climate change

[Guest guest]

heard this fellow on the radio this morn..

mayhaps the blackout in the NE of the US is some sort of cosmic blowback

 

 

With Eyes Wide Shut

 

Climate change threatens the future of humanity, but we refuse to

respond rationally

 

George Monbiot

Tuesday August 12, 2003

The Guardian

 

We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain,

we recognise that our existence is governed by material realities,

and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But

underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs

the moment in which we live, then generalises it, projecting our

future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the

superficial world of our reason, is our true reality. All that

separates us from the indigenous people of Australia is that they

recognise this and we do not.

 

Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the

conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by

reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of

Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and

shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the

Blairs' retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of

economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with

Hitler. Instead, we whine about the heat and thumb through the

brochures for holidays in Iceland. The future has been laid out

before us, but the deep eye with which we place ourselves on Earth

will not see it.

 

Of course, we cannot say that the remarkable temperatures in Europe

this week are the result of global warming. What we can say is that

they correspond to the predictions made by climate scientists. As the

met office reported on Sunday, "all our models have suggested that

this type of event will happen more frequently." In December it

predicted that, as a result of climate change, 2003 would be the

warmest year on record. Two weeks ago its research centre reported

that the temperature rises on every continent matched the predicted

effects of climate change caused by human activities, and showed that

natural impacts, such as sunspots or volcanic activity, could not

account for them. Last month the World Meteorological Organisation

(WMO) announced that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century

is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past

1,000 years", while "the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that

for the whole period". Climate change, the WMO suggests, provides an

explanation not only for record temperatures in Europe and India but

also for the frequency of tornadoes in the United States and the

severity of the recent floods in Sri Lanka.

 

There are, of course, still those who deny that any warming is taking

place, or who maintain that it can be explained by natural phenomena.

But few of them are climatologists, fewer still are climatologists

who do not receive funding from the fossil-fuel industry. Their

credibility among professionals is now little higher than that of the

people who claim that there is no link between smoking and cancer.

Yet the prominence the media give them reflects not only the demands

of the car advertisers. We want to believe them, because we wish to

reconcile our reason with our dreaming.

 

The extreme events to which climate change appears to have

contributed reflect an average rise in global temperatures of 0.6C

over the past century. The consensus among climatologists is that

temperatures will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8C:

by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase we have suffered so

far. Some climate scientists, recognising that global warming has

been retarded by industrial soot, whose levels are now declining,

suggest that the maximum should instead be placed between 7 and 10C.

We are not contemplating the end of holidays in Seville. We are

contemplating the end of the circumstances which permit most human

beings to remain on Earth.

 

Climate change of this magnitude will devastate the Earth's

productivity. New research in Australia suggests that the amount of

water reaching the rivers will decline up to four times as fast as

the percentage reduction of rainfall in dry areas. This, alongside

the disappearance of the glaciers, spells the end of irrigated

agriculture. Winter flooding and the evaporation of soil moisture in

the summer will exert similar effects on rainfed farming. Like crops,

humans will simply wilt in some of the hotter parts of the world: the

1,500 deaths in India through heat exhaustion this summer may

prefigure the necessary evacuation, as temperatures rise, of many of

the places currently considered habitable. There is no chance of

continuity here; somehow we must persuade our dreamselves to confront

the end of life as we know it.

 

Paradoxically, the approach of this crisis corresponds with the

approach of another. The global demand for oil is likely to outstrip

supply within the next 10 or 20 years. Some geologists believe it may

have started already. It is tempting to knock the two impending

crises together, and to conclude that the second will solve the

first. But this is wishful thinking. There is enough oil under the

surface of the Earth to cook the planet and, as the price rises, the

incentive to extract it will increase. Business will turn to even

more polluting means of obtaining energy, such as the use of tar sand

and oil shale, or "underground coal gasification" (setting fire to

coal seams). But because oil in the early stages of extraction is the

cheapest and most efficient fuel, the costs of energy will soar,

ensuring that we can no longer buy our way out of trouble with air

conditioning, water pumping and fuel-intensive farming.

 

So instead we place our faith in technology. In an age in which

science is as authoritative but, to most, as inscrutable as God once

was, we look to its products much as the people of the middle ages

looked to divine providence. Somehow "they" will produce and install

the devices - the wind turbines or solar panels or tidal barrages -

that will solve both problems while ensuring that we need make no

change to the way we live.

 

But the widespread deployment of these technologies will not happen

until rising prices ensure that it becomes a commercial imperative,

and by then it is too late. Even so, we could not meet our current

levels of consumption without covering almost every yard of land and

shallow sea with generating devices. In other words, if we leave the

market to govern our politics, we are finished. Only if we take

control of our economic lives, and demand and create the means by

which we may cut our energy use to 10% or 20% of current levels will

we prevent the catastrophe that our rational selves can comprehend.

This requires draconian regulation, rationing and prohibition: all

the measures which our existing politics, informed by our dreaming,

forbid.

 

So we slumber through the crisis. Waking up demands that we upset the

seat of our consciousness, that we dethrone our deep unreason and

usurp it with our rational and predictive minds. Are we capable of

this, or are we destined to sleepwalk to extinction?

 

www.monbiot.com

[Guest guest]

How depressing!

 

Jo

 

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