Lovelock: Only 500 Million Humans to Survive Global Warming

Note from Tierra y Vida: See story below...According to population trends, there will be 8.9 billion humans on Earth by 2050. But James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia Theory – the scientific theorem that Earth acts as a single self-sustaining organic system – warns that by 2100, only 500 million of us will still be living. If Lovelock is correct, roughly 17 out of 18 people will have died. The impacts of global warming will rival the death rate of the American Holocaust, the "Conquest" of indigenous America. 95% of Native people were wiped away.

That's only the humans. If global warming approaches the levels it reached 250 million tears ago in the Permian Extinction – or the Great Dying, as it's known, 95% of all species could be extinguished.

A recent study by the British government shows that if current trends continue, a third of the planet will be desert by 2100. According to their calculations, areas susceptible to moderate drought will double, to 50% of the Earth's surface. Areas susceptible to severe drought will more than triple to 30% of the Earth's surface. According to Lovelock such impacts will continue for 200,000 years.

And that is nothing more than a glance at one threat – we’re leaving aside Peak Oil, with its all but certain probabilities of economic and agricultural collapse and a permanent and irreversible collapse of industrial society; and we also leave aside the chances of thermonuclear resource wars of the kind the Bush administration is currently preparing in places like Iran.

- Tierra y Vida

http://news.sawf.org/Lifestyle/28669.aspx

Climate change threatens mass extinction over next century, claims scientist

Posted on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 (EST)
A leading scientist has warned that billions of people may be wiped out over the next century due to climate change.

London, Nov 29: A leading scientist has warned that billions of people may be wiped out over the next century due to climate change.

Professor James Lovelock, who pioneered the idea of the Earth as a living organism, feels that as the planet heats up, the survival of humans will become difficult.

He warns that the global population may fall as low as 500 million, and that any attempts to tackle climate change will not be able to solve the problem.

Lovelock fears that as carbon dioxide emissions from man and the planet itself soar, the Earth will heat up causing water shortages, destroying life in much of the planet's oceans, and making it impossible for plants to grow.

"There is very good evidence of what happened 55 million years ago when as much carbon dioxide was put into the atmosphere by geology as is being done by us now," the Daily Mail quoted him as saying, while giving the 5th John Collier Lecture to the Institution of Chemical Engineers in London.

"Temperatures zoomed up by 8 degrees and stayed there for 200,000 years then came back to normal," he added.

Lovelock however acknowledges the fact that mankind has managed to survive many climatic disasters that occurred in the past.

"There have been at least seven of these major climate changes before and we have to adapt. It is going to be tough and there will be some evolution of humans during it," he said.

"The survivors will be those humans that can make their way to refuges or Arctic places and survive there," he added.

Although Lovelock does not say that all human species will be wiped out due to the heating of earth, he claims that the planet would not be able to support much over 500 million under such situations.

"I think an awful lot of people will die but I don't see the human species dying out. I would think a hot earth could not support much over 500 million," he said.

He warns that no simple solution to the problem of global heating is available, and that nothing can be done now to "save the earth".

"It is something quiet beyond humans at this stage in their evolution," he said.

He however stresses that people should continue doing whatever they can to reduce their impact on Earth. (ANI)

African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change

Kenya's herdsmen are facing extinction as global warming destroys their lands Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday November 12, 2006
The Observer

They are dubbed the 'climate canaries' - the people destined to become the first victims of world climate change. And as government ministers sit down in Nairobi at this weekend's UN Climate Conference, the people most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming will be only a few hundred miles away from their deliberations.

Those people, according to research commissioned by the charity Christian Aid, will be the three million pastoralists of northern Kenya, whose way of life has sustained them for thousands of years but who now face eradication. Hundreds of thousands of these seasonal herders have already been forced to forsake their traditional culture and settle in Kenya's north eastern province following consecutive droughts that have decimated their livestock in recent years.

Earlier this year the charity commissioned livestock specialist Dr David Kimenye to examine how the herders are coping with the recent drought, uncovering a disastrous story. Over two months, Dr Kimenye talked to pastoralists in five areas across the Mandera district, home to 1.5 million people.

The study discovered that:

· Incidence of drought has increased fourfold in the Mandera region in the past 25 years.

· One-third of herders living there - around half a million people - have already been forced to abandon their pastoral way of life because of adverse climatic conditions.

· During the last drought, so many cattle, camels and goats were lost that 60 per cent of the families who remain as herders need outside assistance to recover. Their surviving herds are too small to support them.

The new findings follow recent warnings from the UK Met Office that if current trends continue one-third of the planet will be desert by the end of 2100. The scientists modelled how drought is likely to increase globally during the coming century because of predicted changes in rainfall and temperature around the world.

At present, according to their calculations, 25 per cent of the Earth's surface is susceptible to moderate drought, rising to 50 per cent by 2100. In addition, the areas susceptible to severe drought - 8 per cent - are expected to rise to 40 per cent. And the figure for extreme drought, currently 3 per cent, will rise to 30 per cent.

And what is doubly worrying about Kimenye's research is that it has revealed that a system of nomadic pastoralism that has, over the centuries, been able to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and regular drought has been brought by climate change to the point of utter extinction.

It is a fact not lost on those who have been forced out of their historic lifestyle to settle at the Quimbiso settlement. Nearby is a stinking pit where the bones of the last of once thriving herds were dumped and burned - victims of the worst drought in living memory.

The families who until a few months ago herded these animals across northern Kenya and beyond now huddle in this riverside settlement, their children prone to malaria and other illnesses, but at least close to a reliable source of water. Now they are completely dependent on aid handouts for most of their food.

'Our whole life has been spent moving, but we are desperate people. People who have lost our livelihood,' says Mukhtar Aden, one of the elders at the Quimbiso settlement. 'We didn't settle here by choice, it was forced upon us.'

Everywhere are tales of huge livestock losses. In one roadside settlement, which now depends on selling milk from its few remaining animals to passing trucks, a man produces a book recording the dark days of the drought. One entry, for 15 February, shows that the community lost more than 500 sheep and goats and 250 cattle in a single day.

And while rain did came to the region for the first time in more than a year last month, it was too late for the makeshift roadside communities who no longer have animals to put out to pasture.

Wargadud is another sizeable community running along either side of the region's main road. The chairman of Wargadud's water users' association is Abdullahi Abdi Hussein, who describes how the periods of rain have got shorter and the dry spells longer - changing the pattern of four seasons on which the pastoral communities depended.

And while there were always droughts, he says: 'Decade after decade it has been getting more severe. It has only been getting harder and harder and more and more serious.'

ALTERED OCEANS: A Chemical Imbalance

PART FIVE

ALTERED OCEANS

A Chemical Imbalance

Growing seawater acidity threatens to wipe out coral, fish and other crucial species worldwide.

By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer
August 3, 2006

As she stared down into a wide-mouthed plastic jar aboard the R/V Discoverer, Victoria Fabry peered into the future.

The marine snails she was studying — graceful creatures with wing-like feet that help them glide through the water — had started to dissolve.

Fabry was taken aback. The button-sized snails, called pteropods, are hardy animals that swirl in dense patches in some of the world's coldest seas. In 20 years of studying the snails, a vital ingredient in the polar food supply, the marine biologist from Cal State San Marcos had never seen such damage.

In a brief experiment aboard the federal research vessel plowing through rough Alaskan seas, the pteropods were sealed in jars. The carbon dioxide they exhaled made the water inside more acidic. Though slight, this change in water chemistry ravaged the snails' translucent shells. After 36 hours, they were pitted and covered with white spots.

The one-liter jars of seawater were a microcosm of change now occurring invisibly throughout the world's vast, open seas.

As industrial activity pumps massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment, more of the gas is being absorbed by the oceans. As a result, seawater is becoming more acidic, and a variety of sea creatures await the same dismal fate as Fabry's pteropods.

The greenhouse gas, best known for accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet, is entering the ocean at a rate of nearly 1 million tons per hour — 10 times the natural rate.

Scientists report that the seas are more acidic today than they have been in at least 650,000 years. At the current rate of increase, ocean acidity is expected, by the end of this century, to be 2 1/2 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution began 200 years ago. Such a change would devastate many species of fish and other animals that have thrived in chemically stable seawater for millions of years.

Less likely to be harmed are algae, bacteria and other primitive forms of life that are already proliferating at the expense of fish, marine mammals and corals.

In a matter of decades, the world's remaining coral reefs could be too brittle to withstand pounding waves. Shells could become too fragile to protect their occupants. By the end of the century, much of the polar ocean is expected to be as acidified as the water that did such damage to the pteropods aboard the Discoverer.

