If We're Doomed, This Is Why

It's essentially all here, in one blog entry, by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress, originally posted on January 4 and still the site's most popular post. In the post, and in the comments. But before I get to that...

In the end, nobody beats evolution. You adapt to environmental changes, or you go extinct, or at least lose your character and status and start slipping back to something lesser in the long biological journey. What humanity has going for it is intelligence. But that intelligence has resulted in huge changes to the environment that demand even greater intelligence to deal with. In that sense, humanity has to take control of its own evolution. It has to change the game by changing itself, and then consciously changing the environment it has unconsciously disrupted to the point of collapse.

When Darwin first proposed evolution by natural selection, people like T. H. Huxley understood that humanity had to change the game first of all by changing its behavior based on an ethical evolution. Humans, like other animals, had the capacity for cooperation, compassion or empathy, and altruism, but humanity had to make a choice to give them prominence, and appropriate voice in its behavior. Or else it would destroy itself and its environment, thanks to its powerful but mindless and soulless technology.

Then people like H.G. Wells realized that human evolution had to speed itself up in the intelligence it applied to understanding the threats of the social environment. He saw for example that if nations continued to fight each other using technologies developed from scientific knowledge, they would destroy each other and civilization itself. The rational thing, the intelligent thing, would be to cooperate as a species. Later, ecologists showed how the intelligent thing to do is understand and foster the ecological balances that support our life. Humanity has to apply its intelligence to its place in the world, and its impacts on that world.

Though Wells died in despair months after atom bombs were dropped on Japan, the world has so far avoided blowing itself up. But in terms of just intelligence, you don't have to be too much smarter than a human child to see the rationality of what he ranted about all his life.

What takes a more sophisticated intelligence is dealing with a problem that is going to cause catastrophe--and quite probably, civilization-ending catastrophe--in the future, by unfamiliar means. So far we seem to be up to the challenge of gathering the knowledge necessary to know what's happening to the climate and why with enough precision and enough likelihood to rationally merit action to prevent the worst of it. But then the challenge is (or perhaps was) to get enough people to understand and accept this information, so that our democratic/bureaucratic societies will work together--coordinating as a single civilization--to develop and take those actions.

The challenges involved are multiple. But they represent the next steps in our evolution as a species, which turn out now to be necessary for our survival in the foreseeable future. These steps in intelligence and its application aren't beyond the physical capacities of our brains. Plenty of people have already taken them. Now they are steps in social evolution, involving changes in individual consciousness and, for want of a better word, psyches.

This is perhaps my usual all-too-wordy preface to the nub: this post and the responses. To confront this crisis of crises, the Climate Crisis, we as a species, as a civilization, must confront the evidence and what it means. That's mostly what the post itself is about. It lays it out, with all the links you could possibly want. The basic conclusions are up front: "Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected... If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century’s end." And beyond that, the end of life on earth as we know it, the end of civilization and for all intents and purposes, the extinction of humanity as we know it.

You've heard it all here before, but if we're doomed this is one reason why: we can't absorb and evaluate this information. Conceptually, we haven't evolved our thinking to cope with the reality of phenomena like feedback loops, lag times and tipping points. These relatively simple concepts concerning the behavior of complex systems are far too nuanced for anything in our politics but self-satisfied moronic ridicule.

Emotionally, we haven't evolved our feeling or consciousness to apply ethics--as well as compassion, empathy and altruism-- to all of humanity and the planet. If we did that, we would allow ourselves to see that the tremendous weight of this evidence is great enough to justify action, even if these predictions somehow turn out to be wrong. Why do we fear the miniscule chance of being the victim of terrorism, and ignore the much greater chance of huge catastrophe? Selfish genes, I guess.

Psychologically, we can't handle the truth. We go into denial, or we flop around in despair. We don't apply consciousness to at least considering that this is denial, a trick of the psyche--at best, an inappropriate survival mechanism in these circumstances. Instead, billionaires and wannabe millionaires encourage and exploit denial to extend their selfish brutal power and enrich their stupid short lives.

The evidence for all of this is everywhere, including in the comments to this post. One finds that an estimate of those who understand and accept the outlines of the coming catastrophes at 2% is too generous:

"Even my very over educated friends are mostly out-to-lunch on this and while not “deniers” they are in major league denial about the whole thing….it’s like they just can’t believe it’s THAT bad."

But the most cogent comment is from scientist Tom Kimmerer:

"As the bad scientific news keeps piling up, we need to face the reality of weather: we have had an exceptionally cold year in North America, and are in the deep freeze right now. People don’t understand climate, but they do understand weather. I suspect that if we were coming off a really hot year, all the climate denial in the world would not move public opinion. Jim Hansen once said that we will take global warming seriously when the man on the street notices. Right now, the man on the street is freezing his butt off.

As a scientist, I fully accept that global warming is real, serious and a grave threat..but if there is no local (i.e. weather) experience to back that up, it is psychologically difficult for people to take the threat seriously...If 2010 is hot in the US, we are likely to get a climate bill. If the cool spell that began this summer continues, we won’t."

Look, I appreciate the emotional impact of such experiences of the senses as a really hot summer. The memory of a few of those from the late 80s and early 90s is still with me. But are we such captives of experience of the moment that we need it all the time? I mean, we will get it--more killer heat waves, storms, droughts, tropical diseases moving ever northward, flooding--and in relentless combination. It's just that it will be too late to do much about it then. And that's the point: the test of our intelligence is to anticipate a future problem and prevent it.

"As a species," David Orr writes, "we are in our adolescence, and as common at that stage of life, we live dangerously." Gene Roddenberry used to say the same thing. Fair enough, but attitudes like the above--which I think Kimmerer correctly nails--seem more like the thinking of small children. As a species and as a civilization we have a lot of growing up to do, pretty much instantly. If we are up to that, we will have taken an evolutionary leap, and we might even fulfill the promise of our civilization and species, even after all that waste, cruelty and blood in our painful history. If we aren't up to that, we've flunked the evolutionary test.

We don't have to be perfect. We're still bristling egoes, swarming with hurt, haunted by dreams, bathing in self-deception. We just have to be adults about it all.

Not that the twenty people who will ever read this need to hear it. This cuts no ice with some people, I know, who have their own narrative of reality. Extinction, the end of civilization, is part of the plan. But if our kind of consciousness doesn't exist anywhere else, then it dies with us, disappearing from the universe. We view the end of civilization, and the extinction of humanity as we know it, a little more seriously.

Not that I'm likely to live to see it. For me, the tragedy is all this potential unfulfilled. To contemplate that is saddening. To see how it is being cut short in my own time just makes me angry.

Another ridiculously long post. Well, I never could blog.