Benumbed by numbers

Or why the grim coronavirus case counts and dire measures of global warming fail to move us to meaningful action.

Energy prices are through the roof, coronavirus cases are spiralling out of control, and if the G20 don’t get their act together in Glasgow at COP26, average global temperatures are set to rise by more than two percent by the end of the century.

At that level, the planet’s remaining coral reefs will be obliterated; sea creatures will roast in their shells, and five million more people a year will perish in forest fires and other extreme heat events.

To judge by the numbers, the situation is dire and growing grimmer by the minute. If we didn’t know it already, the planet and, with it, our way of life, is in peril.

I write “our” but, as the coronavirus pandemic has shown, if you are poor or live in a country without access to regular medical care or life-saving drugs and vaccines – or where you can no longer count on the monsoon rains to irrigate your fields; or where you have been evicted from your ancestral lands -  then there is nothing new about this crisis; you have been living it for some time.

These numbers should induce anxiety and a deep sense of dread – rage even. But rather than spur us to action, the figures swim before our eyes, benumbing and befuddling us.

“I think there’s been a desensitisation to mortality”, one public health expert informed The Guardian this week. No shit Sherlock.

On 18 October, the UK recorded nearly 50,000 coronavirus cases and 223 deaths – the highest number since 9 March. The UK’s death rate is triple that of France, Germany and Italy. Yet, the same statisticians tell us, deaths are currently far below the 8,433 recorded at the peak of the second wave in January 2021. And public health experts wonder why no one is paying attention anymore?

There is nothing new about the modern obsession with numbers. During the great plague that swept London in 1665, St Giles and other London parishes posted weekly “bills of mortality” to raise awareness of the growing death toll. However, it wasn’t until the 1840s that statisticians, spurred by the Victorian sanitary movement, began systematically collecting data on the health and longevity of populations and compiling “life tables” aggregated by district.

Pioneers of this new science, such as William Farr, the chief statistician at the General Registry Office, hoped that these tables would reveal underlying patterns or laws governing the rates of sickness in particular populations and localities. In this way, assistance – in the form of sanitary improvements – could be directed to unhealthy districts, reducing the threat of infectious disease and, with it, the fear of epidemics and pandemics.

But rather than banish panic, the Victorian obsession with what Hacking has termed this “avalanche of printed numbers” simply displaced this dread into the future, inaugurating “a morbid and fearful fascination with numbers” that continues to this day.

When confronted with an imminent existential crisis – such as occurred in March 2020 when Imperial College modellers predicted the UK was facing 250,000 to 550,000 deaths unless the government changed tack and locked down hard – these technologies of dread can be useful. But once the immediate crisis has passed, then the numbers cease to have the same effect - particularly if, as is the case now, they have been normalised. Even when we make a conscious effort to grasp the human cost behind the statistics, our imaginations shrink before the effort. As Camus writes in The Plague:

“When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”

It is the same with global heating. The other day I was scrolling a web feature on the Climate Crisis. Illustrated by videos of burning forests, scorched tundra and cars inching along flooded highways, the feature used innovative graphics to plot humanity’s path to disaster. If we continue on our present disastrous track, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C this century could be breached in six years’ time. And in a worst-case scenario, we could see temperatures of 2C higher within 20 years.

According to António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, the current “net zero” pledges by signatories to the 2015 Paris Accord fall far short of what is required. Instead, they would result in a six percent increase in emissions by 2030. If we want to get off our current “catastrophic pathway”, warns Guterres, we need to cut emissions by 45 percent.

All very scary, you might say. But they said the same thing about Covid and you and I are still here. Besides, what can we do about it?

That’s the problem with using numbers to spur action against looming apocalypses. Just as coronavirus case counts and disease models project the threat of Covid into the future, so the stream of graphs and reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate experts abstracts the problem of global warming in the same direction.

The result is a cultural and imaginative disconnect in which we are unable to see climate change and the despoiling of the planet as part of our collective past and ongoing present, one in which the lifestyles we take for granted – and many of our family inheritances - our deeply implicated. Instead, as Amitav Ghosh, writes in his new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, we regard the phenomenon “as unprecedented and utterly novel”. Scientists have even coined a term for this “new” geological epoch.

The Anthropocene denotes the period when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. But while some scientists date the Anthropocene to the detonation of the first nuclear devices in the 1940s, others trace it to the 1800s and the industrial revolution.

What this attempt to divide geological time into neat epochs misses is that the human activities driving the Anthropocene and the emergence of new infectious diseases, such as the extraction of fossil fuels from formerly pristine rainforests - and the expansion of agriculture and urban settlements - are as old as civilization and, in the case of capitalism, rest on a mechanistic view of the Earth in which nature exists only as a resource to be exploited, rather than a semi-sentient entity in its own right.

Ghosh begins his book with the Dutch seizure of the Banda islands in Indonesia in 1621 and the subsequent deportation of the islands’ indigenous people in a bid to control the global trade in nutmeg, the precious spice which, at the time, grew nowhere else on Earth.

The story of the genocide of the Bandanese and the extraction of Banda’s natural resources in the name of the “venerable” East India Company is one of the earliest and most brutal examples of the European expansionist project. In Ghosh’s hands, it also becomes a parable for the history of extractive capitalism and what he calls Earth’s “terraforming” – a term usually applied to the molding of new planets but which for Ghosh is shorthand for the colonisation and despoilation of nature and the indigenous peoples who depend on its bounty (and wish to preserve it for future generations).

But rather than acknowledging our part in these histories, we spend our time staring mutely at the numbers and praying that technology will come to rescue.

How else to explain our fascination with Jeff Bezos’s and Elon Musk’s efforts to colonise outer space and establish “self-sustaining habitats” on the moon and other far-away planets?

Bezos says that seeing Earth from the perspective of his New Shepard rocket in July has given him a new appreciation for the “fragility” of Earth, and he has since pledged $10 billion to combat climate change via his Bezos Earth Fund. But while such gifts will be welcomed by climate activists, when set against the long and shameful history of terraforming such “off-sets” are mere marks on a very long ledger sheet.

As with preventing future pandemics, addressing climate change will take more than shuffling numbers from one column to another.