Having just watched Greta Thunberg’s appeal to the United Nations [ https://youtu.be/TMrtLsQbaok ] a friend asked me, “So Mr. Logic, what’s the logical way forward with all this?” Well, in the time-honored tradition, I rose to the task.
It has always seemed to me that logic requires a degree of clarity. To that end, I propose that we first state/accept that, as a result of human activity, global temperatures continue to rise with potentially catastrophic results.
[Please note that I am starting from the premise that global warming is real and a deadly threat based on the observation that the scientific evidence is overwhelming and compelling to the extent that there is no rational/logical way to contest it!]
THE QUESTION
In line with what I was asked, I would like to propose that we define the question to be answered to be: What is the best strategy to employ in order to prevent a global warming catastrophe?
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
Okay, my attempt to use logic to define the main cause of this problem is probably the first part of this blog that is likely to be controversial.
You see, it is not the fact that we are increasing, year on year, our level of industrial activity that is inherently harmful. We could, in theory, double our energy usage whilst cutting CO2 emissions significantly! It would simply require the replacement of fossil fuels with renewables! Wind and solar power for example.
The same goes for the population explosion. Just like more industrialization, having more people doesn’t help, but you could double the world population and still cut back on the emissions that having even more people might be expected to create, if you could just modify their behavior sufficiently.
So, although there are many bad things happening that contribute to global warming, they are not the real problem. The real problem, although something that may seem obvious when revealed, remains hidden from view, for most of us.
Perhaps an anecdote would help here.
When I was about five I sat in front of our black and white TV whilst a woman spoke of her devotion to Jesus. To my utter astonishment, she said something that, to my innocent mind, seemed impossibly strange. She said, ‘I choose to believe’ and throughout the conversation, she said it several times. You see, in common with Greta Thunberg, I have a type of autism that, whilst it may render us less able to do certain things than would be the case if we were ‘normal’, it does, perhaps, enable us to excel at others. We see the world through the filter of logic and we never, ever get to choose what we believe. What we believe is imposed on us by evidence and logic alone and we don’t get a choice in the matter. So, to see an adult actually indicating that what she believed was determined by how she felt about something seemed utterly ridiculous to me then, and frankly, in that respect, since then, nothing much has changed.
I now believe [based on the available evidence] that the biggest single source of humanity’s problems, past and present, is this tendency for ‘normal’ people to ‘choose to believe’. To select those things they choose to believe are true or false based primarily on how those choices make them feel, leaving them wide open to all sorts of confirmation bias, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and indoctrination. Open to all sorts of, what to us ‘logicals’, appear to be absolutely ludicrous mystical and irrational belief systems.
At its core this explains why Germans thought they were better than Jews, Jews better than Gentiles, Turks better than Armenians, Japanese better than Chinese, whites better than blacks, and so on… why the majority of people walk around thinking that there is an invisible man who magicked the universe into existence and, for some reason, loves us all. This, of course, being why we have suffered centuries of religious conflict, the burning of witches, self-flagellation, pointless crusades, and the enthusiastic activities of the Spanish Inquisition for example. (You could probably lump most terrorism and a vast array of other nefarious activities in amongst that lot as well if you like. I won’t hold it against you, but I’m sure there are those who would!)
So it’s not people that are the real enemy, it is the way they think!
When I watched Greta Thunberg’s address I felt her rage and her frustration, but I saw something else; confusion. Her mind simply could not make sense of a world where people ignore its slow, but inevitable destruction. I know all this because, unlike her, I’ve been around a long time and I have had time to work it all out. I remember that same confusion I felt when I first realized that the USA and USSR were building enough bombs to kill us all, several times over. That is probably why she said, “You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.” She was wrong, however, President Trump, for example, was more than capable of understanding the situation, a child could and Trump was not necessarily evil. What was happening here was this. He believed (and probably still does) that his route to a successful and possible two-term presidency, lay in an extensive ‘rejuvenation’ of the American economy via reindustrialization and that acting to reduce carbon emissions was incompatible with that aspiration, so what did he do? He chose to believe the global warming doubters (often funded by the petrochemical industry) and he chose to believe that there is no real danger at all. That global warming is all mostly fake; exaggerated etc!
Now I don’t propose that I know the source of this phenomenon. It may have evolved, along with our increasing intelligence, because it helped counter the adverse effects of becoming aware of the somewhat bleak and irrelevant true nature of our existence and, perhaps, the knowledge that if we are lucky, we are going to grow old, no doubt suffer and then die!
I suspect that it is quite possibly, partially subconscious, but the fact that people can often be heard to say, “I choose to believe” would tend to suggest that somehow, it is also often the product of some sort of conscious intent. In any event, the reason why this happens is not something I am able to discern, the fact that it does is, nonetheless, an observable fact.
So, that, believe it or not, at its core, is the real reason why we have a global warming crisis. Armed with this knowledge a number of approaches to solving this problem might be suggested and that is the subject of the next section.
THE SOLUTION
You could try, maybe through education, to change the way people think, so that they all become logical beings like me and possibly Greta, but even if that was desirable, changing a world dominated by Dr. McCoys and Captin Kirks into one full of Mr. Spocks is something we don’t have the time or the means to do!
You could continue to rail against the behavior of the general public, demanding, begging, and cajoling them into changing their selfish ways, but there’s a reason why that has and will continue not to work. Sure you can tell Mr. Jones that from now on he should cycle to work in the rain, no longer jet off to sunnier climes for three weeks a year with his family and, of course, give up the burgers and the Sunday roast. The problem is that humans are basically selfish beings. They don’t want to give up their creature comforts and constantly telling them that they should tends to just make them feel guilty. At least that is the case with the ones that believe you until of course, they choose not to! Disseminating information about required/desirable lifestyle changes is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but in the long run, doing so is not going to save the world. In the end, most people will simply choose not to believe you!
What about civil unrest? A while back, in London, we had ecology protesters interfering with transport links. I saw pictures of people sitting on the tops of tube trains, for example, successfully creating a considerable amount of transport disruption. So, let’s put ourselves in the mind of one of the passengers. Maybe late for work he/she gets a dressing down from the boss. “That’s the third time you have been late this week, you know about the protesters. What, you think this is some kind of charity? Just get your arse out of bed and get here on f***ing time” Or imagine that you’re trying to explain it all to your inconsolable daughter whose birthday party you just missed. It’s the sort of thing that makes people very angry, even people who might previously have believed in global warming. This situation, within their minds, creates a kind of uncomfortable dissonance. They believe that there is a global warming problem but, at the same time, hate the people who are trying to do something about it, and suddenly, to the angry traveler, the protesters now seem like a ‘bunch of extremists’. So one of two things can occur within the traveler’s minds to resolve this dissonance problem:
1. Conclude that, given the importance of the global warming problem, their blind rage is unjustified.
2. Choose to believe that their rage is justified because the extremist’s concerns are not!
Want to guess which they will choose?
Well, even though I like to keep my personal feelings and opinions away from this website, I think I should say that the protesters who carried out these selfless acts, knowingly put themselves in grave danger for a cause that they believed in. They knew they were unlikely to get out of the situation they had put themselves in, unscathed. They couldn’t even have been certain that they would survive it, but they did it anyway, not for their own benefit but, rightly or wrongly, for the benefit of all. I can’t think of a better definition of courage than that.
A climate change protester being dragged off the top of a tube train before being punched, kicked, and stamped on by an angry crowd.
So, although I’m sure you are already aware of where I’m going with this, just to be clear, I would like to say that, laudable though these protesters’ actions may be, it is sadly the case that they may also be counter-productive. You see, they may not just be turning the public against themselves, they may also, inadvertently, be turning the public against what they believe! That there is a climate change emergency!
So what, you may ask, would work?
As you might suspect, saving the world is never going to be simple or easy, but I believe there is a path that, logic would seem to suggest, is the one most likely to be successful. Rather than dive straight in and start preaching I think, lest my proposal seem a little outlandish, I should first set out some of the circumstances that have led me to the above conclusion:
1. Based on my observation of human behavior, I have come to the conclusion that most people are largely driven by their emotions. You can tell them, the people of the UK for instance, that among the many deaths (34,361) at the time of writing, approximately 27,000 people have drowned, many of them children, whilst trying to illegally migrate to the UK. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe-migrant-bodycount)
Sure, they will acknowledge it’s a bad thing and ponder it for a moment but show them this:
The body of just one of the many innocent children that have died this way and suddenly the ‘normal’ people are all mortified. This terrible, sad picture then appears on the front of every national newspaper and is the main subject of every news broadcast in the UK for almost a week!
