While governments and industries move at a glacial pace, citizens and NGO’s are getting ahead of the storm
Climate change has a long history. “In the last 650,000 years, there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era—and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives. The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented.”
The Situation
The climate is increasingly in the news due to global warming. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luise write in The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, “Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have generated excessive greenhouse gas emissions, causing massive amounts of heat to be trapped in the atmosphere. The principal sources of these human-induced gasses are the production of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, and the emissions of methane from the management of livestock. Warmer air means there are more energy and moisture in the atmosphere, and this can lead to a variety of consequences—floods, tornados, and hurricanes, but also droughts, heat waves, and wildfires… The most alarming discovery has been that human emissions of greenhouse gasses have caused the Arctic to warm about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.”
As ice melts it exposes the darker ocean waters, which absorb heat rather than reflecting it back into space, the reflectivity of ice is diminished before it even melts and air pollution combined with soot from wildfires leads to greater absorption of heat which accelerates melting. Further, the warming of the atmosphere deepens the meandering of the polar jet stream pushing ice and snow from the Arctic to the south and warm air from the south to the Arctic, resulting in the more frequent and severe weather conditions we’ve been experiencing in recent years.
For millennia, atmospheric carbon dioxide had never been higher than 300 parts per million. According to NASA, beginning in 1950 the level spiked dramatically to the current level of 420 ppm. The global temperature is rising; the oceans are warming and becoming acidified; ice sheets are shrinking; glaciers are retreating; there’s decreased snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere; sea levels are rising; the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly; record high temperatures are being exceeded regularly and the warming of the atmosphere and oceans are causing major shifts in species extinction and avian, animal and sea life migratory patterns worldwide.
Notice the alligator, bottom right
The Good News
Writing in A New Climate For Theology: God, the World and Global Warming, Sallie McFague says there are some encouraging perspectives. “If all economic and governmental institutions worldwide were to take the necessary measures through taxes and incentives to ensure lifestyle changes throughout all levels of the human population, the task could be accomplished. We could stabilize greenhouse gas emissions so as to keep the global temperature at approximately 2°C by the end of the century. In other words, climate change is not necessarily an apocalyptic event that will destroy human life and other life on our planet. We know what needs to be done, and we have the technology to do it.”
We must enact a civilization-wide unifying purpose: to restore beauty, health and life to all that have suffered during the Ascent of Humanity.
Charles Eisenstein, Author of Climate: A New Story
Even Better News
Especially encouraging is the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s), non-profit, voluntary citizens’ groups, recognized by the United Nations, organized locally, nationally or internationally oriented and driven by people with a common interest to perform a variety of service and humanitarian functions. They bring their concerns to Governments, advocate and monitor policies and encourage political participation by providing information. In the ’60s there were 20,000 of these. With the advent of computers that number has skyrocketed to an estimated 10 million.
Because they’re funded by donations and run mostly by volunteers, they’re not hindered by short-term financial objectives or political partisanship. That means they can focus on long-term and complex issues such as climate change. Because they enjoy a high degree of public trust, they have already been effective in rallying people to their causes and making change happen when governments couldn’t.
In The Systems View Of Life, Fritjof Capra says the global coalition of NGO’s, combined with global communication technologies has produced a global “civil society” that forms an interface between the state and its citizens. “While the nation-states have been losing power, a new kind of civil society, organized around reshaping globalization—humanizing it on behalf of the health and well-being of people, ecosystems and the planet—has gradually emerged. (Remember my posting on “emergence”?) Indeed, dysfunctional systems, by their divisiveness, ineptitude and inability to act are precipitating the emergence of systems that can act decisively.
Dr. Capra provides an example in the area of agriculture. “If we changed from our chemical, large-scale industrial agriculture to organic, community-oriented, sustainable farming, this would contribute significantly to solving three of our biggest problems. It would greatly reduce our energy dependence because we are now using (In the USA) one-fifth of our fossil fuels to grow and process food. The healthy, organically grown food would have a hugely positive effect on public health, because many chronic diseases—heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and about 40% of cancers—are linked to our diet. And finally, organic farming would contribute significantly to fighting climate change, because an organic soil is a carbon-rich soil, meaning that it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and locks it up in the organic matter. Today, hundreds of systemic solutions are being developed all over the world to solve problems of the economy, environmental degradation, energy, climate change, food insecurity, and so on.”
We hear people say they want to do something about climate change and global warming, but besides the seeming little daily practices cited in last weeks blog “Earth House Rules,” they don’t know what. One huge contribution we can make is to appreciate and support the emergents, people who know what to do and are doing it. Online, I found a long list of A-list entertainers, sports heroes and other celebrities who are dedicated to making a difference. Another option is to call up the list of NGO’s, pick a favorite cause and sign on as a supporter.
In our view, climate change will determine the destiny of mankind, so it is imperative that our generation makes the right choices.
Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister at 2019 G20 Summit
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Photography Monographs. The pages can be turned in each book.
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