Climate Justice and its hidden Instructions
Author: Otto Ulrich and Gunhild Jellinek
Otto Ulrich; Gunhild Jellinek
Climate Justice and its hidden Instructions
The re-emergence of Dawn behind the cloudy surfaces of Twilight and the density of Night
Prelude
Climate change is only just beginning. The actual new data about the growing greenhouse gas emissions show that the coming “Copenhagen-Treaty 2009” will be too late, without a chance to influence the ongoing process already running in the atmosphere, triggered by the CO2-emissions of the last 200 years. The world will see most probably in the next 20 to 30 years an increase of so-called “Climate Refugees” – several 100 million people, mostly from costal areas, who have lost their living conditions as consequence of Global Warming: sea-level rise, intensive storms and flood disasters.
This human crisis might be instrumental to lead to a DAWN of a new awakening: Climate Justice will be reachable, the old western countries like the EU and USA – historically the most driving forces of Global Warming – will have to take over their responsibility to develop a “Culture of Hospitality”: to give those coming homeless environmentally-induced migrants a new home - finally this will foster a growing world consciousness.
The apparent Night in its groping for its inherent Dawn
It can`t be true, there is no mistake, all was done properly - the data are clear, without ambiguity, yet the consequences are incomprehensible. Looking at the newest data, the combat against the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is already lost. Since the year 2000 the concentration of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has increased to such an extent which nobody has ever expected.
Quite incredible -- how big a change of the outer natural conditions are we to envisage?
This scenario appears in fact like a message from a different star, in the light of what is being announced to the world, whether in the World Climate Conference in Posen or in the recent Climate Conference in Brussels last December: What tired diplomats and unknown experts from 180 countries have decided on those conferences, is courageously being announced as success: Namely, that for the next so important World Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the international architecture is being prepared, that everything is being made ready to bring out in next December a new international Climate-Treaty.
Of course hope is being kindled also by pronouncing, that the aim set by the EU during their last climate sitting in Brussels: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent until 2020, is now reachable. Especially so through the input of Billions of Euros, which have been invested into the conversion of the smoky East European Powerhouses.
Yet in the light of the dramatic events upon our heads this makes the impression of a misguided joke - could it be in the end, that a new envisionment of the future, not a technological micro-management seems the one thing necessary. As thinkers have found out today already: Less global Warming needs more (Climate-)Justice!
Even if this sounds radical, and is certainly not politically correct thinking, it could be a way .. Is it a way out?
The facts: In 100 years 4 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature
That what happened 15000 years back, at the end of the last glacial period, - an increase in earth temperature by 5 degrees Celsius, is now threatening us to occur within only one century. In spite of all political rhetoric, somewhat successive climate conferences, insistent warnings from the side of scientists, exciting newspaper headlines,- there are no signs that the climate chemistry above our heads will behave politically correct, in the way we, the humans calculate and proclaim.
Two years back, on 2nd February 2007, - it seems already so long ago - the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Convention, the IPCC read out its actual report about the situation of the earth atmosphere - in those days the future of the anthropogenic Global Warming seemed as yet steerable: One needed only - so the official protocol - to adjust the Kyoto-Climate Protocol which anyway was phasing out**, to a new adequate basis: So the present meeting in Posen was envisaged, and so also the next meeting in Copenhagen.
In this way, with the new agreement, one could, starting from the year 2013, begin regularly to reduce the greenhouse gases worldwide, - 3 percent per year - as the British formulated it so exemplary for their country in their recent Climate Change law of 2008.
How far does this calculation work? Will the scientific laws of the physics of the atmosphere really conform to the political laws, to modern computer simulations or to the laws of the world-market? Can even a Barack Obama force this ever faster driving train into a different direction, when he will speak in front of the world auditorium in Copenhagen in an able manner, as is being proposed now, appealing to a joint action of all.
Still the EU doctrine holds true, which was also shared by the IPCC, which says that an increase in global temperature above 2 degrees Celsius is being regarded as dangerous and intolerable, not without reason..!
Where do we stand now, in 2009?
