Is Man Smart Enough To Avoid Disasterous Climate Change?
Is Man Smart Enough To Avoid Disasterous Climate Change
?
As far as we know, man is the smartest thing ever to evolve, anywhere in the universe. As a species, we are clearly proud of our intelligence, so proud in fact that we named ourselves homo sapiens, meaning "wise" or "knowing" man.
Our intelligence has allowed us to understand how our world works and to shape it for our comfort and success. Our intelligence has allowed us to extend the life of many of our species, to eradicate diseases, to leverage our abilities to build things and to communicate in mass yet personal ways. It even allowed us a few times and only briefly, to leave our planet and visit our close neighbour, the moon. Our intelligence means that we love to solve problems: nothing seems out of our reach given enough time and brain power addressed to it.
On the flip side of intelligence are our social structures that have been used to bolster the power of the few. To have a social structure that is hierarchical with a powerful "leader" rising to the top of the pack is reflected in other species. It is not always the most intelligent that become the leaders.
No other species has managed the ability we have to interact and co-ordinate to wage war on each other such that one social grouping can gain ascendance over another. None has managed to devise weapons of such ferocity that their use could end all life on Earth. None has devised methods of torture to bring about suffering of one in the name of advancement of another. The paradox of intelligence and power is all too easy to see.
The battle between our intelligence, our ability to generate knowledge of how the world works and the wielding of power, our ability to organise our social structures, are becoming increasingly tested by the phenomena of global warming and the resultant climate change.
It comes as a surprise to many that the knowledge of global warming is not new.
As long ago as 1824 a scientist called Joseph Fourier discovered that the Earth's atmosphere kept the planet warmer than would otherwise have been expected and this became know as the "greenhouse effect" The knowledge that that carbon dioxide or CO2 in shorthand, is an active gas that allows the visible (sunlight) radiation from the sun into the climate system but slows that same energy down on its way out as heat (infrared) radiation came more than 100 ago and was described in 1859 by a scientist called John Tyndall. Another called Svante Arrhenius made the first calculations of the impact of adding more CO2 from human activities (principally through the use of fossil fuels) to raise the average temperature of the earth's surface before the end of the 19th century. Pretty much since then, scientists have been improving our knowledge and watching closely for generations now.
In the late 1950's direct measurements of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere started being taken in Hawaii and these have continued ever since. Initiated by a scientist called Charles Keeling, and originally covering two locations, the South Pole and Hawaii, budget cuts meant only the Hawaii station could be kept on. For the first few years it was difficult to understand the data as it seem to fluctuate from month to month rising and falling through the course of the year. Then, the scientist involved realised what he was seeing was the planet "breathing" as the northern boreal forests absorbed carbon dioxide during the growing season. Over the years, this data started to show an undeniable upward trend, rising about 1 or 2 parts per million (ppm) so that the level, which was about 315ppm in 1958 now stands at about 390ppm. For comparison, the average level that seems to have been present pre-industrial revolution has been in a band between 220 to 280 ppm. Keeling also wrote a paper in which he observed that the rate of increase at the SouthPole was nearly in line with what could be expected from the burning of fossil fuels.
This connection and the implication of it remained controversial for a number of years but by 2001 when the third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published, the scientific consensus was that the world was warming due to man's activities (this does not mean that the debate in the non-scientific community has ended, far from it, but the nature of the controversy is now about wielding power, not knowledge).
The battle is now to understand what the future will bring, decide what we should do about it and set about implementing the solutions to climate change before it is too late. Exactly when too late' will be is itself controversial but most scientists working in the field want to see substantial cuts in emissions starting now and continuing until they have been reduced by at least 80% by 2050.
Science already knows that increasing concentrations of CO2 will raise temperature and this in turn will lead to higher sea levels as the ice melts. Higher temperatures also mean stronger and more frequent storms in some areas and a vast increase in the amount of deserts on the planet. These are serious implications and in 1988, the governments of the world instituted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to look at the scientific evidence and make recommendations on what the world should do. They have made four reports since then, the first in 1990 and the latest in 2007.
