The Good News About Climate Change

The Good News About Climate Change

[00:45] Q – Can We Restore The Planet?

I have a question about climate, climate change. I’m just about to finish a university paper, a single paper on climate science as a non-scientist, so it’s been fairly challenging.

I guess it’s exposed me to a good number of climate scientist opinions about how we need to get to zero carbon in order to reel back the damage that’s been done and to restore the planet to the wonderful sort of Goldilocks zone that it, that it is, this incredibly benevolent and wonderful place that we live.

But I can’t really see looking around at all of the things that we do, I can’t see that even though that’s apparently the solution and the thing that I feel like I should contort myself into doing, I can’t see how we’re gonna get there, and I wondered what you thought about that.

[01:47] A – We’re Not Going to Get There

We’re not going to get there. If we had started in the 1940s… 

I work with the Waverley Street Foundation, it’s a foundation dedicated to all the science and practical applications for bringing about solutions to climate change, Waverley Street Foundation. Look it up. Easy to remember. Waverley Council, Waverley Street, Waverley Street Foundation.

And I know all the people, the higher ups in that organization, and I have regular conversations with them. I work with them as a meditation teacher, but we exchange a lot of ideas. And without big perspective, the news is depressing. And the news is if we’d started trying to reverse in a very earnest way in the 1940s, we might’ve made it.

Now, the warming’s happening and it looks as though it’s irreversible, and so now we have to start thinking what we’re doing about what’s coming. And we’re not doing anything about that because we’re concerned with light bulbs. We’re concerned with car emissions, and you know, we think electric cars are the answer, but evidently they’re not because of the long tailpipe, meaning your own personal car isn’t generating any pollution that you can detect, but it runs on electricity that’s coming from a place where they’re burning coal and so your car is contributing to that.

Or, we’re not looking at the mining of the nickel-cadmium that makes the battery for your electric car, which on its own has created massive pollution and also gobbling up territory and displacing thousands of people. You know, the indiscriminate mining of the materials needed for the batteries, for cars is contributing to global displacement and contributing to vast pollution.

And you know, so how do we get out of all this? Well, we’re adaptive creatures, we humans. It’s not that we shouldn’t be mitigating existing carbon emission. We do need to continue doing that so that we don’t make it worse, but as a whole, we’re not doing enough, fast enough, that’s for sure.

And so we’re backsliding and it looks like, you know, the two degrees Celsius, the big scary number, is probably gonna be hit sooner than we ever thought. It’s looking like it’s gonna be hit sooner.

[04:41] This Isn’t Our First Time

And so then what are the repercussions of climate change? Well, there are many, many, many. 

It’s going to start raining in places where it didn’t rain before. The storms are going to get bigger. It’s going to stop raining in places where it did rain once upon a time. So places that are not used to droughts will become drought stricken. Places that are not used to lots of rain will get a lot more rain and all of that. We have to start getting our heads around finding the patterns of that.

Also, the sea levels are going to come up and something like 85% of every major airport in the world, 85% are only a few feet, you know, Sydney, Kingsford Smith, a few feet above sea level. JFK, Los Angeles, LAX. Nobody’s making any plan for moving infrastructure that’s right on oceans, even though we know the oceans are coming up.

It doesn’t look like anybody’s doing anything about this. And so while we’re busy trying to mitigate carbon emission, we might be so busy attempting to solve something that’s backsliding, that we’re not looking at infrastructure change that needs to be made, and planning for a future where the climate has changed quite dramatically.

And so, as human beings always have done, we have confronted, as a species, we’ve confronted climate change many times before. Our species has survived 10 millennia of glaciation. Our species survived the warming and the water rise that came post-glaciation, the last major glacial period, the last ice age.

People used to be able to walk from Russia to North America. We call it a land bridge. It wasn’t a land bridge, it was a land mass. You know, it wasn’t just a bridge, it was a mass of land that went between modern-day Russia and Alaska. And that’s how the tribal Americans all got into North America and all the way down into South America was over that landmass.

But then the water came up and everybody was cut off, and so then everything changed from there. When we look at the largest perspective, we’ve succeeded as a species to adapt and we will continue to adapt because we’re smarter now than we used to be.

[07:31] Realistic Thinking

We may not be smart enough to be able to repair the past entirely. We can do our best, but we need to start thinking infrastructurally. We need to start looking big picture, what’s going to happen and what are we doing about the fact that it’s going to hit two degrees Celsius over what it used to be, rather than, “No, no, no. Not 2%. No, no, not two degrees. Not two degrees. No, no, no, no, no.”

The more we panic about the inevitable, the less we’re doing about the inevitable. And so there’s a lot of thinking that needs to start going into the inevitability. It’s not defeatist thinking, it’s realistic thinking. What has to happen to deal with the inevitabilities as well as doing our best to mitigate existing carbonization of our atmosphere.

So a new front needs to be added to the existing efforts. And it’s not all bad news. The good news is our species is hyperadaptive and we can figure this out. You know, we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner, but we can get out of that corner. We just need to start using a hundred percent of this thing [points to brain] and stop using 2% of it.

So, look up Waverley Street Foundation, see what they’re talking about. It’s a very fascinating, very fascinating field. And of course there are political pressures now that are attacking the whole thing. You know, if you, if a tiger comes in the room and you want to say, “Okay, okay everybody, there’s no tiger, right? There’s no tiger.” You know, the tiger’s salivating and looking at everybody with those murderous yellow eyes, one solution might be, “The tiger’s only there if you believe it,” that kind of thing. “Anybody who says tiger’s getting deported.” Obviously that approach isn’t going to work.

