“Despite knowing that life is so much more than money and gold I fall in line like a good boy, and close my eyes to my guilt and others’ My heart is heavy and my head is bent, my steps echo grey and empty The snow lies black and toxic on the roofs I turn on my TV and sleep it off
And when the acid rain falls, I put up my umbrella…”
A freely translated song by The Lost Generation that I fell in love with when first I heard it. It’s so heavy and melancholic! It captured so well the feeling I had...
I have later realized that this is the lefties’ idea of how rich people are, or the greenies’ idea of how “normal people” are… and that they’re wrong. The rich or normal are not closing their eyes to any guilt. They’re not FEELING any guilt!... It is these “progressive” people’s idea that they SHOULD be feeling guilt, and so they wrongly assume that they do. The progressives also feel this guilt, themselves, and so naturally – but wrongly – expand their feeling to all of human kind.
Our hearts were heavy and our heads bent… not theirs. And I truly, genuinely believed that this depended on them closing their eyes to reality!... Because I felt that this was how it had happened for me… That one day, I opened my eyes to all the misery in the world, and all the pain came gushing in… and ever since that day, I was carrying all the grief of the world. Those who didn’t hadn’t yet opened their eyes.
But you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way! Because I still have my eyes open to all the misery in the world… but my heart is not heavy and my head not bent! It is a fantastic world we’re living in! And an absolutely fantastic time!... Sure, there’s lots of misery in the world, but it’s only a tiny, tiny part of it. And most of it is actually part of life, part of nature, part of what makes life so fantastic! Death, for instance. Suffering, dangers and death are parts of nature, and included in the things that make life fantastic. But just look at how much we have actually reduced these, over the last few hundred years!... We humans defy nature by having a survival-rate to adult age of more than 50%!... This is unmatched. In Sweden, this rate is over 99%... which is insane. And fantastic!
And if you look at it that way, there is of course no reason at all to grieve. On the contrary, these are times for celebration.
The funny thing is that you seem to have surpassed me in grieving, now!... This was NOT a development I saw coming 10 years ago, that I can tell you! But now, you “normal people” are walking around feeling guilt over the climate and are all worked up over Covid-19!... You think it’s a tragedy that 200,000 Americans – most of them already near their deaths – have died in Covid-19, and you think I’m cold and lacking of empathy because I don’t. But how could I, when I’ve already been aware for over a decade that 20,000 children die every day from poverty, and I’ve found peace with that knowledge? That’s 7 million dead children every year, and pretty much ALL those deaths could have been prevented if resources had been there… I used to feel THAT was a tragedy… but I’ve gotten over it! I’ve realized that 20,000 per day, in a population of 8 billion, is after all extremely little. No other organisms have a youngling mortality that low! People never had it before. 200 years ago, more than half of all children died before they were 5 years old.
Also, I’ve lived for several years now in a country where the child mortality is skyrocketing compared to Sweden, and I can see that it doesn’t mean that people are walking around suffering. Quite the opposite! They have much more peace and happiness in their everyday life than the Swedes have. I would have gladly lived here the rest of my life, if they only hadn’t harassed me so much for my white skin.
And so it appears to me that the great tragedy is not death, but the modern Westerners’ attitude to death. Which probably springs from the fact that we have too little death in our lives, rather than too much. Had we had more of it, we would be wise enough not to grieve so much, but instead to celebrate every day that we are alive.
I’ve become like the guy in the song, who puts up his umbrella when the acid rain falls. But I don’t close my eyes, I don’t bend my head and I don’t grieve!... My eyes are completely open, as I’m singing and dancing in the rain.
"May we all have our hopes, our will to try If we don't, we might as well lay down and die"...
-ABBA
I think maybe I did that... Maybe I died.
Until I was 25, I lived like people expected me to live, more or less. Of course I was always unusual, no way to escape that, but in the large picture, I followed people's expectations.
Then at the age of 26, when I was in university, on my way to becoming an engineer, have a good job, get an intelligent husband and have a house, a car and 2 intelligent children, I suddenly fell out of the bubble and my world came tumbling down... I realized that this rich world that I'd been living in (Sweden) was an exception, both in the world right now and in time, and that it was possible only because it was living on the expense of others, both of the poor world today and of the whole world in future. And it hit me that I was not ok with this!! Not at all!...
I cried. I suffered immensely just going into a supermarket, and realizing how much exploitation of nature and poor people there was behind almost everything that was sold there, to us rich people. The evil behind it all was crushing me.
I thought I would die, but then I found my salvation in escaping the bubble, and in putting all of myself - all my powers, all my talents, all my time - into fighting for good, fighting the evil. At 27, I went to Africa, and I started working with a biogas project. It was meant to empower the poor and save the forest, all at once. It's how I survived, but not only that: I felt more alive than I ever had before! Finally doing things that nobody had ever recommended or expected of me, I felt alive for the first time...
That's 12 years ago now. In that time, I've had two children in Sweden, with my Kenyan husband, and I felt I had to take a little break from saving the world outside, so that I could save my own family... The husband had so many problems, and bringing up children takes a lot of one's time and attention.
But then something else happened. The Green Party, which I had been a member of for 18 years, got into government and started doing everything wrong. Taking massive steps in the wrong direction, and calling it small steps in the right direction... It shocked me! And in the aftermath of that shock, I realized, among other things, that for 20 years, I had been paying extra for organic food, because the other food was destroying the planet and to me it was obvious that if it destroys our planet, we stop it... but it had come to nothing, because the others never followed! I was ok with being the first, I was ok with pulling a bit extra, but after TWENTY YEARS, organic food was still less than 10%... The others were still enjoying the money they saved by buying food on nature's expense, on other people's expense.
