“Four seconds to midnight … that’s plenty of time!” Anonymous
I assume there are other aspiring blog writers who experience the sensation of gawping like a fish at a screen as blank as one’s mind, gasping for ideas like the fish trying to breathe out of water.
Maybe it just afflicts those of us of modest talent and originality. Or maybe (being a little less critical or a touch more deluded, depending on your point-of-view) it is the natural consequence of life’s tiring demands. Perhaps it is particularly acute in a modern existence that is constantly bombarded by electronic ‘news’ and social media. Or one surfeited on too many riches when it comes to food, stuff, facts and experiences.
Whatever the reason, writers’ block, to give lack of inspiration a more respectable name, is surely intensified by being in a minority, of swimming against the zeitgeist – so if you have sympathy for any of the views expressed in this somewhat rambling series of posts, please do let me know. In fact, even if you think I am demented, your feedback is valuable …
The Maw of Large Numbers
Speaking of dementia, one of its listed traits is an inability to cope with time: the events of yesterday may be confused with those of last year or one’s childhood. We pity those who suffer so, but maybe theirs is just an acute manifestation of a muddle that also affects us who are supposedly ‘sound of mind’. We too find it hard to grasp lengths of time longer than our lifespan, even if some of us are feeling cocky about remembering when things happened.
So when we read that fossil fuels have taken around 2,000,000,000 years to form in the Earth’s crust and we have used up a large chunk of them within the last 200 years, we might not immediately think “Oh, that cannot last!”, because 200 years seems like a jolly long time to most of us and 2 billion is just mind-numbing. It is as if there is a large maw in our psyche into which we discard these difficult numbers and their unrelatable meaning. We might even be comforted rather than alarmed when the BP Statistical Review 2017 reports that we still have circa 50 years’ worth of proved reserves of oil and gas in the world, and implies the existence of further decades’ worth of reserves not yet proved. At least we who live today in the Western world should be able to heat our houses in our retirement (pending war or financial meltdown). Future generations – at least those that succeed our grandchildren – are faceless and unimportant.
Admittedly, it does seem that environmentalists have tended to underestimate how long we’ve got. For instance, in 1972 the Club of Rome warned of the impending depletion of a range of resources that have lasted much longer than the club anticipated. James Lovelock, the scientist who discovered CFCs in the atmosphere in the 1960s and developed the Gaia theory of a living Earth, wrote in 2007: “before this century is over … the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”. Five years later, he commented that he had been “extrapolating too far” and exaggerating the speed of climate change. David Mackay, the imperious twaddle-busting expert on sustainable energy, wrote in 2008 that cheap oil and gas might be used up in our lifetime, an outcome that looks improbable in 2018.
There is, though, a crucial difference between errors of kind and those of degree.
Out of experience, out of thought
Perhaps we cannot relate to the long term because the ‘long term’ is alien to our own experience of life. In this respect, 2 billion years is as unreal to us as quantum mechanics, or what a flower looks like to a bee. It is not much easier to relate to methane gas (invisible and odourless), or what electricity really is; and in consequence we struggle to be aware of our energy consumption.
Recently, there has been something of a success achieved by David Attenborough in his latest Planet Earth series, in terms of increasing awareness of the damage done by plastics in oceans. Many people (me included) are trying to reduce the volume of plastic we throw away. And some are calling for more incineration of waste plastic.
But this just shows how much easier it is to get the public to engage with something real and tangible. We cannot see electricity (only its conversion to visible radiation when we switch lights on) or natural gas (only its combustion if we use a gas cooker). The wider effects of their consumption are diffuse and indirect (e.g. droughts partly but not precisely attributable to climate change); they lack the incontrovertible quality of a dead fish that has swallowed a plastic bottle top. So it’s a much harder battle to stimulate public concern about our energy use. For every ten who might now say we should incinerate plastics to avoid them spilling into our oceans, is there one who will rejoin with the questions: Where will the energy for incineration come from? How much extra CO2 is produced in the process?
Future vision
We can at least try to see where we are headed. In this respect, the occasional glimmer of public honesty lightens the pervading darkness of denial, for a moment at least. In October 2017, the Dept for Transport published “UK aviation forecasts 2017”, a rare report in which CO2 emissions from all flights departing from (but not arriving at) a UK airport, regardless of destination, have been taken into account in the calculation of “UK emissions”. Using this accounting method, which seems fair, the document estimates that CO2 emissions from flights are now about 38 MtCO2 per annum, or nearly 10% of the UK’s total CO2 emissions, a useful admission given that government statistics for CO2 emissions generally ignore international aviation altogether on the basis that they are not physically produced within the UK. But the honesty is incomplete: the same document omits any calculations showing that the contribution of flying to GHG emissions is much higher than the MtCO2 figure suggests (perhaps around twice as high, which would make aviation’s contribution to UK GHG closer to 20%) because of the extra potency of CO2 emissions at high altitude. Indeed, the DfT report includes a ‘box’ on page 46 that discusses the issue – admitting that “aviation’s overall climate effects could be up to double the climate effect of its CO2 emissions alone” – but then ignores this point in its presentation of GHG numerical data. Its statistics are based solely on CO2 emissions at ground level. If an effect is acknowledged to be important but uncertain, it is intellectually more honest to go with a central estimate of its magnitude than to present statistics that omit it altogether.
Be that as it may, let’s peer into the gloom … but perhaps I will leave it until my next post to present an optimistic vision of an enlightened world.