A WORLD REBORN?

Climate change, or global warming, has taken on a political color, because those with special interests have striven to discredit the findings and interpretations.

Furthermore, they have attributed personal agendas of self interest to the researchers. I am suggesting that the stage has been reached, that regardless of how seductive it may be posed, denial is not tenable and a change in course is necessary, but it is not sufficient, although necessary, for such a change to be limited to political and economic dimensions of human consciousness and experience.

I take as axiomatic in the search for truth and justice there should be respect for evidence and reason. There are times when we, as also must for example courts, rely on expert testimony. A problem arises for people, as so often I am one, who do not have the necessary background or application to review all the relevant arguments. Then it becomes too easily of believing what we want to believe, of being governed by an ideology that may not be in our individual or collective best interest.

The citizen, or juror, should find it relatively easy to come up with a set of robust rules that apply to these cases. These rules of thumb might include basic considerations such as who conducted the observations or experiments, have they been indepently verified, where were they published, and what unexpected findings were discovered? These no doubt are better formulated by those who have thought more about this matter, and I am sure such rules exist.

Those who dispute the results and opinions of scientists are often doing so based on their successful application of public relations in relation to smoking.The proponents of the anti-smoking case have a context, needless to say context is not a footnote. We can observe the emergence of the public relations industry from its foundation in Freudian and behaviorist pyschology, mass production and mass media, in particular television.  Thus we can observe the interesting contraction between the affirmation of the individual right to make independent decisions, and the careful understanding of how those decisions are made, especially in circumstances where an individual either has not understood the full case, or has a strong emotional reason to dispute, or ignore the evidence.

If an individual continues to smoke, then they are likely to complicate their health, if not in the immediate future, and it could be argued their are other environmental and behavioral causes of ill health other than smoking. Why let individual welfare, and the evidence  has been reliably observed for over eighty years if not the statistical proof, get in the way of an profitable business. After all it is not just the corporations that are making profits, but others such as the suppliers, for example the farmers, and consideration should be given to the social impact on those communities. 

This argument, or some reasons along these lines, has at least two important implications. Firstly, and doubtless accurately, it suggests that other economic actors are not constrained by the consequences of their production and consumption. The very point of war industries is to disable and murder enemies, for example. The finite nature of the earth has never been a factor in economic production and consumption, in part because the limits of economic activity had not been measured.

Secondly,  there was a philosophical view, associated with the physics of how stuff acted in the world, that was an anlysis individual of individual cause and effect, which would allow the movement of objects  and even the mysterious force of gravitation to be calculated. This was a stunning scientific development, not least because Issac Newton carefully set out the assumtions every step along the way. The age of reason was not blind to the reality of light, and Newton engaged in experiments in optics, still physics established the basis for the leading technology and attitudes of the industrial age, which pervaded philosophy as it did the understanding of economics. We are still of the view, I suspect, that quantum mechanics has little to do with daily life, a proposition that does not stand scrutiny. Thus the what might be called the pervasive world view, or dominant paradigm of materialism, that ignores the evidence of language and consciousness, and reduces  the plantet and people around us to things as distinct form interconnected and interdependent living beings.

The exponents of the dark arts of self interest and manipulation in the public relations business know that if you tell the dominant story, you control behavior. They may, like Goering disparage culture, but in truth like the Nazis, who were the pioneers of public relations using the new technology of their day, they know how important culture is to individual and collective behavior. Of course, it is often expedient, as the case of smoking illustrates, to separate individual from collective behavior.

Television watching, for example, is a collective behavior, even as individuals are often isolated so it can be experienced as a solitary experience, or the collective experience is imagined rather than experienced. Controlling the story means controlling information, but equally there is a fallacy in supposing that such control can change lived reality. Like the inmates of Plato’s cave such a conceit is not a new idea, but rather one embellished by a pervasive technology. In Orwell’s 1984, only the inner party members, such as O’brien could access the off button. There is considerable power in turning off the stream of unconsciousness.

That said, I really do not know why the Rudd Government would have thought it was reasonable, or politically feasible to set their carbon emissions reduction  by 2020 at 5%, when expert opinion suggests that target would not meet yearly increase in carbon emissions. John Quiggin observed:

The long-awaited White Paper version of the government’s emissions trading scheme is out. I’ve been too disheartened to read anything more than the summary so far. The target of a 5 per cent reduction on 2000 emissions by 2020 seems designed to secure the support of the Opposition, which will probably not be forthcoming anyway. That’s about the only defence that could be made for it.
The government’s main argument in favour of such a weak target is based on Australia’s relatively high rate of population growth. I have no objection to per capita, rather than national, emissions targets in the context of a contract-and-converge agreement leading ultimately to a uniform global allowance per person. But if you wanted to argue that way, the fact that Australia has one of the highest emission levels per person in the world means that our (interim and final) reduction targets must be more stringent than those of other countries. 

 
At some point we should remind ourselves not so much of the politics but of the science. In this instance  political decisions have  governed by the judgment of the domestic realities, but with international implications especially in regard to the Copenhagen Conference in a year’s time at which the Obama Administration might be expected to be a major player. Bill McKibben writing in Mother Jones, but later picked up by CommonDreams sets out the facts as known to science. He observes that James Hansen told Congress in 1988 that the burning of fossil fuels was warming the Earth. Many people refused to accept the truth of this claim,for as Bill McKibben observed how could it be accepted that:

 The central fact of our economic lives (the ubiquitous fossil fuel that developed the developed world) is wrecking the central fact of our physical lives (the stable climate and sea level on which civilization rests). 