And my country closed its borders to refugees in the biggest refugee movement this world has ever seen... With the Green Party voting for it! Not even those 7% were with me!!...
Somehow, I think I died. I stopped breathing for a while. I felt that I had misunderstood everything... I had been trying to save the world, because I thought it was important to reduce suffering... but the world never wanted to be saved! It was fine, the way it was! I was the only one who minded, and that was my problem!... Even those refugees, they never cared for anybody else! They wanted us to save them, yeah, but had they grown up safe, they would have also closed the borders! Even those poor people, had they grown up rich, and I poor, they wouldn't have cared for me!... So why should I care for them?...
Nature is nature. It's cruel, and it's beautiful. Death is ever present. The majority of all living creatures on Earth die very young. Only some very few of them reach the age where it's even possible for them to have offspring. In Sweden, this is no longer true for humans... Most of them now live to old age, but that's an exception. One way or another, that will change again, back to the natural way.
Humans were never made for a life without suffering. Without grief. Without death ever present. I don't think it's good for us!...
12 years ago, I came to Africa for the first time, and I discovered something that we in Sweden must have lost. I discovered a joy, an appreciation of life, that Sweden didn't have. It surprised me, and it puzzled me... Eventually, I started asking myself if it was the proximity to death and suffering that was the cause...?
And now I've reached the conclusion that yes, to a large extent, it is. I now live in Kenya since August 2017, and I still feel so much more alive, so much happier, so much better than I ever did in Sweden. I sell biogas digesters. Thus I'm still empowering the poor and saving forest, but only because it gives me satisfaction, and because that's where I now have my expertise. I always felt enjoyment in clever ideas and beautiful solutions, and biogas has all that. But I'll never again care like I did before. I'll no longer try to rid the world of death or suffering. What for? That wouldn't be an enjoyable world anyway! We were made for hardships, and we need some of that to be able to enjoy life. And pretty soon we all die anyway, and then none of it matters anymore. No matter how sweet or terrible our only life was, it will all have come to nothing.
Enjoy it while you can, if you can! And if you are among those who can, congratulations!
My previous life is over. I died... This is afterlife.
A cap is being tested in the quality check of the Warehouse
It WASN'T the official date, October 24. To think that it would be this hard to avoid falling for rumors!...
What had officially happened though, was that all restaurants and shops in the Jungle* had been given a written notice that they have to leave the area, or they will be demolished. Apparently this warning must be given at least 48 h in advance, which means that as from 2:30 pm today, the restaurants and shops could legally be demolished.
When it had almost turned 2:30 today, one of our volunteer leaders came in to us who were in the Belgium Kitchen (the community kitchen that serves free dinner to all the refugees every day, not to be confused with a restaurant) and said rather stressed that there were a great number of police cars on the bridge outside the Jungle and they had two water cannons with them, so it seemed they were going to start demolishing today and apparently they expected trouble. Therefore we had to interrupt our onion chopping and potato pealing and let ourselves be hurdled out from the Jungle, to spend the rest of the day at the Warehouse of l'Auberge.
In the minibus on the way to the Warehouse, I said:
"That was the last time we saw the Jungle as we know it", and felt intensely that I wanted to hug somebody and cry.
I spent the rest of the day sorting donations to be handed out to refugees. When the working day was over, I asked the person who had picked us from Belgium Kitchen if she had any news about what had happened after we left. She had. Nothing had happened... The second false alarm in two days, and I cannot do it!! There was some talk that there had been a demonstration for open borders planned for this day but that for some reason it hadn't happened, and that maybe that's why the police had mobilized, but what do I know... Maybe they just want to break us down? It's working pretty well, in that case...
My great, wonderful partner came and hugged me while passing by, and in his arms I felt how it burst. The crying broke out. Then he walked on, before I had time to communicate that I probably needed him a bit longer, so I ended up sitting in a chair hugging my backpack. After a while he came back and saw that I was sad, so he hugged me again, longer, and now I cried even more... Why, why, why are our societies so cruel? Why don't we remember our Geneva convention which states that people must be allowed asylum from war and persecution? Why can we only demolish and destroy, but not build up and welcome?
Because of course, even if there wasn't any demolition done today, it will still come. Mattias said that it would be a good strategy for them to take down the restaurants and shops first and use lots of force, so that they make an example, while also destroying some of the infrastructure of the camp. Both these things mean that both the inhabitants and the volunteers become less inclined to defend the Jungle later, when they come to demolish the actual accommodation tents. Another volunteer added later that it however was too early to take down the restaurants now. It's better 3-5 days before the eviction, so that people don't have time to reorganise and build up something again in between.
That is, the restaurants and shops will probably be demolished next week. Because there was after all some basis for this date, October 24. This is the date that a big shelter will open in Paris, and before this opens the government has no place to put the thousands of refugees, even those of them who want to apply for asylum in France.
I woke up screaming a few nights ago. I sat up straight and screamed in full panic, just like my 6-year-old back at home. I don't think I've had a single nightmare for 10-15 years, and screamed I haven't done since I was a kid. And hardly like this, even then. I dreamed that I was in the Jungle. I remember what I dreamed, but it was rather abstract. I did not dream about police or violence, rather of ghosts or aliens... Some vague, undefined evil... Yes, volunteering with refugees without the right to asylum, without the right to be reunited with their families, and nowadays often without shoes, warm clothes or blankets in the ever colder weather, is much, much harder than volunteering with the miserably poor people of Kenya. Sure, the people I worked with in Kenya were quite destitute, and many of them silently hated their lives and longed for a different one, but they were not desperate. And there were, after all, many things in their lives that they loved, and would have sorely missed had they actually made it away from there...
