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Jester;1124128 wrote: Yep- but the desire is there for many orginizations, some humanistic some religious.

Great discussion by the way. Great thread.


I second that, Jester. Gallbally and his thought provoking posts. I cerrtainly have no answers, and we all have opinions on what needs to be done. I like to read the posts here and think about what is said. I respect you all here.

Are "to be aware" and "to worry" the same emotion? Sometimes they are, I suppose.

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I thought I would renew this thread, as I just read a very interesting article about the reality of the consequences that climate change is going to have for most of the people living on planet earth right now.

It's by James Lovelock (he of the 1960s Gaia hypothesis). Its interesting in that he is convinced that at this stage, the situation is so irreversible, and the human race in such denial about what's happening, that the only solution is one of the countries that can reasonably expect to suffer the minimum amount of impact is to essentially start planning for a war situation, protect their borders from the consequences of a general collapse in the human population, secure their energy requirements through nuclear power, maximize their own food supply, and accept that there are going to be large losses of territory and people even from within their own territory from costal inundation, and the general societal collapse that will occur when the full scale of climate destabililzation becomes apparent. This will require a society that is ethically and nationally cohesive, a spartan ethic of self-reliance, and an utter ruthlessness in ensuring its own survival.

I think I will provide the article as its so thought provoking.

From The Sunday Times

February 8, 2009

The fight to get aboard Lifeboat UK

James Lovelock

When someone discovers, too late, that they are suffering from a serious and probably incurable disease and may have no more than six months to live, their first response is shock and then, in denial, they angrily try any cure on offer or go to practitioners of alternative medicine. Finally, if wise, they reach a state of calm acceptance. They know death need not be feared and that no one escapes it.

Scientists who recognise the truth about the Earth’s condition advise their governments of its deadly seriousness in the manner of a physician. We are now seeing the responses. First was denial at all levels, then the desperate search for a cure. Just as we as individuals try alternative medicine, so our governments have many offers from alternative business and their lobbies of sustainable ways to “save the planet”, and from some green hospice there may come the anodyne of hope.

Should you doubt that this grim prospect is real, let me remind you of the forces now taking the Earth to the hothouse: these include the increasing abundance of greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture, including gases from natural ecosystems damaged by global heating in the Arctic and the tropics. The vast ocean ecosystems that used to pump down carbon dioxide can no longer do so because the ocean turns to desert as it warms and grows more acidic; then there is the extra absorption of the sun’s radiant heat as white reflecting snow melts and is replaced by dark ground or ocean.

Each separate increase adds heat and together they amplify the warming that we cause. The power of this combination and the inability of the Earth now to resist it is what forces me to see the efforts made to stabilise carbon dioxide and temperature as no better than planetary alternative medicine.

Do not be misled by lulls in climate change when global temperature is constant for a few years or even, as we have seen in the UK in the past week, appears to drop and people ask: where is global warming now?

However unlikely it sometimes seems, change really is happening and the Earth grows warmer year by year. But do not expect the climate to follow the smooth path of slowly but sedately rising temperatures predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where change slowly inches up and leaves plenty of time for business as usual. The real Earth changes by fits and starts, with spells of constancy, even slight decline, between the jumps to greater heat. It is ever more at risk of changing to a barren state in which few of us can survive.

The high-sounding and well-meaning visions of the European Union of “saving the planet” and developing sustainably by using only “natural” energy might have worked in 1800 when there were only a billion of us, but now they are a wholly impractical luxury we can ill afford.

Indeed, in its way, the green ideology that seems to inspire northern Europe and the United States may be in the end as damaging to the real environment as were the previous humanist ideologies. If the UK government persists in forcing through impractical and expensive renewable energy schemes, we will soon discover that nearly all of what remains of our countryside becomes the site for fields planted with biofuel crops, biogas generators and industrial-sized wind farms – all this when what land we have is wholly needed to grow food.

