What must ‘Humanism’ mean? Richard Norman thinks outside the tribe.

Richard Norman, speaking at the BHA Philosophy and the Arts day conference, 2010

If ‘humanism’ means anything at all, it must surely embrace respect and concern for all human beings, whether they are members of our own family or group or society or are people on the other side of the world whom we do not know and will never meet.  It means a responsiveness to the needs of all with whom we share a common humanity.  As humanists we often invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reflects and translates into political imperatives those shared human needs, and which includes these items:

Article 25:  Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Article 26:  Everyone has the right to education…

Article 28:  Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

But the sad truth is that we have a long way to go before we have an international order in which these rights are fully realized for everyone.  Here are some facts about the world in which we live.

• Around 1.4 billion people still subsist on less than $1.25 a day, the international poverty line defined by the World Bank.
• Around one billion people suffer from hunger.
• Almost nine million children die each year before they reach their fifth birthday.
• Hundreds of thousands of women die due to complications of pregnancy or childbirth every year.
• About 69 million school-age children are not in school. Almost half of them (31 million) are in sub-Saharan Africa, and more than a quarter (18 million) are in Southern Asia. (Data)

Humanists have always been actively involved in organisations dedicated to tackling the challenges of global poverty and injustice. The BHA encourages its members to continue that tradition of involvement, but has rightly avoided duplicating the organisations which are already active in the field.  For this reason there is no specifically humanist movement dedicated to combating poverty and promoting international development.  There are also good reasons, parallel to the ones which Marilyn Mason mentions in the case of climate change, why humanists have not organised as humanists:  we may legitimately disagree about the best way to deal with poverty and global injustice, and we are resistant to being told what causes to support.

But without creating unnecessary new organisations, it’s important that humanists are visible in their support for global justice.  Actions do speak louder than words, and if we’re serious in what we say about shared human values and about living a good life without religion, then we need to put those values into action.  The role of the new interest group ‘Humanists for a Better World’ should be to add a distinctive humanist presence and voice to existing organisations and campaigns.  It should act as a forum for humanists to pool news and information, and to alert one another to important events and campaigns.

Here are some of the issues which I think are currently important.

In the last few years, concern for international development and concern about climate change have become increasingly linked.  The problem of climate change caused by CO2 emissions has been created by the industrialised countries, but it is above all the countries of the global south which are already feeling the effects, with more extreme and unpredictable weather patterns, increased flooding in some areas, and changes in rainfall leading to crop failures and the drying up of pastureland in others.  Action on climate change has to take the form of ‘climate justice’ – enabling the poorer countries of the world to follow a low-carbon route to development and not being forced to pay the price for our failures.  Oxfam and the World Development Movement among others are campaigning for a global Climate Fund which is fair and effective.  See:

• http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change/
• http://www.wdm.org.uk/climatedebt

World poverty is being fuelled by the spike in food commodity prices, which have been artificially inflated by the irresponsible behaviour of commodity speculators.  We need international regulations to curb food speculation – see:

• http://www.wdm.org.uk/food-speculation

Development organisations have increasingly come to recognise that trade is the route out of poverty.  But this requires more than the free-marketers’ mantra of ‘free trade’.  It needs trade justice.  At the level of our daily lives and our own purchases, this is something which we can promote by buying Fairtrade products and raising awareness of the value of Fairtrade.  I’d like to see more Humanist groups committing themselves to using Fairtrade refreshments at their meetings and events.  But it also requires political action, because the scope for trade to benefit developing countries is severely limited by the unfair tariffs and subsidies maintained by the US and Europe.  The Fairtrade Foundation is currently running a campaign against American and European subsidies for their own cotton farmers, which lower world prices and hit cotton-producing countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali.  See:

• http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/products/cotton/default.aspx

If you share these or related concerns, do please make use of the ‘Humanists for a Better World’ web site at www.h4bw.org.uk to communicate news, ideas and actions, and to work with other humanists for global justice and a better world.

Richard Norman is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, founder-member of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group, and Vice-President of the BHA. His book On Humanism was released in 2004.

Marilyn Mason explains why humanists should act together on climate change – and why we need another humanist interest group.

