Our Own Worst Enemies.

Topping Out: The Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to produce any sort of useful agreement in Paris. Only the world’s scientists understand the width of the gulf between the extinction level event seriousness of anthropogenic global warming, and those whose will and resources are required to, at best, soften its impact.

 

PARIS IS ALREADY A FAILURE. The world has already exceeded the target it’s leaders have gathered to enforce. Scientists estimate that the amount of man-made heat already absorbed by the world’s oceans has locked-in a global temperature rise of 3.5°C. That’s already 1.5°C higher than the Paris target of 2.0°C.

 

Bad enough news, you might think, but it gets worse. All around the Arctic Circle, but especially in the uppermost reaches of the Russian Federation, rising temperatures are giving rise to massive burps of methane. The recorded incidence of these emissions has soared over the last five years. This is seriously alarming information, because methane is a much more dangerous “greenhouse gas” than carbon-dioxide.

 

But, newswise, it gets worse still. The rising emissions of methane from the rapidly warming Arctic Ocean are but the feeble harbingers of the vast amounts of methane currently trapped in the planet’s permafrost. Gigatons of the gas will be released into the atmosphere as Earth’s hitherto frozen soil gives up its riches. (Strictly speaking, I should be using the present tense here because, even as you read these words, the permafrost is steaming.) The world faces “runaway” global warming of 5°C and upwards by the end of this century.

 

Fire In The Hole! Gigatons of methane will be released into the atmosphere as the world's permafrost begins to thaw.

 

A temperature rise of that rapidity and magnitude is not survivable – not by a human population numbering in excess of 7 billion. Runaway global warming will cause the Greenland and Antarctica ice-sheets to melt. When that happens the seas and oceans will rise by metres, not centimetres, profoundly reshaping the world’s landmasses. Civilisation, as we know it, will end.

 

Yes, whole cities will be drowned, but that’s not the half of it. The real worry are the inevitable and profound changes in the world’s climate that runaway global warming is bound to trigger. Regions which now produce a large percentage of the planet’s food surpluses will become arid and infertile. The glacial sources of many of the world’s great rivers will disappear. Very quickly water will become more valuable than oil, and men will kill each other with ever increasing ferocity to control it. Famine, Pestilence and War will raise their reeking banners above a sweltering earth. Billions will perish.

 

Could we have prevented this? Was the current unfolding climate catastrophe ever avoidable?

 

Probably not. The human animal is not very good at dealing with slow-moving threats. The slightest tremor in the leaves, the faintest rustle of crushed leaf-litter, and your average homo-sapiens is instantly alert, chipped flint spearhead, or rifle, in hand. Humankind’s evolutionary programming has equipped it superbly to handle immediate and short-term threats to its survival. Long-term threats, however, are much harder to resist, not least because the measures required to meet these less-than-imminent dangers will, themselves, be perceived as immediate and/or short-term threats!

 

As a species, we have evolved the intelligence to perceive long-term threats, but not the wisdom to come together and do what is necessary to eliminate them.

 

Faced with the imminent danger of being overwhelmed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States of America was prepared to direct (or take over) private enterprises, impose strict controls on the operation of the market, raise billions through higher taxes and the sale of war bonds, and require its citizens to restrict dramatically their consumption of fossil fuels. To free up resources for the war effort, neighbourhood “war gardens” were promoted and radical recycling measures made mandatory.

 

If, from the moment the world’s scientists agreed that it was real, the US Government had treated the threat of man-made global warming as the “moral equivalent of war”, the planet might have been spared.

 

Better still, if the nations of the world had truly united in the aftermath of World War II; if, instead of waging a Cold War against one another, the USA and the USSR had jointly waged a war against want, ignorance and disease; then maybe the peoples of the planet would have developed the wisdom necessary to avoid the catastrophe being cooked-up by their industrial civilisation’s relentless pursuit of economic growth and material consumption. If, in exploring the solar system, the world’s peoples had grown accustomed to thinking of their planet as a unique and fragile ark, carrying through the void of space everything they hold dear, then perhaps, just perhaps, humanity could have rung the changes necessary for its own survival.

 

Alas, it was not to be. The Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to produce any sort of useful agreement in Paris. Only the world’s scientists understand the width of the gulf between the extinction level event seriousness of anthropogenic global warming, and those whose will and resources are required to, at best, soften its impact.

 

That tremor in the leaves; rustling in the leaf-litter: it is ourselves.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 December 2015.

