[scas]

Rather than posting a book review, I will attach wikipedia's listing and include the books Preface and Conclusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Species

Preface
Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. When the facts
are distressing it is easier to reframe or ignore them. Around the
world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global
warming. Apart from the climate ‘sceptics’, most people do not
disbelieve what the climate scientists have been saying about the
calamities expected to befall us. But accepting intellectually is not
the same as accepting emotionally the possibility that the world
as we know it is heading for a horrible end. It’s the same with
our own deaths; we all ‘accept’ that we will die, but it is only
when death is imminent that we confront the true meaning of
our mortality.

Over the last five years, almost every advance in climate
science has painted a more disturbing picture of the future. The
reluctant conclusion of the most eminent climate scientists is that
the world is now on a path to a very unpleasant future and it is
too late to stop it. Behind the facade of scientific detachment, the
climate scientists themselves now evince a mood of barely suppressed
panic. No one is willing to say publicly what the climate
science is telling us: that we can no longer prevent global warming
that will this century bring about a radically transformed world
that is much more hostile to the survival and flourishing of life. As
I will show, this is no longer an expectation of what might happen
if we do not act soon; this will happen, even if the most optimistic
assessment of how the world might respond to the climate disruption
is validated.

The Copenhagen Conference in December 2009 was the
last hope for humanity to pull back from the abyss. But a
binding commitment from the major polluting nations to shift
their econ omies immediately onto a path of rapid emission
cuts proved too hard. In light of the fierce urgency to act,
there was a sense at the Copenhagen conference that we were
witnessing not so much the making of history, but the ending
of it.

Some climate scientists feel guilty that they did not ring the
alarm bells earlier, so that we could have acted in time. But it’s not
their fault. As I will argue, despite our pretensions to rationality,
scientific facts are fighting against more powerful forces. Apart
from institutional factors that have prevented early action—the
power of industry, the rise of money politics and bureaucratic
inertia—we have never really believed the dire warnings of the
scientists. Unreasoning optimism is one of humankind’s greatest
virtues and most dangerous foibles. Primo Levi quotes an old
German adage that encapsulates our psychological resistance to
the scientific warnings: ‘Things whose existence is not morally
possible cannot exist.’

In the past, environmental warnings have often taken on
an apocalyptic tone, and it is to be expected that the public
greets them with a certain weariness. Yet climate change is
unique among environmental threats because its risks have been
systematically understated by both campaigners and, until very
recently, most scientists. Environmental campaigners, naturally
optimistic people, have been slow to accept the full implications
of the science and worry about immobilising the public with too
much fear. With the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions
now exceeding the worst-case scenarios of a few years ago, and
the expectation that we will soon pass tipping points that will
trigger irreversible changes to the climate, it is now apparent that
the Cassandras—the global warming pessimists—are proving to
be right and the Pollyannas—the optimists—wrong. In the
Greek myth Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo,
but when she failed to return his love Apollo issued a curse so
that her prophecies would not be believed. I think the climate
scientists, who for two decades have been sending warnings
about global warming and its impacts, must sometimes feel like
Cassandras cursed by Apollo, and never more so than now.
There have been any number of books and reports over the
years explaining just how ominous the future looks and how little
time we have left to act. This book is about why we have ignored
those warnings. It is a book about the frailties of the human
species, the perversity of our institutions and the psychological
dispositions that have set us on a self-destructive path. It is about
our strange obsessions, our penchant for avoiding the facts, and,
especially, our hubris. It is the story of a battle within us between
the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth—our
capacity to reason and our connection to Nature—and those that
in the end have won out—our greed, materialism and alienation
from Nature. And it is about the twenty-first century consequences
of these failures.

For some years I could see intellectually that the gap between
the actions demanded by the science and what our political
institutions could deliver was large and probably unbridgeable,
yet emotionally I could not accept what this really meant for the
future of the world. It was only in September 2008, after reading
a number of new books, reports and scientific papers, that I finally
allowed myself to make the shift and to admit that we simply are
not going to act with anything like the urgency required. Humanity’s
determination to transform the planet for its own material
benefit is now backfiring on us in the most spectacular way, so
that the climate crisis is for the human species now an existential
one. On one level, I felt relief: relief at finally admitting what
my rational brain had been telling me; relief at no longer having
to spend energy on false hopes; and relief at being able to let go
of some anger at the politicians, business executives and climate
sceptics who are largely responsible for delaying action against
global warming until it became too late. Yet capitulating to the
truth initiated a period of turmoil that lasted at least as long as it
took to write this book. So why write it? I hope the reasons will
become apparent.

Accepting the reality of climate change does not mean we
should do nothing. Cutting global emissions quickly and deeply
can at least delay some of the worst effects of warming. But sooner
or later we must face up to the truth and try to understand why
we have allowed the situation that now confronts us. Apart from
the need to understand how we arrived at this point, the main
justification for the book is that by setting out what we face we
can better prepare ourselves for it.