The 2007 report contained recommendations to cut the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to avoid the worst effects of global warming and the resultant climate change. The ideal scenario was for world emissions to fall by 80% by 2050, essentially implying an abandonment of fossil fuel as an energy source. By way of contrast they also included predictions of what would happen if the world continues upon its current trajectory. As forecasting is always wrong, this data was presented as a series of possibilities about a range of possible temperature rises within a range of timescale but suggest that the world would be on course to warm by 6 degree Celsius by the end of this century.
The impacts of such rises are seen as being disastrous. Even at lower levels, serious damage would occur that would threaten the basis of civilisation as we know it. A Royal Society article, called, "The role of interactions in a world implementing adaptation and mitigation solutions to climate change," by Rachel Warren, makes the point that it is the interaction of impacts that is likely to overwhelm, particularly when you consider the very real risk of eco-system collapse over large parts of the Earth. She says:
... a 4C world would be facing enormous adaptation challenges in the agricultural sector, with large areas of cropland becoming unsuitable for cultivation, and declining agricultural yields. This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes, and terrestrial carbon stores, supported by an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. Drought and desertification would be widespread, with large numbers of people experiencing increased water stress, and others experiencing changes in seasonality of water supply. There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on unmanaged ecosystems and decreasing their resilience; and large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
In such a 4C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world. Hence, the ecosystem services upon which human livelihoods depend would not be preserved. Even though some studies have suggested that adaptation in some areas might still be feasible for human systems, such assessments have generally not taken into account lost ecosystem services.
In other words, in the industrial world where food supplies are measured in days and daily life is interconnected and interdependent world, the resilience of our way of life may well be stretched to destruction.
Given the scientific knowledge available and the seriousness of the possible outcomes you would be right in being surprised that action is being ducked. But that is the paradox between our intelligence, how we organise ourselves produces power networks.
Quite early in our history we invented an enormously powerful tool: money. This allowed us to have a medium of exchange that could be used widely with a more or less agreed value. Money and how we account for it has as long and fascinating history as science but it is the power money now holds and the capitalist system that it drives that is at the root of our reluctance to act.
The capitalist system has been an effective (though not perfect) system for delivering present day pleasures but it has done so by fooling us into thinking that destroying the future is "rational behaviour" through the simple error of omitting to place any cost on using the Earth's resources and services. The source of that error is partially our shared imagination of what our relationship to the rest of the planet is (dominant) and partially time related.
Capitalism only became possible following the invention of double entry booking in 15th century Italy. Unfortunately, at that time there were many fewer humans around and they had not discovered how to use fossil fuels in any great way. So, the system that seeks balance is, in fact, tilted. People want to "make money" and are happy to destroy rain-forests (and empty oceans and pollute the atmosphere) to do so because it appears "cheaper" to do so than to preserve them.
Thus, our method of accounting not only drives ordinary people making ordinary every day decisions to destroy the future but assures them that it is "rational behaviour". Maybe it was when the system was invented and the world population was a few hundred million but it clearly is not fit for purpose as we approach 7 billion. If people could make as much, or more, money out of restoring forest, replenishing seas and taking pollution out of the air, things would start to improve quickly.
There are alternative ways to do things. For example, businesses are well used to the idea that capital items needed for production have to be depreciated to provide for their replacement at the end of their productive lives. However, the destruction of natural capital is ignored. Requiring business to pay for the depreciation of natural capital would be one route. If they were obliged to spend that charge on restoration projects of their choice (e.g. restocking oceans, protecting biodiversity, taking carbon out of the atmosphere) it would by-pass government administration (but not verification) and allow established market mechanisms to work effectively. The solution to climate change is making it become part of our economic activity.
Our knowledge and our ability to organise ourselves is what sets us apart from other species. The knowledge that we are imperilling our specie's future by our current behaviour is now as certain as our knowledge of gravity. The challenge is to redesign our social system and the idea of what constitutes "economic activity" to put us onto a path that rewards nourishing planet rather than destroying it. It is referred to as sustainability and it ensures that future generations can continue to enjoy what we have had.
If we achieve that we will have earned our sobriquet of homo sapiens. If we do not, a more appropriate label would be homo incomprehensibilis.
http://www.articlesbase.com/environment-articles/is-man-smart-enough-to-avoid-disasterous-climate-change-4369090.html
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