Kit Stolz

Climate: It’s Not Just a Metaphor

Hope you can read my Climate: It's Not Just a Metaphor op-ed, published this Sunday in the Ventura County Star…here with links.

"Something a little strange has happened in our national conversation
about the economic crisis. Our economic experts frequently speak and
write of the fiscal climate as if it were the physical climate. By
chance or design, they are stealing the thunder of the scientists
warning us of an overheating planet.

Probably, these experts are not conscious of the distraction they’re
creating, but, nonetheless, this rhetorical thievery misleads. It helps
us overlook a threat to the planet and our lives far more dangerous
than an economic downturn.

In the most recent minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market
Committee, for example, can be found repeated references to the
difficulty of attaining “sustainable rates” of employment and output,
and of the dangers of “adverse feedback loops.” This is the phrase
climate scientists use to describe natural processes such as the
shrinking of the polar ice caps, a powerful amplifier for global
warming.

But it’s not just the government. A just-published book called “The
Lords of Finance” profiles the financial experts who “broke the world”
— again, as if the economy was the physical planet. And New York
University professor Nouriel Roubini, sometimes known as “Dr. Doom,”
wrote recently in the Washington Post of “a tipping point” to the
economic collapse, sounding an awful lot like Al Gore speaking of the
tipping points to a climate catastrophe.

The more we discuss the economic crisis in terms of the physical
world, the less we discuss the climate crisis itself, even though
restoring balance in the atmosphere will be far more difficult than
reviving the faltering economy. It’s an alarming irony. As we worry
about our melting savings and our vanishing jobs, we forget about
melting icecaps and vanishing species.

Opinion surveys say that most people believe that climate change is
under way, with the potential to threaten our way of life. Yet, a new
poll from the Pew Research Center shows that the public considers
global warming a matter of less urgency than issues such as moral
decline, immigration and lobbyists. It’s as if we simply cannot believe
that we, as a species, could change the atmosphere, even though all
around us we see evidence we can change the face of the Earth.

Venus Syndrome

In an effort to break through our complacency, our leading
scientific Cassandras are cranking up their rhetoric. Last month, James
Hansen, the outspoken physicist the Bush administration attempted to
muzzle in 2004, coined a new term — “The Venus Syndrome” — to describe
runaway global warming that leads to an evaporation of the oceans and
atmospheric temperatures in the hundreds of degrees, which is what
happened on Venus. Last month, James Lovelock, whose discovery of the
damaging effect of chlorofluorocarbons helped the world avoid a
disastrous expansion of the ozone hole, warned that this century we
will likely see the deaths of billions of people due to starvation.

Does that sound alarmist? A couple of years ago, Lovelock predicted
the Arctic could be ice-free by the summer of 2025, which, at the time,
was considered a far-fetched scenario. Now it’s beginning to look a bit
rosy.

The pessimists are projecting the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer by 2016.

Without minimizing the pain of the unemployed, economic history
tells us that, within a decade, the economy will recover, once again
producing more jobs and income. Both the Great Depression and Japan’s
recent liquidity crisis were but a flick of an eyelash in planetary
history.

Atmospheric history will play out differently. Last month, a new
study led by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, one of this nation’s
most distinguished scientists, showed that even if we were to stop
emitting carbon dioxide forever, starting today, the climate would not
stabilize for a thousand years. The change is now irreversible.

Worse, we are currently emitting greenhouse gases at a rate
comparable to what happened during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum, one of the fastest atmospheric changes in Earth history.
Scientists aren’t sure what caused the global warming of 6 degrees
centigrade tens of millions of years ago, but the leading suspect is
the release of methane deposits into the atmosphere.

Something to keep in mind

Ominously, warming permafrost in the Arctic is once again
threatening to release this natural gas by the gigaton, and create a
vastly different and less-habitable planet. Paleontologists tell us
that this temperature rise led to an “extinction event” for a vast
number of dominant species on the planet at the time.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you hear an economist
reference the current “climate.” Our economy will recover. Global
warming will not be so easily reversed, unfortunately, and the
potential for utter disaster is far greater."

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Our Children for the Apocalypse? A Panel Discussion

From The Onion, of course. Incredibly funny, unsurprisingly.

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf
Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

Rod Dreher: Rush Limbaugh is Crack for Conservatives

Fascinating to see America's biggest blowhard become the spokesman for the Republican Party. After hearing Limbaugh's speech to a national convention of conservatives this weekend, President Obama's right-hand man, Rahm Emmanuel, on Face the Nation, happily declared Limbaugh "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party." (No doubt he knows that Limbaugh is even less popular than George W. Bush among likely voters, according to a poll taken last fall.)

