Major Catastrophe ARCHIVE (mmj)

Where is there Hope? …As an extension of thinking about unintended consequences: regarding the possibilities of a global-scale disaster it is funny how our minds run towards something external, extra-terrestrial and improbable like a giant asteroid hitting the earth, rather than something more local and immediately realisable, but too grim to consider because we never meant it to happen and it seems to darken all hope.

The 'play' Ten Billion has just ended its very successful run at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The work was written by Katie Mitchell and Stephen Emmett, who is also the sole 'actor’. Why ‘play’ and ‘actor’ in inverted commas? It is as much a professorial lecture as a piece of theatre, as Stephen Emmett is a professor of computational science at Oxford University and also head of Microsoft's Computational Science laboratory in Cambridge.

So expect to see him on your TV screen and in a cinema near you soon: Ten billion is the number we are heading for, the predicted size of the human world population this century, and Emmett's case in the ‘play’ is the ecological cost of so many lives - that we are already "too many".

I went to the UN Environmental Yearbook 2012 to remind myself what the headings for the main ecological costs are. Here is the list:

1. Ozone Layer depletion (Hey, this is the Good News story of the last decade!)

2. Climate Change

3. Natural Resource exhaustion and Biodiversity losses on both Land and Sea: oil, metals, forest cover (etc); fish, fowl and fue (etc); and glacier melt (etc, etc)

4. Fresh Water and Sanitation: including 'water footprint' imbalances

5. Waste and Pollution: chemical, municipal, plastics (etc)

6. Environmental Governance: clean energy policies, carbon trading, product certification (etc)

There is a Good News / Bad News balance, but overwhelmingly it is Bad News.

The UN Yearbook is not permitted to name the "OVERPOPULATION" elephant in the room, nor to explore what will happen when the total human population exceeds its resource base. Stephen Emmett is willing to name it however. His cool computational professorial calculation is the tragic ‘play' - this major catastrophe not of the abrupt kind like an asteroid kind more like slow motion - and his conclusion is that Ten Billion is too many: " In truth, I think we are already fucked", he says.

He also says that he has been told by his science colleagues that at climate conferences these days you will tend to see more senior army offices, and he passes on the advice he received from one scientific colleague about what to tell the next generation: "Teach your son how to use a gun."

I read all this in last Sunday's Observer, and went online to look at the reactions to the article in the comments section. Among the c 200 (and climbing) comments most wanted to play with their calculators arguing over the climate change data, and most of the heat of the argumant was in the to and fro was between climate change sceptics and apocalyptic doom-sayers.

However, there was one notable exception, the comment by JBowers (12 August 1:46am… perhaps he keeps late hours) who focused on the particular connections between climate change and conflict. It is worth digging down the comments section especially to follow the references he provides: I found the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2009) paper 'A Brief History of Climate Change and Conflict' particularly telling among them.

The question remains… for if Professor Emmett is right, and we have we have already stepped irreversibly across the threshold of "too many", the computational calculation is that we may as well abandon the democratic processes towards a political economy of Degrowth, give up on global governance measures, and drop our personal commitments to carbon use reduction, and go and check our gun cupboards... "Must we also abandon Hope, all you who enter here?"