What Environmental Reporting Leaves Out

[GliderGuider]

16. You need to expand your horizons, I think.

Climate change is just one of the factors influencing events at the moment.

Other factors include things like the rising EROEI of oil, the length of supply chains, the need for computer networks to make JIT work, the complexity of global legal, political and financial systems, the eradication of species from random positions in the web of life, the trade webs that make global commerce function, the satellite networks that provide weather and position information, the increasing scarcity of phosphorus and rare earth metals, the unpredictable intrusions into the genomes of many species by genetic engineers, the draw-down of fossil aquifers, the impacts of different educational and religious systems in every country on the planet, and on and on.

All this stuff is interconnected, and creates a system of such profound complexity that chaotic results are literally inevitable. In fact, this chaos is happening all around you right now. The reason you don't recognize it for what it is, is that the human brain has such good adaptive abilities that we interpret the chaos as normal in order to keep from blowing our own minds. This is a good ability if we wish to remain upright and functional in the real world, but it's not so helpful if what we need is to distinguish threatening chaos from the normal kind. Our adaptive mental abilities mask the very changes we need to see.

It's all well and good to isolate one minuscule portion of it, like climate change, and say you don't think it obeys chaotic rules (even though weather demonstrably does), but the world we live in is a LOT bigger and more complex than that. You need to grapple with that fact before you can even begin to grasp the issues.

You are not thinking big enough. Not by two or three orders of magnitude.