I begin to write from my kitchen, well-lit; my computer, well-powered; a cup of tea, well-heated on my gas stove etc.
What do I write?
The “news” of global warming comes at us in an aggressive yet unfeeling barrage of words, doesn’t it?
There is urgency, yet little sign of personhood, love, humility or devotion.
It’s all very scientific, and I am a cuddly mystic at heart.
It pits scientists against scientists—the arguments imbued with so many elements and institutions from which I feel alienated, yet am born into and whose benefits I enjoy.
Okay, that is a little disconcerting. Not only am I born ‘on the oil grid’—like most everyone in the developed world—but the last sentence is awkward.
What I’m trying to say is I am attempting to gather a sense of the motives and the truths behind global warming, and the global warming debate.
And recently I saw the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.
The film was slick in its delivery and denial—denying that the problem is man made (or that the warming is even a problem at all—which seems to me crazy given even a glance towards the poorest, hottest countries).
But what was great, is the film was strong enough to push me to research even further. Doing so, I was reminded of how scientists—yes, even those cool, rational scientists, alas—can be full of integrity, full of mistakes, paid off, or paid for, and how specialization in some remote field of, say, archeobotulism can lead to remarkable insight and also encourage irrational myopia.
Ah, to be human.
In my research, I’ve tried to remember what I know about human nature, and seek within that knowledge a place to stand in the barrage—with love, understanding and usefulness, yet with discernment—as the world threatens to come to an end for the billionth time.
Here are a few (hundred) thoughts, hopefully behind or beyond the shrill of a debate that separates us from expansive discernment, emotion, and perhaps most importantly, makes us forget that there remain so many other problems in the world, too.
Almost all of these problems, I boldly yet ridiculously suggest, stem from two things:
1) Humans not considering deeply enough that we are all sisters and brothers—assuming you like family.
2) Humans not considering deeply enough the possibility that the earth is based in intelligence, is all about intelligence, intention, expansion, sustainability and rebirth, and that we are absolutely a part of and tied into this earth (don’t let strip malls and fast food fool you).
The mirror of this is what we have: profit and control far in the forefront as the essence of economic health—before gratitude, people and an understanding that we, brace yourself, ultimately own nothing (heck, even are remarkable bodies are only temporarily).
Have we not seen, all benefits aside, that profit driven ideology at its extreme will, given its logic, be short-sighted and environmentally unsustainable in a way that not even a doubling of recycling blue boxes and smart cars, can cure?
There are problems, suffered in varying and unfair degrees all over the world. Illness-creating pollution and, say, what profit-driven policies in China might do to it, or the Iraq invasion, are gross symptoms of this problem.
SEEKING KNOWLEDGE
Thrown into the global warming fray is the reality that almost no layperson—or even many scientists, it seems—can conclusively judge all of the science for themselves (leaving much elbow room for charlatans and propagandists).
That actually makes sense, if we could be humble enough to admit it. Evidently, trying to model such complex “systems”—be it human nature, the origins of life, or global warming—actually render science deeply incompetent and are thus inherently vulnerable to forces of propaganda and bias.
Noam Chomsky on page 219 of Understanding Power puts it this way:
It’s not just about humans that scientific insight is very limited—even simple physical things can’t be dealt with either. For instance, there’s a “three body problem” in physics: you can’t really figure out what happens when three bodies are moving, the equations are just too complicated.
In fact, a physicist I was talking to recently gave me another example—he said if you take a cup of coffee with cream swirling around in it, presumably all of the natural laws are known, but you can’t solve the equation because they’re just too complex…that’s not human beings, that’s cream swirling around in a cup of coffee: we can’t figure out what’s going on.
PARADOX
A couple thousand years ago, some guy name Pindar wrote that “We become like that we hate.”
Today, despite Richard Dawkins’ insistence on the cool rationality of science, the scientist skeptics of man-made global warming are saying the scientist believers in man-made Global Warming have become nearly a “religion”, manipulating facts, and opposition to the believers are given the label of heretic.
As a lay-person, I really don’t feel certainty on the issues, scientific or otherwise, and I actually hear a great deal of shrill sounds from both groups—and I don’t even have a television.
Saying ‘I don’t feel certainty’, by the way, does not mean that some things are not deeply certain.
UTTER CONSENUS
First of all, it’s important to remember there is actually no debate about whether or not global warming is happening.
It is happening—be it through carbon dioxide emissions or solar activity or whatever.
A significant percentage of the hottest years in recorded history have taken place in the past two decades.
