Informant38

The future is ahead of us now

The Government's chief scientist today gave his starkest warning yet about the world's increasing carbon emissions saying that even the best-case scenario put millions of lives at risk by the end of the century.
Professor Sir David King said that a 3C rise in global temperatures is likely within 100 years, a process that will lead to a rise in sea levels and increase in desertification that will place 400 million people at the risk of hunger. Parts of Britain will be flooded as the UK comes under coastal attack.

Sam Knight/TimesUK/commondreams 14.April.06
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This is a lot like those images of airmobiles and space-age cities that were all curves and ordered conduits of rapidity. In the future everyone will have skin-tight body suits that adapt to the environment. Only in this case the news is not so exciting.
But it's riffing off the same chord. Not to agree or disagree but the corollaries of King's predictions are missing aren't they?
Also a sense of scale and proportion. 400 million at the risk of hunger 100 years from now in a world that's experienced a net gain of over 500 million since 2000.
6 years, 500 million additional mouths to feed. A growing family.
It's obvious there's more to this than forecast.
First of all we aren't going to sustain that rate of growth for 100 years.
The math is unavailable to me, but even at a linear rate that's 6 billion add-ons in a century. Double this, what we have now.
That's without the exponential kick, of 1% of current population leading to 1% more of what you have then, and then 1% of that added on.
It won't happen that way.
King's a professional intellect. He knows this. His friends, colleagues, the people he discusses these things with, they all know this.
So it's manipulative info, not necessarily a bad thing. It's said for effect. It's a kind of scientific/humanist propaganda.
What effect? What's the desired outcome?
It has to come back to a vision, an imagined future, a not-that compared to the images of suffering and chaos that merge too easily with the stories and descriptions of hell, traditionally.
The Judeo-Christian outlook has two worlds that are on fire - hell, and the earth itself at the end-time.
The difference would be hell is permanent and earth is temporary.
That may be some of what's creating the need for circumspection and reduction-to-simplicity on King's part. Not increasing the smug power of people who welcome those visions of millions of suffering souls if it means they personally will be able to avoid it.
Still, leaving out the metaphysical complications for now, a thought exercise that anyone can do is to imagine a world where it becomes increasingly obvious these climatic changes are occurring.
The scramble for higher ground will preclude anything like broad social cohesion - unless there's a control architecture in place that's irrefutable, a kind of meta-fascism whose driving motive is unimpeachable - the preservation of some core of humanity against a whirlwind of chaotic attack, extreme weather, disaster and catastrophe.
Ka-ching!
It will also lead to a dissolving moral bond, increasing the likelihood of those in positions of power and material wealth becoming ethically self-metric, their moral imperatives being reduced to protecting what they have in an increasingly inhospitable landscape as well as against the blowback of societal fragmentation.
Ka-ching!
The prospect of social disintegration and a growing mass of disenfranchised whose lack of basic necessities drives them toward amoral actions comes right out of King's predictions and the evidence they're based on.
And the likelihood of current energy systems, with their reliance on a benign and essentially coherent social landscape, becoming unreliable and requiring too much energy themselves to maintain will mean atomized energy will become paramount, extra-market delivery and ownership, the blood supply of the fortress and the compound off the grid, outside the large economy or underneath it as it fragments - leading to military aggression to secure energy sources with no moral underpinnings other than the self-metric of the aggressors.
Ka-ching!
Passive acceptance is probably not going to get us through.
Neither is panic or frustrated rage.
Neither is business as usual.
Lots of grown-ups are practicing an air of knowing reserve and a kind of selfless responsible concealment - this may account for the constricted tone of King's news release.
The leading climate science news blog is adamant that they don't do sociological implications or politics or policy.
So who's King talking to?
Is it prep?
Waking up the slumbering zeitgeist?
Is it collaborative?
Part of a larger move toward preservation and containment?
On the part of who?
Hard to tell from the story in the Times.