I'm usually a really optimistic person, but after the recent political shifts to the right worldwide and the effect of the Syrian and African refugees on Europe, I think we are in store for a century of not enough action, civil unrest and wars due to Climate Change. Already, many refugees coming to the US from El Salvador and Guatemala are coming here because their crops get too little rain to make them viable. This is a documented fact.
The climate refugees will be a more pressing issue than the weather impacts in the near-term. I don't care how tall your walls are, if people are starving, they will come. These are national security issues and this is why the Pentagon is very concerned about Climate Change. Countries will invade other countries just because they can no longer get water or grow food.
Deep breath, long response, apologies in advance. I completely get your concerns and we will need to maintain some reserves of optimism to sustain us.
One of the problems perhaps is that a looming horizon of all huge challenging constraints can become overwhelming if people panic because we just don’t feel like we know how to solve all of problems straight away and if we are continuously told that we have no future.
We need a very responsive pattern of ongoing change but we will actually be at our most vulnerable if people now just give up hope at the very start.
Desperate people are often dangerous people and not always rational let alone reasonable. People without hope sometimes become even more wasteful. Only seeing doom is perhaps the very beginning of the end for all of us and if fear and anxiety take over the moderating constraints of civilisation tend to come off. That sense of panic is becoming very visible across the planet.
We need to see a way forwards without necessarily first having all the solutions. A sense of resilience and commitment to help drive the required unfolding changes over the next century comes from us having a sense of a bearable future that can be and has to be worked towards.
We can’t afford complacency but equally we can’t afford arbitrarily proceeding with a further lack of precautionary principle as well. Poor long term planning is what got us here so we need to keep our heads clear and not just create a lip service to solutions and quick fixes that just continue the problem. We actually need to transition to a new phase of activity from our last 2500 year developmental phase of continued and accelerated linear growth.
I have been building climate change presentations for many years and just sticking with the current science the scenarios are very depressing and some (much) of it quite scary. Little good is added by us panicking and getting caught up in the noise of the debate of the extremes and potential inefficiencies and additional lack of effective action caused by everyone taking forever more entrenched positions and pursuing even further unnecessary conflict.
We do need collaboration and a minimisation of people using unscientific facts or a lack of absolute transparency to hijack understanding just to WIN their particular perspective in the argument or to act out their panic no matter where their perspectives lie.
We need have some openness about the positive as well as negative potentials and most of all I believe we need to hang together as a species or we will certainly hang together one way or another in the end.
The competitive model doesn’t work any more because we have hit the limits (and are now exceeding) of only having one earth. What we are now dealing with comes out of an unrestrained drive for growth and expansion beyond our now emerging understanding of the limits of the planet. Our contribution in this is accelerated resource usage and correlated green house gas emissions from actions driven in the name of continuous growth and competitive dominance.
The biocapacity of the planet (sum total of renewables produced by the earth) and the ecological survivability of the biofeedback capacities of climate in correlation to green house gas concentrations are limits that we now must learn to work with.
Conflict is inefficient and collaboration is perhaps the balance we need to work together to set limits and solve problems to issues that aren’t bound by borders. Panic, noise and growing aggression and conflict are the added flames and heat that we just can’t afford anymore.
We do need to understand what is a survivable rate of change and how not to create a worse scenario by panicking or destroying all sense of hope. There will be casualties and we need to choose our constraints and I’m suggesting if it’s a choice between survival and private transport that might seem to be an easier choice than many of the others we will need to choose between.
Carbon accounting is the only way to genuinely evaluate the whole of life resource issues of any product or goods or service. That is just science. So much energy is taken up in debating the issues and still perhaps us not seeing the forest for the disappearing trees. But I’d humbly suggest however doom is an expectation bias that none of us can ever really afford. We need to keep a good measure of optimism and hope going forwards.
