Head in the sands

Now I am not particularly concerned about diminishing oil reserves. As the scarcity increases so up go the prices, increasing the economics of finding a successor energy source. Whatever that may prove to be.

We must expect sea levels to rise by at least 2 metres and the seven metre total rise may well prove to be not so far wrong. What is of concern is the speed of rise. We are seeing every indication that it will not be a nice steady even rise but a series of catastrophic collapse of systems that then feed in to fuel the next collapse. So expect a huge storm and the sudden inundation that then goes on to re-occur with increasing frequency. All the worlds major cities are sited at seaports. If London is anything to go by, their essential umbilical cords linking and servicing the city, are buried underground. Not good news when major inundations are to be anticipated. So dreadful inconvenient consequences, huge infrastructure reorganising costs and some billion people moving further inland into already congested hard worked land. But survivable.

Lets not forget either about that very small percentage of the whole worlds population that take for themselves an enormous huge slice of all the worlds resources, whether food, consumer goods, energy or rare metals. The US of A takes more than the lions share and seems to be in dream trance that it can just carry on and only needs to make token gestures. The problem is of course, if the whole of those resource that they take for themselves, were taken away and redistributed evenly the poorest people would only see a very small improvement in access to water and food and little benefit in improved housing, health or education. Which is not a reason to not address an imbalance. US of A is now a weak spent nation and it is only a matter of time before they have to concede and give up what they have taken to be their birthright. It is just becomes a matter of how painful and disruptive is that process.

The most likely scenario looming around the corner is that, on past performance, we, the world populations and our governments, still have not learnt the lessons of peaceful negotiation and, under the duress of food crisis, rising seas, scarcity of essential minerals, someone somewhere will resort, as they always have in the past, to power tactics. Where, as the end result, the world, to all intents, is lost in a radioactive maelstrom. Lets hope, more on a wing and a pray than derived from any rational thought process, that we manage somehow to side step that particular insanity.

It is also just possible that we humans have now so tinkered with the gearing's that those world eco-systems that tend towards a stability are now put into question. So that not only might we be the cause of the gulf stream shut down, or least its moving off, but that we might have introduced an incipient instability into what were otherwise complex self-referential regulating systems, always veering towards some stability. Even if not a stability necessarily supportive of any current biological forms. Though the scale of our human activities do now have impact on our planets regulatory systems, the proportion of our inputs to the planet's mass are still, hopefully, so small that any time-scale of consequence will be long after any humans have any cause for concern. But we do now significantly impact on all those feedback loops that, in the past, use to enable a confident assurance for future environment trends. Not any longer.

This then is my real concern, our impact on climate change. But not only on the climate but the organic lifeforms we are interdependent on. As high-tier feeders and need healthy and vigorous lower forms to provide for the forms we get to eat and survive on. There is the rub. We now control and contain how almost all of the environmental issues that lifeforms depend on. There are only a few patches left on earth of raw natural lifeforms diversity where 'Nature' has any chance of responding to the climate changes we have induced. Elsewhere we rip up centuries of soil micro-organisms, dump loads of narrow range fertiliser's and dowse anything that survives with herbicide and pesticide. Left alone, my money is on 'Nature' to re-establish new lifeforms best suited to the conditions that will come to prevail. That of course might not serve our best interest. Worse than that of course we are not in a position to leave 'Nature' to do its own thing. We limit and control too much. Yet we do not have a blueprint for future lifeforms to suit our needs. Our grasp of how organisms are interdependent and self-supporting is paltry. We are not even at first base to having any clue as to how 'Nature' can respond and recover from the climate change disasters staring us in the face. If 'Nature' has time to adapt to a very likely swift series of changes on the horizon we have to give it a real chance. We have to rapidly reverse diversity decline as diversity is 'Nature's only real tool.

We are entirely at the end of the road for the Roman approach of dominate and control all natural forms as well as those rebellious tribes. We so urgently need to get back to something approaching an Iron Age relationship to the world around us. As an immediate stepping off point we must stop right now the relentless pillaging of our Earth's resources, see previous, Right to Plunder . We have to make a major commitment to living intune, support and in harmony with the organic forms around us. We have to vitalise a rich and diverse habitat where all organic forms can flourish. We have to give up eating when and what we want and desire to surviving on what 'Nature' can offer us without detriment. Then we might just have a hope of surviving the next tumultuous decades ahead.