The Future Taps Us On the Shoulder

You don’t need to be a climatologist to see which way the weather is heading. It’s getting warmer. Glaciers around the world are vanishing into the sky; if the current warming trend continues, Glacier National Park will be without glaciers by 2030. The Greenland ice sheet is melting at 250 percent the rate it was 10 years ago, according to a report just published in Science magazine. The Antarctic ice sheet is also shrinking, which came as a surprise to experts. In Canada, the Mountain Pine Beetle  — no longer controlled by cold winters — is on its way to destroying most of the forests of British Columbia. The Canadian Forest Service says it is the largest insect epidemic in North American history, and expects it to continue to spread east and south. 

But will this matter to us? Eugene Linden, a former science writer for Time, fears it will. In a just-published book called The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, he looks at how climate has devastated civilizations in the past, and connects that to the recent discovery, based on eons-old ice records, that “in the past, climate made many large, sudden shifts from warm to cold and cold to warm.” This he calls a “flickering climate.”

For decades scientists thought climate was like a dial that could be turned up or down without causing chaos. Now, studies of Greenland ice cores have convinced scientists it’s more like a switch, and that, if thrown, the basic structure of the climate could change hugely and rapidly, with potentially extreme winds and drops in average temperatures of as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few years in some places. This is what Linden is trying to bring to our attention. He discussed it recently in an interview:

Ventura County Reporter: How does our state of knowledge regarding global warming compare with what people in the Middle Ages knew about the Black Plague? Are we equally ignorant?

Eugene Linden: I would say we’re ahead of the people of the Middle Ages, who didn’t understand disease theory, but we’re not anywhere near close to a full understanding of what we’re facing. Everything is a surprise right now. We think the Antarctic ice sheet should be getting bigger, but it’s not. The Greenland ice sheet is wasting far more quickly than we thought it would. But we do know that we have put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any point in the last 400,000 years, and we can normalize for everything else, including sunspot activity. Since C02 started going off the charts, crazy things have started to happen.

VCR: According to the White House, the President focuses every day on the hazards facing the American people. In ignoring global warming, is he ignoring a threat as great as or greater than Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein?

EL: The weather is a weapon of mass destruction. I think Bush was blindsided by Katrina because he somehow has been convinced that climate is a non-issue that doesn’t involve national security. But the fact is that Katrina did more damage than 9/11; there was less loss of life, but much greater economic damage, and we were warned about Katrina. I agree with Sir David King [the scientific adviser to Great Britain], who argues that global warming poses a greater threat to humanity than terrorism.

VCR: Regarding the dangers of a flickering climate, you write the cities would be hard pressed to maintain their infrastructure, that FEMA would be bankrupted, and that businesses would struggle to show profits. This would mean that “Governments would find tax receipts drastically reduced, and in the world’s tightly-coupled markets, financial tsunamis would rocket through the system, leaving banks and corporations insolvent. Financial panics, largely absent for over 70 years, would return with a vengeance.” Could this be worse than the Great Depression?

EL: Yeah. It would be. I put a lot of thought into that paragraph; I was very measured. And I don’t even think that’s the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is simply unimaginable: mass starvation. We had one little hurricane last year that played a big role in knocking two points off the GDP in the fourth quarter, but we’re not talking about one little hurricane; we’re talking about lots of different events happening around the world simultaneously. Not to act to reduce the risk is lunacy.

VCR: What sort of prudential measures, if any, have you and your family taken against societal breakdown caused by global warming?

EL: We haven’t taken prudential measures. I’m not a survivalist. I compare our situation to that of Europe in World War II. When you think about that history, you wonder: Why on earth did people stay in Europe? But if you look at what happened, once Stalin and Hitler took control, people found there was nowhere to go. If the wheels really do come off, there will be no place to go. Somebody said to me, well, if that happens, the rich will still have their vehicles. But if nobody else has vehicles, the rich won’t be able to keep theirs either.

VCR: When did you first become interested in climate change?

EL: I’ve followed this issue forever, but back in l988 we had that incredibly hot summer in Washington during which [Senator] Tim Wirth [D-Colo.] held hearings that put the issue on the map. Scientists first started speculating about this issue decades earlier, and George Woodwell and Roger Revelle started to raise alarms about loading the atmosphere with carbon, and accurately predicted that without action on greenhouse gases, the weather would be changing by 2000. If we’d listened back then, we might not be seeing the effects we’re beginning to see now.

