Alarming data and warnings about climate change have been with us for twenty years. The issue has morphed into something like a low-level toothache. The public is numbed by all the bad news, and in place of sensible solutions, we witness the folly of political polarization. You can't believe in climate change and be a good conservative. This departure from fact-based reality is only part of the problem. China and the U.S., who produce 40 percent of the world's harmful emissions, block measures to reverse the trend toward global warming for purely selfish reasons - two rich economies want to preserve the status quo.
One can react to this situation in various ways, leading to a choice of tactics.
-- Mount a vigorous public crusade with greater signals of alarm.
-- Rely on future technology to reverse the harm done to the atmosphere.
-- Prepare for a future with a drastically different ecological balance.
-- Do nothing, except perhaps pray.
-- Temporize until the catastrophe cannot be ignored.
Most people find themselves wavering among these options. If you decide that the real issue is not Nature but human nature, then only a few options are viable. Human nature has a track record. We know, for example, that past ecological disasters, such as turning the Sahara into a desert, denuding Spanish forests, and burning all the usable fuel on Easter Island, could have been averted but weren't. When resources become skimpy, human beings don't suddenly cooperate to conserve what's left. They fight to the last scrap for possession of a diminishing resource. We also know that man-made catastrophes that hurt everyone, such as war, don't come to an end even though peace benefits everyone.
With human nature in mind, the doomsayers appear to be winning. For the foreseeable future, the world will look upon the ravages of global warming and do a combination of hand-wringing, sounding louder alarms, scrambling for some magical technology, and praying. Active cooperation will not emerge any time soon. The rationalists among us -- who always seem to live in Scandinavia -- will soberly adapt to inevitable deterioration in the ecology. People are already talking about preserving coral-building organisms as seeds for the future, accepting that the present coral reefs, already hugely damaged, will one day die.
As a single individual, none of us can alter such massive and overwhelming situation. It seems utterly meaningless to foul our planetary nest. But there is meaning to be found here. The meaning resides in the very source of the problem, human nature. Human beings place their desires ahead of the collective good. We consider ourselves more important than the ecology, which is rooted in the belief that we are above Nature herself, a privileged species that need answer to no one, not Nature, not God (if a deity exists).
The meaning of doom is that all of these assumptions won't be able to survive, not in their present form. The tactic that will prevail is "Temporize until the catastrophe cannot be ignored." At the end point, whenever that occurs, human nature will be forced to look at itself. A reappraisal of who we are will be inescapable (I'm assuming that the human race won't choose mass suicide, although there are some who take the longest view and who claim that the planet may be better off without us). The solution to global warming doesn't have to reach the end point, of course. The coming generation could evolve at a fundamental level.
This seems to be happening with war. At present the number of people dying in armed conflict, including civil wars, continues to drop. The non-proliferation of atomic weapons has reached a point where everyone agrees that the goal should be worldwide disarmament. Nuclear holocaust is no longer a viable threat. But to confront climate change is probably even more basic. If human nature is to evolve, a new set of assumptions would look something like the following:
Human life isn't set apart from life on earth.
We must live in balance with Nature.
Consumerism isn't unlimited and doesn't lead to happiness.
Toxic pollution harms life and cannot be justified.
As a conscious species, humans must be stewards of the ecology.
None of these are surprising ideas; they are common coin in the environmental movement. But to make them viable on a mass scale, the tide must turn. The part of human nature that says "Me first," "I want mine, who cares about you?", "I only live for today, forget tomorrow," and "Nature is here to be conquered" must be re-examined. Will that happen? No one can tell, but it's important to see that the world "out there" has no chance of changing until there's real transformation "in here."
Follow Deepak Chopra on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DeepakChopra
So, our only viable option now is that of northern Europe - rapidly adopt sustainable technologies - or suffer a lengthy dystopia on a damaged planet.
Obviously, global warming/climate change encompasses and impacts all ethnicities.
Yet, some blame-laying below suggests we prefer one tribe or another, e.g., indigenous pre-technologicals over Euro-spawned technologicals or vice versa.
Sure, fossil-fuel based machinery lets humans inflict environmental damage far more rapidly, and we have.
And yes, the thermodynamic constraints are that accelerated entropy production remains a requisite byproduct of emergent "dissipative structures", such as ourselves. However, the Sun is a vastly superior negentropic source and the persistent problem is trapped heat, not waste heat.
Thus, technology CAN be fully sustainable, both in principle and in practice.
Meanwhile, past performance allows some hope.