But nobody will ever say:
"Oh, how I miss my time of fleeing! Oh, how I miss not knowing where to go, not knowing where I could turn to so that I wouldn't be sent back to the war in Sudan or Afghanistan or some other place! Oh, how I miss the feeling of never being welcome anywhere! Of that my death would be a relief for them, ridding them of the burden of my life in their countries..."
Note: By now we know that the eviction in any case started on the 24th of October *The Jungle = The informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live in tents and home made shelters, many after having tried to go to the UK but failed
And so the official date has finally been given: On Oct 24 the Jungle* will be demolished, the people evicted. They fly their helicopters over us all the time, and the other day everybody who wanted to enter the Jungle had to show ID to them. They collected them, went into their police van and spoke on the phone a lot, and after quite a while had passed, they finally came out, called our names one by one so that we could have our IDs back and carry on. Though I managed to sneak past this ID check and got in anyway... They weren't too attentive...
The ID controls, the helicopters and all the rumors I could handle, but the official date has brought me down. I'm sad and hopeless. I know they're not bluffing now, since they have already demolished the Jungle twice before... Both times it rose again, right next to where it had been. What will happen this time? Because there is no plan! There is no alternative! Of course there problem is not that people are so very keen on living in wet tents in the rainy, windy, 0 degrees winter of Calais, that they do so, despite it being forbidden! The problem is that they can't get asylum anywhere, and therefore have to choose between a tent winter in Calais and something worse!... Their only hope of something better is to make it to the UK and live there illegally. Many even have the legal right to permanent residency in the UK, but don't receive their papers. Some have been granted asylum in France but lost their papers, or they were destroyed in the Jungle, and incredibly they had to start over!... Despite the authorities of course having taken their finger prints to be able to identify them, when they applied for asylum.
Hey, stop this! If you have a wound and think that's bothersome, don't try and rid yourself of it by knives, corrosive acid and force! Take care of it instead, and let it heal! Which it has the capacity within it to do, by itself, with only perhaps a bit of help with hygiene right in the beginning. Force, on the other hand, only makes damage worse!
*The Jungle = The informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live in tents and home made shelters, many after having tried to go to the UK but failed
On the second day here, I went to the Warehouse of the British organisation l'Auberge des Migrants. They receive loads of donations, sort them, check them and hand them out to refugees if they are suitable, and if they are not, but still good, they sell them and use the money to help refugees. We signed a paper, and then we were insured while working with them. They had a little warm-up with us, and then a briefing of what we are doing and why. Everything was aimed to getting as high efficiency as possible in our work, so that as much as possible of our efforts and donations would actually go into a good use for the refugees. I especially enjoyed the advice on toilet paper:
"We've noticed that some volunteers use extra toilet paper to try and cover up what they've done in there. Ehm, we do know what you do in there, it's a toilet, and if you cover it up with paper it only means that they fill up faster so we have to go and empty them more often, and of course buy more toilet paper, and all this eats in to our time and resources."
It creates such a lovely relaxed feeling of community and normal, simple humanness when a beautiful girl with long, blond hair stands there talking like that!
But she also said more important things, like that we only hand out to refugees clothes that are flawless, that is they don't have any wholes, stains, missing buttons etc. This is because our gifts reflect how we think about them, and where they come from, torn clothes are not a fashion thing but a marker of poverty and despair. When later I was standing in the quality check station for clothes, I therefore sorted the best clothes for refugees, and those clothes that were a bit torn or broken but still cool and good-looking, for the charity shop, well aware that the volunteers would buy them and love them. Because for us, it's a choice. We CAN walk around in tuxedo and evening gown, if we really, really want to.
She also explained that we newcomers would not be sent into the Jungle*, the way things were now. In the normal case, some of us would be going there every day, and she said that she realized that it makes it more difficult to be working with the relatively hard physical labor that we are doing here, if we never get to see it for ourselves when the help reaches its destination, but the thing is that president Hollande has promised that the Jungle will be demolished, and since there is some kind of a law in France that nobody can be evicted from their homes in winter time, no matter how illegal this home might be, it will probably happen any day now, and the atmosphere in the Jungle is therefore very tensed and stressed. A number of thefts have suddenly occurred, cars have been looted and fights and arguments break out easily. Therefore nowadays only experienced members of l'Auberge go into the Jungle.
(We in Utopia are of course there daily anyway, picking trash.)
Then she still went through briefly what rules they had for those who did go into the Jungle, just to give us some understanding of how we work. Among other things, she said that the refugees' own organisations (the ones organised by the refugees) had requested that we female volunteers wear clothes that cover legs and upper body, including shoulders and chest. This was partly because they wanted us to be respected as guests in the camp, and not suffer any sexual harassment which might otherwise easily be the case, since bare shoulders, deep neck lines etc, symbolizes something else in several of the countries that many of the refugees come from. But also because if the atmosphere becomes sexual in daytime when we volunteers are there, the sexual assaults increase in nighttime, against mostly the women and children living in the camp, that is, the refugees themselves.
Another rule was that we must never take any refugee's picture in which they could be identified, because if one of those get out, it might jeopardize their asylum process later, and even if we don't have the intention of publishing the photo or hand it over to anybody, it makes people nervous and anxious and they have a rough enough situation already. There have also been a number of journalists here and they generally don't write nice things. The camp is not very popular around here...