2. For the reasons I have set out above, it would not be possible to basically shame enough people into giving up the things they love. Sure some will, but nowhere near enough. You can’t expect to change human nature overnight so all you, at best, could hope to achieve would be a slight slowing of the process, but there is a group of people who could very easily stop global warming and these people are the politicians. Shouting and ranting at politicians, for the reasons set out above, will not work. They will always follow to where they believe their best interests lie. But they all have an Achilles heel. Even dictators must try to remain popular if they want to stay in power and in democracies the vote is everything.
So we need to persuade people to just do the one simple, painless, and yet most powerful thing they could ever do to help solve this problem. To draw an ‘x’ in the right box! How do we persuade them? Well, we know that people are generally driven by their emotions so rather than fight that tendency I would suggest it be accepted and used, just as it has been by propagandists over the centuries, but this time to humanity’s advantage. So sure, tell people about and explain climate change:
But far more effectively, we need the media to show them climate change:
An island home before being completely submerged by rising sea levels.
To show how Them:
Safe Britain where Annie Hall was recently swept away and drowned by floodwater.
Lives destroyed:
Show Them:
What happens when your hunting grounds just melt away.
There are many more harrowing pictures that I could have shown you, but those of you who have got this far are not the ones that need convincing, and the climate change deniers? Well, they won’t be reading these words, will they!
So far we have seen some very compelling television programs outlining the nature of global warming and the need for urgent action, but what has been largely missing, in my opinion, is clear, easy-to-follow instructions on precisely what the viewers should be doing about it. We need to be ‘showing’ global warming and most importantly, identifying the politicians who are taking appropriate action and those who are not and then indicating, purely on this basis alone, who those concerned about climate change should vote for and against. Who they should support or oppose. This would give almost everyone a very easy way to do something effective about global warming.
Not a million years ago we, in the UK, as a result of a general election, were been bombarded with environment-centric sound bites. ‘A greener economy’ ‘self-sustainable’, ‘tackling the climate emergency’ were phrases that British politicians were shoehorning into their public speeches. Just one example of the misleading nature of these sound bites (as we saw yet another price increase in the cost of train travel, forcing more people out of the trains and into their cars) was the fact that the installation of solar panels in the UK had recently fallen by 94%. And the reason? A government pledged to, and repeatedly promising “a greener economy” had cut solar panel installation subsidies and feed-in tariffs.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/home-solar-panel-installations-fall-by-94-as-subsidies-cut
And here is another one:
Another well-known British politician was promising to plant 2,000,000,000 trees by 2040. That represents the entire paraphernalia of digging a small hole and planting a tree occurring 190 times a minute for every minute of every day and every night for the entirety of every year until 2040. That’s just over 3 a second. Clearly, that was never going to happen, but even if it did, and in fact, even if the entire UK economy were to somehow become completely carbon neutral tomorrow, it would make almost no difference to the climate crisis at all!
The UK contributes barely 1% of worldwide CO2 emissions!
So there, in a nutshell, is a perfect example of the problem that needs to be fixed. It’s a global problem and I think most people are aware that politicians can’t always be relied upon to honour their promises. However, if enough people, around the world, started responding to the climate emergency and voting accordingly, then it would be a problem that would tend to fix itself. Politicians, seeing what was going on, would soon begin to realize that choosing to believe in the climate emergency, and therefore acting appropriately, would now be the politically expedient thing to do and that putting out slogans and sound bites and then doing nothing or perhaps making things even worse, would not! You see that fact is, unless the ‘powers that be’ can be persuaded to stop setting carbon neutral targets off in the distance, presumably for other people to achieve (2050 is a common one), and start taking the sorts of actions that are urgently required to actually counter global warming now, this problem is just going to get worse. Much worse!
Just some thoughts and possible objections:
I suspect that some people would say something along the lines of, “This will never work because people tend to vote on the basis of loyalty to a particular party, and expecting them, en masse, to change their voting habits is fanciful and unrealistic”.