Examples:
Respect extends to my fellow atmospheric scientists, who initiated and were instrumental in two successful global mitigations: the 1983 TTAPS "nuclear winter" study, which led to the Strategic Arms Reduction treaties of 1991, 1993, and 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_Treaty
And the 1970's polar ozone studies, which led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol curtailing CFC emissions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole
http://larouchepac.com/nawapaxxi/feature
Chopra: "Human life isn't set apart from life on earth" No it isn't. But 'The Hunter' is about the dawning realization that we've created powerful entities on the planet that, in their behavior, aren't human. Dafoe's hunter is after a species hunted to extinction. His dawning realization is that that may be him. That may be all of us.
And of course, the expected false science is include for amusement.
Who pays you netdr? Heartland? Exxon? Kochbros/
What about those extinct corals and polar bears ?
But we're not seeing any kind of leadership when it comes to global warming. No powerful group of standing politicians want to stick their necks out and have them cut off by the oil companies lobbying, media and political arm.
As for temporizing... That is always a terrible strategy in the face of these kinds of problems. By the time things are dire, most of the damage has already been done. Easter Islanders who were waiting to be right about deforestation had to wait for the forests to be damaged beyond repair. Africans who were right about the Sahara had to wait until the desert was at their doorsteps. Indians who were right about the Buffalo had to wait until the animals were on the verge of extinction.
Temporizing is the strategy of the defeated, the doomed, and those who will be locked into the dark closet of history.
All these are examples of failed leadership.
In short, it's not human nature that's wrecking the climate. It's a number of bad choices that leaders continue to make. A similar situation compared to nuclear disarmament would look like this:
1. Nuclear weapons manufactureres lobby Congress and the governments of the world with profits gained from weapons making.
2. Leadership is convinced that nuclear weapons manufacturing is vital to the economy.
3. More and more weapons are produced -- first in the industrial nations, then in the second world, finally in the third world.
4. Small but troubling nuclear weapons incidents begin to occur around the globe. Most rival nations possess nuclear weapons.
5. Media campaigns are waged that are aimed at making nuclear war and radiation leakage events look like they're not too bad.
6. The arms manufacturers get rich to the point where they represent about 5% of world gdp.
7. Some politicians fight the problem, but it's not a political winner since money isn't on their side.
8. Larger, regional incidents begin cropping up with more frequency, but since opponents to nuclear weapons have been marginalized, their voices aren't heard as the crisis intensifies.
They went extinct thousands of years ago because they couldn't tread water for 100 years at a time ?
Those who don't buy into the fantasies of being created by some magical all powerful deity & understand & accept the overwhelming evidence for evolution know we are simply one organism among millions on this planet & are no more special than a cockroach & can go extinct just as fast if not faster than a cockroach if we don not protect & cherish our ONLY HOME, EARTH!!
The worst "science" says "trust us ... not what you read in the climategate emails ... no that wasn't what we really meant ... doomsday, computer models, the end is nay ... spare change for my grant", tidal waves, heat, cold, rain, drought ... it's all because we haven't had more grant money to investigate ... which just proves manmade warming can only be stopped by paying more academics to research global warming's effect on raising grant levels to academics researching the effects of grant levels on rising global warming.
CO2 may contribute 1°C of direct warming. But the overall positive feedbacks may increase that to 3 or 4 °C of warming. And those are the low estimates. Some of the extreme estimates range as high as 6 °C warming.
Sounds like you are more concerned with hoax than science. Sorry.
Hoax "science" ... the kind you get in the church of scientology or any other joke science ... that's what takes a short rise in temperature from 1970 to 2000 (which is the same as that from 1910 to 1940) tells the world this is so unprecedented (whereas it happened 60 years earlier) and then proclaims that we must throw out all the rules of science and base the world economy of a bunch of people who a) can't use excel (Prof Phil Jones), don't understand statistics (Mike Mann) are repeatedly arrested for their environmental activism (James Hansen), don't understand the basic philosophy of science (Trenberth and his "get rid of the null hypothesis).
It's a joke. All the funnier because so many people just don't get it!
The real question is why anyone ever took these people seriously, let alone called their nonsense "science". How can anyone have ever confused drawing a line through 30 years of rise after the "global cooling scare", with science? Science requires proof. All these charlatans have done is taken real science done by others which tells us doubling CO2 will cause a minuscule 1°C rise and then they have falsely added a totally unjustified scaling factor to this real science.
The following massive earthquake is within the standard 2-weeks model, the 6.5 minimum, and within the “Sea of Okhotsk (8+)” region under 8/5 - 11/12 posted in public on 8/5/12 ~ 222 PM CST in http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/242239-harsh-weather-doesnt-prove-global-warming-republican-lawmakers-say.
In the Sea of Sea of Okhotsk,“7.7 magnitude earthquake strikes off east Russian coast” (english.samaylive.com, 8/14/12).