Hopeless Optimism (by Billy Collins)

When it comes to preserving the climate we have come to know and love, this blog has documented in exhausting detail over the last five years reasons not to be optimistic. This documentation comes out of a desire to do the right thing for the planet that has given us life, not — of course — out of a desire to make anyone feel bad, although many of my readers nonetheless hold me accountable for the latter. (No matter how many interesting and/or beautiful other thoughts and visuals I may try to post.)

Such as life in the 21st century. I'm not going to whine about it; I'm very happy to be alive and posting, here and now. But it's worth remembering that past times had their own bitternesses, too many to count, and to remember how folks in the past dealt with that. A truly excellent example comes from the Big Think site via the marvelously light-footed poet Billy Collins, who recounts his life philosophy, which he describes as "hopeless optimism," and uses a Turkish proverb to explain. Here's Billy:

http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/1fcnipp9hz

And for those, like me, who weary of video, here's the proverb on which Collins bases his philosophy:

Every time the ax goes into the forest, all the trees think: At least the handle is one of us.

Geo-Engineering the Climate: Are We Just Not Cynical Enough?

The Virginia Quarterly Review, arguably the best literary journal in the country, has the nerve this quarter to take on an urgent issue, and dispatches Pat Joseph to look at geo-engineering the climate.

He avoids stating his conclusion, but does a masterful job of laying out the facts. See here:

The Obama administration will no doubt reengage in diplomatic
efforts, but the growing economic crisis, combined with falling oil and
coal prices, does not bode well for the negotiations at this year’s
climate summit in Copenhagen. Furthermore, diplomacy is only part of
the story. Fundamentally, global warming is an energy problem, and
solving it will require nothing less than a complete and radical
transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure, something most
energy experts believe will take decades, if it happens at all.

As [Nobel Prize winner and geo-engineering advocate] Paul Crutzen stressed in his essay, “The very best would be if
emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the
stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place.
Currently, this looks like a pious wish.”

But what's really disturbing, according to Joseph and Stanford physicist Ken Caldeira, is the possibility that we will do nothing at all. As Caldeira says:

I think the most likely thing is we don’t do anything. We don’t reduce emissions, and we don’t do geoengineering.

So we guarantee extinction for a million or more other species on the planet, while doing nothing for our good, either. Caldeira and Joseph can only laugh at the absurdity of the situation, in which our species, with all its vast mental powers, is as hopelessly frozen as Buridan's Ass, the mythical dim-bulb donkey placed halfway between two bins of food, and starves to death, unable to choose either.

Wish I could tell them that they're all wrong, that humans are much better than that…but for now, here's a thoughtful photo of the Maldives, threatened by sea level rise, courtesy of m o d e. 

Maldivesdrowning

Translating the G20 “Triumph”

The G-20 meeting in London was widely considered a triumph for Barack Obama and the West. (Even Paul Krugman said so.) The Guardian's George Monbiot sees it differently, He writes:

Here is the text of the G20 communique, in compressed form.

"We,
the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don't
possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set
the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have
already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the
banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of
fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth's living systems. Now we're
going to spend another $1.1 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for
their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the
World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the
greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in
modern times.

Oh – and we nearly forgot. We must do something
about the environment. We don't have any definite plans as yet, but
we'll think of something in due course."

Perhaps the collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antartica will remind the world of what is at stake — nothing less than the planet we know (and presumably love) today.

Oh, right. I'm dreaming. Never mind.

Wilkins1_276

George Will is an Irresponsible Jerk

Okay, that's putting it bluntly, and perhaps on matters besides global warming, Will is a trustworthy friend, a good father, faithful husband, a and so on and so forth. On all that, I have no idea.

But when it comes to climate change, Will is the bow-tied personification of another George — Bush. He's incurious (and has no interest in actually verifying his claims). He's knee-jerk (he refuses to listen to anyone with whom he might not agree). And he's contemptuous.

