On Global Warming – initial thoughts

• Earth, our only home, is facing the grave crisis of Global Warming. There are two schools of thought – both agreeing that global warming is a reality – crucially holding different beliefs about what is causing it. One group, an increasingly vocal minority, firmly believes that human civilization and especially the industrial model of development is the root cause. The other group, consisting of the silent majority and the captains of current industrial model, insist that any and all changes are part of natural cycles, the world has experienced many times in it's long history.
• The “natural cycles people” refer to the multiple ice-ages and varying sun-spot activity as evidence to debunk, what they consider alarmist cries for change in the way we live! There is data to suggest that Solar activity has indeed increased in the last 100 years or so. Indeed the world has gone through more than one ice-age and related massive ecological changes.
• However, if recorded climate data of last 400 years is seen, then it is evident that the 14 hottest years recorded, have been in the last fifteen years! This can not be explained by “natural cycle”. A tipping point is being reached (if not already crossed) as far as the finely tuned global weather system is concerned.
• There is more than enough evidence to show that the greenhouse gases released in the air as a result of industrial civilization are trapping the heat in the atmosphere and causing the surface temperatures to increase the world-over.
• The current model of industrial development leads to massive urbanization world-over. People choose to cluster around means of livelihood -- which today are these huge mega-cities with their industrial-commercial complexes. These lead to clearing of forests, growth of paved surfaces, large amount of construction – urban sprawl. The normal materials used not only have no capacity to participate in the recycling that natural ecosystems do, but make a bad situation worse by the way they reflect and trap heat!
• The CFC fiasco is well established. What we used routinely for cooling our hot homes and commercial establishments was actually puncturing the ozone layer, up there, and resulting in increasing UV radiation reaching the surface of earth! Folks in Australia are paying the heaviest price in terms of increased incidence of skin cancer.
• Nuclear fuel was being pushed as the silent, renewable energy source. We have seen the after effects of Chernoybl in the recent past and also of the Hiroshima / Nagasaki twin bombs. We still have no way of safely disposing the deadly toxic / radioactive waste.
  There are folks in the ecological movement who believe that a technology will get invented which will help us live the way we do and yet not create all this waste. The problem they think can be solved by just 2R – reuse and recycle.
• My personal opinion, and that of many others of the Deep Ecology view is that it simply is too little, too late. The third R is required – Reduce!
• Reduce consumption immediately. We are producing far too much waste. In fact there are already probably twice as many humans as the earth can sustain. The number of species dying off daily is staggering.
• Actually the global warming is the most visible sign of the pain that mother Earth is experiencing. We have indeed become the cancer which is consuming the host. Unless we change our ways, one of the two things is inevitable – either we as a species will be wiped out and something new will take our place or we will take down the planet with us!! Either way “business-as-usual” is a surefire way of killing ourselves, certainly our children and the possibility of any meaningful life for their children!!
• Enough studies, everywhere have shown what needs to be done, how and why. The issue is not about what to do but choosing to do what we know we must do. We must reduce consumption, choose a more sustainable life-style all over.
• Today's economy is predicated on growth – on all of us, and more of us consuming more and more! Our modes of production create far more waste than useful goods. The linear model of industrial civilization is taking us straight to our graves!
• We have enough money in totality to feed and clothe everyone. The key issue here is the concentration of the most in the hands of the few. The rich are getting richer in money terms, the poor even more desperate but the unacknowledged tragedy is that our shared home, Mother Earth, is infinitely poorer and increasingly getting worse!!
• What is required to tackle the global warming and the underlying grave ecological crisis is to live sensibly, with sensitivity, making sustainability as the focus. We owe it to ourselves, the generations to come to make this big shift. NOW is the time! We must embark on this journey so that we create (Actually restore is more like it) the home that this earth is meant to be for all living beings – not just humans!
• The Mother earth is much stronger than us. If we choose to heed her alarm bells, in the form of massive climate changes and species extinction, great. If we don't, this industrial-commercial exploitative civilization will simply be wiped out. For evolution ruthlessly experiments – that which sustains life as a whole continues, everything else is just more material to be recycled in the infinitely regenerative processes of the Natural (Divine?) systems.
  
• Choice is clear – we change course now or die as a civilization!!