A World Without End or
the End of the World?
Climate
change will be with us for a long time. The best we can hope for is some
degree of mitigation as a result of our efforts to reduce the anthropogenically
emitted greenhouse gases. But that is just part of the problem and we must
include climate change in a holistic approach to stabilizing our impact upon
our planet. Climate change is one of the critical components to be addressed in
this holistic approach as increasing annual global temperature destabilizes our
climate in a very negative way for human survival. Parts of the world are
projected to have hotter and longer droughts or greater and longer periods of
precipitation. The destabilization of weather patterns will even affect the
intensity and duration of winter weather as a result of polar air being forced
further towards mid-latitudes as a consequence of shifting
jet stream patterns. Getting your butt frozen off or being buried in a
“freak” snowfall does not mean climate change is not with us – quite the
contrary.
As we are experiencing the impact of climate change we are
also facing food insecurity,
water scarcity,
loss of productive land, massive
reductions in the larger species of our
ocean fish, loss of biodiversity through extinction
and logging,
salinization of farm
land, nutrient depletion of
farmland, loss
of soil, air pollution
and more. All of these other impacts are a result of our efforts to feed the seven billion people
in the world today and satisfy the material demands of those people who have
acquired the means to consume material goods. Meeting these demands requires
enormous amounts of energy and most of this energy is derived from burning
fossil fuels. Meeting these demands is the cause of global warming. The trade
that results between producers and consumers is our economy. It is universally
accepted that our global economy must continuously grow and consequently every
regional economy must grow to prevent the collapse of society. If you consider
this requirement to grow in the face of the impact of that growth we have
nothing less than a doomsday scenario.
If all these threats caused by mankind’s actions were not
enough we throw in the big one - climate change. Climate change will act as a
threat multiplier and exacerbate many of problems that are well on the way to
being disasters in their own right. Individually they are regional disasters
and collectively they are a global disaster.
Scientifically we seem to live in a reductionist
world. Each of the problems illustrated is considered in isolation from all the
others when we are considering strategies for mitigating or reversing the
trends. If we step back for a holistic view and consider what is or are the
common cause(s) we can clearly identify that it is over production in a finite
world. Over production requires the depletion of non-renewable resources and
exceeding sustainability in renewable resources. Why are we engaged in over
production? Two reasons: for survival and for enhancing quality of life of a
population size that exceeds sustainable levels of renewables. We are massively
reducing our planets store of non-renewables. To accomplish these excesses we
burn vast amounts of fossil fuel for energy and that causes climate change.
What to do? Logically the solution is education. If
everyone, or at least most people, understood the problems we are causing, the
relationship between those problems and the ultimate projected outcome on
humanity we would collectively move to resolve the situation. This means
nothing less than abandoning fossil fuels and reducing the population. We will
have to change our culture to live lightly on the planet. Is this possible?
Well, educating the masses in things scientific has always been difficult.
Understanding the causes of climate change and the complex interactions of
climate, weather, oceans, biology and the impact of all these on humanity is a
challenge. To illustrate the scope of that challenge and the probability of
success consider the following:
A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth
revolves around the sun and not the
other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science
Foundation.
The survey of 2,200
people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on
Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science meeting in Chicago.
To the question
"Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the
Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.
That does not give me hope but we have no choice but to try
to educate everyone about our lifestyle and its impact on the planet so we can
collectively attempt to reverse the situation we find ourselves in. We have to
understand it isn’t a world without end but it could be the end of the world.
Bill Cave