Climate Change Part 3: The Greatest Danger
It has been said that Christianity would be perfect if there weren't people involved. I guess that's true of many things. Look at the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. As a group of documents they exalt man to a higher level and establish a nation based on freedom and liberty. It truly is a magnificent construct and grants a never before seen level of rights and responsibilities to the public. The biggest problem is that in order for them to mean anything, they have to be administered by people. And people means politics.
Politics is the study, dynamics, and practice of dealing with large groups of people. What motivates them. What inspires them. How can they be controlled. How can they be freed. And people who make a career out of this are called politicians. Some people are very good at appealing to the mob. Fortunately, there are those who use this talent for good. And since positives in the natural world always have negative counterparts, there are also those who use this talent for bad. What is 'good' and what is 'bad' is always left up to the public to decide, and later, to the historians. It is amazing how often politicians viewed as 'bad' by the people of the day are remembered as 'good' by historians. And the opposite is just as true.
Sadly, the climate change football is now in the hands of politicians. If the Left wins, draconian and unnecessary measures will strangle the global economy and ultimately undermine all their hopes. As history has shown with the utmost clarity, economic downturns always lead to significant increases in carbon output as a result of wars, less efficient industrial practices, and population pressures. If the Right wins, nothing will be done and industrial output will continue to rise at a steady pace, lining the pockets of industrialists and flowing ever more treausure into government coffers. Either way, the people lose.
I've stated in other posts that science does not support the doom and gloom interpretation of climatology. In other words, there is no scientific evidence that rising levels of carbon dioxide will result in a runaway greenhouse effect that will end life as we know it. Nor have rising temperatures been definitively linked to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and even more importantly, it is not alltogether clear that temperatures are even rising. Indeed, average global temperature is a meaningless quantity and the apparent increasing severity of weather related phenomenon has much more to do with larger populations moving into ever more sensitive and dangerous areas, and the rapidity with which the global media reports on and disseminates any kind of negative weather event.
Climate change is real. It has always been real. It is as real as weather change. Expecting the climate to stay constant is no different than expecting the weather to remain constant. The only difference is that climate changes more slowly than weather. In fact, up until the last couple of hundred years nobody even noticed climate change because when people died their climate records died with them. Daily weather recording and stable governments are the only reason that climate change is even noticeable. Climate change is real. On the other hand, catastrophic global warming has no basis in rational scientific study. Nevertheless, there is a very real danger of coming catastrophe.
There are two enormous problems facing the biosphere that are far more immediate than climate change: population pressure and habitat loss. Like 'global warming' they are both side effects of an industrialized societies. Unlike global warming, they are real and demonstrable. And unlike climate change, which despite the negotiations in Copenhagen, humans can not alter, we can do something about population pressure and habitat loss.
Population pressure is simply populations growing beyond sustainability. Put some e.coli on a petri dish and let it grow. Colonies will form quickly and healthy growth will soon cover the surface of the dish with a bacterial mat. But at some point access to food will begin to cause bacteria on the outer edges to die. At the same time, those in the middle will begin to drown in their own waste products. Without outside intervention the entire colony will eventually collapse. This is an excellent analogy to human population pressure. While populations in industrialized nations have been stable for the last half century or so, populations in 'developing' nations are increasing geometrically. While this massive growth is causing some migration, that isn't really the problem. The problem is that the growth of these populations is being artificially sustained.
Most developing nations lack both the industrial capacity and the governmental organization to support large populations. And throughout history, nature has limited the size of these populations through natural causes. Infant mortality, malnutrition, plague, internal strife and other factors have combined to keep average lifetimes comparitively low. While this is nature's way of maintaining stability we in the west view it as anathema. Therefore, we in the West have provided food and medical care that has allowed these populations to burgeon far beyond anything even remotely natural. And whether we have done so for religious reasons, political reasons, or simply out of the 'goodness' of our hearts, we have created a situation every bit as unnatural as the industrially-forced rise in atmospheric CO2.
But we can not focus all the blame on the third world. While population pressure is at least 50% our fault, habitat loss is 100% our baby. For starters, much of the habitat loss we see is occuring in underdeveloped nations whose populations have been artificially swollen by well-meaning but misguided do-gooders in the West. With tribes far larger than anything ever seen throughout the long (and relatively peaceful) history of these far-flung regions, people in these areas are domesticating areas they'd have never dreamed of colonizing in the past.
Yet that is only half the problem. Back home, our insatiable materialism is driving everything from deforestation to the worldwide collapse of fisheries. And with our emerging love of all things 'green' we have shifted this destruction more and more from our own backyard into the developing countries - out of sight and out of mind - accelerating population induced habitat loss. Even in our own nation we need look no further than our own posh neighborhoods to find the worst culprits of habitat destruction. Whether it is a view of the beach out our backdoor or the removal of a mountaintop to get at the minerals under the ground, we are bit by bit eroding the very habitats that once absorbed changes in the ecosystem driven by climate change. Climate change isn't the problem. The problem is that when the climate changes there is nowhere for the animals to go - and humans are included. And since when is a 10,000 square foot home necessary for a family of four? The resources to build it had to come from somewhere as does the energy to keep to cool in summer and warm in winter.
That is the real danger of the current climate of climate change. Because every idea being discussed is driving the global community the wrong direction. The politicians want to turn citizens of the industrialized nations into paupers while supporting the unnatural growth of third world populations. The kernel of their negotiations centers around artificially limiting the growth of developed economies while artificially accelerating the growth of underdeveloped economies, and using the manpower of the developed contries to make it happen. The only possible result of this can be huge populations with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and with personal futures of the citizens stymied by chronic market saturation. Historically, when this happens, there is always only one outcome. War.
Futbol Guru, www.not-a-lemming.com