Shouldn’t this be where scientists shake hands in solidarity and ask, so what about this problem? This is the submerged aspect of the iceberg which finds all humans in accord. As always, however, we are at each other’s throats over the tip of the iceberg.
Either way, virtually all agree the iceberg is melting more than freezing.
WHAT IS THE CAUSE OF THAT WARMING?
The actual debate is this: is the human creation of carbon dioxode emissions the major, or at least a significant, cause of that warming, or is it a natural process, most likely due to increased solar activity?
Instinctually—for what it’s worth—and from what I read, I am inclined to believe that humans are playing a role in this climate change.
But some of that belief stems from my utter disbelief at how humans treat each other for power and profit (and even just because), how we treat animals in general (forcing extinction) and for food with our living-hell factory farms/slaughterhouses, and our consumption of the earth as a whole (and not seeing it as a whole).
We have cut up her trees, paved her body, polluted her water, extracted her nutrients, and scarred her smile—and I like city-living.
I would like to know more serene, bold, wise, and inately indigenous people who love the earth as if the earth is a being, and I could spend time in that bandwidth of awareness, learning.
I also believe solar activity, obviously, again on instinct and from what little I’ve read, plays a role in the current climate rise.
But enough of my limitations.
IF THE ANSWER IS YES
If the answer is ‘yes, humans are causing global warming’, a second logical question follows: what might be the effect on life if this global warming continues?
First of it all, it should be made clear that multi-national corporations like Tobacco/Food behemoth Philip Morris’ have actually been proven to be behind “junk science’ campaigns that plaster the free world with propaganda that says there is no scientific consensus on these issues of health, safety, global warming and so on.
Like selling tobacco to minors and claiming it doesn’t cause lung cancer isn’t enough smoke and mirrors—pardon the pun.
And even if these scientists aren’t directly saying this, they are, in my opinion, in support of ‘junk science’ by being on the Philip Morris payroll.
In an excerpt from The Denial Industry in the Guardian, George Monbiot writes:
TASSC, the “coalition” created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon.
The website it has financed—JunkScience.com—has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press.
It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against “faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas”.
I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.
It is important that I remind myself that a company like Philip Morris, for whatever good it does incidentally with jobs and salaries and so on, actually lives and kills for profit (it’s Tobacco, for god’s sake, and they own large portions of the food we eat, too). And given its mission, it is bound to be in solidarity with, say, Haliburton, Blackwater, Lockheed-Martin, Exxon etc., and power dictatorships all over the world.
Why? They exercise their existence with similar goals: Power. Profit. Top down control. Extraction. Various forms of violence. You see? It’s not a judgment, it’s common sense.
Okay, it’s a judgment based hopefully in common sense, led by the consensus of doctors who have said that cigarette smoke is inherently poisonous (or my belief that weapons of war destroy and maim people etc)—like these people care about pollution, or about some consensus?
We all saw the Tobacco Companies use the letter of the law to lie to Congress—that’s what got Al Pacino so mad in that movie.
To compare this Power to scattered environmental groups is laughable. Exxon, with humanly criminal wars being fought and protested over its commodity, made 36 billion dollars in profit in 2005—an all time one-year record for any company.
Given Exxon as an example, how much of a hindrance can all the environmental groups combined be? How much would Exxon make without those pesky li’l environment groups always meddling?
But like any effective dictatorship, we eventually become dependent on them, help them continue, serve them, and can’t move without them, either indirectly or directly, through what they supply us—which allows them to act as they may.
This continues until it doesn’t, which generally means some other similarly power-based group (perhaps with a different propaganda message, say, Bolshevism), steps in, and actually have the same core beliefs. Control. Submission. Divisiveness. Power etc.
To think otherwise, is analogous to being an apologist for a local two-bit drug dealer or pimp—which we all are on a state level with our tax paying dollars going to the military industrial complex, whose missions have vastly increased the proliferation of drugs worldwide, and always will.
But that’s a different essay.
GLOBAL MOURNING
My point is, all debates aside, there clearly are a great number of scientists who believe that global warming is a serious issue, and human endeavours may be playing a significant part in that problem.
If science has the integrity it so often claims, one would think the general belief of this consensus of scientists would have at least a humbling, inviting effect on the smaller group of skeptic scientists.
Should not those skeptics at least be able or want to understand why such a large group of colleagues believe there is a man-made problem?