Some marine biologists predict that altered acid levels will disrupt fisheries by melting away the bottom rungs of the food chain — tiny planktonic plants and animals that provide the basic nutrition for all living things in the sea.

Fabry, who recently testified on the issue before the U.S. Senate, told policymakers that the effects on marine life could be "direct and profound."

"The potential is there to have a devastating impact," Fabry said, "for the oceans to be very, very different in the near future than they are today."

The oceans have been a natural sponge for carbon dioxide from time immemorial. Especially after calamities such as asteroid strikes, they have acted as a global safety valve, soaking up excess CO2 and preventing catastrophic overheating of the planet.

If not for the oceans, the Earth would have warmed by 2 degrees instead of 1 over the last century, scientists say. Glaciers would be disappearing faster than they are, droughts would be more widespread and rising sea levels would be more pronounced.

When carbon dioxide is added to the ocean gradually, it does little harm. Some of it is taken up during photosynthesis by microscopic plants called phytoplankton. Some of it is used by microorganisms to build shells. After their inhabitants die, the empty shells rain down on the seafloor in a kind of biological snow. The famed white cliffs of Dover are made of this material.

Today, however, the addition of carbon dioxide to the seas is anything but gradual.

Scientists estimate that nearly 500 billion tons of the gas have been absorbed by the oceans since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That is more than a fourth of all the CO2 that humanity has emitted into the atmosphere. Eventually, 80% of all human-generated carbon dioxide is expected to find its way into the sea.

Carbon dioxide moves freely between air and sea in a process known as molecular diffusion. The exchange occurs in a film of water at the surface. Carbon dioxide travels wherever concentrations are lowest. If levels in the atmosphere are high, the gas goes into the ocean. If they are higher in the sea, as they have been for much of the past, the gas leaves the water and enters the air.

If not for the CO2 pumped into the skies in the last century, more of the gas would leave the sea than would enter it.

"We have reversed that direction," said Ken Caldeira, an expert on ocean chemistry and carbon dioxide at the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology, based at Stanford University.

When carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it creates carbonic acid, the weak acid in carbonated drinks.

Increased acidity reduces the abundance of the right chemical forms of a mineral called calcium carbonate, which corals and other sea animals need to build shells and skeletons. It also slows the growth of the animals within those shells.

Even slightly acidified seawater is toxic to the eggs and larvae of some fish species. In others, including amberjack and halibut, it can cause heart attacks, experiments show. Acidified waters also tend to asphyxiate animals that require a lot of oxygen, such as fast-swimming squid.

The pH scale, a measure of how acidic or alkaline a substance is, ranges from 1 to 14, with 7 being neutral. The lower the pH, the greater the acidity. Each number represents a tenfold change in acidity or alkalinity.

For more than a decade, teams led by Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, have traveled from Antarctica to the Aleutian Islands, taking tens of thousands of water samples to gauge how the ocean's acidity is changing.

By comparing these measurements to past levels of carbon dioxide preserved in ice cores, the researchers determined that the average pH of the ocean surface has declined since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution by 0.1 units, from 8.16 to 8.05.

Geological records show that such a change has not occurred in 650,000 years, Feely said.

In April, Feely returned from a cruise to the North Pacific, where he took pH measurements at locations the team first sampled in 1991. This time, Feely's group found that the average pH in surface waters had dropped an additional 0.025 units in 15 years — a relatively large change for such a short time.

The measurements confirm those taken in the 1990s and indicate that forecasts of increased acidity are on target, Feely said.

If CO2 emissions continue at their current pace, the pH of the ocean is expected to dip to 7.9 or lower by the end of the century — a 150% change.

The last time ocean chemistry underwent such a radical transformation, Caldeira said, "was when the dinosaurs went extinct."

Until recently, the ocean was seen as a potential reservoir for greenhouse gases. Scientists explored the possibility that carbon dioxide could be trapped in smokestacks, compressed into a gooey liquid and piped directly into the deep sea.

Then the results of Jim Barry's experiments started trickling in.

A biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Barry wanted to know what would happen to sea creatures in the vicinity of a large dose of carbon dioxide.

He anchored a set of small plastic rings onto the seafloor to create an enclosure and sent a robot down to squirt liquid carbon dioxide into the surrounding water. Then he waited to see what would happen to animals in the enclosures and those that happened to swim through the CO2 cloud.

Sea stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins died immediately. Eighty percent of animals within three feet of the carbon dioxide died. Animals 15 feet away also perished in large numbers.

"When they were adjacent to the CO2 plume, pretty much, it killed everything," Barry said.

Experiments in Germany, Norway and Japan produced similar results. The evidence persuaded the U.S. Department of Energy, which had spent $22 million on such research, including Barry's, to pull the plug . Instead, the department will study the possibility of storing carbon dioxide in the ground and on decreasing emissions at their source.

Scientists say the acidification of the oceans won't be arrested unless the output of CO2 from factories, power plants and automobiles is substantially reduced. Even now, the problem may be irreversible.

"One thing we know for certain is it's not going to be a good thing for the ocean," Barry said. "We just don't know how bad it will be."

Scientists predict the effect will be felt first in the polar oceans and at lower depths, because cold water absorbs more carbon dioxide than warm water. One area of immediate concern is the Bering Sea and other waters around Alaska, home to half of the commercial U.S. fish and shellfish catch.

Because of acidification, waters in the Bering Sea about 280 feet down are running short of the materials that corals and other animals need to grow shells and skeletons. These chemical building blocks are normally abundant at such depths. In coming decades, the impoverished zone is expected to reach closer to the surface. A great quantity of sea life would then be affected.

"I'm getting nervous about that," Feely said.

The first victims of acidification are likely to be cold-water corals that provide food, shelter and reproductive grounds for hundreds of species, including commercially valuable ones such as sea bass, snapper, ocean perch and rock shrimp.

By the end of the century, 70% of cold-water corals will be exposed to waters stripped of the chemicals required for sturdy skeletons, said John Guinotte, an expert on corals at the nonprofit Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Wash.

"I liken it to osteoporosis in humans," Guinotte said. "You just can't build a strong structure without the right materials."

Cold-water corals, which thrive in waters as deep as three miles, were discovered only two decades ago. They harbor sponges, which show promise as powerful anti-cancer and antiviral agents; the AIDS drug AZT was formulated using clues from a coral sponge. Scientists fear that these unique ecosystems may be obliterated before they can be fully utilized or appreciated.

Tropical corals will not be affected as quickly because they live in warmer waters that do not absorb as much carbon dioxide. But in 100 years, large tropical reefs — called rain forests of the sea because of their biodiversity — may survive only in patches near the equator.

"Twenty-five percent of all species in the ocean live part of their life cycle on coral reefs. We're afraid we're going to lose these habitats and these species," said Chris Langdon, a coral expert at the University of Miami who has conducted experiments showing that corals grow more slowly when exposed to acidified waters.

Warm-water corals are already dying at high rates as global warming heats oceans and causes corals to "bleach" — lose or expel the symbiotic algae that provide vivid color and nutrients necessary for survival. Pollution, trampling by tourists and dynamiting by fishermen also take a devastating toll. An estimated 20% of the world's corals have disappeared since 1980.

"Corals are getting squeezed from both ends," said Joanie Kleypas, a marine ecologist and coral expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

The question for scientists is whether living things will adapt to acidification. Will some animals migrate to warmer waters that don't lose shell-building minerals as quickly? Will some survive despite the new chemistry? Will complex marine food chains be harmed?

One laboratory experiment showed that a strain of shelled plankton thrived in higher CO2 conditions. But most research has shown that shelled animals and corals stop growing or are damaged.

"We put a lot of faith in the idea that organisms can adapt," Kleypas said, "but organisms have probably not evolved to handle these big changes."

The best analogy to what is occurring today is in the fossil records of a 55-million-year-old event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the Earth underwent one of the most abrupt and extreme global warming events in history.

The average temperature of the planet rose 9 degrees because of an increase in greenhouse gases. Balmy 70-degree days were common in the Arctic. The sudden warming shifted entire ecosystems to higher and cooler latitudes and drove myriad ocean species to extinction.

Geologists agree that a great warming occurred as a result of greenhouse gases, but until recently were uncertain about the volume of gas involved or how much the acidity of the oceans changed.

James Zachos, a paleo-oceanographer at UC Santa Cruz, made an important discovery in 2003 by drilling into seabed sediments more than two miles beneath the ocean's surface. This muck contains layers of microscopic plankton shells. Their chemical composition reveals what ocean conditions were like when they formed.

Zachos' international team analyzed sediments from a series of cores taken from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean 750 miles west of Namibia. At the bottom of the cores, the team found normal sediments, rich in calcium carbonate from shells — the sign of a healthy ocean.