We have had from 1840 onwards an increase of global warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius and an estimated extra 0.5C is guaranteed because of extra emissions today. It is getting quite tight even with this calculation which is still being pronounced as ok.
In other words: In 1840 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts CO2 in one million parts air – called parts per million, or ppm. Today this important indicator has risen upto 381 ppm per million – in only about 170 years. The scientists speak of an upper limit, which is 450 ppm by the year 2050, and should not be exceeded. This near target: 450 ppm by the year 2050 seems just still internationally negotiable by politicians.
To speak about any greater increase seems politically incorrect, unimaginable: 650 ppm in 2100 and a global temperature rise by around 4 degree Celsius – as scientists already discuss, nobody wants to speak about in public.
The first dusk of a dawn should not blind us to search further
Even when the melody of a coming green industrial revolution can be heard now everywhere, and has become like a mantra of an apparently quick road to solution, it is only a first step. It is certainly bewitching us by its palpability, yet more so than offering true orientation Certainly this will be the main tune we will be hearing, as it has started from Al Gore, will be supported rightly by Barack Obama, and will be heard also at the next Climate Conference in Copenhagen. It is the kind of solution which the industrialised world is able to present.
After all it is this type of bandage which has always worked, a solution in the way of technical improvements or alterations, which brought Western Civilisation to its glimmering success called progress, even when today this success is unfortunately becoming more and more tasteless. For now the point is, as Yvo de Boer, the foremost climate protector of the United Nations has formulated it, “…to take a bypass in the evolution of humanity”. Thus as the New York governor David Paterson, specialised in his town as savings commissioner, makes it a point to enact necessary savings programs drastically: “We will have to change our whole culture”, he opines. In this he has certainly, even perhaps unintended, the worldwide growing economic crisis on his side.
Could it mean that the current global fiscal crisis bears in it a chance to cure the atmosphere, the best chance to introduce new economic principles? For instance: A world with a resource friendly democracy over goods and their production, a cornerstone for a transparent Culture of Contentment.
We should remove the winkers from our eyes which keep us blind, because they make us believe that we can save “our civilisation” with the help of technical means alone. This old paradigm creates the ungrounded hope in us, that placebos will be sufficient to lead us in the desired direction, that ongoing consumerism instead of humanism is empowering the human consciousness.
Truly there seems no other way than to think anew – not in the way of technological answers, but for new creative solutions: The real challenge before us may very well be cultural and spiritual, which bears the chance for change and to grow together as world family. Still we have not started even: Climate Justice. It is persistently being ignored internationally as a task for the future to be faced!
Savitri: „And God`s long nights are justified by dawn.“
The wisdom of Albert Einstein: “We will not be able to solve problems on the same level on which they have arisen”, is unfortunately disregarded today. We are seeking for solutions for the problems of tomorrow and day after tomorrow with our experience of yesterday, we don’t look where the light points to. Yet the search for solutions which will be useful for the world should start just there.
Unfortunately again any efforts in a new direction have first to pass all the filters of conformity, past the guards warding the system to remain as it is. We are searching for the New on a level which seems controllable. But the technological trap into which our western and westernised civilisation has manipulated us - more technologies, even renewable, more efficient and more complex - will not help us to overcome the results of the old technology. We need a “Culture of Prevention”, Climate adaptation is at first a cultural challenge – we have to recognise, the coming new “Copenhagen-Treaty” can’t stop the global rising of temperature within the next few years – CO2, once in the atmosphere, needs 55 to 200 years for decomposition – the sea-level will rise further, the glaciers in the Himalaya will keep melting, the floods will rise higher – and the environmental-induced migration is coming on the international agenda: it can be assumed that the number of environmental migrants will substantially rise in future due to the impacts of climate change. The so-called developing countries will be affected in particular, an increase in drought, soil degrading and growing water scarcity in combination with high population growth, unstable institutions, poverty and a high level of dependency on agriculture means, makes them easier vulnerable in case of intense climatic changes, and more prone to environmental migration on a bigger scale.
Most environmental migrations are initially likely to occur within national borders. Trans-boundary environmental migration will mainly take the form of south-south migration, but Europe and USA must also expect substantially increased migratory pressure from regions most at risk from climate change – and here the old developed and mainly coal-fuelled economic world regions, USA and Europe, have to develop a Culture of Hospitality, this hopefully will foster what is meant with world consciousness.
This will open the doors to “Equal emissions for All”, only then Climate Justice will propel what is called world family, maybe only then we can cure our patiently waiting Brother Atmosphere.
Conclusion:
The most binding Law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature than in the Spirit
(Sri Aurobindo)
Talking about dusk, night and intermittent sprinkles of partial dawns and the momentous flaming up of Agni, the purifying energy cooking in silence in the womb of night, -- it is to wait to observe the right time, the right direction pointed by the Lord of Nature. For it is He who alone has the power to set right that what has moved out of its structure perhaps to embrace greater convergences, a greater coherence of the often too unconscious human, housing the conscious godhead within, in regard to his friend and companion: Mother Nature by his side imbibed too by the inherent Godhead waiting to be respected instead of sucked out to its last drops by humanities greed.
As the Mother observed even so many years ago:
“The Civilisation which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of mind, mind dealing with matter and life…But a new reign is coming, the reign of the spirit.”
The materialistic money- and comfort oriented thinking having dominated large part of humanity and still doing so along with the solutions it offers, is apparently a shortcut, really a dawn veiled in the thicket of dusk. Its fallacies become only too clear in the light of coming dawns, the veils put before our consciousness so long we are moving on the used up ruts of logic, numbers, comfort and habits –before the light of true intuitive and inspired solutions is allowed to dawn (appear)
As it is said also: “The night is darkest before the dawn”— don’t we have to expect a bright dawn, in the uncovering of the falsehoods which seem not tired to paint a picture of half truth, of the truth of more rights for the rich, more effectivity through manipulation of nature, covering our greed for more and more control of the majority of earth spaces and population with the label of helping the materially poorer parts of humanity.
´The Shining ones today showed (us) the Delight
Let the Panis sleep inside the lightless place, they shouldn’t wake from within the Darkness`
(RV 4.51.3)
´O Dawn, today with your light you have opened wide the gates of heaven (for us) (RV. I.92.15)`
Climate Justice and its hidden Instructions
The re-emergence of Dawn behind the cloudy surfaces of Twilight and the density of Night
Prelude
Climate change is only just beginning. The actual new data about the growing greenhouse gas emissions show that the coming “Copenhagen-Treaty 2009” will be too late, without a chance to influence the ongoing process already running in the atmosphere, triggered by the CO2-emissions of the last 200 years. The world will see most probably in the next 20 to 30 years an increase of so-called “Climate Refugees” – several 100 million people, mostly from costal areas, who have lost their living conditions as consequence of Global Warming: sea-level rise, intensive storms and flood disasters.
This human crisis might be instrumental to lead to a DAWN of a new awakening: Climate Justice will be reachable, the old western countries like the EU and USA – historically the most driving forces of Global Warming – will have to take over their responsibility to develop a “Culture of Hospitality”: to give those coming homeless environmentally-induced migrants a new home - finally this will foster a growing world consciousness.
The apparent Night in its groping for its inherent Dawn
It can`t be true, there is no mistake, all was done properly - the data are clear, without ambiguity, yet the consequences are incomprehensible. Looking at the newest data, the combat against the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is already lost. Since the year 2000 the concentration of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has increased to such an extent which nobody has ever expected.
Quite incredible -- how big a change of the outer natural conditions are we to envisage?
This scenario appears in fact like a message from a different star, in the light of what is being announced to the world, whether in the World Climate Conference in Posen or in the recent Climate Conference in Brussels last December: What tired diplomats and unknown experts from 180 countries have decided on those conferences, is courageously being announced as success: Namely, that for the next so important World Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the international architecture is being prepared, that everything is being made ready to bring out in next December a new international Climate-Treaty.
Of course hope is being kindled also by pronouncing, that the aim set by the EU during their last climate sitting in Brussels: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent until 2020, is now reachable. Especially so through the input of Billions of Euros, which have been invested into the conversion of the smoky East European Powerhouses.
Yet in the light of the dramatic events upon our heads this makes the impression of a misguided joke - could it be in the end, that a new envisionment of the future, not a technological micro-management seems the one thing necessary. As thinkers have found out today already: Less global Warming needs more (Climate-)Justice!
Even if this sounds radical, and is certainly not politically correct thinking, it could be a way .. Is it a way out?
The facts: In 100 years 4 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature
That what happened 15000 years back, at the end of the last glacial period, - an increase in earth temperature by 5 degrees Celsius, is now threatening us to occur within only one century. In spite of all political rhetoric, somewhat successive climate conferences, insistent warnings from the side of scientists, exciting newspaper headlines,- there are no signs that the climate chemistry above our heads will behave politically correct, in the way we, the humans calculate and proclaim.
Two years back, on 2nd February 2007, - it seems already so long ago - the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Convention, the IPCC read out its actual report about the situation of the earth atmosphere - in those days the future of the anthropogenic Global Warming seemed as yet steerable: One needed only - so the official protocol - to adjust the Kyoto-Climate Protocol which anyway was phasing out**, to a new adequate basis: So the present meeting in Posen was envisaged, and so also the next meeting in Copenhagen.
In this way, with the new agreement, one could, starting from the year 2013, begin regularly to reduce the greenhouse gases worldwide, - 3 percent per year - as the British formulated it so exemplary for their country in their recent Climate Change law of 2008.
How far does this calculation work? Will the scientific laws of the physics of the atmosphere really conform to the political laws, to modern computer simulations or to the laws of the world-market? Can even a Barack Obama force this ever faster driving train into a different direction, when he will speak in front of the world auditorium in Copenhagen in an able manner, as is being proposed now, appealing to a joint action of all.
Still the EU doctrine holds true, which was also shared by the IPCC, which says that an increase in global temperature above 2 degrees Celsius is being regarded as dangerous and intolerable, not without reason..!
Where do we stand now, in 2009?
We have had from 1840 onwards an increase of global warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius and an estimated extra 0.5C is guaranteed because of extra emissions today. It is getting quite tight even with this calculation which is still being pronounced as ok.
In other words: In 1840 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts CO2 in one million parts air – called parts per million, or ppm. Today this important indicator has risen upto 381 ppm per million – in only about 170 years. The scientists speak of an upper limit, which is 450 ppm by the year 2050, and should not be exceeded. This near target: 450 ppm by the year 2050 seems just still internationally negotiable by politicians.
To speak about any greater increase seems politically incorrect, unimaginable: 650 ppm in 2100 and a global temperature rise by around 4 degree Celsius – as scientists already discuss, nobody wants to speak about in public.
The first dusk of a dawn should not blind us to search further
Even when the melody of a coming green industrial revolution can be heard now everywhere, and has become like a mantra of an apparently quick road to solution, it is only a first step. It is certainly bewitching us by its palpability, yet more so than offering true orientation Certainly this will be the main tune we will be hearing, as it has started from Al Gore, will be supported rightly by Barack Obama, and will be heard also at the next Climate Conference in Copenhagen. It is the kind of solution which the industrialised world is able to present.
After all it is this type of bandage which has always worked, a solution in the way of technical improvements or alterations, which brought Western Civilisation to its glimmering success called progress, even when today this success is unfortunately becoming more and more tasteless. For now the point is, as Yvo de Boer, the foremost climate protector of the United Nations has formulated it, “…to take a bypass in the evolution of humanity”. Thus as the New York governor David Paterson, specialised in his town as savings commissioner, makes it a point to enact necessary savings programs drastically: “We will have to change our whole culture”, he opines. In this he has certainly, even perhaps unintended, the worldwide growing economic crisis on his side.
Could it mean that the current global fiscal crisis bears in it a chance to cure the atmosphere, the best chance to introduce new economic principles? For instance: A world with a resource friendly democracy over goods and their production, a cornerstone for a transparent Culture of Contentment.
We should remove the winkers from our eyes which keep us blind, because they make us believe that we can save “our civilisation” with the help of technical means alone. This old paradigm creates the ungrounded hope in us, that placebos will be sufficient to lead us in the desired direction, that ongoing consumerism instead of humanism is empowering the human consciousness.
