Great Turning Times March 2005
Great
Turning Times March 2005
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the March 2005 edition of The Great
Turning Times. What a lot has happened since
last December’s issue. Over 200,000 people have died
and millions had their lives turned upside down by
the giant tsunami that washed away human settlements
thousands of miles apart. If we ever needed
reminding how much our lives depend on the smooth
functioning of natural systems, this offered that.
There are two stories from the Tsunami that I feel
are especially relevant to us now, and these I’d
like to share with you.
The first concerns the island of Simeulue, which
lies off the coast of Sumatra. Although just 60km
from the epicentre of the earthquake that caused the
giant tidal wave, none of its 70,000 islanders were
washed away. How did they survive? In 1907, many
islanders had been killed after an earthquake had
been followed by a massive tsunami. The story of
this had been passed from one generation to the
next, so that their folk wisdom carried the message
“when the ground shakes, run for the hills”. On
December 26th, they did. They had learnt from
history. The question is, can we? Could the history
of this tsunami be something that we learn from in a
way that protects our lives, or those of our
children or their children? The next story could
offer such a lesson.
In 1993, Thailand’s chief meteorologist, Mr
Smith Dhamasaroj, became convinced that an
underwater earthquake would trigger a massive
tsunami swamping the coastline of the Bay of Bengal
and the Andaman Sea. He knew his stuff, having
studied tsunami’s for decades. Yet he was ignored.
After a tsunami hit New Guinea in 1998, he went
public with his concerns. “I suggested an early
warning system be put in place for tidal waves, such
as alarm sirens at beachside hotels in Phutek, Phang
Nga and Krabi, the three provinces that have now
been hit” he said, “I alerted senior officials in
these provinces, but no one paid any attention”.
Worse than that, he was labelled a scaremonger and
ridiculed in the press. Many tourist officials saw
his warnings as bad for business, as Smith had
recommended that no hotels be built within 300
metres of the shore.
There is an issue here about how we respond to
warnings about problems that haven’t happened yet.
Thailand hadn’t experienced a tsunami like this
within living memory, and so the threat was outside
most people’s range of experience. In a similar way,
warnings of climate change can seem so far beyond
what we’re familiar with that it may sometimes be
difficult to appreciate their urgency. But there are
plenty of warning signs that things aren’t right –
the freak storms, unusual weather, flowers coming
out at odd times. At the end of this newsletter is
an article about a recent conference reviewing the
evidence for climate change. It is disturbing
reading. What happened in Thailand is a reminder of
what can happen when we shut out the news we don’t
want to hear. Let us, like the Simeulue islanders,
learn from history.
This newsletter takes as a starting point a
recognition that our world is in danger. We face a
number of serious threats that include global
warming, depletion of resources, disturbance of
ecosystems and a growing gulf between the materially
rich and poor parts of our world. For many on the
planet, the crisis is here already. This may sound
gloomy, but it is just the start of the story. This
newsletter is about how we find our power to
respond, to create a turning towards a just,
peaceful and sustainable society where people
flourish and enjoy their lives. This is the Great
Turning. So how can we become part of this? That’s
what this newsletter explores.
With you, in this great adventure of our times
Chris Johnstone
Editor, The Great Turning Times,
Email: chris@chrisjohnstone.info
(and I now have a new website at
www.chrisjohnstone.info)
Ps.
If you like this email newsletter, please do pass it
on. If it has been forwarded to you and you’d like
it regularly, email me with SUBSCRIBE in the subject
header. If you want to stop receiving it, please
email me with “REMOVE” as a subject header. It comes
out four times a year, with editions in September,
December, March and June. Copy date for entries is
last day of month before next edition. Please let me
know of events, news, resources etc that you would
like included. Please also keep entries short,
ideally about 100-200 words.
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(1) If you’re from outside the UK and would be
interested in an international edition of this
newsletter that includes insights and resources for
the Great Turning, but doesn’t have details of the
UK events, please email me at chris@chrisjohnstone.info
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(2) It was Joanna Macy who coined the phrase ‘The
Great Turning’ to describe the story of change
required in our times. An interview with her about
this is found in the attached pdf file (which can
also be downloaded from the Yes magazine website at
www.yesmagazine.org/pdf/Macy_Great_Turning.pdf) An
article by her about The Great Turning is viewable
at
http://www.rainbowbody.net/Ongwhehonwhe/MacyGreatTurn.htm
There is more material on her website at
http://www.joannamacy.net
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(3) Joanna Macy is visiting the UK in May this year.
She is giving two public talks. These are:
Saturday 7th May
6pm at the University
of Bath
Admission by Ticket from Carolina Salter 01225
386156
ICE Office [iceoffice@management.bath.ac.uk]
Web details at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/shortcourse/JoannaMacy.htm
Monday 9th May
5.30pm for 6pm, Wesley
Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St (near bus station),
Oxford
Web details at:
http://www.freewebs.com/courageouscommunication/
Please do spread the word about both
these events.
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(4) The workshops that Joanna is running at Monkton
Wyld and Hawkwood College are both fully booked. But
it may still be possible to book a place at the two
day workshop she is running for activists in Oxford
on May 10th and 11th. Web
details at:
http://www.freewebs.com/courageouscommunication/
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(5) How do we find out about what is happening in
our world? Earlier this year, the news came that
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising
much more rapidly than previously expected. While
two UK newspapers carried this story on their front
page, most of the UK national press completely
ignored it. If people don’t hear about what’s
happening, how can they respond? Fortunately the
internet is providing a wealth of up to date and
reliable sources of information. The following sites
are examples and worth checking out.
http://www.grida.no
http://www.worldwatch.org/
http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/theme_a/mod02/www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/
http://www.earthwire.org/uk/
Please do let me know
of any recommendations you have for websites giving
well presented information about the state of our
world, or also of any sites you find inspiring.
Here’s another.
VitalGraphics.net <http://www.vitalgraphics.net/>
- Contains all published editions of the popular
Vital Graphics Series. Each publication
consists of several high quality graphics and text.
The goal of the Vital Graphics Series is to
visualize complex environmental problems such as
Climate Change in an easily understandable way.
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(6)
Voices from the
Edge'
is a speaker series
featuring inspiring and evolutionary
thinkers/activists who have been featured in the
“What is Enlightenment?” magazine. Here are two
upcoming events in the series.
• an
Evening Talk with
Jonathan Granoff
- President of the Global Security Institute
"Inner Peace and Outer Responsibilities"
7th
March 2005. The Window, 13 Windsor Street Islington
N1 8QG.
Jonathan Granoff works directly with governments and
world leaders in the pursuit of peace and worldwide
nuclear disarmament. As President of the Global
Security Institute, he has helped to forge an
international alliance of celebrities, diplomats and
Noble Peace Laureates the likes of Jane Goodall,
Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Michael Douglas,
and a catalogue of distinguished leaders and
activists. Granoff is a tireless activist for peace,
addressing world scale issues such as interfaith
dialogue and the rule of law. Based on a deep
commitment to universal spiritual values, he works
to influence national and global policy and law by
communicating directly with policy makers.
FURTHER INFORMATION : contact
020 7288 7000
WEB SITE : www.wie.org/voices EMAIL:
infolondon@wie.org
• Andrew Cohen
"Living on the Edge of
Evolution"
16th &17th April 2005.
Talk and Day Seminar
The Window, 13 Windsor Street Islington N1 8QG
Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, innovative
thinker and pioneering architect of a new model for
living with authenticity in this world. He is also
the founder and editor-in-chief of What Is
Enlightenment? magazine. Andrew Cohen is a spiritual
teacher unique to our times. His style is simple and
direct, his impact profound. His vision is original
and his message is transforming. Andrew has years of
experience guiding people to higher states of
awareness. Over the past twenty years, through
engagement with thousands of people, he has forged a
contemporary teaching of enlightenment which he
calls Evolutionary Enlightenment. Join Andrew Cohen
in an afternoon talk and day retreat to glimpse this
emerging new paradigm.