But higher up, at a point in geologic history when the last major global warming event occurred, the whitish, carbonate-rich ooze gave way to a dark red clay layer free of shells. That condition, the researchers concluded, was caused by a highly acidified ocean. This state of affairs lasted for 40,000 or 50,000 years. It took 60,000 years before the ocean recovered and the sediments appeared normal again.

In a paper published last year in the journal Science, Zachos' team concluded that only a massive release of carbon dioxide could have caused both extreme warming and acidification of ocean waters.

Zachos estimated that 4.5 trillion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere to trigger the event.

It could take modern civilization just 300 years to unleash the same quantity of carbon, according to a variety of projections by researchers.

"This will be a much greater shock," Zachos said. "The change in modern surface ocean pH will be much more extreme than it was 55 million years ago."

---

Times staff writer Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this report.

Shadow Of Extinction

Shadow Of Extinction

By George Monbiot

Znet, 22 July, 2003

It is old news, I admit. Two hundred and fifty-one million years old, to be precise. But the story of what happened then, which has now been told for the first time, demands our urgent attention. Its implications are more profound than anything taking place in Iraq, or Washington, or even (and I am sorry to burst your bubble) Wimbledon. Unless we understand what happened, and act upon that intelligence, pre-history may very soon repeat itself, not as tragedy, but as catastrophe.

The events which brought the Permian period (between 286 and 251 million years ago) to an end could not be clearly determined until the mapping of the key geological sequences had been completed. Until recently, palaeontologists had assumed that the changes which took place then were gradual and piecemeal. But three years ago a precise date for the end of the period was established, which enabled geologists to draw direct comparisons between the rocks laid down at that time in different parts of the world.

Having done so, they made a shattering discovery. In China, South Africa, Australia, Greenland, Russia and Spitsbergen, the rocks record an almost identical sequence of events, taking place not gradually, but almost instantaneously. They show that a cataclysm caused by natural processes almost brought life on earth to an end. They also suggest that a set of human activities which threatens to replicate those processes could exert the same effect, within the lifetimes of some of those who are on earth today.

As the professor of palaeontology Michael Benton records in his new book, When Life Nearly Died, the marine sediments deposited at the end of the Permian period record two sudden changes.1 The first is that the red or green or grey rock laid down in the presence of oxygen is suddenly replaced by black muds of the kind deposited when oxygen is absent. At the same time, an instant shift in the ratio of the isotopes (alternative forms) of carbon within the rocks suggests a spectacular change in the concentration of atmospheric gases.

On land, another dramatic transition has been dated to precisely the same time. In Russia and South Africa, gently deposited mudstones and limestones suddenly give way to massive dumps of pebbles and boulders. But the geological changes are minor by comparison to what happened to the animals and plants.

The Permian was one of the most biologically diverse periods in the earth's history. Herbivorous reptiles the size of rhinos were hunted through forests of tree ferns and flowering trees by sabre-toothed predators. At sea, massive coral reefs accumulated, among which lived great sharks, fish of all kinds and hundreds of species of shelly creatures.

Then suddenly there is almost nothing. The fossil record very nearly stops dead. The reefs die instantly, and do not reappear on earth for ten million years. All the large and medium-sized sharks disappear, most of the shelly species, and even the great majority of the toughest and most numerous organisms in the sea, the plankton. Among many classes of marine animals, the only survivors were those adapted to the near-absence of oxygen.

On land, the shift was even more severe. Plant life was almost eliminated from the earth's surface. The four-footed animals, the category to which humans belong, were nearly exterminated: so far only two fossil reptile species have been found anywhere on earth which survived the end of the Permian. The world's surface came to be dominated by just one of these, an animal a bit like a pig. It became ubiquitous because nothing else was left to compete with it or to prey upon it.

Altogether, Benton shows, some 90% of the earth's species appear to have been wiped out: this represents by the far the gravest of the mass extinctions. The world's "productivity" (the total mass of biological matter) collapsed.

Ecosystems recovered very slowly. No coral reefs have been found anywhere on earth in the rocks laid down over the following 10 million years. One hundred and fifty million years elapsed before the world once again became as biodiverse as it appears to have been in the Permian. So what happened?

Some scientists have argued that the mass extinction was caused by a meteorite. But the evidence they put forward has been undermined by further studies. There is a more persuasive case for a different explanation. For many years, geologists have been aware that at some point during or after the Permian there was a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The lava was dated properly for the first time in the early 1990s. We now know that the principal explosions took place 251 million years ago, precisely at the point at which life was almost extinguished.

The volcanoes produced two gases: sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. The sulphur and other effusions caused acid rain, but would have bled from the atmosphere quite quickly. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, would have persisted. By enhancing the greenhouse effect, it appears to have warmed the world sufficiently to have destabilised the super concentrated frozen gas called methane hydrate, locked in sediments around the polar seas. The release of methane into the atmosphere explains the sudden shift in carbon isotopes.

Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The result of its release was runaway global warming: a rise in temperature led to changes which raised the temperature further, and so on. The warming appears, alongside the acid rain, to have killed the plants. Starvation then killed the animals.

Global warming also seems to explain the geological changes. If the temperature of the surface waters near the poles increases, the circulation of marine currents slows down, which means that the ocean floor is deprived of oxygen. As the plants on land died, their roots would cease to hold together the soil and loose rock, with the result that erosion rates would have greatly increased. So how much warming took place? A sharp change in the ratio of the isotopes of oxygen permits us to reply with some precision: six degrees centigrade. Benton does not make the obvious point, but another author, the climate change specialist Mark Lynas, does.2 Six degrees is the upper estimate produced by the UN's scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for global warming by 2100.3

A conference of some of the world's leading atmospheric scientists in Berlin last month concluded that the IPCC's model may have underestimated the problem: the upper limit, they now suggest, should range between 7 and 10 degrees.4 Neither model takes into account the possibility of a partial melting of the methane hydrate still present in vast quantities around the fringes of the polar seas.

Suddenly, the events of a quarter of a billion years ago begin to look very topical indeed. One of the possible endings of the human story has already been told. Our principal political effort must now be to ensure that it does not become set in stone.

George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is published by Flamingo. www.monbiot.com References:

1. Michael J. Benton, 2003. When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. Thames and Hudson, London.

2. Press Release issued by Mark Lynas, 17th June 2003. "New Evidence Warns of Global Warming 'Catastrophe' this Century".

3. Eg Robert Watson, chairman IPCC, 20th November 2000. Report to the Sixth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 4. Fred Pearce, 4th June 2003. Global Warming's Sooty Smokescreen Revealed. New Scientist.

The Sixth Great Extinction

The Chimpanzee is our closest relative. Their numbers have plummeted due to habitat destruction, trapping, disease (chimpanzees are susceptible to many human infectious diseases) and, most recently, the bushmeat trade and ebola outbreak. The species faces imminent extinction unless urgent action is taken to reverse this trend.

The Sixth Great Extinction

By Janet Larsen, 07 March, 2004

Earth Policy Institute

Almost 440 million years ago, some 85 percent of marine animal species were wiped out in the earth's first known mass extinction. Roughly 367 million years ago, once again many species of fish and 70 percent of marine invertebrates perished in a major extinction event. Then about 245 million years ago, up to 95 percent of all animals—nearly the entire animal kingdom—were lost in what is thought to be the worst extinction in history.

Some 208 million years ago, another mass extinction took a toll primarily on sea creatures, but also some land animals. And 65 million years ago, three quarters of all species—including the dinosaurs—were eliminated.

Among the possible causes of these mass extinctions are volcanic eruptions, meteorites colliding with the earth, and a changing climate. After each extinction, it took upwards of 10 million years for biological richness to recover. Yet once a species is gone, it is gone forever.

The consensus among biologists is that we now are moving toward another mass extinction that could rival the past big five. This potential sixth great extinction is unique in that it is caused largely by the activities of a single species. It is the first mass extinction that humans will witness firsthand—and not just as innocent bystanders.

While scientists are not sure how many species inhabit the planet today, their estimates top 10 million. Yet each year thousands of species, ranging from the smallest microorganisms to larger mammals, are lost for good. Some disappear even before we know of their existence.

The average extinction rate is now some 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the rate that prevailed over the past 60 million years. Throughout most of geological history, new species evolved faster than existing species disappeared, thus continuously increasing the planet's biological diversity. Now evolution is falling behind.

Only a small fraction of the world's plant species has been studied in detail, but as many as half are threatened with extinction. South and Central America, Central and West Africa, and Southeast Asia—all home to diverse tropical forests—are losing plants most rapidly.

Today nearly 5,500 animal species are known to be threatened with extinction. The IUCN—World Conservation Union's 2003 Red List survey of the world's flora and fauna shows that almost one in every four mammal species and one in eight bird species are threatened with extinction within the next several decades. (For access to IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species database, see www.redlist.org).

