The National Council of Teachers of English describes doublespeak as a blending of George Orwell’s newspeak and doublethink. “Such language,” stresses the National Council, “is not the product of carelessness or sloppy thinking; rather, it is the result of clear thinking.” Indeed, it is “carefully designed to change reality or to mislead.”

More specifically, notes The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal (1997), doublespeak is “language which pretends to communicate, but really doesn’t. It is language which makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant appear attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids or shifts responsibility, language which is at variance with its real or its purported meaning. It is language which conceals or prevents thought.”

The first winner of the National Council’s Doublespeak Award went to Colonel Opfer, the 1974 United States press officer in Cambodia who insisted that reporters were using the wrong terminology to describe US bombing raids. “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing. It’s air support.” Of the many subsequent awards, another went to the US nuclear power industry for the euphemisms it used to describe the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island – an explosion became an “energetic disassembly”, the resulting fire was “rapid oxidation” and the reactor incident was deemed “a normal aberration”. The US Department of State won a later award for announcing that the word “killing” would in future be replaced by “unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life”.

Doublespeak is a common condition. The National Council notes that its synonyms include parliamentese, legalese, gobbledygook, bafflegab and fedspeak. The advertising and corporate world are fond of using doublespeak to hide the portion of reality they don’t want to declare. Like all such language, words are “carefully designed to change reality or to mislead.”

Sometimes doublespeak seems to exist in epidemic proportions, like a pervasive blight infecting the entire landscape of human thought. Political phrases such as “Axis of Evil” are the environmental kin of “ethical oil” or “clean coal”. The reduction of a complex issue to an inane simplicity can be breathtaking. Cost, details, justification and consequences are avoided in awesome leaps of abbreviation. All the environmental problems that could accrue from a new mine are magically dismissed because it creates “jobs”. This four-letter word becomes the justification for unsettling communities and ecologies that were functioning just fine before “opportunity” arrived.

“Opportunity”, in the modern vernacular, is a blessing that should never be missed on the freeway to “progress” – another rainbow we keep chasing over the mountains and through the valleys, usually leaving in its wake a trail of ecological havoc. Like “sustainable development”, “progress” is often an oxymoron in one word instead of two.

Always give a second thought to words such as “healthy”, “natural”, “cheap” and “efficient”. “New” has been a perennial deceiver because it can mean almost anything. In a consumer’s world of boundless material optimism, few seem to consider that “new” is untested and unproven, something conceivably faddish, possibly superficial, potentially unreliable, maybe unnecessary and perhaps dangerous.

Even apparently reputable words such as “recyclable” can be twisted to imply that a product can be justifiably purchased because it will come to an ethical end, a claim that may be unsupportable in any but the most remote sense. Thus doublespeak finds itself in the company of “greenwashing”.

For plastics that allegedly “break down”, the implication is that they reduce to harmless components. In reality, the “breaking down” is usually the decomposition of the material that binds the plastic together, releasing the toxic matter into the environment in such microscopic particles that it is virtually unrecoverable. The result is far worse than if the product did not “break down”. “Compostable” is the only plastic that breaks down in any legitimate biological sense.

One of the most devious and subtle forms of all doublespeak might be called the vacuous platitude, the bathing of incriminating evidence in saccharine terminology that denies by seeming to acknowledge, that rejects by seeming to agree, and that evades by seeming to encourage. BC’s salmon farming industry has been a master of this form of doublespeak. In the face of withering evidence that open net-pen feedlots transfer sea lice and disease to wild migrating salmon, the industry invariably meets every critical scientific study with an unshakable air of self-confidence. The latest example is its response to the damning evidence in Sea Louse Infection of Juvenile Sockeye in Relation to Marine Salmon Farms on Canada’s West Coast (Courier- Islander, Feb. 11/11). The industry professes its best efforts, welcomes the findings, points out other unlikely explanations, declares a kinship with wild salmon, and then encourages further studies. Meanwhile, salmon farming carries on unchanged.

Doublespeak is now epidemic. Its the deception that makes every industrial project “green”, that sanitizes toxic areas as “reclamation sites”, that affronts nature by calling logging “development”, that ironically names shopping malls “Meadowbrook” or “Woodgrove”. Political attack ads are one of the most devious forms of doublespeak. Their unsupported innuendos are slick and slippery masterpieces, too cowardly to make an outright accusation and too vague to provide grounds for rebuttal.

All doublespeak leaves a wake of deception, frustration and cynicism, as if language were turned against itself and a Tower of Babel were broadcasting a confusion that renders people confounded and powerless.

