But
it’s much worse that a problem of science communication (read from the bottom
those to whom this is bcc’d). It’s about the whole psychology that has driven
the rise of science – the notion that, with the exception of the aberration of
science’s use in warfare, science will make our lives better (and even with
war, it will make it better for the winners). The implications of environmental
impact being the product of population and consumption in simple terms are that
science is now saying we must radically curtail our perceived freedoms. This
pricks the bubble of what has sustained support for science within popular
belief. It reveals the idolatry of that belief in contrast with the true faith
of the real scientists, who were always motivated by ideals (“pure knowledge”) rather
than, or as well as, prosaic utilitarianism.
Sometimes
I imagine a scenario called Asteroid. The asteroid is heading straight for us. There’s
nothing, realistically, that our technology can do to stop it, and we’ve got
just a few years left. What do we do in that time? It’s the same question faced
by the terminally ill patient but on a societal scale. It exaggerates the
actual situation, but it also presses the question, “What if climate change mitigation
is nowhere like politically possible “in time”?”
Tom
Crompton has often raised the question of framing of the debate. To me, what
this way of looking at it does is to force a radical re-framing. It suggests we’re
looking at much more than just a scientific issue, but one that is also
ontological (to do with the nature of being; of life itself). I’ve argued in Hell
& High Water that we’re faced with the problem we’ve got because being
has become framed as a question of having, and thus, of consumerism (i.e.
consumption in excess of what is needed for dignified sufficiency). I’ve tried
to show how that process was driven by the motivational manipulation of people
like Bernays and Dichter who used depth psychological methods intended for
healing to drive psychic destabilisation and create consumerist vulnerability
(none of this is original work; rather, it is a synthesis of existing thinking
focussed on climate change). The question now is whether climate change kicks
in bigtime or not, what kind of human beings can we become? How can we reverse
the addictions we have become habituated to, and also, can we start to see current
levels of population decline in some countries as a blessing and not as a
threat to national cohesion? (Consider these fertility rates per woman, that I
pulled off a UN site – a Catholic emphasis for one of their conferences I was
speaking at - deeply patriarchal war-riven Afghanistan, 7.07; Muslim Turkey,
2.14; Catholic Ireland, 1.96; UK, 1.82; China, 1.73; Cuba, 1.49; Italy, 1.38
(hard to blame Catholicism, though the Pope’s not helped), Poland, 1.23; Hong
Kong and Macau 0.97.)
I
am struck that some of us at least on this list have at times lived very
simply, and maybe still do. Radical cuts in consumption do not hold fear for us
– especially if shared across society so we’re not just lone hippies out in the
woods doing something that’s so worthy that it knocks us off the Richter scale
of mainstream credibility. If as a society we’re not going to choose to live
more simply in order to mitigate global warming, we may yet be forced to do so
in response – as the victims of floods and fires are already learning. Either
way, therefore, deepening the human condition is a pressing imperative. The
skills of living from simplicity as distinct from those of living from “making”
a lot of money may become important. In parallel respect George, I was
impressed by the psychological approaches that you and Tom C took on that
recent Radio 4 programme about warming. We must be careful not to psychologies or
spiritualise the whole problem into an ethereal compartment. We need one foot
in that world, and the other in the tangible worlds of science and politics. But
we do need to be walkers between the worlds. Vérène (my wife) and I have been
reflecting recently on something Richard Rohr (a very right on Franciscan
priest) said about “chronic liminality.” Liminality pertains to the threshold –
to moving between worlds. To walk the thresholds is never comfortable. But Rohr
is saying that the only real place of transformation in this world is in the
liminal places, and that is why the great teachers of life of the past are
people who have come to terms with living in states of liminality that have
become, for them, chronic (i.e. perpetual).
I’ve
loved some of the things said on this forum these past few days about sharing
truthfully with children. We need to prepare them for a world of chronic
liminality too. It means cultivating their capacity to engage with science,
politics, economics etc., but equally, engaging the other foot that opens to
inner depth including the inter-personal depths of empathy, of love made
manifest. I often find this difficult territory because it riddles you with
contradiction, but the words of the black American writer Alice Walker can be
helpful:
"Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm. "
From:
Discussion list for the Crisis Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of George Marshall
Sent: 17 February 2011 10:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in
England and Wales in autumn 2000
Here we have one of the central
challenges of science communication. When an extreme weather event happens
scientists are invited to make a connection with climate change. Quite
understandably they are reluctant to do so without full research. This
sometimes comes over as uncertainty- but increasingly I notice the formula
“there is a difference between climate and weather- we cannot ascribe any
single weather event to climate change” and this suggests that the extreme
event is ‘natural variation’ not climate change...see for example the Met
Office explanation of the cold winter which adamantly says that it is NOT
ascribable to climate change
Then, years later, researchers
collect sufficient evidence to establish a strong contribution in the event
from climate change but this is too late and disconnected to help the public
make the connection in their own minds.
What I find disturbing is that
this pattern keeps happening (eg 2003 heatwave, Katrina, floods) and very
likely will be repeated for the current record cold in Northern Europe and US.
Science communications has not found a way of conveying this past experience-
that, whilst it cannot be said with confidence without the research, previous
extreme weather events have been found to be strongly influenced by climate
change.
From:
Discussion list for the Crisis Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Jon Barrett
Sent: 17 February 2011 07:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in
England and Wales in autumn 2000
Dear all,
For those of us wanting to be
able to communicate evidence of a clear, present and local CC
threat, the Guardian reports today on this research just published in Nature
Researchers have
for the first time quantified the part climate change played in increasing the
risk of a severe flood"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/16/climate-change-risk-uk-floods
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09762.html
Jon
Volume:470, Pages:382–385
Date published:(17 February 2011)
Interest in attributing the risk of damaging
weather-related events to anthropogenic climate change is increasing1. Yet climate models used to study the attribution
problem typically do not resolve the weather systems associated with damaging
events2 such as the UK floods of October and November 2000.
Occurring during the wettest autumn in England and Wales since records began in
17663, 4, these floods damaged nearly 10,000 properties across
that region, disrupted services severely, and caused insured losses estimated
at £1.3 billion
(refs 5, 6). Although the flooding was deemed a ‘wake-up call’ to the
impacts of climate change at the time7, such claims are typically supported only by general
thermodynamic arguments that suggest increased extreme precipitation under
global warming, but fail8, 9 to account fully for the complex hydrometeorology4, 10 associated with flooding. Here we present a
multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework
showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales
in autumn 2000. Using publicly volunteered distributed computing11, 12, we generate several thousand
seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather,
both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been
had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never
occurred. Results are fed into a precipitation-runoff model that is used to
simulate severe daily river runoff events in England and Wales (proxy
indicators of flood events). The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic
contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results
indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions
increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by
more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.
--
Jon
Barrett
Le projet pour une vie durable
Goastelliou
29620 Guimaec
France
Tel: 00 33 (0)2 98 67 68 87
Converging
Crises blog: www.jontybarrett.wordpress.com
Goastelliou
website: www.goastelliou.wordpress.com
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