An Inconvenient Truth Revisited

Wednesday, 26 March 2025, 1:42 pm
Opinion: Howard Davis

The shocking ignorance about the impending threat to the planet from global heating displayed by such political leaders as Donald Trump and Christopher Luxon (as well as their deplorable cronies JD Vance, Winston Peters, and David Seymour) has already had disastrous consequences around the globe.

The deserts of Central America and Asia, North Africa and Australia are rapidly expanding, while crop failures, catastrophic droughts, melting ice-caps, devastating wildfires, ocean acidification, and increased cyclonic activity make this climate emergency perfectly clear to all but the most wilfully blinkered.

The inconvenient truth is that the ‘tipping point’ has already been reached.

Many moons ago, the visionary scientist and futurist Richard Lovelock’s Gaia concept of the earth as a self-regulating ecosystem predicted the consequences of global heating with unerring accuracy. He made the point that computer modelling is as unreliable as the long-range weather forecast and only such empirical evidence as rising sea levels can really be trusted. What follows is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but demonstrable fact.

Even if we somehow immediately abandoned all forms of automobile transport and airplane flights and dramatically expanded renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal, the biomass of eight billion people, their livestock, and pets would still account for 47% of world-wide emissions and continue to release devastating levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Early on, Lovelock realised that areas abutting the poles (such Patagonia, Greenland, Canada, and the Nordic countries) will continue to be able sustain life as we know it. He also identified temperate oceanic islands like England and Ireland, New Zealand and Tasmania with the potential to remain habitable.

The UK has far too large a population to become agriculturally self-sustaining and, as energy grids across the country collapse from the increasing heat, it will have about seven days before total anarchy is unleashed. In the ‘developed’ world, only Aotearoa has a sufficiently small population to survive this fast-approaching and inevitable man-made holocaust.

But what sort of world will our children inherit?

Tragically, we’re so heavily invested in and addicted to the products of the petrochemical industry (from the gasoline that still fuels our cars to the plastic nanoparticles invading all forms of life on earth, including not only our food, birds, and fish, but also human breast milk and spermatozoa) that our future as a species is clearly imperilled.

My own admittedly surreal theory is that we’ll become increasingly plasticised, with no further need for FitBits, laptops, or cell phones, as we’ll all have neurochips implanted in our brains that literarily ‘hook’ us up to the virtual reality of the Metaverse of AI, thanks to the ‘genius’ of Elon Musk.

At which point we’ll all melt.

My only suggestion is to enjoy your designer shades and iced lattes while you still can, while taking whatever cold comfort you can find in Enid Blyton’s immortal words, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

The only certainty is that they (and quite possibly we) won’t be around much longer.

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz