Sergio Abranches

My computer screen showed climate militants marching and facing police blockades over the streets of Copenhagen and in the neighborhood of Bella Center. On the TV screens spread all over the crowded Media Center journalists could watch a plenary session of COP15, where government delegates discussed the most pressing global threat of the 21^st Century.

I pushed my chair back and looked at the numerous long tables, each seating around 40 journalists of all parts of the world, of all possible kinds of media. One glimpse revealed it all: government delegates debating their differences, the NGOs marching, peacefully trying to make their way into the negotiations, and the media watching, reporting, commenting.

And, yes, tweeting. About 7 out of 10 computers had Twitter opened on a window. With the right hashtag one could follow what journalists were reporting on Twitter in their languages. Several would tweet in their native languages and in English or French.

This was only one of several dramatic days. While in the plenary sessions delegates defended principled points, in the negotiation rooms intense, tense, and extensive negotiations were in progress. Or, sometimes, in regress. Militants marched protesting for access to the Conference and demanding that negotiators take meaningful action to respond to climate challenges.

Journalists jumped from one press conference to another; looked for exclusive info or insight talking to delegates.

This momentary view of the three international critical players of current climate politics simultaneously in action, like in a movie, made me start taking notes in a frenzy. They were gathered around the same agenda, but to play very distinct and relevant roles: governments, NGOs and the Press. They address climate issues from very different angles. Differences are central not only among these three sets of players, but also within each one. Individuals in each think in different languages. Groupings within and among them reflect diverse social, economic and political backgrounds. They display widely varied degrees of concern, knowledge and engagement regarding climate change.

To a professional political analyst and a journalist this was a very rich situation, a brain-storming event.

Arriving early in the morning every day at the Bella Center, I would immediately start to tweet many ideas about what was happening. Over the twelve days I was there, I posted several pieces to my blogs Ecopolitica and Ecopolity. I also made daily commentaries for the Brazilian radio network CBN. And I took notes all the time, to later help me think and write about the Copenhagen meeting, its aftermath and what’s to be done.

Back home, after some rest, I started reading my notes and browsing some books in order to design an analytical framework to organize my observations. But those intense 12 days of COP15 kept bringing back fragments of memory, snapshots of meaningful moments.

There was a sharp and annoying contrast between the aloofness of my academic readings and the liveliness of these fragments. The first book I picked was about the new transnational activism. For more than 40 pages all I could read was an endless conceptual argument. Academic minutiae seemed to obliterate a sense of relevance. I can’t see how it really matters whether an NGO such as Greenpeace should be called an NGO or something else; whether it is an international, transnational or global organization.

Form has replaced meaning. Formality is mistaken by precision. To be more formal doesn’t mean to be more accurate.

I am too fond of books to abandon reading them, though. I browsed, selected, dropped the useless, and kept reading what seemed relevant to me.

Like Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Browsing it, I stopped at the paragraph below, on chapter 7, “Cosmopolitan Contamination: Global Villages”.

People who complain about the homogeneity produced by globalization often fail to notice that globalization is, equally, a threat to homogeneity. (…) (H)omogeneity, though, is the local kind. (…) In the era of globalization – in Asante as in New Jersey – people make pockets of homogeneity. (…) And whatever loss of difference there has been, they are constantly inventing new forms of difference: new hairstyles, new slang, even, from times to times, new religions. No one could say that the world’s villages are  – or are about to become – anything like the same.

To anyone who spent about 16 hours a day in the Bella Center, for 12 days, as an “embedded journalist”, covering every aspect of the Climate Summit and interacting with all the different tribes that crowded the conference site, Appiah’s contention is crystal clear and couldn’t be more accurate.

It describes and explains the contradictions of globalization, the encounters, exchanges and diversity that it entails. The Bella Center had become a “global site” gathering very different tribes, some with antagonistic interests, to deal with a major global issue.

We could see an NGO militant on a crash-demonstration in the passageways of Bella Center, marching over the streets of Copenhagen, debating technical issues with delegates and lobbyists, or passing the results of intelligence work to journalists.