Don’t feel guilty about opting out of this nonsense: closer examination reveals it as an elaborate scam in the interests of a few nations whose economies are enriched in the short term by the sale of wind turbines, biofuel plants and other green-sounding energy equipment. Don’t for a moment believe the sales talk that these will save the planet. The salesmen’s pitch refers to the world they know, the urban world. The real Earth does not need saving. It can, will and always has saved itself and it is now starting to do so by changing to a state much less favourable for us and other animals. What people mean by the plea is “save the planet as we know it” and that is now impossible.

Did you know the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly seven billion people on Earth, their pets and livestock are responsible for 23% of all greenhouse gas emissions? If you add on the fossil fuel burnt in the total activity of growing, gathering, selling and serving food, all this adds up to about half of all carbon dioxide emissions. Think of farm machinery, the transport of food from the farms and the transport of fertiliser, pesticides and the fuel used in their manufacture; the road building and maintenance; the supermarket operations and the packaging industry; to say nothing of the energy used in cooking, refrigerating and serving food. Like it or not, we are the problem.

Policies based on unjustifiable extrapolation and environmental dogmas are unlikely to avert climate change and we should not even try to implement them. Instead our leaders should immediately concentrate their minds on sustaining their own nations as a viable habitat; they could be inspired to do this not just out of selfish national interest but as captains of the lifeboats that their nations might become.

When I am warned that my pessimism discourages those who would improve their carbon footprint or do good works such as planting trees, I’m afraid I see such efforts as at best romantic nonsense or at worst hypocrisy. Agencies exist that allow air travellers to plant trees to offset the extra carbon dioxide their plane adds to the overburdened air. How like the indulgences once sold by the Catholic church to wealthy sinners to offset the time they might otherwise spend in purgatory.

Thirty years ago I planted 20,000 trees, hoping to restore to nature the farmland I had bought. I now realise it was a mistake: I should have left the land untouched and let an ecosystem, a natural forest, emerge filled with biodiverse and abundant life. Planting a tree does not make an ecosystem any more than putting a liver in a jar fed with blood and nutrients makes a man.

We are trying to undo some of the harm we have done and as climate change worsens we will try harder, even desperately. But it is not simply too much carbon dioxide in the air or the loss of biodiversity as forests are cleared; the root cause is too many people, pets and livestock – more than the Earth can carry. No voluntary human act can reduce our numbers enough even to slow climate change. Merely by existing, people and their dependent animals are responsible for more than 10 times the greenhouse gas emissions of all the airline travel in the world.

We do not seem to have the slightest understanding of the seriousness of our plight. Instead, before our thoughts were diverted by the global financial collapse, we seemed lost in an endless round of celebration and congratulation. Perhaps we were celebrating because the once rather worrying voice of the IPCC now spoke comfortably of consensus and endorsed those mysterious concepts of sustainability and energy that renewed itself. We even thought that somehow we could save the planet and grow richer as well, a more pleasing outcome than the uncomfortable truth.

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war and it seems this is also true of climate change. Simply cutting back fossil-fuel burning, energy use and the destruction of natural forests will not be a sufficient answer to global heating, not least because it seems climate change can happen faster than we can respond to it and may be irreversible.

Consider: the Kyoto agreement was made more than 10 years ago and it seems that we have done little more to halt climate change since then other than almost empty gestures. Because of the rapidity of the Earth’s change, we will need to respond more like the inhabitants of a city threatened by a flood. When they see the unstoppable rise of water, their only option is to escape to high ground; it is too late for them to do anything else, as it is for us to try to save our familiar world.

I am not a willing Cassandra and in the past have been publicly sceptical about doom stories, but this time we do have to take seriously the possibility that global heating may all but eliminate people from the Earth.

SO are all our efforts to become carbon neutral, to put on sandals and a hair shirt and follow the green puritans, pointless? Can we go back to business as usual for a while and be happy while it lasts? We could – but not for long. Apart from a lucky break of a natural or a geo-engineered kind, in a few decades the Earth could cease to be the habitat of seven billion humans; it will save itself as it dispatches all but a few of those who now live in what will become the barren regions. Our greatest efforts should go to learning how to live as well as is feasible on the soon-to-be-diminished hot Earth.