Undoubtedly I will be accused of doom-mongering. Prophecies
of doom have always been of two types. Some, like those of
doomsday cults, have been built on a belief in a ‘truth’ revealed
by a supernatural force or the delusions of a charismatic leader.
Sooner or later the facts assert themselves and the prophecy is
proven wrong. The second type is based on the possibility of a
real disaster but one whose probability is exaggerated. Survivalist
communities sprang up during the Cold War because those who
joined were convinced that nuclear war would break out, leading
to the end of civilisation. There was indeed a chance of that
happening, but most people believed it was lower than expected
by survivalists and the latter were legitimately accused of doommongering.
The same may be said for a number of real but small
risks that have led some to forecast the end of the world—the
Y2K bug and a collision with an asteroid come to mind.
Until recently, catastrophic global warming fell into the latter
category, and anyone predicting the end of modern civilisation
was arguably guilty of exaggerating the known risks because the
prevailing warming projections indicated there was a good chance
that early action could prevent dangerous climate change. But in
the last few years scientists’ predictions about climate change have
become much more certain and much more alarming, with bigger
and irreversible changes now expected sooner. After a decade
of little real action, even with a very optimistic assessment of
the likelihood of the world taking the necessary action and in the
absence of so-called unknown unknowns, catastrophic climate
change is now virtually certain.

In these circumstances refusing to accept that we face a very
unpleasant future becomes perverse. Denial requires a wilful misreading
of the science, a romantic view of the ability of political
institutions to respond, or faith in divine intervention. Climate
Pollyannas adopt the same tactic as doom-mongers, but in reverse:
instead of taking a very small risk of disaster and exaggerating it,
they take a very high risk of disaster and minimise it.
The book has three goals. The first, set out in the opening
chapter, is to lay out the facts that lead to the conclusion that it
is too late to prevent far-reaching changes in the Earth’s climate.
The book’s conclusions hang on this analysis, which is a faithful
rendering of the best climate science, and those who want to
argue that I am too pessimistic must explain where the analysis
goes wrong. Wishful thinking will not do. Although I have tried
to minimise the use of numbers and jargon, the chapter is more
technical than the rest of the book while remaining, I hope, well
within the comprehension of lay readers.

The second goal, occupying the next several chapters, is
to explain why humanity failed to respond to the existential
threat posed by global warming. These chapters consider the
modern preoccupation with economic growth and the enormous
symbolic significance of GDP, the way in which consumption
has become inseparable from the construction of personal
identity in affluent societies, and our penchant for various
forms of denial and avoidance to soften unpleasant truths. I also
consider how, beneath these forces, modern humans became
disconnected from the natural world so that our perspective on
what matters was lost.

The final goal of the book is to help the reader come to terms
with the implications of the great climate disruption that will
unfold this century. The groundwork will have been laid in the
middle part of the book, where I expose the strategies of denial
and dissociation which we deploy so expertly. We all face a choice:
in confronting the reality of a transformed climate we can cope by
using strategies that are adaptive or ones that are unhealthy. In the
last chapter I argue that to despair is human, but sooner or later
we must accept the new situation that now confronts us and begin
to act in ways that can make the best of it. It is also a call to arms,
because we don’t have to take it lying down.

It is important to stress that, while the focus of the analysis is
on underlying causes, the most immediate reason for ‘our’ failure
to act on global warming has been the sustained and often ruthless
exercise of political power by the corporations who stand to lose
from a shift to low- and zero-carbon energy systems. The story of
the influence of the carbon lobby has been told by a number
of authors and journalists. We can all see what has been happening
and if anyone deserves to be cast into the eternal flames of hell
it is the executives of companies like ExxonMobil, Rio Tinto,
General Motors, Peabody and E.ON, along with their lobbyists
and PR operatives. All of this goes without saying, at least in this
book. What is more perplexing is why we have allowed these
people to stop our governments acting on global warming. We
could have surrounded the parliaments, occupied the coal-fired
power plants and shut down the CBDs demanding that our representatives
pass strong laws to protect our children’s future. But
we didn’t. Why? I hope to give some persuasive answers.

Conclusion

Reconstructing a future

Despair

A few decades hence perhaps historians will characterise the
last three centuries as the era of struggle between political philosophies,
each of which promised a utopian vision of the future.
Certainly in the century and a half to 1989 world history was
in large measure the story of the contest between the opposing
forces of capitalism and socialism, with fascism interceding for
two decades in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century,
climate disruption will increasingly push all utopian visions
and ideological disputes into the background. Abandoning the
pursuit of utopias, including the last great utopian vision of
endless growth, our task will be to avoid a dystopia. The triumph
of liberal capitalism, which was hailed prematurely as the ‘end
of history’, coincided precisely with the dawning realisation that
industrial progress has been transforming the physical environment
in a way that threatens the demise of the world that liberal
capitalism promised to create. Distracted by the triumphalism
of the ‘end of history’ there crept up on us the end of progress,
so that now we are staring at a century and more of regress, an
unwinding of the revolution that began three centuries ago with
the liberation of the forces of science, technology and economic
expansion. We can now see that, like a teenage boy who suddenly
acquires the strength of a man, humans proved insufficiently
mature to be entrusted with the powers they unleashed.

Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us
to abandon most of the comfortable beliefs that have sustained
our sense of the world as a stable and civilising place. We are now
led to question our faith in human advancement—the constant
we have used to connect the past with the future—and the psychological
stability it has provided. We will have to accommodate
the fact that, due to our own actions, Nature has turned against us
and can no longer be relied upon to provide the conditions for the
flourishing of life. The foundational beliefs of modernity—the
unlimited scope of human achievement, our capacity to control
the world around us, our belief in the power of knowledge to
solve whatever discomforts us—will collapse. Science and technology—
which we moderns take to be the grandest testimony of
human superiority, our claim to some form of divinity—will be
turned from a celebration of our improving powers into our only
means of saving ourselves and staving off the ravages unleashed
by our hubris. If the great forces of Nature on our home planet
turn against us, who will not feel abandoned and alone in the
cosmos?

Relinquishing our rosy view of how the future will unfold
is a task more difficult than it may appear because the vision of
a stable and sympathetic future undergirds our sense of self and
our place in the world. On a small scale we see this in daily life.
We have all constructed in our minds future worlds based on
an expectation of securing a new job, building a new business
or making the perfect marriage. Over weeks and months we
assemble a picture of a new future in our minds and the new
life becomes incorporated into our conception of self. When the
expected event does not occur we can feel crushed. Even though
our lives are unchanged, our dreams have been shattered. The loss
is no less real psychologically than if it had actually occurred, so
that the process of bringing our newly constructed self back into
conformity with an unchanged reality can be traumatic. Subtly,
our hopes for our lives and those of our children and grandchildren
all depend on an expectation that the world will unfold
in a certain way, as an enhanced version of the world we have
now. If the evidence is that the future will in fact be a diminished
version of what we have now—that life will be harsher and more
unpredictable as the patterns of weather that govern the rhythms
of daily life can no longer be relied upon—then our conception
of the future and the hopes that are built on it are illusory. When
we recognise that our dreams of the future are built on sand the
natural human response is to despair.

In the face of the evidence of climate disruption, clinging to
hopefulness becomes a means of forestalling the truth. Sooner or
later we must respond and that means allowing ourselves to enter a
phase of desolation and hopelessness, in short, to grieve. Climate
disruption will require that we change not only how we live but
how we conceive of our selves; to recognise and confront a gap
between our inner lives—including our habits and suppositions
about how the world will evolve—and the sharply divergent reality
that climate science now presents to us. The process of bringing
our inner experience into conformity with the new external reality
will for many be a long and painful emotional journey. What are
the likely elements of this mourning for a lost future?

Rather than passing through well-defined stages, grief is
characterised by strong episodic feelings and a persistent sense of
background disturbance. When a loved one is diagnosed with
a terminal illness, many people embark on a process of anticipatory
mourning; for those who confront the facts and emotional
meaning of climate change, the ‘death’ that is mourned is the loss
of the future. The first phase of grief is often marked by shock
and disbelief, followed by a mixture of emotions: anger, anxiety,
longing, depression and emptiness. To regulate the flood of
unpleasant emotions, humans deploy a number of strategies to
suppress or buffer them. Among them John Archer includes
numbness, pretence that the loss has not occurred, aggression
directed at those seen as responsible for the loss, and self-blame,
which are similar to the methods we use to deny or filter climate
science. This suggests that the widespread prevalence of forms
of denial and avoidance among the population may indeed be
defences against the feelings of despair that the climate science
rationally entails. The study of grief suggests that accepting a loss
is more difficult when there is room for doubt about the death or
when someone can be blamed for it, both of which apply to the
loss of the future under climate change.

While attention is usually focused on the emotional expressions
of grief, the process is as much a cognitive one as we first
learn to cope with the severe disruption to our conception of the
world, and then begin to build a new conception of the world
that we can live by. It is sometimes feared that those who grieve
too early will experience premature detachment—or ‘decathexis’,
as the professionals call it. In a famous example from the 1940s,
an English bride whose husband went off to war was convinced
he would be killed. She grieved so deeply that when he returned
alive she divorced him. Those who say we should not despair but
always remain hopeful in the face of climate science are perhaps
afraid we will detach ourselves from the future completely, and
then sink into apathy or go on a binge. It seems to be a recipe for
a kind of nihilism, like that glamourised in the Sex Pistol’s song
lamenting ‘no future’.

It is true that, in the words of one expert, healthy grieving
requires a gradual ‘withdrawal of emotional investment in
the hopes, dreams, and expectations of the future’ on which
our life has been constructed. Yet after facing up to the truth
and detaching from the future few of us will just call a halt and
remain trapped in a slough of despond or refuse to think beyond
today. Humans are not built that way. After detaching from
the old future we will construct and attach to a new future,
just as we eventually do when a loved one dies. Yet we cannot
build a new conception of the future until we allow the old one
to die, and Joanna Macy reminds us that we need to have the
courage to allow ourselves to descend into hopelessness, resisting
the temptation to rush too soon into a new future. She quotes
T.S. Eliot:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope of the wrong thing.

