The Dharma of Climate Change

So I watched an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (All In America) where the overall message was one of urgency, like if we don't seriously change our entire economic system and become a leader in utilizing clean energy, then it will be too late. I'm a bit skeptical of the overall urgency expressed in her message, and can't help but to think that there's an ulterior motive behind her fervent call to action on this new Green Deal. I'm still gathering info, but it appears that she believes it's necessary to completely overhaul the healthcare system and move toward free healthcare for all and free education for all? I say cool, that's the kind of thing I can get behind, but at the same time, it makes me wonder what in that message is just pipe dreams to arouse support for her mission, and what is the actual substance. From what I've seen so far, I can't get a good read on her actual, concrete plan for this.

Then Mckinsey does a study that suggests that natural economic causes and conditions might actually do what AOC wants to do, it makes me wonder who's got Mckinsey in their pocket? Their clients are big corporations, and they have a lot of smart people working for them, and I wonder how much subjective data interpretation and "painting a picture" is going on with the McKinsey study Chris mentioned, and who they are doing the study for.

It seems on both sides of this global warming isssue there's actual facts and then there's politicians twisting the story to meet their needs and send the message they want to send. This is at least most of my experience of watching the news in general. I dunno, maybe I'm just too skeptical of what I see in the news. I do believe that we're in trouble with the climate, but it's a complex scientific problem, which I currently don't have the time to fully understand, so when I say to myself "yeah, it looks like we really are screwing up the planet irreversibly" my rational scientific mind says yes but when I look at the basis of that belief is mostly just because there's other scientists saying so, and I've seen a chart or two. But after having taken a class in college on environmental chemistry and solar energy it really does seem to be a a multifaceted, complex problem with many variables that not many people fully grasp, so that may be part of the problem. For example, people harp on the the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, which humans can be reasonably assumed to have an influence over based on looking at a chart of the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the last hundred years. But from my limited knowledge, CO2 is actually not the major greenhouse gas accounting for increased temperatures. There's a complex interconnected process in which CO2 influences the amount of gaseous water in the atmosphere, which actually is much more of a relevant figure for global warming. And that's just one level of subtlety. It's not so easy to convince the general public that we have a problem on our hands and that something must be done quick, when the capacity to actually understand the problem is not there. It's too easy to deny the problem because it's hard to fully explain the problem. This is the curse of science, the more you learn the more complicated things get.

So I'm not sure what I think of all this except to say it's my gut feeling that we as humans should really do something, but it's unclear on what scale and how that will happen. So it's easy to resign and throw our hands up in the air, because it's too big for even one country to tackle, it will require total human collaboration, and we are not at that point yet.

We often think not as skeptics but as deniers who are looking for reasons not to trust and then act accordingly but to justify our predisposed tendency to do nothing because that's the most convenient path.

Can't say I disagree, but how do we get around this problem? People can know that this is what's happening, but still do it because that's how we're wired. The most urgent or immediate survival pressure gets the most attention.

Either we trust the 99% of climate scientists who say we are in real trouble, or we don't. We can't all do or re-do all the original research and become experts with deep knowledge of the problems we face. That's just not practical or even possible, There is a trust factor that has to enter into our thinking on this and other issues and in my opinion, it is that trust factor that has been seriously eroded over the past few decades.

I agree. It's weird how we trust doctors to perform surgery on people and we trust pharmaceutical companies giving us magic pills to treat ailments, but for some reason people can't get on board with the scientists saying the world is in deep trouble. It's just not convenient or an immediate threat, I wonder if that's the real problem.

SigmaTropic wrote: It's weird how we trust doctors to perform surgery on people and we trust pharmaceutical companies giving us magic pills to treat ailments, but for some reason people can't get on board with the scientists saying the world is in deep trouble. It's just not convenient or an immediate threat, I wonder if that's the real problem.