We in Britain live on one of the safe havens where life can continue in the heat age. The northern regions of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, where not inundated by the rising ocean, will remain habitable, and so will oases on the continents, mostly in mountain regions where rain or snow still fall. But the more important exceptions to this planet-wide distress will be Japan, Tasmania, New Zealand, the British Isles and numerous smaller islands.

The human world of these “lifeboat islands” and continental oases will be constrained by limited food, energy and living space, however. The ethics of a lifeboat world where the imperative is survival are wholly different from those of the cosy self-indulgence of the latter part of the 20th century. I cannot help wondering how we will manage – how we will decide who among the thirsty will be allowed aboard. We in the UK have little land left to farm and feed ourselves, but we and the refugees may in any case not be able to do so because the majority of us are urban, caring little for the world outside the city and not understanding that all our lives depend upon it.

Apart from the occasional disastrous flood, excessive heatwave or wholly unexpected frost, the climate in the UK will change slowly and imperceptibly at first. In the short term, nothing much is likely to happen with the climate here that would stir a rebellion. What might do so are the disastrous consequences of sea level rise leading to the destruction of a city or the failure of food or electricity supplies.

These dangers will be aggravated by the ever-growing flux of climate refugees, to which will be added returning expatriates who left the crowded United Kingdom for what they thought would be a pleasant life in Europe. Our gravest dangers are not from climate change itself but indirectly from starvation, competition for space and resources – and tribal war.

Yet Britain provides a history and an example of human response to a threat which, although far less severe than global heating, was sufficient to make survival an imperative. For these islands this was the second world war and it was certainly enough of a threat to stir the response now needed.

In a small way the plight of the British at that time resembles the state of the civilised world now. We had had nearly a decade of the well intentioned but wrong belief that peace was all that mattered. The followers of the peace lobbies of the 1930s resembled the green movements now; their intentions were more than good but wholly inappropriate for the war that was about to start.

We woke in 1940 to find facing us across the Channel a wholly hostile continental force about to invade. We were alone without an effective ally, but fortunate to have a new leader, Winston Churchill, whose moving words stirred the whole nation from its lethargy: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” We need another Churchill now to lead us from the clinging, flabby, consensual thinking of the late 20th century and bind the nation into a single-minded effort to wage a difficult war.

Let me tell you how I personally experienced the onset of it when I was 20 years old. THE path ran along the edge of fields recently harvested for their crop of grain; it went between Chelsfield and Orpington, some 14 miles southeast of London’s centre. As I walked in September 1939, the London suburbs already encroached upon the countryside. The fields had a tired look, as if they were about to give up the game and retire for good beneath a permanent crop of semidetached houses planted by their new owners, the developers. But my angst about the ruin of rural Kent was rudely disturbed when suddenly and to my amazement the air filled with the sound of air-raid sirens.

I walked on, wondering if soon the sky would fill with bombers, but instead the sirens sounded the all-clear. And so the second world war started with a false alarm; indeed, in terms of war nothing much happened on mainland Britain for another nine months. There seems to be a close parallel between the events and feelings we had then and those now. I was not quite that archetype, the man in the street or on the Clapham omnibus, but was a young man on a footpath, fairly sure that real war would soon begin even though there were still deniers, among them experts and politicians.

Seventy years later, events in far places such as the melting of Arctic ‘‘ice, the collapse of glaciers in Antarctica, droughts and famines across Africa and the occasional extra-fierce tropical storm give us the same anxiety that the war in Spain and German expansionism gave in the 1930s. We somehow sense it will be our turn soon, but we continue our business and pleasure as usual and perhaps put a solar heating unit on the roof, just as we dug air-raid shelters in our gardens back then.

It was not enough in 1939 to dig personal air-raid shelters, nor is it now enough to genuflect with small green gestures; nor to put windmills and solar panels on the roof to supplement the electricity supply; nor to hold meetings before that great religious symbol of spin, the giant white wind turbine and sing hymns about salvation for the planet. Not only must we survive, but we must stay civilised and not degenerate into mob rule where gang leaders promote themselves as warlords.

For this we have to take effective local action. Most of all, we have to secure supplies of food and clothing and, if we continue city life, energy.