Waiting, I will suggest, does not mean we should be passive.
The nature of the mourning process will vary with the individual,
depending in part on the strength of their attachment, conscious
or unconscious, to the future. Some people live largely for today
and give little thought to tomorrow. Others have a deep sense of
attachment to the healthy evolution of their societies, the natural
world or civilisation. Those with an interdependent or metapersonal
self-construal are more likely to feel distressed by the
threat posed by climate disruption to the future welfare of other
people or the natural world. In some cultures, people feel a much
stronger attachment to their ancestors and descendants. How we
mourn will be influenced by how our society and those around
us are responding to the loss. At present, the early mourners feel
lonely and isolated, sometimes keeping their thoughts to themselves
for fear of alienating those around them with their anxieties
and pessimism. It is as if the doctors had declared there is no hope
of recovery for a sick child, yet all around friends and family are
saying, ‘Don’t worry, she will be fine’.

Against this, I expect to see a new genre of humour, not as a
way of ridiculing but of accommodating the facts. Here is the first
one I have come across:

I, for one, welcome the coming apocalypse. We can have a
world where all a man needs to make his way is some stubble,
a mullet and a sawn off shotgun, and women are beautiful,
deadly and clad in leather. One can live by your wits and your
nerve, fending off hordes of mutants, cannibals and assorted
beasts.

Much like Basingstoke on a Saturday night, in fact.
In addition to a rash of gallows humour and post-apocalyptic
novels, at some point we can expect to see a period of nostalgia for
the future lost, including a ‘life review’ that may take the form of
an outpouring of books and public discussion reflecting on the era
that is passing, an era that will glow more golden in retrospect.

Acceptance

The trauma arising from recognising the gap between our selfconcept
and the disrupted future we now face can be thought
of as an instance of ‘positive disintegration’, the term used by
psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski to capture the idea of our world
‘falling apart’ when the situation makes untenable the assumptions
we have used to construct an integral sense of self. The inner
struggle to adapt ourselves to changed circumstances requires that
we go through a painful process of disintegration involving strong
emotions, including excitability, anger, anxiety, guilt, depression,
hopelessness and despair. But the ability to navigate them
and reconstruct our selves is a sign of mental health. Accelerated
psychic development requires a difficult transition in which the
individual becomes an active agent in his or her own disintegration,
a process in which we assess and reintegrate the broken
pieces of ourselves into a new and more robust whole. It is an
adaptive coping strategy.

Climate disruption has the smell of death about it. It
threatens to bring to the surface that which we work so hard
to suppress. Fear of death, wrote Ernest Becker, ‘is the mainspring
of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the
fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it
is the final destination for man’. The desire for immortality
is perhaps the best answer to the riddle of why the affluent are
driven to accumulate more. There is evidence for this. Studies
using ‘terror management theory’ have shown that when given
fleeting reminders of their own mortality, people are more likely
to seek out means of enhancing their self-esteem, especially by
attaching greater importance to money, image and status. They
are also more likely to punish those who do not agree with their
worldview. Sheldon and Kasser suggest that humans may be
‘hard-wired’ to pursue extrinsic goals of wealth, attractiveness and
position because they improve the chances of survival in times of
uncertainty and threat. There is, therefore, a risk that the threat
posed by climate change will see a greater emphasis on the sorts
of consumer values that have aggravated global warming. We
seem to be trapped: materialism exacerbates climate change, and
talking about climate change makes us retreat further to materialism.
Does this mean we should not talk about the climate crisis?
Fortunately, the answer is ‘no’.

While fleeting reminders of death are shown to promote selfinterested
and materialistic behaviour, folklore, philosophy and
religion have long taught that reflection on death ‘concentrates the
mind’ in a way that makes possessions and social standing appear
trivial and causes us to reflect on those deeper aspects of life that
give our existence meaning. Those who have had near-death experiences
or life-threatening illnesses are often transformed so that they
see their previous lives as empty and self-centred. ‘Post-traumatic
growth theory’ suggests that confrontation with one’s mortality
typically brings about a change in priorities, away from greed and
vanity and towards a greater emphasis on intimate relationships, a
greater sense of personal strength, more openness to change and a
deeper appreciation of life. Tests of the theory indicate that more
sustained and considered reflection on death does indeed stimulate
more intrinsic goals centred on building close relationships,
personal growth and community betterment. So while fleeting
reminders of death tend to induce a retreat to self-gratification,
more conscious and careful processing of death brings about the
opposite reaction. When the reality of death cannot be avoided,
prolonged reflection causes us to transcend our defensive reactions
and accept both life and death more maturely.

The expected effects of a changing climate over this century
naturally stimulate thoughts of mortality—our own and that of our
descendents, the vulnerable in poor countries and other species. We
reflect too on the prospects for more abstract things like civilisation
and progress. While it is tempting to suppress such thoughts, the
evidence suggests that an open public engagement with notions
of impermanence and death could have a salutary effect and contribute
to a shift in value orientation that is both more mature and
more protective of the environment. Reluctance to draw attention
to the threats to survival implied by climate science fails to counter
the tendency for people to resort to self-focused and materialistic
goals. Contrary to the prevailing ‘don’t scare the horses’ approach
of governments and environmental organisations, more conscious
reflection on the meaning of climate disruption is likely to encourage
more pro-social and less materialistic goals.

