By Harold Forbes

Anthropogenic Global Warming and the resultant climate change is a real, if difficult, issue for humans. For the first time our understanding of the science of the world and ability to generate knowledge is producing not fun and exciting things like parachutes, airplanes, space rockets, consumer electronics or smart cars, it is telling us that we are on a head long course of destruction not only of industrial civilisation but possibly of life itself. Fixing the problem strikes right to the very heart of what it is to be human: how we relate as individuals to others in society, how we relate as one generation to the next.

Across the globe, most people agree that climate change is a problem: a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found levels of agreement of this ranging from 75% in the US to a near unanimous 97% in Japan. What is much more difficult is to get agreement on what can be done to solve the problem. This has been amply demonstrated at an international level where nearly twenty years of negotiation has not managed to produce much beyond an agreement of intentions. In fact, some people find it very difficult to imagine there might be any form of solution: after all, they argue, if burning fossil fuels is the main source of the problem and modern civilisation is dependent upon the energy released by them, how can we possibly give up burning them?

One of the odd characteristics of the human mind is that it finds it difficult to imagine that situations may be substantially different to how they are today and that, once knowledge is gained, it cannot go away. As late as the 1930′s people thought that it was impossible for a space rocket to break free from the Earth’s gravity while the so-called Dark Ages of history were characterized by a loss of knowledge and understanding of the physical and theoretical world. Our world is one of constant surprises and changing conditions.

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