With their heads "out the window" the question becomes problematic

by Robert McLean

Thanks to Beneath the Wisteria supporter, Dave Glover, this observation was spotted:

“The scientific community realizes that we have a planetary emergency. It’s hard for the public to recognize this because they stick their head out the window and don’t see that much going on.”

 — NASA Scientist James Hansen.

Roger Scuton's new book.

This difficulty is unquestionably problematic for those of us who gather each month Beneath the Wisteria to discuss our private and, beyond that, our public response to climate change.

As mentioned at our September gathering, having read endlessly and listened tirelessly to many scientists of all stripes and climatologists who are among the best in the world, I seriously doubt that humans, being clearly the most intelligent life-form on earth, have the brain-power to recognize that the human experiment has wandered into remarkably dangerous territory.

The difficulty for those who accept the science, unequivocally, is that alerted to the reality that humans have changed earth’s atmosphere, is to maintain our integrity in the face of comments from people unable to differentiate between the fickleness of the weather and the sweeping and compounding changes to our climate.

The brilliance of our education has brought us to the abyss and on arrival, there has been a bifurcation of values, ideals and intentions with one group having invested physically, emotionally and practically in the “business as usual” paradigm and another having devoted similar effort and energies to what is an opposing concept.

The second group, eager to preserve conditions that allow homo-sapiens to survive and along with that, have hope of a different outcome and so to be seen in history as a group which understood the importance of responsible custodianship of the earth, or at least the pursuit of ideals ensuring the continuation of human habitation, is swimming against the current.

Faced with the overwhelming momentum from the drivers of the business as usual paradigm, those of us who wish to preserve what it is that allows humans to flourish find it difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to maintain our integrity, our balance and, importantly, our decency.

But we must, for if we surrender our integrity, decency, our sense of fairness and willingness to negotiate and to compromise, then all is lost for we devolve to what in common parlance is “war”.

The task is significant, but honourable.

In the discordant nature of the conversation, we must remember the observation of James Hansen that we have a planetary emergency; an emergency that most don’t even know about; an emergency that most see being resolved if we pay attention to recycling; an emergency that is happening “somewhere else”; an emergency that will vanish if we bury our reason in another episode of “Big Brother”; an emergency that needs people like you and I to confront the "business as usual" boosters.

British philosopher and academic, Roger Scruton, wrote in “How to think seriously about the planet: The case for environmental conservatism” about the US Climate and Energy Security Act and said:

“This bill – heavily influenced by input from climate advocates and radical NGOs – aims to reduce the total of American greenhouse gas emissions to 83 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2050 – in other words to a total of 1 billion tons per year. It has been calculated that the last year in which the US emitted only 1 billion tons of greenhouses gases was in 1910, when the population was a quarter of the size, and the total GDP one twenty-fifth the size, of levels reached today.

“To achieve the target, therefore, people six times as wealthy as their forebears will have to generate (per capita) a quarter of the emissions by those relatively impoverished and therefore energy-conserving ancestors".

The answer rests it seems, in considering how we live: do we support the “business as usual” boosters or align ourselves with the broad philosophies of those who gather each month Beneath the Wisteria?

I suggest it is the latter.