The complicated relationship between ice ages and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels has just become a little clearer thanks to the work of Dr. Larry Edwards and a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota. Although such science may seem esoteric, it is vital in explaining the heating effect we are having on Earth’s climate by burning massive amounts of CO2-emitting fossil fuels. Dr. Edward’s work also helps to explain the cyclical arrival of ice ages and how our Industrial Age is impacting these cycles (New Scientist, May 22/10). With such insights, we can better anticipate the consequences of our behaviour and take corrective measures.

Suspicion began as early as 1864 that Earth’s changing tilt may have something to do with ice ages. More serious work was done in the early 20th century by Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian engineer who spent decades examining variations in Earth’s orbital cycles and the tilt of its axis from 22 to 24 degrees and back again every 41,000 years. Milankovitch theorized that the angle and intensity of sunlight striking our planet could have an effect on the warming and cooling that seem to cause the rhythmical advance and retreat of ice ages – an ice age could be initiated by a cooler summer sun allowing a gradual accumulation of polar snow and ice. A more serious examination of Milankovitch’s work began in the late 20th century as global warming and climate became a puzzle of greater scientific interest.

But climate science is rarely tidy. The arrival and departure of ice ages didn’t always correlate to Milankovitch’s tilt model. Besides, polar ice only appeared on our planet about 30 million years ago. If his model were the sole explanation, then ice ages should have occurred regularly throughout Earth’s history.

The hidden variable was carbon dioxide. Scientists now know from studying marine sediments, ice cores, coral and stalagmites that atmospheric CO2 levels began to gradually fall about 30 million years ago, causing a cooling trend that, by about 2.5 million years ago, eventually brought the temperature level low enough for the axis cycle to have its effect. As expected, minor ice ages occurred every 41,000 years until about 1 million years ago. Then the ice ages began “missing a beat” and became major. Neither CO2 levels, tilt nor Earth’s other orbital irregularities could explain the magnitude of these more extreme ice ages. Some other dynamic was causing them. Complicating the explanation was the fact that CO2 levels were rising and falling simultaneously with the advance and retreat of the ice sheets, not ahead of them. If changing CO2 levels were coincidental, they were not causal. What was happening?

The new explanation is that ice ages are partly responsible for their own demise. As they get larger and heavier, they depress the planet’s crust, thus lowering their elevation and causing melt from higher temperatures. Additionally, the foundations of the ice sheets may sink below sea level, allowing warm ocean water to undermine and destabilize them. When Earth’s axis shifts enough to cause additional summer warming, then the ice age ends.

But what explains the increased levels of carbon dioxide that rise and fall simultaneously with the ice ages? The answer resides in the effect of the melting ice.

Melting ice releases huge amounts of fresh water, overlaying the northern oceans with a surface of reduced salinity and density. This shuts down “the Atlantic overturning circulation – the great ocean current that carries heat north, then sinks and flows back along the bottom of the ocean.” The south-and-north distribution of heat stops and the southern oceans become warmer. Since warmer water holds less dissolved gas, huge quantities of CO2 are released into the atmosphere causing additional warming, more melting and less oceanic heat distribution. This process continues until the ice is melted, an equilibrium re-establishes, and the system waits for the cycle to begin again.

The relevance for us today is that our industrial burning of fossil fuels is emitting enough carbon dioxide to alter this cycle. If conditions were normal, we would be entering one of the 41,000-year cooling cycles. But rapidly climbing CO2 levels – they have exploded in geological time from 280 to 390 parts per million in an incredibly brief 250 years – are quickly returning us to conditions that preceded the first polar ice of 30 million years ago. Our climate is “currently on course to become like that of the Miocene 10 to 15 million years ago, long before the ice age cycle began, when it was 6°C warmer and sea level was up to 40 metres higher” (Ibid.).

The solace in this news is that our fossil fuel emissions are preventing an oncoming ice age thousands of years hence. The disquieting news is that these same emissions are causing an almost instantaneous temperature rise and a destabilizing impact on the stable inter-glacial period that allowed us to develop our civilization. We will soon be confronting climate conditions that are entirely new to our human species. The rapidity of this new climate change permits no time for species and ecosystems to adapt. And, as adaptable as we like to think we are, it presses us to adjust our agriculture, relocate our settlements, modify our water use, alter our resource consumption, shift our energy sources, and prepare our huge and diverse global population for dramatic changes.

We have learned a huge amount about ice ages and climate change since serious study began less than a century ago. We still have much to learn about our effect on Earth’s climate, how we will mitigate the changes we are unleashing, and how we intend to adapt to these new circumstances.