FURTHER INFORMATION : contact
020 7288 7000
WEB SITE : www.wie.org/voices EMAIL:
infolondon@wie.org
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(7) Two websites I
mentioned in the last edition are so good that I’m
going to recommend them again.
http://www.projectflamingo.com/
is produced by the Web of Hope. That name gives
something away!
and
Big Picture TV (http://www.big-picture.tv)
is an online TV channel that broadcasts video on
demand (VOD) over the web. It includes loads of
inspiring interviews with inspiring people. I’m
gradually working my way through them. Highly
recommended.
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(8) Footprint
Education offer courses in EcoTherapy. They also
organise the Wild at Heart gathering in early
September, that is now seeking presenters and
contributors. To find out more, view their on-line
newsletter at
<http://www.footprint-education.org/enewsspring05.html>
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(9)
2005 Weekend
Courses
on the
Welsh
Borders nr Hay-on-Wye
Organised by
Gaia Cooperative
in association with
Resurgence and Schumacher College
Lots of interesting and inspiring workshops – see
attached file for info or check out their website at
<http://www.gaiacooperative.org/>
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(10) Live Your Dreams
– a one day course in
Stroud, Saturday 16
July, £47 including lunch
See attachment no.3 for info. For details please
ring Hawkwood College 01453 759 034
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(11)
The
work that reconnects in Spain!
September 17th – 24th
at Cortijo Romero, Southern Spain.
With Chris Johnstone and Kathleen Sullivan.
Cost £425 To book, phone 01494
765775
or see web details at
http://www.cortijo-romero.co.uk or at
http://www.chrisjohnstone.info
Is it possible to find our power to
respond to planetary crisis whilst living a life of
joy?
This one week residential course combines personal
renewal, deepening connection with life and personal
power training in a splendid setting among the
foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Come to this if you
want to strengthen your ability to find and play
your role in this Great Turning whilst having a
great week/life too.
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(12)
The
work that reconnects in Dorset!
Monkton Wyld Court, nr Charmouth, Dorset
September 9th – 11th 2005, Cost £160 (concs £130)
full board. With Chris Johnstone and Kathleen
Sullivan
We live at a time of mass extinction of species and
disturbing trends in global weather systems. How do
we find our power to respond to this? The Work That
Reconnects involves empowerment processes developed
by Joanna Macy and others (see www.joannamacy.net).
Past participants have experienced a profound sense
of renewal, deepened personal power and reconnection
with life following these workshops.
To book or for further info, contact Chris Johnstone
at email: chris@chrisjohnstone.info or see website
at
http://www.chrisjohnstone.info
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(13) Inspiring
rainforest activists/deep ecologists John Seed and
Ruth Rosenhek continue their series of workshops in
North America in June – August this year. You can
see details of their workshop programme at
http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/schedule.htm
They are some plans underway for John and Ruth to
offer some workshops in the UK in 2006, but this is
just at the planning stage at the moment. If you
would like to invite John and Ruth to run a workshop
in your area and you can help set this up, please do
get in touch with John at
rainforestinfo@ozemail.com.au
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(14) Thanks to John,
you can see past editions of The Great Turning
Times, and its predecessor Deep Ecology News,
at
http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/news.htm
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(15)
What if, every
day, you could take one small action to help feed a
hungry child for free, would you do it? Just click
at this site.
http://www.hungrychildren.com/
Each
time you visit this site, a donation is made to help
support the sponsored child shown. It doesn’t cost
you anything.
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(16) Startling facts –
60% of the world’s population receive less than 6%
of its income. The richest 20% receives over 80% (UN
figures). North America and Europe have less that
12% of the world’s population, yet account for over
60% of the world’s consumer spending (The State of
the World Report 2004). If everyone was to live at
the same material standard of living as the average
North American, we’d need another six planets to
provide the materials for this. You can find out
more about reducing your ecological footprint by
checking out the page on the Gaia Coach Institute
website at
http://www.gaiacoach.co.uk/detail_3.asp?ID=16
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(17) And some good
news – even though the US government hasn’t signed
up to the Kyoto protocol to tackle climate change,
increasing numbers of US cities are taking steps
anyway. Seattle Mayor Greg
Nickels announced plans to lead a city-by-city
effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions in
accordance with the terms of the international
treaty rejected by the Bush administration.