It's a sad display for a man once considered "responsible."  That is, as as another George — Orwell — would say, Will was once thought to be an opinion-leader who knew that ideas have consequences, and that bad ideas can lead to bad outcomes.

Does this sound hyperbolic?

It's really not. In a column a few weeks back, Will claimed that "global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level." This cherry-picked the data, by ignoring the huge fact that Arctic ice is declining rapidly, and Antarctic ice is not. But it also ignored the alarm about the decline in Arctic Ice that is being expressed by scientists around the world, including (most recently) researchers for the US Geological Survey. They have been charged with assessing the future of the polar bear, and they took a hard look at what is happening to Arctic ice vs. what the climate models project.

Their conclusion? Arctic Ice is declining faster than any of the models foresaw. Take a look:

Arctic Sea Ice Decline Exceeds Projections

It's this sort of fact that may have led Tom Toles — who like Will also works for the Washington Post syndicate, and has also won a Pulitzer Prize — to single him out in a panel this weekend. Striking to see Toles get that pointed.

Draw your own conclusions, as they say.

TolesonWill

Pessimism Lite: It’s the New Optimism!

Ted Rall has really been on a roll lately. I can't prove this to you in his space, since his site has come up with a devious ploy to make his editorial cartoons difficult to reproduce. As a blogger who tries conscientiously (I think) to give credit where credit is due, and makes no money blogging, I think this is kind of dumb, and kind of sad, and I wonder if Rall (no dummie) is really on board with the idea.

But I can direct you to his latest, which has a global warming pay-off…that's surprisingly funny. Look!

Climate: What We Need is a Rhetoric of Salvation

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University who specializes in studying social activism and the environmental movement in particular, wrote a response to a post on Andy Revkin's Dot Earth site this past Sunday that has been widely admired. It's critical of the language climate preservationists use to describe the crisis, and points out a contrast to the visionary speech-making of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Is that a fair comparison? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure "a rhetoric of salvation" is even possible with climate, given what the science is telling us about the warming in the pipeline. But is it true that climate preservationists have failed to inspire the public? With the possible exception of Al Gore — yes.

So it's worth thinking over what Brulle had to say. Take it away, Robert…

It seems to me that a discussion of tipping points is useful in terms
of discussing the science of nonlinear processes. But this is hardly
the type of language that will increase issue saliency in the public.
When you set a specific goal, or say if we go over some threshold the
risk will increase dramatically, you are then linking action to a
specific scientific claim that can be disputed. Since we aren’t yet
past the tipping points, or if we are past them, the evidence has not
emerged unambiguously from the background variance, it is difficult to
maintain the truth of dire predictions in the future.

Yet the environmental movement uses these thresholds as a rallying cry. Bill McKibben’s organization http://350.org
sets a specific ppm concentration as its goal and as its namesake. I am
in no position to dispute the validity of this specific CO2
concentration. But I see this type of language as lacking rhetorical
resonance with the public.

Social movement research over the
past 40 years has shown that an effective social movement will be based
on a rhetoric of salvation. It contains an analysis of how we entered
into our current problematic situation, and how evil it is. It then
projects how we can work to move ourselves out of this state and toward
a resolution of the current problems and into a beneficial situation.
Thus an effective rhetoric critiques the current situation and offers a
Utopian vision of where the society needs to go. It is this combination
of threats and opportunities, – nightmares combined with dreams – that
fuel social movement mobilization and social change.

The civil
rights movement provides an excellent example. In his “I Have a Dream”
speech, Martin Luther King combined both the nightmare of racial
injustice with the utopian dream of a just society into a seamless
narrative. This speech became an icon for the movement, defining a
sense of injustice (threat) and opportunities for effective action
(hope).

