Learning from Ladakh: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 4

Within a resource-scarce environment, the Ladakhis live materially rich, spiritually healthy, sustainable lifestyles. Given the overuse of the term, sustainable means, “in a way that can be continued indefinitely.” In direct contrast, Americans inhabit a vast, resource-rich territory, yet many are impoverished, many others are spiritually bankrupt (to wit—they are immune to the human suffering and environmental destruction caused by their way of life), and are psychologically impaired (as evidenced, among many measures, by their heavy reliance on drugs, legal and otherwise). Often referred to as the world’s wealthiest country, it is also one of the world’s least sustainable.

Image from https://marketingland.com.

The question of lifestyle is fundamental to the human predicament. For, leaving the sanity of Ladakhi society and coming back to our world again, we must at least accept the insanity of our position. That faced with problems of geological proportion—both in extent and time, problems of our own making—we insist on business as usual, of the insanity of “doing the same thing over and again and expecting different results.”  Given the evidence—a dwindling of finite resources, a potential biospheric mass extinction, a heating Earth, alongside the specter of rising populations, hunger, material inequality, and suffering—a simple tweaking of our system seems hardly sufficient. As we have seen in previous posts, the solutions that we have insisted on employing are simply revved up versions of the problems themselves, and are therefore amplifying the problems and accelerating our predicament. Economic growth, we realize, is just another way of saying growing consumption. Same with the lowering of fertility promised by the Demographic Transition: adults focus on careers and material-based lifestyles rather than on the traditional lifestyles grounded in large multi-generational families. And the technologies that we have employed—no matter how honorable our intentions may have been—have usually led to blowback, which has resulted in further consumption of mostly useless and superfluous objects and an accelerated deterioration of the environment. Our consumption continues to reduce mineral and biological reserves and unravel the biospheric weave; it further pollutes the Earth; and it places billions of people in a position where they must—indeed, their hunger has them longing to—work long hours in mind-numbing jobs. 

Image: https://commonground.ca/the-real-message-in-bottle/

            And yet, even with all this effort and all its environmental and existential blowback, we still cannot—as a species—provide the minimum basic material needs for all our human family. Nearly a billion people are hungry, and billions suffer the health and social consequences of micronutrient deficiencies, non-potable water, and unsanitary conditions. Nearly two billion people are without electricity.[i] All our enormous destruction of the planet has, at best, raised half of our human family to some modicum of physical comfort for some brief period, which may extend to but a few generations.  And most of those who “enjoy” these minimal comforts find themselves working long hours in monotonous jobs—in Third World factories and in First World offices—with little financial security. They are born into societies where the bonds and security of family and community have become thin and tenuous. And they find themselves powerless to alter their circumstances.  Their ancestors had more control over nature herself than we do over our economic and political environment. 

Image: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post.

            Even in the United States, once considered the paragon of democracy, ninety percent of Americans don’t trust their government’s ability to address the relevant issues.  Ninety percent of Americans believe that genetically engineered foods should be so labeled; 88% think that solar power should be developed and utilized; 90% believe that the gifting of Congressmen by registered lobbyists should be prohibited.[ii]  Yet, for these three simple, sensible, significant, and relatively inexpensive initiatives there is as yet no concerted effort by the nation’s elected representatives.[iii] How less likely is it that this nation and the loosely related societies making our global civilization will be able to resolve the more complex problems of a population explosion, of global hunger, global warming, resource depletion, etc.?  We have become, as the writer Daniel Quinn noted, “captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels… [us] to go on destroying the world in order to live.”[iv]

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/05/americans-strongly-favor-expanding-solar-power-to-help-address-costs-and-environmental-concerns/

Fittingly, we can admire the Ladakhis for their environmentally friendly ways.  We can envy their communalism and their ability to integrate their spiritual lives with their everyday material existence. Many of us living in the psycho-spiritual wreckage of the post-industrial world feel that we are missing a meaningful relationship with the land, life, and community, and we are educated enough to sense that their absence was the bargain made for the material comforts and excitement provided by industrialization and urbanization. Still, few of us are willing to blithely annul the bargain. If given the chance, few of us would trade positions with the Ladakhis. Even if we could dissolve the strangeness by perhaps beaming ourselves into their world with the full complement of our community—our family, friends, and acquaintances, our language, our location—few of us would be willing to live with the medical ignorance, the limited diet, the infrequent baths, poor hygiene, the limits on individualism, and the provincial simplicity and ignorance of the accelerating world beyond our boundaries. From our standpoint, the Ladakhis appear to be living anachronisms. Yet, we can appreciate their virtues and might like to bring these forward into our future, to take the best of what we have learned as a species during our sojourn here, to integrate the benefits of science, for example, with the wisdom of living happily within our environmental means. What will it take to actually to do so? What will motivate us?

