Despite the enormous enthusiasm that accompanied Canada’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games a year ago – the crescendo of competition and the excited crowds that transformed Vancouver and Whistler into a festival celebrating the aspiration of “Swifter, Higher, Stronger” – something about the whole event felt contrived, artificial and remotely hollow.

Maybe it was the momentary loss of perspective. The Games, after all, are an homage to humanity, a self-congratulatory ritual honouring the abilities of nature’s most noble creature – the same embodied pinnacle of perfection that is causing environmental havoc on the planet these days. Sliding ever faster down mountains or skating ever more athletically on ice are hardly the preoccupations that will extricate us from the global mess we are creating for ourselves and the other life trying to inhabit this most rare and beautiful Earth.

Beneath the facade of professed accomplishment – the contrived drama of winning and losing, the excited theatre of tragedy and victory – lies a hidden insecurity, a shaken confidence, an inkling of profound fallibility, a lurking doubt that perhaps all our speed and stature and strength is little more than empty bravado. Do we need more confidence? Do we want a more inflated opinion of ourselves? In the great scheme of things, do we deserve an enhanced sense of our own grandiosity? Surely, given the difficulties into which we are manoeuvring our planet’s biosphere, we need more humility, more modesty, a more proportioned sense of who we are and how we belong in a living ecosystem that is – to our presently reckoning – unique in the universe. Celebrating at the altar of ourselves seems too self-congratulatory for comfort.

An explanation for this doubt and insecurity may lie in our dawning realization that we must somehow reform how we perceive and conduct ourselves on this planet. Despite our evident affluence, many of the structures supporting our material wealth seem increasingly precarious. Government finances almost everywhere are debt-stressed and shaky. Basic monetary policies and financial institutions seem insecure. Global climate change and general environmental deterioration erode the basis for optimism. Ocean acidification, species loss, energy challenges, soil erosion, resource depletion and uncounted varieties of pollution loom as ominously intractable threats. Fearing systemic failure, some thinkers are now questioning the very foundations of our modern civilization. Religion does not escape such scrutiny.

This may explain the recent arrival of numerous books on atheism. The explanation that they are to counter the impact of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam may be too superficial. A deeper and broader foreboding may be motivating their appearance.

In a poignant review of such books on atheism, Daniel Baird examines the arguments of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Michel Onfray to find a secular and rational replacement for religion (“God’s Slow Death”,The Walrus, April, 2007). The implicit substance of all these arguments is that the current paradigm that governs our thinking and behaviour is not viable. Belief has coupled with our human character to undermine the logical pragmatism we need to negotiate our way through a world that is becoming increasingly precarious.

Baird’s essay ends with the account of a theologian, a “raised and educated Mennonite” who “spent thirty years of his career attempting to resolve the apparent conflict between science and religion.” And the end result? He lost his faith. “But I still have a Christian body,” he said. “My lifestyle is still the same as it was before.” Then Baird asked him, “Do you think it’s possible that we simply can’t bear to see life and the world as it really is?” And the theologian replied, “Yes.”

This “yes” shakes not only the foundations of religion but it sends tremors through almost everything else we do and believe. It suggests that we invent systems, build institutions, form organizations, construct dogmas and concoct entertainments all as tactics of avoidance. They are all merely useful social distractions that allow us to avoid a stark confrontation with the raw reality of our biological dispensability.

This is the place where religion and the Olympics intersect as a common practice. Both are beliefs intended to elevate our status, one concerned with the spiritual and transcendent, the other with the personal and communal. And both are in conflict with the environmental realities now confronting us. How are we to legitimately celebrate ourselves when an objective assessment of the planet suggests that our vaunted human attributes are responsible for an escalating, global, ecological crisis?

Whenever and wherever we celebrate ourselves, perhaps we should pause for a moment of doubt and reappraisal. Did the Olympics reform us? Are we any different now that the Olympics are over and the glow of tribal euphoria has faded? Perhaps we should temper the hysterics of self-congratulation with the same perspective offered by atheists. Elevating ourselves with beliefs or gold medals will do nothing for the sobering environmental problems we must confront. Maybe we should restrain our celebrating until “Swifter, Higher, Stronger” becomes “Smarter, Brighter, Wiser”.

Predicting the future is fraught with inaccuracy. Even experts are known for their remarkable inability to anticipate the results of unfolding circumstances. But a professor of politics from New York University has become a rare exception.

