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Thanks Alastair,

I have always assumed that this list was about crisis - crisis 
recognition and response.  (Some also consider societal change, but as a 
response to crisis.)

The general recognition of a world crisis is beginning to dawn, as Paul 
Rogers point out in his excellent piece [1].  It is important to hammer 
home the good science that shows that the force of Katrina and the force 
of the Queensland floods are both related to extra high temperature in 
neighbouring ocean - and a component of that temperature is from global 
warming.  Too often journalists will end their piece with something to 
throw doubt about the effects or existence of global warming - for 
example here [2].

The retreat of Arctic sea ice is a crisis which needs to be recognised 
more widely, because of "positive feedback" of the "albedo flip".  As 
the reflective sea ice retreats, the resulting open water absorbs solar 
energy and the air above the water is heated.  If Arctic warming 
continues unabated, massive quantities of methane will be released from 
melting permafrost - enough to cause global warming to spiral out of 
control.  Also there is the risk of Greenland ice sheet disintegration, 
producing 7 metres of sea level rise.  The sea ice is already in a 
critical state [3].

This is an emergency.  But what can we do?   Traditionally the focus has 
been on greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing emissions cannot help on 
the necessary timescale to save the Arctic sea ice.

Our only option is to use geoengineering to cool the Arctic.  Now almost 
everybody, scientists and environmentalists alike, has a natural 
aversion to engineering on global scale.  But we have no choice.  Either 
we embrace geoengineering, and get it to work on our behalf, or we are 
doomed to many degrees of global warming and many metres of sea level 
rise.  That's curtains.  That's the end of civilisation.

At present we seem hell bent on a suicidal course of relying on some 
miraculous reduction of CO2 emissions, which by itself can neither halt 
global warming, nor save the Arctic.  All talk is about changing 
people's lifestyle to reduce carbon footprint.  But this won't prevent 
catastrophe.  We are indeed like the proverbial lemmings - and we are 
about to fall over the cliff edge.

Rant over.  Does this make sense to anybody?  Does anybody understand 
what I'm saying?  I know you don't want to know - you desperately don't 
want to believe what I'm saying.  It's extremely uncomfortable to 
contemplate.  Like Jeremiah's warning to the Israelites that Babylonians 
wanted them as slaves - the Israelites didn't want to know.   But if we 
all bury our heads in the sand, we and our offspring have no future.  We 
need a Transition to Science and Sanity.

That's how I see it.  Can anybody see my point of view?

Kind regards,

John

[1] 
http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/world-in-breakdown?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_2011-01-14%2005%3a30 


[2] http://planetark.org/wen/60863

[3] http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52896

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On 15/01/2011 08:00, Alastair McIntosh wrote:
>
> Well everybody ...
>
> It seems to me from recent postings (mostly on the warmest year not 
> being news theme) that there's a strong view on this list that climate 
> change is too narrow a focus, and that we should be widening out our 
> concerns to issues that threaten crisis in a broader sense. I very 
> much concur with that.
>
> When I first came onto this list about 3 years ago I mistaken called 
> it the "Climate Crisis Forum" because that seemed to be its singular 
> concern. But it's interesting to look back on how that singularity 
> came to pass. Nature is not a follower of fashion. Nature operates 
> according to life's adaptation to the physical realities affecting the 
> biosphere. Human beings, once beyond the level of basic sufficiency in 
> life, are dedicated followers of fashion. If we don't have to fight or 
> flight we look for ways to twiddle our thumbs. This produces a 
> mismatch between underlying biophysical realities affecting the planet 
> and the human perception of what is important, given that most people 
> do not think long-term (ask any politician about voting realities).
>
> The prophets of a society -- those who see and testify to the bigger 
> picture -- are perennially faced with the same problem. In Jeremiah's 
> time it was how to wake the Israelites up to the fact that the 
> Babylonians were at the door and about to force them into slavery. The 
> Israelites tried to shut him up by putting him in the stocks and 
> throwing him down a well. They didn't want to know. The same is true 
> of modern prophets -- and I use the term in its secular as well as its 
> spiritual sense. The party-goers hate the party-poopers, even when 
> they're right, especially when they're right.
>
> As such, modern environmentalism (i.e. post Rachel Carson, Teddy 
> Goldsmith, etc.) has had a marketing problem. The materialistic 
> eighties were an era in which war became acceptable again as a tool of 
> political policy (Falklands) and massive deregulation undermined 
> localism. "Greed is Good" became disturbingly normalised. The idea 
> that "Green is Good" started to become a fading seventies dream. The 
> 1972 Limits to Growth Report which had caused such a stir began to pop 
> with the Ehrlich bubble. There were no limits that technology couldn't 
> fix. There was no need for a "frugral" green movement that could be 
> dismissed -- often with good justification because of its own 
> indulgence of neurotic fads -- as "yoghurt knitters".
>
> Along comes climate science in the late 80s and the sudden conversion 
> of Mrs T. All of a sudden "our" agenda re-opened. Climate change 
> became the presenting symptom of everything else we'd been banging on 
> about since at least the sixties countercultural revolution and the 
> wider need, arising out of WW2, to seek to understand and resolve the 
> authoritarian mindsets of our parents pre-baby-boomer generation. Some 
> of those neurotic fads were understandable -- all the cranky diets and 
> crazy cures and "energies" and what have you. They were and are a 
> visceral response from sensitive souls injured by socio-psychological 
> mores that negate whole living, and render full incarnation into what 
> it means to be a human being a very painful process for some.
>
> Climate science packed all these concerns -- both justified and 
> neurotically inflated -- into one knapsack. In millenarian terms such 
> as ethnographers study the threat of climate change served as a "folk 
> devil" -- the singular cause of all our ills. We (I speak generically 
> and not for the better informed position) missed the point that it was 
> not a singular cause; it was, rather, the measurable thermometer stuck 
> in the mouth of the patient afflicted with multiple maladies.
>
> But things move in fashions, and a thermometer reading was easy for 
> the media and public to understand. As one of my ex-public school 
> media friends keeps telling me, "Remember, McIntosh, if you want to 
> reach the ordinary person you must pitch what you write for what you'd 
> imagine to be the reading level of an 8 year old." As such, we all 
> constellated behind climate change. We didn't have much choice because 
> it became the only show in town. Biodiversity? As somebody said (was 
> it on this forum?) a recent survey suggested that most people think 
> it's a washing powder. In any case, there is a sense in which climate 
> change is the only show in town. It is the most systemic problem a 
> biosphere can suffer.
>
> For a short time during the mid-nineties the green movement, naively 
> in my view but recognising the need to KISS (keep it simple, stoopid) 
> when communicating with today's public, pushed the view that 
> mitigation was a) technically possible and b) the only thinkable 
> option. If adaptation was mentioned at public meetings there'd be 
> angry responses from campaigners who'd get up and say, "To talk about 
> adaptation is to concede defeat and let the governments and the 
> corporations off the hook." But those culprits in fair measure, 
> especially in democratic free market economies reflect, at least to a 
> substantial degree, the psychological mores of the people. Yes, they 
> may be demons, but to demonise them alone is to deal with our own 
> complicity by projection and scapegoating. The bottom line, as Cop15 
> so ignobly demonstrated, is that while mitigation might have been 
> technically feasible (e.g. Monbiot's analysis in Heat), it was never 
> going to be politically so.
>
> That brings the movement -- the movement of those who are concerned 
> about the world beyond self-gratification -- to a crisis point. As 
> such, this debate we've been having makes for an interesting meta-take 
> on what a Crisis Forum should be here for. The question is how do "we" 
> -- those who seek to serve as researchers, policy-makers and 
> opinion-leaders on these issues -- seek to steer matters henceforth? 
> What is worth researching, campaigning about, conforming our 
> lifestyles in accordance with (while acknowledging the difficulty and 
> our complicities -- thank you, Michael)?
>
> In short, what is the greater purpose to which we can meaningfully 
> hitch our visions and serve?
>
> My sense is that climate change is going to go off the boil for a 
> while because it's resolutely gone out of fashion -- at least in 
> certain countries, like the UK. That doesn't mean we stop bothering 
> about it. The science, if it is broadly right, will continue to catch 
> up. All the time it is catching up, an what's interesting is that a 
> lot of that catching up seems likely to throw us back onto the 
> original component concerns of climate change. (For example, I'm 
> interested in the Scottish fishing industry, and a BBC round-up 
> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-12180743> 
> yesterday states:  "Iceland and the Faroes said they saw the situation 
> differently. The countries argued that the mackerel stock has 
> gravitated north in recent years - thought to be due to climate change 
> - so they were now fishing in their own zones.")
>
> The question of "crisis" interests me in 2 respects. First, I am 
> concerned with the dynamics of love and the trauma that lovelessness, 
> a.k.a. violence, generates in scarring the human condition. As such, 
> matters that heighten conflict between peoples are troubling ... we 
> are not that far away, yet, from those dynamics of world war that so 
> shaped today's elderly generation. Secondly, I am interested in the 
> dynamics of transformation. Crisis, as the old Chinese pictogram has 
> it, represents both threat and opportunity. Whenever I see crisis I'm 
> asking, "How can deeper insight, deeper humanity, be drawn from this?" 
> This is what I mean by finding a greater purpose to which to hitch our 
> wagons.
>
> As for the discussions on this list, personally I hope it will 
> continue to be a well-informed context for discussing climate change, 
> but also, that there may be a widening out into other dynamics of 
> global crisis. But above all, a deepening of reflection about what the 
> trends in global crisis mean in an ontological sense. The role of a 
> prophet is to testify to situations in ways that might dig out 
> channels that the deluge can later fill and be directed by. I think we 
> are in an era of maybe not being heard as much as we were 3 years ago, 
> but of needing to beaver away digging those channels. Jon's missive on 
> the Transition movement is interesting in this respect. I agree with 
> all his misgivings about it, but also with his perception of why it is 
> important. Transition, without having to TM the term, is what we need 
> to be working on, but what is so often lacking when words like 
> transition or transformation are used is a clear vision of what it is 
> that we are moving towards. This is why, in my view, the single most 
> important thing any of us can be doing in present times is to deepen 
> our reflection, and seeking out of embodied experience, of what it 
> means to be human: epistemologically, ontologically and dare I suggest 
> it, teleologically (concerned with end-purpose). Such an agenda goes 
> profoundly contrary to dominant trends in the postmodern academy. But 
> perhaps Derridean postmodernism with its denials of reality, along 
> with the nihilistic forms of Sartrean existentialism that have 
> accompanied it, are part of our problem. Climate change and associated 
> crises has the great virtue of forcing us back to biophysical 
> properties. Who knows what can open up from there.
>
> Oh dear ... sorry to have generated such breakfast indigestion!
>
> Alastair.
>