I met a German volunteer, Carola, who said that we should focus more on the decisions that our leaders make, bring people's attention to them and thereby try to change them. So I told her how I had sent an e-mail to every single one of our green party MPs, after they had voted through the decision to almost completely close the door to refugees (with the support of the most right wing party Moderaterna and the racist party Sverigedemokraterna and nobody else) asking them how they could stay in a government that did that. How they could claim that it was better to stay and have an influence, after this. I wrote:
"WHAT then, are you going to do, in those two years remaining of the current period, that will have such an enormous impact that it balances up for what you just did?!"
She said:
"I guess nobody answered?"
But oh no, many answered. They answered things like accommodation, trains and green fuels... They just haven't realized that they made history with the decision of closing the borders. (At this point, several other international volunteers around us agreed and said that they had believed Sweden would be the final outpost, those who would never give up on humanism, the living example that an other way is possible that they always have been... and that when Sweden also failed, that's when they lost hope.) You can't make history with green fuels today. 20 years ago, yes, but not today. The same goes for accommodation and trains...
And anyway, who cares! Who cares if there is accommodation and trains! Who cares if the planet survives! What's the point of even being alive, of having societies with people and activities in them...... if this is what we do to people.
I met another volunteer who said:
"They're waisting a good 10 years of their lives, trying to find a home in countries that don't want them"
Mattias told me that he had met a person in the Jungle who was fluent in Swedish. You see, he had lived in Sweden for 9 years, before finally having received his final denial of his asylum application, after appeals, and been deported back to Afghanistan. Now he was in the Jungle to try and get into the UK instead, to live there illegally. No more asylum processes for him!
Another person that Mattias met had lived illegally in London for 6 years, working as a taxi driver, until one day he was caught and deported. Now he was back in the Jungle...
A 14 year old boy died on the highway the other day, run over by a truck, while trying to sneak onboard a truck to England. The driver took off. Maybe they never even noticed having hit anything. Maybe... no, I won't write that. The boy who died had a brother and two uncles in England, thus having the legal right to come and live there. He had started the legal process to do so, but after having heard how very long time that takes, he decided to still try and get there on his own. He was 14! He was marked by war and violence! He needed to be with his family, in a safe environment, to be able to heal and become a whole human being! Now he will be united with his family only in heaven...
How can we be this wasteful with human lives.
And how can we talk about green fuels, while this purely human made, politically constructed catastrophe is still going on?
*The Jungle = The informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live in tents and home made shelters, many after having tried to go to the UK but failed
It was a small adventure just to get here. The train from Brussels was severely delayed, so I missed the last connecting train in Lille. Then the train company treated me to hotel with breakfast! It took them over one hour to set it up, and I was really tired and wanted to sleep, so that was a bit frustrating, but when I finally got my room, it was quite nice.
Because of this, I reached the Jungle the next day at 11:30, in the middle of the work day. The coordinator told me to go to the Jungle by bus, which I was just fine with, and she gave me an address. But nobody knew the address. On the other hand, everybody knew "The Jungle" ("Le Jungle")... although somehow it was as if the mood changed when I said it. And then it seems as if the driver intentionally let me off at the wrong stop! At least it was very far from the Jungle... Now one of the volunteers tried to send a car to pick me after all, but since I was no longer at the train station, they didn't find me. So I asked for directions and started walking instead. A guy I asked said it would be around 3 km maybe, and now that I check with the map, I can see that he came rather close with his estimation! (Almost 4 km) (I can also see that there are indeed bus stops much closer to the Jungle) But after having walked for a while, I asked a group of people again, to be on the safe side. One of the men, who was looking kind of rough-neck, hesitated a bit and then said in perfect working class English, to his mates in the car that he was standing by:
"What do you say, we take her there first and go get gas after?"
It turned out that they were English, who were there to make a documentary in the Jungle, and for the occasion had brought a tandem bike, as a means to make contact with people. They decided that they had time to take me, and one of them asked, kind of as a joke, if I preferred the car or the bike. But I definitely wanted to go on the bike! And so I through my bags, except my handbag and of course my money pouch underneath my clothes, into the trunk, and hopped up behind the Sudanese guy on the tandem bike. My first tandem ride! That I've always been so curious of, when I've seen one go by! On the rod, there was a camera attached, filming my feet. It was great fun!
We reached the Jungle, but the car had not arrived yet. Was I worried? Actually hardly at all! I had already found my kind, and recognized them. They wouldn't steal my bags from me. And sure enough, a few minutes later they showed up. They had just gotten a bit lost on the way.
And then, two Utopia volunteers came and escorted me into the Jungle, and so I had reached! :)
On the first day, I was picking trash in the Jungle. I handed over the two rolls of black garbage bags that I had bought in Brussels, and my young team leader Theo got really happy and cried out:
"Oh, super!" (in French)
One could have believed he had received a finer gift!
There were a few trash pits and trash hides, and there were a few cups and stuff lying around along the paths, but there were also a number of drums with trash bags in, or just a bag tied to a tent line or so, that were full of trash and that we took and exchanged for new bags. We were invited for tea at a make-shift tea house between the tents. We were strictly instructed never to be alone in the Jungle, and never to touch some blue cubes or little sachets with something blue in them, since that was rat poison and very dangerous. Often you would find blue cubes or sachets in the bottom of a trash pile... Where humans see trash, they throw more trash! A flock behavior, for the benefit of the flock. Unless there are bins, and people who pick trash.