And shouldn’t the believers, in kindness and respect, explain the nuance of their, say, 10% uncertainty, and use the skeptics’ science as the basis of that? Can the two groups not come together on the rational of scientific solidarity? Or is this ‘science’ as diametrically opposed as evolution and intelligent design?
Skeptics of man-made global warming—and god love them—are often, in my research, at least partially funded by, and sometimes directly in the pay of those interests whose sole purpose is to continue the exploitation and use of fossil fuels.
Alas even scientists—these supposed bastions of reason—looking at the same or similar evidence, find themselves in opposite camps.
What can you expect, when the smartest of their direct ancestors built the bomb?
SCIENCE CAN BE ABOUT AS RATIONAL AS A NUCLEAR WARHEAD
Perhaps in such a compelling world, some scientists who are being heard for the first time are unable to see outside the media paradigm, or the lure of corporate and government funding, no matter how subtle or vulgar it may be.
Remember, scientists are not known for their social abilities. They were generally the ones that never got laid in high school. Then again, I was an athlete, and I never got laid in high school either. My point is this: a little press must turn some of these people, under the guise of rationality, secretively megalomaniacal.
For example, knowing tens of millions will read this essay, and because of it join hands across the world singing Kum Ba Yah, I feel intoxicated myself. For the first time ever, I know I can change the world. And tomorrow, after the post-intoxication hangover, rest assured I will rule the world.
Actually, I don’t drink.
Jokes aside, one doesn’t need scientific proof to know that in varying degrees, people sell out all the time to their self-interest and its aggrandizement—and virtually always rationalize that selling out until it becomes internalized. Scientists are no exception.
Where does this leave relatively sold out lay-people like myself?
NEWS
The divisive, opportunistic, sensational, style of most mainstream media is so manipulative, and so void of true humane debate—meaning real interest, a desire to listen, sufficient time for expression, a hunger for learning etc—that it actually encourages tribalism, or leaves us too bewildered to see if there is a reliable consensus.
I say, so what? What has to be undertaken anyway, is an everyday fight to deny one’s tribal desires, to refine on one’s discernment, to understand the nature of the struggle of being human and temporary, and to relax from the need to be sure of the truth behind the consensus on problems that come via the press.
For no matter what side is taken—or even if man-made global warming turns out to be proven wrong—it doesn’t change the fact that massively beautiful areas all over the world have been poisoned by human endeavour (the ground, the air, the water, the spirit); opportunities for sisters and brothers everywhere are pathologically unequal; governments and corporations are often heinously in collusion, exploitative and oppressive, and given the opportunity—pervasive in the West—the average person moves towards greater and greater over-consumption and countless other woes…
Who needs a consensus to see that? Just walk down Hastings Street in Vancouver, try to have your voice heard by a federal or provincial politician, or watch a World Vision commercial.
One can also see how remarkable, awe-inspiring, and beautiful it is that we exist at all.
But who can figure out what to do about these problems? That’s the ongoing meditation. How to make the world more beautiful? How to have dialogue? How to listen? How to love more?
Again, no consensus can be reached on solutions. As we see so blatanly with federal politics, it is useful to remember that behind much of this debate—pushing it, twisting it—is the force of those institutions and individuals who make their living off fear and exploitation, and who believe that to pull back and speak candidly is to lose, to listen is to be weak, and to think future generations is against maximum profit.
If you do actually want to make a real dent in the world, solidarity is vital—whether you join Philip Morris (I hope not), or a group pushing for energetically sustainable technology (call me up, I’ll blog for you). There is power in numbers and the effect of that power is always up for grabs, always potentially shifting.
THE SADNESS OF CO-OPTING GEORGE BUSH IDEOLOGY
It is ironic that, when it’s useful, some of us so easily follow the George Bush “with us, or against usâ€? paradigm. It appears the believers and the skeptics of the global warming debate are beginning to co-opt this paradigm for their own use—or at least the media is staging it this way.
Believers, non-believers. Heretics. Tyranny. Inquisition. These words keep being used, lines are drawn. The ego behind the debate becomes more important than solidarity.
I quote Mamhmood Mamdani here, and replace the word genocide with man-made global warming.
But to me, whether we call it [man-made global warming] or not is not really the key question right now—simply because there is such a “politics� around naming [man-made global warming] or not. Sometimes, the effect of that politics is to detract attention from the situation and to focus it on the debate.
I’d rather focus attention on the situation.
And to be fair, George Bush was not the inventor of us-and-them technique, but he did use to justify killing thousands of innocent people for profit and geo-strategic positioning.