Of 1,130 threatened mammal species, 16 percent are critically endangered—the highest threat level. This means that 184 mammal species have suffered extreme and rapid reduction in population or habitat and may not survive this decade. Their remaining numbers range from under a few hundred to, at most, a few thousand individuals. For birds, 182 of the 1,194 threatened species are critically endangered.

Although the status of most of the world's mammals and birds is fairly well documented, we know relatively little about the rest of the world's fauna. Only 5 percent of fish, 6 percent of reptiles, and 7 percent of amphibians have been evaluated. Of those studied, at least 750 fish species, 290 reptiles, and 150 amphibians are at risk. Worrisome signs—like the mysterious disappearance of entire amphibian populations and fishers' nets that come up empty more frequently—reveal that there may be more species in trouble. Of invertebrates, including insects, mollusks, and crustaceans, we know the least. But what is known is far from reassuring.

At the advent of agriculture some 11,000 years ago, the world was home to 6 million people. Since then our ranks have grown a thousandfold. Yet the increase in our numbers has come at the expense of many other species.

The greatest threat to the world's living creatures is the degradation and destruction of habitat, affecting 9 out of 10 threatened species. Humans have transformed nearly half of the planet's ice-free land areas, with serious effects on the rest of nature. We have made agricultural fields out of prairies and forests. We have dammed rivers and drained wetlands. We have paved over soil to build cities and roads.

Each year the earth's forest cover shrinks by 16 million hectares (40 million acres), with most of the loss occurring in tropical forests, where levels of biodiversity are high. Ecologically rich wetlands have been cut in half over the past century. Other freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems have been degraded by pollution. Deserts have expanded to overtake previously vegetated areas, accelerated in some cases by overgrazing of domesticated animals.

A recent study of 173 species of mammals from around the world showed that their collective geographical ranges have been halved over the past several decades, signifying a loss of breeding and foraging area. Overall, between 2 and 10 percent of mammal populations (groups of a single species in a specific geographical location) are thought to have disappeared along with their habitat.

Direct human exploitation of organisms, such as through hunting and harvesting, threatens more than a third of the listed birds and mammals. Other threats to biodiversity include exotic species, often transported by humans, which can outcompete and displace native species.

A recent survey of some 1,100 animal and plant species found that climate change could wipe out between 15 and 37 percent of them by 2050. Yet the actual losses may be greater because of the complexity of natural systems. The extinction of key species could have cascading effects throughout the food web. As John Donne wrote, "no man is an island." The same is true for the other species we share this planet with: the loss of any single species from the web of life can affect many others.

Healthy ecosystems support us with many services—most fundamentally by supplying the air we breathe and filtering the water we drink. They provide us with food, medicine, and shelter. When ecosystems lose biological richness, they also lose resilience, becoming more susceptible to the effects of climate change, invasions of alien species, and other disturbances.

The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity provides a framework for countries to conserve biological diversity and promote sustainable development. It has been signed by 168 countries, notably excluding the United States. The parties, which recently held their seventh conference in February 2004 in Kuala Lumpur, have set a target of substantially reducing biodiversity loss by 2010. Yet the convention lacks mechanisms for action and enforcement, which may make it difficult to achieve the target.

Consciously avoiding habitat destruction and mitigating the effects of land use change, reducing the direct exploitation of plants and wildlife, and slowing climate change can help us stop weakening the very life-support systems we depend on. While this may be the first time in history that a single species can precipitate a mass extinction event, it is also the first time in history that a single species can act to prevent it.

Copyright © 2004 Earth Policy Institute

Apocalypse now: how mankind is sleepwalking to the end of the Earth

Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this...

06 February 2005

Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.

Last week, 200 of the world's leading climate scientists - meeting at Tony Blair's request at the Met Office's new headquarters at Exeter - issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.

Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.

The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri - chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - told a UN conference in Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached "dangerous" levels.

Then the biggest-ever study of climate change, based at Oxford University, reported that it could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC's worst predictions. And an international task force - also reporting to Tony Blair, and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers - concluded that we could reach "the point of no return" in a decade.

Finally, the UK head of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, took time out - just before his company reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, one of the main causes of the problem - to warn that unless governments take urgent action there "will be a disaster".

But it was last week at the Met Office's futuristic glass headquarters, incongruously set in a dreary industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, that it all came together. The conference had been called by the Prime Minister to advise him on how to "avoid dangerous climate change". He needed help in persuading the world to prioritise the issue this year during Britain's presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of economic powers.

The conference opened with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, warning that "a significant impact" from global warming "is already inevitable". It continued with presentations from top scientists and economists from every continent. These showed that some dangerous climate change was already taking place and that catastrophic events once thought highly improbable were now seen as likely (see panel). Avoiding the worst was technically simple and economically cheap, they said, provided that governments could be persuaded to take immediate action.

About halfway through I realised that I had been here before. In the summer of 1986 the world's leading nuclear experts gathered in Vienna for an inquest into the accident at Chernobyl. The head of the Russian delegation showed a film shot from a helicopter, and we suddenly found ourselves gazing down on the red-hot exposed reactor core.

It was all, of course, much less dramatic at Exeter. But as paper followed learned paper, once again a group of world authorities were staring at a crisis they had devoted their lives to trying to avoid.

I am willing to bet there were few in the room who did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The conference formally concluded that climate change was "already occurring" and that "in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought". But the cautious scientific language scarcely does justice to the sense of the meeting.

We learned that glaciers are shrinking around the world. Arctic sea ice has lost almost half its thickness in recent decades. Natural disasters are increasing rapidly around the world. Those caused by the weather - such as droughts, storms, and floods - are rising three times faster than those - such as earthquakes - that are not.

We learned that bird populations in the North Sea collapsed last year, after the sand eels on which they feed left its warmer waters - and how the number of scientific papers recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming has escalated from 14 to more than a thousand in five years.

Worse, leading scientists warned of catastrophic changes that once they had dismissed as "improbable". The meeting was particularly alarmed by powerful evidence, first reported in The Independent on Sunday last July, that the oceans are slowly turning acid, threatening all marine life (see panel).

Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, presented new evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft: 90 per cent of the world's people live near current sea levels. Recalling that the IPCC's last report had called Antarctica "a slumbering giant", he said: "I would say that this is now an awakened giant."

Professor Mike Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois, reported that the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, once seen as a "low probability event", was now 45 per cent likely this century, and 70 per cent probable by 2200. If it comes sooner rather than later it will be catastrophic for Britain and northern Europe, giving us a climate like Labrador (which shares our latitude) even as the rest of the world heats up: if it comes later it could be beneficial, moderating the worst of the warming.

The experts at Exeter were virtually unanimous about the danger, mirroring the attitude of the climate science community as a whole: humanity is to blame. There were a few sceptics at Exeter, including Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russia's President Putin, who last year called the Kyoto Protocol "an interstate Auschwitz". But in truth it is much easier to find sceptics among media pundits in London or neo-cons in Washington than among climate scientists. Even the few contrarian climatalogists publish little research to support their views, concentrating on questioning the work of others.

Now a new scientific consensus is emerging - that the warming must be kept below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided. This almost certainly involves keeping concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change, below 400 parts per million.

Unfortunately we are almost there, with concentrations exceeding 370ppm and rising, but experts at the conference concluded that we could go briefly above the danger level so long as we brought it down rapidly afterwards. They added that this would involve the world reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 - and rich countries cutting theirs by 30 per cent by 2020.

Economists stressed there is little time for delay. If action is put off for a decade, it will need to be twice as radical; if it has to wait 20 years, it will cost between three and seven times as much.

The good news is that it can be done with existing technology, by cutting energy waste, expanding the use of renewable sources, growing trees and crops (which remove carbon dioxide from the air) to turn into fuel, capturing the gas before it is released from power stations, and - maybe - using more nuclear energy.

The better news is that it would not cost much: one estimate suggested the cost would be about 1 per cent of Europe's GNP spread over 20 years; another suggested it meant postponing an expected fivefold increase in world wealth by just two years. Many experts believe combatting global warming would increase prosperity, by bringing in new technologies.

The big question is whether governments will act. President Bush's opposition to international action remains the greatest obstacle. Tony Blair, by almost universal agreement, remains the leader with the best chance of persuading him to change his mind.

But so far the Prime Minister has been more influenced by the President than the other way round. He appears to be moving away from fighting for the pollution reductions needed in favour of agreeing on a vague pledge to bring in new technologies sometime in the future.

By then it will be too late. And our children and grandchildren will wonder - as we do in surveying, for example, the drift into the First World War - "how on earth could they be so blind?"

