Blue Flower

The climate in the Middle & Near East is set to change and create swathes of climate refugees. Ads millions start to pour into Europe even now, it seems that EU state governments have no idea how to respond except to retreat into insular "safe zones" that will hold out for a short while and present humanity with a huge moral dilemma. We look at What Next?

Understanding orientalist climate

How The Middle East Was

The orientalist paintings depicting the region in the 19th century tend to give us a very romantic idea of what the Holy Land, the land of the Pharoahs, the deserts of Arabia and Constantinople, really looked like. We glance at them wistfully and wish we could be transported there for the authentic adventure holiday of a lifetime. Of course, they were quite brutal times too but people did live and survive in some sort of harmony with there surroundings. 

What changed?

Probably the single most defining change in the Middle East has been the discovery of vast amount of fossil fuel energy in the form of oil and gas. It is this discovery that eradicated the tribesman from the desert landscape as they were transposed into vast areas of refining and pipelines to serve the thirst of those customers in the West. But with every exchange... we gave them our wealth in exchange for their oil and gas and now we have very little left and neither do they. In the boom of it all we borrowed heavily from ecology and are now going to pay the price. The "correction" will be severe and some form of tragedy will touch everyone.

Can we do anything?

TO BE CONTINUED......

Here is a tralier for the 2010 film, 'A Hitchhiker's Guide to Gaia' looking at Professor James Lovelock's forward thoughts on what we can do to prepare for climate change:

Jim Lovelock Gaia - cover image

In this retrospective documentary, we can see the background to who Professor James Lovelock is and try to understand how he came to his theories on Gaia. Lovelock is not a "one hit wonder", he has had many successes through out his long career and that gives us another reason why we should take his warnings seriously:

 

 

The Oxford martin School hold an event, in conversation with James Lovelock:

 

 

Gaia Theory New Scientist 1975

1975 maybe about 4 decades ago but that doesn't mean it loses its' sense of cool. In the mid-seventies, Gaia Theory was just making it's appearance on the scene as one of the most controversial scientific hypothesis of the day.

The whole magazine can be viewed by clicking here

 

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