Hell and High Water E-Book

Alastair McIntosh

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 512

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Climate change is the greatest challenge that the world has ever faced. In this groundbreaking new book, Alastair McIntosh summarises the science of what is happening to the planet - both globally and using Scotland as a local case study. He moves on, controversially, to suggest that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity. In a fascinating journey through early texts that speak to climate change - including the ancient Sumerian Epic of "Gilgamesh", Plato's myth of "Atlantis", and Shakespeare's "Macbeth" - McIntosh reveals the psychohistory of modern consumerism.He shows how we have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and the motivational manipulation of marketing. To start to resolve what has become of the human condition we must get more real in facing up to despair and death. Only then will we discover the spiritual meaning of these our troubled times. Only then can magic, new meaning, and all that gives life, start to mend a broken world.

Leseprobe

Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish writer and campaigner for social justice and environmental sustainability. He holds fellowships at the Centre for Human Ecology, the E. F. Schumacher Society and the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster. In 2005 the University of Strathclyde gave him an honorary post as Scotland’s first professor of human ecology. He guest lectures around the world at institutions including the Russian Academy of Sciences, the World Council of Churches, WWF International in their ‘One Planet Leaders’ programme and, for the past decade, speaking about nonviolence on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at Britain’s foremost military staff college.

Praise for Hell and High Water

‘Provides a chilling clarity . . . McIntosh’s excellent exposé might just clear a path out of the darkness’ – Paperback of the Week, The Herald

‘A concise and concerning summary of the current thinking on the science of climate change . . . eloquent and bewitching’ – Institute of Environmental Management, The Environmentalist

‘Thoughtful, incisive and emotionally powerful’ – Duncan McLaren, Friends of the Earth

‘He is at the forefront of an increasingly important exploration of hope in an apparently hopeless ecological situation’ – Michael Fordham, Huck Magazine

‘A valuable insight . . . a fantastically unlikely combination of insights’ – John-Paul Flintoff, TimesOnline.com

‘What’s really significant about this book, politically, is that McIntosh has made green living sound attractive . . . He takes a step back from the problem and looks at the causes behind the causes . . . Of genuine international importance’ – Roger Cox, Scotsman

‘He explores the deep order conditions of hope for our planet in the midst of the crisis of global warming. There is no room for a shallow optimism in our present predicament. Hope is a virtue of a different order of magnitude . . . A deep cultural pathology demands a deep cultural psychotherapy’ – Professor Emeritus Edmund O’Sullivan, Resurgence

‘Among climate change books, Hell and High Water is in a class of its own. I know of no one else who has to date presented such a holistic perspective on our collective challenge’ – Peter Vido, www.ScytheConnection.com

‘It’s odd that a book of such bright hope should be based on such practical despondency. But then, this lies at the core of his message. He is saying that only when you have stared into that dark place can you find a hope that is real . . . McIntosh offers a soul-based solution’ – Vikky Allan, Sunday Herald

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alastair McIntosh 2008www.AlastairMcIntosh.com

The moral right of Alastair McIntosh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84158-622-9 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-489-8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

IntroductionThe challenge of climate change is a challenge to ourselves

Part 1 – Climate Change

1 Nullius in VerbaPublic debate and scientific consensus

2 Beyond Tipping PointScenarios of what climate change means

3 Devil’s DilemmasTechnical options to mitigate climate change

4 Spirit of the BlitzIs radical change possible within democracy?

Part 2 – The Human Condition

5 Pride and EcocideHubris, violence and the destruction of nature

6 Dissociation of SensibilityEmptiness and the loss of inner life

7 Colonised by DeathThe consumer psychology of climate change

8 Journey into the SoulDrawing hope from the jaws of despair

9 Towards Cultural PsychotherapyReclaiming that which gives life

Afterword

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have contributed to the thinking in this book. In particular, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Human Ecology with whom I have worked for nearly two decades and who valiantly held together an organisational structure where we could mutually explore the science, psychology and spirituality of global problems. I would like particularly to thank my old boss, Ulrich Loening, who taught me so much about the state of the world, and Osbert Lancaster, who has directed the CHE through stormy times. Thanks also to Professor David Miller and his colleagues at the Department of Geography and Sociology, University of Strathclyde, who have provided the study of human ecology with an anchor point amidst their considerable expertise on the politics of globalisation.

For commenting on portions of the manuscript and general brainstorming, I am thankful to my long-standing ecological mentor, Tess Darwin; Michael Northcott of Edinburgh University’s New College; Tom Crompton of WWF UK; Henning Drager of Friends of the Earth UK; Zoë Palmer of the CHE; Mike Price of the Doghouse Duo; and both my mother-in-law, Joëlle Nicolas, who pressed me on the importance of hope, and my mother, Jean McIntosh, for several of her stories that I have woven in. Detailed technical attention to aspects of the text was most generously given by Myshele Goldberg of the Department of Geography and Sociology at Strathclyde University, Stephan Harding of Schumacher College and author of Animate Earth, Iain MacKinnon of the Isle of Skye and the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster, David Cromwell of the Laboratory for Satellite Oceanography at the University of Southampton, Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud of WWF International in Geneva, and Duncan McLaren, Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland. All remaining errors, and especially all issues of judgement, are entirely my own responsibility.

Throughout the writing of this book I have been kept variously supported, informed and challenged by old friends and acquaintances including George Marshall of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, John Seed of Australia’s Rainforest Information Centre, Gehan, Issy and all at the GalGael Trust, James Jones the Bishop of Liverpool, Tom Forsyth of Scoraig, Luke Concannon of the chart-topping duo Nizlopi and George Monbiot of The Guardian.

This book would never have come into being without the inspiration of Hugh Andrew of Birlinn Ltd, and my literary agent, James Wills. Hugh was able to see a book in me that I didn’t know was there, and his commission and flexibility allowed the blossom to find its own shape. I have particularly appreciated the professionalism of his staff, including my editor, Andrew Simmons, and my patient copy editor, Nancy E.M. Bailey.