VCR: You quote Wallace Broecker of Columbia University on Greenland ice: “Through the record kept in Greenland ice, a disturbing characteristic of the Earth’s climate system has been revealed, that is, its capability to undergo abrupt switches to very different states of operation … ” Could such an “abrupt switch” lead to a decades-long El Niño?

EL: That would be one of the possibilities. I’m hedging on El Niño because there are still a lot of unknowns about how El Niño links with other climate cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Some speculate that El Niño might be a delivery system for global warming … if you change the geometry of atmospheric circulation over the Pacific, for instance, it might lead to a shutdown of the California Current, and in short order you’d have no more redwoods.

VCR: A prominent climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bill Patzert, jokes that El Niño has always been part of our climate and ought to be called “El Niñcompoop,” for people who aren’t prepared for its effects. Is it possible that a decades-long El Niño wouldn’t be so bad?

EL: El Niño barely budges the needle as a climate change event. Even the big l998 El Niño that caused $100 billion damage represented a global temperate change on the order of one degree. The threat is change many times that magnitude.

VCR: Most people don’t realize that the consensus IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] projections in the 21st century, although sometimes criticized for being too extreme, are actually very middle-of-the-road.

EL: The fact that the international consensus statement from the IPCC was as strong as it was is something of a miracle, but you know, consensus doesn’t matter to nature. Nature isn’t going to say, well, the humans made their best effort to reduce emissions, and we’ll try to meet them halfway.

VCR: What reaction do you hear from scientists on this?

EL: Enormous frustration. They feel they’ve done all they can do, but no one seems to be listening. Thomas Karl in a 2003 paper in Science wrote that we are now entering the unknown, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

VCR: A reporter for ABC, Bill Blakemore, blogged recently that the few reporters who cover this beat exclusively often find themselves checking in with colleagues, partly “to do some mutual therapy.” Has the story taken a psychological toll on you?

EL: I haven’t talked about it that much with other reporters, but I understand why you might need a support group, because we’re kind of out in the wilderness on this subject. Every time something dramatic happens, such as the collapse of an ice shelf in Antarctica, then the experts get wheeled out of storage, but then something else happens, and the story gets pushed to the back burner.

VCR: Do you ever hear complaints that reporting on this issue is too negative, too depressing? Or is that the kind of question you only get from Californians?

EL: The complaint that the issue is too depressing seems kind of silly to me. Either climate change is a threat, or it’s not. Our emotional reaction to the facts is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what we’re doing, and we’re doing nothing. The issue ought to be galvanizing.


VCR: In your book, you write that the coverage of global warming has been “fitful” and “timid.” Can you talk a little about the reporting on this issue?

EL: You used to see the same four naysayers trotted out in every story to supply the contrarian view, long after the scientific consensus was settled. It never seemed to dawn on anybody that it was the same four guys dismissing it, whereas any number of scientists are eager to talk about the threat. I’d like to believe the media is getting over that. When you see a story about the dangers of smoking, you don’t see a reporter on a story about tobacco searching out someone to say that smoking is good for you, but even though the consensus on global warming rivals the consensus on the dangers of smoking, reporters still feel that obligation.

VCR: But it’s not just reporters who are at fault, is it?

EL: A lot of the confusion is the result of a  well-organized effort effort to mau-mau editors by fossil fuel companies who did not want to see the U.S. join the international effort [to control C02 emissions]. And the attention-span of editors is like an eight-year-old’s: they’re always looking for the next story. The media and the public look at the story as something far off in the future, but what happens if the future comes up and taps you on the shoulder?

VCR: Climatologist James Hansen did get coverage lately, but for being muzzled by a public relations official from the Bush Administration … not for what he advocated, which is an end to the construction of new power plants.

EL: You’re right, he has been covered more for being muzzled than for anything else … but Jim Hansen had the guts to stand up to the administration and say you’re not going to muzzle me, and it totally backfired on them. What you’re seeing these days is that the muzzlers and the naysayers are looking more and more like idiots. For years they were out there saying, “Don’t believe your eyes on the melting glaciers,” looking at these temps from the stratosphere or whatever, but the evidence of warming is so incontrovertible now that this isn’t working any more.


VCR: In your book, you write that one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, Swiss Re, has warned some of its clients, such as ExxonMobil, that they may drop coverage for liability on climate change-related lawsuits if Exxon continues to oppose action to reduce emissions. Will they act?