There is research being done to investigate exactly this. Humans just haven't evolved to deal with this type of far off and serious problem. There's something called Terror Management Theory (TMT) based on the anthropologist Ernest Becker's book Denial of Death. I read one paper that used TMT to construct an argument that talking about climate change catastrophe triggers all sorts of defense mechanisms:

TMT underlies an extensive and well‐established literature; researchers have shown that efforts to repress one's mortality awareness, triggered when people are explicitly or implicitly reminded of their unavoidable death, influences individuals' attitudes and behavior. These psychological defenses, including denial, distraction and worldview defense, sometimes produce counter‐intuitive and potentially counter‐productive outcomes. Meanwhile, the growing global awareness and media coverage of climate change, and much scholarly research, has skewed toward negative “disaster and death” narratives. Exposure to such stimuli, highlighting climate change's potentially life‐threatening effects, may exacerbate counter‐productive responses.

Of course, if that's the case what do we do? Just not talk about it? Should scientists conceal their data? I wonder if this type of defense mechanism triggering wasn't what happened when Exxon executives got the bad news from scientists. It's easy to think of people like that as monstrous villains and certainly they did a terrible thing, but who knows? They might have just gotten scared and put their heads under the sand.

Well, that's damning.

No, not surprising at all. Humans are capable of amazing (but often terrible) feats when they band together in groups.

Re-reading parts of the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power. He escaped the Nazis and spent the rest of his life thinking and writing about the great catastrophes of the early 20th century. "There is no other hope for the survival of mankind than knowing enough about the people it is made up of."

On a lighter note but in the same vein, if you haven't read the internet classic What is the Monkeysphere? on Cracked.com , it's really funny. If you like biting, irreverent black humor about the human condition. It's about something called Dunbar's Number, a hypothesis in anthropology that humans only have the brain power to maintain relationships with about 150 other people.

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

I realized I wrote some nonsense, so I deleted it.

Two countries, joined by a shared border, yet separated by a identically-named yet distinctly different currency.

It will be great for trade... of course New York will be underwater, but...

These Extinction Rebellion guys were next to the Brandenburg Gate here in Berlin yesterday. Simultaneously a statement as well as the practice of facing global mortality.

A joint Defense Dept - NASA report says we're toast within 20 years.
www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmkz8/us-mil...ned-by-pentagon-says

Hello everyone,

I haven't posted on this forum yet but have been coming on occasion to read some of the very good practice threads which abound here. But seeing this topic come up I must speak up. I haven't read all the posts so I might be repeating some stuff which has already been covered... A word of warning : this post contains heavy and hard to swallow information.

I'm sorry to have to be very grim in my response but yes, there is now absolutely no doubt that global collapse has already started and will have monumental proportions. Whether millions or billions will die because of it is uncertain, but more probably billions ... (some serious estimates - the famous model from the club of Rome's 1972 book The limits to growth - say ... earth population starts declining uncontrollably by 2030 and down to 4 billion by 2100). I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give away figures like that just for the sake of information, but it's hard to contain.

Sustainable development is a lie - it seems it would have been possible had radical measures been taken in the 70's-80's, but that has not happened AT ALL and it is now off the table.

Renewable energies are aso kind of a lie : because green energy sources have a much lesser ratio of efficiency than petrol, there is not even enough easily accessible petrol left to produce enough green energy sources to replace the global need for energy given the way we are living now. That's a bit of a convoluted sentence but it basically means that degrowth is inevitable. The problem is, we have passed the time when a smooth degrowth would have been possible (I think the last windows of opportunity were in the 90's-00's). This itself is a fact of difficult to fathom proportions...

The massive and highly complex interconnectivity and interdependence of our financial systems, economies, and infrastructures - now globalized - makes them extremely fragile, and a small event like the 2008 financial "crisis" sends ripples worldwide (think of what happened to greece, a european country). How do we feed, say, Paris, if the food supply chain is interrupted even for a little bit ? What happens to hospitals in case of an extended energy shortage ? What do you do when the banks have crashed and the atm's have stopped distributing cash ?

Basically, thermo-industrial civilisation is about to consumate itself. Industry and the norms of living which have developed in the past two hundred years depend on an abundance of energy which simply will never be available again to us now that almost all the oil is gone. So, this is not a crisis, because it will never go back to the "norm" which has been ours since the post-war years, or even the 19th century.

