A Warmer World, An Altered Human Mind

BIMBO CABIDOG

In a lyrical short story first published in Esquire magazine, August 1936, the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro were immortalized by Nobel Prize author Ernest Hemmingway. As it stands today, the beautiful wintry scene at the zenith of the highest mountain in Africa may not last anymore.

Mt. Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano located in Tanzania. Enchanting artists and plain visitors of yore, its pristine white cap now melts when it shouldn’t. The scene of breath-taking allure painted by the great novelist Hemmingway in the canvass of his prose is on the way to vanishing. This is due to the hotter than usual climate across the Dark Continent.

With such trend continuing everywhere, what will the world be in 2040 or 2050? It is an issue as RAGING as the Muslim jihad phenomenon in the capitals of the west. It conjures a scenario where no other than mankind may have suicide-bombed itself.

In March 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a Fifth Assessment Report detailing the broader impacts of an increasingly warmer earth on water resource, food production, and other natural and human social systems. The report also indicated the world’s vulnerability in different areas, regions and key risks over the future.

The scientific community has long held that the entire food chain can be decimated to a vast extent, and the human species itself endangered, if temperature rise will go on. Global warming poses a more serious threat to civilization than Islamic extremism. Climate terror is upon mankind.

For those in Africa, a hotter world was a matter of grave concern as early as ten years ago. In 2006, governmental and civil society leaders here held a summit attended by then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. The assembly intended to discuss and come up with a response action plan to the heat that was wreaking havoc on the region.

A warmer clime automatically triggers the spread of diseases and makes the natural food supply more precarious. In Kenya, one province was severely hit by flooding due to altered weather. In some places like Turkana, sun blasted plains threatened to extinguish an extraordinary culture.

That was several years before Supertyphoon Yolanda lashed. On November 08, 2013 the world came to great shock and grief when the tropical cyclone described as the strongest storm on record hit Eastern Samar and Northeastern Leyte, Philippines. Around 8,000 inhabitants at once perished in the city of Tacloban and the towns of Guiuan, Palo and Tanauan.

The catastrophe was brought by combined maximum sustained winds of 285 kilometers per hour and 15-foot waves surging inland from the sea. Almost everyone agreed that this was what climate change is already all about. The ferocious winds and crushing waves of Yolanda couldn’t have happened if not for the despoliation of weather systems by rising global temperature.

Over the last 100 years, the earth has warmed by about .6 degree centigrade. But crossing to the third millennium, deep concern has begun to be expressed by various circles including the scientific community on the unabated trend of global temperature rise especially among the developed countries.

If the heat yet climbs up by three degrees and because of the melting polar ice caps sea levels rise by 7 meters, where will humans go? Oceans invading higher elevations can easily displace 100 million people all over the globe.

Meanwhile, on the remaining dry land, already degraded environments will scorch, water bodies will disappear, and vegetation will become thinner and thinner. All over Asia and Africa, this has already manifested in lakes drying up and expanses of cropland being claimed by desertification.

With estuary, coastal area and lowland flooding on the one hand, and high aridity on the other, most species including Homo sapiens could already go the way of the dinosaur.

Of course a lot of people know it. The apocalyptic effects of global warming are not an imaginary ghost story by the old folks to scare the young into behaving and bundling themselves in a corner. The futuristic scenario is for real. The world of man will crash, if temperature rise is not halted. The latter part of the present century alone may well see the prophetic end of days.

How will societies deal with the threat? There are two ways. One is knowing how and preparing to adapt. Human populations and settlements will have to drastically alter patterns in the advent of unbearably hotter environs paired by vast areas under water. Living then will not be what it used to be. With substantial amenities absent, things may beat back to the Stone Age.

What are examples to prepare for? Housing and food procurement will border on frontier extremes. Scarcities will be the norm dramatically impacting on lifestyles. Climate events beyond control will shrink families and communities and exact a huge psychological toll. Quality of life can recede to the hunting-gathering stage.

How to cope up or survive under these conditions will be more central than how to earn a living.

But before we get there, we are presented a wiser second way to deal with the nightmare. This is to prevent it from happening. Respond to global warming now, not later. Cool down the heater. Stop doing what you used to do.

What exactly has to be stopped? It is the furnace from churning more heat. The furnace is the deposit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap radiation from the sun. They are the carbon emissions from industrial and biological waste. They should subside or stop.

Reducing or stopping outright carbon emissions is of course easier said than done. That will take uprooting of most of the ways civilization has been going on for the past three centuries. Salient among this is the reshaping of culture and reconfiguring of human-social needs after the industrial revolution. Social modernization, driven by runaway industrial production and highly consumptive lifestyle, would give rise to the use of energy and resources at unprecedented levels.

As culture turns more and more to artificial means of satisfaction, burning in all spheres of human activity would increase thousand-fold especially with the extraction of oil from the bowels of the earth. With this, prodigious volumes of byproduct in harmful gases would be spewed out. In the case of carbons, they would remain suspended in air and trap solar heat. 

Confronted by overheating machinr and human activity, cultures must start to veer away from modes of living dependent on huge consumption of energy. Industry for one may have to slow down. Demanding lifestyles, such as having a car and motoring to places may have to be forgone. Eating hamburger in fast-food stands that take supply of raw material at the expense of decimating natural ecosystems may have to exit.

The climate time bomb is on. The world is a boiling magma of energy turning every facet of human life from ceaseless industrial production to culture characterized by highly artificial urban living. As this hot core of need and satisfaction churns the goods and services the present historical social development requires, the earth nears explosion.

Energy generation and consumption must wind down. It may have to address already just what man directly needs, not what a whole gamut of activity at putting up the industrial economic base and the social superstructures needs. This entails a sort of back-to-nature reprogramming, living simply, and going by the basics.

Human life needs a reboot. Old habituated practices have to be kicked out. The usual behaviors, attitudes and tendencies that demand so much especially in destroying the natural biophysical environment have to be discarded. Aims and aspirations and even rationale for living must be changed. The concept and conduct of being human themselves have to take some paradigm shift.

How deep should change get? It may have to turn man back to the mode of living in the period of Adam and Eve, before the fall. This means living in harmony with nature, on what nature provides. It doesn’t dare alter the vast array of creation and its internal laws of motion – the interaction of elements therein and growth, which the limited human mind neither engineered nor significantly knew.

The world is what it is today, in great peril and racing towards self-destruct, because of the altered mind of man which kept on changing it, not for better, but for worse. The answer to global warming and the need to deflect its apocalyptic outcome may be what Paul in Roman 12:2 said: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”