WATER WARS

What could happen? Wars break out over diminishing water resources as populations grow and rains fail.

How would this come about? Over 25 per cent more people than at present are expected to live in countries where water is scarce in the future, and global warming will make it worse.

How likely is it? Former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali has long said that the next Middle East war will be fought for water, not oil.

DISAPPEARING NATIONS

What could happen? Low-lying island such as the Maldives and Tuvalu - with highest points only a few feet above sea-level - will disappear off the face of the Earth.

How would this come about? As the world heats up, sea levels are rising, partly because glaciers are melting, and partly because the water in the oceans expands as it gets warmer.

How likely is it? Inevitable. Even if global warming stopped today, the seas would continue to rise for centuries. Some small islands have already sunk for ever. A year ago, Tuvalu was briefly submerged.

FLOODING

What could happen? London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, many other cities and vast areas of countries from Britain to Bangladesh disappear under tens of feet of water, as the seas rise dramatically.

How would this come about? Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt. The Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by more than 20ft, the West Antarctic ice sheet by another 15ft.

How likely is it? Scientists used to think it unlikely, but this year reported that the melting of both ice caps had begun. It will take hundreds of years, however, for the seas to rise that much.

UNINHABITABLE EARTH

What could happen? Global warming escalates to the point where the world's whole climate abruptly switches, turning it permanently into a much hotter and less hospitable planet.

How would this come about? A process involving "positive feedback" causes the warming to fuel itself, until it reaches a point that finally tips the climate pattern over.

How likely is it? Abrupt flips have happened in the prehistoric past. Scientists believe this is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, but increasingly they are refusing to rule it out.

RAINFOREST FIRES

What could happen? Famously wet tropical forests, such as those in the Amazon, go up in flames, destroying the world's richest wildlife habitats and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to speed global warming.

How would this come about? Britain's Met Office predicted in 1999 that much of the Amazon will dry out and die within 50 years, making it ready for sparks - from humans or lightning - to set it ablaze.

How likely is it? Very, if the predictions turn out to be right. Already there have been massive forest fires in Borneo and Amazonia, casting palls of highly polluting smoke over vast areas.

THE BIG FREEZE

What could happen? Britain and northern Europe get much colder because the Gulf Stream, which provides as much heat as the sun in winter, fails.

How would this come about? Melting polar ice sends fresh water into the North Atlantic. The less salty water fails to generate the underwater current which the Gulf Stream needs.

How likely is it? About

evens for a Gulf Steam failure this century, said scientists last week.

STARVATION

What could happen? Food production collapses in Africa, for example, as rainfall dries up and droughts increase. As farmland turns to desert, people flee in their millions in search of food.

How would this come about? Rainfall is expected to decrease by up to 60 per cent in winter and 30 per cent in summer in southern Africa this century. By some estimates, Zambia could lose almost all its farms.

How likely is it? Pretty likely unless the world tackles both global warming and Africa's decline. Scientists agree that droughts will increase in a warmer world.

ACID OCEANS

What could happen? The seas will gradually turn more and more acid. Coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all life depends, will die off. Much of the life of the oceans will become extinct.

How would this come about? The oceans have absorbed half the carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, so far emitted by humanity. This forms dilute carbonic acid, which attacks corals and shells.

How likely is it? It is already starting. Scientists warn that the chemistry of the oceans is changing in ways unprecedented for 20 million years. Some predict that the world's coral reefs will die within 35 years.

DISEASE

What could happen? Malaria - which kills two million people worldwide every year - reaches Britain with foreign travellers, gets picked up by British mosquitos and becomes endemic in the warmer climate.

How would this come about? Four of our 40 mosquito species can carry the disease, and hundreds of travellers return with it annually. The insects breed faster, and feed more, in warmer temperatures.

How likely is it? A Department of Health study has suggested it may happen by 2050: the Environment Agency has mentioned 2020. Some experts say it is miraculous that it has not happened already.

HURRICANES

What could happen? Hurricanes, typhoons and violent storms proliferate, grow even fiercer, and hit new areas. Last September's repeated battering of Florida and the Caribbean may be just a foretaste of what is to come, say scientists.

How would this come about? The storms gather their energy from warm seas, and so, as oceans heat up, fiercer ones occur and threaten areas where at present the seas are too cool for such weather.

How likely is it? Scientists are divided over whether storms will get more frequent and whether the process has already begun.

THE MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH: A REFLECTION OF OUR COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

“The Jungian analysis by Paul Levy, of Bush and the culture which maintains him, reaches deep into the American psyche. It should be studied and digested by everyone. If the citizenry would recognize that Bush's egomania is acting out a national illness, we would all be saner. If the US could integrate the "shadow" which Bush projects upon "the axis of evil," perhaps we could achieve world peace and start to solve global problems. A MUST READ.”

Carol S. Wolman, MD, Board Certified in Psychiatry

THE MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH:

A REFLECTION OF OUR COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

by Paul Levy

One good thing I can say about President Bush is that he's gotten me interested in politics. Before he came to office, I was mainly interested in spiritual matters, and considered politics a "distraction." There was something playing out through George W. Bush as president, though, that not only caught my attention but strongly triggered something in me. In his campaign he promised us a foreign policy with humility, yet his actions seemed so arrogant, so full of hubris. I sensed a deep underlying incongruity, as if some unfinished psychological process was unconsciously enacting itself through him. The problem with this was that because of his position as president, his unconscious was playing itself out and being dramatized on the world stage, where it was negatively affecting the lives of billions of people. I saw that he was unwittingly evoking and literally creating more of the very situation that he was claiming to be fighting against. It is as if he is fighting against his own shadow, which is a battle that can never be won. There seems to be an element of craziness in it.

I would like to speak the marginalized voice. This voice can no longer be kept silent, as it is being emboldened by the endless destruction that the Bush Administration is causing. It is as if there is an elephant in the living room, and more and more people are pointing at it. The emperor has no clothes, and people are noticing. Situations like this, where someone's unconscious actions are causing great harm to others, literally demand to be named. There is a field of fear and cover-up that gets constellated around someone like George Bush that inhibits people from speaking the truth. This is analogous to how people were afraid to disagree with Bush after 9/11 for fear of being called terrorists. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."

The truth now needs to be uttered. George W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual dis-ease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in. It’s an illness that has been with us since time immemorial. Because it’s an illness that's in the soul of all of humanity, it pervades the field and is in all of us in potential at any moment, which makes it especially hard to diagnose. Bush's malady is quite different from schizophrenia, for example, in which all the different parts of the personality are fragmented and not connected to each other, resulting in a state of internal chaos. As compared to the dis-order of the schizophrenic, Bush can sound quite coherent and can appear like such a "regular," normal guy, which makes the syndrome he is suffering from very hard to recognize. This is because the healthy parts of his personality have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts them into its service. Because of the way the personality self-organizes an outer display of coherence around a pathogenic core, I would like to name Bush's illness "malignant egophrenic (as compared to schizophrenic) disorder," or "ME disorder," for short. If ME disorder goes unrecognized and is not contained, it can be very destructive, particularly if the person is in a position of power.

In much the same way that a child's psychology cannot be understood without looking at the family system he or she is a part of, George Bush does not exist in isolation. We can view Bush and his entire Administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, Wolfowitz, etc), as well as the corporate, military industrial complex that they are co-dependently enmeshed with, the media that they control, the voters that support them, and ourselves as well, as interconnected parts of a whole system, or a "field." Instead of relating to any part of this field as an isolated entity, it’s important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the "medium" though which malignant egophrenia manifests and propagates itself. ME disease is a field phenomenon, and needs to be contemplated as such. Bush's sickness is our own.

THE LIE

It is not that the threat of terrorism is not real, but that Bush's policies in dealing with terrorism are actually fueling the fire. A recent poll showed that the majority of Americans have finally recognized that the war in Iraq has actually increased the threat of terrorism. Talking about Bush's policies on terrorism and his pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, Al Gore says, "Instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies…….the unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States." Bush totally fell into Bin Laden's trap. Bin Laden couldn't have imagined a better recruiting tool for terrorists than for Bush to invade Iraq. The way Bush is fighting terrorism is actually the very act which is invoking and creating more of it in the first place.

