To Hope or Not to Hope: How Fearful Should We Be of Climate Destabilization and Catastrophic Climate Destabilization?

Catastrophic climate destabilization. Sounds scary, right? Well, quite frankly, most of the projected impacts of our changing climate are, in fact, very scary. But is fear useful to us in this situation? To be honest, when Lovelock says in The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning that “it is too late for us to try to save our familiar world,” the effect for me is that hope and optimism quickly dissipate. It’s hard to act when failure is guaranteed.

In Ondi Timoner’s documentary Cool It (based on his book by the same name) Bjorn Lomborg addresses the fear issue when he says that “the scare tactics used to motivate people have gone too far. The hysteria blocks clear thinking, diverts money to the wrong solutions.” This video takes a good look at the argument put forth by Lomborg, author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. Lomborg fits Craven's definition of a skeptic because he doesn’t support the idea of making drastic, urgent carbon cuts. But he does believe that “global warming’s real, it’s man-made, and it’s an important problem,” and that we ought to invest in solutions that are both environmentally and economically viable. His message is even somewhat uplifting: the world is actually the best it’s ever been; we’ve never before had things so good. Plus there is a bevy of possible solutions, from water splitting to wave power, and if we would fund research, we might be able to actually enact change on the climate destabilization issue. The overall effect of this particular video was that I felt much more hopeful about our ability to address the climate change issue and to solve many of the world’s other problems in the meantime.

(harnessing the power of waves could help our climate, according to Lomborg.)

After all, that’s what we’re really hoping for here at Universe Spirit. We feel we must first address the catastrophic destabilization of the climate so that humanity can continue--but in a new direction, with sustainable prosperity for all. This would mean that all humans have the same basic level of access to food, shelter and health care, for example. And and it appears that these are some of the issues that Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus Center are also trying to address.  

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***photo by Barbara Walsh, who is unaffiliated with our organization.

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