Global Warming

The ground at night - a detail from the H4BW website

“Global warming” might not sound too bad right now, as we come out of one of the coldest winters in recent years to an delightful April sunny spell. But, counter-intuitively perhaps, global warming and the melting of the polar ice-caps, which cause changes to ocean and air currents, appear as likely to cause freezing winters in Britain as they are to intensify desertification in hotter parts of the world and to bring other unpredictable extremes of weather. Globally, we seem to be seeing more of these extremes: not just our unusually snowy winter, but more floods, more droughts, more forest fires.

“Climate chaos” is in fact a more apt description of our future, and the chaos is unlikely to stop at climate. We can expect increasing conflicts over diminishing resources such as oil, land and water, escalating extinctions of wildlife, more frequent humanitarian disasters, and mass migrations of refugees from areas where food crops no longer grow.

The end of this century, when most of us will be safely dead, is often given as the time when a 2 or 4 degree rise in the Earth’s temperature will cause this chaos, but of course it won’t suddenly start then – it will be a gradual process and may already have begun in Africa and Australia and even closer to home. If future humanity and the planet’s ecosystems are to survive in anything like good shape, radical action is needed now.

Acting together and personal choice

Organised Humanism in the UK has been surprisingly slow to take on the ethical challenges of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. Individual humanists are doubtless doing their bit, convinced by the scientific consensus that things will go very ill for our children and grandchildren, perhaps even for some of us, if we do not change our wasteful life-styles. I’m sure many of us switch off our lights and computers, eat less or no meat, avoid unnecessary travel, cycle, recycle, buy less stuff and local stuff, go on climate change marches, join environmental groups and campaigns, write to our MPs… but we have done little collectively. Why is this?

I can think of several reasons. Firstly, existing humanist organisations have their hands more than full with the day-to-day concerns of their members and the wider non-religious public: the provision of advice and ceremonies for the non-religious, campaigns for recognition and equality, and other domestic issues. The BHA can campaign against faith schools securely supported by its membership, but is there less consensus about human responsibility for climate chaos? the best ways to tackle it? whether it is really happening?

Perhaps it stems from our lack of (or freedom from) individual leadership. Humanism brings together freethinkers, and has no system, democratic, autocratic or sacred, for choosing, or following, personal leaders. Pronouncements from religious leaders on the environment and what their followers should do about it have been coming thick and fast recently (on the coat-tails of science, of course), but humanists have no equivalent figureheads. Many of us would resent being told what to think or do, even about something on which there is overwhelming agreement, including, remarkably, not just scientists but  the world’s politicians. Despite their failure to achieve fair and legally binding agreements at Copenhagen in December 2009 and at Cancun in December 2010, disagreements between world leaders seem to be about how best to mitigate climate change and who should bear the financial burden, not about whether to bother.

For humanists, whether or not to bother about climate change remains a personal choice. Some may in fact prefer the line of “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg that we should focus first on the problems that we can overcome, problems such as poverty, education and hunger, and that the resulting growth in prosperity will then produce environmental solutions; for example, less deforestation, stable populations, and technological advances. But the new humanist interest group Humanists for a Better World (H4BW) recognises that these global problems are indeed interrelated: for example, poverty can exacerbate deforestation and thus increase carbon emissions; education, particularly of girls, can help to stabilise population and thus reduce demands on land and water. Working and campaigning on these issues does not preclude working and campaigning on environmental sustainability, and the environment cannot necessarily wait while we solve these other problems: forests may not recover from the damage we inflict while, say, extending agriculture or growing bio-fuels; extinctions tend to be irreversible; and as developing nations develop out of poverty they pump yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus accelerating climate chaos. We need to act on all fronts, though not necessarily all of us on all fronts all the time.  H4BW intends to enable and encourage collective and individual humanist action on many of them.

The unique humanist position

Being a humanist should not involve ignoring the fate of people who live far away or who will exist in the future, or indeed the fate of other species; neither should it entail the Pollyanna-ish belief in human perfectibility and inevitable progress that some accuse us of. Progess is certainly not inevitable on most of the issues that H4BW is concerned about, and there are far too many vested interests and too much short-termism around to feel great confidence about solutions emerging in time without considerable pressure for change . Human beings can choose to act for the common good or not, but I hope that enough humanists are concerned enough to be a real presence in environmental campaigns and to add a strong collective voice to the pressure for change.