At the root of Bush's pathology is a deep dissociation. Like the terrorists, he has split-off from his own darker half, projecting the shadow "out there," and then tries to destroy this dis-owned shadow. By projecting the shadow onto each other, Bush and the terrorists are each seeing their own shadow reflected in the other. They see each other as criminals, as the incarnation of evil. By projecting the shadow like this, they locate the evil "out there," which insures that they don't have to recognize the evil within themselves. It's interesting to note that the inner meaning of the word mirror is "shadow holder." Ironically, by fighting against their own shadow in this way, they become possessed by the very thing they are trying to destroy, thereby perpetuating a never-ending cycle of violence. To quote C. G. Jung, one of the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century, "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided [not in touch with both the light AND dark parts of themselves] and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

Symbolically, this is the repetition compulsion of the traumatized soul gone awry, to daemonic proportions, acting itself out on the world stage. To quote noted psychologist Rollo May, the daemonic is "any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person [or whole nation]…..the daemonic can be either creative or destructive [i.e, demonic]…..violence is the daemonic gone awry." The disease takes on a certain autonomy and literally possesses the person or group, as it is self-generating, self-perpetuating and self-organizing in nature, like a closed and negative feedback loop. The person who is taken over doesn't suspect a thing as the field secretly conspires and colludes with and enables their psychosis.

Jung simply refers to projecting the shadow as "the lie." It’s interesting to note that one of the inner meanings of the word Devil is "the liar." Projecting the shadow, to quote Jung, "deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil." Jung stresses the importance of consciously developing what he calls one's "imagination for evil," which is to consciously recognize one's potential for evil. This recognition means embracing and integrating one's dark side into one's wholeness, which is made up of both light and dark. If we have no imagination for evil, to quote Jung, "evil has us in its grip…….for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil."

By projecting the shadow, Bush is unwittingly being a conduit for the deepest, archetypal evil to possess him from behind, beneath his conscious awareness, and to act itself out through him. At the same time, ironically enough, he identifies with the light and imagines that he is divinely inspired. He then believes that any action he desires is justified in the name of God, as he can rationalize it as being God's will. Unable to self-reflect, he is convinced of the rightness of his viewpoint, which he considers non-negotiable. This is a very dangerous situation, as Bush has become unconsciously identified with and possessed by the hero, or savior archetype. This figure is religious in nature, as it derives from the transpersonal, archetypal dimension of the collective unconscious. Being inflated with the hero archetype, he (archetypically) wants to save the world from evil and to liberate the planet.

This is the height of irony since, in reality, Bush is acting as an unwitting conduit for evil by instigating wars and taking away people's freedoms. This incongruity brings into bold relief the severe schizoid split that characterizes Bush's condition. His inflation blinds him to the real consequences of his actions and is one of the easier to recognize aspects of his pathology. Being inflated due to an unconscious identification with an archetype is, in essence, an expression of having forfeited one's humanity, a state in which humility becomes impossible.

Bush has fallen into a state that is the embodiment of arrogance. Succumbing to the temptation of power, Bush has become corrupt, which is the inevitable consequence when one prefers power over truth. He has fallen into a vicious cycle where he has become addicted to power. Bush and his regime are compulsively driven to do everything and anything they can to hold onto the position of power they find themselves in. Not only do they not see the depraved nature of the situation they have fallen into, they don't want to see it. Being in the role of having power, there is a counter-incentive to self-reflect, which just reinforces the strength of the pathogen. As Al Gore mentioned, this is Bush's Faustian pact with the Devil.

Interestingly, as Freud pointed out, the Devil is symbolically related to the archetypal figure of the negative father. The negative patriarchy, the dark father (darth vader) is the deeper, mythic, archetypal process that has seized Bush and is unconsciously playing itself out through him. The negative father is a power-intoxicated devil, so to speak, that wants to control, dominate and dictate to others. Like a bully who is in a position of power and privilege, this figure abuses its power simply because it can. Because it is attached to the position of power it finds itself in, this figure is not interested in change, and therefore has become rigid, calcified and egocentric. As Bush told Tim Russert of “Meet the Press,” “I’m not going to change.” This figure is an expression of an old paradigm, macho (“bring ‘em on”) mentality whose MO is force. It does not learn from its mistakes, and has wounded, terrorized and killed millions over centuries. Seemingly strong and powerful on the surface, at the root of the figure of the terrible father is extreme fear and weakness, as it is threatened by anyone who challenges its dominance.

The archetypal role of the negative father that Bush embodies is a figure that exists deep inside of everyone. We’re collectively living out the archetypal myth of the death of the negative patriarchy, which is symbolized by the myth of the old king who is in dire need of transformation. We have all dreamed up the Bush regime to play this out for us so that we can bring consciousness to this part of ourselves. The old king is dissociated from and threatened by Eros, from feeling, from the feminine, from the heart, from relatedness, even from mother nature and the environment (which it objectifies and tries to dominate, instead of being in relationship with), and from love. Concerned about nothing other than itself, this figure is indifferent to other people’s suffering, all the while professing its compassion. It is a true wolf in sheep’s clothing. Another name for the mythic negative father is ME disease.

At the root of Bush’s process is an unwillingness and seeming inability to experience his own sense of sin, guilt and shame, as if he is afraid of being exposed, of being found out. He’s clearly unable to feel any remorse and experience his own weakness and vulnerability, his own sense of failure. This threatens his narcissism too much. This inability to experience his shame and guilt sets in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of denial, cover-up and projecting the shadow, all of which are based on a lie. Bush then falls into an endless loop of hiding from his own lie, which is to say, from himself. This process allows Bush to becomes a conduit for egophrenia to take him over and incarnate its malignant aspect through him.

Jung comments on this resistance to self-reflection and endless cycle of self- deception by saying "Hysterical self-deceivers, and ordinary ones too, have at all times understood the art of misusing everything so as to avoid the demands and duties of life, and above all to shirk the duty of confronting themselves. They pretend to be seekers after God in order not to have to face the truth that they are ordinary egoists."

Falling victim to one's own deception as Bush has can have a very mesmerizing and gripping effect on others, as he appears so convinced of what he is saying and is able to project this conviction. To quote Jung, "Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one invents and believes oneself." Bush has the seductive coherence of someone who is fanatically identified, like the typical fundamentalist, with only one side of a polarity. Thomas Merton, commenting on the case of the obviously demented Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, points out "One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane." A key feature of malignant egophrenia is that it is very hard to recognize when someone is a carrier, because the person can seem so normal and even endearing. The person afflicted can be very "charming" and have a certain type of charisma that can entrance those who don't see through their subterfuge.

Just like Hitler struck a chord deep in the German unconscious, Bush is touching something very deep in the American psyche. Bush is acting out on the world stage an under-developed psychological process that deals simplistically with issues such as good and evil. It’s as if he hasn't grown out of and fully differentiated from the realm of mythic, archetypal fantasy that is typical of early adolescence. This immature aspect of Bush's process speaks to and resonates with those voters who support him, as it is a reflection of their own under-developed inner process.

Whereas Hitler’s evil was more overt in its cruelty and sadism, Bush’s dark side is much more hidden and disguised, which makes it particularly dangerous. People who vote for Bush are somehow blind to what is very obvious to others. It’s as if they’ve become hypnotized and fallen under the spell that Bush is casting. Why would people vote for someone stricken with malignant egophrenia? People who support Bush are suggestible and susceptible to the same malady that Bush is embodying, as if they have a predisposition for it (based on their own trauma, dissociated psyche and tendency to project the shadow). Supporting Bush is a sign that a person not only doesn't see the deadly illness that is incarnating itself through Bush, but is an expression that this disease has taken up residence in their being and is using them to do its bidding.

THE DISEASE IS NON-LOCAL

Being a field phenomenon, malignant egophrenia is non-local in nature, which means that it is not bound by the limitations of time or space. Being non-local, this disease pervades and underlies the entire field and can therefore manifest anywhere, through anyone and at any moment. The disease's non-local nature makes the question of who has the disease irrelevant, as we all have it in potential. It is more a question of whether or not we are aware of our susceptibility to fall prey to the disease. This awareness itself serves as an immunization that protects us from the pernicious effects of the illness, thereby allowing us to be of genuine help to others.

Bush, like all of us, is both a manifestation of this deeper field and simultaneously an agent affecting this field. He’s become so fully taken over by the disease, all the while not suspecting a thing, that he’s become a "carrier" for this deadly disease, thus infecting the field around him. He’s become a portal through which the field around him "warps" in such a way as to feed and support his pathogenic process. A non-local, reciprocally co-arising and interdependent field of unconscious denial and cover-up gets constellated around Bush to enable and protect his pathology.

People who don't recognize Bush's illness and support him are colluding with and enabling in the co-creation of the pathological field that is birthing itself through him into the human family. People who support Bush become unwitting agents through which this non-local disease feeds and replicates itself. By supporting Bush they are collaborating with and becoming parts of the greater, interconnected and self-organizing field of the disease.

The situation is very analogous to when seemingly good, normal, loving Germans supported Hitler, believing he was a good leader trying to help them. The German people didn't realize that the virulent pathogen malignant egophrenia had taken possession of Hitler and was incarnating itself through him. By not seeing this and supporting Hitler, they became agents used by this non-local, deadly disease to propagate itself. This was a collective psychosis, and this is what is taking place in our country right now.