This role differentiation develops while these organizations grow, become stronger, wealthier, and more influential. They diversify their political roles as they get more expertise, more organizational capabilities and enlist people with different skills, aptitudes and backgrounds. Through this process, these new actors of global politics are creating a global civil society even before the first pieces of what will become a system for global governance are put in place. Formal international politics, having governments as the main actors, is far behind, particularly as far as global climate politics is concerned. And we saw plenty of evidence supporting this hypothesis there.

Although the different tribes interacting at the Bella Center theater had the same agenda, it was their different approaches to this common agenda that mattered most. Differences were paramount. They allowed critical actors to play very different roles: as militants, negotiators, reporters, analysts, commentators, doing intelligence or sharing information. Differences were a source of diversity as well as a fuel to contentious politics. Diverse actors expressed distinctive perceptions of climate change as a threat, an opportunity, a hindrance or a hoax.

At the end, diverging interests were stronger than commonalities and the deal was watered down. This end to the summit has by no means diminished its historic dimension. Formal politics has stayed behind, but made a few steps forward. Civil society got out of there stronger and more enlightened about what to do next.

My own perception is that interests, conflicts, and different views became more visible and recognizable in Copenhagen. Like when the small and threatened Tuvalu confronted the giant and threatened China.

I can’t say whether other global meetings on other issues have gained the same political magnitude as COP15 did. What I know is that the Copenhagen Summit was unprecedented in all counts, when compared to the other COPs: the number of NGOs, the size of national delegations, the scale of media presence and coverage, or the number of chiefs of states and governments present to the last 2 of the 12 days of the Conference. This was beyond any doubt the larger and more cosmopolitan climate meeting ever.

It was, by far, the major display of strength, technical expertise and political capability by the global environmental movement in recent history. Large and small NGOs became critical actors in the negotiations. They had expert people doing serious policy advocacy. They fiercely confronted lobbyists and greenwashers. They aptly transmitted to the media technical information and intelligence on what was being negotiated within closed doors.

As far as climate meetings go it was the first time ever that the components of a future cosmopolity were assembled in full. What we’ve seen in Copenhagen was the first full scale emergence of a cosmopolitics that will very likely become a dominant feature of 21^st Century global life.

Cosmopolitanism was clearly visible as the main element of climate politics at the Bella Center meeting. One could see Timothy Brennan’s “polychromatic culture” live at the atrium, passageways and rooms of the Center. Brennan is right when he says this multiverse culture is “a new singularity born out of a blending and merging of multiple local constituents.” The quote is from the essay “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism”, published in Daniele Archibugi (editor) – Debating Cosmopolitics.

And it was possible to discern the seeds of cosmopolitanism as global governance in the dramatic exchange of visions, demands, interests and principles. The strength of global civil society, in situ and all over the world directly connected with their counterparts in Copenhagen, is clearly building momentum for the emergence of this sort of cosmopolitanism.

The unprecedented presence of world media and the width of media coverage, will certainly help to broaden the scope of cosmopolitan politics.

Finally, the unprecedented attendance of more than 100 heads of states and governments, among them the leaders of the major mature and emerging powers has contributed to give this first experiment of climate cosmopolitics strong political significance.

The citizenship of this future system of global governance is emerging before any new element of effective global governance is in place. Building such a governance regime will be a daunting endeavor. Its complexity should not be underestimated. It is not about building a world state, or a global government. There is too much risk for freedom and human rights in such a notion. It is about global governance without global government. It requires a considerable amount of institutional innovation and experimentation.

Ben Block from the World Watch Institute, pointed correctly that despite disappointment, the Climate Summit marks a high point for the activist movement. This part of global civil society has swelled in strength and recognition in recent years.

The two-week U.N. conference may have ended in disappointment for most climate activists, who travelled from nearly every continent, but the gathering marked a historic high point for a movement that has swelled in strength and recognition in recent years.