Image: http://ingervandyke.com/2014/05/tribal-people-western-monoculture/

ENDNOTES

[i] Rifkin (2009:510) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.

[ii] Solar and wind power—ABC News/Washington Post Poll, April 14-17, 2011, available at http://www.pollingreport.com/energy.htm.  Accessed April 21, 2011.  Lobbyist—ABC News/Washington Post Poll (Jan. 5-8, 2006). Available at http://www.citizen.org/congress/article_redirect.cfm?ID=14945.  Accessed April 21, 2011.

[iii] In 2016, the U.S. congress passed a toothless bill requiring the labeling of GMOs. Lugo, D. (2016, July 8) U.S. Senate passes GMO food labeling bill. Science. doi:10.1126/science.aag0649. Accessed November 11, 2018 at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/us-senate-passes-gm-food-labeling-bill.

Charles, D. (2016, July 14) Congress Just Passed a GMO Labeling Bill. Nobody’s Super Happy About It. National Public Radio (NPR). Accessed November 11, 2018 at https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/14/486060866/congress-just-passed-a-gmo-labeling-bill-nobodys-super-happy-about-it.

[iv] Quinn (1995:25). Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, Bantam, New York.

Ladakh & Globalism: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 3

Ladakh is not utopia. It suffers its own set of imperfections. Being a peaceful and rural people, the Ladakhis are vulnerable to aggressive neighbors. Like any (and many) people who don’t have a national identity backed by military force, their lands have been claimed by numerous rulers—Moslem, Indian, Chinese. If their lands today existed within Chinese territory—rather than that of pluralistic India—they could well lose their religious and economic freedoms. Still, modern India offers its own challenges to sanity. 

The Ladakhis are vulnerable to the lure of consumer products and to the excitement of the lifestyles of the western tourists and Indian businessmen. By the 1990s, traditional mud homes in Leh were being replaced with the insulation-inferior, but higher status, concrete houses. And the youth in the town increasingly desired the education and excitement that modern India could offer them on the other side of the Himalayas.  Medically, the Ladakhis suffered from a stomach ulcer that basic hygiene and—as a last resort—antibiotics could easily alleviate. 

Much has changed in the last couple of decades.  The once quiet paths between villages have become well-worn from the hiking boots of Western travelers and tourists. Hotels and guesthouses have sprung up in some of the villages. The Indian rupee is standard trade, and children commonly go across the mountains for an education. And not least, the presence of the Indian military in this contested territory has added the accumulated material and pollution that comes with supporting tens of thousands of soldiers for several decades.i] The town of Leh is more crowded and polluted than ever before, and the signs of squalor and wealth are more common. And as with nearly everything else in the world, the change is accelerating. 

Resort hotel in Leh.

Change can bring improvement, of course, as well as deterioration. Western doctors have visited Leh to treat the bacterial-caused stomach ulcer, improving the lives of many. An Ecological Center in Leh tries to wed the best of Western knowledge with Ladakhi wisdom. With the economist E.F. Schumacher’s concept of Small is Beautiful in mind, the center provides information and models the technologies meant for homes, family groups, and villages. Solar roofs to heat water; trombe rooms where the walls are designed to absorb solar energy and radiate it inward; mini hydropower units; greenhouses which serve to both grow winter vegetables and to draw the afternoon heat into the attached home. The goal, if outsiders might be so presumptuous, would be to perfect the Ladakhis’ already exemplary society. 

Solar project in Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Not being organic to their evolution, however, the “perfections” will carry their own set of blowback. In Ladakh, where the traditional lifestyle brings little surplus, how can the people afford to either purchase or produce the sophisticated pharmaceuticals or solar technologies without compromising the economic, communal, and ecological integrity of their society? Perhaps, the economist in us suggests, by turning their long winter months of rest, celebration, and leisurely-paced work into well-disciplined hours of factory work, producing something that they can trade for the improvements. Any larger perspective, however, sees the obvious blowback—the pollution, stress, the slow unraveling of what was once integrated. This is not a question only for the Ladakhis.  People in traditional societies all over the world have been facing these choices for the last century. And their numbers have been dwindling as the forces of globalism pull them in, leaving fewer holdouts whose lifestyles can serve as alternative realities for us.[ii]

ENDNOTES

[i] India has border disputes in this region with both China and Pakistan.

