Information - Our Main Weapon Against Global Warming
By Walter Truett Anderson, Pacific News Service, October 17, 1995

Over the past years an ocean of scientific data has accumulated indicating global warming on a scale that will seriously, maybe even drastically, affect human life everywhere. Yet because this ocean is invisible no politics of scale has arisen to mobilize the world's people to meet this challenge. Nevertheless the information now being relentlessly gathered throughout the world provides the only weapons we have for mastering the menace. PNS writer Walter Truett Anderson is a fellow of the Meridian Institute, a U.S.-Canadian organization concerned with global government. His next book is entitled "Evolution Isn't What it Used To Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World."

Although climate change has arguably become the most important challenge the human species has ever faced, nobody has ever seen it. And its invisibility means that the world's political pundits - from Far Right to Far Green - just do not see it relentlessly moving towards us.

The Earth is not what it used to be. It has become a different kind of planet -- a wired, monitored, information-age world -- and the human race has become dependent on scientific information for its very life. To put it in a nutshell, the Earth is undergoing a mutation in which humans and nature are becoming more dependent on each other than ever before.

The invisibility of global warming, its existence at the present time as pure information, is the key to the deeper message about this new do-or-die co-existence of Earth and Humans. We are dealing with complex collections of scientific data -- information gleaned from the past, gathered in the present by global weather monitoring systems, projected into the future through computer models of the complicated life of the world's weather systems. In short, that information is all machines, mathematics, projections.

But in some places where it counts the challenge is being taken very seriously. The world's top leaders may be bewildered by the acrimonious debate now going on about global warming, but they are not taking any chances. They have already taken major action on a closely related challenge: the damage to the ozone layer. They came together in Montreal to draft an international protocol limiting use of chlorofluorocarbons believed to be the source of the damage.

The data on ozone layer damage, like that on global warming, is also entirely abstract, based on technology and theory. Yet it convinced these leaders, despite pressure from big business conservatives, that the damaged layer led to human skin cancers and eye cataracts along with possibly broader impact on ecosystems.

But an even bigger indication of how seriously governments are taking the challenge is the array of organizations and gadgetry the U.S. Government has put together to monitor climatic change. The U.S. government's Global Change Research Program is the most complex and sophisticated system of that type that has ever existed. It orchestrates the work of eleven different federal agencies. Among these are the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Artificial satellites are the real wonder-workers in environmental monitoring. Over the last 35 years, twenty thousand satellites have been put into orbit. Many of them are still out there, watching the environment. They track storms around the world, sample the health of vegetation, follow the migrations of wildlife, note the expansion and contractions of desert and forest, take the temperatures of the oceans. They serve as elements in the information systems that link laboratories, data bases and researchers around the world.

One thing on this rapidly changing planet is certain: this information system is here to stay. In fact the biggest part of the U.S. globe-watching project, scheduled to come on line in 1998, is NASA's Earth Observation System (EOS) with a series of satellites to be launched over a ten-year period to measure everything from aerosols to phytoplankton.

Another certainty is that this ocean of information on which we all are coming to depend for our very lives will require government regulation. That's going to disappoint environmentalist-bashers on the right who want business and industry to go their unimpeded way. So too romantic environmentalists in their dreams of a world in which humanity has no power over nature. The new reality is that ecosystems have to be managed through information.

And unthinkable as it may sound, politicians, ideologues and diplomats now immersed in the grand games of world politics will become the most disappointed of all. All their power comes from nation-states but this ocean of information is already washing away their sacrosanct boundaries.

Planet-spanning information offers the only tools we have to meet the challenge of global warming. But to use these tools effectively we will need a new consciousness, a new sense of responsibility for the human species as a whole and a willingness to create world governance to take daring actions to save us all. That sets up a much more immediate and visible challenge to bring about a borders-transcending politics to start creating such governance.