The Future Simply Can't Be Known

A while ago I blogged my stance on Climate Change based on what I know and understand during that time. I'm constantly evaluating my position on this controversial issue. I'm still currently torn. But I do my best to keep up to date on differing perspectives so that I can make a more informed opinion.

——– 

The Future Simply Can't Be Known
(originally posted on www.c4chaos.com)

Just finished reading Michael Crichton's recent speech at the National Press Club – The Impossibility of Prediction (exclusively available on Integral Naked. premium site. first month is free). My memories of reading State of Fear came flooding back to me. Crichton's arguments are just so compelling. Unlike the usual articles, news reports, documentaries, and propagandas we usually hear about Global Warming, Crichton's speech cites numerous scientific and academic sources including “the gold standard in climate science” – Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. For those who are interested and have the patience, Crichton also included a hefty bibliography in the novel to support his scientific gripe.

I'm all for taking care of the environment, but the issue of global warming never really alarmed me, even before I read Crichton's book. Maybe I'm just callous when it comes to environmental issues which may or may not happen a century from now. We all choose our causes. To me there are more pressing matters like famine, poverty, epidemics, terrorism, that the rich countries can do something about. Not to mention our own personal transformation. So it was very natural for Crichton's arguments to appeal to me both intellectually, and intuitively.

For me the bottomline is Crichton's acceptance of and challenge in dealing with uncertainty in complex and non-linear systems. I find it to be more optimistic and open-minded. As Steve Jobs had eloquently put it, ”you can't connect the dots looking forward.”

…we can't predict the future, but we can know the present. In the time we have been talking, 2,000 people have died in the third world. A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds. Fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute. This does not have to happen. We allow it.

What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken this phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now, it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and antihuman doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.

- The Impossibility of Prediction, a speech by Michael Crichton

p.s. but what i'm really interested in are the tips Crichton gave Wilber on how to better write his next book. after Boomeritis, i think Wilber could use 'em.

ADDENDUM:

09/06/2005 - For more intelligent discussions on global warming and reactions to Crichton's position, check out this thread on the IN Forum.

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

you are right C4chaos

your passion and and spirit

enliven the debate

your words are in action

the power of words empowering your self and others

well done

it is in  communicating clearly the nature of the problem and looking systematically at the steps which can be taken on an individual, group , collective , national and international level……and believing that we can make positve changes to a better life now and in the and future

to be willing to face the nature of the problem

to  able to grasp the situation

to be able to communicate this to others

is the first step

will walk with you C4Chaos

love

catemurray

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

I agree famin, poverty, epedmics, and terrorism are all very important issues none of which should be ignored.  But really why do we need to choose between them and the environment.  We're going to be facing a huge increase in all those areas if we ignore the health of the planet.  We need to get away from greed and narcissism and exercise responsible choice so we can correct all of these issues. 

I know we have it in us.       

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

But what can be done. The big companies and the govenment don't seem to worry much or at least not do enough.

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

well, in fairness, companies, governments , and countries do care. this issue is just so big and so politically charged and it slow things down. not to mention that this issue is also controversial.

but anything we can do in our own personal sphere of influence will be good enough.  

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

It is a big issue, and I must say I must educate myself in this issue. My own understanding is superficial, I need to gain some depth. I find the articles on this pod very useful. C4chaos you got such a great research, thanks for sharing and for opening our eyes. I find the reading interesting.

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

“My own understanding is superficial, ”

you are not alone on this. in fact, i think most people's understanding (present company included) about Climate Change is very superficial. this is one of the main reasons i started this pod, so that i'll be able to spread the awareness and at the same time, enrich my own understanding as well. like that G.I. JOE slogan used to say, “knowing is half the battle.” :) 

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

Some words about the supposed impossibility of foreseeing the future.

I am driving a car.  There are break lights ahead.  I am not sure what will happen if I do not put on the breaks.  Will I stop in time?  Will I skid off the road?  Will I wait too long, stop and then have the car behind me crash into me?  Will the car in front of me start moving again quickly enough so I will not run into it.

I cannot foretell the future in this scenario, but if I am a prudent person, I would be cautious and start to slow down, in order to be prepared for what would happen.

I have read, but don't ask me where, another writer talk about what else we prepare for in our lives, even though we cannot foretell what exactly may occur in the future. If you keep reading about climate change, etc., you will no doubt bump into it yourself.

Just because you cannot tell 100% which of the many dire things could happen, if we all think nothing will happen until the end of this century or into the next when we will not be alive, doesn't mean that there are we can ignore the signs pointing the way towards unprecedented and possibly catastrophic events.

You may not be aware that because scientists are generally cautious people and because of the intervention of governments in the wording of the final IPCC Climate Change 2007 report, which you can see online (all but part 4 which will be approved and adopted in Spain in November), that words and phrases were removed from the report that would have made the warning stronger than it is now.

