- We live in a dream world. 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 that 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.
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- 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.
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- 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." In December
it predicted that, as a result of climate change, 2003 would be the warmest
year on record. 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. Last month the World
Meteorological Organisation (WMO) announced that "the increase in
temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any
century during the past 1,000 years", while "the trend since
1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period". 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.
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- 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 give 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.
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- The extreme events to which climate change appears to
have contributed reflect an average rise in global temperatures of 0.6C
over the past century. The consensus among climatologists is that temperatures
will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8C: by up to 10 times,
in other words, the increase we have suffered so far. 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. 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.
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- 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 up to four times as fast as the percentage
reduction of rainfall in dry areas. 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 1,500 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.
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- 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. 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.
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- 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
- that will solve both problems while ensuring that we need make no change
to the way we live.
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- 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 that our
rational selves can comprehend. This requires draconian regulation, rationing
and prohibition: all the measures which our existing politics, informed
by our dreaming, forbid.
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- 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?
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- www.monbiot.com
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1016638,00.html
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