Finally, it is my wife, Vérène Nicolas, who has called me constantly back to the mantra of spirituality, and who has nurtured some of the most inspirational ideas that are shared here. Yet again, thank you for being you, dear love.

For Ossian Nicolas McIntosh

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

Robert Burns, 1794

INTRODUCTION

Several years ago my widowed and slightly disabled mother moved from the retirement croft house on the Isle of Lewis to the nearby town of Stornoway. Now well into her seventies, she had acquired a cottage by the harbour thinking that ‘city life’ would make it easier to cope with the wild winter weather.

Tuesday, 11 January 2005 was a tempestuous day even in Govan – the shipbuilding area of Glasgow where I presently live with Vérène my wife. But further out west on the Outer Hebrides, a storm of unprecedented proportions had come in from the Atlantic. Late that evening my mother telephoned. She was coping, but her voice sounded wraith-like and terrified.

Wind speeds are measured on the Beaufort Scale. Francis Beaufort was an Irish admiral who had first gone to sea in 1787. His original scale went up to Hurricane Force 12. Each gradation related to sailing conditions, thus a Force 12, with sustained wind velocities of between 73 and 83 miles per hour, were those ‘to which she could show no canvas’, and which, over dry land, might cause ‘considerable and widespread damage to structures’. On that January night in 2005, winds of 120 mph (200 kph) were recorded near Stornoway. There was also a very high tide and so, combined with the storm surge of water piled up by the tempest, Stornoway’s lower-lying streets became inundated by the sea.

As I metaphorically held my mother’s hand over the phone, she described how waves were bursting over the defensive wall across the road. Shovel-loads of stones hailed against her bulging windows. She feared what might happen if the glass gave way. Salty rivulets percolated in around the windowsills and trickled down through the carpets. The whole street was impassably awash. Anybody venturing out would be at peril not just from the deluge, but also from roofing slates flying around like guillotine-edged banshees.

‘I’m exhausted,’ she told me. ‘My strength is almost gone. I’ve been up and down the stairs for the past two hours, mopping up as fast as it comes in. The emergency services sandbagged my front door, but they can hardly cope and say there’s nothing else they can do.’

The crisis subsided as the tide receded, but that night’s storm cost the islands millions of pounds in damage. I visited straight afterwards, and three boats were wrecked outside my mother’s house, cast up on the rocks almost to the road. In our village of Leurbost, close friends from school days were dealing with roofs ripped from off their weaving and blacksmithing sheds. On a causeway joining South Uist to Benbecula, a family of five in two cars – thought to have been escaping from rising floodwaters inside their low-lying home – were swept away to death. It was the worst natural disaster and the most terrible storm within the islands’ living memory.

Scotland’s top politicians of the time immediately promised to repair not just ‘the infrastructure damage, but also to repair the confidence and the morale of the local community.’1 Three years later little has been done. The causeways remain dangerous, and the community feels passed by. I couldn’t help thinking that if this was the response to a small place at a time of high national prosperity, what would it be like if ‘extreme weather events’, as they’re called by the meteorologists, get much more common? The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans during August 2005 hardly inspires confidence. George Bush had recognised that full recovery may take 25 years and a $6 billion programme was set in place to patch up the flood defences.2 According to National Geographic News, this was completed to pre-Katrina standards within two years, ‘but the system is actually riddled with flaws, and a storm even weaker than Katrina could breach the levees.’3 One wonders what the chances are of Bush’s 25 years ever being reached without a repeat debacle. Already there is anecdotal evidence that the rich are thinking twice about rebuilding in such threatened areas. New Orleans was poor to start with, but as awareness of global warming spreads one can envision the emergence of neighbourhoods both there and elsewhere socially stratified by climate apartheid. The poor will only be able to afford property that is at risk. For the well-to-do, a house on the hill is coming to mean more than just status with a view.

Events like the Hebridean storm and Hurricane Katrina have forced billions of people around the world to start asking questions about climate change. The idea that the Earth is kept warm by a ‘greenhouse effect’ is nothing new. It was first put forward in 1824 by the French physicist, Joseph Fourier. The possibility that burning carbon-based fuels like coal and oil could ramp this up into global warming was first advanced by the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. He made some surprisingly accurate calculations as far back as 1896.4 Throughout the twentieth century the volume of both carbon emissions to the atmosphere and scientific data about them grew exponentially, but it has only been over the past couple of decades that concern harboured by specialists has broken through into public consciousness. Few things shift consciousness like the fear of death or material loss. And when disasters start to hit home, even those whose lives were previously cocooned from the natural world begin to ask questions; questions like:

1. Is the climate undergoing dangerous change?

2. If so, is that change caused by human impact?

3. And if so, can we mitigate the causes and, where necessary, adapt to consequences?

The problem with reactions to specific events like both of the 2005 storms we have been discussing is that there can be no direct proof that they were ‘caused’ by global warming. The world’s weather systems and the variables that make it up are immensely complex. There can only be greater or lesser degrees of probability that any given extreme event is driven by climatic change. After all, every generation will, by definition, suffer its ‘worst storm ever’ at some point in people’s lives. One or two bizarre anecdotes possibly puffed up by the world’s mass media don’t make for a scientific case that the foundations of the known world have come unstuck. To build a robust body of evidence requires many such anecdotes, accurately measured so as to start comprising a body of data that can distinguish long-term climate change from short-term climate variability and, especially in Britain, from mere weather! As it happens, recent data does suggest that the incidence and severity of Atlantic storms is on the rise. In a paper, ‘Heightened Tropical Cyclone Activity in the North Atlantic: Natural Variability or Climate Trend?’, a team of American scientists found that ‘about twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago’. They conclude that this is consistent with the theory that warmer sea surface temperatures associated with global climate change is pumping extra energy into weather systems and thereby upping the ante.5