There’s a tiger, but we need to learn how to deal with it and we will. We’ll learn how to deal with it if we’re smart and we need to get smarter. So, let’s keep on doing what we can do, but not rely upon humanity suddenly reversing it all. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

[10:01] There’s No Evolution Without Disruption

And so now we need to start thinking about, okay, let’s assume that humanity’s not going to reverse at all, what are we doing now? What are we doing next? And not enough thinking’s going into that. There’s too much on, “We’ve gotta get it back. We’ve gotta take everything back to the pre-industrial era.” It just doesn’t look like that’s gonna be happening.

So now, there’s no evolution without disruption. This is a scientific fact. When we look at the long, the biggest picture, steady states that don’t have disruptions evolve too slowly to avoid extinction. So one of the guaranteed ways of a species becoming extinct is for it to have a steady state that doesn’t have interruption to it, because there are evolutionary demands going on all around that require the species to change.

Now, what causes extinction is not always some big event that made the species go extinct. It may be a failure for that species to be disrupted. So when a big disruption occurs, what happens is adaptive forms and functions begin to appear. We start to get super creative and adaptive, and it causes surges in evolution.

You get a surge in evolution after a disruption, you generally don’t get a surge in evolution if there’s just a steady state without any interruption to it. Evolution doesn’t happen fast enough. So disruption speeds up evolution, and right now we’re in disruption. And so to harness it, we have to get more adaptive thinking, more adaptive forms, more adaptive, everything, and then we’ll get a surge of evolution.

So we’re experiencing disruption right now. It may not be the crisis point of disruption. I think that’s still coming, that crisis point’s still coming where everybody realizes that business as usual is not possible. 

Right now we’re still in that mentality of business as usual is the answer to everything. That’s what we call steady state, slow evolution, and it’s not fast enough to match the evolutionary forces that are going on all around us.

[12:46] Just Meditate, You’re Made of Stern Stuff

So disruption’s going to have to happen. And don’t worry, just meditate. You’ll have the adaptive energy. I love talking to anthropologists who study the post-glacial period, the last period at the end of what is commonly called the Ice Age.

When our ancestors lived on ice for 10,000 years. This is prior to agriculture being discovered or activated, and there are various estimates, but somewhere between… the population had started off at about a hundred thousand homosapiens, at the start of the last glacial period. 

By the end of that last glacial period, 10,000 years, the human population was arguably down to as little as 12,000 people, dotted in various tribes all around the place, living on ice, most of them living on ice. Some people estimate as many as 20,000 humans.

In total, you are related to two of those people. Everyone in this room is related to two of those people who thrived. They didn’t just survive, they thrived on the ice for 10,000 years. 10,000 years with no agriculture, very little plant life that yielded fruits and things, they figured out how to do it.

And you’re related to two of those. You are made of stern stuff. This thing that’s coming easy. It’s not 10,000 years of glaciation. And so, we have a lot of tools now that our ancient ancestors didn’t have. And, we’ll find a way forward. We just need to be…The first thing we need to do is stop wasting the resource of human brainpower. We are wasting the resource of human brain power. We’re doing that collectively because we refuse to sit down in a chair and get rid of accumulated stress twice a day, which everyone who knows how to meditate just thinks, “I can’t wait to meditate. Oh, goodie.”

[15:17] It’s Not a Chore

It’s not a chore. You know, you sit down in that chair and you think, “Ah, what a relief. Let me close my eyes and dive into this thing. Beautiful.” And somebody asked me today, what was I surprised by in the last 50, whatever years it is that I’ve been teaching? What was the one thing that surprised me the most? And my answer was, the one thing that surprised me the most was how resistant the population is to learning meditation.

It’s like, you say to people, “You can do this thing, it’s effortless. You sit in a chair, it’s so lovely, you’re gonna go down into this beautiful, blissful place and you’ll be able to do it twice every day and release all of your accumulated stress and all that.”

And people go, “Nah, nah, no, look, I’ve got other things to do mate. I’m busy, I’m too busy.”

And, you know, you’re like, “What are you busy doing? You know. You nong. Come on, come in here and let me teach you. Get yourself to the chair twice a day. It’s gonna open up all of your potential. It’s going to open up everything for you. Why are you running from this?”

[16:26] Learn Vedic Meditation

That’s surprising to me. I’ve taught what sounds like a vast number of people, something like 50,000 people, to meditate. It sounds like a vast number. Compared with zero it’s a lot. But you know, considering that there are millions right now listening to this podcast, and I run into people all the time… “Are you Thom Knoles?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I listen to your podcast three times a day, every day.”

And then I got one couple sitting in a restaurant with me, looking at me. “Are you Thom Knoles?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you sign this?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a napkin.”

“Yeah.” And what I wrote on it was, Learn Vedic Meditation.

And I said, “Have you learned Vedic Meditation yet?”

They go, “No, not really. Oh. But she listens to it when she’s falling asleep. She likes to listen to your voice when she’s falling asleep. She said, it makes it so easy.”

And I thought, “I’m here to awaken the world and this woman is using my podcast to go to sleep with. What’s that?”

So all of those who are listening on the other side of this camera lens, learn Vedic Meditation. Go and find a qualified teacher and learn it and awaken your full potential. It’s not a chore. It’s the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

Practicing this technique of meditation is easier than not practicing it. So, you can be sitting here gazing at the wall. That’s really hard compared to practicing Vedic Meditation. That’s massive effort, you know, just staring at the floor and drooling mindlessly is really hard work compared with Vedic Meditation, which is more effortless than that. So I don’t know what people are afraid of, but it really surprises me.

It surprises me. So there’s my message for the night. I think we’ll bring it to a close now.

Jai Guru Deva.