Limbaugh's rise to power has forced some real conservatives to draw the line. One of the best is Rod Dreher, who in this sharp post declares Limbaugh to be "crack" for conservatives. Dreher writes:

Take a look at this passage [from Limbaugh's speech], and please tell me what is conservative about it?:

Let
me tell you who we conservatives are [said Limbaugh]: We love people. [Applause] When
we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere,
when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see
Americans. We see human beings. We don't see groups. We don't see
victims. We don't see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we
see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the
average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not
see that person with contempt. We don't think that person doesn't have
what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants
to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous
taxes, regulations and too much government.

This is a comforting lie [writes Dreher]. It is Rousseau conservatism: the idea that
man is born innocent, but corrupted by society, or government. Remove
the chains of government, and man will return to his natural, good
state, which is one of limitless possibility. This denies two bedrock
truths of philosophical conservatism, which are that 1) human nature is
fallen, and 2) man must learn to live within limits. A conservatism
that is not founded on a conscious recognition of those two truths is a
false conservatism, and has a shaky foundation from which to criticize
liberal utopianism.

Funny thing is, Dreher's "conservatism" is probably closer to the stance of most environmentalists than is the limitless faith of liberalism of old…having seen what we have done to the planet, we know that our species cannot be trusted, even with our own home, and yes, we must learn to live within limits.

For conservatives, those limits tend to be sexual, not environmental…but the principle remains.

George Will Misleads on Global Warming Again, Slapped on Wrist

This Sunday George Will,who is supposedly a serious thinker and not just a right-wing partisan, wrote his second Sunday column in a row about global warming. Just as he had the Sunday before, based on a septic Daily Tech item, he claimed that a) there has been no global warming since l997-l998, and b) global sea ice levels are what they were back in l979.

He sniped at Andrew Revkin of The New York Times, who pointed out that Will was ignoring certain inconvenient facts, such as the difference between the Arctic and the Antarctic, and, most of all, that Will's claim about sea ice was in fact challenged by the very Climate Research Center he quoted.

But this time, after thousands of email complaints, Will was chided not just by reputable outsiders, but by his paper's own ombudsman, who said Will's claim "should have triggered a call for clarification."

Wow. That's gotta sting.

Yours truly critiqued the situation on Revkin's deservedly popular Dot Earth site. This turned out to be one time when my analysis was actually quite popular on the advanced graded-on-a-curve commenting system, so forgive me for quoting myself:

For those of us concerned about the health of the planet, the
controversy over Will's column has been a distracting frustration. It's
not just that Will adamantly doubles down on his wrongheadedness.
That's to be expected: he's been waving off the threat of climate
change for years.

Digging into the details of his cherry-picking
and distortions not only ignores the trend, as Andy said, but ignores
the alarm among scientists specializing in the cryosphere. At the
American Geophysical Union two months ago, for example, a panel of
genuine experts from around the world warned of the "Arctic
Amplification" of the global warming signal, with extremely alarming
consequences, such as the softening of the permafrost in the East
Siberian Arctic Shelf.

http://news.bbc.co.uk…

Here's how the BBC opened the story on this briefing:

"Scientists say they now have unambiguous evidence that the warming in the Arctic is accelerating."

Why
is that simple statement from the best peer-reviewed experts on the
subject ignored so that we can debate the distortions in a Daily Tech
story?

Not that it'll matter. We know what George will do. He will wave off the evidence. We know this because that's what he's always done. Back in 2006, in an off-camera discussion recorded on the weekend news show This Week, Will said he had been contesting global warming for thirty years, and when Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation confronted him with a slew of inconvenient facts, he told her to "shut up!" (See my post about it here.)

Will is a knee-jerk global warming denier who will never change, but as usual, a picture tells the story best of all…here's Will literally waving off the issue on the aforementioned news show.

Venus, the Moon, and the Stars too…

Thanks to Deborah Byrd's great EarthSky science site, it's easy to look out at the night sky and understand what you see…the beauty you'll have to find yourself…

Global Warming Satellite Crashes

Happened to be observing at Vandenberg Air Force base the launch of a satellite that scientists hoped would answer a huge question about global warming called the OCO, or Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Ten minutes after lift-off, those of us standing in a chilly field in the early morning heard the voices over the loudspeakers at mission control warn that they were "initiating a launch contingency poll."

When translated from engineer-speak, this turned out to mean that the mission's protective nosecone did not come off as planned. Instead of going into orbit, the satellite crashed into the Indian Ocean. Here's my story about it for the Santa Barbara Independent.

They added a nice photo of the launch from the Air Force, courtesy of Andrew Lee.

It's a real shame this quarter-billion mission didn't reach orbit, because the satellite had a crucial question to answer. Why is it that sometimes the earth's natural carbon sinks — principally, the oceans and the forests — effectively sop up most of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, both naturally and from the burning of fossil fuels, but some years not?

