Political View

Political Views

There are many sorts of ‘reality’ about. Like minor gods they crouch for employment, waiting to be invoking to legitimate policies and projects that might otherwise be seen to be unwise or damaging. Their illegitimate offspring are called “unintended consequences” and are disowned and ignored, because the ‘reality’ lay in the intent, as expressed and celebrated, not in the outcome, disastrous though that may have turned out to be.

If we look around we will see ‘commercial reality’ cutting out the rainforests to make patio furniture, ‘industrial reality’ hovering infant fish from the ocean floor, ‘financial reality’ scraping the flesh from generosity with its golden teeth. Wherever there is a short-term advantage to be exploited, there you will find its own ‘reality’, waiting.
But if we look up at the sky we will see, oblivious to human concerns, the one real overall reality, whose name is simply: “How things are.”

It is a vast spacecraft, with climatic weapons of untold disaster at the ready, tooling up to destroy all we recognise as life on earth. Are the nations of the world gathering together to defeat or deflect it? Have they pooled and consolidate their defences?

No, not because it isn’t there, but because it is the sun and has always been there, and under it we have always nursed our other, petty, ‘realities’; human greed’s and squabbles about which it can know nothing, but away from which we cannot turn our eyes.

Global warming was first noticed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the dangers that it had started to bring were not widely appreciated until a clear and unequivocal warning was given by Mrs Thatcher to the United Nations in November 1989. There she gave a rousing speech in which she called for a vast international co-operative effort to reverse without delay the already damaging effects of global warming.

That was the moment of truth, the end of humanity’s innocence.The United Nations received it with rapture and took no notice. Nor, come to that, did Mrs Thatcher, who promptly went on to foster a number of carbon-emission-rich initiatives, including the biggest road-building programme ever, for what she called “The great car economy”. So, in defiance of her own protestations, she and her government chose to follow ‘economic reality’ and, it could be said, thereby sealed the fate of the world.

Now, seventeen years on, with the largely man-made greenhouse gas (atmospheric CO2) at 380 parts per million and rising, global warming is now well under way. That was an ‘unintended consequence’ of the glorious industrial development of modern civilization, but nevertheless there is no doubt that the people of the world have to take notice of it and deal with it, or, very possibly, die.

The most widely-held consensus is that unless it is checked and reversed, global warming would cause the earth’s surface temperature to rise until a new ‘equilibrium temperature’, which may be several degrees Celsius higher than it is now, is reached. If that is allowed to happen, it is known that the earth would face a major extermination of most known life forms.
The obvious and perhaps the only sensible way to put a stop to this would be immediately to impose such restrictions on the output of man-made CO2 as are necessary to stop and reverse the progress of global warming.

What is not definitively established, and is therefore the subject of much conjecture, is how much time there is left in which to do this. Estimating the time available is not an easy task and it has been made more complex by a technical peculiarity of the process of global warming, which has meant although the greenhouse effect has been well under way for some time, its true effects are not, yet, visibly and seriously, affecting our own day-to-day lives.

The current understanding is that this delay is due to the fact that the mass of the earth is so vast that it is taking a long time to heat up. In addition, much of the extra energy currently being received is, for the moment, being absorbed ‘endothermically’ in the observable preliminiary process of melting the glaciers and ice-caps and the evaporation of water. This process has the effect of cooling the atmosphere, or rather, of slowing the rate of its warming, which gives a false indication of the speed of the process.

Apart from a few fringe commentators, some of whom maintain that global warming either isn’t happening, or is going to be rather fun, there are at present two main ‘schools of thought’ about how global warming should be dealt with. One, which takes what could be called the ‘gradual’ view, maintains that, (perhaps because the current rate of warming is regarded as typical), the process is relatively slow and that consequently, as well as making convenient, minor, but always publicly celebrated, gestures of energy economy, there is time enough to look for some, as yet uninvented, technical method of gradually reducing, without causing unacceptable inconvenience, the massive input of millions of tons of atmospheric CO2 from industrial and transport sources that are steadily building up the greenhouse effect and adding to global warming.That this is the preferred policy of the political establishments and some of their scientists was confirmed unequivocally by the Prime Minister who told us in May 2005 on Channel 4 TV that . . .“ . . . the reality is that you’re never going to tackle global warming by cutting economic growth or your living standards, and whatever people might want us to do there, the political reality is that it isn’t going to happen . . .”