An estimated 45,000 people attended the climate negotiations. This included greater participation from government delegations, business groups, and academics, in addition to larger turnout from campaigners. The “youth” delegation, representatives of the below-30 age group, increased its presence at forums that were once attended only by bureaucrats and scientists. Youth organizers said that their volunteers registered some 1,000 attendants, twice the participation compared to a year ago.

The activist crowds were relentless: they raised their voices during negotiation sessions, press briefings, and lunch breaks; they scattered in the corners of conference rooms and gathered in mobs to block passageways; and they screamed loudly for adaptation aid, among other demands. Activists also made subtle suggestions about the ineffectiveness of carbon offsets, for example by using tricks to show airplanes vanishing magically in the same way that carbon offsets make emissions “disappear,” they said.

Negotiation leaders acknowledged that the demonstrations captured their attention.

This history in the making gives full support and deep meaning to Jonathan Watts’s opinion that

Copenhagen will shape our lives for years to come.

Sergio Abranches

What if we are living now at the edge of tremendous changes and breakthroughs that will lead the humankind to evolve faster than ever along the twenty-first century? What if we are at the edge of a tipping-point in the history of humankind?

Mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge wrote, back in 1993, that acceleration of technological progress has taken us to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”  Vinge, one of the first writers to envisage cyberspace, wrote on an essay for NASA in 1993, later published by the Whole Earth Review, that the cause of this sweeping change would be “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” He called this tipping point a singularity.

A singularity, in physics, in astronomy, is where the laws of physics as we know them break down. My friend Ulisses Leitão, professor of Physics and Linux evangelist, tells me that the greatest singularity, is the Big Bang moment: “density would be so high, tending to infinity, that present Physics would not be able to describe its physical behavior. It would require a unified theory of all fundamental forces of Nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravitational. A theory encompassing Quantum Physics (small dimensions), Relativistic (high energy), and Universal Gravitation (large distances). “This theory doesn’t exist, we’ve been searching for it for the last 60 years…” If the search is possible, i.e. if we have the tools to search for it, than, in the long run, the theory is possible. That’s the point to me.

Vinge thinks that technological singularity means a moment beyond which huge, but unpredictable, changes occur, as John Hind explains on an article for the Guardian, in 2002. On his original presentation of singularity, Vernor Vinge said that “when greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.” He went even farther: “there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities, on a still-shorter time scale.” That is thinking as creatively about the future as possible.

Envisaging inevitable surprises we can anticipate without ever knowing in advance their consequences to us, as Peter Schwartz proposes in his 2003 book Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, is also about creative thinking. They are two different and equally valid ways of thinking about a “history” for the future that is boldly visionary and technically sound.

Inevitable surprises we can anticipate, as hypothesized by Peter Schwartz, are not in contradiction with the possibility that we are plunging into a singularity, a whirlpool of vertiginous change. The former tells us about changes we can anticipate, but not know its consequences. The latter tells about a tipping point after which change will accelerate beyond imagining to arrive at a quantum leap on human evolution that goes beyond everything we’ve known so far.

The difference is that one way of thinking points to the possibility of anticipating the changes that could create the means for the emergence of singularity. The other invites us to try to anticipate the broader consequences of these events. To look at the time, Vinge invites us, “where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.” From the human point of view this change will be “a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.”

Can you imagine how much controversy this idea has created in the academic and intellectual circles more than 15 years ago? Reaction to the singularity hypothesis was widespread. Supporters have also multiplied. Social scientist Robin Hanson once collected several comments on Vinge’s singularity. One comment has direct implications for the whole idea of looking into the future: it stated that nothing is certain, we’re always dealing with hypothesis. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute said that he did not “regard the singularity as being a certainty, just one of the more likely scenarios”.

