Climate Change And The Cargo Cult

Chris Cunningham

Description

Climate Change is a major threat to our way of life, and requires urgent political action to remedy its many threats, but is it a symptom rather than the disease? This book argues that the problem lies deep in our commitment to the quest for ever increasing economic growth. At some time in the 1970s the Western World passed a point of economic satiety beyond which further economic growth was of little benefit, and indeed was counter-productive, to living the good life. We must therefore seek a better understanding of our environment and of what constitutes genuine wealth. Life without the frenetic economic activity and culture of selfish possession that drives the modern economy can indeed be more humane, more pleasant and more meaningful than what we have today , but to reach it will require a major re-evaluation of what is important in business, politics and culture.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Weather

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528944687
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

About the Author
Chris Cunningham is a retired Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia . Born in Tamworth, NSW, he grew up and completed his primary and secondary education in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. He studied architecture and town planning at the University of Sydney, and geography and economics at Macquarie University.
He worked as a regional planner and policy adviser in Australia and the UK before taking up an academic position at the University of New England in 1981. He is the author of several books as well as numerous academic articles and broadcasts on topics related to town planning and community. His book about early European exploration in the Sydney Region, The Blue Mountains Rediscovered , won the inaugural NSW Premier’s Prize for Regional and Community History in 1997. Chris is married to Anne, a retired GP. They have four adult children.

Chris Cunningham
Climate Change And The Cargo Cult




Copyright Information
Copyright © Chris Cunningham (2019)
The right of Chris Cunningham to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788234825 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781788234832 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781788234849 (E-Book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
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Foreword
This story is about geography in the broadest sense of the word. It deals with both natural phenomena and human activity distributed over the surface of the earth . It is initially focussed on weather and climate , these days no longer haunts of generalist geographers but a specialist discipline of physicists who have become the modern meteorologists and climatologists, but it also delves into those areas of thinking usually occupied by economics, human geography and political philosophy. It explores the issue of the impact of climate change – and more particularly the economic and political ideas that drive the industrialism that gives rise to human induced climate change – on global society, with particular reference to Australia as an example of a continent and society likely to be adversely affected by climate change.
As this is written, during January 2017, it can hardly be doubted that climates across the globe are indeed changing towards a warmer earth . Considerable doubt, however, can be expressed about some of the more extreme claims in popular media concerning inevitable disaster for the human race and all life as a result of climate change per se . I am not attempting to prove or disprove the role of human activities in the causes of climate change: those matters have been well dealt with by others. A great majority of climate scientists are totally convinced that artificial causes account for most of the global warming experienced in the past three decades, and the succession of ever hotter years globally since 2012 provides empirical evidence, rather than merely computer modelling, to support them. That in turn requires that governments of the world cooperate to hugely reduce, and preferably eliminate, human society’s reliance on fossil fuels .
In the discussion here, I am assuming that weather , and thus climate change as projected by those climate scientists, will indeed occur more or less in line with their projections, and that the average temperature of the globe will rise by the order of 3˚C over the next century or so, unless very significant action is taken by governments across the globe to reduce enhanced human emissions of greenhouse gases. Those advocating immediate and meaningful action on climate change might well see this as a pessimistic assumption. Given the ideas outlined in Chapters Seven to Nine, the reader might well see it as optimistic. That assumption is somewhat higher than the middle of the range of such temperature increase that is currently being projected with reasonable confidence by climate modellers. Adaptation of humans and their societies to changing climates is really the only sensible long-term policy that governments can hope to pursue to mitigate the impact of climate change. Optimistic ‘climate management’ scenarios , at present being debated on the world stage, attempt to constrain global temperature rise over the next century or so to less than 2˚C from pre-industrial levels (approximately 1.2˚ above current levels), or even more optimistically to confine such increase to 1.5˚C, just 0.7˚ above what we are currently experiencing. Even accommodating to the former will take immense civic effort from all nations of the globe. Indeed, it is doubtful if political action, even dramatic and draconian, can really do much to halt the progress of nature as it responds in very complex ways to a warming earth , for, to a large extent, the damage has already been done and industrial processes over the past half-century have already put into the atmosphere the mechanism, whereby warming of the surface of the earth is inevitable. Nevertheless, this is no argument for doing nothing about the problem, and certainly not a case for ‘business as usual’, as will soon become apparent.
Climate is the central idea that links economics and geography . These two disciplines, expressed in their broadest sense, embrace not only our concern about climate change but also that for our wealth and well-being . It is climate that determines the global production and distribution of the food supply – not just for people but for all life. It is climate that determines which regions of the earth are suitable for human forestry, agriculture and pastoral pursuits. Economics focuses on the behaviour of individuals and societies in winning wealth from nature, and in generating and distributing goods and services, but it is climate primarily, and geology secondarily, that locate the distribution of the natural resources that economics takes for granted. Adaptation of humanity to changing climates is not necessarily easy, but for most of human history it has been a painful fact of life. That the cause of current climate change is largely a result our own activities in no way eases the pain: not a small part of those activities results from our desire to insulate ourselves from the environment of the natural world. It is unlikely that human endeavour can do much to reverse current trends towards warming climates: as we have already noted, the most optimistic scenario that current advocates of best practice can promise is mitigation.
Adaptation, however, does not let us off the hook and allow us otherwise to proceed as we have proceeded in the past. Climate change is itself but a symptom of a much greater social and environmental malaise that is, without any doubt at all, directly a result of human industry. This is the destruction, by an industrial system that produces far beyond the demands of human needs , of the natural and cultural wealth of the planet. This wealth includes the natural environment and its resources upon which we all, in common with all other life, depend. It also includes a vast heritage of human endeavour and culture.
Emphasis on economic growth – exponential increase in physical wealth per capita – as the main objective of society and government puts immense, indeed unbearable, pressure on natural ecosystems upon which humanity, and indeed all life, depends for its sustenance. These ecosystems and regions, created as they are by the natural climatic conditions of the earth , cannot be expanded to meet the demand that our economies will be placing on them in the future. In truth, they are already being degraded by current human industrial activity. As an example, we have witnessed very substantial losses in the stocks of the world’s commercial fisheries over the past half-century. In most cases the resource has diminished by something like a fifth and in some cases has more than halved. The measured output of the global fishing industry, therefore, is not an indication of additional wealth produced by that industry: much of it is attributable to (literally) eating of the capital that is required to sustain the longer-term viability of the industry. We can expect similar declines in the useful resources of croplands, forests and grasslands in the next half century, and yet the demands of industrial economies intent upon growth are ever more insistent. Few environmental economists would argue that the earth ’s geosystems can sustain as much as double present-day production, and most would indeed aver that nature would be crippled by such a figure. Nevertheless, global economic growth , compounding even at 1%, a figure considered abysmally low by most macroeconomists, would double present production in 70 years – within the lifetime of most children being born today.
The earth ’s accumulation of ‘stuff’ has to slow necessarily towards zero economic growth and probably, negative economic growth – as currently defined – within the lifetime of that generation. Therefore, I argue, it is indeed worthwhile pursuing policies such as curtailing or limiting, including taxing and rationing, fossil energy use even if implementation of these policies has comparatively little effect on climate outcomes. Limiting