*The Jungle = the informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live, most after having failed to go to the UK
Still feeling light and happy at heart. I'm surrounded by a warm, soft and loving bunch of friends and soul mates... It is wonderful.
I met a German yesterday, a bit older than most people here, 28 years, with dreads, who said that in a way she thinks that we who are here are passive. We try and clean up the rubble of what our governments destroy, but we should try and stop them from destroying it in the first place! But I said that I believed many here have done what I have: Tried to influence our governments and populations, but beaten ourselves bloody against the wall, given up and said to ourselves:
"Ok, enough of this. Now I'll just be cleaning up the rubble instead..."
On the other hand, we'll never give up. Because we can't, not until we give up our breath. And coming here, to this massive trail of rubble, that we all know exists but that we otherwise never see, except from a distance, and start cleaning up in the outskirts of it, is a way of gaining energy to keep fighting again afterwards. Because all who are here feel the same way! We may have different thoughts and opinions about stuff, but we feel the same way.
This is the real life. At home it's just pretending. You can go on living and fighting in the pretended life for a while, so long as you remember that there is a reality out there, outside of this bubble! And that that's what you're fighting for.
Traveling is easy, so easy... Everything sorts itself out! It's fun too. You become alive... If I had to do it on horse back, I would still travel around the world.
But I don't, of course, I fly with Ryanair. There are no stables with the apartment I rent, just a parking lot. There are no rest stops for horses along the way, with fodder and water troughs, only gas stations. And no sailing ships to cross the oceans with... Hardly even ferries anymore... There are only airplanes. So I go by airplane. And ruin the planet. But look selfishly forwards to once again living the ancient human dream of being carried by the air, way above the clouds...
Perhaps it's deranged to be feeling this light and happy, when traveling to the deep despair in an illegal refugee camp... but I do. I do.
In the morning after the event, I found two messages on Hangouts, saying:
"If you're reading this, don't look at international news.
You won't go to sleep
Terrorists in Paris. Craziness."
My honest first reaction was:
'Tsss, as if that would have kept me up! Ok, so I have a lot of world angst, and I've been crying many times over the HIV epidemic in Africa and the many orphans it leaves behind and things like that, but this! I mean, I can't stay awake every time there is a terrorist attack some place in the world! They happen so often these days; then I would NEVER sleep! And I'm not French, even though I understand that to a US person, the difference may seem subtle... ;)'
(I'm Swedish)
I even posted something totally non terror in France related on facebook that day, which I realized later would have seemed terribly out of place to other people reading it... They would have been like: 'What?? What does that have to do with anything!...'. Well, nothing! I just thought it was a good quote from a song that had been on my mind for a while, and I had not yet realized what kind of a mood everybody was in!...
During the day I started thinking that 'Oh no, this terrorism will probably mean more persecution of innocent Muslims... More bullying of Muslim children in schools...'. And that thought did bother me a bit, but I was still holding it from me, and sort of hoping that the terrorists in this case wouldn't be Muslim.
It wasn't until I watched the news that evening that I realized what an apparently big deal this was to everybody!... I went on facebook again, and these French flag colored profile pictures started turning up everywhere! And everybody was writing thoughts about terrorism! And after the news, there was a program where they usually discuss events of Sweden and the world in more detail, and of course, that was also about the Paris terror attacks this evening, although it had been scheduled to be about the ongoing refugee catastrophe...
I felt myself getting more and more disgusted. What, why do you all care all of a sudden?! I've been posting things about how refugees drown in the Mediterranean, how death is the only way out of Guantanamo bay prison, how half of all inhabitants in the Gaza strip are now children because none is left to grow old, and you haven't given a damn! I've been blogging about how you make suffering continue all over the world by sponsoring it with your money every time you shop, but you don't react! You still buy clothes made by child labor in appalling conditions, when you could just switch to fair trade, and contribute to a positive development instead! But you don't care enough!...
Now, all of a sudden, I'm the one who comes out as emotionally cold... It's very weird.
A bit later I was voice chatting with the same person who sent me the above messages, and I said:
"I don't know how stupid I must be, but I honestly never thought it would be this big!..."
"Yeah, me neither! I never thought they would have that capacity! In FRANCE!"
NO!!.... That's not what I meant!!.......... I meant the reaction!
Maybe it is because my dad died when I was 13 or something. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that I've spent around a year living and working in Kenya, where they have metal bars for every window. And they can't imagine not having that, because obviously, people would just go in! A glass window doesn't stop anybody! It wasn't until my own dad died that I really, fully realized that people could die, and that everybody would one day. Maybe the combination of this and the Kenyan windows has made me realize, what others haven't: That I am kept safe every day, only because people CHOOSE not to kill me. They can if they want, but every day they make this choice! They would get caught, hopefully... At least there is a substantial risk of that, but what if that doesn't mean anything to them? What if they are prepared to blow themselves up, so long as they get to blow me up too? Then there is nothing to protect me. There can't be. The only thing that can protect me from being killed that way is that nobody hates me, or my group, so much that they find it worth blowing themselves up just to get to me!...
So I'll refer something that I commented on one of the many facebook posts on terrorism that I read that day:
'I think we should at least TRY not committing any assaults first. If after that, we still have terror attacks committed to us, by mentally sane people, then we can start thinking of a different strategy.'