The god that he summons for that assertion is the one called political reality. This deity, regardless of any actual considerations, is what he is obliged to follow, presumably because that is where our living-standards and the votes they bring are to be found. What this actually means for the future of the world is so appalling as to be beyond belief, because it makes clear that, although he accepts that our precious economic growth and our extravagant living standards are known to be the main power-house of the pollution that drives global warming, there is precious little of substance that he is prepared to do about it, even though there is really no certainty that the gradual view chosen by the political establishment is either valid or likely to have the necessary effect in the time that remains.

The other school of thought, which could be called the ‘urgent’ view, takes into account other known aspects of the current situation. One is already mentioned: that the current rate of climatic warming is less than it would be if it wasn’t being used up melting the glaciers. Another is the observed fact that now, while the global warming is currently melting the glaciers and ice-caps, it is at the same time thawing out, and probably beginning to release, the large quantities of methane which are still deep-frozen in the polar regions. It is also understood that once this happens, there will be what is known as a ‘positive feed-back effect’, a process which is self-inducing in that the released methane, being a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, will increase the greenhouse effect, thus releasing more methane . . . and so on. That, coupled with many other similar ‘positive feed-back effects’ including the loss of polar-ice reflectivity, would, if unleashed, set global warming on its way to becoming runaway and non-reversible.But also, as already mentioned, underlying and dwarfing these effects is the largely unrecognised physical fact that the immense thermal mass of the earth, which, like some gigantic storage-heater block, has been slowly soaking in the heat for decades, will go on slowly warming up and contributing to climatic mayhem even after the greenhouse is dismantled and the CO2 reduced.

The urgent view is that the present lull in the progress of global warming indicates that there could still be a ‘window of intervention’ which might last a few years, perhaps even a decade. Within that period the human race must, if it is to survive, plan, put into effect and complete the implementation of, all the social and industrial changes necessary to reduce the concentration of atmospheric CO2 to a level at which global warming is not only stopped but the long-term stored heat of the last twenty years warming is proportionately dissipated. The above alternative prognoses, being “mere mathematics”, are inevitably in some degree conjectural and obviously can’t be demonstrated in practice. So no doubt people and governments are tempted to assume that they are entitled to choose and support a particular version of the situation. This may be the most convenient, or the most optimistic, or even the view which they think is most likely to be accurate. After all, as people say: nobody can ever be absolutely certain exactly what the future will bring.They are wrong about that. We have no such entitlement. Nobody has. Ordinary common-sense tells us that there is only one thing that is absolutely certain. It is this.
In circumstances where there is even the slightest chance that the result of failing to deal with a possible situation would be the death of the world, then, if it wishes to survive, the human race has no option but to take whatever action is necessary to deal with that situation, however unpleasant and difficult that may appear to be, and to take it at once.In our situation there is, to use the Cold War phrase: ‘no alternative to worst-case thinking.’ So to take action now is not a matter of choice. It is an imperative. We are not used to imperatives. We are more accustomed to being offered a choice between alternatives. So the options can be expressed as if they were a choice.If, on the one hand, we choose to accept some quite severe privations in order to bring the levels of atmospheric CO2 down, we will certainly be seriously inconvenienced for a while, but we will survive (perhaps ingeniously finding new sources of energy), and there will be no reason why our grandchildren shouldn’t have a homely, habitable world to live in for the foreseeable future (and if, later, it should turn out that our caution was unnecessary, we might feel a bit foolish, but at least they would be alive). If, on the other hand, we take no notice, if we choose to ignore the known likelihood and just go on more or less as usual. If we let life take its course as we make some gestures towards energy economy while continuing to pump up the CO2 concentration, then we should be able to go on being very comfortable, for a while. But if we do that there is a very real likelihood that most of our grandchildren will be dead or, if alive, will be vainly trying to find a way to go on living in a climatically explosive world that is inescapably on its way to chaos and death. So if there is a choice, it is a straight choice between life and death, between the life and the death of the human race.

The reality is that if no choice, or the wrong choice, is made, if we are so limp that we allow the Prime Minister’s ‘political reality’ to prevail over actual reality, then the final ‘unintended consequence’ may well be that the only chance of survival for our grandchildren will depend on nothing but the hideous hope that the first major disaster of the oncoming climate change will turn out to be sufficiently dreadful to command the nations’ full attention at last, and that it will happen soon enough to bring the world to its senses while there is time.
Don’t bank on it!