Block 11. Climate Change

How will we archive and make available to future generations an account of our current and future struggle against what Laurent Fabius (at the Paris COP nearly 5 years ago now) called ‘the greatest challenge mankind has ever faced’: climate change?

We have now arrived at a point at which there is no longer any doubt about the fact that:

1. human activities past and present are having an effect upon our planet and its ability to sustain life
2. these human activities are directly contributing to dramatic climate change driven by the average increase in temperature across the world (presently 1.5C since the early 1900s and potentially heading up to 2, 3, 4C (or more) degrees of heating by the end of this century.  See:

• http://www.tonyversity.com/students/news/6c-2-is-more-than-enough/   and
• http://www.tonyversity.com/students/news/cc-dd-resources/

I am reminded of a film from a few years ago starring a brilliant and very Northern (British) actor with the amazing name of: Pete Postlethwaite.  The film was « The Age of Stupid« .  It imagined a message being sent back in time from the relatively near future to our epoch asking how on Earth (literally!) we could have been so stupid and ostrich-like (heads in the sand) as to largely ignore the problem knowing it might not definitely condem our generation but that such inaction would condemn our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to a world where survival (rather than ‘life’) would be the dominant preoccupation of most, if not all, of the world’s population.

The point is that the results are in from all sciences and in all corners of the world: we know where our ship (ark?) is headed and we know that if we don’t do something truly dramatic our eventual ‘destination’ will not be a happy one at all…

So we need to record perhaps what governments and COPs and IPCCs don’t: how we, the world’s global population – and there are a LOT of us – see the world population LIVE ... – are living, doing and feeling about this issue and how we can (if you like) send a message forward to future generations to explain (and maybe even apologise?) for breaking our promise to hand on to our successor generation a world much as we received it from our parents.  What sort of research should be done?  What sort of information should we seek to capture (so much is digital and ephemeral nowadays: blink and it’s gone!).   I suppose I am thinking of an archive / Museum equivalent of the Svalbard Seed Vault project, storing away in hope samples of all the world’s seeds so that, if GMO gets out of contol or climate were to render many seeds extinct, then the world would still have hope of being able to plant and feed itself again once we have got the climate back under control.

So what would be the story from ‘The Age of Stupid‘ that we / you might save to explain our present time to those who come after us?????????

By the way…. if you want to watch the ‘Age of Stupid’ here it is on YouTube with thanks to Spanner Films for allowing ‘reasonable use’…