The need of ideas grows exponentially more urgent

 We need ideas now more
urgently than ever.

Ideas that will generate some sort of abatement of climate change implications are needed now more urgently than ever.

Reports from disparate points around the world illustrate that the realities of climate change predicted by climatologists were too conservative and the much discussed “tipping points” are in some places already upon us.

Prolific suggestions about response might have been appropriate if this was still 1980, but being 2012, some 32 years later and with the situation inevitably much worse, the time for talk and grandiose solutions is gone.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss possible means to avoid earth’s unfolding dilemma without sounding pessimistic and overly dramatic, but the situation humanity faces brings on a certain pessimism and can only be resolved through decidedly dramatic action.

What has worked for the past 200 years has enriched humanity, but came at a misunderstood cost to the health of the planet; an account which is now due and which humanity, if it persists with its “business as usual” ways, will not be able to settle.

Had we acted in 1980, we would now have been cruising toward a workable solution, but it is not 30 years ago, it is 2012, well the eve of 2013, and the world is close to having 400ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and with the world’s permafrost beginning to melt, who know where that carbon dioxide content will stop.

The world is presently at less than one degree Celsius in global temperatures, historic emission of Co2 make an increase to a two degree increase certain and now some respected groups and scientists are predicting three and four degree increases and should that eventuate, five and six degrees seems inevitable.

Many, including Australian Professor Ross Garnaut who has considered the costs of climate change, are reluctant to say how well humanity would endure post Industrial Revolution increases in global temperatures of five or six degrees.

Few in our society how pull the strings of power and who could show the way in helping the world abate climate change and find a way to work through it seem unwilling to make tough decisions; decisions that will be decidedly unpopular and yet, are probably the most obvious way to address the present dilemma.

An example of why it would it work already exists.

The much considered World Financial Crisis of 2008 slowed growth, slowed consumption and slowed our use of the world finite resources and during that period humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions fell away dramatically.

The lesson, it appeared, should have been obvious – if we learned to live a more restrained life, understood how to find contentment with less, equally understood that we should not envy or covet our neighbour’s goods or way of life and lived in concert with nature rather in competition with it, then it would be possible to slow our global carbon dioxide emissions.

It is an inadequate idea, but in working just four-hours a day the traditional business world would, in some essence, be sustained, we would have less to spend on the present frivolities of life and it would be a wonderful introduction how we must live in a world governed by quite different from those of the past two centuries.

The legitimacy of The Four-Hour Work Day can be argued endlessly, but our changing climate and the ever depleting finite natural resources will eventually, within a decade or so, make to adoption of such inevitable.