There are many uncertainties in how climate change will play
out over this century and beyond, except that each decade will be
marked by greater disruption to everyday lives. For most people
in poor countries there will be no redeeming features of climate
disruption, just hard lives being made harder, and the daily
struggle punctuated by catastrophic weather events and political
eruptions that may burden them even more. For many citizens of
affluent nations it is possible that accepting the future will be
marked by greater hardships and tests of our capacity to adapt
could be the stimulus to a new orientation to life with more attention
to higher goals. Isn’t that the lesson of history? Certainly, we
know that levels of mental illness declined in London during the
Blitz in World War II, perhaps due to the effect of group bonding
at a time of peril for everyone. For all of its material benefits,
which few would repudiate, affluence has not been notable for its
promotion of psychological health. It is now well established, by
Tim Kasser and others, that those who pursue intrinsic life goals
of self-acceptance, personal development and community orientation
lead more fulfilling lives than those who pursue extrinsic
goals of material acquisition, physical attractiveness and celebrity.
Just as the new values of the Protestant ethic helped usher in the
era of capitalism, there is a chance that fresh values will emerge in
the era of the hot Earth—values of moderation, humility and
respect, even reverence, for the natural world. And in place of selfpity
and instant gratification, we could see a resurgence of
resourcefulness and selflessness. ‘Resilient people’, writes Shelley
Taylor, ‘tend to find some meaning and interest in whatever they
are involved in; they are actively engaged and infrequently bored,
apathetic or alienated. . . . They rarely feel like passive victims’.
It is true that the shift could be in the opposite direction, a
retreat to self-preservation in which the ruthless and the wealthy
use their power to control dwindling resources and exclude others
from sharing in them. It is to prevent this from happening that,
in the last section of this chapter, I urge the mobilisation of a
mass movement to build a countervailing power to the elites and
corporations that have captured government. In short, a revived
democracy is the only means of fighting the effects of climate
change in a humane way.

Meaning

Morris Berman has observed that during periods of rapid transformation
in human history, such as the Renaissance, ‘the meaning
of individual lives begins to surface as a disturbing problem’. As
the climate crisis unfolds, and poses the question of the future of
humankind, the meaning of our lives will come increasingly to
the fore. After a long period of psychological disruption stability
will return only with the emergence of a new understanding of the
Earth, a story to replace the one in which the globe is seen as a
repository of resources to fuel endless growth. The new narrative
will reflect a world no longer subject to human will but governed
by forces largely beyond our control. In that sense, the new story
will be closer to those of pre-modern cultures where daily lives
and destiny were in the hands of all-powerful invisible forces. In
the West little changed from Ancient Greece to Shakespearean
England. Caught in a storm at sea, Pericles declaimed:

Wind, rain and thunder, remember earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to you.

As much as anything else, Shakespeare’s plays are about the
weather—its fickle capacity to disrupt the plans of mortals, its
moods as symbolic of ours, and its utility as the chief weapon of
the gods.

I have suggested that we now face a profound threat not
because of our beliefs or even our attitudes, but because of the
very way we see and understand the world, our way of being in the
world. The scientific revolution taught us to understand ourselves
in a new way, to feel radically separated from the world around
us, to experience ourselves as isolated egos inside our bodies which
must understand and act on the ‘world out there’. The alternative
is simply a different way of experiencing ourselves out of which
a distinctive understanding and set of values arises. It involves
reconceptualising the Earth in a way that supersedes the idea that
it exists to meet our needs, to accept that it is not a storehouse to
be raided at will but our only home.

Of all humans, we moderns alone have lived in a radically
desacralised cosmos. We saw that, on the eve of the scientific
revolution, Isaac Newton himself was an avid participant in an
animate universe. Newton, and almost all of those who came
before him, differed from us not so much because of what they
believed but because of their mode of being in the world. For
them, in addition to its practical consequences, the disruption of
the climate by human activity would have had religious meaning.
Climate change would have meant sky trouble. For pre-modern
men and women the sky was powerfully symbolic. It represented
the infinite, the transcendent; it is where the gods dwell and
where we aim to ascend after we have cast off our mortal form. As
Mircea Eliade writes: ‘. . . a religious sense of the divine transcendence
is aroused by the very existence of the sky’. With climate
change mortal humans have violated the domain of the gods,
disturbed the home of the transcendent. Why wouldn’t the deities
retaliate, the more so as we have aroused the heavens by digging
into and releasing the energy of the underworld?

I am not sure this is such a primitive understanding of the
meaning of climate change, for the signs that the sky retains its
divine symbolism are everywhere: it is where the prayerful look;
where the eyes of the goal-scorer turn; its moods impose themselves
on ours; and it still feels eerie to fly in it. And nothing can
better evoke a sense of cosmic mystery than the night sky. It is
one thing, therefore, to foul our own realm on the surface of the
Earth but quite another to violate the celestial vault, the realm of
the gods.

Eliade has noticed that in early cultures, after the act of
creation the Supreme Being withdraws. As men and women
become increasingly occupied with their own discoveries, the
divine becomes more remote and other religious forces come into
play—fertility, sexuality, money and personal creativity. These
are more practical mythologies. Today in the West, meaning is
found above all in the commitment to progress, technology and
consumption. We have not lost our religious sensibility, for secularisation
can be understood as ‘the disembedding of faith from an
encompassing religious culture’. But the god of gods can always
stage a return. Eliade wrote:

In cases of extreme distress and especially in cases of disaster
proceeding from the sky—drought, storm, epidemic—men
turn to the supreme being again and entreat him . . . [I]n an
extremely critical situation, in which the very existence of the
community is at stake, the divinities who in normal times
ensure and exalt life are abandoned in favor of the supreme
god.