Other data also supports the ‘folk memory’ of many old people that I grew up amongst on the Isle of Lewis. I must ask my reader to excuse me if I often draw on Scottish examples in this book. It’s a question of needing to dig from where I stand, but I hope that the examples I choose will be seen to have far wider relevance in principle. The old Hebridean folks often said that the balance of nature was being upset. They maintained that winters were warmer than they had been early in the twentieth century, and the summers wetter. You can no longer take short cuts safely across frozen lochs in today’s winters, and oats will rarely ripen properly. Sure enough, weather station records for the west of Scotland confirm this folk perception. The figures show that between 1914 and 2004, average temperatures did indeed rise by half a degree. Rain, snow, mist and whatever else counts as ‘precipitation’ rose over the same period by 9.5%. The statistics can be presented with even greater drama if one looks at the data set for 1961–2004. Here the west Scottish temperature increased by fully one degree, and precipitation by a whopping 23.3% – a disproportionately high share of which falls in winter.6

There is now a very wide scientific consensus that data like this, drawn from many parts of the world and reflecting a broad range of climate variables, suggests that significant change really is happening to the planet. As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) uncompromisingly put it in their November 2007 report: ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.’7

We will see later that the vast majority of experts not in the pay of oil companies believe that the primary cause of this warming is carbon emission caused by the burning of fossil fuels. But the implications for our Western way of life – for what it would take to reduce and stop it – are, shall we say, thought provoking. George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning is an analysis described by Sir John Houghton, former head of the Met Office, the British weather forecasting service, as ‘the best book I know . . . broad, balanced and practical’. I have known George for many years and have every confidence in the accuracy of his appraisal. He sums it up in these words:

By 2030, according to a paper published by scientists at the Met Office, the total capacity of the biosphere to absorb carbon will have reduced from the current 4 billion tonnes a year to 2.7 billion. To maintain equilibrium at that point, in other words, the world’s population can emit no more than 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon a year in 2030. As we currently produce around 7 billion, this implies a global reduction of 60%. In 2030, the world’s people are likely to number around 8.2 billion. By dividing the total carbon sink (2.7 billion tonnes) by the number of people, we find that to achieve stabilization the weight of carbon emissions per person should be no greater than 0.33 tonnes per year.

In the rich countries, this means an average cut by 2030 of around 90%. The United Kingdom, for example, currently releases 2.6 tonnes per capita, so would need to reduce its emissions by 87%. Germany requires a cut of 88%, France of 83%, the United States, Canada and Australia 94%. By contrast, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the only international agreement that has been struck so far – commits its signatories to cut their carbon emissions by a total of 5.3% by 2012.8

Other assessments fall into a similar ballpark. For example, Al Gore, whose documentary An Inconvenient Truth became an unexpected box office hit, considers that the rich world must cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050. In a detailed study for Friends of the Earth and the Cooperative Bank, Manchester University’s Tyndall Centre prescribes a 90% reduction by 2050, but with the majority of this, 70%, needing to be achieved by 2030.9 To stabilise carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere close to current levels the IPCC’s 2007 report states that global emissions would need to fall almost immediately by 50–85%, but this would still result in a temperature rise above pre-industrial levels of 2.0–2.4ºC and a 0.4–1.4-metre sea-level rise.10 But the IPCC’s small print contains a worrying qualification. Their forecasts are based on older models that incorporated ‘the sea-level rise component from thermal expansion only’. In other words, the melting of glaciers is not included. As we will see, data has only recently become available suggesting that the icecaps are melting at rates not previously anticipated. There is always an ‘inevitable outdatedness’ with scientific reports that synthesise vast amounts of published data. We will therefore need to wait until the IPCC’s next report in several years’ time for a more comprehensive prognosis.

To cut carbon emissions and thereby mitigate the lead cause of global warming means changing our lifestyles, increasing the efficiency of existing fossil fuel uses, or moving to non-carbon energy sources such as nuclear or renewables. In Heat, George Monbiot examines British energy use sector by sector. He shows that the necessary changes could be made to stack up, but his findings would have radical implications for how our society is structured. For example, with transportation there would need to be a virtual end to air travel and a heavy curtailment of car use. Even high-speed trains are not efficient enough. George considers that only a massive expansion of bus routes could deliver what is needed. I can almost feel my readers groan! But this is precisely what makes some of George’s words so deeply important. It begs the question as to whether the way we look at this whole issue needs to shift ground. He writes:

Most environmentalists – and I include myself in this – are hypocrites . . . I would like to believe that the changes I suggest could be achieved by appealing to people to restrain themselves. But though some environmentalists, undismayed by the failure of the past forty years of campaigning, refuse to see it, self-enforced abstinence alone is a waste of time . . .

I have sought to demonstrate that the necessary reduction in carbon emissions is – if difficult – technically and economically possible. I have not demonstrated that it is politically possible. There is a reason for this. It is not up to me to do so. It is up to you . . . The campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.11

So here is the real challenge of climate change. It whisks us up in a whirlwind and throws us down against . . . ourselves. That is why the central thesis of this book is that climate change cannot be tackled by technical, economic and political measures alone. Those things are all important, but in addition and perhaps most important of all, we have to look at ourselves. We have to address not only the outer world of atmospheric science, economic imperatives, and realms of political possibility, but also the inner world of psychology and, I will suggest, spirituality. The bottom line and top priority is that we must get to grips with the roots of life and what gives it meaning.

In attempting so to do I want to stand, if I may, on the shoulders of people like George Monbiot. I will largely take the findings of Heat and similarly carefully researched texts as a given. There is no point in writing yet another book about climate change when I am not a climate scientist. As such, the shorter part of this book, Part 1, will merely give a summary of the science and the politics. In Chapter 1, I explore the difficulty of knowing what to think about a complex scientific debate with conflicting media voices. Chapter 2 looks at global climate change scenarios and includes a short case study of Scotland. Chapter 3 summarises the technical options to mitigate climate change. And most dismally of all, Chapter 4 looks at why our hedonistic democracy is so impotent in making changes that, actually, need to start within each one of us.

