All life on Earth will cease in just five thousand years, according to an international team of astronomers. The stargazers, led by Dr Tessa Wendel of Adelia, have discovered a new star – and it's coming our way.
The red dwarf star, dubbed 'Nemesis', is due to pass close to the Sun shortly after the year 7,000. Wendel's team calculates it will miss both the Sun and the Earth, but its gravitational pull will so destabilise the Solar System that life here will become impossible. In other words, mankind needs to find a new home.
Sound like science fiction? Well, it is. It makes up part of the plot of Isaac Asimov's 1989 novel 'Nemesis'. It's a good novel on many levels, but I mention it now to contrast the fictional response to a long drawn out disaster and the real one.
In Asimov's fiction the scientists easily convince the politicians that humanity has five millennia to prepare for the worst. The politicians then give the scientists the go-ahead to develop huge, super-fast space ships to evacuate Earth's twelve billion people. Oddly, they don't consider the option of birth control, which could dramatically reduce the scale of the problem.
In reality, scientists are still struggling to convince some politicians that we face a climate catastrophe, though the truth is staring them in the face. The Earth is undeniably warming; glaciers are undeniably melting; aquifers are undeniably drying up; soils are undeniably deteriorating; oil production is undeniably peaking; CO2 emissions are undeniably rising; rainforests are undeniably shrinking; and fish stocks are undeniably collapsing. Any one of these is cause for alarm, but put together they have the makings of an extinction event.
Rising seas may put most of Bangladesh underwater. Melting glaciers in the Himalayas and drying aquifers in the lowlands to either side may turn the mighty Yangtze and Ganges rivers into streams. Without water or oil-based fertilisers, productive farmland may become dust-bowl and two billion people may be displaced. Who will take these people – your community? Who will feed them – your farmers? Without assistance from beyond their borders will the governments of India and China, both of which have atomic weapons, simply let their people perish? Nuclear holocaust might be the thing to knock us off after all.
Hopefully none of the above will come to pass, but it seems likely disasters similar to these will occur in all corners of the globe – some in our lifetimes. And after environmental catastrophe come violence and disorder. Remember Hurricane Katrina.
The time frame for our extinction may be less than a couple of centuries, but it doesn't yet seem to be a top priority. Yes, plenty of money is going into building wind farms or researching electric cars, but much more is going into oil exploration, weapons development or the marketing of fizzy drinks. Instead of working to combat existential threats, most of us are ignoring them or shifting responsibility to others – among them, those who govern us.
Can our governments bear the burden? The evidence suggests not. Okay, there was Kyoto and, who knows, a new agreement may come out of Copenhagen, but overall these inter-governmental efforts are paltry in comparison to the task we all face. Government agencies suggest we reduce, reuse and recycle*, while their trillion-dollar stimulus packages are designed to make us spend, spend, spend. The voters are ready. A recent poll revealed 83% of Britons are prepared to make cutbacks to fight global warming.
So why are the politicians not responding?
We shouldn't rule out ignorance and incompetence. Politicians of all colours and in all countries can be guilty of these sins, in spite of access to the best brains their universities have to offer. Another factor may be the electoral cycle. Barack Obama has three years to produce results if he is to be re-elected; switching to a green economy may not pay dividends for decades. Pressure from corporations is another factor. Whether legal or not, politicians can be bought by oil companies. It may also be that our leaders have grown used to shirking the difficult economic decision by leaving them to the market.
Politicians may also be fearful. In many cases their power bases will be weakened if we take the steps necessary to prevent environmental meltdown. If we all stopped buying things we don't need then the world would fall into an unimaginably deep depression; the capitalist system would collapse; the rich would be forced to hand over most of their ill-gotten gains to the poor or risk violent revolution. Could any politician remain in office through such a chain of events?
Then there's the conspiracy theory. There are many of them out there on the Internet and most are pure nonsense. Here's one. The elites of the world know exactly what's going on and they have a plan. They will do all they can to empower themselves, as they have since 1980 when the income gap started to widen, but especially since 2008 when taxpayers rewarded bankers for their failure. They will secure all the oil and gas they can and use it to develop sophisticated machines to serve them and kill us. Then, once technology is at such a level that workers are no longer needed, they will release a disease upon the world. It will not kill us; the cure their factories offer will do that. In a stroke they could reduce the world population from seven billion to seven million and end the environmental crisis.
Sound like science fiction? Let's hope it is.
Whatever the reason for our politicians' failures, the issue is too important to delegate. I believe we should do what we can to find out what's stopping them from acting and help them overcome it. And if that fails, we should be prepared to take matters into our own hands.
*A note on reduce, reuse and recycle. According to the American EPA website, reduce means: 'reduce the amount and toxicity of trash you throw away'. In the past it meant 'reduce the amount of the Earth's resources that we use,' and this is still its meaning in some quarters. This subtle rebranding means politicians are giving us the green light to keep on shopping at the Earth's expense.
Fossil Fuel
Wavehunter