Seattle joins several dozen other American
cities that have already made commitments to adhere
to the terms of the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile,
mayors from several other American cities (including
Santa Monica and Oakland, California and Portland,
Oregon) have expressed solidarity with Nickels in
his bid to form a coalition of cities committed to
fight global warming.
Source:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/212425_kyoto17.html
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(18) Countrywide
ECOPSYCHOLOGY GATHERING
Laurieston Hall, SW Scotland, 18th - 25th June 2005
A residential week bringing together activists,
therapists, theorists and
interested newcomers for workshops, seminars,
practical projects, rituals,
parties and networking; all as guests of a rural
community.
Ecopsychology asks: why do we allow the destruction
and degradation of our
planetary environment? And how can we mobilise our
energies to do things
differently? Many people are exploring ecopsychology
in a huge variety of
ways, practical and theoretical sometimes without
even knowing the word!
This Gathering will bring some of us together in the
same place to share,
exchange, celebrate and learn.
Cost on a range depending on income: £187, £228,
£269, with a concessionary
low-income rate of £146.. This covers all food and
accommodation.
For full details and booking, go to
www.ecopsych.org.uk, email
info@ecopsych.org.uk
or phone Sandra White, 01992 503451.
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(19) First
Announcement - A UK Ecopsychology Training?
A small proto-steering group is considering setting
up a one year training
course in ecopsychology, perhaps starting in 2006.
Because this would be
such a new venture, we have decided to put the word
out at an early stage,
hoping to hear from people who are or might be
interested and to get
feedback about what most excites you, what sort of
structure would work
best for you, and so on.
Our vision is of eight to ten residential weekends
over about a year
(perhaps including one longer group experience in
the wilds?): mostly in
the countryside but some in urban settings, with
several different
facilitators (the whole course being held by a
steering/visioning group).
This will not be an academic course, although
reading will be recommended;
there will be no formal assessment, but lots of
feedback. It will be open
to a wide range of people, including
psychotherapists, eco-activists and
all who are drawn to this venture. Participants will
have considerable
input into what happens and how it happens, during
the year and at and
after the end of the year.
We invite you to contact
training@ecopsych.org.uk or Ecopsychology
Training, 31 Nest Estate, Mytholmroyd, HX7 5BH to
register an interest and
to contribute your own responses and visions.
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(20) MENDING OUR PLACE
IN THE WORLD
A weekend workshop in Bristol led by Nick Totton
April 30th - May 1st 2005 10am - 5pm
Cost £95 (£80 concession)
Something is spoilt and broken about the
relationship of humans to the rest
of the world. The result is that we in turn spoil
and break the world
around us. On this experiential workshop we will
explore how we can live
our own naturalness as a part of nature, reconnect
with our love and awe in
the face of the nonhuman, and gather energy for
active resistance to the
destruction of species and environments, including
our own. The goal is to reach a place of
greater strength and joyfulness from which we can
act more creatively.
Nick Totton is a therapist and trainer with over
twenty years experience
of leading groups. Originally he trained as a body
psychotherapist, but over
the years his approach has become broad based and
open to the spontaneous
and unexpected. He has written several books
including Psychotherapy and
Politics, and has a website at www.erthworks.co.uk.
If you want to discuss the workshop, email him
at nick@erthworks.co.uk,
or phone 01422 886 525. To book, please send a
cheque
(£20 deposit or full payment) payable to Akousis to
1, Fairlawn Road, Montpelier,
Bristol, BS6 5JR (phone 0117 924 7154)
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(21) Some more
excellent news... Quite a few newsletters ago, I
mentioned that inspired eco-dwelling builder Tony
Wrench was due to have his roundhouse home torn down
because it was too ahead of its time to fit in with
local planning regulations. Based at the
permaculture community at Brithdir Mawr in Wales,
the amazing turf-roofed structure is still standing.
You can catch up on how this has happened, and also
what you can do to help it stay this way at
http://www.thatroundhouse.info
From May 14th to 29th, Tony is running a two week
course in how to build there roundhouses. This will
be at a Cardigan farm site, and you can come for any
length of time over the 15 day period. The fee is
40% of your income for an average week.