To this, I would say that this objection, in fact, highlights one of the reasons why this approach might actually work quite well. You see, the loyal block votes often tend not to be the ones that finally determine who does and does not stay, or get into power, and the politicians know this. In the UK we call them ‘swing voters’. Voters for whom political parties are not like football clubs to be supported come what may, but are the ones who will change their allegiance depending upon how they feel about individuals and/or their policies. These are the people, across the world, who finally tend to be the ones that determine who gets into power and who stays there, so become one of them and your vote may count for more than you might think!
Others may ask, “Who is to say what it is the politicians should actually be doing?”
What I see going on at the moment looks a lot like a sort of, ‘scattergun’ approach. Some protesters doing something here, a television program there, speeches, and a whole raft of articles on the internet and in magazines for example.
I believe we should draw on the knowledge of the world’s leading experts in order to define exactly what it is that should be done by each and every administration to counter global warming. Some ideas might be a requirement to provide significant funding to assist in the installation of solar panels, funded perhaps by putting tariffs on products that result from unsustainable beef production, palm oil, and hardwoods derived via the destruction of the Amazon rainforest for example. The imposition of a landing tax at airports to help fund the development of far less damaging aircraft that in turn would, of course, be allowed to land tariff-free, might be a good idea. With political will, a great deal is possible, for example, twenty years from now we could all be flying about in carbon-neutral electric planes. Sounds like science fiction?
How about now?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48630656
Then there are wind farms. The UK, for example, is such a windy island that we could easily produce enough electricity, from wind farms dotted around our coasts and rural areas, to power the country to the end of the century. The technology already exists and the installation process, in spite of the huge scale involved, is actually quite straightforward, but nobody has set about doing this or for that matter, is even promising to do so. Perhaps that needs to change, but to be honest, I’m not an expert in these matters and it would seem to me that the best people to determine what the followers of this blog should be requiring of their representatives, should be the experts in the field.
Some might suggest that I am just asking everyone to vote for the Green party or the equivalent, but I think we should be apolitical and focus only on what the people in power are actually doing and what those likely to obtain power are promising to do. Given the obvious urgency of the situation (at least obvious to me that is!) I do not believe we have the time to waste on protest votes etc. It seems that the best way forward would be to focus on getting appropriate action taken as soon as possible.
Many would say that we should (somehow) be targeting the large international companies, but just as it is irrational to expect Mr. Jones, to cycle to work in the rain, forgo sunny holidays, and give up the burgers and the Sunday roast. It is the case that it is also completely illogical to expect companies to unilaterally take sufficient action to solve the climate change problem by themselves. Mr. Jones would be able to see that his neighbour, Mr Smith is not taking these actions and therefore he and his family might well ask why the hell should they! (It is also the case, of course, that Mr Smith and his family might be thinking exactly the same thing!) A similar thing happens with companies. You can’t expect company ‘A’ to take action that it perceives, rightly or wrongly, will disadvantage it when competing with company ‘B’ and of course, the same thing works in exactly the same way, the other way around. After all, changing the way you operate normally incurs costs. In some instances, massive costs! Would you risk upsetting your investors or even bankrupting your business to save the world for everyone else, including those who would inevitably replace you in the marketplace? What we need, to deal with this dilemma, is something that is perceived to maintain ‘a level playing field’ for all concerned and there is one way and only one way that this could ever be provided! It’s called legislation!
So can I now ask you for a favor:
If you have got this far and agree with what I have proposed here, please send this on to your friends, etc. The more people that see this the better and the less likely it is that the rest of the Amazon rainforest will end up looking like this:
The Amazon Rainforest
Did you feel my pain as you viewed these images? If you did then know that the whole world should be feeling that pain right now and that is something you can do something about. Share this with your friends because this is the logical way to save the world!
Life uses what is available! We are mostly water, H2O!
Whithin a huge cloud of……..err Stardust?
The problem is that we need to be listening to what the real science is telling us, but when the so-called experts in the media talk, what in the fullness of time can be shown to be a load of old tosh, then they play into the hands of the conspiracy theorists and trumped up doubters like those indicated above. Everybody who has a vote, has a vote regardless of what they know or understand and every politician isn’t necessarily expert at anything other than perhaps making speeches. So it is important that when the voice of science is heard, it imparts clear and accurate information that we can all, always trust. Break that trust and you create a void that can be filled with the sort of dogma and ignorance that this world has been plagued with for far too long and at a time when we no longer have the luxury of simply believing whatever suits us. A time when our collective ability to understand the 
Scientists On Acid 