The lesser divinities could reproduce and augment life but
they could not save life in moments of crisis. Perhaps these archaic
patterns remain implanted within us, structuring our deeper
consciousness so that, as the climate disruption unfolds and the
sky seems to turn against us, we will abandon the lesser gods of
money, growth and hedonism and turn to the celestial god, the
creator god who alone has the power to save us. Is not the tentative
turn to Gaia just such an appeal? If our scientific understanding
and technological control over the world allowed us to discard the
gods, will the reassertion of Nature’s power see us turn again to
the sacred for protection? Will the late surge of militant atheism
come to be seen as a Homeric burst of pride before the fall?

Act

Climate disruption’s assault on all we believed—endless progress,
a stable future, our capacity to control the natural world with
science and technology—will corrode the pillars that hold up the
psyche of modern humanity. It will be psychologically destabilising
in a way exceeded in human history perhaps only by the
shift to agriculture and the rise of industrial society. Already we
find psychiatrists and psychologists issuing guidelines on how to
respond to the emotional and psychological distress associated
with awareness of climate change, although the leading therapeutic
recommendation of ‘be optimistic about the future’ suggests that
the mental health professionals have yet to grasp the seriousness
of the threat posed by global warming. We can expect that, for
a time, the loss of faith in the future and in our ability to control
our lives will see a proliferation of mental disturbance characterised
by depression, withdrawal and fearfulness. It is well known,
however, that one of the most effective responses to depression is
to act. Helplessness is immiserising, and we should not capitulate
to it even when things appear irredeemable. As Pablo Casals is
reputed to have said: ‘The situation is hopeless; we must now take
the next step.’ Finding meaning in adverse circumstances is one of
the most remarkable human qualities.

If it is too late to prevent climate disruption there is still much
we can influence. Any success in reducing emissions is better than
doing nothing, because warming and its effects can at least be
slowed down. Resisting those who want to capitulate is a fight
worth having. And we can begin preparing for the impacts of
climate disruption not by self-protection but by vigorous political
engagement aimed at collectively building democracies that
can ensure the best defences against a more hostile climate, ones
that do not abandon the poor and vulnerable to their fate while
those who are able to buy their way out of the crisis do so for as
long as they can. For we should remember that once the dramatic
implications of the climate crisis are recognised by the powerful as
a threat to themselves and their children they will, unless resisted,
impose their own solutions on the rest of us, ones that will protect
their interests and exacerbate unequal access to the means of
survival, leaving the weak to fend for themselves. This is how it
has always been. We must democratise survivability.

Climate change represents a failure of modern politics.
Elected government should execute the people’s will yet, in this
greatest threat to our future, governments around the world
have not represented the interests of the people but have allowed
themselves to be held in the thrall of a powerful group of energy
companies and the ideology of growth fetishism they embody.
It is apparent to even the most dim-witted observer that these
corporations are ‘more interested in commerce than humanity’, as
Thoreau wrote, and are run by executives who are, to put it most
charitably, misguided and self-interested. This is truer today after
the remoulding of democratic political systems to give greater
influence to lobbyists and insiders. The climate crisis is upon us
because democracy has been corrupted; influence has replaced
representation, and spin now substitutes for honest communication.
The ‘professionalisation’ of the major political parties has
turned them into finely tuned vote-getting machines. Instead of
being the expressions of competing social forces and ideologies
they are driven by polls, focus groups and minute demographic
analysis. Political campaigns now occur largely in the mass media,
a channel between the people and their leaders that is filled by an
army of specialists whose task is to craft messages and cultivate
editors. This is possible because the power of social movements
has waned, and visionary politics has been swamped by the lure of
affluence. For the most part, environment organisations too have
been sucked into the political game of influence-peddling and
media management, with their leaders resigned to incrementalism,
a strategy now mocked by Nature’s powers.

The passivity of the public has allowed our political representatives
to become more and more dominated by a professional
class of power-seeking individuals who stand for little other than
self-advancement. Political parties have been hollowed out, with
memberships shrinking and those remaining deprived of all influence.
In Britain, for example, with the expectation that after years
of New Labour the Conservatives will form the next government,
lobbying companies are relinquishing staff close to the Labour
Party and hiring Conservatives with a view to having instant
access. The Sunday Times reports that ‘more than 50 prospective
candidates chosen by the main parties are already working as
lobbyists and public relations executives and are deeply enmeshed
in the world of spin and politics’. PR veterans describe the two
career paths, lobbying and politics, as ‘a natural fit’. The influence
of corporate lobbyists is checked only when it becomes too transparent
or when the pressure to ease up on regulation jeopardises
the system as a whole, such as occurred with the deregulation of
finance on the United States before the crisis of 2008. Reclaiming
democracy for the citizenry is the only way to temper the effects
of climate disruption and ensure that the wealthy and powerful
cannot protect their own interests at the expense of the rest. To do
so requires a new radicalism, a radicalism that refuses to be drawn
into short-term electoral trade-offs and aims to shift the ground
of politics itself.

