Written by: Roberto R. Bravo, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The so-called Glasgow Climate Change Conference has begun with promising words: virtual consensus on the reality of the situation and the urgent need to take serious and far-reaching measures; no denialist attitude among the participants, as there has been in the past.
However, it is worth noting the significant absence, among others, of some of the most polluting countries, such as China, Russia and India, and some with the highest rates of deforestation, such as Brazil. And the remarkable presence of the United States is due to the sudden change in its policy on this matter, following the recent elections in the country. As is well known, its former president, the billionaire Donald Trump, is, along with Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, one of the biggest deniers of the pandemic, of climate change and of anything that, in their narrow minds, appears to threaten their economic interests. The Chinese government, by the way, has already announced that it will maintain its "development plans", which involve more pollution. And no one is unaware that behind such attitudes there are companies willing, and sometimes lobbying with huge sums of money, to maintain their exploitative domains and even extend them to the Arctic, Antarctica and any other geographical space that could bring them economic benefits, while they are up to avoid any legal curbs on deforestation, hunting, fishing, resource exploitation and polluting industrial and commercial activities. All this despite the concern for the climate and for conservation that the majority of the populations of their respective countries may have... An evidence of the abuses of power by political leaders and the economic groups that support them, even in democratic countries...
In the first days of the Conference, agreements have been approved – although not binding, so they could be just words – for the reduction of methane and CO2 emissions, the reforestation of large areas of the planet (to which Brazil has agreed, which in reality is not so surprising, as we shall see) and other measures, with the support of considerable international investment from the public and private sectors, including major banks.
But remember that the celebrated Millennium Development Goals for social development agreed in 2000 by the United Nations, which should have been achieved within 15 years, have only led to improvements (and depending on how they are measured) in a few countries and only in part; that the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate has only seen timid and clearly insufficient progress so far; and that global warming has been warned about since the 1950s, for quite some time now. This raises the fear that, once the initial enthusiasm has worn off, the new agreements reached will also remain on paper. If this happens, it will be not just one more good political and social purpose left behind, but probably the last.
The lack of political action has been mainly due to economic pressures from tycoons and financial lobbies traditionally opposed to anything that might hinder their ambitions. Time has revealed the not always legal, and even less ethical, manoeuvres of some large corporations to conceal the harmful effects on health or the environment of the use of certain materials (asbestos is just one example), of industrial products and processes (pesticides, polluting spills), waste (plastics, radioactive waste), medicines (the list is endless), some forms of work (such as mining) and, of course, consumer products (tetraethyl lead, tobacco, "junk food", etc.), to mention only the best known. The last items on the long list are greenhouse gases, which are responsible for the current average global temperature being the highest in almost a million years.
Faced with the warning of the scientific community based on exhaustive studies (Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis) and with the growing environmental awareness of a large part of the world's population, the response of the economic lobbies has been mainly to deny the obvious facts, such as CO2 being a pollutant or that there is global warming (since, in their limited perspective, there are still winters, and sometimes very cold ones, they say), or to try to minimise the facts: such a "small" increase in global temperature as cited by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its report (see the previous article), of only 1.1ºC, cannot be the cause of the climatic upheavals occurring in all parts of the world.
Surely there are other causes that do not depend on us. In fact, natural catastrophes are nothing new on the planet, as shown by geological data going back millions of years (say those who at least believe in science). On a closer scale, there are reports of great climatic disturbances in historical times, and many people have heard occasionally of heavy snowfalls, unusually long winters or exceptionally hot summers that occurred only a couple of generations ago. Moreover, humans have always been able to adapt to variations in climate, from the Inuit populations of the Arctic regions to the inhabitants of the steppes and savannahs, to the Berber groups of the African deserts. On the other hand, today we have information about what is happening elsewhere in real-time, thanks to telecommunications, which makes many things seem more serious and frequent that they probably are...