In the words of Wally Broecker and Robert Kunzig, and their excellent book from last year Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat — and How to Counter It:

What [Ralph] Keeling's record has consistently showed is that when compared with records of fossil fuel use, only about half the carbon that we are putting into the atmosphere is staying there. The rest must be going into the ocean, as [Roger] Revelle suggested, or into plants on land.

But if you dig a little deeper into this story, you discover two shocking facts. One, as indicated in the quote above, scientists cannot trace how and where this "missing carbon" is being reabsorbed. Being good physicists, they can make calculations and surmises, but they cannot track that missing carbon.

Second, a little known fact, the amount of carbon being reabsorbed by the oceans and the forests of this planet varies greatly from year to year and we don't know why. It's a curious irony, actually. Our emissions of CO2 from the burning of carbon are steadily increasing, and we can chart that increase quite accurately. But our understanding of the natural world's capacity to soak up that excess carbon dioxide is primitive by comparison.

Here's a graphic that explains this better than any sentence or two possibly could, courtesy of David Crisp, a team leader on the OCO mission. Please note the tremendous variability in the reabsorbtion of CO2 from the atmosphere:

An Unsurpassed Loveliness

This has been a day of unsurpassed loveliness for yours truly. For thirty years I have wondered, off and on, if I made the right career choice, and suspected perhaps I should have gone into journalism, despite its current woes, for personal reasons. Now it seems as if the universe is giving me a second chance. At a modest local level (as I told my wife, "I'm on track to become the world's oldest cub reporter.").

But how many times does one get a second chance in life? Universe, thank you thank you thank you…

Why We’re Expecting Too Much of Obama

The most powerful critique of the American way of life in recent years has come from a conservative professor named Andrew Bacevich, who in his book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism absolutely dismantles both the Bush doctrine and the fatuous belief that Barack Obama will fundamentally change the national security state.

It's pretty gloomy stuff, but I can't see the flaw in Bacevich's logic. (Which is based on the work of philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, principally his book Beyond Tragedy.) Because the American people cannot rein in our desires, American presidents are fated to put our military power into ethically indefensible wars against other nations, principally nations with oil assets. And a similar impatience with limits and process has turned our democracy into an enormous, endless popularity contest.

As Bacevich told Bill Moyers:

I think the troubling part is, because of this preoccupation with,
fascination with, the presidency, the President has become what we have
instead of genuine politics. Instead of genuine democracy.

We look to the President, to the next President. You know, we know
that the current President's a failure and a disappoint – we look to
the next President to fix things. And, of course, as long as we have
this expectation that the next President is going to fix things then,
of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things.

One of the real problems with the imperial presidency, I think, is
that it has hollowed out our politics. And, in many respects, has made
our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a
democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think,
really has worn very thin.

I love Barack Obama, but this is why I doubt he will be able to bring about fundamental change — because the same public desire to see one man fix all things, means that one man must fix all things, a task not only beyond the capabilties of any individual, but a task we have given him because we won't take responsibility for our own part of the problem.

It's like what happens when Superman shows up in a story. Once he appears, all the other official good guys — the cops, the public officials, the soldiers — look small and almost useless. Why bother with them? Superman will fix the problem.

We want our President to be Superman. The bigger the challenge, the bigger our hope.

NASA Satellite Launch Goes Awry: Stolz Attacks Engineers

Yesterday morning at 1:55 a.m., NASA launched a satellite designed to precisely measure flows of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Unfortunately the nosecone failed to open as the mission neared orbit, and the satellite crashed into the sea near Antarctica.

Bad news for NASA — and the planet — but an interesting night for yours truly. Never attended a press conference at 5:00 a.m. before. If you're curious, you can see me asking tough questions of emotionally-devastated engineers on NASA TV (link). They called it a "contingency briefing."

Will post the story when it runs tomorrow in the Santa Barbara Independent. For now, here's a snapshot of lift-off…an impressive event, even from four miles away. Within thirty seconds the mission was ten miles high and traveling at 2000 mph.

Hollywood is Forever

Many years ago, a young student director named Marty Brest made a self-financed movie as a fellow at the American Film Institute called "Hot Tomorrows." The plot cannot be synopsized, but the climax was unforgettable, as the young searcher standing in for Brest himself looked high and low for the meaning of Hollywood, in mortuaries, nursing homes, and old movies on TV. He found the answer in the fact that those it blesses…live forever. It's really that simple.

And for yours truly, the meaning of the Oscars-cast last night can be seen in this image, which perfectly aligns what makes the movies immortal — youth, sexiness, money, and glamour.

Take it away, Alicia Keys….