Singularity has raised controversy since the first time Vernor Vinge used the idea, fictionally and rather diffusely, on a novel, Marooned In Real Time. On the story, a character says, at a certain point of the plot: “It was the Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.” It is a breaking point, a paradigm shift beyond the concepts we’re used to. Similar to the passage from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

It is easy to understand why all the controversy. We are talking about two orders of unknowns and neither is really easy to look into. The future is an entertaining idea until we start to realize it points to our ineluctable finitude. We have to make ourselves comfortable with the idea of looking beyond ourselves and our beloved ones. Singularity radicalizes this vision. It points beyond human dominance in the universe. Not comfortable at all. Ray Kurzweil and several others took this idea much further, into the real of transhumanism. But that’s far beyond my view.

Stewart Brand has a point worth recalling in his The Clock of the Long Now: time is asymmetrical to us. We can see the past but we can’t change it. Yet we still argue about the past, I’d add. We cannot see the future, he continues, but we can influence it. He is not implying we can control the way future events will unfold. It is not about trying to control the future, but trying to give it, i.e. to future generations, the tools to help itself.

Isn’t that precisely what we are trying to do about climate change? We know, or most of us know, we cannot control natural laws. There is very little we can do with the tools we have today about the amount of GHG we’ve already sent to our atmosphere, or the global warming we’ve already bought with the carbon we’ve emitted so far. We can develop tools to adapt human society to these very likely events, though. We can develop tools and the required means of governance to reduce future emissions and avoid worst case scenarios.

None of these challenges is about certainty, about knowing beyond any doubt. Certainty will always fall within the realm of our finitude. It is about uncertainty, risk, chances we should no take. We can estimate probabilities and educatedly guess probable consequences. To do that we must look into the future, and doing it with art, creativity, imagination and boldness helps a lot. Worst than to reveal good and bad things that might be brewing in our future, would be to make these views dull and obvious.

I, for myself, as far as climate change is concerned, would rather be warned of risk greater than what is most likely to happen than to be informed of risk that might fall short of probable outcomes. The same is true for me regarding the future history of this century. I’d rather think that humankind will have overcome its frailties, brutality and insensitiveness; learn solidarity to the sufferings of those different from oneself; domesticate the propensity of the powerful to oppression and of the rich to amass far more wealth they can manage; than to imagine it will be all the same in 2100.

There is a tipping point looming on the horizon of our future. It may not have anything to do with Vinge’s singularity. We can only be sure of one thing: change will be overwhelming and our old models will have to be discarded, a new reality will rule.

Thinking about the future is not easy. It is very much like gaming, one has to get through a maze of obstacles and deception to reach further and higher, moving to increasing levels of complexity, towards one’s goal.

The task is to envisage plausible, different, alternate futures. The whole exercise is about increasing levels of abstraction and detachment from current experience, down to concrete hypothesis about a new state of the world.

One could do that either by using quantitative simulation tools or qualitative story writing. Quantitative methods are still too linear to my liking. If necessary I would prefer to use system analytic tools such as Studio 8 (Powersim) for PCs, and Stella or iThink, for Macintosh (my case). If I can choose, I’d rather use more qualitative scenario writing that can be as effective as simulation curves. Dealing with the future is a tricky affair, be it to interpret the results of one’s models, be it to get meaningful results from one’s storyboard.

Future thinking requires an awkward combination of audacity and discipline. Audacity to dare to be radically creative and to feel absolutely free to use all one’s intelligence, information and knowledge to consider alternate futures. Discipline not to let the past and the present to contaminate your views of the future. Both past and present have to be wisely and carefully applied in shaping the context for your future stories, but they cannot dominate them. The greater danger lies in the temptation of linearly projecting our present experiences and biases into the future, what Ray Kurzweil calls “intuitive linear view” in opposition to the “historical exponential view”.

Let me be clearer: the present writes linearly the “business as usual” future. In many cases, as for climate change, the “business as usual” future is the one we cannot afford, because it is not feasible. It is a future that will not actually be. There are emerging forces, many still latent, that will very likely change the course of future history away from the “business as usual” scenario. The contradictions of maintaining the status quo generate a turbulent environment in which these forces tend to unfold and gain strength. At the same time it is a hostile environment for the dwindling forces behind the status quo.

