Time to Wake: Climate Change is Here

By Guy Lane

Climate change is here, and it’s no longer just the poor people getting swept away by the fires and floods. Today, even the rich, powerful & famous are getting hammered.

Celebrity mansions lost to wildfire, high-tech fighter jets crushed by cyclone rubble, and luxury super-yachts sunk at their moorings; all in just one month. Climate change is here, and there’s more to come. So much more.

Whether you are familiar with climate change or new to the subject, this short, punchy book is your chance to wake to the growling, snarling calamity of ‘abrupt’ climate change, and what can be done to make it better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guy Lane
• Release date: Dec 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370388608

Guy Lane

Guy Lane is an environmental scientist, author and entrepreneur based in southeast Queensland, Australia. He is founder of Vita Sapien and author of Lifewise Philosophy.guylane.comvitasapien.org

Book preview

Time to Wake:

Climate Change is Here

by Guy Lane

This book is advised by The Restoration Story by George Monbiot, 2018:

"Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the hero of the story - it might be one person or a group of people - confronts those powerful and nefarious forces, against the odds, overthrows them, and restores order to the land."

I wrote this book to invite you to be one of those heroes.

Part 1 --

Introduction

Lagom.

I want you to imagine a terrifying scene. You are inside a large, well-appointed house, watching a hot, dry wind blowing a wall of fire down a forested hillside towards your neighbour’s home.

Suddenly, the beautiful white mansion next door is overrun by the wildfire. Windows shatter, fire pours from the roof, and vegetation bursts into flames. The hot wind showers the yard with burning embers, which swirl around like bright orange confetti.

A movement catches your eye. You squint through the embers to see, but your eyes are streaming from the acrid smoke. Then you see it! There are horses on this property. The horses are panicking, running anxiously to and fro, unsure how to escape the awful inferno.

The sunlight is choked by dense smoke and the sun looks down accusingly at you with its blood-red eye. Hell has come to paradise, and you wonder how long before the flames reach you. You turn away from the horrible scene, sobbing, gasping, and you ask aloud, Why is this happening?

Standing there, watching the inferno with you, I can answer your question.

My name is Guy Lane. I am an environmental scientist. I won’t go into detail about my background here as I have described this the first book in this series: What Comes Next: Climate Change, the Future and You.

For those new to this series, I will say that in 30 years of learning about Life & Earth, I have come to understand that our global civilization is in grave trouble. This is very bad news for all 7.7 billion humans on this planet, yourself included.

What’s the trouble? There are multiple problems, but the one that looms large is abrupt climate change. That’s not just climate change; that’s ‘abrupt’ climate change. There’s a big difference.

Through our reckless and short-sighted actions, we humans may have already condemned the human race and most other species to extinction in the coming years. It may already be too late to fix the mess we’ve made.

There is plenty of scientific evidence that supports this argument. And there is evidence to say that there is still opportunities for human civilization to enjoy its birth right, to exist deep into the Long Future. I am a student of both these arguments, and I honestly don’t know which one will play out. Our extinction is not yet certain, so I search and share what seem to be the most promising options to avert our fate while also mapping out the forces ranged against us.

Our global predicament is not caused by an absence of money or technology. Globally, we give hundreds of billions in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry every year. That money could be easily redirected towards climate solutions. And while we humans behave like unsustainable super-predators, we sure do make some good technology! Rockets that land on floating barges, mobile phones with the power of supercomputers, cars that don’t need drivers - really, we can pretty much invent anything we want.

So, if money and technology aren’t the problem, what is? The biggest part of the climate change problem is the behaviour of some people. In this book, I introduce a new way of thinking these people and the organisations they collectively form. I call this the Krakate.

If you recognise the scenario with the burning house in the first pages of this book, that is because it is a reflection of the terrible events that took place across California in the early part of November, 2018. One of the major fires was known is the ‘Woolsey fire’, which swept through and destroyed thousands of hectares of habitat and many hundreds of homes.

The Woolsey fire is one of three case studies of climate disasters I use in this book, which are taking place around the world with increasing frequency and intensity. Two others are the storm that sank hundreds of yachts in Rapallo, Italy; and Hurricane Michael, which ruined some of the world’s most powerful jet fighters, when it crossed the coast in Florida in October.

Why should I pick on these three disasters to tell a bigger tale? I do this to demonstrate that today even the rich, powerful and famous are vulnerable to climate change. Climate change is no longer just an affliction on the poor, anymore.

Before we discuss these events, I want to tell you a little more about myself – more than I have shared previously in What Comes Next. I do this to demonstrate how it is that I came to be studying these issues and writing this book.

I have been a ‘climate change professional’ since 2002. In that year, I took a job consulting to an Australian Government program called the Greenhouse Challenge. I was located in North Queensland, Australia, and my role was to recruit and conduct carbon audits on businesses. Given my long fascination with the ocean, I targeted the marine tourism industry. It was a great job. I would visit the Great Barrier Reef on the fast-cat ferries, observe the operations, and identify the sources of greenhouse emissions. Later, with fuel and power bills in hand, I would calculate how much diesel the vessels were gobbling up, and how much electricity the office operations consumed. Then, using carbon coefficients from the Australian Government manual called Factors and Methods, I would calculate how much climate-changing CO2 the marine tourism operators were belching into the Coral Sea air.

Naturally, I was one of the first people to point out the cruel irony of a reef tourism industry, based on diesel-powered boats, and jet fuelled international flights. Back then, no one paid much attention; it was all just business as usual. The Great Barrier Reef was still ‘great’, and climate change was a threat to be reckoned with sometime around 2100, way beyond the next quarterly report to shareholders and the lives of all the tourists.

Today, the northern third of the reef is mostly dead, as a result of multiple pressures, most notably from consecutive mass-bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 caused by increased sea temperature triggered by climate change. This summer, 2019, is tipped to be another reef-killing year; maybe the last when the Great Barrier Reef can be truly called ‘great’.

One day, in 2002, I drove from Port Douglas to Cairns. I pulled into Rex’s Lookout, a magnificent cliff-side viewing area that overlooks the Coral Sea. I pondered what to name my new carbon auditing service. I looked at the sea and contemplated the CO2, and came up with the name ‘SEA O2’, a name I still trade with today.

Through SEA O2, I developed other services, including training programs. I researched the best advice I could find about climate change, and delivered it to whomever cared to hear it.

You see, I have been researching and sharing climate change issues for over 16 years. Back in the early days, the official mantra went like this: "If we don’t change our ways with respect to greenhouse emissions, we will be in big trouble, one day."

Well guess what?

We didn’t mend our ways. Instead, we went full-steam ahead; business-as-usual, powered by fossil fuels. All the while, the United Nations climate change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pushed out its five-yearly reports, which we now know dramatically underplayed the risks of climate change. So, for most of my 16 years in