Humanists can offer something distinctive and constructive to the debates about sustainability, climate change, renewable energy and peak oil. We may well be more rational and far-sighted than most politicians about the economic and human costs of global warming and the investment and actions necessary to mitigate and perhaps ultimately adapt to it. Unlike some “deep greens”, we will not dismiss out of hand the technological solutions that are probably our best hope if we are to have enough food, clean energy and water. Unlike some commentators, we will tend to accept the scientific consensus rather than denying that there is a problem or hoping that it is just part of a natural cycle that will sort itself out or about which we can do nothing. Unlike a few of the more misanthropic environmentalists, we are unlikely to gloat over the mess that humanity has got itself into and rejoice that at least the planet and cockroaches and rats will survive even if we don’t. Unlike some religious believers, we will not oppose family planning or look forward to “end times” and eternal paradise or anticipate rescue by a deity if this life fails.

We know it’s up to us, we surely hope that our children and grandchildren and people in the most vulnerable parts of the world are not going to have lives immeasurably worse than ours, and we know that humanist ethics require us to consider the consequences of our actions – or inaction.

“Four out of five people think that the number of cars in use is having a serious effect on climate and two thirds agree that everyone should reduce their car journeys. These figures apply as much to car drivers as to anyone else. However, the figures suddenly drop when people are asked whether they are willing and able to match words with actions. Less than half said yes to reducing car journeys. Another 12 per cent admitted that they could use the car less, but did not seem willing to. And 23 per cent say that people should be allowed to use their cars as much as they like.” (British Social Attitudes, published January 2008)

I believe that committed humanists are more willing than most to match words with actions, and that together we can help to bring about much needed change and counter any perception that humanists believe the Earth exists just for us to exploit, that there is a “great gap at the heart of …liberal secular humanism”. To do so, humanists need to be more vocal and more visible, and I hope that the new website H4BW.org.uk (still in development) will enable many more of us to be so, and to work together on climate chaos and the other linked global issues. Though Humanists for a Better World will be mainly a virtual community sharing news, ideas and actions, we hope it will occasionally have a physical presence too, as there is always considerable positive interest when humanists appear at demonstrations and meetings, and support from the British Humanist Association will tie us in to existing structures and networks. Do please have a look at the website and take action as and when you can.

Marilyn Mason was a teacher for 20 years before working as Education Officer of the British Humanist Association (BHA) from 1998 to 2006. She is a campaigning member of South West London Humanist group, affiliated to the BHA and co-founder of H4BW.

While the world’s industrialised countries are building complex carbon markets to enable them to carry on polluting, Ecuador has come up with a much simpler idea for mitigating climate change: leave the oil underground. It is promising to lock up as much as a fifth of its oil reserves indefinitely, providing rich nations pay out at least half the market value of the oil – some $3.6bn – as compensation.

The trail-blazing proposal was first floated in 2007, but it took a step towards reality last week when the UN Development Programme signed an agreement with the Ecuadorean government to be the independent administrator for the project’s trust fund. The accord makes Ecuador the only country in the world offering to leave lucrative oil reserves untapped in an attempt to slow climate change.

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-worlds-first-really-green-oil-deal-2046512.html

Michael Shermer considers the difference between scepticism and denial…

WHAT is the difference between a sceptic and a denier? When I call myself a sceptic, I mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims. A climate sceptic, for example, examines specific claims one by one, carefully considers the evidence for each, and is willing to follow the facts wherever they lead.

A climate denier has a position staked out in advance, and sorts through the data employing “confirmation bias” – the tendency to look for and find confirmatory evidence for pre-existing beliefs and ignore or dismiss the rest.

Scepticism is integral to the scientific process, because most claims turn out to be false. Weeding out the few kernels of wheat from the large pile of chaff requires extensive observation, careful experimentation and cautious inference. Science is scepticism and good scientists are sceptical.

Denial is different. It is the automatic gainsaying of a claim regardless of the evidence for it – sometimes even in the teeth of evidence. Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact.