After all, France has for many years grown to be a more and more openly racist and xenophobic country. They have banned the use of burqa. They have made themselves infamous for evicting Romani settlements. Their police is allowed to ID anybody at any time for no reason, which by many sources is used to systematically harass people of African appearance, so that, for as long as those people choose to still live in France, they will know that they are not wanted. They don't belong. In 2005 they had enormous youth riots, started by the death of two young immigrant boys getting killed when running from the police into a power plant, but escalated by the police throwing a tear gas canister into a Muslim praying hall for no reason. Other than racism. They don't let in refugees from across the Mediterranean. Oh, and of course, let's not forget the bit that the terrorists themselves stated as their reason: They've been bombing their country! (Part of the statement: "as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets")
So again, let us really try to do things right first. Because quite frankly, we are not, at the moment. France wasn't, and even Sweden isn't. Even in Sweden, Africans, Muslims and other minorities have a rough time. Our own original population the Samish still complain about racism. This our enormous reaction to the terrorism in Paris, less than two days after an almost as big terror attack in Beirut, which is almost as close from here as Paris, passed without a raised eye-brow, is yet another evidence of our racism. And racism creates enemies. It takes a huge motivator to get a person to want to blow themselves up! But racism is also a huge burden to carry, for those subjected to it... And so long as we are only able to see the suffering of ourselves and our own, but disregard the suffering of those on the other side, there will be no end to wars and terrorism. But if we do things right from our end... who knows?
So before you say anything more about how bad terrorism is: Take a look at yourself, and your country! Whatever your country does, you are responsible for it, you know.
Solidarity that has limits is not solidarity. It's just some kind of expanded selfishness.
This is how it went, as far as I now to the best of my ability remember it.
Almost 20 years ago I struggled to awaken the awareness of the public to the increased greenhouse effect. This was in the days when it was totally weirdo style to believe in such a risk! It was only the Green Party who did, and not even all among them. By the way, they were around 4% of the Swedish population, and I wasn't even a member yet. I had only seen an episode of "World of Science" (Swedish factual TV show) talking about this.
With time, the awareness about the greenhouse effect slowly grew, and in the Green Party and other environmental organisations it became an established fact.
Then I went to Chalmers University of Technology to study, and among other things I learned, on a molecular level, how the greenhouse effect works. In a computer lab for example, I learned that 95% of the greenhouse effect comes from water vapor, which regulates itself in the atmosphere. It surprised me to some extent that I had never heard this before.
Then in one course, they invited a climate skeptic, who gave a guest lecture he called:
"Climate change - Science, politics or religion?"
On top of showing how the "climate movement" actually resembled religion in a number of ways (the lurking doom's day, repent from sin and and you shall be saved, strong, charismatic leaders,...) he gave a few, it seemed to me, pretty strong arguments as to why the climate hysteria was exaggerated, and to how it was in fact technically impossible to foresee how the climate would change, regardless of what we did, or didn't do. When asked by a person in the audience what he thought we should spend our efforts on, he said that we should prepare ourselves for climate changes in either directions, since the only thing we could be sure of was that climate would always keep changing.
We were supposed to hand in some kind of summary of the lecture of one page, and so I handed in a page with what I thought were the strongest arguments for the climate hysteria being exaggerated. I got a vague and somewhat funny response from the examiner... She said, roughly, that it didn't at all need to be that way, and that many of my classmates were much more critical. (Which is a silly thing to say... To accept a notion that over-throws everything you've until now believed in and fought for, hardly makes you uncritical! It makes you open-minded and very self-critical.) I got interested and asked her to send me these other students' papers so that I could read them. Then she said that she couldn't give out other students' work without their permission. So I asked her to please ask their permission. (Why wouldn't they give it? Wouldn't most of us only be happy if our work could be of interest to anybody, other than the teacher?) But she replied that I could ask them myself instead. But the course was over so I wouldn't see them again, and I didn't know their names and much less their e-mail addresses, nor did I know who had written about this particular topic! So I asked her if I could at least have their e-mail addresses then, so that I could ask them, but I didn't get them. Weird behavior!! ...Wasn't it?
Then in 2006 Al Gore's movie came, and suddenly the whole world turned around! This could have been happy days for me, when I finally obtained redress for all my thankless work... if only I hadn't just started turning around in the opposite direction. Figures!
Quite soon I was made aware that Al Gore used a gigantic presentation scam in his movie, which I recount here. (In short he talks as if the temperature curve follows the carbon dioxide level curve, when in fact it is the other way around.) And you know, when somebody makes such a huge mistake, whether intentionally or unintentionally, it becomes hard to trust anything of what that person says.
I now started pressuring all my tutors for an answer about how it really was with this climate change thing. Most of them said it wasn't their field. One of the tutors in the course where we handled the greenhouse effect said: "Well, it's hard to imagine what else could be causing it!", which is about the same answer as believers in God gives to the origin of life... My master thesis examiner, Göran Petersson, turned out to be a convinced skeptic.
Let me give you some background to Göran Petersson. He is now way above retirement age, but carries on working at Chalmers in what seems to be an unimpeded pace. He is a committed environment advocate! He is one of the few among my tutors who was consequently using his findings and expertise to try and influence the social development through debate articles, TV appearances etc. He rounded off his course plans by writing that if also it wouldn't go so well on the exam, we shouldn't let this bring us down. A life-long commitment could often be as useful to the environment, if not more, than the ability to cram large amounts of facts in a short time!... Meaning he assumed we were there in his course (of which at least one was compulsory) to save the environment, rather than to get good grades or a fine job! He encouraged students to do political activism in the university, and complained that there was far too little of that, these days.
