Free The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding Page B

be sustained, and if we don’t change, the system will at some point face a crisis, most probably a nonlinear one characterized by a disruptive, relatively sudden shift in the state of the global ecosystem.
    In order to relate to these issues, people often focus on local impacts of extreme weather or natural climatic disasters. There’s no shortage of examples of this playing out today, with direct human and economic impacts. In my home country, Australia, we have in recent years experienced many of them. We’ve had the worst drought on record, with serious impacts on our food production and collapsing river systems. We’ve had to urgently build expensive and energy-intensive desalination plants when we faced the prospect that some of our largest cities could run out of water. We’ve had the most intense wildfires on record, with hundreds killed, and we’ve had record heat waves that have led to hundreds more fatalities, like the heat wave (the kind that hits just once every three thousand years) that ravaged my hometown of Adelaide in March 2008.
    As I write this book, new heat records are being set all around the world and in global averages. Pakistan is facing instability and widespread suffering from extraordinary floods. Russia has banned wheat exports after record-breaking temperatures and a severe drought threatened food supplies. Each time a record is broken or new extreme weather impacts are observed, it is easy and understandable to focus on them. However, the science says don’t pay too much attention to individual events or years, focus on the global system and trends as a whole, as we’ve covered. This is what should concern us most.
    Despite all this evidence, when I present on this topic, one of the questions I often get is something along the lines of “Surely it’s not that bad? I understand it’s serious, but environmentalists and scientists need to shock us into action, so they exaggerate, don’t they?”
    In response, I often refer to what a nice day it is outside, what a pleasant and safe walk I had to the venue, what a good breakfast we all had that morning after a good night’s sleep in a comfortable home or hotel. My point is to acknowledge that it is really hard, in the face of all this, to internalize that the global ecosystem is on the brink of crisis, or perhaps already in one, when we don’t directly feel or see the signals around us.
    This is a human response based on instincts we have developed over millions of years. We respond to danger that is physically close and immediate in time. This response has served us well, when the neighboring tribe attacked or when there was a tiger at the cave entrance.
    So here we are in the modern era with the same instincts. For most readers, things are good, life is interesting, our needs are met, and the environment we see every day seems pretty good. Sure, there are issues, but it doesn’t feel as if we’re on the verge of systemic collapse, that’s for sure. We focus instead on tonight’s dinner, the project we have due at work, or the challenge we’re facing in our relationship.
    The problem is that we don’t sense any danger in our physical, instinctive senses. Those who do, such as those facing wildfire, drought, or flood, respond to that immediate challenge, focusing on their personal safety and protecting their friends and family.
    To understand the threat we face here, we have to resort to global ecosystem science, an area most people find intimidating and confusing. However, we simply have no choice. Given the time it takes to change human instincts, we are going to have to work with what we’ve got!
    So my response to this question is that you either accept the science, articulated by groups of experts and based on a rational assessment, or you don’t. This is the way it is, because most of us don’t see, and critically won’t see, sufficient physical