Full article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.000-living-in-denial-when-a-sceptic-isnt-a-sceptic.html

World temperature

Reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming could lead to deadly temperatures for humans incoming centuries, according to research findings from Purdue University and the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Researchers for the first time have calculated the highest tolerable “wet-bulb” temperature and found that this temperature could be exceeded for the first time in human history in future climate scenarios if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate.

Wet-bulb temperature is equivalent to what is felt when wet skin is exposed to moving air. It includes temperature and atmospheric humidity and is measured by covering a standard thermometer bulb with a wetted cloth and fully ventilating it.

The researchers calculated that humans and most mammals, which have internal body temperatures near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, will experience a potentially lethal level of heat stress at wet-bulb temperature above 95 degrees sustained for six hours or more, said Matthew Huber, the Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who co-authored the paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Full article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504155413.htm

In commentary published last week on Seedmagazine.com, my co-editor Lee Billings suggested that Earth Day might be more effective if stripped of its “save the planet” sensibilities. He offered that a better message would be “save the humans.”

This idea immediately rubbed me the wrong way. But upon further reflection, I realized this more anthropocentric view is also the driving force behind the idea of “ecosystem services”—the goods and services that nature provides to humans. Indeed, one of the big ideas underpinning the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was that we might do well to go beyond acknowledging the inherent value of biodiversity; the MEA mostly emphasized the benefits that people reap from a healthy environment, from shared resources like a stable climate and clean water, to commodities like fuel, fiber, and food. The appeal to our species’ self-preserving, even self-serving instincts has arguably gotten even stronger past five years, as behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists have leveraged their insights to help make greener choices more appealing to our status-seeking, myopic brains.

Against this backdrop, it was all the more striking to see events unfold last week in Cochabamba, where Bolivian President Evo Morales opened
the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth with a call for a “Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights.”

Continues: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/save_the_planet_vs_save_ourselves/

Birds, bats and lizards may play an important role in Earth’s climate by protecting plants from insects that forage on foliage. A new study suggests that preserving these animals could be a low-tech way to fight climate change.

“The presence, abundance and diversity of birds, bats and lizards, the top predators in the insect world, has impacts on the growth of plants,” said ecologist Daniel Gruner of the University of Maryland, co-author of the paper published April 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “If you don’t have plants, you don’t have organisms that are recapturing carbon.”

Because these animals feed on both plant-eating and insect-eating bugs in equal numbers, it was believed they wouldn’t have a net effect on plant growth: When the animals gobble up the plant-eating insects, the population of these harmful insects decreases. But, when the animals feed on insect-eating insects, there are fewer predators to eat the herbivores.

The new meta-analysis indicates this is not the case. The presence of insect-eating animals has a positive effect on the growth of plants.

Continues: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/bats-fight-climate-change/

Consider these two quotations:

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe” – Albert Einstein, 1946.

“Arrogant&naive2say man overpowers nature” – Sarah Palin, 2009, tweetingabout the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change.

These two statements reflect different aspects of the current dilemmas facing those of us who, for one reason or another, think about possible global catastrophes and how we might avert them. In January, on behalf of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), I announced that the Doomsday Clock – established in 1947 by scientists who had worked on the first atomic bomb in 1945 – was to be moved back by one minute from its previous setting of five minutes to midnight – five minutes to Doomsday. As of 14 January, it reads six minutes to midnight.

This is the 19th time the clock has been adjusted since its inception. It was closest to midnight (two minutes) in 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons within six months of each other. It was set farthest back in 1992, at 17 minutes to midnight, as the Soviet Union dissolved.

The decision to add a minute – taken by the BAS Science and Security Board in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 19 Nobel Laureates – reflects our sense that the world has entered a potentially more positive phase in dealing with the big twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change.

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2272/judgement-day

The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.

The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.

The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.

Last October the museum launched a temporary exhibition called “Prove It! All the evidence you need to believe in climate change”. The museum said at the time that the exhibition had been designed to demonstrate “through scientific evidence that climate change is real and requires an urgent solution”.

Chris Rapley, the museum’s director, told The Times that it was taking a different approach after observing how the climate debate had been affected by leaked e-mails and overstatements of the dangers of global warming. He said: “We have come to realise, given the way this subject has become so polarised over the past three to four months, that we need to be respectful and welcoming of all views on it.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7073272.ece

The evidence that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

The “fingerprints” of human influence on the climate can be detected not only in rising temperatures but also in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000 sq km a decade.

The study, by senior scientists from the Met Office Hadley Centre, Edinburgh University, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, concluded that there was an “increasingly remote possibility” that the sceptics were right that human activities were having no discernible impact. There was a less than 5 per cent likelihood that natural variations in climate were responsible for the changes.

The study said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had understated mankind’s overall contribution to climate change. The IPCC had said in 2007 that there was no evidence of warming in the Antarctic. However, the panel said that the latest observations showed that man-made emissions were having an impact on even the remotest continent.

Continues: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7050341.ece

Former US Vice President Al Gore on took aim at skeptics who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change, saying he wished it were an illusion but that the problem is real and urgent.

Gore, who has made the fight against climate change his signature issue since leaving the White House in 2001, specifically addressed challenges to the accuracy of findings by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion,” Gore wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.

“But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes” in reports by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Climate change skeptics have pointed to errors in the panel’s landmark 2007 report – an overestimate of how fast Himalayan glaciers would melt in a warming world and incorrect information on how much of the Netherlands is below sea level – as signs that the report’s basic conclusions are flawed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/gore-takes-aim-at-climate-change-skeptics-1913871.html

Spring begins today, Monday 1 March, and it is running about three weeks to a month late compared to recent years.

The coldest winter since 1981 has kept the natural world locked up tight, substantially setting back the blossoming of trees and spring flowers, and delaying the emergence of hibernating insects such as bumblebees, and red admiral and peacock butterflies.

Over the last 15 to 20 years, spring has advanced considerably because of the warming climate – according to the Met Office, Britain’s average temperature has increased by a full degree centigrade since 1970 – and by mid-February in most years, blossom and spring flowers are in evidence, as well as butterflies on warm days.

But this year the natural world is only just awakening. At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for example, the million or so Crocus tommasinianus which form a quite spectacular carpet of pale violet began to flower on Friday – whereas they were out in early February last year.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/spring-is-back-to-normal-ndash-after-15-freak-mild-years-1913668.html

John Krebs puts recent coverage of climate science in context.

My non-scientist friends are beginning to ask me “What’s gone wrong with science?” Revelations about melting glaciers and potentially dodgy emails about global warming, the resurfacing of Andrew Wakefield and the MMR scare, and the sacking of the Government’s drugs adviser, have created the impression for some people that science is in a mess.

Of course science isn’t in a mess, nor has anything changed. But the stories underline two important features of scientists and science. First, scientists, just like every other trade — bus drivers, lawyers and bricklayers — are a mix. Most are pretty average, a few are geniuses, some are a bit thick, and some dishonest.

Second, science itself is often misunderstood. Scientists tend to be portrayed as voices of authority who are able to reveal truths about arcane problems, be it the nature of quarks or the molecular basis of ageing. In fact, science is almost the opposite of this. InThe Trouble With Physics, physicist Lee Smolin considers how to describe science and concludes that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feyman’s phrase says it best: “Science is the organised scepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7018438.ece

Untitled artwork by Roy Calne

The world is over-populated and over-heating. Sir Roy Calne offers a blunt appraisal of humanity’s long term prospects.

It has recently been suggested that humans have an inborn hardwired wish to believe in a supernatural being.  Such belief would seem to offer a reasonable evolutionary advantage at an early stage in living together in communities, sharing duties, collaborating and beginning to specialise,  and requiring an hierarchical disciplined dogma of rules.

I feel therefore that this part of human nature is important, historically and currently.

However, the crystallisation of major religions associated with increased world population, and consolidation of humans in geographical areas which until recently were relatively separate, has resulted in certain religions having great power associated with coercion, fear and persecution for those who do not comply.  Not surprisingly fringe groups in each religion have developed.  Fundamentalist extremists are often violent and even suicidal adopting philosophies which have resulted in great misery, wars, massacres and slavery.

