Copenhagen and all that

Almost unnoticed in Copenhagen, at least by the affluent of the world, amongst the litter of paper, rhetoric and huddled negotiation that seems to have come to so little, is a giant elephant.

This beast represents the increasingly rapid and global replication of the industrial model of development pioneered in Europe and America in the nineteenth century.  If just the Chinese ever acquire the American lifestyle right across their population, they will have to kill most the rest of the human species and occupy the vacated land, in order to control sufficient resources to do it.
 
Even that would not be enough and not for long.
 
The US annual per capita emission rate of carbon is around 20 metric tons.  Multiply that by 1.4 billion Chinese equals 28 billion tons.  Current total human carbon emissions are 22 billion tons.  The earth’s current capacity to absorb our carbon emissions is around 7 billion tons per annum (which is just over 1 ton per head of present global population).

With no people alive in the world except Chinese living the American dream, the annual rise in atmospheric carbon would go from 15 to 21 billion metric tons.

They would be roasting the planet at a significantly faster rate than it is now!

Regardless of the reliability of climate science, any estimate at all of the growth of global industrial production over the next twenty to fifty years, says that even if we can keep dodging absolute ecological and resource limits, the life support system will have been very likely irreversibly and perhaps mortally damaged
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The intensive industrial system and the human population explosion it has allowed will have occupied too many ecological niches and taken too much out of them, for too long and too quickly.

The scientific warning of human induced climate change is just one of many canaries that are chirping as loudly as they can, trying to tell us of the awful danger we are in.

And from Copenhagen to Wonthaggi (my nearest regional city in South-East Australia), there aren’t many people really listening to these messages, or beginning to approach, even in their dreams, what we are going to have to do to avert, or at least minimize, the pattern of catastrophe that is relentlessly bearing down on us.

When I read the words of climate change deniers and anti-wind farm NIMBYs  (Not In My Back Yarders) in the columns of our local newspaper, who can’t yet see the radical, diverse and urgent need to adapt, my reaction is not so much anger and irritation, as fear.

I hope I do not live long enough to see the lives of my children and grandchildren ruined by this terrible reluctance to face reality.