Yellow bile

I’ve been reading the Summary for Policymakers of the First Part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (catchy title). There is some good news in it – Antarctica isn’t getting hotter, apparently. Also, in the language of the report, “it is very unlikely that the MOC [meridional overturning circulation of the Atlantic Ocean] will undergo a large abrupt transition in the twenty-first century”. In other words, the Gulf Stream is not going to spontaneously shut down a la The Day After Tomorrow. This is as close as the report comes to cracking a joke. It could slow down by twenty-five percent, though, even in one of their more optimistic scenarios – A1B, which imagines a world of “increased social and cultural interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income”. Wouldn’t that be nice? However the cooling of the North Atlantic by the reduced Gulf Stream will be more than offset by increases due to global warming.

The various future scenarios were my favourite part of the report - possibly because they’re the most imaginative part of it, and they got me imagining. The world of B1 sounds alright to me: “rapid change in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity and the introduction of clean and resource efficient technologies. The emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social and evironmental sustainability, including improved equity”. But my money would be on scenario A2: “a very heterogenous world. The underlying theme is self reliance and preservation of local identities ... Economic growth is primarily regionally oriented and per capita economic growth and technological change more fragmented and slower than other storylines.”

It’s worth reading the report: it’s not too hard to follow, and a lot of the comments in the media have nothing to do with anything in the report, which is factual and quantified throughout. My favourite dumb reaction – apart from a hilarious indirect quote that the Sydney Morning Herald attributed to Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, that “people needed to learn how to adapt to hotter temperatures” – has been our Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, who says that "Three degrees will be a disaster for all life on Earth. We will lose somewhere between two out of every 10 and six out of every 10 species living on the planet at that level of warming." I would love to know where he got these numbers from, I think he's pulled them out of his ass. I’ve given Tim Flannery the benefit of the doubt up until now, because he’s on the right side and his heart is in the right place, but he’s either deliberately scaremongering or he’s a very bad scientist. Six out of ten species disapearing due to three degrees of global warming is absurd. The Cretaceous extinction only took out fifty percent of the world’s species, and it needed an asteroid ten kilometres wide and a dust cloud that blocked the sun for a few years and stopped all photosynthesis.

Not that a sudden rise in average temperature and a vastly altered rainfall pattern is going to be good for species biodiversity. Species occupying highly specific niches, with limited geographic distribution, will be in a lot of trouble – but then they always are, when global temperatures change. As for us, old H sapiens, who I’m parochial enough to care about most – I don’t think we’re going to go extinct, at least not because of global warming. The report notes that 125,000 years ago sea levels were likely 4 to 6 metres higher than at present, and temperatures 3-5 degrees warmer. (Somebody tell Tim Flannery). Homo sapiens was doing alright for itself back then – that's about when we left Africa for the first time.

Of course things are a little different now – there’s five billion people, and we live where the water is. This is what the report doesn’t have, what I don’t understand, and what I can’t really imagine – what happens when the world gets warmer, when the sea levels rise, when the crops don’t grow where they used to? Obviously, you don’t want to be living in Venice, or on a coral atoll, but I can’t imagine whether it’s something we will gradually adjust to, or whether it will be a root cause for wars, famines, population migrations, and the end of civilization as we know it. Hopefully the report of Working Group II in April will enlighten me on some of these matters. Like most people, just the thought that we’ve fucked up the atmosphere so badly that it is having these effects scares me, and makes me think we should do something in a hurry. Although, I suppose, we still haven’t altered the atmosphere as much as cyanobacteria did a few billion years ago. Good thing they did, too: they made all that oxygen.

The other thing I’ve been reading is a book written by an anonymous Russian peasant, called The Way of the Pilgrim. It is the book Franny is reading in the eponymous short story by J D Salinger I was talking about a couple of blog entries ago. It advocates continuous prayer. Why am I reading it? Because it sounded interesting when Franny talked about it, and because I have 20,000 books, and one of the nice things about this is that occasionally you will read a reference to something you think you might like to read, and then you discover that you already own it. I was pretty optimistic that we'd have this one – we own a lot of Christian dogma.