Recently weapons have become so advanced as a result of scientific developments that the carefully planned suicidal thoughts of small groups could now result in huge destruction, out of proportion to previous historical events.  What we have seen so far is probably the tip of the iceberg concerning the potential extreme scale of development of atomic, biological and chemical weapons.

There is a theme running through all major religions and specifically written in some texts where the deity instructs his followers to “go forth and multiply”.  This is not a particularly difficult instruction to follow since it mirrors the evolutionary imperative to survive and reproduce. There is now an enormous inbalance between the numbers of humans conceived and surviving beyond reproductive age and the previous attrition that came from diseases that can now be controlled or cured, particularly infection.  In other words, there is ever increasingly efficient death control, but birth control is limited mostly to the developed world, especially civilisations where women are educated and emancipated and have freedom of choice concerning the number of children they will bear.

I was amazed recently to watch an excellent programme chaired by David Attenborough on the danger to the world mainly of global warming, but also in the utilisation of resources and the elimination of wildlife species.  He pointed out that the booming human population of the world fuelled man-made global warming, necessitating enormous efforts to reduce our harmful emissions.  In developing countries, quite naturally, there is an aspiration to attain the creature comforts of the rich, developed nations.  All this was handled in a masterly fashion by David Attenborough with his charming and persuasive personality. But in the whole programme the word “religion” was not mentioned.  Nowhere did he point out that the powerful religions either proscribed birth control actively or tacitly in the wish for co-religionists to increase in numbers.

We are constantly being encouraged to eschew scepticism in the battle to negate overpopulation and climate change, but realistically there seems to be no way for any individual or small group to influence the progressive deterioration of the planet, a direct result of the inexorable increase in human population.  Perhaps like many extinct species the direction  in destination of homo sapiens is to become homo extinctus.

Sir Roy Calne is a pioneering transplant surgeon who performed several record first transplant operations in Europe and the world. A fellow of the Royal Society, a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, and a member of artists’ group Group 90, Calne is currently the Yeah Ghim Professor of Surgery at the National University of Singapore.

Like a patient waiting for hospital scan results, this week the government nervously anticipates new growth figures for the economy. Any sign of an increase and relief could quickly lead to self-satisfaction about its handling of the recession. Approving nods may be seen later this week in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Why? Because among political and business classes, growth, measured by rising GDP, is considered always a “good thing”. But is it?

The banking crisis taught us that when things look good on paper, if the underlying accounting system is faulty, it can conceal high risk and imminent disaster – as Jared Diamond put it in Collapse, his book about societies throughout history that fell by wrongly estimating the resilience of their environmental life-support systems. What looks like wealth might just be a one-off fire sale of irreplaceable natural capital. Ecologically speaking, he writes, “an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cashflow”.

To avoid collapse the economy has to operate within thresholds that do not critically undermine the things that we depend on on a daily basis. They’re often interconnected, like a sufficiently stable climate, productive farmland, fresh water and a healthy diversity of plants and animals.

On climate change, a new piece of research by the New Economics Foundation thinktank looks at which rates of global economic growth are compatible with prevention of a dangerous level of warming.

Story continues http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jan/25/uk-growth-energy-resources-boundaries

Angry Mob and Anton Vowl take on Richard Littlejohn over climate versus weather

Richard Littlejohn tackles climate change – again – and makes the point that as it is cold outside climate change is therefore a conspiracy concocted to victimise honest taxpayers. This is par for the course (Littlejohn mentions saving the Polar Bears yet again in this column) but it is interesting to see that this time Littlejohn actually attempts to tackle the criticism he gets in his comments:

Ah, say the ‘experts’, there’s a difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’. They are forced to resort to semantics to sustain their insistence that the science is settled, even though they are all sitting there shivering like brass monkeys. They’d still cling to their belief in man-made warming if Hell froze over.