Resources Of Our Own

The impulse to care for our own: Whenever the earth quakes, the waters rise; the winds rage – or the bombs fall – something within us is simultaneously jolted loose. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens – the man that knows. But we could just as easily (and probably with more justification) have called ourselves Homo Caritas – the man that loves.

The following essay was written on Sunday, 5 September, one day after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Christchurch in New Zealand’s South Island. It was published in a Special Earthquake Edition of The Press, Christchurch’s leading newspaper, on Monday, 6 September 2010. (For a more overtly political response to the Christchurch quake, see Scott Hamilton’s brilliant posting on the Reading The Maps blog.)


VAST AND SLOW are the forces that shape our world. As we human-beings flit, sometimes purposefully, more often heedlessly, across its surface, the mute miles of stone beneath our feet are driven forward, millimetre by relentless millimetre, on invisible and unfathomable tides of molten magma.

Continents move. Climates change. Plants and animals evolve. Our life-spans are too brief for our brains to acknowledge all but the most rapid changes: the transformation of our parents’ and our children’s faces; the steady growth of trees; the rise and fall of empires.

The adult May-fly, they say, lives but a single day. Measured against the finely-ground sands of geological time – we are all May-flies.

Fortunate human-beings can live their entire lives blissfully unaware of this powerful "other history" unfolding below them. There are occasional hints: ash-clouds rising from a distant volcanic peak; a harmless rocking and rolling registered through the soles of the feet. We note them in passing (the more thoughtful among us recalling geography lessons from long ago) only to resume the flitting and darting of our May-fly lives.

Except.

Except when the whole blind ballet of stone and magma comes to a halt, and upon its temporarily immovable objects a mountainous weight begins to exert an irresistible force.

Except.

Except when the slow-breathing planet, unable to exhale, coughs, the earth heaves, breaks free, and the tectonic dance resumes.

At such moments our own brief histories, and the vast, slow-moving history of the planet itself, touch one another. For a few terrifying, jack-hammering seconds we are made aware of how impossibly, overwhelmingly big and powerful is the one, and how very, very small and insignificant is the other.

All the things we like to think of as solid and dependable: the homes we live in; beloved old buildings of brick and stone; the very streets we walk on; are bent and twisted, lifted up and cast down. It’s as if the Almighty, like a surly child grown bored with his own creations, has laid them flat – just to see them fall.

Being touched in this way by what Charlton Heston, in The Ten Commandments, calls "the mighty hand of God" usually leaves human-beings feeling frightened, helpless and awe-struck.

So often nowadays we hear people using the expression "awesome" to describe what are really quite ordinary, even trivial, events. A major earthquake, however, really is awesome – something which inspires awe: that feeling of terror and insignificance we experience whenever we’re confronted by forces immeasurably greater than ourselves.

But it doesn’t last.

Homo Sapiens may only have walked upon this planet for 100,000 years, and his evolutionary forbears for less than 10 million years – a mere blink of an eye in geological time – but we are not without resources of our own.

Moving below the surface of our waking human mind is the magma of species memory and the far from mute impulses of mammalian instinct. We are, after all, the heirs of the greatest disaster to befall this planet since the cosmic collision that gave birth to the moon.

When an asteroid larger than Mt Everest smashed into the Earth’s crust 65 million years ago it wiped out 95 percent of all the animal species then living. That we are here at all is largely due to the social instincts of the family mammalia – the impulse to care for our own.

With every evolutionary leap towards specialisation and sophistication that social impulse has grown stronger. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens – the man that knows. But we could just as easily (and probably with more justification) have called ourselves Homo Caritas – the man that loves.

For whenever the earth quakes, the waters rise; the winds rage – or the bombs fall – something within us is simultaneously jolted loose. It goes by many names and takes many forms, but the word that best describes human behaviour under crisis conditions is the word our prime minister, John Key, used when asked why he’d come to Christchurch following the magnitude 7.1 earthquake which struck the city on Saturday, 4 September 2010.

He came, he said, to show "solidarity".

It’s such a good word, solidarity. Derived from the Latin solidus, meaning "the whole", it speaks of that most powerful of human instincts – the instinct of the group to draw together when threatened.

Our political and economic systems may heap rewards upon the selfish and the sly, but when disaster strikes, the overwhelming human response is to reach out, to help, to think of what best serves the interests of the whole.

Vast and slow are the forces that shape our world. When the earth heaves our first thoughts rush to the planetary forces that dwarf us. But they are not the only forces at work. Earthquakes may lay cities low – but it’s Love that rebuilds them.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Monday, 6 September 2010.