The Sun. Credit: NASA

By Jon Moore

In this wonderful period of global catastrophe, end times and disaster, we are confronted with the title, “Nothing Is What It Seems” every day. The planet needs to be saved and saved quickly or, to quote Hanrahan, “We’ll all be rooned.” But is this really the case? Have humans, the biosphere and even the planet herself lived through previous temperature spikes equal to the most dire climactic soothsayers’ predictions? And if they’re correct will it lead to an end of time climactic event? Are the predictions of those soothsayers any better than those of a medieval astrologer or modern economists? In brief is everything we are being told bollocks?

The arrival of fully modern humans occurred during the Pleistocene, a period stretching from around 2.5 million years before present to 12,000 years before present (ybp). Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago our species evolved into being. Remember we have only lived through 12,000 years of the Holocene with the key point being that we evolved in an environmental period different from our current conditions.

The Pleistocene like the all of the past is a foreign country. So foreign, in fact, most people alive today would be hard pressed to survive a week let alone a few hundred generations. The Pleistocene was characterised by ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere and colder drier weather patterns in the Southern Hemisphere. Paradoxically, the Australian continent had much more available water not because it rained more but because it evaporated less due to the lower temperatures. The key to human success in this period was small bands of individuals moving together across the environment. We were able to move more quickly than the other Homo species about at the time; H. floriensis, H. erectus and H. neaderthalis are the ones we know about so far, but more of that in a later part. Our species was able to accumulate and exploit more of the available resources than these other species. We filled the available niches and everything else was shunted off to the dustbin of extinction. This is known as normal evolution.

From the evidence available to us now, it appears the key to our survival was the small groups of up to 50-odd individuals and emotional attachment to ideas and leaders. Leaders can come and go but ideas are surprising difficult to shift. Hand in hand with these attachments is our ability to filter the environmental signals coming to us from our surrounds. This filter is selected for automatic responses to stimuli. I can attest to this from a personal experience. One day I was walking across a paddock deep in thought about the coming Spring’s planting schedule when I realised I was frozen to the spot. Thankfully I stayed frozen and scanned my surrounds by sight. Within three feet of me was a brown snake wound up ready to strike. After the longest 60 seconds of my life, the snake, (and I know this to be impossible), shrugged its shoulders and slithered off. The point of this is we all carry something from the Pleistocene deep within us. Some of it is useful, (no snake bite), some of it is not and we will come to that presently.

We are now living in a warmer environment from the one we evolved in. We have lived through a time up to 4 degrees warmer than it is now and managed to adapt to both this rise in temperature and its subsequent decline. This period is known to archaeologists as the Holocene Climatic Optimum and occurred between 9000 ybp and 5000 ybp. It was described during my student days as the “Garden of Eden” time even though it appears to have occurred after early domestication practices. I have noticed there is little reference to this time in current climate debates and it was a time when, according to current mythologies, polar bears should have become extinct. Clearly the polar bear is either a fraud or at least as adaptable as the rest of the biosphere. Now the rate of temperature rise is often raised in the current debate. The adaptability of humans should never be underestimated. There is good evidence that the last glacial period ended, in geological terms, quite quickly – a couple of hundred years in some instances. Slowly at first and then accelerating towards the end. The current climate time line is similar. True, sedentary humans with property rights over stuff, particularly when the stuff is mortgaged, are less mobile and hence less adaptable than Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers or even nomadic tribes but we all share the same brain structure and the same ability to adapt. So here’s a thought: “Don’t Panic!!!

Leaping forward to the present, our emotional attachment to leadership may be the biggest hurdle we have. As our societies have become more specialised and the renaissance individual has been replaced by the expert, we now have leaders in many fields who know more and more about less and less until they reach the point where they know everything about nothing. The generalist has been replaced by the expert. This is all well and good if the experts do not succumb to hubris. However Climategate is our first clue that fame, honour and funding may be driving some individuals to commit acts of scientific error. So how are we to know?

The YouTube Generation

The past two generations of Teacher Union- induced changes to the education system, possibly introduced for good reason, do not equip individuals to deal thoughtfully with our current situation. Rather than make Mathematics and English mandatory, only English remains so and, as a result, the English current curriculum does much to discourage students from thinking critically.

The study of newspaper clippings, advertisements and YouTube clips is so shallow as to be humorous if it wasn’t so dangerous. This was done in the belief all forms of creative activity were created equal. Possibly… but how can a two minute YouTube clip hold the same level of creative effort as say “Dune”? You can watch the clip over and over and learn very little else. I’ve re-read “Dune” ten times and each time I am greeted with a new nuance. The same is true for “Brave New World”, “1984” and “Jonathon Livingstone Seagull”. In the past, studying the great works of fiction equipped individuals to interrogate newspapers, advertisements and YouTube clips but the reverse is simply not so. Similarly the discipline of Ancient History has been moved from the study of political change during the end days of the Roman Republic into the mundane social history of the last days of Pompeii. Knowing what the plebes ate as they were smothered in ash is interesting but how does that allow one to understand the drivers of greed, power and political machinations common to human societies? Clearly it does not.

A lack of critical thinking in the general populace, a slavish following of experts and an underlying post religious/post communist vacuum in the intellectual life of the left has given rise to the religiosity of the Socialist Green movement. This envisions a world where everyone is equal (Communism) in a manner where everyone has less stuff (Christianity). To achieve this and ensure that greedy people don’t cheat the system, an overarching set of treaties will be enacted. “To hell with individual responsibility and freedoms we need to ‘Save the Planet!’” the cry goes up.

Any critical analysis of this movement reveals it it be flawed on many levels. Clearly state capitalism, that is, centrally run economies either for Marxist economic reasons or climatic need will result in disaster. The dream of a cap and trade system is to redistribute wealth about the planet. This idea works so well even the Chinese Communist Party rejected it in favour of a market economy. All other attempts at utopia have failed. From the communes of the 60s and 70s which broke down over who does the dishes to present-day North Korea which is starving to death, communal ‘for the good of all’ or for the good of the planet bureaucracies fail. The nations of the world may well agree to this nonsense, in which case we can look forward to a Trabant-style outcome. It seems unlikely they will be that stupid. Several things will mitigate against it.

To return to climate change it is apparent that temperatures are already trending down though some would argue this

Prof Tim Flannery. Credit: scienceinmelbourne2007

has been the warmest decade on record!!! The records go back to the 1880s so as a data set for comparison with reality they are less than useful. *Actual data does not match the predictions. Even Tim Flannery, the soft fuzzy face of human induced Climate Change, cannot explain why temperatures are falling while CO2 concentrations are rising.

Could it be that a system as vast as our planet cannot be replicated in models adapted from economics? That is economic models which failed to predict every financial crash since the second world war? It seems a more complex situation is occurring and we just cannot know.

As we look about us, at the great debates running in the media and amongst the chattering classes, at the fluctuations of political parties, at the rise and fall of debt, clearly all is not what it seems. We need to look at ourselves before we look at our society. Parts 2 to 5 will delve more deeply into this. Hopefully we will see more clearly and be able to act more justly when we have finished.

*Garth Paltridge weather balloon data Tasmania

Earth philosopher, organic farmer, family man, archaeologist and author, Jon is well-known in his hometown as a dispenser of independent, wide-ranging wisdom to anyone who will listen, an excellent raconteur and a regular imbiber of fine coffee. Already working on a number of related publication projects, Jon’s first book, Zen Druid will be available in August next year. Follow Jon’s latest venture at Living the Dream.

Tags: climate scepticism, climategate, CO2 emissions, global warming, green conspiracy, green socialism, Jon Moore, Tim Flannery, YouTube generation