Thus far my material is not distinctive and readers who are already well-versed in climate change debates may wish to skip or just skim over Part 1. In Part 2, my contribution attempts something different from the usual take on global warming. My thesis is that the most galling aspect of the problem is driven not by fundamental human needs, but by manipulated wants that find expression in consumerism. To mitigate climate change and even to adapt to its consequences without losing our humanity, there needs to be a radical reactivation of our inner lives. That is not something that we can achieve entirely on our own. It also requires change across society – perhaps even what I describe as ‘cultural psychotherapy’.

Part 2 of the book therefore explores the history of and the prognosis for the human condition as it relates to environmental impact. In Chapter 5, I show that the ancient world of the Sumerians, Hebrews, Greeks and Romans displays an astonishing perspective on how the human condition reflects itself in the condition of the Earth. The ancients equated hubris or excessive pride with violence and so, with the destruction of nature. Their moral analysis fits even better to our present day condition than it did to their own.

Chapter 6 suggests that as modernity took root in the West, culturally embedded violence damaged our capacity to develop and sustain a rich inner life. Rather than evolving a healthy balance between our inner and outer lives, Western societies have been turned inside out. It shows especially in the faces of some politicians and celebrities. Our outer lives are hyperactive and there’s a corresponding emptiness, even a deathly nihilism, at the core.

Chapter 7 argues that this deficiency of inner anchoring has rendered us vulnerable to colonisation by marketing that has pushed consumerism by generating wants. As we lost touch with inner sensibility our psyches – our totality in body, mind and spirit – became open to hijacking by carefully honed tools of motivational manipulation. Inner climate affects outer climate because inner hubris drives outer hubris in a spiral of mindless economic frenzy. As Leonard Cohen puts it:

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing

Nothing you can measure anymore

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world

has crossed the threshold

and it has overturned

the order of the soul12

Chapter 8 suggests that if we want to tackle the deep drivers of consumerism and so tackle the roots of climate change, we need to call back the soul. This means setting aside delusions of mere optimism about the future and blind faith in technical fixes, yet paradoxically, deepening our capacity for hope. It means finding the courage to face death and open the heart to love. It means being prepared to be surprised by potential depths of being of which we might previously have been unaware.

Lastly, in Chapter 9 I tentatively suggest twelve steps by which we might work to re-ground the human condition in what it can mean to be most deeply, and beautifully, human. This means working towards a psychotherapy of the soul – a deep healing of what has gone wrong or never properly developed – that is not just individual, but cultural.

My readers should know that I am painfully aware, as will be explored further in the Afterword, that this is an uncomfortable and also an unfinishable book. It may disappoint, for I have no easy or adequate remedies for global warming. While I try to be careful not to play up people’s fears (and some would say I play them down too much), I cannot say that I am optimistic about saving some of the things that are most familiar and loveable in this world. And yet, my position borders on the perverse. I perversely hold out hope for humanity, not in spite of global warming, but precisely because it confronts us with a wake-up call to consciousness. Answering that call of the wild to the wild within us all invites outer action matched by inner transformation. This book takes an exploratory walk on that wild side.

Credit Crunch Postscript to the Second Edition

As this book goes to reprint within its first year, the science requires no significant revision. Suffice to cite the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress of March 2009. Here 2,500 scientists concluded: ‘Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised.’

Meanwhile, in London in April 2009, the G20 sought to re-inflate the same old economy with ‘sustainable global growth’. But as the UK Government’s Sustainable Development Commission said the same week, ‘The myth of growth has failed us.’ To raise 9 billion people up to OECD levels by 2050, according to its Prosperity Without Growth? report, would require a 15-fold economic expansion. While economists dream on, the ecology unravels.

Everything said about ancient hubris here in Part 2 applies directly to the economic crisis. Both the credit crunch and the climate crunch have the same origin. Our resultant predicament is like a tangled ball of string. Pull on any end, and all connects – far and wide, outer and inner, ever tighter. It’s grim, but it’s exciting: for what it demands of us collectively today is nothing less than visionary depth – the courage of getting more real.

Part 1 – Climate Change

Chapter One

NULLIUS IN VERBA

Wishing to dig from where I stood when I started the research for this book in the autumn of 2006, I ran an internet search on the keywords ‘climate change Scotland’. The first link that jumped out was a sponsored one – in effect, a paid advertisement. Bold lettering shouted: ‘Climate Change is serious.’

What was this? An environmental NGO with an over-resourced capacity for spitting out headlines? Not so. Here was the Scottish website of The Royal Society.1

Which royal society? Like the letterhead of a stately mansion house that omits anything so common as the street name and number, here was an institution with such a sense of its own prestige that it feels able to dispense with the full title: The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.

Created by Royal Charter in 1660 and with offices in both London and Edinburgh, the Royal Society has a Latin motto: Nullius in Verba. It means, ‘On the words of no one’. In the vernacular: ‘No bullshit.’ Ideas must stand on their own feet or else fall down. Luminaries like Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Christopher Wren and The Lord Kelvin were foundation stones of this august body, but their recognition lay in the strength of their contributions and not because they were timeservers or the son of so-and-so. ‘On the words of no one’ . . . And so going, or gone, were the days when an argument about the nature of reality could be clinched merely from personal authority or, for that matter, from religious dogma. In was to become experimental method as the measure of all things.

The way for this had been paved by early modern scientific philosophers and especially by Sir Francis Bacon, England’s Lord Chancellor under King James VI and I. In 1626 Bacon had published a utopian science fiction, New Atlantis. It picked up from where Plato had laid his pen down after describing the technically advanced mythical continent of Atlantis. Plato’s Atlantis, as we will later see, succumbed to hubris and so to environmental catastrophe under the wrath of the gods. Bacon, copying the technique used by Plato in The Critias leaves his account of Atlantis unfinished. It ends abruptly with the sentence: ‘The rest was not perfected.’ But this was not before Bacon had set out a scientific new world order complete with flying machines, submarines, animal experimentation for medical research and what we might today call genetic engineering for agricultural improvement. At the end of the day Bacon himself became the victim of one of his own experiments. He caught a chill while outside stuffing a chicken with snow in order to study the effects of refrigeration! That was the end of Sir Francis. But in championing the idea of experimental method he had greatly advanced empiricism – the idea that, to be valid, knowledge must proceed by observation, experiment, and building up a body of tried and tested evidence.

Through such science, modernity as we know it emerged. Historians vary on the timing, but for our purposes we can say from about the early seventeenth century onwards. Reason was its guiding light, and so the seventeenth century became known as the ‘Age of Reason’, melding into ‘The Enlightenment’ of the century that followed. What took place over this time was a gradual cultural shift from values to facts. Facts alone were to be sacred. All else was subjective opinion. The emerging paradigm could be summed up in the expression: ‘If you can’t count it, it don’t count!’ Previous schools of philosophy had built up elaborate structures of belief from first principles.2 They drew on notions considered ‘metaphysical’ – beyond the physical realm. These were ideas about underlying ‘essence’ and ‘being’. They were articulated in assertions about ‘God’, ‘the Prime Mover’, ‘natural law’, ‘soul’ and the entire ‘superstitious’ – as it was coming to be seen – superstructure that encrusted them. Scotland was particularly noted for such arcane speculation, earning it the sometime designation ‘metaphysical Scotland’. But now, all over Europe, the Enlightenment was bringing in a new broom to the musty metaphysical cupboard. So far so good. And the science that came out of it created the affluence without which many of us would not be here and living in such comfort today. What’s more, there’d been a bad smell in that old cupboard for a long time. It needed a cleaning out.

But a broom readily becomes a thrashing stick. By the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the white light of reason had blinded our eyes to the baby that, arguably, had always been in the metaphysical bathwater. The cutting edge of empiricism had sharpened into a particularly deadening expression of materialism, known as ‘logical positivism’. Positivism is another word for empiricism – it is the notion that only ‘positive’, or evidence-based conclusions about reality are valid. Logical positivism was to become the conventional wisdom of the dominant group in British and American universities during the twentieth century. It could be colloquially summed up in the words: ‘If you can’t count it, it don’t count; and if you can’t kick it, you can’t count it.’ Today we might consider it to have been a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The very means chosen to appraise validity renders invisible key parts of what we might want to look at. Subtlety gets kicked to death. Logical positivism thereby collapses the world and the human being into a shrivelled and shrunken parody of its own stifling worldview. Meanwhile the French postmodernists went to the other extreme, deconstructing the presumed validity of all things positive. But that need not concern us at this point.

The most uncompromising voice of the empirical movement was A.J. Ayer, author of Language, Truth and Logic (1936) – probably the single most influential work of philosophy to emerge from England in the twentieth century. Ayer defined positivism as being that which makes sense of the world because it is of the senses. It thereby invalidates metaphysics because ‘the utterances of the metaphysician who is attempting to expound a vision are literally senseless’.3 In saying this he constructed the perfect Catch-22 argument; one that completely denies the worth of anything coming from the inner life. Remember Catch-22 from Vietnam days? To be in the army you had to be insane; but the only way out was to plead insanity. Logical positivism said that in order to be known and accepted as valid, things had to make ‘sense’; but anything intangible like vision, dreams, poetry, story or myth couldn’t possibly make sense because they failed what I will call the kickability test.

Science here was moving a long way from the intentions of the original founders of the Royal Society. Science, or at least some of its prominent proponents, was out not just to bring a clean sweep to the metaphysical cupboard, but to knock it 6 feet under. For metaphysics read ‘God’ in shorthand – the ultimate ground of being – and the trouble with burying God is that the Holy Ghost, so to speak, has a haunting tendency to keep on coming back! Cue Professor Richard Dawkins, whose chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University is funded by the billionaire Microsoft whiz-kid Charles Simonyi – a man who, in 2007, became one of the world’s first space tourists.4 For Dawkins it’s not enough for science to be neutral about the possibility of transcendent metaphysical realities such as he incorporates into the catch-all expression ‘God’. Only the wooden stake through the heart treatment will lay the Ghost sufficiently to rest. As he surmises in his brilliant, witty, but ultimately empty book, The God Delusion: ‘I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.’5

That, then, is a highly potted and therefore somewhat cavalier history of modern scientific thought. There are plenty of scientists who would see things in other ways and would give metaphysics their place, but frankly, they’re not the ones that produced a book that cleared two-thirds of a million copies in its first year on the shelves. Whether we agree with Dawkins or not, he has touched a cultural nerve. Whether we like it or not, he surfs the leading edge of Ayer’s positivistic wake, giving a particular spin and thrust that arguably distorts the original rich diversity of Enlightenment ideas. Such is the present-day ‘where it’s at’ of a worldview that has emerged from the minds of some of the men who built The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. And that is what’s so fascinating when that self-same natural knowledge now points to the possibility of limitations or contradictions within its own worldview. As we will see later in this book, unpacking these will take us into territory that becomes, well, metaphysical. The Royal Society today almost hints at such an evolving direction itself! As I wrote these words, I was thrilled to see that the last of its five strategic priorities for its 350th anniversary in 2010 is to ‘Inspire an interest in the joy, wonder and fulfilment of scientific discovery’. A philosopher like Dawkins would not disagree with those words. He too borrows such language. But it is borrowed, albeit without the grace of acknowledgement, from the metaphysical realm. It implies human capacities that transcend mere logic. Indeed, it comes very close to religious language.

