Jan Inglis has just released a video that helps us to understand the impasse we face related to decision making and climate change.
Jan’s Summary of the Video: Underlying the climate change crisis is a crisis in our collective ability to make decisions that support sustainable systemic responses. This 37 minute video highlights the connection between the complex challenges of responding to climate change, and the capacities needed to engage in effective democratic decision making. It indicates that research in human development helps us to understand these 21 century capacities. Public deliberation through deliberative democracy, when designed to support adult development, holds the possibility of improving our capacities to respond systemically to these complex public issues.
This video includes environmentalists Thomas Homer Dixon and Lester Brown, evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, developmental specialists Robert Kegan and Bill Torbert, and deliberative democracy and complexity specialists Shawn Rosenberg, Jan Inglis and Sara Ross. Presentations and a study guide are available to accompany the video. This video link is made available free of charge for initial viewing. As production was self financed donations to cover video production costs are appreciated. For institutional use the High Definition DVD can be purchased. Click here to download and obtain web link for details.
“What Underlies Our Inability to Respond to Climate Change” ?
The answer is simple. There is no Anthropogenic Climate Change and therefore there is nothing to be done except adapt/enjoy the warmer weather.
How do I know this?
I have searched for nearly two years for a definitive paper proving Anthropogenic CO2 causes Global Warming and all I have found are some rather dubious correlations.
If you think that anyone is going to break their economy and throw what wealth they have away on that basis, you would have to be not of this world.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
Good point. I am always looking at the arguments for anthropogenic climate change. And you know I keep finding evidence for climate change that can’t be easily explained by any one cause – human or otherwise. So I am more inclined to be an “ant” than a “grasshopper” (if you know the Aesop’s Fable) and use the precautionary principle – be prepared for climate change whatever the cause.
Because even you seem to indicate that change is happening. This climate change appears to impact different parts of the world differently. So though you might enjoy the extra warmth – what about all the commodity and food crops that depend on the climate the way it is now? What will happen when conditions for growing change? We have already lost almost all our pine forests in BC Canada because climate change has caused the pine beetle to destroy them. That hurts!!
I don’t care if no one/no organization bases their decisions to change on human causes – I DO care if they aren’t smart enough to develop an adaptation strategy for change – because it is upon us now.
This video talks about how to make decisions regardless of causes of climate change. Some people think humans are responsible or at least contribute and others don’t. I come down somewhere in the middle on the causes. But I come down decidedly on the side of making decisions to adapt.
Best of good luck as you enjoy the change, best of good leadership to everyone else for developing decision processes and adaptation strategies so the rest of our cities and crops (and us) can survive.
Cheers
Marilyn
Marylin,
Thanks for your reply.
I have some minor issues though.
“So though you might enjoy the extra warmth – what about all the commodity and food crops that depend on the climate the way it is now?”
First of all the increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, infinitesimal as they may be are often credited to the reason why we have not yet suffered a Mathusian Melt-down.
http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Schieder/Ayn_Rand_and_the_End_of_Malthus.shtml
Secondly, a warmer climate is generally a more fertile climate. For instance during the Holocene Maximum where temperatures were between 2 & 5 deg warmer than present, the Sahara was a fertile area.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2997337
http://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/struktur/institute/nptw/agrarmet/phaenologie/clima
Historically it has been unusually cold temperatures that have caused droughts and crop failures.
Some say that the rise of civilisations happened on the back of warm periods, certainly seems true for the Roman Period and early medieval times. The Minoan Warming is even named after another ancient civilisation, and the worlds earliest civilisations coincide with the Holocene Maximum.
Of course all the above indicates that the earth warms and cools quite regularly and completely without our help.
What scares me at the moment, is not global warming, but what the IPCC want us to do to reduce our CO2 emissions by 57%.
Have you ever thought about that?
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
HI Roger
What scares me is the dichotomy about possible change scenarios – 4 degrees hotter as I wrote in February at http://marilyn.integralcity.com/2011/02/16/gaias-reflective-organ-needs-5-degrees-hotter-inside/
or 4 degrees cooler from a “small nuclear war” described by National Geographic here
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110223-nuclear-war-winter-global-warming-environment-science-climate-change/
NOW those are polarities that are worth serious contemplation!!
btw if you want to consider what would happen to food producing areas in the world outside of the temperate zones we live in in Canada and NZ – consider the maps fro the 4 Degrees Hotter regarding local climates and precipitations in the tropics and sub-tropics.
We may have to prepare for mass migration!! Just to share our good fortunes 🙂
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