EL: As soon as Swiss Re sees that liability for climate-change related lawsuits is a serious possibility, they will likely take some action. If they see some clear paths for action, and [statistical] outlier corporations that refuse to respond, then they will call for an exclusion in their insurance for directors and officers. That’s what they’ve told me, and I’ve been talking to insurance executives on this issue since the early 1990s. If you as a corporation are going to knowingly court the risk of lawsuits, why should we, the insurance company, be responsible? One executive compared it to the situation with asbestos, where damages were apportioned according to market share. Since ExxonMobil is estimated to produce 1 percent of the CO2 emissions around the world, that’s a lot.

VCR: In Winds of Change, you write of insurance companies “off-loading” increased risk caused by global warming. Have you seen any evidence of that?

EL: Insurance rates in southern Florida have already doubled. We’re already seeing off-loading of risk. Insurance executives are taking this seriously. They were blindsided by 9/11 and bore that risk for free, and they took a big hit. That has opened their eyes to other risks they’re insuring for free. It’s complex, because insurance uses past behavior to assess violent, extreme events, but the past is no longer a guide to the future. We’re seeing insurance costs rise in anticipation of more frequent and extreme climatic events. For example, in Massachusetts, which is facing increased hurricane risk, the [state] FAIR plan rates have risen in anticipation of more claims.

VCR: You wrote a piece on a flickering climate for Fortune magazine in January. What kind of response did it receive?


EL: Fortune ran the piece because they think their audience is getting interested in these issues, and it got a very big response, and mostly positive. Even the Wall Street Journal takes this issue seriously on their news coverage; it’s the editorial page that’s in cloud-cuckoo land.

VCR: Some of the facts of climate change are, as you say, very complex and even paradoxical. Is it too complex for the average citizen to understand?

EL: It’s not complexity. It’s that in the 17 years since global warming was first explained, the issue has been muddied by disinformation. If people think this is something that’s far off in the future and a matter of debate, they’ll wait for the scientists to sort it out. But if people realize that the scientists agree, then I think they’ll be perfectly capable of understanding the threat.

VCR: As I read this book, it’s about 50-50 whether the switch toward a flickering climate will be thrown.

EL: We don’t know what the tipping point is. I say that having surveyed scientists on this question intensely. We do know that we’re headed for 550 parts per million [of CO2] and probably more, but nobody knows where the runaway effect begins, and nobody can tell you that 550 ppm equals two degrees of warming. [Currently the world is at about 380 ppm of atmospheric CO2; in 1950, it was at about 310 ppm; in 1850; it was at about 280 ppm.] There are so many unknowns. We can only hope that we’re not seeing the beginnings of a transition to a flickering climate right now.


VCR: In your book, you get depressed when you see the comparison between us as a species and fruit flies, because we seem equally blind to our environment. Where, if anywhere, do you see hope?

EL: Katrina opened our eyes to the destruction potential of extreme weather, just as the heat wave of 2003 that killed 35,000 in Europe opened eyes over there. We should have some advantage over past civilizations that fell because of climate change in that we can look back at their example as well as better understand how changing climate might impact our future. The scientists have done their job. We just have to listen, and I have to believe we will. There’s an old Chinese proverb: If you don’t change direction, you end up where you’re headed. Makes sense to me.

[This piece ran as a cover story in the Ventura County Reporter this week, and will run in one or two other papers in Southern California next month.]

If Only We Watched the Snowpack the Way We Watch “American Idol”

Water managers in California have been concerned about global warming for years, knowing that if the Sierra snow pack doesn’t accumulate, or melts early, we simply do not have the reservoir capacity to compensate. More action has been taken than many realize; in Ventura County, for example, a major underground reservoir was constructed for the remarkable reasonable price of $90 million, with backing from Republicans and Democrats. But much more needs to be done, and it would help a lot of if the public had some awareness of the very real possibility of major water shortages in years to come.

Today Patt Morrison, a wonderfully sardonic writer for the LATimes, had a terrific column on the subject in the op-ed pages. Being a good writer, she is able to touch lightly on topics of real depth. Sometimes humor can offer insight that straight-on factuality simply can’t touch. This is one of those times. The two central graphs:

Why are we so cavalier about the water supply? Why do we believe the scientists — or the snow pack — will invariably bail us out? It’s what comes of seeing too many TV shows in which disaster is always averted between the last commercial break and the previews of next week’s episode.

