I live in California near an earthquake fault that is going to “GO” in maybe the next 30 years, and make a big mess of everything out here. I do not see people being adequately prepared for it.

Global warming is a more abstract process, and people are even less prepared. For example, we use a great deal of oil to grow our food, to the extent that growing more food means more global warming.

The difference between us is that I think we could have perceptible “sea level events” within 10 years and sea level events that impact industrial and urban infrastructure within 20 years, with catastrophic impacts from sea level rise within 30 years.

I see a similar urgency in planning for an earthquake and planning for global warming. However, planning for a big earthquake on the Hayward Fault is easy. Planning for global warming is hard. How many people know how to grow food without using a good deal of oil? Not many.

I have admired and learnt much from your blog since discovering it last year, and truly hope that you are recuperating well from last month’s events.

We are just starting to assemble a team of web-savvy, climate change experts, to help build what we hope will gradually mature into a definitive map of the climate change policy debate.

There’s a basic skeleton of the map in place on the site: but, as you will see, there’s much to be done to bring it to maturity.

If the mapping approach we are taking to the debate appeals to you, I would be delighted to guide you through the process of contributing arguments, evidence, and options to the map.

You are welcome to join us in this process at any time; so, if your instinct is that participation now would be anything other than therapeutic, please trust that instinct: we will happily wait.

David

I like what you’ve posted here and I’d like to add a few thoughts of my own along this line.

I believe that as human intelligence advances, it is natural for us to begin to embrace larger circles in our concerns. Me, my family, my village, my town, my city, my state, and my world is a progression that expresses this idea. Most of us are still focused at the family level and most of us are still driven unconsciously by our biological imperatives which means that our deepest motivations concern the preservation and propagation of our own genetic seeds.

But, self consciousness and introspection can advance humans along this progression more quickly. Indeed, when the communist theorists suggested that “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need”, they were promoting a state composed of people who held the good of everyone in the state as their highest good. But, as history has shown, it was an idea far too ahead of its time to have had any chance of success.

The average man thinks ahead to Friday to his paycheck and not much farther. The more intelligent man arranges his behavior and connections at work to secure his advancement within the local structure. An even more intelligent man, goes to university so that when he steps into the world of work, he’s already stepped in at a high level. Some folks never save a dime and others begin their retirement accounts in their twenties. Some folks promote local issues and local politicians whereas others embrace national or global issues. We can see this differentiation of action as a function of intelligence all around us.

When you talk about the “well being and happiness of others”, I sense that you’ve embraced the good of all of us as a species as being the most appropriate field of action. And I applaud your choice.

I tend to think this way as well. But, I’m wary of the “can’t see the forest for the trees” problem we humans are always so blindsided by. So, I make it a conscious and intentional part of my approach to always try to take the highest POV and to free myself of any biases I may have. When I first read about Xenobiology/Exobiology, I found it very interesting because it was an attempt to see biological forms like us from outside of our local prejudices and assumptions. Some Sci-Fi novels like “FootFall” have been quite helpful in thinking about this as have studies on Dolphins like some of the stuff John C. Lilly did.

So, to turn back to the Earth and our local problems here - one of the things I wonder about is why we haven’t heard from other life forms in this galaxy? (think Drake Equation). And I wonder/suspect that it may be because biological evolution usually follows a similar course regardless of where it arises. Chemical self-replication, as it matures and complexifies, engenders a deep urge or biological imperative to survive, to propagate and to protect its progeny until they themselves can propagate. And the purpose of this ‘urge’,of course, is to continue and optimize self-replication. In a survival sense, the ones who would have tended to survive, would have been the very ones in which the urge was most prominent and thus it was conserved and enshrined at the very core of our beings in all of our biological forms here on Earth (and elsewhere where ever life has evolved, I suspect).

Here on Earth, this urge has driven an arms race of biological evolution from the very beginning of biological time with each form trying to out compete each other for resources. As an enabling motivation, the biological imperatives worked well though most of biological time. Until one species stumbled into a series of new adaptations that led to generalize intelligence, the ability to embrace higher abstractions and to possess self-awareness. And then everything changed. The relative balance of power that had tenuously existed among all the evolving forms over time, was suddenly upset by one species with an adaptation which could transcend them all with the ring of intelligence. And this species, brushing off the feeble attempts of the other species to compete, quickly began to expand and fill all the niches and all of the land and to consume the majority of the planet’s resources. Why? Because, in spite of its higher intelligence, Man was and is still driven blindly and unconsciously by the same biological imperatives that have always driven biological forms on this planet - it simply didn’t know when to stop.

So back to Xenobiology/Exobiology and the Drake Equation. Might this sequence be followed widely in the universe where ever life evolves? Personally, I think it probable. This makes the sort of thing that Brownlee and Ward were talking about in their book, “Rare Earth”, more poignant still. Because, if higher forms of life evolve only rarely and then it has an inborn tendency to destroy itself once it evolves to the level of generalized intelligence, then it makes avoiding these mistake ever so much more pressing for us.

So, now to finally return to the points you were making, Fergus. Darfur, Timor, Zimbabwe…? I think not, my friend. They are good motivations but there are much bigger issues on the table here. I’m persuaded that history will probably follow an arc somewhat like the one described recently by James Lovelock who thinks that a very large die off of human beings and a major disruption of the biosphere is coming soon. Against a backdrop like that, Darfur and the other places you listed (in spite of the horrific suffering happening there), will seem as irrelevant in the not too distant future as was the porter who was obsessed with arranging the deck furniture on the Titanic that fateful evening.

So, to me, the deepest issue to understand is what drives us to do what we’re doing to this world? And, once we think we understand that, what can we do with that understanding to alter the course we are on? These questions cut beneath all else and as such, I believe, they are the logical extension of what I was talking about when I began this when I mentioned the progression of “Me, my family, my village, my town, my city, my state, and my world”. I think that the highest good for all of us is best served by asking the deepest questions we can conceive of.