Let’s look at it empirically and logically. Can we say that the world we live today is the outcome of 30 years of business as usual? Look around you, all the gizmo, the economics, the social networking, the cultural context, all significant elements of both your personal and professional lives. Now, think back 30 years ago. Almost nothing that is relevant for our current personal and professional lives could be found in 1979. Why should we bet our existence on the belief that 2039 will be approximately equal to 2009, linearly increased or decreased, a bit improved or a bit worsened? Isn’t it more likely that it will be as different as 2009 is from 1979, or even more so? Some of you reading this post weren’t even born back in 1979. Is there a more radical change than between being and not being? Look at all the differences it means to be 20 or 50 years old. To me business as usual, in the long run, is a logical impossibility.

Besides, a business as usual outcome in the age of global warming and climate change is much less likely than a happy scenario of a low-carbon society or a doom story of a society that has chosen to burn itself out of history.

The dangerous temptation of projecting the present into the future should not be mistaken for acknowledging the political, social and cultural strength of the status quo. We’ve built a world not to change, but to expand upon what we already have and are. Our institutions are set to prevent that we shift towards the very different. They are adjusted to help us become more efficient, building upon what we already do. Like the French say with savvy, the rule is: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more it changes, the more it remains the same. This is true on the short and mid run. On the long run, however, the World will change no matter what forces try to prevent it from changing.

There is another danger haunting everyone trying to think about the future: “short vision” or the inability to hold a long view. In this hectic society we live, overflowing of news, information, scientific findings, gadgets, you name it, threaten to engulf us on an ever accelerating pace. To adapt and survive we have to spend so much time sorting out what is meaningful to us, that we can only look at today. Tomorrow will always be another day, very much like yesterday, and so this experience seems to hold for the future as well.

It doesn’t. The future will not be like yesterday, today or tomorrow. It will be something very different. If we look back at twenty, thirty years ago, our world was so different from today. There are countless things we do, use, have that we couldn’t even dream of a few years ago. The only thing we can be sure of is that change will happen, life will find a way very likely unprecedented and unforeseen by most.

A group of future-minded people was so worried about this short view syndrome that they decided to create a foundation dedicated to promote long-term thinking. I should have said very long-term, because they say they “hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years”. They intend to do that by providing a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking.” Among the founding fathers of the Long Now Foundation are two well known authors and professional scenario planners, Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz. They aren’t a group of “outliers”. They’ve been sponsoring some of the most creative and interesting seminars I’ve seen lately. One of the most recent, on July 28, was on “Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future”, with Pamela Ronald, head of plant genetics at UC Davis, and Raoul Adamchak, who teaches organic farming, there. Their main claim is that “to meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach”.

To adopt a long view – it doesn’t have to be 10,000 years long – is to open ourselves to the novelty that lies ahead of us. It may sound as a cliché, but the future is indeed full of surprises, bad and good ones, and, more often than not, inevitable surprises. Peter Schwartz wrote in his 2003 book, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, that “surprises are the norm”, particularly after science and technology-powered revolutions have greatly increased the complexity and turbulence of our life. He tells us that there will be more surprises, we will be able to deal with them, and we will anticipate most of them. We cannot know their consequences in advance or how they will affect us, but we know many of the surprises to come, like economic collapses, for instance. He wrote that in 2003.

Far-reaching scientific and technological changes have accelerated our biorhythm as they exponentially increased our power to tinker with both our natural and built environments. We are right now experiencing the early beginnings of yet another scientific revolution. It will lead to the convergence of several advancements that are already among us, but when put together in full interaction will likely become something very different. Something much larger than the simple sum of their parts. I am talking about the fusion of digital, nano, bio, and neuro science and technologies that will inevitably produce a new techno-age, full of wonder, potential, and risk.

The breadth of the changes to come can be so astonishing that we may not continue to be able to anticipate surprises, and to make “pretty good assumptions about how most of them will play out,” as Peter Schwartz asserts. We may be traveling to a higher dimension of our future, totally new and yet inconceivable.