Truly there seems no other way than to think anew – not in the way of technological answers, but for new creative solutions: The real challenge before us may very well be cultural and spiritual, which bears the chance for change and to grow together as world family. Still we have not started even: Climate Justice. It is persistently being ignored internationally as a task for the future to be faced!
Savitri: „And God`s long nights are justified by dawn.“
The wisdom of Albert Einstein: “We will not be able to solve problems on the same level on which they have arisen”, is unfortunately disregarded today. We are seeking for solutions for the problems of tomorrow and day after tomorrow with our experience of yesterday, we don’t look where the light points to. Yet the search for solutions which will be useful for the world should start just there.
Unfortunately again any efforts in a new direction have first to pass all the filters of conformity, past the guards warding the system to remain as it is. We are searching for the New on a level which seems controllable. But the technological trap into which our western and westernised civilisation has manipulated us - more technologies, even renewable, more efficient and more complex - will not help us to overcome the results of the old technology. We need a “Culture of Prevention”, Climate adaptation is at first a cultural challenge – we have to recognise, the coming new “Copenhagen-Treaty” can’t stop the global rising of temperature within the next few years – CO2, once in the atmosphere, needs 55 to 200 years for decomposition – the sea-level will rise further, the glaciers in the Himalaya will keep melting, the floods will rise higher – and the environmental-induced migration is coming on the international agenda: it can be assumed that the number of environmental migrants will substantially rise in future due to the impacts of climate change. The so-called developing countries will be affected in particular, an increase in drought, soil degrading and growing water scarcity in combination with high population growth, unstable institutions, poverty and a high level of dependency on agriculture means, makes them easier vulnerable in case of intense climatic changes, and more prone to environmental migration on a bigger scale.
Most environmental migrations are initially likely to occur within national borders. Trans-boundary environmental migration will mainly take the form of south-south migration, but Europe and USA must also expect substantially increased migratory pressure from regions most at risk from climate change – and here the old developed and mainly coal-fuelled economic world regions, USA and Europe, have to develop a Culture of Hospitality, this hopefully will foster what is meant with world consciousness.
This will open the doors to “Equal emissions for All”, only then Climate Justice will propel what is called world family, maybe only then we can cure our patiently waiting Brother Atmosphere.
Conclusion:
The most binding Law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature than in the Spirit
(Sri Aurobindo)
Talking about dusk, night and intermittent sprinkles of partial dawns and the momentous flaming up of Agni, the purifying energy cooking in silence in the womb of night, -- it is to wait to observe the right time, the right direction pointed by the Lord of Nature. For it is He who alone has the power to set right that what has moved out of its structure perhaps to embrace greater convergences, a greater coherence of the often too unconscious human, housing the conscious godhead within, in regard to his friend and companion: Mother Nature by his side imbibed too by the inherent Godhead waiting to be respected instead of sucked out to its last drops by humanities greed.
As the Mother observed even so many years ago:
“The Civilisation which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of mind, mind dealing with matter and life…But a new reign is coming, the reign of the spirit.”
The materialistic money- and comfort oriented thinking having dominated large part of humanity and still doing so along with the solutions it offers, is apparently a shortcut, really a dawn veiled in the thicket of dusk. Its fallacies become only too clear in the light of coming dawns, the veils put before our consciousness so long we are moving on the used up ruts of logic, numbers, comfort and habits –before the light of true intuitive and inspired solutions is allowed to dawn (appear)
As it is said also: “The night is darkest before the dawn”— don’t we have to expect a bright dawn, in the uncovering of the falsehoods which seem not tired to paint a picture of half truth, of the truth of more rights for the rich, more effectivity through manipulation of nature, covering our greed for more and more control of the majority of earth spaces and population with the label of helping the materially poorer parts of humanity.
´The Shining ones today showed (us) the Delight
Let the Panis sleep inside the lightless place, they shouldn’t wake from within the Darkness`
(RV 4.51.3)
´O Dawn, today with your light you have opened wide the gates of heaven (for us) (RV. I.92.15)`