Contrary to the simplistic view of the deniers, more concerned with their immediate interests than with learning the reality of the facts, today we know that nature is the delicate result of a complex system where the formation and composition of the atmosphere, the water cycle, the levels of temperature, pressure, humidity and relative acidity, the composition and availability of nutrients, and a variety of other factors have allowed the development of increasingly complex organisms over billions of years, up to our species. In the course of this slow evolution, many species have disappeared due to the successive changes. In fact, the vast majority of species that have lived throughout Earth's history have become extinct. From a geological point of view, the Earth, rather than the planet of life, could be called the planet of extinctions.
In a complex dynamic system, as physical and biological studies show, and the mathematics of chaos has widely publicised, a slight variation of one parameter can under certain circumstances cause remarkable alterations of apparently very distant variables (the recurrent image of the butterfly flapping its wings and contributing to unleash a hurricane at the other end of the globe is the latest scientific version of what popular wisdom expressed as the straw that broke the camel's back or the drop that caused the glass to spill). The 1.1°C increase resulting from recent changes (at geological scale) introduced by our industrialisation scheme is an average value referring to limits that can be, and indeed are, extreme in various parts of the globe, from temperatures in excess of 40°C in some places to icy cold and snowfall in the middle of summer in places where they had never been recorded. The Earth's surface, for example, is experiencing a higher temperature increase than the global average, and in some parts of the Arctic Circle that difference is as much as double. And of course, the cold extremes are smaller, both in frequency and intensity, as this is a global increase. The increase not only influences temperatures but also phenomena that depend in various ways on climate, such as atmospheric and ocean currents, the distribution and frequency of precipitation, the extent of polar ice, the distribution of water, and so on.
Living things grow adapted to the environment on which they depend for survival, and natural variations in the environment produce from well-known annual fluctuations in plant and animal populations to seasonal migrations, such as those of marine and bird species in search of suitable conditions. However, human-induced alterations of the atmosphere, waters and green spaces over a much shorter time span do not give species time to adapt. Add disastrous direct interventions such as overexploitation, indiscriminate logging and hunting, chemical spills and dumping, and even relocations, without much ecological knowledge, of competing or predatory species that have led to disruptions of the food chain, with a decrease in natural foods and abrupt alterations of ecosystems. The all-too-well-known consequence is the danger of extinction that currently hangs over virtually every species on the planet – including, of course, ourselves.
While it is true that humans have been able to adapt to extreme situations (including the exploration of space and the bottom of the seas), any adaptation requires a certain stability of the environment, which allows for anticipation and response in accordance with the surroundings and the specific situation; a stability that the current climate change has altered and, according to forecasts, will take at least tens or hundreds of years to re-establish.
The deniers stubbornly insist on denying the evidence, eager to continue benefiting from the current economic model. By hiding and refusing to see what they do not want to see, they have come to convince themselves of their own lies, to the point that their short-sighted attitude prevents them from properly weighing risks and benefits, as companies – including their own – normally do when faced with a new situation. It should be obvious to any analyst that the immediate benefits do not nearly outweigh the high potential risks. The dangers of global warming are too high for any economy, simply because there will be no economy to sustain if life on the planet cannot be sustained. So, this time there must be no economic pressures to get away with, and no politicians to back them.
The first, urgent and important thing we have to do is to immediately and drastically reduce our CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, continuously and incrementally until they are totally eliminated: in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, days rather than weeks. However difficult or complicated it may be, replacing as soon as possible the bases of our industrial park and our energy consumption models with a rational use of clean energies and non-polluting processes is the only way in which we can avoid major environmental disasters and even maintain a reasonable progress in our way of life. Many companies have already taken or are taking the challenge, regardless of others’ irresponsible attitudes or governments’ bla bla. What are the rest of us waiting for?
Next: The immediate transition to a clean economy is both possible and profitable.
Robert R. Bravo, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Besides his long experience as a researcher and lecturer on Ethics, Logic of Science and Philosophy of Language in Universities of Spain and Latin America, Roberto R Bravo writes and teaches on management skills in the areas of language and argumentation, coaching, leadership, and conflict management from a philosophical standpoint. Member of the editorial board of some academic and non-academic journals, he has published a number of essays, short stories, books for children, and translations. He is currently working on several books, both fiction and non-fiction.
