What If

Alton C.  Thompson

What If

Alton C. Thompson

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What If? Alton C. Thompson So far, the United State has spent “nearly US$650 billion (in nominal dollars) on NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration).” This despite the facts that: 1. In 1938 Guy Stewart Callendar [1898 - 1964]“linked global warming to CO2 emissions,” being the first person to do so.1 Unsurprisingly, Callendar “thought global warming was good because it would stop what he called ‘deadly glaciers’ returning and could boost the growth of crops at high latitude.” 2. In 1988 NASA’s James Hansen testified before “the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate,” and his: main conclusions [were]. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. As to effects, Hansen limited his comments of “summer heat waves.” 3. Since 1988 a number of articles have been published on effects, including these:  Climate change will be sudden and cataclysmic (2021)  Humanity should brace for catastrophic climate change (2022)  Humans may be extinct in 2026 (2023)  Opinion: I’m a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too (March of 2024) Given that global warming—which is now accelerating—has, since Callendar’s time, been determined to be an extremely serious problem, even threatening our continued existence as a species (!), one has good reason to expect the mass media—television, radio, and newspapers—to be reporting on it. However, there has been “media silence” instead! So that although I’ve heard “climate change”2 on television a few times, I’ve never heard “global warming” used! On weather reports I’ve heard about 1 This relationship was first proposed, though, by Svante Arrhenius [1859 – 1927]. 2 In an infamous memo by pollster Frank Luntz in 2001, “climate change” was advocated as the preferred term to use! On p. 142 Luntz wrote: “As one focus group participant noted, climate change ‘sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” consequences of global warming—such as excessive heat and consequent wildfires, excessive rain and consequent flooding, etc.—I’ve never heard a weather reporter link the one with the other. And when, several years ago, I sent an email to the lead meteorologist at one of the local television stations here in Milwaukee (I live in a suburb), asking why I never heard “global warming” mentioned, I received this response: Our management forbids us to do so. (!!) I suspect that that policy is a universal one in this country—the reason for that being: It wouldn’t be good for business!! But failing to report on global warming isn’t good for any of us!! Why, I ask, isn’t that obvious for business leaders (and others)?! At any rate, it’s a “fact of life” today—and must somehow be “worked around’! The question that I have is why is it reasonable for us to have spent almost US$650 billion on space programs and virtually nothing on efforts3 to save our species from extinction?!! And the answer to that question appears to be: Widespread ignorance about global warming on the part of our “leaders”—both governmental and private sector!! That ignorance includes ignorance about the causes of global warming; it’s human caused, resulting from: 1. Our burning of fossil fuels. 2. Our deforestation activities. I should add that “carbon black” produced by the burning of fossil fuels also contributes to global warming, while also causing health problems. The widespread ignorance that exists about global warming means that if our species is to avoid going extinct in the “near” future, it will be efforts by individuals and organizations in the private sector that will enable our continued existence; assuming that to be possible, that is!! A useful starting point for our (possible!) saviors is to recognize that the 5 scientists who co-authored this recent paper4 begin their paper by stating: we declare . . . clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. Then, toward the middle of their paper they assert: 3 President Joseph Biden’s environmental efforts are discussed in this article. 4 Which has been signed so far by “15,682 from 165 countries”! To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live, in ways that improve the vital signs summarized by our [29] graphs. When I read the “we must change how we live” in that sentence, I immediately thought of creating ecovillages,5 and sent an email to the article’s lead author—William J. Ripple—with that suggestion. He responded: I think you are on the right track with ecovillages. (!) What makes that suggestion reasonable is the fact that during the lengthy period (99+% of our existence so far!) while members of Homo sapiens were gatherer-hunters,6 we humans became “designed”7 for that way of life! Designed not just physically, but psychologically and sociologically as well. That latter fact means that we became designed for small-group living! In this 2022 paper the Ehrlichs state: Most people don’t realize that the world to which they wish to return was not normal (usual or typical) for our species. More importantly, it was not remotely sustainable (Dasgupta et al. 2021), even perhaps inevitably unsustainable (Rees 2010). Indeed, it is relatively difficult to define in detail what normal behavior is for Homo sapiens as an entity, in part because of the largely blank pages of prehistory. The most recent 300 out of 300,000 years have been abnormal in the sense that a fever of 107 degrees Fahrenheit is abnormal when, for most of a person’s life, her temperature has been at about 98.6 degrees. Until 10,000 years or so ago, the normal lifestyle for Homo sapiens was living in small groups (Schmidt and Zimmermann 2019), hunting and gathering. Humanity’s fever started about ten millennia in our past and rapidly led to a highly febrile system of giant groups, which have increasingly industrialized. Humanity grew from scattered groups of 20 to cities of 20 million, from normal to abnormal, in an evolutionary instant. And in this more recent paper from early 2024 Paul R. Ehrlich writes: Many of our problems seem traceable to Homo sapiens being a small-group animal, most comfortable in collections of under 150 people or so, the so-called Dunbar’s number. It was proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar based on studies of primate brain size and group size. That’s roughly the maximum size of most hunter-gatherer groups, as it is today of typical groups of colleagues, lengths of Christmas card lists, and so on.18 We’re now a species trying to get “comfortable” in groups of thousands, millions, or in some peoples’ minds, billions. And we’re clearly often doing a lousy job of it. Religion is one way we’ve found to develop in-group versus out-group distinctions that can make our perceived groups smaller, as are race, gender, patriotism, political parties, soccer team support, corporate loyalties, fraternities, sororities, and on and on. Many of these groups go far beyond Dunbar’s number and 5 Here’s a map of ecovillages throughout the world today. Forty years ago I published a strategy for getting a proliferation of “eco-communities: “Ecotopia: A 'Gerendipitous' Scenario.” 6 The term that I prefer over “hunter-gatherer” because our ancestors were mainly vegetarian! 7 The late anthropologist Alan Barnard [1949 - 2022], Hunters and Gatherers: What Can We Learn from Them (2020), p. 56. could be a rich research field for social scientists interested in the causes, connections, and consequences of group-size variation. Almost all of these entities carry the same seeds of believing in myths, failing to have as much as possible an evidence-based world view, and promoting intergroup dissension and even violence. I should add here that our “group size” problem began during the Neolithic Revolution (which began about 11,700 years ago). It was during that period that agriculture began to replace gathering-hunting in some groups—and the new sedentary mode of existence fostered a growth in group size, and problems for humans! Because we became designed for small-group living, it makes eminent sense today to restore smallgroup living today—and creating ecovillages would do that. Not only would doing so help reduce many of our social problems; the fact that ecologically-responsible living would be the norm in an ecovillage means that a proliferation of ecovillages would reduce the odds of our going extinct “soon”! It may, of course, be too late for our salvation as a species; but given that we cannot know the future with certainty, it’s incumbent upon those of us who know that our species could go extinct “soon” to do what we can to prevent this from occurring! But will we?! That remains to be seen!!

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