Hot and bothered in Manila: Climate Change and human nature

Manila is melting. This is my fourth year here and I've never known it so hot. They call April the Summer here, then the rains are supposed to arrive and cool things down a little. But this year apart from a side-swipe by a passing typhoon some ten days ago, which drenched Manila in a heavy downpour and knocked out a few power lines but dealt all its real mayhem, death and destruction up the east coast of Luzon, the blistering heat has just continued to build. The polluted sky hangs like a sinister curtain outside the 30^th floor window of my office with its panoramic view across the city and out over Manila Bay; in the unventilated gym where I go to box the sweat pours in rivers off me and the other masochists still training; at night I wake with a horrible breathless feeling in my chest from nightmares in which evil aliens arrive in cloaked space-ships to destroy the Earth through global warming projected by lethal rays. I wonder: is this really it? Has climate change really begun to take effect?  The charts all show that, as climate Change takes hold, the western side of the Philippines is supposed to get hotter and drier while the east gets wetter and subject to more and more typhoons of increasing intensity. During these murderously hot days, on which only the air-conditioning in the car keeps road rage in check in the grid-locked traffic of Makati City, it is very easy to convince oneself that things really have started to change and not for the better.

Which makes me wonder just why the stuff about climate Change that comes to me, whether in the newspapers, on the tv or radio, or in the official documents in my in-tray, is all so terribly complicated, convoluted, tongue-twistingly acronymed and jargonised to smithereens and frankly tedious. 'All countries now agree that strong climate action is more urgent than ever!'  screams one of the documents attached to an in-coming email, before vitiating itself in a sea of bureaucratic detail.

Does any normal human being understand what was agreed during the last climate change bun fight in Cancun?  Does any normal human being know that there is going to be yet another love fest quite soon, this time in Durban, and does anybody think it is going to make any difference? Does anybody remember the Kyoto agreement or what that involved? Or the Copenhagen Accord? Does anyone know what a carbon market is? (No, dear, it is not somewhere where you go to buy fuel for your probably soon to be, if not already, illegal coal fire.)

The documents I have on my desk make pretty turgid reading, but underneath all the Beachcomber-ish gobbledegook they tell a story that ought to have everybody, if not alarmed, then at least feeling uneasy. Apparently even if the Kyoto experiment were repeated it would still not meet the target of staying below a 2° C increase in the global climate. And Kyoto is already over. Meanwhile there are a lot of aspirations and a number of  pots of money all wrapped up in complex bureaucratic management procedures, but, in the absence of anything legally binding, it's business as usual.

And it's too hot for me to box.

Yet half of the people I meet or those who read this will tell me the heat out there has nothing to do with climate change. The science is actually very complicated, they say, and no-one really knows how to interpret the data. That's the trouble with scientists. They are complicated people.

A funny thought that occurs to me is that the issue of global warming and human-induced environmental catastrophe has actually been around for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. As a boy I had a David Bowie album that started with a song about the Earth coming to an end in five years' time. (No prizes, but who can name the album and the song?)

Still on the subject of the devastating effects of Climate Change that await us, I watched a David Attenborough video on the plane coming over here from London last month. In it he demonstrated with the help of highly equipped teams of scientists all over the world, that the oceans really could be dead by the middle of the century. Fish stocks have been fished to crisis point and coral reefs are threatened not only by the warming of the sea but by its increasing acidification due to the increased amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air. Now it starts to sound like the plot of the movie Soylent Green, if anyone can remember that terrifying vision of an over-populated future, and I am feeling really depressed.

Talking about David Attenborough, he gave a short talk on Chimpanzes on the radio the other day, in which he described how they hunt Colobus monkeys. To do this they have to work as a team with one group of chimps driving the Colobus monkeys into an ambush. While expressing his regret at the sight of the 'all too human' bodies of a female Colobus and her baby being ripped apart and eaten, Attenborough cannot help admiring not only the chimps' teamwork, but also their willingness to share the spoils of the hunt. It would seem that they are at their most human in terms of what we would see as essentially positive characteristics, when engaged in an act of extreme violence and bloodshed, albeit against another species and in search of food.

The close association of what is destructive and murderous in our nature with what makes us human -  something that would seem to go well beyond the association of aggression with affection or protective love postulated by Konrad Lorenz (at least with regard to Greylag geese!) – is a fundamental problem for psychologists and sociologists and metaphysicians alike. At times it seems enough to justify the doctrine of original sin, which in this post-religious world, where Professor Hawkin has just told us the idea of Heaven and life after death is a fairy-tale, really is rather disturbing.