He was also one of those who killed the acidification hype. You see, a few decades before the climate beat, the acidification beat swept across Sweden. All environmental problems could then be blamed on acidification, which was very convenient since most of the acidification came from down the continent and the UK, and so we didn't have to change anything ourselves. Göran Petersson and his colleague Olle Ramnäs then walked in another direction and managed to show that the forest death that we observed was, to the largest part, caused by tropospheric ozone, from our own domestic traffic.
If Göran Petersson was now a convinced climate skeptic, this was an opinion of grave significance to me.
I went to some sort of panel debate at Chalmers... Some 6 or 7 researchers held a short presentation each about their work concerning the climate change. One of them was from the IPCC. All the speakers agreed in large about the climate threat, if they also had slightly different angles and figures. The audience, which consisted mostly of employees and students at Chalmers, was more skeptical. Several of them brought up the issue of Al Gore's turned around causality argument with temperature and carbon dioxide, and the man from IPCC said (revealing some impatience) that he couldn't understand what difference it made, since we knew that at least there was a causality relation in the direction that Al Gore said as well!... Which I found provokingly ignorant! On the whole, he was the one of them who made the most careless and unscientific impression. But this may have been because he was not a researcher himself... but only summarized research? This round of presentations anyway obviously didn't convince the audience, and it didn't convince me.
Later, my supervisor in my master project, secondary school teacher and biogas expert Björn Martén, said that it probably was the nuclear power lobby that was behind the climate hype... Because the only thing that could quickly replace our present consumption of fossil fuels, without forcing us to cut down on our energy usage and thus our lifestyle, was nuclear power! My subsequent studies in the renewable energy field has confirmed this.
Eight years have passed since this time. Still nothing has managed to really convince me! Ok, so I haven't been actively looking into it either, but still. Then, a few weeks back, I started discussing climate with an online friend on Skype. He said there had been a complete scientific consensus in this since 1992, and that since then it had only been an issue of the uneducated very slowly getting it. But the highly educated skepticism that I had experienced around me at Chalmers was, as you can see, one and a half decade later...
I told my Skype buddy about Göran Petersson, and he said he was interested in reading some of what he had published in the field. So I contacted Göran again (something I've done many times over the years, for various reasons), and he sent me this (translated by me):
---
Here is my critical review of carbon dioxide in the parliament (with links to some earlier reports):
I forwarded it to my Skype buddy but I haven't heard from him again. When I clicked into climate4you myself, one of the first links I found was "The BIG picture". There I found, among other things, these pictures:
Global temperature over 420'000 years. The dotted line is the modern temperature. What's inside the little read box is shown in more detail in the graph below. From: climate4you.com
Top graph: Global temperature 10'000 years back, up until 1850.
Bottom graph: Carbon dioxide rate 10'000 years back, up until 1777.
Since the data above comes from ice cores, the last few hundred years are not there. In the caption of the original graph you can read that the carbon dioxide levels have since then risen to around 395 ppm (which is way off the chart) and that temperature has risen to about the same levels as they were in the medieval warm period.
From: climate4you.com
Note that the normal state of the earth is ice age, with around 7 degrees lower temperatures than now.
Note how well the temperature increase of the latest 100 years, up to medieval temperatures, blends in with the temperature fluctuations of all times, and doesn't look at all special.
Note how the climate has been unusually stable for unusually long in the last 10'000 years, but how it has still fluctuated more in this time than what we've seen in the last 100 years. In the Minoan warm period, and twice before that in this 10'000 year period, it was 0.75 degrees warmer than now, and 8'000 years ago the temperature rose 2 degrees, just as fast as it is rising today.
Note, of course, how the carbon dioxide curve, in this shorter time perspective than that of Al Gore, doesn't at all follow the temperature curve...! It seems highly uncertain to claim that that last 100 year temperature increase must be caused by the increase in carbon dioxide rate... I mean, what were all the earlier fluctuations caused by?
Note how you can clearly see that even in the year 1850, where the ice core data ends, the temperature had already started rising!... Isn't that funny though? The industrial revolution had barely even started in 1850, so the temperature increase began BEFORE the industrial revolution!... In fact, even the IPCC says that up until 1915 the concentration of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and other green house gases could hardly have had any effect at all. That's more than 100 years after the temperature started going upwards.
In reports and presentation materials, the IPCC, without exception, make all their graphs about the last 100 years (which are not seen above). To show these last 100 years, without putting them into the above perspective, seems to me like severe misrepresentation of data.
I went to a Green Party congress a few weeks ago. Greenpeace was there! They were lobbying for us to support a motion to use our governmental energy company to phase out brown coal mining in Germany (because a Swedish government owned company owns some brown coal assets there) which I supported. I took the opportunity to discuss the above images with some of them. To my grief they were all totally confused, and said that this was not consistent with what they had previously seen. Which could be explained by them previously only having seen Al Gore's temperature and carbon dioxide curves over 650'000 years, and IPCC's many graphs concerning only the last 100 years. I asked the activists if they knew how large a part of the total greenhouse effect is caused by water, but they had lots of trouble even understanding the question, and when they did they had no clue of the answer. I also spoke to another Green Party member who said that he had heard that the temperature was higher now than in millions of years before, which you can see is absolutely not the case!!... Even if the temperature should rise the predicted 3 degrees in total, it would make it higher than in the last 10'000 years, true, but not higher than in the last 420'000 years. Should it go up 5 degrees it would be. Then maybe it would be higher than in millions of years. But that is still only a hypothetical scenario!
