Clive Hamilton - The great climate silence: we are on the edge of the abyss but we ignore it
‘How can we understand the miserable failure of contemporary thinking to come to grips with what now confronts us?’
After 200,000 years of
modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in
history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed.
It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations
to sink in. Our best scientists
tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems
of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in the
face of these facts we carry on as usual.
Most citizens ignore
or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful
thinking; and some influential voices declare that nothing at all is happening,
that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet the evidence tells us that so
powerful have humans become that we have entered this new and dangerous
geological epoch, which is defined by the fact that the human imprint on the
global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of
the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth
system.
This bizarre
situation, in which we have become potent enough to change the course of the
Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves, contradicts every modern belief
about the kind of creature the human being is. So for some it is absurd to
suggest that humankind could break out of the boundaries of history and
inscribe itself as a geological force in deep time. Humans are too puny to
change the climate, they insist, so it is outlandish to suggest we could change
the geological time scale. Others assign the Earth and its evolution to the
divine realm, so that it is not merely impertinence to suggest that humans can
overrule the almighty, but blasphemy.
Many intellectuals in
the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have
anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because
the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more
than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please. The “humans-only”
orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced by our total
absorption in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to
view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble
of our existence.
It is true that
grasping the scale of what is happening requires not only breaking the bubble
but also making the cognitive leap to “Earth system thinking” – that is,
conceiving of the Earth as a single, complex, dynamic system.. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/05/the-great-climate-silence-we-are-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss-but-we-ignore-it
There is no amount of ideological deception capable of altering basic physics, chemistry and biology. It is ethically untenable for intelligent people to look the other way while elected officials deny reality, and our opportunity to avoid catastrophe slips away. We know that the continued acceleration of climate change will bring more droughts, rising seas, more extreme weather, longer forest fire seasons and destructive storm surges. This in turn would lead to more water stress, crop failures, poverty, starvation, warfare and ever worsening refugee crises. We know that the warming already achieved is expected to displace millions of people in low lying regions. Indeed, at our current rate of warming segments of the Middle East, Africa, and south Asia, will likely become uninhabitable for future generations...