To find out more:
email Tony on tonywrench@lineone.net To book, please
send a deposit of £10, by April 20th, to: Tony
Wrench, Brithdir Mawr, Newport, Pembs, UK SA42 0QJ.
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(22) The 2nd Be
The Change Conference will be held in London on
May 5
Be the Change is a coming together of people who
aspire to manifest the kind of world they believe is
possible – a world that works for everyone. It was
Gandhi who first exhorted us to 'be the change you
wish to see in the world'. Find out more at
http://bethechange.org.uk
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(23) One of the people
who’ll be presenting at the Be the Change conference
is Mike the Mentor, who has a website at
http://www.mikethementor.co.uk He
produces a newsletter for people interested in the
themes of coaching for personal and planetary
change. See his website for details.
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(24)
The article below was
written by Michael McCarthy, environment editor of
The Independent. Please read it. It contains
important information.
MICHAEL MCCARTHY
Slouching towards disaster
The Tablet 12 02 2005
When the world s environmental experts met to
discuss climate change in Exeter last week, warnings
about the plight of the planet were even more
dire than expected. As the mercury moves up the
thermometer, there seems - to this writer at least
-
one
inescapable conclusion.
SCARE stories are meat and drink to
environmentalists; the modem
environmental movement was started by one,
when Rachel Carson’s dramatic account of what
agricultural pesticides were doing to American
songbirds was revealed in her groundbreaking 1962
book, Silent Spring.
Since then the damage humankind is wreaking on
the planet has been exposed time and time again .in
a series of reports, ranging from the destruction of
the rainforests to the overfishing of the seas. Many
are of these frightening warnings become accepted
both by the public and the scientific establishment
because they turn out to be self-evidently true. Go
to large areas of the Amazon and you will find the
forest has simply gone; look at the last 30 years’-
worth of statistics for catches of cod in the North
Sea
and you will find the numbers have tumbled despite
the increasingly strenuous efforts of fishermen to
bring back more fish.
Such alarums have a political as well as a
scientific
thrust. They have constituted the
lifeblood of the Green movement. They are what
has brought widespread support for groups such
as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and put
the environment high on the public and political
agendas, and, at last, the Churches’ agendas.
Such interest is to be expected. If you are a young
mother and you hear that a brand of apples may
contain pesticide residues, do you want your young
children eating them?
Would you not support campaigners for clean
apples? Sport their badges? Display their car
stickers? Fill m their direct-debit mandates?
Yet although the term “scare story” can perfectly
well be applied to something
The rivers of the Rockies, the alpine flowers, the
forests of the Amazon. One after another they will
go
frightening but also verifiable, it is not a neutral
one.
It has a definite pejorative ring, strongly implying
that the scare may well be a good story, but that
its
basis is exaggerated or even untrue. The charge has
in recent years been laid at green campaigners (most
aggressively by the Danish statistics professor
Bjorn
Lomborg) that they do indeed exaggerate, believing
they need above all to keep up the momentum of
public concern ‘lest their support should ebb away.
More seriously, critics such as Lomborg charge that
even research scientists have a vested interest in
bad news, because this is the most reliable way of
securing funding.
I have reported on the environment for national
newspapers (first The Times and then The
Independent), since 1989, and my experience
has been that, unfortunately, exaggerations have
indeed sometimes occurred. There have been some
environmental scares over the past 20 years which
have caused a sensation and filled the headlines,
but
not been completely borne put by the evidence.
Let me offer three examples from purely personal
observation. In 1984, British scientists discovered
that over Antarctica a gigantic hole had developed
in the layer of naturally occurring ozone gas in
the stratosphere, because of the destructive action
of a group of industrial chemicals,
chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs), widely used in refrigeration, air
conditioning and aerosols.
The ozone layer protects us from the most harmful
of the sun’s rays, ultraviolet B radiation (UVB),
and
it was widely asserted that because of the ozone
hole, many living organisms, from the plankton of
the Southern Ocean to the shepherds of Patagonia,
now faced potentially catastrophic injury. The ozone
layer protects us from the most harmful of the sun’s
rays, ultraviolet B radiation (UVB), and it was
widely asserted that because of the ozone hole, many
living organisms, from the plankton of the Southern
Ocean to the shepherds of Patagonia, now faced
potentially catastrophic injury.
The ozone hole is still there (although mending
because of the successful phase-out of CFCs),
and such a disruption of the earth’s atmospheric
chemistry must of course be of very great concern,
but I personally know of no well-attested example of
any living organisms being damaged by excess UVB
from ozone depletion, anywhere.
Another example: dioxins, the Green movement’s
“bogey” chemical, a range of substances produced
by high-temperature burning, and so used as a key
plank in campaigns against rubbish incinerators.
Dioxin is a word whose very mention is intended
by environmentalists to strike terror into honest
citizens’ hearts, but apart from the special case of
the Seveso chemical factory explosion in Italy in
1976, when people living near the blast suffered
skin
complaints after close exposure to gigantic amounts
of the chemical, I know of no incidence anywhere of
dioxins at naturally occurring levels actually
causing
any harm, to anything.
A third example: Brent Spar, the large (15,000
tonnes) obsolete North Sea oil storage buoy was
the subject of a spectacularly successful pan-
European campaign by Greenpeace in 1995, to
prevent its being dumped in the Atlantic by the oil
company Shell. Greenpeace convinced the public
that to dump Brent Spar in the ocean would be an
unforgivable and immensely damaging pollution, an
environmental crime of the first magnitude.
I take the view that disused offshore oil
installations
should not be dumped at sea. But as to Brent Spar
itself being a major pollution danger, I cannot help
but remember that from 1941 to 1943, the U-boats
Of Grand Admiral Doenitz sent to the bottom of the
Atlantic an amount of allied shipping (15m. tonnes)
which was the equivalent of a thousand Brent Spars
- and no one has ever suggested that that brought
about a significant marine pollution problem.
I offer these examples of my reaction to
environmental scare stories over the years because I
suppose I am about to put forward one of my own.
Last week the British Government held an
international conference, at the headquarters of the
UK Met Office in Exeter, on climate change. It was
called personally by Tony Blair, who is making
the problem of global warming one of the central
policies of his simultaneous leadership in 2005
of both the G8 group of rich nations and of the
European Union. Its purpose was to update policy
makers everywhere on climate change science,
which is rapidly moving. General appraisals of it
are
carried out by the UN’s-Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), which has produced three
assessment reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001. The
third assessment report (known as TAR) is chapter
and verse on what the international community of
climate scientists think is happening now, and
likely
to happen in the future, with global warming.
The most important conclusion of TAR was that
the earth’s average surface temperature was likely
to warm by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade
between now and 2100, depending on how human
societies controlled their emissions of carbon
dioxide
(C02), the waste gas from industry and transport
which is retaining more and more of the sun’s heat
in
the atmosphere.
These are enormous rises (even at the lower end)
and they are expected to have similarly enormous
impacts, ranging from the widespread failure of
agriculture and many more extreme weather events
from droughts to flooding, to sea-level rise around
the world. The fourth IPCC assessment is not due
until 2007, and so last week’s conference was in
the nature of a mid-term report about where the
science has got to. I covered it for The Independent
with Charles Clover, environment editor of The
Daily Telegraph, and Paul Brown, environment
correspondent of The Guardian. We have known
each other for 15 years and covered many such
conferences and we thought we knew what to
expect: a minor tweak in the detail here, and twitch
in the policies there.
We were taken aback. The opening day brought
disclosure of two major new threats to the world.
The first concerned Antarctica, with a warning
from the British Antarctic Survey (the body whose
scientists discovered the ozone hole) that, perhaps
because of rising temperatures, the vast ice sheet
covering the western side of the continent may be
starting to break up. Were it to collapse into the
sea, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise global
sea levels by more than 16 feet. Goodbye London;
goodbye Bangladesh.
Only four years ago the IPCC TAR said it was safe
for probably 1,000 years, certainly until the end of
this century; last week Professor Chris Rapley, the
BAS director, said that judgement would now have
to be revised.
The second alert concerned an issue many of the
scientists present were only dimly aware of: the
acidification of the oceans. The billions of tonnes
of carbon dioxide human society is producing are
not only causing the climate to change. When they
dissolve in sea water they are combining with it, in
a
simple chemical reaction, to produce carbonic acid.
But the world’s seas are alkaline, and have been for
many millions of years, and it is in this
environment
that thousands of species of small marine, organisms
at the bottom of the food web, from plankton to
shellfish, have evolved.
They will not be able to live in an acid sea. The
point about these two disclosures is that they
were not based on predictions of future events by
supercomputer models of the global climate, which
is the origin of most scare stories - to use the
term
neutrally - about global wanning. They were based
on actual observation, in the real world, of things
that are happening now.
But there were plenty of predictions as well at the
conference, and they were grimmer than ever. For
example, there was the most pessimistic assessment
yet of global warming causing collapse of the Gulf
Stream which perversely would bring a new ice age
to Europe. A group of American scientists calculated
that in the absence of major action to control
emissions, the chance of this happening was now
greater than 50 per cent.
And there was an assessment that the ice-sheet
covering Greenland may start to melt - which would
cause global sea levels to rise by 20 feet - with
a temperature rise of only 1.5 degrees C. above
pre-industrial levels. We are already 0.7 above
prendustrial
levels; we are well on the way.
Perhaps the most vivid of a plethora of pessimistic
papers was a review of studies on which ecosystems
and species would be hit by which temperature rises.
It was a long, dire litany of disappearances as the
mercury moves up the world’s thermometer:
Queensland’s highland tropical forests very soon; at
a one degree rise South Africa’s unique fynbos flora
and the rest of the Arctic sea ice; between one and
two degrees the trout in the rivers of the Rockies;
between two and three degrees the alpine flowers
of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the
broadleaved
forests of China, and the rain-forests of the
Amazon. One after another they will go, the special
places of the earth, the glories of creation.
The overwhelming impression given by the
conference, a meeting of entirely sober scientists
with nary a campaigning environmentalist in
sight, was that these things will happen. Firstly,
there was a strong sense that climate change was
proceeding much more quickly than had been
anticipated. The report of the conference steering
committee said: “Compared with the TAR” - only
four years ago, remember - “there is greater clarity
and reduced uncertainty about the impacts of
climate change across a wide range of systems,
sectors and societies. In many cases the risks are
more serious than previously thought.” Secondly,
big temperature rises are already “built into the
system”, as Margaret Beckett, the UK. Environment
Secretary, acknowledged, because there is a time
lag between the CO; going into the atmosphere
and the subsequent rise in temperatures. Even if all
emissions were stopped dead tomorrow all over the
world, enough CO; is up there to cause a further
rise,
according to a paper circulating at the conference
(Hansen et al, 2005), of 0.6 degrees C.
But - and this is the third point - the emissions
are
by no means going to stop tomorrow. Under the
Kyoto protocol, abandoned by the United States,
the world’s biggest CO; emitter, the industrialised
countries are struggling to cut their emissions back
to merely 5 per cent below 1990 levels; controlling
climate change would require a cut of perhaps 60 per
cent.
Yet, as the conference chairman, Dennis Tirpak, head
of the climate change programme of the OECD,
reminded delegates, the 2004 World Energy Outlook
of the International Energy Agency calculates that
the next 25 years global emissions of CO2 are
likely to increase by 62 per cent, mainly from the
developing world, as the Chinese and the Indians
rush to build coal-fired power stations to service
their exploding economies. The necessary cuts are a
fantasy.
When it was all over Paul Brown and I travelled
back from Exeter to London by train, working out
what it meant, working towards the inescapable
conclusion. I have written at such length to try to
put
that conclusion into some sort of context. It was
the
inevitability of what was going to happen, I think,
that for the first time struck us with real force:
that
whatever flapping, floundering efforts humankind
eventually makes to try to stop it all, the great
ice
sheets will melt, the seas will turn acid, and the
land
will burn. By the time we reached London we knew
what the conclusion was. I said:
“The earth is finished.” Paul said: “It is, yes.” We
both shook our heads and gave that half-laugh that
is
sparked by incredulity. So many environmental scare
stories, over the years; I never dreamed of such a
one
as this.
And what will our children make of our generation,
who let this planet, so lovingly created, go to
waste?
Michael McCarthy is environment editor of The
Independent.