To understand global warming just put a pot on the stove, fill it about one quarter full of cold water, put on the lid – a glass see-through is preferable – then turn the heating element to low and watch patiently.

For the longest time nothing seems to happen. Gradually, however, water droplets will appear on the underside of the lid indicating a rise in humidity. Then, at some undetermined time, the silent heating process suddenly begins to hiss and mists of vapour begin drifting through the confined air. Eventually, the still and quiet confines of the pot become a turbulence of churning water and steaming air.

Although this pot experiment is an extremely simplified model of global warming, it illustrates the consequences of adding heat to a climate system. The dynamics on Earth, of course, are incredibly more complicated than the space inside a pot. But the principle remains the same. Added heat causes average humidity to rise, precipitation to increase and the convection currents of ocean and atmosphere to move more vigorously.

We humans would like to perceive ourselves as an insignificant force in the great scheme of climate. But the cumulative effect of 250 years of huge carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels to energize our industrial activity is having an effect on weather. We are still in the early stages of the pot-heating experiment. But the air is beginning to move more vigorously, the humidity is rising, and more water is condensing and dripping from the lid. Scientists are now concerned about the inevitable shift from silence to hiss, the unpredictable “tipping point” that suddenly and radically re-organizes the entire system – Systems Theory calls this moment “emergence”.

So far the heating process has been relatively gradual – we add a little more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the planet gets a little warmer. But we may be approaching a threshold of radical change. Thawing permafrost is now releasing huge stores of methane locked in frozen northern bogs – methane is about 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And rock-like methane deposits held deep in the oceans by cold and pressure may become volatile in warmer water. Since warmer oceans hold less dissolved gas, less of our carbon dioxide will be transferred from the atmosphere to the oceans, thereby accelerating global warming. Meanwhile, melting polar ice is exposing more ocean water to solar heating, further accelerating the warming process. Warmer oceans also destabilize glaciers that are footed in them, thus reducing ice cover while adding to sea-level rise by melt and water expansion.

We humans build our settlements and establish our livelihoods on the basis of normal conditions. A change from normality is usually a threat to our security. On the West Coast, changes in ocean temperature are threatening fisheries by introducing foreign predators and diseases to local waters. In Arctic territory, melting permafrost is eroding shorelines, washing away villages and collapsing roads, airports and forests. The torrential Australian rains that recently brought flooding and then the 300 km/hr winds of Cyclone Yasi to Queensland are both being attributed to warmer water in the nearby Coral Sea.

Statistically, weather is changing everywhere on our planet. Generally, it is becoming more extreme and more damaging, precisely what we should expect from rising temperatures. Dry places are getting drier and wet places are getting wetter. The abnormality of heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms that disrupt our ecologies and our lives are becoming increasingly commonplace.

The rise in global ocean surface temperature of about 0.1°C (to a depth of 700 metres) compared to the 0.6°C rise in atmospheric temperature can be explained by oceans being the indirect recipient of generated greenhouse heat and water holding many times more heat than air. A 0.1°C temperature increase may seem trivial in the great scheme of things, except that climate systems are intricately balanced, extremely complex, very active and notoriously unstable. And oceans – covering about 70 percent of our planet – are a primary generator of weather.

The pot experiment is a simple way of illustrating the dynamics of climate and reminding us that the impacts of global warming are imminent and already discernible. Most scientists are clearly alarmed about the reticence of both politicians and public to respond to the innumerable warnings from their studies and predictions. Some scientists say we have but a short few years to radically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions; others say we have already gone beyond the point of no return and are now launched into dire and unstoppable consequences. Most scientists seem to agree we should have taken action three decades ago, when the warnings were first sounded and the required corrective measures would have been less extreme and shocking.

Given human behaviour, the more extreme and shocking the required corrective measures and the more disruptive their effects on our entrenched habits and enterprises, the less inclined we are to undertake them. Paradoxically, as the urgency to radically reduce greenhouse gases increases, effective corrective measures become increasingly unlikely – almost as if our human character were programmed for unavoidable appointments with catastrophe.

However, if we recognize this human failing, we can correct it. Before the water in the pot reaches a boil, we can each undertake to do something – anything – to reduce the heat.

Success always comes with costs. The clarity of this idea, presented so elegantly in the 19th century by Thomas Malthus and then explored recently by the economist Joseph Tainter and the ecologist/historian Kenneth Boulding, illustrates parallels between nature and humans that should give us thoughtful pause.

