The Schwartz Report

[Guest guest]

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Editor's Note

One of my readers, , filed a comment today about how did a once "sensible guy" whom he heard on one of my appearances on the syndicated radio program, Coast-to-Coast, end up with "environmentalism as my religion" which has turned me into "doomsaying with hell and brimstone?" That seemed a question which demanded a response, so I want to take a moment to answer and, perhaps, others. I have spent thousands of hours studying climate change, and its many societal consequences. The first story I published on this subject in 1991 was based on a paper in American Scientist. That was nearly two decades ago. Many of you may have noticed I rarely publish polemic political bloviation on subjects SR covers, for or against. If I do I identify it as such. Usually I use the popular presentation of a technical research study or report. When I know full text is available online, or when graphs or charts are worth looking at, if the article itself does not do so, I frequently cite the primary source for those who would like to dig deeper.Now as the the "hellfire and brimstone": I try hard, not always successfully I admit, to select articles which have a minimum of passionate adjectives. Those I reserve for my introductory comments so that you can choose to read them or not. I do it this way because I believe you are entitled to know, independent of the article itself, where I stand on a subject. All of this research, not only on climate change, but a wide variety of other trends -- the result of thousands more hours of research -- has left me convinced that a near perfect confluence of events, almost all of them human created, and most the result of greed and short-sightedness, have come together in this decade to change the world most of us have known all our lives. We grew up in a bi-polar world -- the US and the USSR -- that world has ended. A new multi-polar world is emerging, in which the US is going to be just one power center. There will also be China, Russia, India, Brazil, and several other vortex centers. For all of its history the US has been a world driven mostly by White values, to serve White purposes. That is ending. Several states already are, or are about to become, majority non-White, and the country as a whole will be majority non-White sometime around 2035. Even more dramatic, the world we and all our generations going back 500 years have lived in, a world built on White cultural priorities, White visions of religion, and White dominance is also ending. In this new multi-polar world Whites will be just another minority bloc struggling to make the Green Transition out of the petroleum age into a world where profit alone can no longer be the only social priority. As if that were not enough, our stupidity and greed, yes, stupidity and greed, have so damaged the planet's natural cycles and systems that we are entering a period of massive perturbation. Warming is only a small part of this. More than anything water is destiny. Either too much which is submerging our coasts, or not enough because of drought, and the breakdown of ancient hydrology systems. This matters for many reasons, but the most immediate and pressing is the issue of food. You have probably noticed that in the last year you have been seeing an increasing number of stories on a growing food crisis. Why? Because more and more research is screaming at our apparently deaf ears that we are close to a collapse of the international food network. It doesn't matter whether one is a Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, this is going to fall upon the just and the unjust with magisterial indifference. If I sometimes seem like a man with his hair on fire it is because that's where I am. Many days I feel like I am watching one of those slow motion explosion scenes one sees in the movies, and I am trying to convey to you, my readers, that you, and I, must make different choices in our personal lifestyles, and voting selections, and almost every other aspect of our lives. We can get through this. We can prosper. But we must accept that it is never going to be 1952 again. Social movements like the Teabaggers, Fundamentalism, and the rise of Willful Ignorance, in my view, are the responses of individuals who either cannot, or will not, recognize that this world is ending, a new one filled with potential, but still largely undefined is emerging and that nature bats last, whether we like it or not.-- Stephan

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