Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Well, scientists continue to study the global warming phenomenon and its effects on climate change, and the bad news mounts, along with the evidence that we humans are the drivers behind many of these changes.   It’s not as if one day the news will get better and then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our lives.  We can’t escape the choices, folks.  We cannot escape the choices.

Anyway, a couple of things.  First, the National Academy of Sciences is releasing a new report that shows that the earth is approaching a temperature that has not been seen in a million years.  We are within 1 degree Celsius, which is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of that record.

The study was conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Dr. James Hansen of GISS, one of our leading climatologists, is one of its authors. 

Now keep in mind that we have put enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that, should we stop emitting them today, the earth would continue to warm over the next century (previous post, remember?  Carbon dioxide  lingers in the atmosphere for that long before dissipating).

So this from the study’s opening summary paragraph, the abstract of which you can get here:

“Global surface temperature has increased 0.2°C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes. ..  Comparison of measured sea surface temperatures in the Western Pacific with paleoclimate data suggests that this critical ocean region, and probably the planet as a whole, is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene maximum and within 1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years. We conclude that global warming of more than 1°C, relative to 2000, will constitute ‘dangerous’ climate change as judged from likely effects on sea level and extermination of species.”

We are dealing with a nightmare scenario here, and this country hasn’t even decided to anything serious about it yet.  The subject doesn’t even come up much.  Even the stir caused by Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth, seems to have died down a lot.  We seem to absorb the bad news — and then move on.  And, just to accentuate the reality of denial, I found reference to this study in a tiny section in the Washington Post called ‘Findings’, five paragraphs on page A10.  I can’t find it at all on their web site. 

I found this Reuters article regarding the study on the NY Times web site, a good summary of its findings in terms of the impact of rising sea surface temperatures on the El Nino effect.  The study indicates that global warming will increase the severity of the El Nino cycles (’super El Ninos’) resulting in more killer heat as we saw in 2005.

Meanwhile, because of people like Gore and many other ecologists and concerned citizens, there is information getting around, talks being given, etc.  So what happens is that the level of fear rises, along with despair — because it seems as if there is nothing we can do.  That is why leadership is so important, why Al Gore is so important, why we need a little courage, a little truth-telling, from leaders of our ‘culture shaping’ institutions — teachers, religious leaders, politicians, the media, writers and artists, and on and on.

If we sink into helpless despair, we will, as a species, really sink — into extinction.

Meanwhile, as I went on line to find this study, I also came across another report from the Academy that links more definitively the rise in greenhouse gases with the warming ocean temperatures leading to more destructive weather patterns.  The study shows that human behavior is a leading driver in rising sea surface temperatures of the tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which means more tropical storms, hurricanes and cyclones.

Sometimes I get really scared.  And I think it is good to feel fear.  It is most appropriate.  But to keep the fear from turning into paralysis, we have to get busy changing our lives.  And I don’t mean busy like using up more fossil fuels, I mean getting busy about being less busy, about living more simply and locally, about giving up our misplaced ‘American Dream’ of riches and comfort and the illusion of an unending supply of resources, or technological innovations, that will allow this lifestyle to go on and on.

At some point, as we super-heated our planet and began to run into the real limits of the earth’s capacity to sustain life, some generation was going to have to face this – the end of these consumption patterns brought about by the industrial revolution.  And folks, we are that generation.

It’s like a diagnosis of cancer.  You can keep putting off the moment when you have to deal with it, along with all the changes that will mean in your life.   But if you do, at some point that cancer will become terminal.

Let’s hope we can stop ourselves before we reach that point.