As we ponder those time-frames, we must also consider that recent UN reports are calling for urgent protection of the planetary life support systems for humans and most other living species. [1, 2] Because while the planet can do without us, we humans cannot do without a particular set of ecological conditions on Earth.
The regional climates of the Earth vary greatly from its equator to its poles, because the parallel rays of the Sun fall unevenly across the curve of the planet's surface. Global average climate is the average of all those climatic regions. It showed little variation during the last 10,000 years, the Holocene (geological) epoch that gave rise to human civilization.
What preceded it was 140,000 years of extreme climate variation, conditions that did not allow humans to settle anywhere for long, so that we could live only as hunter-gatherers. A stable global average climate permitted us to develop agriculture—and with it city life, culture and civilization. It was in this context, 2550 years ago, that an Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, attained fully awakened awareness. In Athens at the same time, extraordinary masterpieces of classical Greek art were being created, as was the first democracy in human history.
The stable Holocene climate was produced by a self-regulating atmospheric system; one with finely-balanced concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) (principally carbon dioxide and methane). Greenhouse gases partially block radiation of the sun’s heat from the plant back to space. Global climate is continuously re-created by interdependent cycles of carbon, nitrogen and water between the environment and living beings. Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Holocene atmosphere was stable, at 280ppm (parts per million).
200 years ago, the Earth entered a new geologic epoch, where human economic and industrial activity has come to dominate the biosphere and evolutionary path of the planet. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen termed it the Anthropocene. As we see in the graph above, burning fossil fuels to power the industrial revolution dramatically increased carbon gas concentrations in the atmosphere. A resultant ‘forcing’ of the greenhouse effect has increased global average temperature by 0.8C since 1880. This might sound like a small increase, yet it has initiated momentous change across all climatic regions of the Earth. The polar ice caps and terrestrial glaciers have begun to melt. Extreme weather events (hurricanes and typhoons, floods, heat waves and droughts) have quadrupled in frequency since the 1950s.
Some 80% of global energy supply still comes from fossil fuels, creating an enormously powerful economic lobby of business corporations who extract and burn them, as well as related industrial users. We may call this the Fossil Carbon Complex. Oil, coal and gas are doing three remarkable things at the same time: generating the greatest profits in human commercial history, causing climate breakdown and rapidly running out.
The Fossil Carbon Complex owns most of society's energy generation, distribution and infrastructure, and still receives annual taxpayer subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars. Its political influence is maintained by lavishly-funded PR and advertising, and it is enormous. At the present stage of global society, we see a chronic, ongoing failure to confront and redirect Big Coal and Oil, embodied in the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December, 2009.
How has such a dangerous existential and inter-generational challenge come about? Can we transform energy systems and energy use rapidly enough to avoid climate chaos? Are we to be so comprehensively deceived that we destroy our climate, agriculture and civilization for the short-term profit of some dominant business corporations?
Mainstream media coverage of current events is contaminated by PR disinformation, funded and relentlessly pushed by the wealth of the Fossil Carbon Complex. Its aim is to manufacture doubt about climate science, conceal the causative role of fossil fuels in global warming and reinforce our addictive relationship to oil and coal. The power of this "permanent PR campaign" is so great that many people have abandoned reason and science, choosing to "believe" there is no problem to address. But climate change, like gravity, is a scientific fact. One does not change gravity by not believing in it.
