It may already be too late but, once again, we have been issued a warning about how thoughtlessly we are abusing the planet. A few years ago the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which examined 20,000 papers on all aspects of climate change and global warming. The Panel concluded unequivocally that global warming is being fuelled by human activity. But this was not the first time we had been warned. In 1992, following the conference in Rio de Janeiro on climate change a report was commissioned by an authoritative group of scientists. The report which resulted from that was ‘World Scientists’ Report to Humanity’ and was signed by more than 1600 scientists, half of them being Nobel Prize winners. Their report did not mince words. Humanity and the natural world, they warned, are on a collision course. The way we use the planet is unsustainable and that unless drastic measures are taken the prospects for humanity will be ‘irrevocably diminished.’
Now, fourteen years later, with the situation that much worse and with little meaningful having been done in the meantime, we have been issued another warning. This time from the eminent English economist Sir Nicholas Stern. In a 700-page report, Stern warns that global warming is likely to shrink the world economy by upwards of twenty percent if no action is taken now. That would bring on a major world Depression the like of which has not been seen since the 1930s, and would almost certainly last a lot longer. While the cost of making these changes will be enormous, the report makes no bones that the cost of doing nothing will be infinitely greater, and not just in monetary terms. It warns that upwards of 100 million could be made homeless by rising water levels. We are aware of the threat to the low-lying Pacific islands, but think of the Netherlands, much of which already lies below sea level, or Bangladesh, much of which is low-lying land already disastrously prone to flooding. Or the lowlands around Shanghai. These densely populated countries would effectively cease to exist. But then a similar number of people could be forced from their homes through drought. We already hear of Australia experiencing its worst drought in a thousand years.
The Stern Report makes clear the need to reduce our dependence on heavily-polluting fossil-fuel-driven goods and services. It is imperative that deforestation around the world is prevented and reversed and that cleaner fuels become the norm. The report suggests the target of non-fossil fuels accounting for sixty percent of energy output by 2050. It urges the extension and wider ratification of the Kyoto Treaty on carbon emmissions, bringing in India, China and Brazil into the club of countries committed to serious reduction of carbon emissions, and a serious investment in green technology.
The Stern Report has serious implications for humanists, as for everybody else. What are we doing to avert the calamity? Are the battles we have been used to waging important any more? Is there not now a much greater, if more elusive, threat? Maybe we have worried too much about ridiculous side-shows like creationism versus evolution while the real danger stands unidentified. Far more damaging than these flat-earthers has been books like The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. This scandalously irresponsible peddling of pseudo-science and junk scholarship has thrown dust in the eyes of people who needed to see clearly. Richard Branson, soon after announcing that significant profits from his Virgin airlines business would be transferred into combating global warming, admits that he lost two years, having been temporarily convinced by Lomborg’s pseudo-science. The Skeptical Environmentalist suited the political right and the acolytes of big business, who saw too great a threat to the bottom line to take the need for real change seriously. The fact that it was unscholarly propaganda masquerading as science seemed not to matter. Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth – even if too much attention is given to Gore himself – is a useful corrective.
This new awareness of the extent of the danger we face as a species is going to have important repercussions on the humanist movement. It seems to me we need to realign our message to stress that atheism is a world-view best suited to the cosmic perspective we are going to need if we are to survive as a species. No longer can humans–of whatever persuasion–afford the hubris of seeing ourselves as a privileged species, created in the likeness of God, and given a planet to exercise a thoughtless dominion over. The earth doesn’t need us at all, but we need the earth for everything. Then the core message of planetary humanism is that no solutions are meaningful unless they are co-operative, planet-wide solutions.
It probably also means that we should be more discerning in the controversies we involve ourselves in. Maybe the real danger for the twenty-first century is not some caricature ‘fundy’ but our car, sitting there in our own garage? That would mean the threat comes not from the thoughts of others, but from our own presumption of having some right to drive these selfish-minded polluting capsules around the place. Learning to see our consumer culture as part of the problem would be as good a place to start on the road to saving the planet. Many things we now take for granted are going to have to be abandoned or recategorised as a privilege. Wasteful or unnecessary use of water, travel, heating and lighting are all on the list. But can we make the required changes, or are we really like the proverbial frog who sits uncomprehending in the water as slowly it rises to boiling point?
Dear Bill
I admired your editorial in the Autumn 2007 'Open Society'.
The letter was published in the winter issue of 'Open Society' of New Rationalists and Humanists.
You have shown great courage and I hope you are not ignored. You questioned the controversies we get involved in and suggested the “real danger for the twenty-first century is not some caricature 'fundy' but our car, ...”
The car is only a part of a destructive materialistic lifestyle, but it is a key and symbolic piece.
Last year in New Zealand alone our cars killed and maimed about 6000 people, intimidated children away from biking and walking to school, consumed space needed for housing and recreation, forced thousands of households out of town, at the same time sabotaging public transport so they can't easily get back and condemned all of us to a life of noise, smoke and congestion. The long term effects are to have destroyed at least in part if not completely our future comfort on planet Earth, and to have robbed all future generations, no matter how long humans survive, of easy access to fossils fuels.
The sad irony is that urban transport woes were solved by the tram over 100 years ago and we have squandered progress since then by diverting to the blind alley of the private car.
This is neither humane nor rational. Yet we Rationalists who claim these attributes for ourselves are not conspicuous in our efforts to do something about it.
Human attitudes are very slow to change and the non-rationalist elements and vested interests go on claiming there is no problem and that there is a right to squander the world's irreplaceable resources. So far the Rationalist effort has looked a little as if we are waiting for god to fix it. Well done for a rational Rational approach.
Jeff Hunt
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