nations and degradation in the quality of our lives and the institutions meant to serve us.

This is the message he will be presenting in Sydney this weekend, though he disagrees that it is paralysing in effect.

Rather, he says that expecting some great leader or new technology to swoop in and save humankind from the mess it has made of the planet and its climate impedes action. The belief in endless progress, that the world will somehow be better in the future than it was in the past, is a juvenile artefact of modernity.

So what to do if you accept he is right? Bendell suggests you take a deep breath and then time to grieve. He is an advocate for the COVID-era trend of quiet quitting for the desk-bound practitioner of deep adaptation.

With that done, says Bendell, many will want to leave their work and refocus their lives on simpler things.

“I found I didn’t want to try and pitch for research funding,” he says. “I didn’t want to try and recruit more students to a new MBA program. You know, it just it felt yucky to me.”

So now he teaches permaculture in Bali, a form of farming that restores nature, that does not rely on fertilisers or agribusiness, that is, in his words, collapse-ready.

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