So there you have it: the only difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ according to Littlejohn is semantic. I wish everything in life was as simple as Littlejohn makes out, but sadly things are a little more complex than that and the cold weather outside today says nothing about climate change or the climate in general. I guess this is why Littlejohn rarely engages in criticism of his points, because when he does he looks feeble-minded, rather than just ignorant.

http://www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/95-richard-littlejohn/862-the-semantics-of-climate-change

After all, the reason why there are different words for different things is often because they’re different. Climate means something very different from weather, although they both talk about rain, and sun, and so on. Either this is too hard for Littlejohn to understand – and I do wonder sometimes – or he’s decided that he can dismiss what anyone else says on the basis that they’re simply using two different words that really mean the same thing.

Using Littlejohn’s reasoning, there’s no difference other than semantics between a cat and a dog – if I think they’re the same thing, then they’re the same thing, and it’s only people trying to pull the wool over our eyes who try to use different words to describe them.

http://enemiesofreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/who-cares-what-words-actually-mean.html

According to a recent petition, 31,486 US scientists dissent from the consensus on climate change.

That sounds like a lot. But is it?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/climate-change-a-consensus-among-scientists/

As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to try to make a deal to prevent further global warming, why should East Anglians be concerned? Because what happened in 1953 could happen again, answers Margaret Nelson of Suffolk Humanists

In 1953 I lived on the North West coast of England, and I didn’t hear about the floods in East Anglia. I didn’t hear of them for several years after I moved here, until I became a funeral celebrant. Then I heard stories from people who were affected by the North Sea surge. 307 people were drowned, some as they slept. Hundreds of animals were lost.

In 1953, communications weren’t as good as today. The first story I heard about the flood was about a man whose parents had a small general store on the Tendring peninsula coast. He heard that there was a danger of flooding and phoned them to tell them to move onto higher ground. Thinking that they had plenty of time, they started moving their stock onto the highest shelves, and were caught by the rising water before they could escape. When their son arrived, a day or so later, he found them both lying face down in the water, drowned. He never recovered from the shock, his wife said, and was terrified of water for the rest of his life. At his funeral, some of his colleagues said they’d never understood, until then, why he wouldn’t go swimming. On my way home I stopped at the public library and asked if there were any books about the flood. There was one, which I borrowed.

After that, there were more stories. A man who lived in a boat moored on Mersea Island made a living selling firewood and anything else he could find. He delivered it with an old bicycle. He was caught by the flood before he could get home, and spent the night up a telegraph pole. A family who were living in an old hut near Harwich, waiting to be rehomed by the council, were cut off by the water. Fortunately, they had a dingy, so the father was able to get to work and buy groceries. It was several days before they all managed to escape.

The reason I’m telling these stories is that it will happen again. The likelihood of another sea surge like the one in 1953 has increased as we get more extreme weather, due to climate change, and as sea levels rise, large areas of the East Anglian coast will be flooded. Areas of special scientific interest will be lost, as well as hundreds of people’s homes. Compared with the few houses that are currently falling into the sea, due to coastal erosion, it will be far worse.

This map is from Marinet, the marine network of Friends of the Earth. FOE provides a briefing of the coastal areas under threat.

Of course, if you’re one of those who don’t believe that climate change has anything to do with them, you’ll think this is all exaggeration, and you’re probably quite happy to buy a cottage by the sea. You might have read about those emails, and believed they provided the proof that it’s all a conspiracy by scientists to spread alarm and make themselves feel important. But how much do you know about the science? Could you prove they were wrong? Or do you just hope they are, because you really don’t want to make any changes in your lifestyle to help reverse global warming? Here’s one explanation why the people who say those emails prove it’s not happening are wrong…

But now the Daily Express, which is, of course, an authority in these matters, says that climate change is “natural”, so we’ve no need to worry. Not so, says the New Scientist, pointing out all the errors in the Express’s piece, while Anton Vowl supplies 100 reasons why the Daily Express isn’t the world’s greatest newspaper.

Anyhow, quite apart from any concerns you might have about coastal property prices, if you do accept the science, here are a few more reasons why humanists – that is, people who don’t believe there’s any superhuman being to come and clear up any mess we make of the small planet we all share – should care about climate change:

• Because more extreme weather will cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of people and millions of other creatures;
• Because floods and drought will make some parts of the world uninhabitable, leading to huge numbers of climate change refugees who’ll want to move to areas, like Europe, where it’s likely that this will lead to conflict;
• Because water shortages will cause loss of life, and possibly water wars;
• Because we could lose thousands of species;
• Because low-lying areas, like the Pacific Islands and Bangladesh, will become totally submerged;
• Because it will be impossible to grow food in previously productive areas;
• Because the Earth will be a very unpleasant place to live for many of us;
• And so on.

Humanism is about an ethical approach to life, without religion. Like many things, such as the X-Factor, other people’s sex lives, and the BNP, religion is a distraction that is of little importance compared with making a concerted effort to change ourselves before the planet changes any more for the worst. That means a simpler life, with fewer unsustainable luxuries, fewer children, less meat, less energy. We can do it, can’t we?

This article was first published at on the Suffolk Humanists and Secularists blog at http://www.suffolkhands.org.uk/node/1145

Science and compassion both exert themselves in concerns about climate change, making it a very humanist issue, argues David Flint

Humanists believe in reason and science as well as compassion. Most humanist moral and political thinking derives fairly directly from the third of these. In climate change, however, we have a political and moral issue that is critical for the whole human race but which derives very directly from science.

In the 40 years that I’ve been a humanist the movement has fought, and continues to fight, a series of struggles over abortion, divorce, sex, euthanasia and religious privilege (many of which are ongoing campaigns). In each case we have made an essentially moral argument based on the rights of individuals to make choices about their lives and the lack of authority, by church or state, to overrule those choices. We have used science to support these views – and have generally been lucky in finding that it does support them.

Climate change, I believe, is different. It’s a challenge to the world and a particular challenge to Humanism.

Firstly it’s the most important issue we’ve faced since the invention of the atom bomb, and arguably ever. Climate scientists are almost completely agreed that unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast temperatures, and later sea levels, will rise uncontrollably. This will reduce the Earth’s carrying capacity, drive many species into extinction and reduce the human population substantially.

Secondly, our understanding of climate change comes mainly from science. Literally thousands of scientists have contributed to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); itself probably the largest scientific endeavour ever conducted. Science has been less successful in predicting the human consequences of climate change largely, I think, for fear of being thought to exaggerate. My own attempt to understand the consequences is seriously depressing.

Thirdly, climate science shows that the problem is due primarily to industrialisation; itself closely associated with science and the Western societies that gave rise to individualism and modern humanism. Science and humanism thus originate in the very processes responsible for the problem. Climate change is a political challenge to Western societies because it threatens those societies and the liberties that they support. It’s also a particular challenge to humanists because we need to show that societies based on our values, reason, science and liberty, can exist without destroying the environment that supports us.

Fourthly, it requires long-term international action on a scale unmatched since World War 2. As in that war this will require most people in many countries to forgo products, like cars, and experiences, such as foreign holidays, to which they feel entitled. In the poorest countries people are already dying from the effects of climate change. The required actions conflict with some national goals, such as China’s industrial development, and make the UN’s Millennium Development Goals harder to achieve.

As I write this world leaders are travelling to Copenhagen to negotiate a solution to the problem. The diplomats, scientists and pressure groups have been there for a week – some for much longer. But this is itself a problem. Diplomats are used to negotiation and expect to end every negotiation with a compromise. But you cannot negotiate with the laws of nature. A compromise that fails to cut emissions fast enough will be a failure, delaying but not preventing the climate catastrophe.

That’s why some humanists, including myself, spent Saturday 5 December marching through London to create a ring around Parliament in The Wave, the UK’s largest ever climate change demonstration. In London there were over 50,000 people, with another 13,000 in Glasgow.

This was not only a very big event it was also very diverse. Organisations present ranged from the establishment – the Co-Op, Women’s Institute, WWF and RSPB – through Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Greenpeace to the Socialist Workers Party. The organisations affiliated to Stop Climate Chaos, the organising committee, claim over eleven million members. That’s far more than have joined ALL the UK’s political parties and, I’d guess, far more than are shareholders in the most environmentally damaging businesses.

Climate change is a humanist concern because it threatens the survival of human civilisation and calls for us to respect the science, exercise compassion and collaborate, globally, in a great humanitarian cause.

David Flint is a BHA member and Chair of Humanists4Science