[ii] There are some last holdouts, a few forager societies in the Amazon, India and the Indonesian Islands, and others who have interact with civilization, such as the Khoisan in southern Africa, the Changpa nomads of Ladakh, the Amish in the United States.  As we will see, there is a paradigm emerging (for example, Carson, 2010) which holds that local, distributed forms of non-scarcity lifestyles are now possible and will one day become the norm.  The work-life in such a world would likely fit somewhere between the low-impact life of the Ladakhi and the stressful, long hours of today’s industrial society.

The Days in Life: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 2

June is planting time, and just as Norbert-Hodges had described, we watched the men of several families plowing the fields together, singing (!) to their dzos (a hybrid of yak and domestic cattle), occasionally sipping chang from a metal jug that sat in a corner of the field. The chang tasted something like what a thin fermented buttermilk might, not unpleasant, slightly alcoholic. Not delicious like a fine wine, but neither would one need an accountant to estimate its carbon footprint. In these desert mountains the Ladakhis enjoyed an affluence that could be the envy of billions on the rest of our resource-rich planet.

They actually sing to the dzo as they work. The dzo will spend the rest of the year freely roaming the local mountains.

We spent the chilly mountain evenings in our hosts’ kitchens, relaxing and eating with the family. Every kitchen was large by even western standards, about the size of an American living room, the walls covered by a rich array of shiny well-scrubbed brass and copper pots and other cookware, with the fire of the stove providing light and warmth.  The pots were acquired by bartering with Tibetan tradesmen who still traveled between the villages along the ancient mountain paths. This room was designed to be the heart of the home. We sat not far from the low stove, upon cushions or mats around a long low table. We ate a simple meal of ground barley called sampa, with some lentils and a few greens, and we drank buttered tea. There’s not much variety in the Ladakhi diet, limited as it is by the short growing season, the elevation, the soil. This led us to wondering how even more luxuriously people could sustainably live in much of the world where the growing seasons are longer and the soils are fertile and support a wide variety of foods… if we could re-learn some simple lessons from the Ladakis.[1]

A typical kitchen in a Ladakhi home.

On the first floor were housed the animals, equipment, and a room that collected the human wastes which dropped from a room above. It was this second-story bathroom that particularly impressed me. About the size of a large American bathroom, it was empty save a shovel standing in a layer of sand a foot in depth.  In the middle of the room a hole about two feet square had been cut through the floor. This was the toilet.  “Flushing” meant shoveling some sand through the hole onto the floor below. Simple and the paragon of efficiency, it was an ingenious use of the dry, antiseptic climate. The second floor also housed the kitchen and various storerooms for the long winter months.  On the third floor were bedrooms, including our guest room, and a ghompa, or chapel.  Every home we visited had a ghompa, a dark, windowless room set aside for prayer and contemplation. There were usually some rugs in the middle of this room, an assortment of prayer books to the side, some wood carvings, a few prayer wheels, old cloth thankas hanging from the walls, a small altar sitting on a shelf with a lamp, bowls, and other important objects, the smell of juniper incense hanging in the air. Far away, on the other side of the Himalayas, each thanka painting would surely fetch some hundreds of dollars in the impersonal coldness of the import-export shops of Kathmandu and the worlds’ many cities. But here they served the many-layered functions of art, emblematic of the room and of the culture, itself. Grounded, soulful, and holistic, economical yet miraculously abundant, stunningly beautiful, imbedding a sense of priorities developed through generations of living sustainably in a resource-scarce world.

A typical Ladakhi home.

A home prayer room.

Another traveler, Ingmar Lee, wrote eloquently of the world I witnessed:

In the Zanskari villages I passed through, wealth was not measured by money and there was no poverty. Every house was busily inhabited, they wove and dyed their clothing, they grew their food, there was no garbage, no pollution, whether visual, aural, or the physical soiling of water, air and earth. The arability of the land was not determined by any natural availability of organic earth. Instead, the placement of villages depended on where aqueducts could be engineered to irrigate the barren, sterile mineral soil, and all organic soil nutrient was carefully added with a clear understanding of the processes of composting. The size of a village was intrinsic to the extent of the irrigable area of its fields, which in turn depended on the people-power to cultivate it, and the supply of water from the glaciers above. The village grew to a size that balanced what it was able to produce, and the population stabilized at that point, regulated in part by the practice of polyandry and the celibacy of the lama and chomo who renounced the householder's life to live in the Buddhist gompas, which overlook every village in the land. At the bottoms of the farthest fields, one could see the browning off of the barley crops, as the water supply dwindled off to exhaustion.[2]

The Hemis festival.

It seemed to us—as it had to Norberg-Hodge and Ingmar Lee—that the people of Ladakh had evolved a way to live harmoniously with nature and with each other. We might quibble with the specifics of their cultural ways—their fashion choices, food, religion, entertainment, whatever.  However, as a whole it worked. People laughed easily. They were kind to us, but neither overly curious nor intrusive. They worked alone sometimes, but more often together for a common purpose. They lived abundant yet simple lives within an environment that was green only a few months of the year. The Himalayan winters are long and cold, and plant life goes dormant. And so its products are precious and are used time and again, in their naturally deteriorating form. A fiber, for instance, might be used for clothing, then as a rag, then as lining for the gutter-sized irrigation canals that come off the mountain streams. Yet, contrary to our expectations about the lives of people in harsh and resource-scarce environments, the Ladakhi’s life is neither laborious nor impoverished. And the long cold months, we were assured, were spent indoors mostly, in a spirit of rest and celebration.

She was a child in 1994.

ENDNOTES

[1] Lee, I. (2011).

[2] Relearn because—extrapolating from the studies of modern-day forager societies—pre-agricultural societies supported happy, cooperative, and sustainable lifestyles. It was with the advent of agriculture (and the consequent acceleration of the autocatalytic process of innovation, wealth, and population) that the quality of human relationships with the Earth and to each other radically changed.

Ladakh: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 1

This post begins a many part series on The Evolution of Consciousness: Too Little Too Late. This is the first of three posts on Ladakh, a region in India just north of the Himalayan Mountains.

Ladakh

High on top of the Tibetan Plateau in the northern reaches of India lies a region called Ladakh, inhabited by a people who live as sustainably, cooperatively and happily as we could ever aspire, and who could indeed serve as an inspiration for the rest of the civilized world. They are the descendants of various nomadic groups who immigrated into this rocky, desert terrain over two thousand years ago and who have for centuries been culturally Mahayana Buddhists of the Tibetan traditions.[i]  In 1994, my wife and I visited Ladakh during the month of June, when the snow lines were crawling up the Zanskar and Ladakh mountain ranges and their melt waters engorged the streams that fed the frothing headwaters of the Indus River. We had been inspired by tales told by travelers we had met during our year in Asia and by the stories of the linguist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her book Ancient Futures.

The town of Leh spreads out in the Moon Valley between the Zanskar and Ladadkh mountain ranges.

            Norberg-Hodge wrote of the Ladahki society and its culture in a way that felt implausibly romantic. She wrote of a happy people living equitably and amply in a resource-scarce desert; of a kind people who sang to their work animals and shared the farm and village responsibilities with their neighbors in a kind of anarchistic communalism; whose ample three-story houses were simple, environmentally friendly, and comfortable; who incorporated into their everyday lives a respect for the Earth, for the individual, and for all life through an adherence to their religious and spiritual principles.  Impossibly, here lived a civilized people who had formed a complex society that worked without degrading the environment or fomenting psychological anxiety and social tensions. Intrigued and somewhat skeptical, we felt that we must see this Shangri La for ourselves.

https://www.jimmynelson.com/people/ladakhi

We walked through the quiet streets of Leh, Ladakh’s one large town of ten thousand people, and we trekked through the mountain paths to remote villages not yet connected by the networks of road or wire or money.  And in each village we entered, our guide would speak to the first person we met, who would greet us with a guileless smile and lead us to their home or that of their family’s.  There we were given a room furnished only by a few thick wool Tibetan rugs upon which we slept. 

A simple saw.

