How to boil frogs

According to the latest climate data, June 2010 was yet another record-breaker. This graph comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a division of the US Department of Commerce, and shows it to have been the hottest month since they started keeping records in the 1880s. For much of July the North-eastern United States and the Moscow region of Russia have been baking in unprecedentedly high temperatures (over 100°F in New York City), and the consumption of electricity for air-conditioning also hit a record.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate has just decided to reject any kind of legislation restricting CO₂ emissions, thanks to the opposition of the entire Republican block and of coal-state and “Blue Dog” Democrats. Oh yes, and China for the first time passed the USA as the world’s no. 1 consumer of fossil fuels and emitter of greenhouse gases, having reduced its overall fuel efficiency by 14% over the past year thanks to a massive spike in coal and oil usage. Bear in mind that ownership of cars in China, though rising fast, is currently at about 1 per 30 people, compared with one per 2 or 3 in the USA (depending on how you count them). As for air-conditioners, about 15% of dwellings in China are fitted with some kind of unit (usually relatively small), compared with nearly 90% in the United States. All this, of course, without looking at rising fuel and electricity consumption in other large developing countries like Brazil, India, etc.

The reluctance of politicians to do anything serious about the problem, especially in the US, is as much as anything because they’re worried about being punished at the polls for doing so. Judging from opinion polls, the public regard terrorism, for instance, as a much higher priority – even though there have been no terrorist attacks on US citizens outside war zones for many years now. In other words, although the temperature in the pan is rising faster and faster, most of the frogs are staying put and denying that there’s anything’s wrong – “it’s just pleasantly warm”, or “these are natural fluctuations”, or “there’s nothing we can about it anyway”.

This reaction seems puzzling and counter-intuitive, even when you take into account the massive power of the fossil fuel industry and of its many stooges in the media. Many observers thought that the scale and visibility of the Gulf oil spill would lead to a massive public repudiation of oil and greater support for alternatives to it. (It appears so far to have been roughly 10 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill – whose effects are still being felt 20 years later – and in a much harder environment to clean up.) Yet this hasn’t happened either on any noticeable scale – and this can’t just be because the oil industry has doubled its lobbying expenditures over the past three months.

I mentioned in an earlier post the evolutionist argument that it’s because we’re not “wired” to respond to collective and long-distance threats like this: while the threat of terrorism, for instance, presses our “gotta protect my family” buttons, global warming is a relatively distant, vague and above all collective danger. This would also explain why the determination to combat global warming appears to be so much stronger in more collectively minded nations like Germany and Japan than it is in a powerhouse of rugged individualism like the USA.

There’s probably something in this argument – but it’s very well-worn, and it can all too quickly lead to a tedious reiteration of the standard liberal rant about wicked oil companies, evil Republicans, and people who are so cruel about that nice Al Gore. Above all, it conceals the real mystery about global warming – which isn’t the fact that North Americans are doing less about it than Europeans, but that the human race as a whole is responding to it so ineffectively. Yes, European CO₂ emissions are set to remain pretty static over the next 20 years, while China’s especially will probably rise dramatically (see third graph), but so what? – we’re all boiling in the same pan. And, unlike the frogs in the (apparently untrue) story, we have no way of jumping out.

The planet seems to be headed for a very fundamental transformation, which it’s clearly too late to reverse totally, and may well be too late even to mitigate significantly – even if the Americans and others currently unwilling to pay 20¢ a gallon extra for their gas suddenly become bicycle-riding tree-huggers. Like the (closely related) massive overpopulation of the planet with its concomitant exhaustion or contamination of so many of the Earth’s resources, it follows directly from our culture, our lifestyle, our economy, our value system and pretty much every aspect of the way we live. And neither God, nor Nature, nor Gaia, have ever written any guarantees that we’ll be able to continue this indefinitely; we’ve gone way out on our own limb over this.

The great scientist James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, doubts that we have the capacity to implement any solutions that would work anyway: "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change ... the only thing that can save the Earth at this point is the Earth itself.”

The coming transformation looks more and more like a spiritual one, as the level of contradiction and dissonance rises, and our current culture, economy and lifestyle become more and more disconnected from the Earth and from any kind of sustenance or sustainability. Whoever – if anybody – is here to see it, the world of 2110 is likely to be much more radically different from today than our world is from that of 1910.