This is exactly what Jung was warning us about when he said "The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche."

A COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

Malignant egophrenia is crazy-making. It induces a very hard to recognize form of insanity. It's a world where up is down, as its flawless illogic is convoluted and inverted at its core. People with egophrenia do not recognize the mirror-like nature of reality, so they accuse other people of doing what they themselves are doing. For example, Bush is talking about himself when he accuses Saddam Hussein of being “a man who has defied the world,” and “a man who has made the United Nations look foolish.” When we fall prey to egophrenia, we are unable to recognize that we are taken over, as we become bewitched by our own projections. Part of the disease is that when we point at it and call it by its true name - as being a form of insanity called ignorance - people who are stricken with the disease will see us as the one's who are crazy. Unless we recognize the insidious nature of this disease, there is a crazy-making field around it that will make us a part of itself. Collective psychosis is like that.

There is only one reason why the mainstream psychiatric community is not studying this contagious psychosis as it spreads through Bush, his regime, and the surrounding field. They are not studying this disease because they haven't yet recognized that the disease even exists. To the extent that any of us are unaware that this non-local pathogen pervades the field we become hooked by it through our own unconscious blind-spot. By not recognizing the nature of the disease, the mental health community becomes its unwitting agents, helping the disease to propagate. What clearer sign do we need of a collective psychosis than when our mental health system itself, whose job it is to monitor such phenomenon, not only doesn't recognize that there is a collective psychosis running rampant in our society, but are themselves infected with it?

The DSM-IV, the psychiatric diagnostic manual, is continually expanding and including new diagnoses as we deepen our understanding of and map the contours of the human psyche. The problem is that the DSM-IV is an expression of an "old paradigm" way of thinking in that it looks at mental illness as it exists in individuals, regarding the individual as an object existing separate from the field around them. This is based on an illusion, for the individual is embedded in the greater field (family system, society, and planetary culture) and is an expression of this multi-textured field. The individual and the field around them interpenetrate and condition each other so fully that they can't even be regarded as two separate aspects that have become joined together, but rather must be seen as inseparable parts of a greater whole. Egophrenia expresses itself non-locally throughout the entire field. Consequently, instead of being viewed through the lens of the fragmented, separate self, it requires a more holistic vision that recognizes the existence of the interdependently co-arising field. It’s not a question of integrating ME disease into the existing DSM-IV, but instead of radically expanding, up-leveling and re-visioning our understanding of the nature of illness itself.

It’s profoundly important that the mental health community at large recognize this age-old disease with which we are all afflicted. Doing this changes this community from being part of the problem to part of the solution. The disease literally feeds on our unawareness of it. The recognition of the disease is itself the beginning of the cure. By recognizing the nature of this collective psychosis, we snap out of being part of it. Malignant egophrenia, unrecognized and misdiagnosed until now, has wreaked havoc all throughout human history, and is at the very root of our current world crisis. To the extent we are unaware of the nature of this collective psychosis, it has us in its grips and will unconsciously get acted out through us in a destructive manner. The choice is truly ours.

One of the signatures of ME disease is that it hooks people through their unconscious blind-spot, so when people are afflicted by this deadly disease they are truly asleep to what is getting acted out through them. Bush himself is being manipulated, used and victimized, like a marionette on a string, by a deeper matrix of cover-up and deceit that has been perpetrated by him and his very regime, and has now taken on an autonomous life of its own. This disease, if it gets out of control, means self-destruction for both victim and perpetrator. There are no winners. The entire interconnected web that supports Bush can be recognized to be tentacles of this virulent, non-local pathogen that, to the extent that it is not seen, is potentially gaining more and more sovereignty. Like a sci-fi movie, we have dreamed up a higher-dimensional Frankenstein monster that has taken on a life of its own and truly threatens all of us.

MALIGNANT NARCISSISM

Psychologically speaking, one facet of Bush's condition is what is called "malignant narcissism." This is a narcissist who reacts to others who don't support and enable their narcissism not just with aggression but with sadism. I’ve never seen so many books come out by members of a presidential administration that hold up a mirror and reflect our president's shadow. Instead of self-reflecting and taking in the critical feedback, the Bush administration reacts like a mean-spirited malignant narcissist behaves- by denying the accusation and then by trying to destroy the messenger.

Malignant narcissists also tend towards paranoia and are very adept at charming and manipulating others. They can seem confident and self-assured, but are, in reality, covering deep insecurities and fears through an inflated self-image. Malignant narcissists are unable to genuinely mourn or feel empathy for others and have an overwhelming lack of genuine compassion. They relate to others (including the environment) as objects to satisfy and support their own inflated, narcissistic self-image (so much for "compassionate conservatism"). Malignant narcissists have contempt for anyone who disagrees with them (as it threatens their narcissism). For example, the Bush Administration labels those who disagree with them as being "un-American," "unpatriotic," and as we have seen in more extreme cases "terrorists."

Malignant narcissists also have contempt for and flagrantly violate the rule of law, which they believe themselves to be above. Thai intellectual and social critic Sulak Sivaraksa likens Bush to two other malignant narcissists, Hitler and Stalin, arguing that Bush's declaration of an "axis of Evil," Hitler's "Final Solution," and Stalin's "pogrom of peasants" were actually analogous attempts "to perfect the world by destroying the [perceived] impurities." Another modern day malignant narcissist is none other than Saddam Hussein.

THE PALE CRIMINAL

The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche talked about an extremely pathological condition that he called the "pale criminal," which is a chillingly accurate description of Bush that adds even more insight into his psychiatric profile. Jung felt that the pale criminal idea of Nietzsche was so profound that he referred to it in articulating a particular type of malevolent personality disorder. To quote Jung, the pale criminal "simply will not and cannot admit the he is what he is; he cannot endure his own guilt, just as he could not help incurring it. He will stoop to every kind of self-deception if only he can escape the sight of himself….which consists essentially in one hand not knowing what the other is doing, in wanting to jump over one's own shadow, and in looking for everything dark, inferior and culpable in others….but since nobody can jump out of his skin and be rid of himself, they stand in their own way everywhere as their own evil spirit." Jung continues that the pale criminal's unconscious identification with one side of the polarity, his "God Almightiness, that is to say all those qualities which are peculiar to fools and madmen and therefore lead to catastrophe……merely fills him with arrogance and arouses everything evil in him. It produces a diabolical caricature of man, and this inhuman mask is so unendurable, such a torture to wear, that he tortures others……disrupts the laws of humanity, and sins against all the rules of the human community…..he has to keep his crime secret…..he is the most violent breaker of the bond of the human community."

Nietzsche referred to this individual as a "pale" criminal because if this person were to self-reflect and look in the mirror, they would have their breath taken away at seeing who they have become, and would become pale at the sight of themselves. This figure is an embodiment of what Jung would call the "statistical criminal" that lives inside of all of us in a state of potential, and that can manifest under the right conditions. The Bush administration is breaking the moral code, the law of the planet, what Thomas Jefferson called "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." It's important to see through our naïve illusions and recognize that what the Bush regime is doing is truly criminal.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NAMING THE DISEASE

Malignant egophrenia is both an expression of and at the root of the extreme polarization and dissociation in both the human psyche and the world process at large. We can even say that it’s the "bug" in the system that has in-formed and given shape to all of the conflict and disharmony of human relationship. ME disease is as old as the human species. However, we’re now at the point in our evolution where we can finally recognize it, see it, give it a name and diagnose it.

Malignant egophrenia is truly diabolical in nature and is what the ancient, indigenous cultures would call a demon. Jung warned us that a difficult task lay ahead of us after the mass insanity of the second World War. He points out that after the "demons" abandoned the German people, these negative energies weren't banished. To quote Jung "the demons will seek a new victim. And that won't be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey." Projecting the shadow literally opens the door for malignant egophrenia to take up residence in our being. Jung calls these demons "autonomous complexes," which are split-off parts of the psyche that can possess a person and seemingly develop an independent will and quasi-life of their own. These autonomous complexes can't stand to be seen in much the same way a vampire can't stand the light. Malignant egophrenia will shape-shift and do everything in its power to resist being seen. It’s elusive, mercurial and very much a trickster. The disease obfuscates itself, creating any number of distractions to hide behind, and will even react violently to being seen, for being seen takes away its omnipotence and autonomy.

When we see a demon we know its name. Naming it is exorcistic, as it dis-spells the demon's power over us. To name something is to symbolize it. The word "symbolic," which means that which unites, is the antidote and antonym to the word "diabolic," which means that which divides and separates. George Bush claimed to be "a uniter, not a divider." However, he has only united one thing- the entire world against us. To see this diabolical aspect of what is coming through Bush, namely, that he is an instrument that is creating separation, is itself to be seeing with symbolic awareness.

