I get asked this question from time to time and I still don't have an answer.
Yes yes, I'm one of THEM that sits on the fence and shrugs and says "I dunno.."
Infuriating ain't I ;)
The trouble is that I am not a scientist, or expert. I am a normal person. The only input I get is from what I read in newspapers, magazines and online and these articles are nearly always from someone well embedded on their side of the fence, so its impossible to have an objective view.
One journalist put it very nicely the other day.
"We do not need to "save" the planet. Earth is will get along just fine no matter what happens. What we are worried about is saving the human."
And this I think hits the nail on the head.
After all the Earth was survived being a flaming ball of volcanic gases and it has survived being almost completely covered in ice. A little climate change is not going to register on grander scale of the earths life. If being on fire was the same as having flu then climate change (although devastating for us)is bearly a pimple on the side of Earths nose.
Sounds like this puts me in the doubters corner?
Well it doesn't.
The trouble is with the people who dismiss climate change is the general air of "Well I'm not going to stop burning live pandas to run my car."
Humans who think like that are like the intergalactic version of the rough estate family who throw their rubbish out the window and onto the tiny patch of grass outside. They don't care, it doesn't effect them so why bother.
The trouble with the whole movement is that a few years ago it was "the" thing to do.
Every newspaper and magazine had a "green living" column, every supermarket rushed out to make "ethical and green" products for the masses to consume. No middle class dinner party was complete without talk of the organic free range caviar fed chicken they were eating, and the solar panels they were having installed.
Then the recession came and all these ideas went out the window and showed the majority of people for what they are, fashion victims.
Take a good look around you.
Notice how all the ethical products in your supermarket have been pushed to a small corner of the store? Notice how that columnist you enjoyed reading about with her green themes and clever ideas has disappeared?
Now middle class dinner party talk is peppered with last second trips by air for half term ski trips and how cheap chicken is at the discount supermarket down the road.
So you see, a lot of the media concern a couple of years ago was little more than glorified advertising. An attempt to milk the green cash cow and get the chattering classes to spend money on their products to pretend they where saving the earth.
For the record, we are on LESS money than a few years ago but still manage to live more ethically than many people wh have pleanty of spare cash!
So where do I stand?
I stand in the clean up camp.
I re-cycle, I shop second hand, I don't waste anything, as a family we strive to leave as little a footprint as possible.
Humans are going to have to become more flexible.
Why do people think its acceptable to live somewhere like Las Vegas and still have green lawns? Why would anyone heat their pool to bath water temperature all year? Why do people think the heating in their house should mean they can walk about in t-shirts like summer.
THESE are the people who will never change and who's in-flexibility make life miserable for all of us.
Man's wish to live wherever he wants and then mould it to what he wants it to be are killing all of us. When the Apocalypse comes with the Las Vegas housewife turn on the sprinklers, shut the door and crank up the air con?
Probably.
We used to be nomadic people. We used to keep a few vital possessions and move with the seasons. In a nutshell farming sealed our fate and turned us into something more than animals.
I guess some would say this was a good thing, but the future of mankind? I don't know.
In the times past when humans migrated seasonally, land was given the chance to recover. Think about it. If all the Zebra and wildebeest grazed only one part of the savanna for a year it would be a desolate dust bowl, possibly lost forever.
BUT!!
But with our modern technology we have all sorts of tricks to keep land working for us!!
We can concrete over tracks so they remain dry, we can spray our fields to make them yield high....but.
Modern farming has a lot to answer for.
Here is an example.
Over the last few weeks we have received an unprecedented amount of rain. Seriously soggy weather.
Our fields (where the horses live) are old pasture. We have never ploughed them (and that's 9 years we've been here) and they possibly were not ploughed for as much as 20 years or more before that.
The fields next to us have been ploughed yearly forever.
Not only that, but for the 9 years we have lived here they have even grown the SAME crop!
This is farming at its most "modern".
No year left fallow, no crop rotation, no year of sown grass for cattle grazing..no no no..this is how farmers did it in the OLD days.
So back to the rain.
The fields that belong to us coped well with the rain. Whenever there was a break the solid happily sucked up as much excess water as it could.
The fields next to us though remain (still!) in parts like a network of lakes and streams. The ground has been so compacted and so heavily sprayed that there is not a thread of life in it. If you pop a spade into our field you come away with a bucket of worms, pop a spade into the ploughed fields and all you get is a hole full of water.
They are as barren as a dessert.
Do I think man has made global warming?
Yes and no.
We certainly haven't helped. Global warming has hap pend on its own for many centuries, this time we hurried it along and are now furiously trying to undo it.
I for one will keep living like I give a damn and do my best to prepare my family for the future.
One in which we should, maybe, be prepared to adopt semi-nomadic lives again.