These debates sometimes appear so rational, civilized, or normal, perhaps even unavoidable. But when they are agenda-based, they seem to push towards greater divisiveness, and are thus dehumanizing.
Is the blind ignorance of this debate—“with us or against us�—not in accord with the paradigm that saw in 1885 all of the European Powers gather in Germany to decide the fate of the dark continent, Africa, with not one African delegate invited to the conference?
One sees the same sickness with the civilized gatherings of the G8—a cabal by definition, to the rest of the world (the G177), no matter how good the intentions.
With so many economic and political problems, is not the world too complex for these intentionally divisive slogans like “with us or against us”?
With practice, you can learn to block them with special Wonder Woman bracelets or even see them coming early with your spidey senses.
But as Mark Twain once said, and I’m paraphrasing: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still tying up its laces.”
If global warming is the most dire problem going, well…? This might be discovered the hard way.
But we might also actually learn to communicate slightly better than we do now. This is a beautiful thing. When my back is bad, and then it gets five percent better, my life improves considerably.
So let us all, somehow, blatantly, daily, in our prayers, intentions, actions, emails, outrage, ask ourselves, ask scientists on either side of the debate (so-called), ask those who truly believe in the earth, to try and reach across this divide that appears to be real.
Make a phone call. Find out what your colleagues are saying, and why. Stick up for each other, if only in understanding.
THIS POINT IS WORTH REPEATING OVER AND OVER
No matter what the cause of this increase in temperature, it is those billions of humans without a voice in this debate who will most likely be worst effected from a survival point of view—those living on a subsistence level in, say, parts of Africa and India and so many other places.
Who speaks for them? How are those voices heard? And who speaks for the generations to come?
For even if the man-made-global-warming-believers are misguided in their conclusions, or even proven wrong, the vital quest for alternative forms of energy—collectively across countries and continents—should surely excite and push any honest human towards support and action, and solidarity with the entire species.
Why not find a place of connection (after all, science is ‘purely’ fact), and not let special interests divide us on the details?
Why go political, when it’s possible to be less political, and more humane?
IF THE ANSWER IS NO
If the answer to question one is ‘no, humans are not responsible for global warming’, and the cause of climate warming is solar activity, which is the standard belief of most skeptics, the follow up conclusion remains the same: that the effects of global change could be catastrophic.
I am not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV, but even on a tiny level, I have seen the acres of dead trees in the BC interior due to the dreaded pine beetle, whose proliferation is allegedly due to warmer winters.
EITHER WAY
So if the consensus is that the effects of significant warming (whatever that level is), whatever the cause, would be catastrophic, a third question presents itself:
What might be the most effective way to minimize the ecological problems of a planet whose temperature is rising?
I don’t know, but that is a huge question, and the bottom line is this: either way, we’re in it together, skeptics and believers, even rich and poor—although unlike death, I would not yet call it the great leveller—although an expanded shift in human conscious would be an extraordinary thing.
BEYOND THE DEBATE
Even if global warming proved to have limited effect on the ecosphere, there are endless other significant environmental problems that need to be addressed, and many of these problems result from fossil fuel dependence.
For instance, is it not a real thought that not one cup of water from any of the Great Lakes would be considered healthy to drink? What happened?
But at least Canadians have gallons of treated water. How many Third World countries have almost no access to clean drinking water for their poorest?
Now, why is this not worth alarmist cries? Why is this not headline news?
Can global warming skeptics not see that we should all be alarmed—or at least deeply aware of and working towards sustainability for everybody—even if global warming isn’t man-made?
There are countless, severe environmental problems resulting from excessive carbon dioxide emissions (try walking through Nairobi at rush hour) and other fossil fuel pollution.
All this before mentioning the countless wars fought over the resource, with the resulting untold misery and death for hundreds of thousands of people which simultaneously, by our impotence to stop them, probably increases loneliness and decreases compassion for the victims.
One could justifiably say much of this has nothing to do with the global warming debate. But isn’t that the whole problem? One could say nuclear warheads or cluster bombs are neutral, too, and nothing to do with violence.
Does that not miss the point?
I say: how can not stopping the death of a child—allegedly every three seconds—from preventable diseases not be vital, alarming and deeply focusing to all humans, particular those with such considerable material advantages?
America is bankrupt, multi-trillons in debt, compounded massively by its leaders’ most recent need to for fossil fuel. Perhaps that is pure greed, or perhaps it an international addiction—and addictions, by their nature, are shortsided and desperate.
I don’t know.