The story on Page 1 says NASA may have found geysers on a moon of Saturn, and immediately it’s: Oh, there’s a space volcano spurting ice like a chocolate fountain at an Oscar party. Cool. Maybe Halliburton can go bring it back. Think I’ll go hose down the driveway to celebrate.

It’s just so true. We do expect an action hero to ride to the rescue. (And, surprisingly, Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing his best, although his big bond issue is foundering, partly on the issue of above-ground reservoirs, the Republican insistence, vs. below-ground reservoirs, which is what the Democrats want.)

But when it comes to psychology, the ground truth is that people think that there is an easy scientific answer to these questions. Last year my hair cutter figured the state could easily shore up the 600-foot cliff of mud that swamped La Conchita, killing ten. Last week she suggested the government could easily haven broken up Hurricane Katrina, if it wanted, although she did laugh when I pointed out that it was about 250 miles across…

 

The Scientist Becomes a Star–And Passes the Baton to Al Gore

James Hansen, whose important address to the American Geophysical Union in December inspired a clumsy attempt to muzzle him by a young public relations official from the Bush/Cheney campaign, has become something of a media star.

The good news is that the controversy, a humiliation for a once-revered agency, has inspired a good faith pledge from NASA to allow "scientific openness." NASA’s chief administrator, Michael Griffin, has set a "goal of allowing NASA employees to discuss the implications of their work and not just the scientific facts, as long as they emphasized that they were speaking as individuals and not for the agency," reported Andrew Revkin for the NYTimes. As Chris Mooney commented on his site:

For the first time, perhaps, we can actually say that the Bush administration, charged with some type of interference with science, has responded by cleaning up its act, rather than by denying or ignoring that the problem exists.

In an email sent to colleagues, a cautious Hansen declared:

It will be interesting to query NOAA colleagues to see if there is still selective use of government ‘minders’ to monitor interactions with the media on topics such as global warming.  The situation in EPA, where double-speak (“sound science”, “clear skies”, …) has achieved a level that would make George Orwell envious, is much bleaker, based on the impression that I receive from limited discussion with colleagues there.  The battle to achieve open communication between government scientists and their employer, the public, is far from won.

Nonetheless, Hansen emphasized that he is going back to work, and specifically to work on how to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses.

Intriguingly, he also posted on his site a statement of political inclinations, challenging his former minder’s claim that he had "a very partisan agenda" and "ties reaching to the top of the Democratic Party." Hansen describes himself "moderately conservative," registered to vote as an Independent, concerned mostly with global warming, and a former supporter of Republican John Heinz and John McCain. But he addds that he has great respect for Al Gore, and stresses:

He has a better understanding of the science of global warming than any politician
that I have met, and I urge citizens to pay attention to his presentation, which I understand will come out
in the form of a movie. Even if you don’t agree with Vice President Gore’s politics, you should pay
attention to his climate message. He knows what he is talking about.

Gore was in Las Vegas yesterday to tout his new global warming picture, called "An Inconvenient Truth," to exhibitors. According to the LATimes, his voice was "booming as he strode inside the theater, [and] he grew more impassioned as he implored theater owners to book — and then keep playing — the May documentary about global warming:

"You are all in a unique position…. There is going to be a grass-roots campaign like you have never seen."

But although Gore is the star of the movie, the one-shot poster barely mentions him. To this observer, it’s something of a promotional marvel: funny, memorable, fully part of our cultural moment. Let’s hope the movie is just as good.

Aninconvenienttruth_1

The Clock of the Long Now

On a walk the other night I was listening through my futuristic little Shuffle iPod to John Lennon being interviewed by Jann Wenner back in l972, and couldn’t help but be struck by Lennon’s eagerness to see the future. I can’t remember exactly how he put it, but his faith was absolute, unbending, full. How different the future feels today! And no, it’s not just me.

In January this year I was fairly stunned by an essay by Richard Rodriguez in the Cal Berkeley alumni magazine in which he argued that the hidden theme in California literature (and life, let us presume) is disappointment. Now that California’s future is over, Rodriguez argued, that will have to change.

What is obsolete now in California is the future. For a century and a half Americans spoke of California as the future when they wanted to escape inevitability. Now the future attaches consequences and promises constriction. Technocrats in Sacramento warn of a future that is overwhelmed by students, pollution, immigrants, cars, fluorocarbons, old people. Or the future is diminished—water quality, soil quality, air quality, education quality, highway quality, life quality.