The use of specific empirical targets (350 ppm, or 2
degrees) ignores this rhetorical requirement. Instead we are presented
with a technocratic language that is not at all immediately apparent
what is being advocated. Additionally, it is a rhetoric without utopia,
but rather constraints. There is no positive vision of a future in
which we can realistically deal with global warming and have a positive
outcome. The chants of “green jobs” are hardly the type of rhetoric
that will motivate strong social movements. Think of how ridiculous it
would have been if Martin Luther King Jr. had stood up with graphs
about racial discrimination and set some sort of empirical goal.
Instead, he appealed to the sense of justice in the face of injustice,
and projected a vision of an alternative social order that motivated
scores of people to put their bodies and lives on the line to achieve
this goal.

The environmental movement used to understand and
utilize this type of language. The original Wilderness Act called for
the creation of places “where the Earth ant its community of life are
untrammeled by man.” The Clean Water Act set the goal of cleaning up
the waters so that we could fish and swim in our rivers. These are
easily visualized goals, and define a Utopian vision of a better life.

The
reliance on technocratic language, and the absence of a Utopian vision
of a sustainable social order, greatly inhibit the salience of global
warming issues in the general public.

RobertBrulle

Climate Change: A Back-Burner Issue

According to Toles, maybe not:

Earthonthebackburner

Much as I dislike giving credit to a fake enviro like Thomas Friedman for writing about the environment, his column yesterday effectively made some important points no other nationally syndicated columnist has dared put forth, at least that I know of. The column is called Mother Nature's Dow:

Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how she’s
feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is
how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning —
in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster
and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few
years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it,
too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.

Consider just two recent articles:

The
Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, that “the pace of global warming is
likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial
greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and
higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms
in global ecosystems, scientists said. ‘We are basically looking now at
a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in
climate model simulations,’ Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie
Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University,
said.”

The physicist and climate expert Joe Romm recently noted on his blog, climateprogress.org,
that in January, M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of
Global Change quietly updated its Integrated Global System Model that
tracks and predicts climate change from 1861 to 2100. Its revised
projection indicates that if we stick with business as usual, in terms
of carbon-dioxide emissions, average surface temperatures on Earth by
2100 will hit levels far beyond anything humans have ever experienced.

“In
our more recent global model simulations,” explained M.I.T., “the ocean
heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of
carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises
are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century
are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. Not
one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each
separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures.
[But,] rather than interacting additively, these different effects
appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the
contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the
chance of much higher temperatures.”

Mike, my faithful reader, I know Friedman is a jet-setter with a carbon footprint probably about the size of New Jersey, and he's come to this subject having blown his credibility on Iraq, the economy, and countless less important topics. But still — this time he's right.

How Do You Save A River? Easy. Make a Wetland…

The Environment Agency of the UK, after looking at climate models that predict a shocking 50-80% drop in river flows from the hard-rock west of England and Wales by 2050, are calling for drastic measures to maintain flows and species habitats. To wit (from the Telegraph):

River flows across the country will be cut in half, while the west of the
country could lose up to 80 per cent of their river water.

The agency is to urge water companies to build new treatment plants to purify
fresh water from the sea and to clean effluent waste water to ensure there
are reliable sources of drinking water in the future.

Natural habitats will also be threatened by the lack of water and in some
cases vulnerable species will need to be moved in ambitious relocation
programmes to ensure their survival.

The one possible bit of good news I can see here is the idea of the Agency specifically setting out to create wetlands in the upper reaches, both to absorb flooding during storm events (expected to be heavier, due to the increased intensity of the hydrological cycle) and to maintain flows during dry times. Also interesting is the idea of relocating endangered species…though surely that won't be easy. 

The strategy also proposes creating large areas of upland wetlands, which have
in the past been drained for farming and industry, to help slow the progress
of rain run-off and act as natural storage areas that will also provide
valuable habitats.

While summers will be far drier than present, short extreme rainfall events
will become more common and river flows during the winter months will
increase, raising the risk of flooding unless run-off can be slowed down by
wetlands and peat bogs.

Story doesn't discuss how in the world one might relocate a salmon run…perhaps no one knows.

River-map_1374214f