Copenhagen has begun and a lot of hot air is being spouted – all in a good cause, admittedly.

The climategate wagons keep going driven by who knows what – the fact that some scientists don't tell the unvarnished truth? Of course it is true that of all the cops, judges, policitians, executives, real estate agents, used car salesmen…. some of them turn out to be bent. No doubt some scientists are too.

But come on people! The reality is that we have an ecology that is out of balance. The oceans are experiencing acidification. CO2 entering the oceans turns the water acidic. That alone should be cause for concern. And it is caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere. But that is just the beginning. The glaciers are melting at such a rate that they are not rejuvenating. That means that rivers that start as streams driven by glacial melt are not going to be around for much longer. When that happens millions of people will be without water.

Continents are becoming deserts.

Does it matter whether the cause is anthropomorphic carbon dioxide or not? No. But the reality is that it the continuing use of coal fired power stations, built to satisfy continuing and growing consumer demand is helping make the problem worse.

I hate to be a chicken little, but we have to face the same reality as the smoker who goes in to the doctor and asks how to solve his cough and is told to give up smoking. He wants a treatment for the symptoms when the cure is to change his habits.

We have to be prepared to change our habits.

The problem for the governments of this world is that they know that the simple solution of consuming less is one that will be damaging for their economies. They all look at each other and know that whoever blinks first is going to be the ones whose economies get hit hardest, fastest.

So what they are all doing is playing for time.

They figure that at some point in time there will be a system crash. The think that no one remembers the guys that helped ensure that the train wreck from happening. Everyone will remember the ones that introduced new taxes. And that means that they won't get voted in again. So they wait for the crash with the expectation that they will be able to treat it after the event.

Here is our reality:

Regardless of climate change and the argument about whether it is getting hotter or it is getting colder, we have a problem with fresh water reserves, with desertification of land (caused by the over use of pesticides and herbicides primarily), with acidification of the ocean, with a collapse of fish stocks… These should be warning enough that we are already in the danger zone.

There will be a crash. What it looks like is hard to predict. What we should be able to deduce, though, is that it will come and it will be relatively soon.

By the way, we are also heading in to that pre-Mayan calendar ending time zone, so we can expect a whole bunch of crazies to come out with new end times predictions to go with the climate stuff.

We have a very limited time to get ourselves into communities which have economic, social and energy robustness. It doesn't mean that we all have to be off the grid and armed to the teeth. But it does mean that we have to plan our future pretty carefully.

Its not good enough to say that nothing is going to happen because “they” will fix it.  The reality is that there is no fix possible when you have politicians not willing to be the first to make the sacrifice of their jobs. Which is what it all gets down to.

So instead, what we have is a game of musical chairs where those that run the markets are doing their best to transfer as much of the financial wealth into their accounts as rapidly as possible and before the music stops. Presumably they have the hope that they will be able to buy their way out of the problem…

The irony is that in this dystopian future that I suspect it is too late to stop from taking place those things that we think of as being utilities that are near free – water, power, communications – will be expensive and hard to come by. Who cares what price a flat screen TV is if you don't have power?

Having said all that, I also believe that there are some incredible innovations that are being created that can solve some of the problems – particularly in the energy sector.

This entry was posted on December 7, 2009 at 10:43 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet