Welcome to my blog.
This would be the final blog on Tunnel vision, the term, however, might keep popping up from time to time.
As discussed in previous blogs, there are three distinct but not necessarily mutually exclusive types of tunnel vision. Spatial Tunnel Vision, Temporal Tunnel vision and Tunnel vision due to lack of knowledge (Agyantaa). The third one being the most relevant and probably in part responsible for the first two.
The basic purpose of my book is to remove “Tunnel vision”. However, it is not that simple.
The fact that most of us Humans, particularly Indians, do not think a lot about Climate breakdown or Global warming while taking most of our decisions, is because of the lack of knowledge about the dangerous scenarios possible with business as usual, with no climate action. The list of catastrophes possible due to climate breakdown is pretty long and this is an inappropriate place to discuss them in detail.
With complete lack of knowledge about it, there is high likelihood that we humans would shove off the responsibility (of causation or action) and put all the blame on something else like the Demon or Shanidev or the Government (although note that the Government is also in a way responsible and is not completely innocent). This finger pointing did happen in Uttarakhand floods, Kerala floods, Mumbai floods, Chennai floods etc. It is a scientific fact that all of these bore, fingerprints of the Climate breakdown and that global warming added to the severity of these events. Flooding is not the only risk possible, there are other more significant risks like draught and thus severe food crisis, famines and wars for shelter, food, and water, a glimpse of it is already visible in countries like Yemen and Syria. Nuclear wars, sea level rise, hurricanes, forest fires, progressive mortality of all green photosynthesizing members due to severe drought and high temperatures and runaway climate change leading to such high temperatures like 8 degrees above normal global average temperature due to positive feedback loops which has potential to lead to complete obliteration of life on Earth or Extinction of Humans are others.
The purpose of this blog or the book is not to scare the hell out of the reader and make him/her follow strict measures. However, knowledge of all the worst case scenarios is highly relevant. There are excellent books (apart from my book) in the market completely dedicated to that which include, “Farewell to ice” by Dr. Peter Wadhams, “Extinction Dialogues” by Guy Mcpherson, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia” by James Lovelock, “the Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas, “Learning to die in the Anthropocene” by Roy Scranton etc. Alternatively, one can read the SR-15 i.e. Status report on 1.5 degrees warming submitted by IPCC which can be downloaded online.
My book, however, is written with a positive outlook, and promotes action rather than inaction or wait and watch.
The fact that this knowledge is highly relevant to deciding the future of our Children means that you should be interested in not only my blog/book, but every possible credible source of information one can get one's hands on to. However, the internet is flooded with articles written by skeptics funded by fossil fuel industry, who look at a small part of the evidence and deny or refuse to look at all the evidence available. Thus one should be careful in selecting what one should read.
There is a term called the halo effect, described by Daniel Kahneman in his book on Psychology called “Thinking, fast and slow”. To discuss it in detail will have to wait for a couple of blogs from now. However, what you chose to read first, does have a halo effect on what you read subsequently. Thus if you read a skeptical article first, you are more likely to be skeptical about anything further which you read, irrespective of whether the first article i.e. the skeptical article was more scientifically correct or the other subsequent ones.
Contrary to one might believe, there is extensive literature and evidence of Global warming and its impacts. A paper by Patrick Brown1, says that the probability of 3 degrees-plus warming is as high as 90% with Business as usual scenario i.e. if extensive climate action is not undertaken. Any warming greater than 1.5 degrees is cataclysmic to ecology and any warming more than 2 degrees would significantly reduce our food production and would be disastrous to humans. Any warming more than 3 degrees has the risk of going into auto-enhancement mode akin to a roller coaster coming down a slope, under gravity without, any need for external power due to positive feedback loops leading to much higher resultant warming. Any warming more than 5 degrees, would go into unknown risks category according to Prof. V Ramanathan2 in one of his paper and can lead to extinction of humans or even extinction of life on Earth. One should remember that a lot of gaps in understanding regarding this positive re-enforcement still remain, as to how fast the warming could progress, and that the melting of Arctic ice and Antarctic ice as shown by studies, has occurred much faster than expected.
A paper by Steffen et al3 named “Trajectories of the Earth system in Anthropocene” given below, commonly known as “the Hothouse Earth” paper, published in PNAS, is an important landmark paper which is freely available on the internet and can be downloaded and read to get an idea of the significance of the problem.
There is a separate section in my book, where “Interesting literature on Global warming and Climate change” can be found. Purpose of this section is to emphasize that a single book, is by itself incapable of completely rooting out Tunnel vision and that lack of knowledge is the primary target which needs to be addressed in pursuit of our goal of solving the enigma of Global warming.
In subsequent blogs, I would attempt to shed light on “how to make out if a source of information is credible or not” and “what to remember while reading about Global warming and why”
So stay tuned.
Written by: Dr. Rohit Kale
Follow on twitter: @RohitKale23
Contact on : drkalerohit23@gmail.com
Website: saveourmotherearth.in
References
1.Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget. Patrick T. Brown, Ken Caldeira Nature volume 552, pages 45–50, 07 December 2017
2.Well below 2°C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes PNAS | September 26, 2017 | vol. 114 | no. 39 | 10315–10323
3.Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, PNAS | July 6, 2018. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115
Author of the book: How the Homo Sapiens Blundered (now available on Amazon India, Flipkart and Infibeam)
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