There are not enough doctors for the state’s emergency rooms, not enough blue parking spaces outside, not enough oil, not enough natural gas, not enough electricity. More blackouts, more brownouts, too many air-conditioners, too few houses, frogs on the verge of extinction, a fugitive middle class. A state without a white center. To the rest of the nation California now represents what the nation fears to become.

Then, tipped off by former fellow grad student Gayle Brandeis, I saw an essay in Details by Berkeley writer Michael Chabon. He sees the future in much the same way, with less of an emphasis on California, but  more supporting details:

I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it.

But Chabon writes not to bury the future, but to praise it, and to tell us of a new device to restore it  called The Clock of the Long Now. It’s a sixty-foot machine dreamed up by several geniuses, most famously Stewart Brand and Brian Eno, which is designed to be put in a cave in a national park in Nevada, and to run for 10,000 years.

The point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the degree if not in quite the way same way that we used to do, and to reintroduce the notion that we don’t just bequeath the future—though we do, whether we think about it or not. We also, in the very broadest sense of the first person plural pronoun, inherit it.

That’s asking a lot of any machine, but what a great idea! Let’s hope it helps. Here’s a picture of a model of the clock in a London museum, from Wikipedia:

Theclockofthelongnow

 

Big News: Obama is a Crack-Up!

According to a transcript helpfully provided by the Chicago Tribune’s political blog, known as The Swamp, Barack Obama is funny. Really! Here’s just a couple of lines from his speech at the annual Gridiron Club roast. The target this year was Dick Cheney, of course. Word has it that the Big Veep was laughing so hard he had to take his glasses off and wipe them.

And then there’s the flap about global warming,” Obama said. "You know, the Bush administration’s been a little skeptical about the whole concept of global warming. It’s actually not the warming part they question. It’s the globe…. The president was so excited about Tom Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. As soon as he saw the title, he said, ‘You see? I was right.”’

"I was told that this dinner is off the record,” Obama said, moving on to the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping in search for terrorists. "No taping or recording of this event, unless, of course, secretly authorized by the president. I completely trust the president with that authority, by the way. But just out of an abundance of caution, and not implying anything, I’ve asked my staff to conduct all phone conversations in the Kenyan dialect of Luo.

"Truth is, this domestic spying has all kinds of useful applications for homeland security,” he said. "And I have a suggestion in this regard, Mr. President: you can spy on the Weather Channel, and find out when big storms are coming.

Am I a Hairless Chihauhau?

In today’s LATimes, Hal Clifford writes very amusingly about a not-so-funny possibility: That our way of life as we know it will soon collapse, leaving us as vulnerable as a hairless chihuahua in the woods.

I live a comfortable, conventional life that is at odds with what I know intellectually. A life that I am all but certain could easily be changed by forces beyond my control.

And this is where I begin to feel like a Mexican hairless Chihuahua. These dogs wouldn’t last a week in the woods, so they live their lives in tiny sweaters, tucked in the crook of somebody’s arm, or scampering around a city apartment and yapping at the Chinese food delivery guy. Their environment is, shall we say, artificial.

And isn’t mine too?

How long, I wonder, would I last in the woods?

As evidence for our difficulty facing big enviro problems, Clifford mentions an article from the magazine he edits, Orion, by Bill McKibben. Back in the summer of 05, McKibben pointed out that our inability to deal with big slow problems like global warming has a evolutionary component:

There was great Darwinian pressure to pay attention to the tiger roaring in front of you. You solved one day’s problems, and moved on to the next day. It’s no wonder that we find it hard to concentrate on something like global warming that plays out over decades, not news cycles.

True, undeniably true, and it’s depressing when you contrast the weight of the scientific evidence against the lack of interest from the public, as documented by framing specialist Matthew Nisbet. The environment in general and global warming in particular show poorly in the polls he cites.

Yet the word "Darwinian" implies that this focus on "the tiger in front of us"–the Other, one might say–is part of our genetic heritage and inalterable. But an extraordinarily readable article on primate behavior by a Stanford scientist, Robert Sapolsky, makes exactly the opposite point:

...one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active — aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented "subliminally," which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it.

More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate. Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge. Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable.

Of course, an ability to avoid seeing the Other as the enemy is not the same as the ability to face an abstract problem. But please, no more talk about how we’re "hard-wired" for mindless agression in the face of the Other. Read the piece, and you’ll see that extensive primate behavior studies as well as brain studies have shown that’s just not true.

