Climate, technology and chaos Blog

As should be clear there appears to be a possibly rising wave of protest against:

• climate change and policies on climate change,
• ecological destruction and
• cruelty to farm animals and live sheep exports.

So far the Australian Federal and State governments response can be tabulated easily:

• Play down the problem and say they are dealing with it, when they are not, and have a history of not dealing with it.
• Say we should not discuss climate change during a lengthening period of crisis.
• Say that Australia only produces a small amount of emissions (I have dealt with that issue earlier).
• Promote new coal mines and suggest more taxpayer subsidies for new mines and for coal-fired power stations.
• Promote gas as a substitute for coal, but not actually cutting back on coal.
• Make the electricity market regulations so complex it is hard for new entry companies to figure out.
• Propose new laws and regulations that make protesting against corporate destruction criminal, and increase fines and jail terms for protestors.
• Suggest that protestors are hypocritical because they don’t live completely on the renewable energy the governments and corporations are blocking.
• Suggest that the science is not in yet.

Let’s briefly discuss the science of climate change, even though climate change is a mere sub-category of the problems we face through destroying our ecologies for profit and ‘development’.

The scientific theory of Global warming has been around since the late 19th Century, as shown by this supposedly old clipping from a New Zealand Newspaper from the early twentieth Century (I say ‘supposedly’, because I’ve not gone through the newspapers archives and seen it myself):

The theory is straightforward. Carbon Dioxide, Methane and various other “greenhouse gases” (including water vapour), act like a blanket does on a bed. They trap the heat in, and slow down its escape, making the areas under the blanket hotter.

One of my friends suggested it is like going into a car on a hot day, shutting the windows and turning off the air conditioner; the temperature in the car will rise and, as most people know, sometimes pets and kids left in such a car will die, even if they would have easily survived outside.

This theory of greenhouse gases has been around for a long time and has not met with any serious challenges as to its accuracy. This is despite the fact that any proposition about the universe carries some levels of uncertainty, despite us now knowing an awful lot more about climate change than we did at the turn of the Century and despite the fact that scientists more or less professionally disagree with each other and try to tear down established theories. [In my experience, scientists of a particular type are unlikely to ever team up to form a conspiracy, they would splinter almost immediately]

We now know there can be many factors which cause climate change. Without the burning of fossil fuels, it is possible we would be heading into a colder period, but the burning seems to be over-powering other effects. The burning seems to be the dominant cause of our current change.

Some people suggest that we have been burning things for a long while, and wonder why it is only just a problem now. That is pretty simple. The amount of burning that has been happening has massively increased since the eighteenth century. It has further massively increased since the 1950s. In the first ten years of this century alone, world coal consumption doubled. While debate continues as to how much coal burning is continuing to increase, there is little doubt that the projected increase in available coal will further increase emissions at a huge rate.

This extremely rapid, in geological time, increase in greenhouse gases puts incredible strains on the planet’s balancing mechanisms, which now seem more or less used up, or breaking down. It is likely to be the wild oscillations of those systems which are producing the wild weather we experience. The strain on these systems is increased by deforestation and ocean acidification and poisoning. There is not enough photosynthesis going on to draw down the excess Carbon, and make it part of the natural cycles.

It also needs to be stated that, while it is getting harder to mine some sources, we will not run out of fossil fuels in time to save us. We have more than enough to reach the end of civilization as we know it.

Let us be clear, if people burnt fossil fuels at the rate we were burning them in the 1950s then we almost certainly would not have the severe problems we have now, and could probably have solved any future problems if we had been inclined to.

After all, as the old proposition states, even if the scientists are wrong and we do something, we will be producing less harmful and less polluting energy, and destroying our world ecology less. The costs will be a bit of lost profit, the sacrifice of the political power of fossil fuel companies, and the forcing some corporate change. If scientists are right (we trust them with the theories behind computers and aircraft, and cars, and so on), then not doing anything is close to suicidal.

We have less than 1 degree temperature change at the moment, and things are not looking good. If we don’t stop 3 or 4 degrees of increase from happening, we will be in a bad way. Yes those are small increases, but in complex systems, some small changes can make a huge difference. This is life.

While destruction of viable ecologies and emissions of greenhouse gases are major problems, we could have solved them, if we had taken them seriously.

However, we face a reluctance by some governments and corporations to even consider the problem and, in the face of opposition, their attempts to shut down commentary and discussion. This appears aimed at keeping on with the destruction and the marketing of fossil fuel burning.

I suspect that a problem for these political parties and corporations is that, if they were to act, they would be implying they had been wrong in the past, and that is not allowable. They can never be wrong. They can only be Right.

This is a simple form of authoritarianism, imposed largely for the benefit of a segment of the dominant groups. It will eventually harm everyone, whether that is intended or not.

Political action is needed, as this is primarily a political problem.

Tags: Anthropocene, climate change

This entry was posted on November 26, 2019 at 12:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.