Eyes Wide Shut on Global Warming

With Eyes Wide Shut: Climate Change Threatens the Future of Humanity, but we Refuse to Respond Rationally

by George Monbiot

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0812-08.htm

We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we recognize that our existence is governed by material realities, and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in which we live, then generalizes it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality. All that separates us from the indigenous people of Australia is that they recognize this and we do not.

Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs' retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler. Instead, we whine about the heat and thumb through the brochures for holidays in Iceland. The future has been laid out before us, but the deep eye with which we place ourselves on Earth will not see it.

Of course, we cannot say that the remarkable temperatures in Europe this week are the result of global warming. What we can say is that they correspond to the predictions made by climate scientists. As the met office reported on Sunday, "all our models have suggested that this type of event will happen more frequently." In December it predicted that, as a result of climate change, 2003 would be the warmest year on record. Two weeks ago its research center reported that the temperature rises on every continent matched the predicted effects of climate change caused by human activities, and showed that natural impacts, such as sunspots or volcanic activity, could not account for them. Last month the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years", while "the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period". Climate change, the WMO suggests, provides an explanation not only for record temperatures in Europe and India but also for the frequency of tornadoes in the United States and the severity of the recent floods in Sri Lanka.

There are, of course, still those who deny that any warming is taking place, or who maintain that it can be explained by natural phenomena. But few of them are climatologists, fewer still are climatologists who do not receive funding from the fossil fuel industry. Their credibility among professionals is now little higher than that of the people who claim that there is no link between smoking and cancer. Yet the prominence the media give them reflects not only the demands of the car advertisers. We want to believe them, because we wish to reconcile our reason with our dreaming.
..more..

in the world is to reduce Greenhouse Gas - or nothing else will ever matter, ever again.

And this is one of his best.

We're killing ourselves, literally, by degrees. I've long thought the dilemma of setting environmental policy is that the human lifespan is not long enough for us to be forced to live with the consequences of our choices. But that's no longer operative. Now, I believe we're confronted with a potentially terminal crisis in our lifetime.

we were in an emergency/crisis situation before Bush stole the election and began doing all he could to make things worse. We are facing a crisis like no other, do we have the will to deal with it?
I pray the younger generations start to take notice, their very future is threatened.

Seriously, if we don't take responsibility for our consumerism and the damage it is causing, won't the rest of the world have to take us out in order for them to survive?

Blair will be forced to break ranks from shrubbie and do something about GW (Global Warming not George W) otherwise the UK will continue to cook and simmer.

<snip>
"Paradoxically, the approach of this crisis corresponds with the approach of another. The global demand for oil is likely to outstrip supply within the next 10 or 20 years. Some geologists believe it may have started already. It is tempting to knock the two impending crises together, and to conclude that the second will solve the first. But this is wishful thinking. There is enough oil under the surface of the Earth to cook the planet and, as the price rises, the incentive to extract it will increase. Business will turn to even more polluting means of obtaining energy, such as the use of tar sand and oil shale, or "underground coal gasification" (setting fire to coal seams). But because oil in the early stages of extraction is the cheapest and most efficient fuel, the costs of energy will soar, ensuring that we can no longer buy our way out of trouble with air conditioning, water pumping and fuel-intensive farming."
<snip>

:shrug: :think:

we can no longer put this off, we can no longer hide behind politics, and petty differences. We need to pass something soon, and the only thing that comes to mind is Kyoto, for the love of go I hope that the next Democratic president sees this.