Absolutely nothing is being done to mitigate the climate change disaster barreling down on us. To our great misfortune, the naysayers/deniers have won -- and our kids and grandkids will pay the price. The right wing would rather listen to Forbes magazine, the Wall St. Journal and Fox News (mouthpieces for the greed-driven elite 1%) than to the hundreds of thousands of greatly alarmed scientists across the globe, who are begging for reductions in human-caused pollution. For proof of the dire warnings the scientists are shouting at us, go to: http://www.hbo.com/vice#/ and watch the eye-opening segment Greenland is Melting. Seeing is believing -- unless you live in the Bubble Dweller world of right-wing nay-sayers who keep spouting the old Groucho Marx absurdity: Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?
Scientists agree that human activities have been the primary source for the observed rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of the fossil fuel era in the 1860s. Eighty-five percent of all human-produced carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and oil, including gasoline. The remainder results from the clearing of forests and other land use, as well as some industrial processes such as cement manufacturing. The use of fossil fuels has grown rapidly, especially since the end of World War II and continues to increase exponentially. In fact, more than half of all fossil fuels ever used by humans have been consumed in just the last 20 years.
Human activities add a worldwide average of almost 1.4 metric tons of carbon per person per year to the atmosphere. --From: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=2001
But, who cares about all that? Business must go on as usual. Damn the warnings! To hell with the world population and its fate! The elite can never have enough money. They have been bitten by what the American Indians call the "Wetigo devil." Wetigo is the dark entity latent in each of us that is attracted to Excess. It is also known as the "shadow self" or "the devourer within." Once it embarks on a "gimme, gimme, gimme" lifestyle, acquiring more and more, its ability to discriminate right from wrong evaporates and it becomes enslaved by the idea it can never get enough. Nothing will satisfy it; no matter how much it acquires, it always craves more. It will trample on everything and everybody in its pursuit of more and more excess. By following the path of Wetigo, many civilizations have fallen into ruin. Ours is well on its way. Along with the scientific warnings, the wisdom warnings of the American Indians are falling on deaf ears.
As for the common people who proudly call themselves "conservatives" and who give their full support to the Wetigo-infested 1% that is destroying our society, it is impossible to understand their mind workings. Against all education, against all information, against all proof, they willfully insist on supporting the elite 1% and voting against their own interests, politically and economically. They revere Reagan and his "Reaganomics" that, since 1980, have brought catastrophe upon our country and the planet. We live in a world where the insane are running the asylum. A recent study on where the most psychopaths in our society are operating concluded that corporate CEOs are at the top of the list. Hmmm...no surprise there. Right wing politicians must be a close 2nd.
The climate change deniers have won
Scientists continue to warn us about global warming, but most of us have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it
The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm last week. “As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do,” it said as it began one of those sentences that you know will build to a “but”. “But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible change.”
In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world’s pre-eminent educational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren’t their warnings leading the news?
In one sense, the association’s appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% said that humans were causing it.
When the glib among us talk about the “scientific debate on global warming”, they either don’t know or will not accept that there is no scientific debate. The suggestion first made by Eugene F Stoermer that the planet has moved from the Holocene, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the manmade Anthropocene, in which we now live, is everywhere gaining support. Man-made global warming and the man-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and (let us hope) brief epoch in the world’s history.
If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the American association’s warning the British government’s budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it.
David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be “at the heart of this historic fight against climate change“, now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend
All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won. And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can’t call us “global warming deniers ” because “denier” makes us sound like “Holocaust deniers”, and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.
Tempting though it is to blame cowardly politicians, the abuse comes too easily. The question remains: what turned them into cowards? Rightwing billionaires in the United States and the oil companies have spent fortunes on blocking action on climate change. A part of the answer may therefore be that conservative politicians in London, Washington and Canberra are doing their richest supporters’ bidding. There’s truth in the bribery hypothesis. The right is going along with an eruption of know-nothing populism. An ever-growing element in conservatism becomes more militant as the temperature rises.
Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of “cognitive dissonance”, a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.
When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.
Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don’t want to think about it.
I am no better than them. I could write about the environment every week. No editor would stop me. But the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen. How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (not stop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?
The American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Eril M Conway quoted a researcher, who was asked in the 1970s what his country’s leaders said when he warned them that C02 levels would double in 50 years. “They tell me to come back in 49 years,” he replied.
Most of the rest of us think like the Washington politicians of the Carter era. And most of us have no right to sneer at Dorothy Martin and her cult either. We cannot admit it, but like them, we need a miracle to save us from the floods.
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