Historians have noted that one of the greatest threats to the survival of societies is not adversity but cynicism, the pervasively negative attitude that defeats the possibility of finding solutions to recognized challenges. Cynicism undermines the viability of societies by summarily discrediting personal initiative, communal effort, adaptive innovation, technological ingenuity and collective wisdom.

Cynicism seems to be the temper of our times. We know what our challenges are and, in most cases, we know how to move toward solutions. But we are in danger of adopting a dismissive indifference, a perverse reluctance and a defeatist resignation that fails to address these challenges with adequate resolution and vigour. When the challenges invite us to be brave and assertive – “Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows,” Shakespeare advised – our heroism is crippled by cynicism. If we don’t believe that we are capable of surmounting our difficulties then we commit ourselves to be victims of our own failings.

This failure is illustrated wonderfully in a recent Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon (Globe & Mail, Mar. 29/11). Aside from the inclination of Dilbert to be somewhat cynical anyway, this one is particularly so. Dogbert in the cartoon is typing at a computer. “I’m writing fake press releases for imaginary new green energy technologies,” he says to Dilbert. “Scientists say that by 2040 you will be able to power your entire home with the breeze from your refrigerator door.” So Dilbert asks Dogbert, “Now how will I know which green breakthroughs are real?” And Dogbert replies, “Seriously? You think there are real ones?”

Such cynicism is insidiously destructive because it fails to see hope and, therefore, fails to see options and solutions. Many of the changes we need are not technologically onerous; they can be made by simple administrative means. Reducing the intense impact of industrial ocean fishing by international agreements would save bluefin tuna from imminent extinction and end the population collapse of other large fish species. Enforcing no-whaling protocols would spare endangered cetaceans from crisis conditions. Designating Marine Protected Areas and limiting catch sizes would ensure perpetual fish stocks in fishing areas.

The terrestrial equivalent of MPAs are parks. Beyond providing environmental protection and ecological security, they stabilize climate, counteract species extinction, educate people, generate employment, and are a source of local, provincial and national pride – surveys show that Canadians identify themselves more strongly with national parks than with hockey.

The growing anxiety about food production can even be addressed by low-tech means. A UN report on Agro-Ecology and the Right to Food (March 2011) found that developing countries could produce 80 to100 percent more food by practicing ecological rather than industrial agriculture. An organic system of careful planting would reduce the debilitating costs of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, make soils more drought resistant, buttress food self-sufficiency and also store vast amounts of carbon. In The Climate Challenge, Guy Dauncey argues that if 1.5 billion hectares of the world’s agricultural land were farmed organically, soils would sequester enough carbon dioxide to reduce atmospheric CO2 by an astounding 11 percent.

Conserving energy is the cheapest way to energy sufficiency. If we can accept this fact and be aware of the energy consumption of our appliances, gadgets, homes, vehicles and travel habits, then we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, harmful pollutants and the cost to ourselves, our society and our environment. If we take the cynical position that our individual actions are unimportant, that it’s too late to stop the slide into environmental Armageddon or that ecological problems do not exist, then inaction ensures that the possible becomes the inevitable.

Even without the revolutionary technological innovations that will hopefully solve all our energy needs and save us from the fossil fuel conundrum, we can control greenhouse gas emissions by carbon taxes that can then be directed to research and projects to reduce the effects we don’t want. A price on carbon can have the multiple benefits of providing a cost incentive to reduce emissions, of inducing a price structure that will encourage innovation while providing funds that can be directed to carbon reducing projects. Ironically, because the business community hates uncertainty and anticipates the inevitability of some form of carbon tax to control greenhouse gas emissions, it actually wants them sooner rather than later.

Consumers guide the marketplace and voters elect governments. In modern, industrial, democratic societies, people get what they deserve. A cynical public with cynical views abdicates the right to determine the products it can buy, the safety it expects and the destiny it imagines. Cynicism thwarts collective involvement and action. It disempowers the individual and transfers authority and control to those who function in self-interest. It invites victimization and exploitation, the very processes that create cynicism. Individually and collectively we make the world we want, a task that can be as easy as making thoughtful choices.

So many of our environmental problems can be addressed by simple changes in attitude. Recent sociological studies have indicated a worrisome rise during the last two decades in the use of “I”, “me” and “mine” instead of “us”, “we” and “they”. This unhealthy trend can be counteracted by thinking in terms of our human community and the environment that sustains it. On a planet where everything is connected to everything else, obsessive self-interest is ultimately unfulfilling and self-defeating. Indeed, if being cynical about everything means that not even cynicism can be trusted, then we can all find better options.