It’s quite a charming little book, although I doubt I’ll finish it. It has made me think about prayer, though, which being a fairly sceptical agnostic is not something I’ve ever thought about much. The sort of prayer this book advocates is a kind of ceaseless mantra that has a lot in common (as Franny points out) with chants and meditations from Buddhism and other religions. But it has also made me think about traditional prayer, and I wonder if it is something we miss when we abandon religion. Not the communication with a supernatural God - more the routine of putting one’s thoughts and hopes in order and expressing them in a sincere and penitent fashion. There might be value in that. Of course it made me think of what I’m doing on this blog at the moment – I already thought of it as a sort of penance, but I think it might be also be a kind of secular prayer. (Wow, this whole paragraph seemed a lot more profound in my head than it does when I type it).

I don't want to give the impression that I’m being entirely cerebral and meditative and generally wonderful at the moment. Tim (who by the way has just written a terrific blog entry that is both more interesting, and shorter, than this one) said my blog, at the moment, is like somebody putting things together. I think he meant in terms of writing, but it's also true in terms of life. I feel a lot better than I did towards the end of last year (when I thought I was feeling good, but was actually a little manic and crazed – it happens that way sometimes). But I still don't think the humours are totally in alignment. If I was a medieval doctor, I would diagnose myself as a little choleric. A definate excess of yellow bile – how did they treat that, anyway? Specifically:

The other day I nearly got in a fistfight with the postman. The post, at work, is usually delivered by a nice woman, with whom I share a running joke – we joke about whether I have bills, or cheques. In truth this joke got a little old for me about eighteen months ago, but the post lady seems to enjoy it, and she’s nice, so I have a little chuckle with her about it when she brings the mail. Occasionally, though, she is off, and then the post is delivered by an evil little munchkin who doesn’t like me, and whom I don’t like. The point of contention is this – both Plup, and the assholes upstairs, are at number 83. The regular post lady gives me my mail, and puts the neighbours mail in their mailslot. The evil munchkin refuses to do this. He give it all to me. I have explained to him many times than the Chinese names, and strange electronics companies, are next door, but he takes no notice.

The other day I was standing out the front of the shop and the munchkin came up and thrust a letter at me. I quickly glanced at it and saw it was for an electronics company. I made no move to take the envelope from him.

“Not ours,” I said.

“You’re 83, aren’t you?” he said – aggressively.

“We’re not Electrocomputing,” I said.

“Well, take it and write that out,” he said.

I was standing in front of the neighbours’ door, which has a slot in it marked letters. I pointed to it. “It goes right there,” I said.

At this point the munchkin reached past me and tossed the envelope into my shop, then moved on towards the next place.

“God, you’re a dickhead,” I said, not particularly quietly.

He came back. He got right up close to my face. “What did you say?”

“I said you’re a dickhead,” I said, emphasising the last word and clearly enunciating both syllables.

My second-hand book dealing mentor was standing next to me and he said “Hey!” – I think to both of us. We glared at each other and he walked off. I was ready to go, though. A couple of years ago I decided that I should get myself into a fistfight if a suitable opportunity arose. It’s a male rite-of-passage that I feel I should experience. Ever since, I’ve been kind of on the lookout for some not-too physically superior jerk who might be pushed into throwing a punch at me.

It’s a slightly different resolution to one I made back in high school – at a not particularly wonderful point in my life – that I wouldn’t let myself be bullied, and that it was better to get beaten up than feel intimidated and ashamed. When I’ve discussed this with people they are often surprised that I haven’t been in lots of fights – they seem to think I have a smart mouth – but then up until I made my (only semi-serious) resolution a couple of years ago I never went looking to get hit; I just refused to be intimidated, and was quite content to use whatever verbal skills I have to extricate myself from situations. The truth is I’ve only ever been hit once – and I didn’t hit back. It’s something I’ve always regretted.

posted by Nicholas @ 10:30 PM