In fact, try going to Ontario's climate modelling for Ontario) and see what the temperature difference in northeastern Ontario in the worst case scenario and what kind of rise in temperature is possible there.  The website is the government of Ontario's gogreenontario site.  Well, I'll tell you.  The temperature changes are more severe and dramatic the more north you get.  The scientists are saying here that the rise in northeastern Ontario could be as much as 10-11 degrees (which is many, many degrees warmer than further south in the province).

I also read an article from a blog or pod somewhere just today - here or on another website, or newsletter I get (I'm more chemically imbalanced at the moment than usual), about the ice in the Arctic.  Every week or so there seems to be yet another article about the ice in the Arctic.  This last article says because of whichever bit of ice they mention in the article (sorry, I just don't remember), that this is happening much quicker than they think (they do keep saying that, maybe we just don't listen). 

In fact, this leads to the probability that there will be no ice in the summertime in the Arctic by 2030.  The article also mentioned that as early as (next summer?) the Arctic passage would be clear for ship traffic and that sometime after that the northern Arctic passage would also be open for ship traffic. (As a Canadian I pay attention to that, because there have already been other mumblings from other countries saying they don't recognize Canadian sovereignty over the north.

Now if the scientists are giving us time frames which are getting so much closer to the present - you may think 2030 is a lot of time, but earlier reports the skeptics have scoffed at were mentioning the end of the century or into the first part of the next century.

I can't say I have always thought climate change the biggest priority. In fact, I always had human rights at the top because of letter writing I do for Amnesty International and later I added child poverty (when I started to sponsor four boys 8, 9, 10, 11, in Armenia, through World Vision) and lastly I joined Greenpeace.  However, though I think Greenpeace does important things, the histrionic methods they use are just not my cup of tea.  I now have as well a membership with the David Suzuki Foundation, which has many more suggestions about what I can do to help with climate change.

However, it was only a co-worker who gave me An Inconvenient Truth to read and who started a Green Committee at work, that I started to read books and visit websites and start learning about climate change and related topics. It didn't take long before I viscerally felt the possibly catastrophic consequences for my children and any children or grandchildren they may have.


“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

–John Donne, 1623, from “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions”

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

Here is a visionary poem from the American poet, Richard Wilburn, born in 1921. Since he mentions weapons in the poem, I imagine he meant to talk about some apocalyptic future after nuclear bombs were used in a war. I suppose it would be a good peace poem.

However, if you think of it as a general warning about what will happen to humankind and the natural world, particularly when people have been warning us for years of the consequences, and we have done too little about it, then perhaps you will find, as I do, several parts of the poem truly gripping.

ADVICE TO A PROPHET

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?–
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return.

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

1959, 1961

These two lines from the poem remind me both of the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and, particularly the first line, of what the skeptics are always saying, although in much less eloquent language:

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?–

And why the environmentalists who have been warning us for so many years to little avail, have not gone “mad-eyed from stating the obvious, not proclaiming our fall but begging us in God's name to have self-pity” is a credit to their decades of commitment and resilience.

Philosophers and scientists have been thinking about climate change and global warming for many years, even before the phenomenon had a name and many years before there was sufficient scientific evidence to back up their ideas. Google (or otherwise look into) the names: Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, Arbid Hogbom, T.C. Chamberlin, Knut Angstrom, E.O. Hulburt, Guy Stewart Callendar, Lewis D. Caplan, Gilbert N. Plass, Hans Seuss, Roger Revelle, Bert Bolin, Erik Eriksson, Mikhail Budyko, Charles David Keeling, Helmut Landsburg….  Or to save time, just Google Arrhenius - which takes you back to 1896.

Just because most people have not known about climate change until relatively recently doesn't mean some visionary thinkers haven't been thinking about the issue for a very long time. We have had warnings many decades ago.

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

The future does not exist.We can think about it,we can dream but it is not here.

The present,that's what's count.In the present moment we can have projects,we can prepare

all kinds of maps,we can think about realisation of things we like so much.

But the future? it's too difficult.We know we can't predict it.

The climate would not be my priority.Things might or might not  happen.

It's just maybe or maybe not.

In my humble opinion we must  enrich our minds, give a hand where the suffering

is today and hope……and dare.,

Namaste,
Madeleine
t

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

Madeleine:

People buy car, life, house insurance, as protection for events that cannot be foretold. It would be irresponsible and imprudent if they did not.

Similarly, the scientific consensus is that the impacts of climate change are already being felt and will only get worse, unless substantive changes are made to the way we are living our lives.  But even if sufficient changes are made now, it will take many years before it positively impacts and reduces the threat of climate change. 

This year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a body of scientists and researchers, under the sponsorship of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Association, are putting out Climate Change 2007, a report in four parts which can be read on their website (although I believe the fourth section will not go up until after it is approved and adopted in November in Spain). Type IPCC into Google and you can have a look at the massiveness of the report yourself. The first of the four parts is nearly 1000 pages long and I lost count (or patience) tallying up the number of scientists, researchers and peer-reviewers of that section of the report because there were so many.  The Climate Change 2007 report represents a consensus in thinking among hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of scientists worldwide.

Climate change has been in the minds of scientists and other thinkers off and on since the early 1800s.

The only proviso I hear about the report is that, as governments were involved in pressuring the panel to remove certain words or phrases that would have made the report even stronger than it already is.  Some people believe the report is somewhat too conservative about the risks involved in climate change.

I think it has been conservatively stated that Arctic ice would possibly not be melting until the end of this century or into the next century.  I have certainly noticed the increased frequency in which reports on the ice melting much faster than scientists have thought possible. And when that happens there is less white snow or ice to reflect the heat of the sun, and the dark oceans absorb more of the heat of the sun.  This is called a “positive feedback”, which unfortunately is a very, very bad thing.

It will not take much in the way of temperatures rising for ice to continue melting at an unimagined pace.

I have seen An Inconvenient Truth and I have read stacks of books and have stacks more I want to read on climate change and related issues.

Anyone who does not yet viscerally feel the threat of climate change on the future of life on earth, has not come to the stage where they know enough about it.

We would be fools not to take this threat extremely seriously. There will be serious flooding when the Arctic ice melts and that will result in millions of climate change refugee to join the many refugees that already exist because of war and conflict.

ICE-FREE ARCTIC ON THE HORIZON?

According to a www.stopglobalwarming.org%2Fsgw_read.asp%3Fid%3D745049102007">recent Guardian story, the Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and sea ice levels are now at record lows.

As the article explains, ”Experts said they were “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as Britain disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the north-west passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the north-east passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.”

The loss of sea ice will not only threaten polar bears, other mammals and sea life, but could also accelerate global warming, since white ice deflects heat, and darker-colored waters absorb more heat.

(P.S. The above article came to me in a newsletter via email from Stop Global Warming.org )

As a Canadian, because a number of countries, who know realize the importance of an ice free north-west shipping passage, are questioning Canada's soveriegnty there, this is something of concern.  In addition, climate change is not a future event.  It is already happening.  The Inuit in northern Canada have roads and villages built on permafrost which remains frozen.  However, the permafrost is thawing, which means a shorter season for the roads to the north, and that villages built on permafrost are under threat by climate change.  In fact, I have seen pictures of one village which was abandoned because it was starting to fall into the ocean because of the permafrost thawing.

Inuit people are traditional hunters, and the animals they depend on are losing their habitat, as ice is an important part of it.

The Inuit warn us that they are the canaries in the mines. What is happening to their lives and the habitat of animals in the north will happen to us if we don't get a move on it. 2030 is not that far away, and at the rate the ice is melting and the rate at which industrialized countries are moving (like snails), I would not be at all surprised to see the ice melt even faster than that.

I have posts on many sites and have joined many climate change related pods because I am committed to doing as much as I can, as the mother of two boys, to see that there is still a habitable earth for them and their families to live on in the future.

Businesses, organizations, schools, individuals are not doing enough yet to save the earth and its inhabitants. Outside of the time I spend at work, my present includes hours and hours of time trying to talk with people - live or through discussions in sites such as this one - to share what I have learned to get people to understand what is at stake is not some vague future prospect. It is already here and more damage is yet to be done.

Here are the first four lines of a poem by Richard Wilbur, an American poet, called Advice to a Poet. (I quote it in full in an earlier post in this thread - a beautiful, visionary and gripping poem.)

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self pity….

The reason it is not hard to see the future of climate change is because it is already here now.

I think Hurricane Katrina was an example of the kind of unequal impact climate change will have on the poor.

If you have not seen An Inconvenient Truth, I would strongly urge you to see it with family and friends.

Dryad
Forest Guardian

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

Dryad,

Yes,I understand.Life Insurance,house insurance are bought because
of the unknown future.
As for the car,it's really practical for now.
Again the future is unknown.
The climate,climate change,the ice meltingtsunami,earthquake,etc,
is not that a repeat of the past ?
The future is a mystery.

Namaste,
Madeleine

Re: The Future Simply Can't Be Known

The great eco-prophets of our time, Al Gore in the U.S. and Dr. David Suzuki in Canada have spent their entire adult lives trying to get people to understand the science behind and the catastrophic dangers of climate change. 

In spite of what must at times be wearying work, decade after decade, and “mad-eyed from stating the obvious”, these ethical, dedicated, and hard working men, continue year after year to wander North America and sometimes elsewhere in the world to get their point across.

I came to the Zaadz website specifically to avoid the sheer numbers on some sites of unthinking climate change skeptics, as they were sucking away my energy and time.  I was drawn to the site for the positive energy and goodwill and desire of most Zaadists to change the world for the better. Most recently, I simply do not have the kind of mental wellness I need to deal with unthinking skeptics.  

You do not need to wait for some great teacher to tell you what this is about.  The tools are all readily available for you to learn about this on your own if you are open to do so. The person who started this site and this particular discussion site has evolved and moved further forward to other types of questions.  I hope you will, too, as this is not a place I can stay.