The Greenpeace activists said over and over that it was only some percent of all researchers who opposed the consensus notion (and that Göran Petersson must be in this percent). They said that if you checked who financed these few percent it was most often the oil industry (which is not true about Göran). One of them tipped me off to check out what Hans Rosling has to say in the matter, which of course I immediately did as soon as I got home, because Hans Rosling is a big idol of mine. The things he has taught me! This was the best of him I could find in this topic:
19 min
And OH MY DISAPPOINTMENT when he too makes a logical somersault, almost as big as Al Gore's!!... So he says that he's going to talk about the climate over 300 years, 100 years back and 200 years forwards. He shows a graph from the IPCC report, showing how the sea levels have risen in the last 100 years, according to various sources with strong agreement, and says (here it comes):
"So as I read it: Today the question 'Does human change climate - yes or now?', that's over. That is set. The big question nowadays is 'How much will it change?'" (at time-stamp 5:21 in the movie above. Watch from 3:34 for background.)
What??!! But that's not at all what the graph is showing!! The graph only shows that the climate is changing, not that it is the humans who are making it change! Maybe he is not basing the conclusion on the graph but on something else entirely, but on what then, and if so, why does he say "as I read it"? Clearly the most likely interpretation at hand to the listener must be that he bases the conclusion on the graph he is showing and talking about, and if so the conclusion is all wrong! Because as we have seen, climate has always been changing, and the last 100 years are not at all unusual.
The rest of the video presents, in itself interesting, statistics about energy consumption distributed over different sources of energy and over different income groups in the world, but this I already knew.
Then I found this article in Wall Street Journal, talking about the 97% myth. It says that sure, scientists are in agreement that the climate is getting warmer, and that humans have an influence on the climate, but that no 97% of them think that humans are causing the larger part of the warming, or that the situation is alarming! Now of course the Wall Street Journal doesn't feel like the most reliable source in the world, but it does link to other sources, and among them a petition with 31'000 signatures by scientists, having signed a statement that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere". 31'000! That's quite a lot... And scientists who don't even like to sign petitions...
Here is a survey, found via the above article, which clearly shows that the degree of agreement is far below 97%. More precisely, the scientists were very sure that we have a global warming going on, but far less sure that humans cause the larger part of it.
The scientists were asked to answer on a scale of 1-7 (where 1 is the lowest and 7 the highest) how sure they are of, in the top image, that the climate is changing, and in the bottom image, that humans are causing the largest part of the change. On the question of whether the climate is at all changing, 67% have answered with a 7, and 87% have answered with either a 7 or a 6. On the question of whether it is humans causing it only 35% answered with a 7, and 67% with either a 7 or a 6. The mean value of the answers of the bottom question is 5.7, and no less than 16% actually answered 4 or less, where 4 thus is the middle option. Ok, so they are clearly leaning towards the affirming side, but it is still far less than a 97% consensus!... At least consensus with certainty... Further, this is just a survey, so the scientists were asked to make a subjective guess about the answer to the questions, not to give an answer based on their own research. And funnily enough, they gauge the technical abilities to predict the climate far lower than their certainty that humans cause the larger part of the climate change...
But ok. Maybe it is as the majority of the scientists after all are guessing. And maybe the IPCC knows something that I don't, which shows with 95% certainty that the temperature will rise with minimum 3 and maximum 5 degrees because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. This could be the case! But let me ask you something: If this is the case, why is it so very hard to find the evidence of this? Why is it super easy to find graphs showing that the temperature has increased in the last 100 years (as if anybody doubted this), but quite impossible to find the data that they build their 3-5 degrees increase estimate on? And why are there such severe fallacies and logical somersaults among some of the primary advocates of the idea? And why are so many of the most enthusiastic advocates of radical climate politics totally clueless about basic facts concerning climate and carbon dioxide? Why do they harbor so many misconceptions, like that it's warmer now than in millions of years, or that water is an insignificant greenhouse gas? And why is the press saying that 97% of scientists are sure of an opinion that they really aren't sure of?...
This reminds me of the time just after the Swedish minister of foreign affairs, Anna Lind, was murdered. Almost immediately a person was arrested, and I found it odd that everywhere in the press and on TV he was referred to as "the murderer of Anna Lind", despite the police stating that he was "suspected with reason" (rough translation by me) which according to the same press and TV channels was a low degree of suspicion. How could everybody be so sure, when even the police, who were the only ones who had actually investigated it, were not? And the public was soon equally sure. Everybody talked about "the murderer of Anna Lind", and how relieving it was that he had been caught. I remember talking on the phone one evening with a law student friend of mine, and he also said this:
"They caught Anna Lind's murderer now at least, that's a relief". I replied after some hesitation:
"Yeah, I'm also starting to accept this now... Up until now I have been feeling that 'Wait until the trial is over, he is only suspected with reason yet', but I'm also starting to believe now that it is actually him..."
It was only a day or two after this conversation that this person was released, and a totally different person was arrested, as "suspected with probable reason" (another translation by me), which is much stronger, and later was also convicted!... If you wish to be conspiracy-theoretical you might suspect that this first person, who received some damage compensation for his trouble, had been held in arrest just to keep the population calm and happy while they were looking for the real murderer!
Well, it feels the same way now. Everybody is convinced of what is about to happen, but nobody can present any evidence for it. And I don't want to fall for it again, and start believing it me too, without evidence! So please, is there anybody who has evidence? NOT showing that the temperature has risen over the last 100 years, I already know this, but that it is somewhat certain that it will continue to rise with a total of 3-5 degrees due to anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases! If so, please show them to me, I ask.