Because we didn’t speak their language, our impressions did suffer that important limitation. We did, however, speak with travelers along the way and with numerous Ladakhis, too—business people, doctors, monks, householders—who through their broken English unanimously confirmed our impressions. We had found ourselves among a people who were—despite their harsh environmental circumstances—modeling humanity’s potential relationship with the land and community. As the XIV Dalai Lama noted, “The author [Norberg-Hodge] is right to highlight the humane values of Ladakhi society, a deep-rooted respect of each other’s fundamental human needs and an acceptance of the natural limitations of the environment. This kind of responsible attitude is something we can all admire and learn from.”[ii]           

The mud bricks are background left. The man mixing the mud is background right. The two women are tending to the children.

Many of the remote villages could be reached only by foot. We walked for hours on narrow mountain paths, ten to fourteen thousand feet above sea level, where bushes and other plants are scarce among the rock formations and weathered stones. Then unexpectedly we would crest a hill to view a valley far below, green with the late Spring growth and cut into the familiar geometries of farming. The houses did not come into view until we climbed down closer, as they blend into the surrounding earth. Three story houses, all of them. Every family has one. They build them as they need them, when a young couple moves in together, oftentimes. I spent an afternoon watching several families working together to build such a home, from stone and mud blocks shaped by a wooden mold. The houses are wood-framed, and yet, through generations of planting, more trees grow here than did a thousand years ago. As the adults raised a wall, an old woman tended the children. Farther away, a young man, clearly retarded, swept the streets of the village. Everyone seemed to enjoy a role in this village.

The houses blend with the background rock, from which their homes are made.

As we came upon the village of Temisganglate one afternoon, a group of the village men were fixing large flag stones into the path, lengthening the portion of the path to the village that would be hard-surfaced. Neither hired, nor governmental workers, nor members of a church or charity.It was, from what I understood, an act of communal anarchism. They worked at a leisurely pace with tools as sophisticated as a pick and shovel. Large stones were moved from one place to the next by a human chain. In that same moment, surely hundreds-of-thousands—if not millions—of men and women were lifting iron and cement weights in gyms around the world, paying hefty prices for the privilege. What an odd, estranged luxury in comparison.

Diane Schade feeding a dzo.

END NOTES

[i] Norberg-Hodge, H. (1992) Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

[ii] The XIV Dalai Lama in the preface to Norberg-Hodge (1992).

How the least bit of Global Warming Causes so much Climate Change

 The Earth’s atmosphere has been steadily heating up for the past two centuries, about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1906, according to the IPCC.[i] That’s 0.7˚ Celsius for our non-American readers.  Which does not really seem like much, does it? If it’s 65˚F on a comfortable October afternoon, would it really feel much different if it were 66.3˚F. I don’t think so. And yet that little bit of warming is being blamed for floods and droughts, heat waves, crop losses, climate refugees, ecosystem disruptions, increase in the frequency and intensity of storms, and of course the melting of glaciers and ice caps and rising sea levels. So what gives? How does a little increase in temperature lead to such dire climatic consequences?

We’ll use logic and the simplest of math to make sense of it. First the logic. When we speak of a 1.3 degree rise in temperature, we mean that every place on the Earth is that much warmer all the time; every second of every day of every year. And not just on the surface of the Earth, but for the entire bottom seven miles of the atmosphere, as well.  That, we’ll see, represents a lot of energy.

Secondly, temperature and energy are not the same phenomenon. They tell you different things. For instance, temperature can give you a sense of how high your fever has risen and therefore how sick you may be.  However, when you want to know how much energy your food will provide or how much work you did during your run, you measure these in calories, or joules if you are a scientist. The 1.3 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since 1906 only hints at the true extent of the energy that the Earth has been absorbing. It is the energy in a physical system, such as the atmosphere, that tells you how much work can be done and therefore the magnitude of the possible consequences. Temperature cannot move wind and waves, but energy can.

So, now for some simple math. To give us a sense of how much energy a 1.3 degree rise represents, we rely on a simple formula: q = mc∆T. Now please don’t run away. It is true that math education in the United States is so torturous, so removed from any practical uses, and therefore so meaningless, that educators have made generations of people feel frustrated and stupid for not understanding it, and then most of these people hate math for making them feel this way.  Still, we can appreciate the wonders that even simple mathematics can reveal. So stay with me for a moment.

q is the heat energy measured in calories or joules that a system gains or loses. The system can be a rock, a lake, or the atmosphere, whatever you are studying.

m is the mass of that system. A one-degree rise in a lake is going to translate into a lot more energy than a one-degree rise in a bucket of water.

c is something call specific heat. Different substances absorb heat differently. It takes way more energy to raise a kilogram of water one degree Fahrenheit than it does a kilogram of iron, believe it or not. Just think how hot a car’s metal skin gets in the summer and how cold in the winter. Metal’s low specific heat tells you that a little heat quickly raises its temperature.

∆T just means the change in temperature.

So, we’re going to use this equation q = mc∆T to give us a sense of the energy the atmosphere has acquired since 1906.

Since we know the temperature change we’re considering (0.7˚C, because we’re using the metric system) and the specific heat of air (1004 J/kg·K), we need to find only the mass of the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere’s mass is estimated to be about 5.10 x10^18 kg.  We will use only 80% of that mass, because it is the bottom layer of the atmosphere that is warming. This layer, where our weather occurs, is called the troposphere and contains about 80% of the atmosphere’s molecules.[ii]  80% of 5.10 x10^18 kg equals 4.08 x 10^18 kg. By the way, 10^18 is a million trillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- a very big number. The Earth is big and we are very small.

So, the additional energy in the atmosphere associated with a 0.7˚C change =

q = mc∆T = (4.08 x 10^18 kg)(1004 J/kg·K) (0.7˚C) = 2.9 x 10^21 J.

10^21 is clearly an enormous number – a billion trillion. For comparison, the atomic bomb “Little Boy” that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 released 63 trillion joules (6.3 x 10^13 J) of energy.[iii] This means that the energy added to the atmosphere represented by a 0.7˚C temperature rise equals the energy that would be released by 46 million (46 x 10^6) Hiroshima-sized explosions. These comparisons are for illustrative purposes only, as the energy released in hyper-energetic nuclear events will behave differently than when that same energy is held in the molecules of the atmosphere. However, even in this enormous volume of air, the energy is not spread evenly. It moves about the planet and collects into storms, cyclones, and air masses. We are trying to contemplate unimaginable amounts of energy interacting in unimaginably complex ways! What is simple to understand is this: the portion of the atmosphere where weather and climate occur carries far more energy than it did a mere hundred years ago. How much energy? The energy contained in 46 million atomic bombs. Then, it may not surprise us after all when we witness – mainly through the media – historic changes in weather events, climatic shifts, and in the biosphere.

 BELOW ARE 46 CUBES, EACH WITH 100 SQUARES TO A SIDE. THEREFORE, THESE 46 CUBES HOLD A TOTAL OF 46 MILLION SQUARES. WHAT?! AND IN OUR LITTLE EXERCISE, EACH SQUARE REPRESENTS ONE ATOMIC BOMB OF ENERGY THAT HAS BEEN ADDED TO THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE IN THE LAST 100 YEARS.

Image borrowed from http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/numbers/arab/intro.htm.

And we may not be surprised that most of the changes will not redound in our favor. Agriculture is only a few thousand years old. We have developed our specific breeds of plants and animals to be successful within the very specific environmental conditions of the past few thousand years. The Earth’s climate has been relatively benign in these millennia, and our domesticated varieties are not as genetically varied and therefore as resilient as wild species. Meanwhile, our population has ballooned to over 7.7 billion people, with another four additional billion expected to join us this century.[iv] Civilization and all its security and comforts are based on food security and therefore on a reliable global climate. This is the system with which we are tampering when we add hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) to the atmosphere. Scientists expect Civilization to increase the Earth’s atmosphere temperature another two to three degrees Celsius by century’s end; that is, another 130 to 200 “Little Boys” worth of energy.[v] It is the energy involved, not the few degrees of temperature, that is truly frightening.

ENDNOTES

[i] IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2007c) Full Report, Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group 1 Report, “The Physical Science Basis.”

[ii] Wallace, J.M., and Hobbs, P.V. (2006) Atmospheric Science: An Introductory Survey. Elsevier, London, UK.

[iii] Energy released in the two atomic bombs (15 kt in Hiroshima and 21 kt in Nagasaki) = 36 kilotons TNT (Pittock, A.B., Ackerman, T.P., Crutzen, P.J., MacCracken, M.C., Shapiro, C.S., Turco, R.P. (1986) Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War Volume I: Physical and Atmospheric Effects, John Wiley & Sons, New York.) = 1.5 x10^14 joules.

[iv] United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2017) World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision.

[v] IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2018) Full Report, Sixth Assessment Report.