Many organisations have said that ‘Climate Change is serious’. In the context of the history of ideas just outlined, what causes me to sit up and take note is that none other than the Royal Society – the keynote of scientific caution – has now raised its voice in the same tone.

*  *  *

The webpage that opened in late 2006 from Google’s Royal Society link turned out to be timely and prophetic. It said: ‘It has become fashionable in some parts of the UK media to portray the scientific evidence that has been collected about climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities as an exaggeration.’ It then went on to lay out what it called ‘twelve misleading arguments . . . put forward by the opponents of urgent action on climate change . . . highlight[ing] the scientific evidence that exposes their flaws.6

I say that these words about media portrayals proved ‘prophetic’, because in March 2007, just a few months later, something happened in British society that placed the Society’s unease in sharp relief. Indeed, it prompted the Society further to sharpen up its web statement into a pithy six-point riposte that went live in April that year. The trigger was a TV programme broadcast by Channel 4 that got the whole country debating climate change. Most people, on both sides of the argument, felt suitably outraged. It became the main talking point of chat shows and newspaper columns for at least a fortnight.

What had happened was that in a TV programme called The Great Global Warming Swindle, producer Martin Durkin persuasively suggested that the public had been conned about climate change. The culprits, he said, were a curious combination of besandaled hippies, grant-grubbing scientists, and Margaret Thatcher!

Durkin’s documentary had what looked like an impressive cast of scientists. It opened to buccaneering music and headline captions saying:

THE ICE IS MELTING

THE SEA IS RISING

HURRICANES ARE BLOWING

AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT

SCARED?

DON’T BE

IT’S NOT TRUE

Channel 4’s official website heaped it on with corresponding vim and vigour. Here was a message that everyone yearned to hear. Amidst ads for Nintendo and the House of Fraser, potential viewers were asked:

Are you green? How many flights have you taken in the last year? Feeling guilty about all those unnecessary car journeys? Well, maybe there’s no need to feel bad.

According to a group of scientists brought together by documentary-maker Martin Durkin, if the planet is heating up, it isn’t your fault and there’s nothing you can do about it.

We’ve almost begun to take it for granted that climate change is a man-made phenomenon. But just as the environmental lobby think they’ve got our attention, a group of naysayers have emerged to slay the whole premise of global warming.7

The documentary itself presented an impressive array of interviews and graphs to suggest that the public have been fed a pack of lies. Global warming, it maintained, has nothing to do with anthropogenic causes – that is, with the notion that greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere by people are the problem. Rather, the cause is all down to solar activity. The sun does its stuff in mysterious ways that come and go according to natural cycles and these affect the Earth’s climate. There’s nothing we can or should do about it except lie back in the deckchair, luxuriate on the beach, and soak up the sunshine.

*  *  *

Before taking Durkin further, let’s look at what it is that makes it possible, in the first place, for human beings to lie back on this planet and enjoy the sunshine. What made it possible at all for advanced life to have evolved here?

The answer is green leaves – along with a few other organisms like algae and phytoplankton. These are the photosynthesisers that biochemically capture the sun’s energy, producing sugar. It led the pioneering Scots botanist and human ecologist, Professor Patrick Geddes, to coin the expression ‘By leaves we live’, because our entire food chain is so driven.

In photosynthesis sunlight converts six molecules of water and six of carbon dioxide into one molecule of sugar and six of oxygen. Peer into a pond on a sunny day and it can be watched happening. Tiny strings of bubbles will be seen rising from the leaves of water plants. It’s beautiful to observe. Here we see the very air that we breathe being replenished in its goodness.

Oxygen comprises about a fifth of the atmosphere’s composition. If photosynthesis stopped it would eventually be all breathed up, burnt up in fires, or consumed in natural chemical processes such as the rusting of metals and break-down of rocks. Without photosynthesis, animal life, including our own lives, would slowly suffocate. The sugar produced as photosynthetic product is the basic chemical building block by which all life is energised. The starch in the potato and the sugars in fruit are so made. The malt that distils into whisky is sunlight. The lion that mauled David Livingstone was, ultimately, solar powered: it got every ounce of its spring from the sun’s photons ‘captured’ by leaves of grass, and stored in the fat of the game it would have gorged on.

Our bodies, therefore, owe their entire energy and oxygen supply to photosynthesis. But even more than that, the very amenability of planet Earth is now believed to be a consequence of life creating the conditions for its own flourishing. Back in the 1960s, when the English scientist James Lovelock was asked by NASA how they might predict whether planets might have life on them, he suggested analysing whether their atmospheres were, in principle, capable of supporting life as we know it. Lovelock realised that our own planet can only support advanced life because more simple forms have created the preconditions. Marine life, for example, captures carbon dioxide (CO2) and ties it up in sea shells. This ‘pumps down’ the greenhouse gas and ‘fixes’ it, eventually forming rocks like limestone and oil shale. A certain amount of greenhouse effect is necessary to keep our planet sufficiently warm for life to flourish. As such, we need some CO2 to be in the atmospheric mix. But Lovelock saw that without life constantly pumping down excess carbon to become ocean sediments and eventually rocks, the Earth would have had far too much atmospheric carbon and would therefore be a hot and inhospitable place. Early life forms – mainly microscopic ones – thereby tamed the Earth for us. A wonderful self-regulating process is kept in place that maintains equitable temperatures.

During the late 1970s Lovelock named this process Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess, a divine personification of the Earth. At first many in the scientific mainstream marginalised his views, though the Royal Society had made him a Fellow in 1974. Eventually, in the Amsterdam Declaration of 2001, more than a thousand delegates (including the world’s four principal global change organisations) issued a statement that, in effect, endorsed him. It said: ‘The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.’8 This self-regulation – which takes place crucially within the narrow limits that the life forms undertaking it can tolerate – is the fulcrum of ‘the balance of nature’.

When we heat limestone to make cement, or burn carbon-based fuels, we pour back into the atmosphere CO2 that it took millions of years for ‘Gaia’ to lock up. Mostly we don’t realise that this is happening because CO2 is invisible. But imagine if every car driving down the street left a visible plume of smoke, and every plane left a vapour trail that took more than a decade to start fading noticeably. The Earth would be crisscrossed with the trails of our journeys, and that’s actually how it is with CO2 . . . except we can’t see it.

Why does this matter? After all, CO2 presently makes up less than one-twentieth of 1% of the composition of the atmosphere. It matters because the gas is a powerful modifier of the Earth’s climate even in small quantities. Along with other greenhouse gases including water vapour, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone, CO2 is molecularly ‘tuned’ to catch and re-emit the sun’s warmth at a wavelength that warms the atmosphere. This energy would otherwise have been re-radiated off the Earth’s surface and returned to outer space. But greenhouse gases keep it down to Earth. Increasing their proportion in the atmosphere is like wrapping a blanket round the Earth; it’s like enclosing it in a gaseous ‘greenhouse’. As the glass helps a greenhouse to warm up on a sunny day, so greenhouse gases have this effect on the whole Earth.

Human action is only one source of CO2 to the atmosphere. Natural processes like plant decomposition and volcanic eruptions also produce massive amounts, though human output per annum is on average a hundred times that of volcanoes. From a combination of computer models, laboratory experiments and observations of what actually happens on the planet, most scientists are now convinced that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are upsetting the atmosphere’s balance and, with it, upsetting the balance of nature. Both the observed and the computer-modelled evidence concur in ways that strongly support theories of how global temperatures fluctuate with levels of atmospheric CO2. Today these findings suggest that the stability of the Earth’s climate is in serious jeopardy.

It is easy to blame science, or more accurately, the application of technology, for these concerns. But we must never forget that without first-rate science most of us would never be able to move beyond anecdotal speculation to realising that a problem actually exists. Consider the ozone hole that was such a worry to sun lovers a couple of decades ago. Most people would never have known what was contributing to their skin cancers were it not that elaborate scientific instrumentation was able to detect that which was invisible to the naked eye. The ozone hole problem was relatively easy to address. The effective implementation of an international convention led to changes in the types of gas used in refrigeration and aerosol cans. But the CO2 problem is much more deeply structured into the economies and lifestyles of modern society than ozone gases ever were.

The evidence that CO2 really is a problem comes from a variety of scientific approaches. One examines isotope balances in marine sediments. Another looks at the growth characteristics of fossilised plants. But perhaps the most convincing data comes from measuring the composition of minute air bubbles trapped in ice cores. These provide a cross section of time that documents changes over several hundred thousand years – double the time that human beings in our present highly evolved form as Homo sapiens have been on the planet.

In June 1999 a team of nineteen scientists from France, Russia and America published their study of the Vostok ice core in Nature – the most prestigious scientific journal in the world. This provided detailed information on a 3.6-kilometre-long ice core extracted from Vostok in Antarctica. It tracked cycles of atmospheric change over the past 420,000 years by analysing dust content and the composition of its minute air bubbles. The results strongly support the theory that there is a positive feedback relationship – one that amplifies itself – between the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and the Earth’s temperature.

The Vostok scientists observed that concentrations of CO2 at the time when they undertook their study were 360 ppmv (parts per million by volume), and 1,700 ppmv for methane. The previous highest levels that they found in the historical record, as reflected in their core sample, had been 300 and 750 ppmv respectively. Their 1999 press release warned, ‘Such levels are unprecedented during the past 420,000 years’.9 Levels that were ten or even twenty times higher than these have probably been present on Earth at certain times in the past half billion years. These would have been caused in particular by intense volcanic activity. It is true that the planet eventually recovered from them, but not before life had suffered catastrophic upheavals such as the Permian mass extinction. It would, therefore, be unwise to use these times of high levels of atmospheric CO2 to justify complacency today. The Earth at those times did not have to support the conditions that make possible our advanced civilisation.

Between 1999 when the Vostok study was published and January 2007, world CO2 levels have risen further to 383 ppmv as measured by the US government’s laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.10 Presently they are increasing by more than 2 ppmv per annum and the rate of annual increase is growing exponentially. No informed person seriously disputes that this is caused by burning fossil fuels, forest destruction, intensive agriculture and cement making. Cement manufacture alone produces between 5% and 7% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Not only does it take a huge quantity of (mostly) fossil fuels to run a cement kiln at 1,500°C, but the process of heating limestone itself gives off massive volumes of CO2. Even the fabric of the buildings that most of us live in thereby contributes to global warming.

According to the government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in Britain today 42% of carbon emissions come from business, agriculture and the public sector, 26% from residential sources, 25% from domestic travel and 7% from air travel. The lattermost stirs the ire of environmentalists because its rate of increase threatens to undo efforts made towards energy conservation in other sectors. Also, much air travel is for reasons of status or pleasure. It highlights the tension between what we’d like to do and what we ought not do.

Since the approximate start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, atmospheric CO2 levels have risen by about 30%. Most of that increase has taken place since 1945. The worsening is now being driven by a combination of affluence in the West and the rapid industrialisation of countries like China and India. Industrial lifestyles are destabilising the planet. We stand in a cleft stick between expectations of ever increasing prosperity and limitations on planetary carrying capacity.

