A Lesson In Humility

A Lesson in Humility
A Book Review of Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What It Means for Our Future

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/fre...humanity.shtml

(Gold9472: Doom and gloom warning...)

by Michael C. Ruppert
8/19/2005

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” -- Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

August 17, 2005 0800 PST (FTW) -- There is no hyperbole or alarmism anywhere in this book. This is truly a case where the understatement of fact is a bludgeon; an elegant and frightening bludgeon. Now and forevermore drop any illusion, conscious or otherwise, that global climate change is a long, slow, irrelevant process. And forevermore drop any belief that science, as articulated by the human mind, is the final or complete answer to anything.

I won’t tell you what John D. Cox didn’t say until the very end.

Cox, a seasoned journalist writing with silky aplomb, lays out scientific facts discovered over the last ninety years in a way that sets the reader up for a seemingly endless warehouse of other shoes dropping on our comfortable notions about how this planet behaves (and has behaved for millennia). The earth is a living thing.

The book really operates on two levels. It starts with the courageous (and ultimately fatal) research of German scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912 who speculated that the Greenland Ice Shelf might contain a detailed record of earth’s climate history going back several hundred thousand years. It follows with a detailed history of how science – ever reluctant to challenge sacred bovines – has come to make a series of discoveries demonstrating that Mother Earth can be fickle, unpredictable and very rapid in her “mood swings”. As the scientific discoveries unfold, a whole new reality appears showing that, even without the gross anthropogenic “tinkering” of modern man in the form of greenhouse gasses, deforestation, and pollution, mankind is about as secure on this planet as were the dinosaurs, the Saber-toothed tiger and the Trilobite.

So much for our supremacy.

On another level however, Climate Crash is also an exposé of the arrogance and myopic self-centeredness of the human ego. While giving due honor and praise to scientists who fought against the grain to establish that global climate collapses can occur in as little as one year, it leaves elegantly unsaid the fact that had mankind not been so in love with convenient scientific constructs, it might now stand a better chance of survival as we face a real climate collapse that has already begun in earnest.

I wish that all of our discussions and pontifications about Peak Oil, about politics and economics could be divorced from one underlying assumption: that human intelligence is the sine qua non of the universe.

Even as we analyze and speculate endlessly about current events, we still assume that we humans can figure it out and hence control it. That is where our collective fear (False Evidence Appearing Real) drives us. It is unthinkable to us that anything might be superior in consciousness or power to the human mind.

There is no spiritual (as opposed to religious) humility in our analyses. There is no awareness that humans simply cannot control the universe (and shouldn't). We are as guilty as the elites we criticize for failing to place ourselves humbly within a universe where all things are connected and where many things are more powerful than intellect, will or industry. We are “the powers that be” – our own worst enemies – and we reinforce the same basic error endlessly.

There are many realities other than the human intellect and ironically, science has proved this (e.g. The Tao of Physics). These realities do actually manifest in our limited world view; they influence it, change it and then we dismiss them glibly, ignore them, or denigrate them simply because we won’t admit that we can't understand (control) them.

A good definition of the word humility is "teachable". It implies listening rather than talking. It demands a broader consciousness. It demands a surrender.

We assume rational behavior in all of our conceptually defined human players because we are afraid of understanding or accepting irrational behavior; because irrational behavior threatens our own self image as Gods: definers of reality. I saw a good quote the other day from Chalmers Johnson, “The danger is to believe that Washington knows what it is doing.”

We act and think as though we are isolated from the rest of the universe, our environment, other living things, or the planet on which we live. We treat ourselves as a closed system with no exterior feedback loops and the universe treats us accordingly. How arrogant is that? How dysfunctional? How successful has mankind been? How many human civilizations have collapsed before us: “industrialized man”?

Yet still we behave as if "This time it will be different." That's a classic definition of insanity. Arrogance will be the "cause of death" on Homo Sapiens' cosmic Death Certificate.

Some things cannot and should not be completely understood by the human mind simply because the human mind (on an intellectual basis) is not capable of it. Feelings, emotions, natural and spiritual realms are just as real as the intellect and industrialized man has systematically cut itself off from what I believe is the only truly "rational" approach available: integration on all levels with the world around us.

What the human race needs is reconciliation with the universe and a willingness to trust something other than its own mind. Otherwise, the only thing we really worship is ourselves and it seems as though there is paltry little meat on a bone which we chew endlessly and with increasing fervor, receiving ever shrinking amounts of nourishment as desperation sinks in.

Now here’s what Mr. Cox didn’t say.

FORTUNE magazine wrote in a January 26, 2004 feature article titled The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare:

As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.

The same Pentagon report which sparked the FORTUNE article soon prompted another major story in Britain's The Observer which labeled the Pentagon report on Climate Collapse released in 2004 as “Secret”. After describing apocalyptic climate change triggered by global warming and the collapse of the Gulf Stream an important observation was buried in deep in the text.

By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war.

Let them that have eyes, see. Let them that have ears, hear. Let those that can read, study this book and begin to think about survival. Not for our sake, but for the sake of all of the souls we have brought into this world; the souls we will leave behind us. The quality of mercy be not strained and perhaps mankind might get one more chance at true evolution.

And the next time you hear or see CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post try to reassure you that climate change is something that takes centuries, pick up the phone and demand that someone be fired for crimes against life. You might also do that the next time you see them report that oil will not peak for another ten to fifteen years.

Planet earth is a living thing. Its lungs are the Amazonian rain forests. Its heart is the core and the magnetic field that surrounds us and protects us. It is capable of eradicating the human race in a heartbeat and all the more likely to do so if we continue to infect it and keep trying to kill it. Our debts are coming due today.