The stock markets finished slightly higher today, Tuesday, February 6, 2007
At a dinner recently, I told friends I didn't have all the information I needed to decide whether global warming is caused by humans. They inched away from me, glaring as if I had blasphemed. The issue is emotional and political, and feelings cloud perception.
It is not my object here to take a side on the global warming issue. I write about it because it appears to be gaining consensus and political momentum only thirty years after global cooling was the primary climate fear.
Few people will ever read all or even most of the relevant climate data. Fewer still will understand all the factors of the internal variability of climate change. An even smaller number will make a correct prediction. We each depend on the interpretations of others to form our opinion. Climate change is a complicated issue that should neither be reduced to a picture book, nor ignored if the source is trustworthy. Looking at this issue from a socionomic perspective, you can observe things you won't see otherwise.
A sentiment extreme seems to be forming… a broad consensus that our previous success is already our undoing. There is disagreement about the assumptions on which the consensus is based, and charges that we are seeing yet another attempt to establish truth by repetition instead of by the scientific method.
"How can you NOT take the other side of this trade?" a colleague remarked when he read an article describing this unanimity of opinion. I think that depends on how long you can hold the position, because if this issue reflects both bullish and bearish trends, it could have staying power.
Socionomically, this issue looks like the expected overlap of two behavior trends, one near its end and one just beginning:
1. The peak manifestation of the last stage of the trend toward inclusionism extends to include the natural world… "At the peaks of expansions, most people feel a stronger kinship with animals and trees. The environmental, or ecology movement, when expressed in terms such as, “let’s work together to clean up the environment,” is a manifestation of the last stage of the trend toward inclusion." Pioneering Studies in Socionomics
2. The most successful icons of the previous prosperity are attacked in a bear market. On a global scale, the most successful icon to attack would be the current state of human activity. "As on so many different fronts, the advantage in the battle for social change is shifting from expansionary forces to the forces of fear, conservatism and scientific quandary. As the bear market progresses, the conservatism overtakes the feel-good elements of this trend." Pete Kendall's Sociotimes.
I would expect to see more conflict between the developed and the developing world, growth of military technology, and an attempt to establish some form of international climate police in an effort toward "climate repair."
If the consensus presented this week is real in all its scary details, the climate will rein in our long, delicious, natural resources smorgasbord, and an age of struggle will indeed be upon us. It is uncomfortable to consider what it means when simultaneous exponential growth in resource consumption, human population, financial markets, technological progress, and species extinction… confronts radical climate change. That would indeed resemble a Bear Earth.
The best outcome might be the natural, and probably inevitable one: a continuation of recent bear-market moves toward defensiveness and conservation, and eventually fiscal practicality. As Amory Lovins says in a recent issue of The Economist, frugality and efficiency can yield expanding returns. Perhaps we can "begin laying visible foundations for a richer, cooler, fairer and safer world."
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