Captain Future's Log

The Life and Death of Global Civilization

We've had so many bad wars on this and phony wars on that, the concept is just about bankrupt. But there is still a tingle of life in the metaphor, because war means urgency plus mobilizing all resources to achieve an end. And now that the question of whether the Climate Crisis is real is becoming a very sick joke, it's time to focus on what really we've got to do.

Here's Australia's Tim Flannery, author of the new book, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, in Wired:

Again and again in all areas of climate science, what I'm seeing is trends in the real world that are running far, far ahead of what the computer models predict...

The classic example of that is of the hurricane season. There was a study in 2004 that had projected out to 2080 and tracked trends in hurricane intensity and all the rest of it. What we see in the real world is these things are arriving a hell of a lot faster than we see predicted in the computer models.... I'm really worried that we're swiftly running out of time to deal with the problem.

I do think that if we're going to survive this first threat to global civilization -- and it is the first big test of global civilization -- we will need to put ourselves on a war footing.

When a government goes on a war footing, they reorganize their enterprises around the imminent threat of invasion. So they can restructure the economy, the way the bureaucracy works, in order to combat the immediate threat. I do think the situation is worse than suggested in most computer models. We've got less time than we thought we did. We will need to give this issue primacy in our thinking as governments and as individuals over the next decade or so. "

It's about time real leaders understood this and have the guts to say so. Because it's no longer a matter of fighting global warming by installing some insulation in your garage. It's going to take focused, sustained and large-scale attention.

It's interesting that he uses the term "Global civilization." It occurs to me that the response to the Climate Crisis will either define and perhaps even create something worth calling 'global civilization,' or it will end the possibility of it ever developing, essentially forever.