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With eyes wide shut

Climate change threatens the future of humanity, but
we refuse to respond rationally

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 12, 2003
The Guardian

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.
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." 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Special report
Climate change

Graphics
CO2 emissions
The world in the 2050s
The greenhouse effect

Interactive
Guide to drilling for oil in the Arctic
Calculate your personal carbon count

Key resources
The Kyoto protocol
Bjorn Lomborg: Are we doing the right thing?

Useful links
UN framework convention on climate change
Greenpeace
Friends of the earth













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