*  *  *

But while most scientists accept this analysis, powerful voices in public life seek to silence it. Martin Durkin was only the latest of a string of climate change ‘deniers’ but he set himself up to make a good case study. In The Great Global Warming Swindle Durkin denigrates much of the science that has just been discussed. He basically suggests that some 2,000 of the world’s most eminent experts who have publicly put their reputations on the line by publishing or speaking out about climate change have got it wrong. As such, his views and those of his handful of interviewees might have been dismissed as scarcely worthy of debate. He is, after all, a film-maker and not a climatologist. But a great many people and vested interests wanted to believe the case he made. Although it feels like yielding to a distraction, that case needs to be looked at here. In a way, Durkin has done us all a service. He has provided a focus on the global warming sceptic position and this has pushed the other side to muster its evidence. As we have seen, the Royal Society already had concerns about climate change denial when it issued its website warning in 2006. Durkin’s documentary crystallised a debate that needed to come into the open. He may have confused a willing public, but in so doing he has forced many people rapidly to become better informed than they might otherwise have bothered to remain.

Nobody on either side of the debate denies that global warming is a reality. Attempts were made in the early days to suggest that rising temperatures were merely an artefact of urban life. Many of the weather stations are in cities and the idea was put around that these have simply experienced a warmer microclimate due to energy released by buildings and transport. However, this theory failed to stand up when adjusted in the light of data from non-urban stations. Micro-climatic effects do exist and are well understood, but global warming is pretty much across the board. Detailed records of world weather patterns exist from about 1850, when accurate thermometer recording began. Between 1906 and 2005 average global temperatures have risen by 0.74ºC.11 That may not sound like much, but it represents a massive increase in the energy that drives weather on the Earth’s surface. Without doubt climate has fluctuated ‘naturally’ over time in the past. Evidence for this includes tree rings, coral growth, ice sheets and human historical records such as artists’ paintings of the Thames freezing over, or medieval accounts of grapes flourishing in England. What distinguishes the change from about 1970 onwards is rate of increase. Presently temperatures are climbing by about 0.2 of a degree centigrade per decade. Most scientists consider that only a small part of this can be put down to ‘natural’ causes.12 The bulk of it is almost certainly caused by us.

The most authoritative body in the world that looks at these trends is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorology Organisation. As we have seen, its November 2007 report says, ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal’. Sea levels are rising, ice cover is shrinking and rainfall patterns are changing. The IPCC states that ‘eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature’. It concludes that the main cause of this is ‘very likely’ to have been anthropogenic – that is to say, our fault – and I am told by people who were present at the meetings where the 2007 report was finalised that the language would have been very much stronger had it not been for equivocation by such countries as America, Australia, China and Saudi Arabia. In a nutshell, such is the scientific consensus on which the Royal Society bases its concern.

*  *  *

But not so the school of Martin Durkin. Durkin maintains that the supposed link between CO2 and temperature increase was stirred up by Margaret Thatcher as part of her vendetta against the coal miners. She wished to cut reliance on coal (i.e. the working classes) and oil (i.e. the Arabs), and to restore nuclear power to respectability (i.e. to the men in dark suits and white coats). Added to this was a twisted neo-imperial conspiracy to deny Africa its right to development.

To support his position, Durkin claims that NASA data refutes the idea that anthropogenic greenhouse gases drive global warming. The warming is real, he agrees, but the culprit is not the profligacy of consumer lifestyles. Rather, it is sunspot activity. Global warming in his view correlates closely with solar cycle data. As this originates on the surface of the sun, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can all breathe a sigh of relief, curse the green fascists who scared us into guilt trips about our cheap foreign flights, and get back to sunning ourselves. Simple as that.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Booker reflected much of the anti-environmentalist comment that bloated the media following the broadcast of Durkin’s film. He wrote:

Only very rarely can a TV documentary be seen as a pivotal moment in a major political debate . . . Never before has there been such a devastatingly authoritative account of how the hysteria over global warming has parted company with reality . . . our own political establishment, led by Tony Blair and David Cameron, is lining up with the EU, the UN and that self-promoting charlatan Al Gore. They propose measures that threaten not only to undermine the prosperity of the developed world but to rob billions of people across Africa and Asia of any chance to escape from the deprivation that kills millions every year.

Truly, this pseudo-religious madness has become by far the most important and all-pervasive political issue of our time.13

Within environmentalist circles Martin Durkin had already established sound credentials as a bête noir. Back in 1997 he had played a similar card in a TV documentary series called Against Nature. This, too, had portrayed green thinking as a conspiracy against the economic aspirations of ordinary urban and working-class people. George Monbiot did some investigative digging at that time and published his findings in his Guardian column. He headed it, ‘The Revolution has been Televised’:

. . . Against Nature was driven not by healthy scepticism but by shrill ideology.

If this were so, where might it have come from? At first we thought the Far Right might have been involved. But, over the last three weeks, another picture has begun to form. Against Nature IS the product of an extreme political ideology, but it comes from a rather different quarter: an obscure and cranky sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party.14

It would be only fair to say that when I checked out the website of the RCP, their current position does not seem to reflect that of Durkin – quite the contrary. One of their articles even affirms that ‘respect for the dignity of Mother Earth and for the dignity of human beings go hand in hand’. It looks like either Durkin or the party have moved in different directions since 1997.

Durkin’s axe to grind seems to be that sustainable development and ‘green’ thinking generally is a ploy by which the rich seek to deprive the poor of economic progress. He does have a point here. Conservation in the narrow sense of that word has often been the preserve of the foxhunting classes. It has gone hand in hand with conservativism, pheasant bagging and sucking rents out of servile tenants. I’m with Durkin that far. It is something that has driven my own work with land reform. Too often there’s been a split between conservationists, who are passionate about wild nature, and social development, with its passion for people. But thankfully that divide has been closing. We need both conservation and appropriately sensitive development to provide sustained and dignified human livelihood in a rich and beautiful natural setting. What we don’t need is cancerous over-development that promotes surplus rather than sufficiency, and results in exponential demands on the Earth’s material natural resources.

But Martin Durkin seemed blind to these shifts that the sustainable development agenda has brought into synergy. The galloping narrative in The Great Global Warming Swindle told 2.5 million viewers – 11.5% of the audience share15