http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=599
See this same article,
minus the references, on Common Dreams,
under this title: "With
Eyes Wide Shut: Climate Change Threatens
the Future of Humanity, But We Refuse to Respond Rationally".
8/12/03.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0812-08.htm
Sleepwalking to Extinction
Something
about the human mind appears to prevent us from grasping the reality
of climate change
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 12th August 2003
We live in a dreamworld.
With a small, rational part of the brain,
we recognise that our existence is governed by material realities,
and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But
underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness which
absorbs the moment in which we live then generalises it,
projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the
present. This, not the superficial world of our reason,
is our true reality. All that separates us from the indigenous
people of Australia is that they recognise this and we do not.
Our dreaming will,
as it has begun to do already, destroy the
conditions necessary for human life on earth. Were we governed
by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the
drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats,
occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations,
bursting in upon the Blairs' retreat from reality in Barbados
and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the
one we bore when we went to war with Hitler. Instead, we whinge
about the heat and thumb through the brochures for holidays
in Iceland. The future has been laid out before us, but the
deep eye with which we place ourselves on earth will not see it.
Of course, we cannot
say that the remarkable temperatures in
Europe this week are the result of global warming. What we can
say is that they correspond to the predictions made by climate
scientists. As the Met Office reported on Sunday, "all our
models
have suggested that this type of event will happen more frequently."1
In December it predicted that, as a result of climate change,
2003
would be the warmest year on record.2 Two weeks ago its research
centre reported that the temperature rises on every continent
matched the predicted effects of climate change caused by human
activities, and showed that natural impacts, such as sunspots
or volcanic activity, could not account for them.3 Last month
the World Meteorological Organisation announced that "the
increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have
been the largest in any century during the past 1000 years",
while " the trend for the period since 1976 is roughly three
times that for the past 100 years as a whole."4 Climate change,
the WMO suggests, provides an explanation not only for record
temperatures in Europe and India but also for the frequency
of tornadoes in the United States and the severity of the
recent floods in Sri Lanka.5
There are, of course,
still those who deny that any warming
is taking place, or who maintain that it can be explained
by natural phenomena. But few of them are climatologists,
fewer still are climatologists who do not receive funding
from the fossil fuel industry. Their credibility among
professionals is now little higher than that of the people
who claim that there is no link between smoking and cancer.
Yet the prominence the media gives them reflects not only
the demands of the car advertisers. We want to believe them,
because we wish to reconcile our reason with our dreaming.
The extreme events
to which climate change appears to have
contributed reflect an average rise in global temperatures
of 0.6C.6 The consensus among climatologists is that temperatures
will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8C:
by up to ten times, in other words, the increase we have
suffered so far.7 Some climate scientists, recognising
that global warming has been retarded by industrial soot,
whose levels are now declining, suggest that the maximum
should instead be placed between 7 and 10C.8 We are not
contemplating the end of holidays in Seville. We are
contemplating the end of the circumstances which permit
most human beings to remain on earth.
Climate change of this
magnitude will devastate the earth's
productivity. New research in Australia suggests that the
amount of water reaching the rivers will decline by up to
four times as fast as the percentage reduction of rainfall
in dry areas.9 This, alongside the disappearance of the glaciers,
spells the end of irrigated agriculture. Winter flooding and
the evaporation of soil moisture in the summer will exert
similar effects on rainfed farming. Like crops, humans will
simply wilt in some of the hotter parts of the world:
the 1500 deaths in India through heat exhaustion this
summer may prefigure the necessary evacuation, as
temperatures rise, of many of the places currently
considered habitable. There is no chance of continuity
here; somehow we must persuade our dreamselves to confront
the end of life as we know it.
Paradoxically, the
approach of this crisis corresponds
with the approach of another. The global demand for oil
is likely to outstrip supply within the next 10 or 20 years.
Some geologists believe it may have started already.10
It is tempting to knock the two impending crises together,
and to conclude that the second will solve the first.
But this is wishful thinking. There is enough oil under
the surface of the earth to cook the planet and, as the
price rises, the incentive to extract it will increase.
Business will turn to even more polluting means of
obtaining energy, such as the use of tar sand and
oil shale, or "underground coal gasification" (setting
fire to coal seams). But because oil in the early stages
of extraction is the cheapest and most efficient fuel,
the costs of energy will soar, ensuring that we can no
longer buy our way out of trouble with air conditioning,
water pumping and fuel-intensive farming.
So instead we place
our faith in technology. In an age
in which science is as authoritative but, to most,
as inscrutable as God once was, we look to its products
much as the people of the Middle Ages looked to divine
providence. Somehow "they" will produce and install
the
devices - the wind turbines or solar panels or tidal
barrages - which will solve both problems while ensuring
that we need make no change to way we live.
But the widespread
deployment of these technologies
will not happen until rising prices ensure that it becomes
a commercial imperative, and by then it is too late.
Even so, we could not meet our current levels of consumption
without covering almost every yard of land and shallow sea
with generating devices. In other words, if we leave the
market to govern our politics, we are finished. Only if
we take control of our economic lives, and demand and
create the means by which we may cut our energy use
to 10 or 20% of current levels will we prevent the
catastrophe which our rational selves can comprehend.
This requires draconian regulation, rationing and
prohibition: all the measures which our existing
politics, informed by our dreaming, forbid.
So we slumber through
the crisis. Waking up demands
that we upset the seat of our consciousness, that
we dethrone our deep unreason and usurp it with our
rational and predictive minds. Are we capable of this,
or are we destined to sleepwalk to extinction?
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Reuters, 8th August
2003. Europe's Heatwave Doesn't Prove Global Warming.
2. Geoffrey Lean, 29
December 2002. Official: next year will be the
hottest since records began. The Independent on Sunday.
3. Meteorological Office,
28th July 2003. Europe and North America
warming due to human activity. Press release.
4. World Meteorological
Organisation, 2nd July 2003. Extreme Weather
Events Might Increase. Press release.
5. ibid.
6. Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, 2001. Climate Change
2001, Synthesis Report.
7. ibid
8. Fred Pearce, 4th
June 2003. Global warming's sooty smokescreen
revealed. New Scientist.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993798
9. Research by the
Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment
Hydrology, cited in The Institute for Sustainable Futures, 2003.
Impacts of Climate Change on Water Supplies and Soil. Sydney.
10. See for example
Richard Heinburg, 2003. The Party’s Over:
Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.
New Society Publishers, Canada; Kenneth S. Deffeyes, 2001.
Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton
University Press; Bob Holmes and Nicola Jones, 2nd August 2003.
Brace Yourself for the End of Cheap Oil. New Scientist.
12th August 2003
