In countless cartoons, there's a guy in a robe and long beard who's walking around carrying a sign saying The End Is Nigh. The joke is that he's ridiculous -- some loony who takes the Book of Revelation literally. But what if the joke's on us?
The June 6 issue of the leading scientific journal Nature contains a paper co-authored by 22 researchers from all over the world. Their disciplines range from zoology, paleontology and geology to fields that are not your father's Oldsmobile, like ecoinformatics and computational ecology. Getting published in Nature means that independent peer reviewers have vouched for the quality of the authors' evidence and the rigor of their thinking. We're talking gold-standard science here.
What the paper says is that the earth is approaching a global tipping point, "a state shift in Earth's biosphere." It may happen in as few as 10 to 15 years; it may even have already happened. It will be irreversible, "a planetary-scale critical transition" whose consequences may include mass extinctions and "drastic changes in species distributions, abundances and diversity."
Its consequences could be as catastrophic as an asteroid hitting the Earth. But unlike asteroids, volcanoes, plate tectonics and other suspected culprits in the prior Great Extinctions, the cause of this tipping point is people.
There are 7 billion of us now; there will be over 9 billion when today's toddlers start having kids. To support that population, we've cleared more than 40 percent of the planet's surface for agriculture and urban development, and that will hit 50 percent by 2050. Add to that the fossil fuels we're burning, and the resulting carbon dioxide that we're pumping into the atmosphere is acidifying the oceans, melting the ice caps, messing with the climate and heading us toward "widespread social unrest, economic instability and the loss of human life."
So what do we do with news that bad?
The right's response has been denial - a war on truth. Rush Limbaugh calls science, academia, government and the media the "four pillars of deceit," a Red Queen maneuver that beheads anything incompatible with the Gospel of Rushbo. Sense is nonsense: if that's your epistemology, there's no arguing with it. Or, shifting from Lewis Carroll to the Doobie Brothers, "What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away."
But if you don't think that Nature is Pravda, if you can't wear a Science = Stalin button, if you don't believe that those 22 researchers have an ideological axe to grind, how do you process the news that the end may in fact be nigh?
There's another kind of denial, one that's different from Rush's de-definition of reason. Some facts are so disturbing that the only way we can handle them is magical thinking. If we don't dwell on them, they won't hurt us. If we ignore them, they'll go away. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is a familiar example. The obesity epidemic is another. We know how scary and intractable these problems are, but we quarantine those thoughts. Defense, Inc. and Food, Inc. spend whatever it takes to market images of security and pleasure to us, and we find them so appealing that we willingly inhabit a cloud cuckoo land that poses no threat to their profits.
But suppose we put away childish things. Suppose we faced the ecological bad news head on. What if the specter of a global tipping point, an irreversible environmental catastrophe, grabbed our attention as powerfully as the prospect of extinction grips the people of Earth in space invasion movies? We'd do everything we could to stop it, right?
In the U.S., the scale of action required to prevent such a state shift in our planet's biosphere can only be attempted by our political system.
Uh-oh.
Special interests own Congress. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision holding corporations to be people, together with the demise of campaign finance laws, puts plutocrats first. Big media, while raking in billions from political ads, is holding audiences riveted to spectacles instead of holding candidates accountable for lying. If you think a re-elected Barack Obama could get a decent energy policy passed by the next Congress, you haven't been counting the Koch brothers' money or listening to Mitch McConnell.
The consequence of being a citizen who cares about issues like carbon footprints, peak oil and rising temperatures is a feeling of powerlessness. The oligarchs have us by the short hairs. If you aren't feeling impotent, you haven't been paying attention.
Powerlessness hurts -- literally. It's a clinical diagnosis. The Occupy movement was, briefly, a kind of therapy for it. Tracking every online detail about the latest outrage is a recent form of self-medication for it. But as long as informed majorities are rendered helpless by a rigged system, the only thing more demoralizing than knowing how nigh the end may really be is being trapped, powerless, alongside that nutcase in the cartoon.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.
Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan
I've been thinking about this for years. I agree that governments and national leaders around the world lack the political will (and political capital) to do much of anything until ecological catastrophe strikes.
My solution involves small settlements/communities that go off grid and live sustainably. My reserach and practical experience is that ~150 people (of which ~100 would be healthy adults, 30-40 families of 4-5) on ~150 sustainable acres) is optimal.
This solution is problematic when catastrophe strikes everywhere else, but until then I haven't been able to come up with anything better.
- There will be great suffering down the road. There is great suffering now
But I do think there will be a solution, 9 Billion people will each plant a tree, tend the fields, and give up their cars
The planet will be different, disease will probably wipe out a significant portion, and w/a/r will make a few people rich
And people will pay taxes
The End
As the actions of the Vatican prove, those who believe in him will be blessed, they only believe in their institution.
The more I know, the more I grow, and so long as I never spoke up there must be no truth to those "stories". Well thats certainly proving to be wrong, of course that means a great deal of science is wrong as well. Better to eliminate the anomaly then to actually have to deal with it. Its ok I understand, a great deal of science today is only possible with a great deal of ignorance anyways.
It's really that simple but it takes more than a handful of people to make this happen. It takes everyone having enough personal accountability to do their part to reduce their carbon footprint.
The biggest problem is apathy and laziness. It takes extra effort and planning to buy "greener" products, to carpool at least once a week and so on. These are baby steps that everyone can start tomorrow. Before you buy a product, consider where it's made and how it's packaged. One small example are those juice boxes for kids lunches. They are one of the most damaging types of packaging anyone can use because they are multi-layered (paper/wax/plastic) and unable to be recycled. So, if you can find an alternate drink for your kids, you have made a positive impact with just one small change.
You don't have to be GREEN overnight..........you can simply be GREENER immediately and then over time, make the big leap.
Every single power player on the planet is convinced that Growth is Good.
I actually saw a comment on one of these threads the other day that laughed at folks back in the 70s for forecasting widespread famine by the end of the century. The person, evidently, had no idea that by the year 2000 or 2001 (depending on how one likes to end a century) 12% of the world's people were starving with an additional 18% at some level of nutritional deficit.
When the facts are considered irrelevant, all argument is reduced to faith ... just the way folk like it, evidently.
The newest move is to change building codes to make homes able to withstand the increasingly powerful storms. I believe we call them basements now.
I truly believe that given the choice of sacrificing even a small amount of money or convenience by the majority of people versus the survival of their specy would be scorned regardless of the proof offered.
You can't help the helpless, you can't think for the thoughtless, we spend unlimited funds educating our children but chose to ignore the scientific evidence presented by our most educated scientists in favor of Rush, Newt, and Rick.
One thing for sure, approximately 50% of the U.S. population deserves what is coming.
The transition from one form of energy to the other will probably involve a period of relatively low profits (maybe, the horror of it all, losses) for the producers.
Cagey investors know that we will continue extracting fossil fuels the old-fashioned way until it takes more than one unit of fuel to extract one unit of fuel ... no matter what the incidental damage to the environment.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-limits-economy.htm