But for some genetic or cultural reason—or some combination of the two—few people actually feel deeply enough, myself included, for the suffering of their sisters and brothers, locally or gloabally.
It seems to me the nature of the “modern world”, the global economy that strives to maximize profit and market share, by its nature, pushes towards environmentally self-destruction.
Excuse the message, but environmental stewardship, elevating those who profoundly care for the earth, for human beings, would require massive shifts in social planning, social intention, and socio-psychological shifts barely comprehensible by current discourse.
And media, needing addicts, does not inherently celebrate compassion, expansive thought or humility.
I say humility because I can not say why it was not me, for example, born into poverty, and suffering profound physical deprivations and humiliation in a world of plenty.
Luck? Karma? The most powerful human voices are not disturbed spiritually by the depletion of resources. So the counter is solidarity amongs those who do. Who might that be?
But imagine the resistance, when someone like Patrick Moore, former Greenpeace founder, can actually say without flinching, or choking, from the film the Great Global Warming Swindle:
…the environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries…I think it’s legitimate for me to call them anti-human.
Like, okay, you don’t have to think humans are better than whales or better than owls or whatever, if you don’t want to, but surely it is not a good idea to think of humans as sort of being scum, that it’s okay to have hundreds of millions of them go blind or die or whatever.
I just can’t relate to that.
I can’t to releate to Moore’s comment. I live in East Vancouver and I’m a vegetarian—a double threat—and I know no environmentalists who think in the manner Moore describes. I know people who intrinsically feel those who are privileged, including themselves, are just not taking enough care of all people, and the earth’s resources.
Granted, as a friend told me, privileged environmentalists do sometimes fight to keep green parks in the suburbs, let’s say, while the poor would like low-income housing that might not be environmentally friendly.
Self-interested hypocrisy is human. But Moore’s comment, to me, is sad, vulgar, shameless propaganda and, no matter how much he was hurt or whatever inside Greenpeace, I can’t imagine that he really believes it.
In fact, it is probably a sound-byte worthy of Greenpeace’s worst and spurious claims.
NOT TO MENTION
Even further to this, fossil fuels and fossil fuel technologies are, due to a limited supply of resources, and by almost anyone’s estimation, clearly on a finite timespan.
The days of fossil fuel existence seem to be nearing an end, forever. If this is true, alternative technologies are the only possibility for the human future.
Why not make it a collective goal for the good of all? Unless the answer is just collective mental illness, the answer must be that devotion to profits are the true modern day religion.
FROM JUNK SCIENCE TO JUNKIE
Given all of these facts and speculations, why is the Global Warming debate, which is just the tip of the iceberg, getting so much air time?
One of the reasons is that Al Gore—who fights not the hierarchical nature of corporations and their obsession with profit, or his own addictions, or the environmental catastrophe of, say, excessive and unsustainable (not to mention deeply cruel) meat-production—got a movie made.
But are we distracted from the bigger questions, which reside in the thickness of that silent area submerged in the ocean below?
And if the global warming consensus turns out to be wrong, what then? Back to business as usual? It’s business as usual anyway.
A BIGGER QUESTION
Do certain institutions have an inherent fear of losing their power, should sustainable technology, for instance the wind or the sun, become the main sources of energy for human communities worldwide?
Is there some reason large percentages of our taxpaying dollars aren’t being used to find these answers?
WHO OWNS THE SUN?
Or does a company making all-time record profits for any corporation ever, for example—which shows just how insignificant environmental groups really are—feel that the difficulties of trying to own the sun and/or the wind might pose a strategic problem?
If so, isn’t that interesting? For if one can own the water, as Bechtel and others have vowed to do, why can’t one own the sun or the wind?
On the flipside, if it seems absurd that a person or a corporation could own the sun or the wind, why is it normal for a corporation to own the water—or oil, or other resources for that matter?
SCREAM LOUDER
Whenever a debate gets too shrill, deeper issues are almost certainly, and intentionally, being forced to the background for the benefit of the few.
In this case, four of the most important might be:
One, the billions of vulnerable voices who never get heard.
Two, the ongoing and hopefully rising question of rights of ownership and the question of how democracy can exist if multi-national corporations—which by definition are hierarchical and answer only to themselves and their stockholders (and varying degrees of the law but no specific nation)—have control over so many aspects of every individual’s life and future.
Three, what paradigms—environmental and political—will future generations be born into?
If you feel isolated, love someone more, love yourself more. The world has its own way. We are only here for a little while. Beautify your spirit—and don’t foget how strong you are, too.
That’s just the beginning.
Petex
