It seems we are swimming in a sea of conflicting opinions and scientific evidence when it comes to climate change.

Seashells in the desert. A clue?

Whatever your opinion, you can Google it and find support for it, including quoted scientific evidence.  Whatever you look for you will find. One thing I’m sure of is that the climate is changing.  It has never stopped changing in fact.  It always was, long before the arrival of Homo Sapiens and it and always will be.  Hence we find seashells in deserts and rainforest remnants under the ice in various parts of the world.  Really, we shouldn’t be surprised.

An increasing number of people on the planet are voicing their concerns about our impact on Mother Earth and this suggests that they’ve reached the sixth stage of human development, as mapped by Dr Clare W Graves.  This means that more people are thinking in more complex ways.

As this new worldview grows, it’s becoming increasingly evident that many of the world’s powerbrokers are still at less complex stages of development.  The evidence lies in their materialistic priorities and the placing of financial profit over and above issues that could threaten the continued stable existence of the human race.  Some of these issues include over population, the availability of drinking water, food and adequate healthcare, and natural resource depletion.

The upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is unlikely to result in any meaningful global action to cope with climate change.  The primary reason is that the political decision makers who will attend face conflicting opinions from powerbrokers in industry and from within their voting constituencies. Few will have the courage to go with their own feelings at the risk of a voter backlash.  Most will look for a nice comfortable compromise.

At the very heart of the climate change matter, the wrong questions are being asked. Namely, is climate change our fault and if so what should we stop doing?  Anyone who has trained in NLP will know that negative messages often bring the opposite of the desired result.  Hence the failure of programs that ask people to stop or reduce their carbon emissions.  We need to focus on positive messages if we want results.

Anyone who knows human nature will realise that people respond to signals in their immediate environment.  If everything feels fine, why should we reduce carbon emissions?  The impression of the majority is that more immediate hurt will come from reducing carbon emissions than from continuing to live the way we do.

So what’s the alternative then?  Firstly, to stop arguing about whether humans are causing climate change.  The climate has always been changing.  Secondly to focus on what the world needs ‘to do’ (positive language) to help humans cope with climate change.  Some regions on Earth can no longer support the agriculture they once did, because of climate change.  Other places are being inundated with sea water as levels rise.  These are immediate and very real impacts, not scientific postulations.

A more subtle message hidden within the problem of dealing with climate change is that our democratic system of government is in the early stages of failing.  As the world’s problems become more complex and our capacity to have global influence increases, we need our very best leaders and problem solvers driving the bus.  These people are rarely the ones elected by a majority vote.  This is a very challenging issue and one that the world isn’t quite ready to deal with yet.  I suspect things will need to get a lot worse before we start looking at options other than one-vote-one-value democracy, but eventually we will need to.