Naming the disease, we are able to (alchemically) contain it, so that it can't possess us from behind and act itself out through us unconsciously. Once the disease is named, it’s anchored to consciousness so that it can't vaporize back into the unconscious. This de-potentiates the disease, beginning the process of re-integrating it back into the profound unity of the psyche. The energy that was bound up in the compulsion to endlessly re-create the disease becomes liberated and available for creative expression. The prescription for this disease is simply for enough of us who see it to connect with each other in lucid awareness so that it can be contained, metabolized and healed. This is an evolutionary impulse from the universe in which we are invited to participate.

Encoded in the disease is its own medicine. Hidden in the daemonic is our guiding spirit, our true genius and inner voice. This is why Jung calls the daemonic the "not yet made real creative." The fact that such a dark shadow is emerging in our world is an expression that light is nearby, as shadows are themselves an expression of light. Demons are actually blessings in drag. Lucifer is truly the bringer of light.

IS THE DISEASE A BLESSING OR A CURSE?

ME disease is unique in that it collapses the boundary between inner and outer. Egophrenia is an inner disease of the soul that expresses itself via the medium of the outside world. Malignant egophrenia is manifesting itself, both literally and symbolically, hidden yet visible for all who have eyes to see, simultaneously veiling and revealing itself. Symbolically encoded in egophrenia's literal manifestation is the key to its re-solution. Symbols are the language of dreams. A symbol brings together and reconciles two contraries into a greater whole. A symbol reflects and effects a change in and of consciousness itself. A symbol is both the expression of as well as the doorway into a more transcendent, higher-dimensional part of ourselves.

People don't see egophrenia because they don't recognize the symbolic dimension of existence, but rather are absorbed in the literal dimension of reality. It is very convincing to (only) take things literally and see these literal facts as "the (one) truth," as events in this world ARE literally happening. They're as real as real can be. This can be very entrancing, particularly with the evidence right in front of our face. People are dying. Seeing symbolically doesn't negate the literal dimension of this but instead complements and completes it, as both are true simultaneously. The literal and symbolic dimensions of reality interpenetrate each other so fully that they can't be seen as two separate things that are joined together, but rather are interdependent parts of a greater whole. The birth of symbolic awareness not only more fully completes our picture of the nature of the universe we live in, but gives us access to the way to actually deal with this deadly disease. Egophrenia is truly initiatory, as it is a wake up call to symbolic awareness, which is a higher dimension of our being. All that is needed for malignant egophrenia to reveal its blessing is for us to recognize its revelatory function.

Jung says "Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered." Malignant egophrenia is a modern day plague of Egypt. If we don't see what it is symbolically revealing to us, malignant egophrenia will destroy us. It's a gesture from the universe, beckoning us, demanding us to integrate it and thereby receive its blessing. By prompting, pressuring and challenging us to come to terms with it and receive its gifts, malignant egophrenia has the potential to awaken us, thereby furthering the evolution of the species.

Seeing the symbolic nature of malignant egophrenia is to see that it is both a deadly disease and the highest blessing co-joined in one phenomenon. Is it a wave or a particle? It is a true "coincidentia oppositorum," a conjunction of opposites, an expression of divinity. The question is, do we recognize what is being symbolically shown to us by egophrenia, or not? The inner meaning of the word apocalypse is "something hidden being revealed." Will these apocalyptic end times we are in be an initiation into a more expansive part of our being? Or will it destroy our species? How it will manifest completely depends on us.

The fact that malignant egophrenia is manifesting in fully visible form in our world right now is an expression that this particular energy is available for assimilation in a way that was unimaginable until now. When an unconscious content is ready to be integrated, it always gets dreamed up into fully materialized form. This is the dimension in which the energy bound up in the infinitely regressing feedback loop of the disease can be accessed and redeemed. If we can make use of its lessons, ME disease becomes a portal into a more whole and integrated part of our being. It is a potential blessing in a very convincing disguise that it's not.

Being a non-local field phenomenon, the malignant egophrenia epidemic is something all six billion of us are collaboratively creating and dreaming up together. Bush is an embodied, mirrored reflection of a part of ourselves, just like we, reciprocally, are a reflection of a part of him. His disease is our disease. Bush and his regime are a living embodied reflection of our collective shadow. We have all dreamed them up to play out these roles, in full living color, so that we can see and integrate these parts of ourselves. To see this is to recognize our true face in the disease, which liberates its blessing aspect. Like Christ says in the Gnostic Gospels "I am a mirror (shadow holder) to you that know me." Compassion spontaneously arises when we recognize these fear-ridden parts of ourselves.

GENUINE COMPASSION AS ACTIVISM

The malignant egophrenia epidemic is happening right in front of us, for all who have eyes to see. If we don't look at what’s happening, if we turn away, ignore it, and contract against it, we are lying to ourselves. Then we’re colluding with and unknowingly feeding the disease. Our looking away is a form of blindness. Our looking away is a form of ignorance. Our looking away, our contraction, IS itself the disease. Our resulting complacency and inaction is, in fact, an expression of our lack of compassion. To quote Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. "One who passively accepts evil [allowing it to happen] is as much involved in it as the one who perpetrates it."

There is a great danger when we see evil, though. To quote Jung, "It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our hearts…..the sight of evil kindles evil in the soul." Malignant egophrenia forces upon us the responsibility to come to terms with the evil inside our own hearts. If we solidify Bush as being evil and react with righteous indignation, we are guilty of the very same thing we’re accusing Bush of (i.e, projecting the shadow). We then become a conduit for the very evil we’re reacting to. Who among us has not been guilty of being a channel for ME disease at one time or another? If, when we see this virulent pathogen, we contract against it and react in any way, be it in judgment, hatred, anger or revulsion, we’re helping to perpetuate the diabolical polarization that is the signature of the disease. Our reacting in this way, which is typical of many political activists, is itself an expression that we ourselves have the disease, or to say it more clearly, the disease has us.

This disease literally has the potential to humble us. We may think- not us, we could never catch this disease. However, this very arrogance opens us up to being hooked by the pathogen. We may think- let's step out of our arrogance, for who are we to know anything? Let's be an enlightened bodhisattva and not judge what Bush is doing, for who are we to judge? Or let's be an enlightened psychiatrist and not diagnose, name or pathologize Bush in any way, for we don't want to cast any spells. However, to have these attitudes is to fall under the seductive spell of the bug, causing us to disconnect from and give away our power. In this way, we forsake one of our greatest spiritual treasures, the act of discernment. Being a spiritual warrior embraces and includes the most extreme discernment, which is the ability to differentiate and is a function of seeing clearly. Discernment is different that when we are unconsciously caught in judgement, which is a reaction to and contraction against something. Wielding the wisdom of discernment is an expression of having genuine compassion.

Compassion is sometimes fierce, though. Sometimes it says "no," and sets a boundary. Genuine compassion is not always smiley-faced, otherwise known as "idiot compassion," which just enables and reinforces asleepness. Genuine compassion is not passive. It propels us to act for the benefit of all beings. True compassion demands us to be willing to consciously step into our power, mediated through the heart, and to find the courage to speak our true voice: The malignant egophrenia epidemic has induced a form of criminal insanity in the entire Bush regime that we are all complicit in by allowing it to happen.

To quote Thomas Jefferson "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." To quote Thomas Paine "It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from his government." Being truly patriotic and compassionate in our current situation involves doing everything and anything we can, however big or small, to remove Bush and his regime from office, for their good, as well as our own.

We, as a people, need to recognize the severity of the crisis our country is in. And then we need to act. It’s an extremely dangerous situation that a person who is possessed by the virulent pathogen malignant egophrenia happens to be in the commander's seat of the most powerful country in the world. What’s more, he’s steering the ship to shipwreck, or as the retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who headed Central Command before becoming President Bush's personal emissary to the Middle East, put it, "over Niagara Falls." With Bush as president it’s as if we’re in a car going over the speed limit being driven by a drunk adolescent who has fallen asleep at the wheel. It’s our responsibility as awake adults to recognize our situation and to do something about it. If not, if we continue to passively and helplessly watch what is playing out in front of our very eyes, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. This is what Al Gore was trying to tell us in his speech when he ended with the quote by Abraham Lincoln, "We- even we here- hold the power, and bear the responsibility." Now is the time to act before it is too late. As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. says "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

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A healer, Paul Levy is a spiritual and political activist. He is in private practice, helping other people who are also spiritually awakening to the dream-like nature of reality. He can be reached at paul@awakeninthedream.com. Please feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired.

© 2004 Paul Levy