- Geraldo Luís Lino, special to
Climate Change Dispatch
The word resilience can be described as the capacity of resistance, elasticity and recovery from physical shocks. This is a property that Mankind has always demonstrated to possess while facing all kinds of threats to its evolution, and this is also the third and most important keyword for the needed reassessment of the climate debate.
Despite some transitory interruptions in the civilizational process and a lot of setbacks and tragedies of all dimensions, the intrinsically creative, associative and synergetic nature of our species have granted Mankind the evolving capacity (in terms of knowledge and socio-political-economic relations) and the resilience needed for overcoming all sorts of challenges so far: adverse climatic conditions, food scarcity, epidemic and pandemic diseases, natural hazards, conflicts of all kinds, bad rulers, short-sighted leaders, and with unfortunate frequency, irrationality pandemics fed by exotic ideas disconnected from any coherent process of understanding of the universal laws – like environmentalism and its standard bearer the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory.
It is worth reminding that our species appeared in the penultimate Ice Age somewhere in Africa and set out from there to conquer all the continents under much more unfavorable climatic conditions than those prevailing in the Holocene period, the last 12,000 years. It was under the harsh conditions prevailing during most of that time span that our forebears developed the “physical” and “social” technologies needed not only for their mere survival, but also for the advent of civilized life: fire, tools, sophisticated hunting weapons, the taming of animals, articulated language, capacity for group action and even profound abstract concepts like the intuition of a principle of universal order and a refined artistic sense (exemplified by the magnificent paintings in the Altamira and Lascaux caves and by the 35,000 year-old flutes made out of animal bones found in Southeast Germany). Only agriculture had to wait for the onset of our warm interglacial the Holocene.
So, with that 150,000-plus years inheritance of accumulated knowledge, Mankind has no shortage of conditions for facing any environmental scenarios created by the natural oscillations of the climate dynamics, with all the temperature, humidity, ice cover, sea level and other changes that may be expected in a foreseeable future. The keyword is ensuring the needed resilience for such capacity – instead of sacrificing the wellbeing and progress perspectives of much of the world’s population for an irrational obsession with a tiny rising of the thermometers and tide gauges.
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