Human societies do not behave rationally. This is the conclusion reached by Robert Prechter, an American financial guru and social theorist who outlines his ideas in a 1999 book, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behaviour and the New Science of Sociometrics (New Scientist, May 22/10).

Prechter argues that societal moods swing from optimism to pessimism – so called Elliott Waves – and these swings control the movement of financial markets, investment strategies, consumer purchasing patterns and even popular trends such as fashions, films, books and music. “Positive moods” are reflected in such words as “unifying”, “liberating”, “joining” and “tolerant”, whereas “negative moods” are indicated by “fragmentation”, “separation”, “restricting” and “bigoted / xenophobic”.

According to fellow scholar, John Casti, the last great “megachange” that buoyed optimism was the official beginning of globalization in 1975 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (Ibid.). This positive mood lasted until 1999 when the real value of money, as measured in gold, peaked. Since then, Casti argues, globalization has created a deepening pessimism. Its very foundations of “income balance, free movement of labour, reduction or removal of trade tariffs, and the like”, have failed. Income disparity and protectionism are increasing, not decreasing.

But the pessimism is rooted more deeply than in commerce and social justice. Casti cites the work of John Petersen, a non-profit think-tank founder whose “predictive modelling” coined “megachanges”. His modelling also identified other unsettling trends linked to globalization, including “the collapse of the global financial system, the end of oil, serious climate change, dramatic rises in food price, and more.”

The ideas of Prechter, Casti and Petersen all identify a generally negative mood coursing through human society. While globalization has brought many promises of prosperity and some clear benefits, beneath the superficial hue of optimism are systemic flaws that are creating a deepening and pervasive apprehension.

The paradox of globalization is that it offers connectivity and cooperation while its size and complexity highlights our individual powerlessness and precariousness. Economic, political, social and environmental globalization also means interdependence and vulnerability – whatever happens anywhere on the planet affects everyone elsewhere. The effect is a feeling of being overwhelmed by information and forces beyond our personal control.

The earthquake and subsequent damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is just the most current example. As a consequence of events in Japan, British Columbians are compelled to monitor local rain and seaweed for radiation levels. Rotating electrical outages in Japan have broken the global supply chain for auto manufacturing, one of the world’s most complex. Of the 3,000 parts that go into a car or truck, “each of those parts is made up of hundreds of other pieces supplied by multiple companies. All it takes is for one part to go missing or arrive late, and a vehicle can’t be built” (Globe & Mail, Mar. 29/11). Consequently, auto plants in North America are shut down and workers are laid off. An interruption in the supply of Japanese computer chips and other digital components has the same global effect.

The integration of the world’s financial system into a global network of interconnections creates another kind of precariousness. The ramifications of relaxed lending and investment policies in the US culminated in a 2008 seismic shock to world banks and economies that is still being felt. Consequent debt in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Iceland and Portugal all reverberate around the planet, affecting employment, exchange rates, savings, retirement plans and our individual sense of security.

Terrorism causes global edginess. The unrest generated by a burgeoning human population creates humanitarian, political and military complications that affect all countries. Global food supplies are tight enough that crop failures in Australia, Ukraine or Russia force up the price of bread in Canada. A radical Islamic group in Afghanistan or a deranged dictator in Libya produces global disturbances. A fundamentalist preacher ceremonially burns a Koran in Florida and enraged mobs kill innocent United Nations’ employees in Kandahar.

But the most important influence of all occurs with Earth’s biosphere, the living environment that enwraps our planet. Emissions from coal plants in China or tar sands in Canada bathe the entire world with pollutants. Melting ice in Greenland raises oceans everywhere. Diseases and exotic species spread easily with our global transportation systems. Because communication and media connect instantly to every part of the planet, everywhere becomes local. A round Earth provides no escape.

If the global mood of pessimism is to change to optimism, then our governments must think beyond trade agreements to environmental protocols that protect our atmosphere, oceans, fisheries, forests, soils and climate. Ecological security is primary. Everything depends on it. Although such security can never be guaranteed, at the very least we should have some sense that the deteriorating conditions on our planet are being reversed.

To regain our feeling of individual empowerment, we need a paradigm shift from spending and exploiting to conserving and caring. We also need awareness and initiatives that will counterbalance globalization with localization. These are rational things we could do to improve our mood.