These islands, although among the few areas of the world least threatened by global heating, are at the same time among the least well supplied with food and energy. We have grown so used to an ample supply of food from abroad that we forget that in the second world war, when food imports were scarce, we nearly starved. We have indigenous sources of fuel but they are fast declining. The land available for agriculture competes with housing and industry; unless we act soon, more of it may be disabled as the numbers inhabiting our small nation steadily increase.

Just as in 1939 we had to give up on a massive scale the comfortable lifestyle of peacetime, so soon we may feel rich with only a quarter of what we consume now. If we do it right and with enthusiasm, it will not seem a depressing phase of denial but instead, as in 1940, a chance to redeem ourselves. For the young, life will be full of opportunities to serve, to create, and they will have a purpose for living. It will be tougher for the old, but as that still viable wartime comedy, Dad’s Army, revealed, far from dull. Whatever happens, it will be quite a change from the banalities of city life now.

Let us try to imagine what life might be like for an ordinary family living in, say, Reading, about 30 miles from London, in 2030. The forecast global temperature rise is 1.8C and the sea level rise is 12cm. Our family will hardly notice any change, especially since they have had 20 years in which to adapt. In war there are long quiescent spells, then sudden violence and panic, and so it may be with climate change.

The Thames will have flooded seriously on a few occasions from excessive rainfall, but so far the sea will not yet have reclaimed the Thames Valley as a tidal creek. Perhaps new housing will still be appearing on the flood plain, in between the floods – new housing will be needed now that the population has risen to perhaps 80m, as refugees from Europe and the world come in.

The most noticed things will be the dullness and shortages and the expense of food and energy. If Europe has failed to abandon its love affair with renewable energy and we have failed to build adequate supplies of nuclear energy, electricity will be ruinously costly and blackouts will be endemic. The family will grumble but somehow muddle on. But much of the rest of the world will be changing to scrub and desert and (as John Beddington, our government’s chief scientist, has recently warned) drought and famine will be taking over the once fertile Earth.

Closer to home, across the Channel, summer heat will have grown unbearable despite the widespread use of air-conditioning. Food production will fall as drought and heat make growth more difficult. Elaborate schemes to irrigate using the desalination of sea water will alleviate some of the loss, but at a huge price in energy. The flow of climate refugees will continue, with many settling in huge encampments, possibly near the ethnically similar communities of earlier immigrants.

Assume this is approximately a true picture of the course of events if we let them happen. But what if at some time in the next few years we realise, as we did in 1939, that democracy had temporarily to be suspended and we had to accept a disciplined regime that saw the UK as a legitimate but limited safe haven for civilisation. Orderly survival requires an unusual degree of human understanding and leadership and may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency.

It could be forced upon us by a weather event like that of 1953, when a storm tide in the North Sea devastated parts of the Thames estuary and Holland. Hundreds died. A similar event now could devastate much of the Netherlands, London and its hinterland. Perhaps this would be enough to bring to the fore some Churchill whose rhetoric would fire the nation to make the effort needed to adapt properly to change instead of just patching its problems in an incoherent way.

I suspect that effective action to sustain this island community will come from some form of internal tribal coherence and rare leadership, not from international or European good intentions. With luck the same will apply with the other havens. There will be time enough for internationalism during the stability of the long hot age. We have no option but to make the best of national cohesion and accept that war and warlords are part of it.

For island havens, an effective defence force will be as important as our own immune systems. Like it or not, we may have to increase the size of and spending on our armed forces. Perhaps the next generation of scientists and engineers will be competent and serve the Earth as general practitioners serve us in medicine. In wartime old dogs are quite quickly taught new tricks.

The first truly great environmental disasters will usurp the political agenda and displace many false ideas hampering change. As in war, there could be the rapid application of new technology to climate and survival problems. I hope it will work, but I do not think humans as a species are yet clever enough to handle the coming environmental crisis and I fear they will spend their efforts trying to combat global heating instead of trying to adapt and survive in the new hot world.

So let us prove Garrett Hardin, the American biologist, wrong when he said gloomily in 1968 that, as humans are naturally selfish, our condition is truly tragic; for in tragedy there is no escape.

We can prove him wrong by surviving. Next week I will tell you how science might save us.