James Renwick’s new book aims to make climate change something we feel, not just experience in the abstract. Shanti Mathias talks to him about the emotions involved in working to understand the climate.
“The time to act is now,” James Renwick writes more than once in his new book Under The Weather. Styled as a ‘future forecast for New Zealand’, the book is a clear and concise tour of some of Aotearoa’s climate future – what we know, why we know it, what might change and what can be done about it. Through it all, Renwick – a veteran meteorologist and climate communicator who has helped produce IPCC reports – is clear: as hard as it may be to imagine, we don’t have to live in a world where climate change is happening . There are things we can do to change terrible patterns to imagine a newer and better future.
Climate scientists have been telling us variations of this message for decades. How does it feel to push for action for so long – and still be so far from where we need to be? “It’s getting more and more frustrating,” Renwick tells me. “The message hasn’t changed.” He sometimes worries that climate warnings will be like the proverbial boy who cried wolf — warnings echoing through the threatened countryside, taken less and less seriously each time. But the wolf is here: scientists are drawing it with ever greater precision, learning more about the places it will ravage.
If it were up to Renwick, he wouldn’t have to report anything about the climate at all. He would be relaxing with his computers, looking at the climate in the big picture. “I do this because I love data analysis, I love looking at the clouds. Left to my own devices, that would be all I would do,” he says. But then he began to give talks; people kept telling him they understood climate when he talked about it. Climate cannot be a mere scientific curiosity for him, but a place where the messy realities of politics and policy, corporations and culture are also at work.
Under The Weather’s writing style leans toward calm clarity: measured, even sentences delivered with authority. This is not the kind of non-fiction book that has footnotes or references, or even an index; the last few pages are simply a list of resources for those who want to learn more. That’s not a mistake: this is climatic writing for a person who worries about graphs. (“I like numbers and looking at graphs,” says Renwick. “But if you go to the pub with a graph, you don’t get the same crowd as when you start telling stories.”) So Under The Weather is Renwick’s project to make the amendment of climate something to feel, not just to experience abstractly.
Some of the hardest parts to write, he says, are the parts about his childhood; Renwick describes the feeling of returning to his home in Christchurch as a teenager to find the bike shed blown down by the wind, the crisp feeling of the bitter cold he knew when he was younger becoming that much less frequent. The book took four years to write, squeezed in between his many other commitments. In the habit of writing as a scientist, where personal stories are forbidden, Renwick found it difficult to know which anecdotes told the best climate stories. “I don’t usually go through my personal story, but I wanted to be engaging, to be human, not a cyborg in an office with a computer.”
The other demanding section was when he described how climate change would affect the Pacific Islands. One of the best things about Under The Weather is its specificity: while Renwick draws on Australian, North American and European examples, he also has specific details about the weather in New Zealand and the Pacific. “I don’t live in the tropical Pacific and haven’t had direct experience,” says Renwick. “I needed to talk to people who are right in the firing line of extreme temperatures and precipitation, knowing that these impacts are happening now. You write with a heavy heart about this, so I had to pump up my optimism quite a bit.”
Renwick sees himself as an optimist. The book lists known and effective solutions: active transport, investing in solar and wind energy, better home insulation and efficient appliances and production processes, more climate-friendly land use. He has less time for high-tech, unproven, unscaled solutions like solar radiation management (blocking sunlight) and carbon capture and storage (sucking carbon out of the air by seeding iron in the oceans or grinding rocks). “We can’t bet on a technological fix,” he wrote. When it comes to implementing climate solutions and envisioning a world where these changes are possible, this optimism is urgent. “We need a vision of a positive future or no action will be taken,” he wrote.
Optimism and hope are important, says Renwick. He hopes his book will give people a reason to act, not make them despair. Hope, he says, is an active, courageous mood, not a vague sense of optimism. He’s not protesting, instead focusing on his work with the IPCC and the panel on climate change, but climate action is something that takes all forms. “I can be hopeful because there are young activists who are hitting the roads to push for action on emissions,” he says.
But with the experience of hope comes anger and confusion. Fossil fuel executives are the sole object of his wrath in Under The Weather. “I don’t know what goes through the mind of such a person,” he tells me. “I don’t know how they sleep at night… They know the consequences of climate change – how could they not? — and yet they continue to focus on the short-term end.” He sees powerful, wealthy people who continue to profit from drilling for oil and coal, and he despairs. “I don’t know how to change these people’s minds. I don’t know what story to tell. They sure know what they’re doing and they’re adamant about it.
Renwick wants people to talk about climate; wants people to remember that just because action was urgent for two decades, it is no less urgent now. Know that they are already experiencing the effects of climate change; not abstractly like doomsday headlines, but in humid air, tropical storms, warm winters, dry summers. You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know what’s going on – and you don’t have to be a climate change commissioner to know that something needs to change. “I have access on my computer to global datasets that show me the change happening on a large scale,” says Renwick. But he wants people to know that climate is already all around them. “It’s getting warmer all the time – we don’t have the frosts like we used to. We interact with the climate every day – it’s not like we look out the window and see a big apocalyptic thing. This is already happening and there is no need.”
Under the Weather: A Future Forecast for New Zealand by James Renwick (HarperCollins NZ, $40) is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.