Politicians he says judge their actions by the political cycle (but as I have suggested, I do not believe those are the only political issues in play, but underlying cultural issues are acting as a hidden hand). So nine years late, it might be time to awaken from the sleep:

It was September 2007 that the tide began to turn. Every summer Arctic sea ice melts, and every fall it refreezes. The amount of open water has been steadily increasing for three decades, a percent or two every year-it’s been going at about the pace that the hairline recedes on a middle-aged man. It was worrisome, and scientists said all the summer ice could be gone by 2070 or so, which is an eyeblink in geologic time but an eternity in politician time. In late summer of last year, though, the melt turned into a rout-it was like those stories of people whose hair turns gray overnight. An area the size of Colorado was disappearing every week; the Northwest Passage was staying wide open all September, for the first time in history. Before long the Arctic night mercifully descended and the ice began to refreeze, but scientists were using words like “astounding.” They were recalculating-by one NASA scientist’s estimate the summer Arctic might now be free of ice by 2012. Which in politician years is “beginning of my second term.”

Tipping point, which might be part of the political conversation is not an “idle buzzword”, say Bill McKibben it means that there is “an amplifying mechanism” in play which is to suggest that the cause of global warming may be anthropogenic, “the physical world is taking over”. Thus reference Newton, and the dominant understanding of physical reality we all should have no trouble understanding the implication the process is almost out of control. So the talk about alarm may be very relevant indeed. He explains further:

 We poured carbon into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat; that excess heat began to melt ice. When that ice was melted, there was less white up north to reflect the sun’s rays back out to space, and more blue ocean to absorb them. Events began to feed upon themselves. And in the course of the last year, we’ve seen the same thing happening in other systems. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report showing that 2007 had seen a sudden and dramatic surge in the amount of methane, another heat-trapping gas, in the atmosphere. Apparently, one reason is that when we burned all that fossil fuel and began raising the temperature, we also started melting the permafrost-melting eight times more of it in some places over two decades than had thawed for the previous 1,000 years. And as that frozen soil thaws, it releases methane; enough of it now bubbles out to make “hot spots” in lakes and ponds that don’t freeze during the deepest part of the Siberian winter. The more methane, the more heat, the more methane.  

Alarm bells should be ringing not just because the polar ice caps are melting, but equally because the glaciers around the earth, in particular those on the Central Asian plateau are melting, with downstream global implications for significant human populations. There are multiple effects and pincher movements, and only practical answer might appear to be going cold turkey on carbon emissions, which may not be soon enough, nor stop the process in its tracks, and not without significant practical costs. It is as if we are travelling on the Titanic and we will not survive if we leave taking avoiding action to the last moment. Delay betokens disaster.

Now it seems we have the information to take our bearings, and reset our course. Bill McKibben explains:

The final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper with several coauthors called “Target Atmospheric CO2”. It put, finally, a number on the table-indeed it did so in the boldest of terms. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” it said, “paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

Get that? Let me break it down for you. For most of the period we call human civilization, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hovered at about 275 parts per million. Let’s call that the Genesis number, or depending on your icons, the Buddha number, the Confucius number, the Shakespeare number. Then, in the late 18th century, we started burning fossil fuel in appreciable quantities, and that number started to rise. The first time we actually measured it, in the late 1950s, it was already about 315. Now it’s at 385, and growing by more than 2 parts per million annually.

And it turns out that that’s too high. We never had a number before, so we never knew whether we’d crossed a red line. We half guessed and half hoped that the danger zone might be 450 or 550 parts per million-those were still a little ways in the distance. Therefore we could get away with thinking like the young Augustine: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” Not anymore. We have been told by science that we’re already over the line.

And so we’re now in the land of tipping points. We know that we’ve passed some of them-Arctic sea ice is melting, and so is the permafrost that guards those carbon stores. But the logic of Hansen’s paper was clear. Above 350, we are at constant risk of crossing other, even worse, thresholds, the ones that govern the reliability of monsoons, the availability of water from alpine glaciers, the acidification of the ocean, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the very level of the seas. It is at least conceivable that instead of a slow, steady rise in the height of the oceans, we could see rapid melt in Greenland and the West Antarctic, where much of the world’s frozen water resides. We can’t rule out, warns Hansen, a sea level rise of up to 20 feet this century. Plug that into Google Earth and watch waterfront developments turn into high-priced reefs. We can’t rule out, in other words, the collapse of human society as we’ve known it. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted…” We should add the phrase to the oath of office for every politico on the third planet.

Then the argument advanced is “that we’ve got to transform the world’s economy far more quickly than we’d hoped”.  I have been trying to suggest that economic change and political change are not sufficient, although obviously necessary, and no doubt all of the suggestions made in the article are relevant and necessary, but what is required is change to the underlying substratum of  politics and economics, cultural change.  So the challenge becomes can cultural change take place quickly enough.  The cultural change case is made by David Korten in The Great Turning, favourably reveiwed by Yes Magazine,, and critically reviewed by Mark Satin.

The fundamental issue is however whether cultural change is essential. I suspect it is, very much in the same way that peace and nonviolence are necessary, in other words the acceptance of assumptions that survival with peace and justice is possible and practical. We are not going to understand how we have come to this stage in our human evolution, in the evolution of human consciousness, unless we dig into the bedrock of our beliefs and values.

To start, I think is to ask a simple question that anybody can suggest answer: What is the good life?

But now we also have to act quickly.

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