Technology will not work miracles either : it takes a lot of energy to produce technology... It has been shown that even if we mastered nuclear fusion, and had unlimited energy forever, all the other aspects of the world (environmental catastrophes, financial crashes, depleting resources including of the different kinds of materials and minerals which are essential for building technologies like smartphones and computers... among other things) would not get better and this energy miracle woud not avert what I'm describing. Think about that.

I recommend an extremely well documented book by a researcher named Pablo Servigne, "Comment tout peut s'effondrer". I don't know if it's been translated from french, but other books certainly exist in english. I dare you to not be convinced by it ^^ It is an amazing work which references hundreds of scientific articles and books by respected scholars, researchers, etc. etc., former political leaders like a former minister of the environment (france) ; in fact it's so convincing that I'm now in the process of a deep personal "conversion", let's say... If you would like some other sources, because why would you take my word for it, I'll be glad to share, there are many things available online.

I'm lucky enough to basically have very few responsibilities - except for my own life - and so this might be easier for me, but I think everyone can implement drastic changes in their lifestyles if they face this with lucidity and hope. Because this is what is needed. Politicians do what the people who elected them want them to do, and there is no hope to expect from them. Most people are in denial or incapable of owning up... No one is gonna come and make everything better for us. We must become adults and responsible.

I believe - with lots of reasons - that in the years to come, a few things will become massively important, like living in the countryside, having a way to produce your own food for the most part, being completely OUT of the whole techno-industrial-financial-fossile fuel vortex, having strong mutual-help relationships with the people who live close to you, ... Awakening and art will be of enormous importance, I think. Not to instrumentalize these, of course... but taking in as much nourishment as possible from the wealth of cultural treasures which are easily available to us at the moment (for now ! hehe) is something I find compelling right now.

Our civilization(s) is already beginning to collapse - when and if the realization starts to sink in, world events start to take a very different meaning. We should prepare for it as best we can.
Industrial civilisation was an insane dream and we must go back to ways of living which will align better with how humanity has functioned since the beginning of time.

I think this doesn't have to be seen as something terrible... I will spare you the thing about crises and opportunities. But there are many very pragmatic and concrete things which can come from facing this reality, letting its radical consequences sink in, and then acting on it... In some ways, it might actually be good news. When I think of the loss and absence of direction and meaning which is so massively present in people my age (I recently turned 26)... Well this fact starts to make a bit more sense.
I'm only beginning to develop in this direction, and I must say that i'm still very shaken and uncertain about what to do, although in some ways understanding all this is operating a profound internal redirection, for me... which is not without some form of grievance, fear, of course. But also an enormous amount of clarity, power, and surprisingly, relief - because of course, I'd known about this without realizing... every young person on the planet knows about this, deep down. This was not sustainable...

Someone mentionned the role religion could play in this. Well, I just want to remind you that the word, before acquiring this almost disgusting connotation that most people feel when they hear it, comes from latin religare, which means "linking", "bonding", "creating connections". This is in fact what we need the most ! I don't remember where I read that, but someone said that religions are in essence "a way of relating to the unconditioned"... Ethical living and knowing nibbana/asankhata - isn't that what we are doing ? We are all religious people here ^^ (I must admit I would hate it if someone told me this).

I'm joking, but at least religion is better than science. A human community whose external and internal structures are governed by something which promotes ethical conducts, instils a sense of sacredness, provides global meaning and in the best of cases, can lead its member to move into the truth (which is what i am personally seeking through meditation practice) - doesn't that sound better, more noble anyways, than our nihilistic societies, than hedonistic materialism, the worship of the individual, and even the epistemological values which have come to govern the western spirit since the scientific revolution ? Incidentally, it is this "progress" which has allowed us to pollute SO MUCH that every single living thing on this planet is now externally threatened, after having, arguably, contributed to the destruction of the interior of man...

People 2500, 2000, even 1000 years ago new much more about what life is and what it means to be alive than we do now with our advanced technologies and fields of knowledge. Isn't science a huge part of the problem ?

I hope many people open their eyes to this as soon as possible. I believe in awakened comunities like this one for the future.

Kind regards,

Olivier

ps : and to prolong the theme and ease this harshness, a humanising improvisation which rhymes with release for me, by a deeply "connected" man ...