We all value and benefit from a law-abiding society. Yet at
times like these we have a higher duty and are no longer bound
to submit to the laws that protect those who continue to pollute
the atmosphere in a way that threatens to destroy the habitability
of the Earth. When just laws are used to protect unjust
behaviour our obligation to uphold the laws is diminished. In
the usual course of affairs, it is right to allow the normal democratic
process, however slowly its wheels may turn, to change
the laws to reflect the new reality. In 2008 the truth of this was
acknowledged in the case of six Greenpeace protestors arrested
for causing criminal damage to the Kingsnorth coal-fired power
plant in Kent, to wit, scaling its smokestack and painting a slogan
on it. Persuaded by the defence’s argument that the protesters
had a lawful excuse—for in causing damage they were trying to
prevent the greater harm being done by the power plant to the
climate—the jury of ordinary citizens acquitted the six.
Global warming presents us with a uniquely challenging historical
predicament. In the great struggles for universal suffrage
and civil liberties, and against slavery and unjust wars, victory
meant the end of the problem, or at least the beginning of the
end of the problem. In the case of climate change victory can
come too late. A sudden awakening in a decade by governments
and the people to the dangers of climate change will be too late;
the global climate system will have shifted course and the future
will have been taken out of our hands. In such times we have
moral obligations other than obedience to the law. We feel we
owe obedience to a higher law even though we have to accept
the consequences of disobeying the ones in the statute books.
It is for this reason that those who engage in civil disobedience
are usually the most law-abiding citizens—those who have most
regard for the social interest and the keenest understanding of the
democratic process.

With runaway climate change now jeopardising the stable,
prosperous and civilised community that our laws are designed to
protect, the time has come for us to ask whether our obligations to
our fellow humans and the wider natural world entitle us to break
laws that protect those who continue to pollute the atmosphere in
a way that threatens our survival.

Despair, Accept, Act. These are the three stages we must pass
through. Despair is a natural human response to the new reality
we face and to resist it is to deny the truth. Although the duration
and intensity of despair will vary among us, it is unhealthy and
unhelpful to stop there. Emerging from despair means accepting
the situation and resuming our equanimity; but if we go no
further we risk becoming mired in passivity and fatalism. Only by
acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity.

[MD]

I only made a ten second speed read. It's obviously a very philosophical and heart-felt spleen rant. I hope the author found some catharsis in its creation, but it remains meaningless.

Have a nice day!

[peeker01]

I'm glad I'm not paying for the bandwidth around here.

[kublikhan]

You can boil alot of that down to one sentence:

The siren song of continued prosperity is sweeter than the doom and gloom of reality.

[Cog]

Indeed

[peeker01]

Or.....Our continued prosperity is reality. The siren you hear is the Bull$hit Police coming to bust
the purveyors of unjustifiable doom and gloom.

[MD]

Or.....Our continued prosperity is reality. The siren you hear is the Bull$hit Police coming to bust
the purveyors of unjustifiable doom and gloom.

You can't mean that, at least with regard to the "great unwashed". We are in for the most profound cultural upheaval since world war 2, at least . Many millions will ride above the mayhem, all the while pointing to progress.

Good luck in your effort to remain one of their number. The odds for you aren't looking very good.

[peeker01]

You know MD, unbridled doom can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. AGW and PO are theories
at best. At worst, dishonest levers of economic destruction wielded against a naive citizenry.
I hope my participation here counterbalances some of the crazy talk. The truth always lies
somewhere in between.

[kublikhan]

Or.....Our continued prosperity is reality. The siren you hear is the Bull$hit Police coming to bust
the purveyors of unjustifiable doom and gloom.

This reality does not sound very prosperous to me:

The UN food agency reported that world food prices in January 2011 reached their highest level ever recorded - and looking likely to keep rising for at least some time, meaning hunger for many. And 2011 sees extreme drought famine in East Africa affecting Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. 2009 saw richer G20 countries doing £trillion-plus bailouts of their misrun banks, while charities called for more aid for poor countries to prevent the economic crisis from destroying more poor people's lives as poorer countries are being hit by dramatic declines in trade and foreign investment. But the UN is now reporting that recent cuts in aid by richer countries and poor investment practices have been increasing poverty in Africa, and worldwide now the poor are facing increased hardship. The present economic downturn also seems to have increased the abandonment of children and of elderly women in poorer countries, and to have increased the murder of children and of elderly women in poorer countries.

World Poverty

[peeker01]

As sad as the famine situation is in North Africa, this is a thread about "CC". Try to stay on
topic. These people have had trouble feeding themselves long before the advent of "CC"
and "AGW" and "PO".

[Sixstrings]

That book sounds depressing.

[kublikhan]

Ummm, that was on topic. Did you miss the part about the extreme drought? CC is a factor in the poverty I described. Of course it is not the only factor, but it is definitely contributing.

Global security is being threatened by climate change and resulting natural disasters, such as the drought afflicting Somalia, according to the UN chief.

At a UN Security Council debate on the links between global security and climate change on Wednesday (20 July), UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon spelled out the risks associated with rising temperatures worldwide. He said: “Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets.”

Somalia is currently experiencing one of its worst droughts for 60 years. On Wednesday the UN declared that the country was in a state of famine, as around 3.7 million Somalis face a food crisis.