In nature, success for a species requires that it must always find new sources of nourishment if it is to flourish. It must also find ways to dispose of the wastes generated by its increasing numbers. In oceanic algal blooms, for example, a generous supply of nutrients feeds massive plant growth but the inability of the aquatic environment to dispose of the carbon dioxide from the decomposing algae creates an anoxic dead zone in which nothing lives. In another example, a rising population of animals may find enough food to thrive but must then combat an increasing incidence of virulent diseases. Such adversities are the “metabolic cost” of success, a process that is paralleled in human civilizations.

Every successful thing we do as humans comes with metabolic cost. Each solution to a problem brings new problems that invite new solutions in an ascending network of complexity. The earliest farming communities that could feed more people than their ancestral nomads, invariably risked survival from soil depletion and erosion. The irrigation that increases food production in dry climates, eventually causes the salinization that renders the ground useless. The standing armies that became necessary to protect large swaths of territory had to be fed and equipped, often at a destructively high cost for the security they were providing. (The Canadian government is spending $11 billion to purchase and service 43 new helicopters and now intends to commit $16 billion for 65 new F-35 stealth fighter aircraft.) Rome eventually collapsed under the weight of metabolic cost. Indeed, history is littered with wrecked civilizations in which the metabolic cost of complexity rose to debilitating levels.

Metabolic cost is insidious because it is invariably disguised as progress and welcomed as efficiency. The economic globalization that ships billions of tonnes of resources around the planet can only be sustained by the expenditure of gargantuan amounts of energy. The international tourism that whizzes hundreds of millions of people from country to country exacts a damaging toll on the atmosphere and destroys distinctive cultures. This metabolic cost is now expressing itself as oil shortages, resource scarcity, political conflict, terrorism, miscellaneous pollution and global warming. All these problems are directly linked to the hidden cost of solutions.

The technological ingenuity that allows the industrial fishing of our oceans has heretofore been successful in feeding a burgeoning human population. But the metabolic cost will be empty oceans and a chain reaction of catastrophic ecological and social consequences. The specific problem of an inadequate supply of wild salmon – caused by solutions to other problems – is being addressed by salmon farming, a solution that purports to reliably supply protein to affluent societies at an affordable price. The metabolic cost, however, is excessive energy use, bureaucratic supervision and a proliferation of ecological stresses such as parasites and diseases. The inherent inefficiency of using 6 tonnes of oceanic fish to make one tonne of fish meal, and then expending 1.5 to 3 tonnes of fish meal to grow one tonne of salmon, is patently wasteful given the increasing demands on limited marine resources.

The metabolic cost of complexity expresses itself in many other ways. Despite increases in efficiency, energy consumption continues upward because the hidden toll of consumerism expands faster than energy savings. The number of households requiring two working adults to maintain a modern standard of living has become commonplace rather than rare. Debt and stress are rising everywhere that modernity encroaches. Demands increase disproportionately on law enforcement, education and health care. No matter how many freeways are built, commuting time continues to lengthen. The contentment of people declines as civilization becomes more complex.

Consider the metabolic cost of oil. Whereas 50 years ago the return of energy for expended effort to procure oil was about 99 percent, about half the energy we now get from oil is expended to acquire it. Offshore drilling, once a rarity because of risk, is now ordinary. The ecological costs of deep-sea wells – as BP’s Gulf of Mexico blowout attests – can be horrendous. So can spills from oil tankers and pipelines. Indeed, a large portion of the current political and economic stress on the planet can be linked to the complexities of supplying, financing and securing oil resources.

The same applies to other resources. As we exhaust the most accessible supplies, we venture into more remote, costly and risky places to find diminishing quantities of wood, iron, coal, gold, natural gas, copper, lithium and the rare earth metals needed to supply our increasingly sophisticated technologies. The ecological, social, political and cultural costs rise with the disruptions to the human and natural environments.

And hovering above all this metabolic cost, like the Angel of Death, is global warming and climate change, a pervasive malaise that is already incurring billions in property damage, disrupting food supplies, dislocating people, inspiring political tension, causing vast human suffering and ravaging natural ecologies. These are the complications we have earned from a average world temperature increase of about 0.6°C. And our political leaders are willing to risk a 1.5°C increase – 2.0°C maximum. Many climatologists think we are presently on target for an increase of at least 3.2°C.

The only known way to reduce metabolic cost is simplification. In these days of increasing complexity, simplification seems like an impossible goal. But it may not be so difficult if each of us were to move in this direction with our awareness and choices.

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.