Over a 30 year period, Dr. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has an average of 90% accuracy for thousands of predictions – he doesn’t predict random events such as lottery draws or issues involving millions of variables such as stock market prices, financial crises or general elections. But he is incredibly accurate at predicting outcomes where a limited number of people interact with “negotiation or coercion, cooperation or bullying” (New Scientist, Mar. 20/10). This includes geopolitical and strategic situations pertaining to “domestic politics, foreign policy, conflicts, business decisions and social interactions”.

Bueno de Mesquita accomplishes the nearly-impossible by using game theory and mathematical models to assess what people will do in situations that depend on other people’s decisions. His operating principle is “that people do what they believe is in their best interests”. The outcome is determined by the complex interaction of all the self-interested reactions of all the people involved – five people generate 120 interactions while ten people generate 3.6 million interactions.

Since “garbage in equals garbage out”, the gathering of accurate data is extremely important. From an arbitrary scale – 1 to 100, for example – a number is assigned for each person’s involvement in each of four categories: the outcome desired, the importance of the issue, the determination to reach an agreement, and the weight of each person’s influence. A computer algorithm processes the numbers and arrives at a number that indicates an outcome on a graduated scale between two defined extremes. The numerical outcome must be interpreted but Bueno de Mesquita says it is not ambiguous.

In one example, on the question of whether or not Iran would build a nuclear weapon, an outcome number of 120 on a scale of 1 to 200 indicates that Iran would enrich weapons-grade uranium but would not build a bomb. In another example involving foreign aid to Pakistan, the American government wanted to know how much foreign aid would be needed to convince Pakistanis it was in their best interests to eliminate terrorists within their country. The model predicted that aid of $750 million would have to be doubled. But even with $1.5 billion per year, Pakistan would only pursue terrorists on a scale of 80 out of 100 because the total elimination of terrorists would dry up their American foreign aid. In this particular assessment, self-interest would trump peace.

In a related but more important matter, Bueno de Mesquita ran his calculations to predict the outcome in 2050 of international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and control global climate change. His prediction is not promising. The model expects that stringent reduction targets will be set, but not met, as countries such as Brazil, India and China struggle to rise in political and economic power. Canada has already established precedent in this regard by committing to targets and then abandoning them.

Although we still have 39 years until 2050, recent events are supporting Bueno de Mesquita’s prediction. The definite targets set in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol have not been met – emissions have gone up rather than down. Negotiations at Copenhagen in December of 2009 backed away from these targets. And the 2010 discussions at Cancun, Mexico, were only a success because they were not an abject failure – optimists argue that foundation agreements were reached that will accommodate the major decisions that must be made in 2011 at Durban, South Africa.

Nature, of course, responds to reality, not intentions. Negotiation is not action. And the longer negotiations last, the more dramatic must be future corrective measures. The Cancun meeting agreed that the target for the highest global average temperature increase should be 1.5°C, with the proviso that 2.0°C should be the absolute ceiling. Research from the Climate Action Tracker project, however, indicates that existing pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will set the temperature increase at 3.2°C (Guardian Weekly, Dec. 17/10).

If Bueno de Mesquita is correct that people act on the basis of their “best interests”, at what point does preventing global climate change become a common priority? Such a question is complicated by the fact that “best interests” are not distributed equally around the planet. This partially explains why Canada has been both a laggard and obstructionist in United Nations’ climate negotiations. While rising oceans are submerging South Pacific islands, while Africa’s Sahel is cooking in drought and Australia is drowning in flood – Australians had their drought last year – Canada has not been motivated by dramatic climate disasters. Indeed, unlike the turmoil that will be generated in much of the rest of the world, Canada may even experience a net beneficial effect from global warming. Meanwhile China, India and Brazil are too busy with economic growth to risk serious carbon dioxide reductions.

Whether this situation lasts until 2050, as Dr. Bueno de Mesquita predicted, remains to be seen. But solving a global problem without a global agreement almost certainly subverts any solution. The path our leaders are now choosing, however, offers no return. Once started, the ecological and climate changes that are being set in motion cannot be stopped within a time frame meaningful to our present civilization.

If “forewarned is forearmed”, then knowing the future allows us to change it. This is the sobering relevance of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions. With an accuracy rate of 90%, we won’t be able to complain that we weren’t warned.