Troubling Fantasies

The famous farmer, poet, professor, and writer Wendell Berry confronts the industrial/scientific complex in a deeply troubling essay in a recent issue of The Hudson Review.

When recently honored by the Smithsonian, Berry insisted that:

"Part of the reason for writing all these essays is my struggle never to quit, to never utter those awful words ‘it’s inevitable.’"

But Berry points out that "the economic independence of families, communities, and even regions has been almost completely destroyed,"and that despite this interdependence:

"Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge."

But most troubling of all, at least for those of us who think that science offers the best hope to governments who wish to make decisions on a fair, rational basis, Berry believes that land-grant colleges (which were established largely to help farmers) have hopelessly failed in their mission:

"…as we continue our enterprise of "sound science" and technological progress, our agriculture becomes more and more toxic, specialized and impoverished of genes, breeds, and varieties; we deplete the aquifers and the rivers; our rural communities die; our fields and our foods become less healthful; our food supply becomes ever more dependent on long-distance transportation and immigrant labor; our water becomes less drinkable; the hypoxic zone grows in the Gulf of Mexico."

This seems a little unfair to me. Is it science that has led to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico? Or corporate agriculture and industrial plants spewing toxins? And is it science that has allowed those nitrates and toxins, or industry and look-the-other-way governments and regulators? 

But Berry is less interested in pointing the finger than he is the issues facing farmers, and on this front, he has a point difficult to counter. It’s true that today’s world is much more about "information" than about "conversation," and that much of this "information" is technical, deliberately stripped of all local language and context. Such information is of little or no use unless it is part of a conversation, Berry thinks. He wants less information from "the center" (the city, university, and government) and more conversation from what he calls "the periphery" (farmers and locals outside wealth and power).

"The idea of the extension service should be applied to the whole institution. Not just the agricultural extension agents, but also the graduate teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other community servants should be involved. They should be carrying news from the university out into its region, of course. But this would be extension in two directions: They would also be carrying back into the university news of what is happening that works well, what is succeeding according to the best standards, what works locally. And they should be carrying back criticism also: what is not working, what the university is not doing that it should do, what it is doing that it should do better."

And he warns that:

"The idea that we have now progressed from a land-based economy to an economy based on information is a fantasy…people of the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the land productive: There will always be an abundance of food, fiber, timber, and fuel. This too is a fantasy. It is not known but simply taken for granted."

It’s that last line that troubles me most. I have not the analytic tools to fairly evaluate this particular assumption. But is there any doubt that it is, in fact, taken for granted?

 

Quote of the Week

"A party of great vested interests banded together in a formidable configuration: corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad, sentiment by the bucket-full, patriotism by the imperial pint, the open hand at the public exchequer, the open door at the public house, dear food for the millions, cheap labor for the millionaire."

Winston Churchill, speaking of the Tory Party of l904; quoted by Lewis Lapham, of Harper’s, speaking of the current Bush administration, in a speech available via the Lannan foundation. (HT: Salon’s Audiofile)

Seeing No Evil–Nor Any Global Warming

It’s one solution to global warming: let our environmental satellites "collapse." From a CNN story:

Scientists warn that the consequences of neglecting Earth-observing satellites could have more than academic consequences. It is possible that when a big volcano starts rumbling in the Pacific Northwest, a swarm of tornadoes sweeps through Oklahoma or a massive hurricane bears down on New Orleans, the people in harm’s way — and those responsible for their safety — will have a lot less information than they’d like about the impending threat.

To be fair, this is not a new issue in observational science. In his autobiography ("Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth") the man credited with discovering global warming, Charles Keeling, repeatedly describes scrambling desperately for funding. Had the funding been interrupted,  the famous Mauna Kea observatory he helped launch would have had to shut down, with serious, perhaps catastrophic consequences for our understanding of atmospheric chemistry.

But that’s exactly what we’re facing right now:

Landsat, a series of satellites that have provided detailed images of the ground surface for more than 30 years, is in danger of experiencing a gap in service. Landsat 7, launched in April 1999, is scheduled to be replaced by a next-generation satellite in 2011. But if the existing satellite fails before that date and NASA has not developed a contingency plan, scientists, land managers and others who depend on Landsat images could be out of luck.

(Hat Tip to my hometown friend Brad, a metereologist…)

[Correction: Tim Flannery reminds me that it’s Mauna Loa, not Mauna Kea.]