At the UN Security Council debate, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner described findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The fourth assessment report from the IPCC in 2007 is based on the research of thousands of scientists worldwide and concluded that it was "unequivocal" that the Earth is warming and that human activities play a role in this change.

Yesterday (Thursday 21 July), John Vidal wrote about the increase in extreme droughts in Somalia on the Guardian website. He said: “They started having droughts every seven years; in the 1980s they came about every five years and in the 1990s every two or three. Since 2000 there have been three major droughts and several dry spells”.

Extreme drought, climate change and security in Somalia

But thanks for providing an excellent example of someone resisting the truth about CC. For once your trolling is actually on topic.

[peeker01]

Kub, we've all grown accustomed to you torturing the truth, but tonight you are in fine form.

From the Wikipedia -

Famine in Africa


Malnourished children in Niger, during the 2005 famine.
In the mid-22nd century BC, a sudden and short-lived climatic change that caused reduced rainfall resulted in several decades of drought in Upper Egypt. The resulting famine and civil strife is believed to have been a major cause of the collapse of the Old Kingdom. An account from the First Intermediate Period states, "All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children." In 1680s, famine extended across the entire Sahel, and in 1738 half the population of Timbuktu died of famine.[58] In Egypt, between 1687 and 1731, there were six famines.[59] The famine that afflicted Egypt in 1784 cost it roughly one-sixth of its population.[60] At the end of the 18th century,[61] and even more at the beginning of the nineteenth, the Maghreb suffered from the deadly combination of plague and famine.[62] Tripoli and Tunis experienced famine in 1784 and 1785 respectively.[63]
According to John Iliffe, "Portuguese records of Angola from the 16th century show that a great famine occurred on average every seventy years; accompanied by epidemic disease, it might kill one-third or one-half of the population, destroying the demographic growth of a generation and forcing colonists back into the river valleys."[64]

[Fishman]

Yep, we're all doomed. Please send all your canned food, back account numbers, rifles, ammo to me. I like to take long shots.

[peeker01]

I'm with you Fish.....everyone send me your .40 cal and .357 Sig.

[kublikhan]

OMG! Droughts happened in the past? You have just successfully debunked CC! There was this nagging thought in the back of my mind it was all a scam. But I lacked the intellectual forethought you possess to put it all together. Droughts happened in the past....who woulda thunk it.

[peeker01]

"But I lacked the intellectual forethought you possess to put it all together." I rest my case!

But what is your point then if you realize Africa and the world have suffered drought since
the beginning of time?

[Ibon]

Ask yourself what it matters if we thoroughly understand the collective inertia that keeps us from any meaningful mitigation of CC.

With this knowledge you arrive to the conclusion that we are incapable of preventing the consequences.

Is this a self fulfilling prophecy or have we known all along that we weren't going to do anything about it?

What would the nature of the consequence have to be to unequivocally break the collective inertia against taking action.

The answer for me has always been that the consequence has to be so severe that the consequence itself represents the mitigation.......because any consequence that results in us still having a choice is not a game changing consequence.

It is not the burning of fossil fuels or the lack of political or economic resources. It is not a failure of planning or non conclusive science.

It is and always has been about nothing more than hubris.

There are no half measures when dealing with this hubris.

[peeker01]

I was in Panama last year. You dudes rip down the rainforest any time it suits you. Get off
your high horse!

[kublikhan]

My point is that the droughts and extreme weather are increasing in frequency and are linked to global warming and human activity.

Rising Global Temperatures and Drought
The increased frequency of drought observed in eastern Africa over the last 20 years is likely to continue as long as global temperatures continue to rise. This poses increased risk to the estimated 17.5 million people in the Greater Horn of Africa who currently face potential food shortages.

What is Causing the Drought?
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of California, Santa Barbara, determined that warming of the Indian Ocean, which causes decreased rainfall in eastern Africa, is linked to global warming.

Global Temperature Trends and Drought
“Global temperatures are predicted to continue increasing, and we anticipate that average precipitation totals in Kenya and Ethiopia will continue decreasing or remain below the historical average,” said USGS scientist Chris Funk. “The decreased rainfall in eastern Africa is most pronounced in the March to June season, when substantial rainfall usually occurs.

Indian Ocean Warming Linked to Human Activity
Scientists compiled existing datasets on temperature, wind speed and precipitation to see what was driving climate variations in the tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean region. Most of the Indian Ocean warming is linked to human activities, particularly greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions.

More Frequent Drought Conditions in East Africa

On March 31, The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned of "potentially catastrophic" impacts on food production from slow-onset climate changes that are expected to increasingly hit the developing world.

The report filed with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, warned that food production systems and the ecosystems they depend on are highly sensitive to climate variability and change. The US National Climatic Data Center announced in June that April's weather extremes were "unprecedented" and "never before" seen in a single month. The center also noted drought across the southern plains, wildfires in the southwest, and record floods along the Mississippi River.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, believes it is time to emphasize the link between extreme weather and the global climate in which it develops.

"The environment in which all storms form has changed owing to human activities. In particular, it is warmer and more moist than it was 30 or 40 years ago," Dr Trenberth said.

The decline of agriculture?