James Baldwin on climate science

 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

 

James Baldwin wasn't thinking of climate when he wrote that, but if you think about it, isn't that the logic of climate policy efforts today?

Isn't that the hope, the idea that drives our science – to win the public over with the truth?  

And perhaps that's why it's not an easy sell, either. It's a confronting, a look in our eye.

 

Baldwin

To me it's a tribute to Baldwin's "piercing honesty," that his formulation takes on new life as it ranges across time and space. To Jose Antonio Vargas, who wrote about James Baldwin in a spectacular essay for the Los Angeles Times, it's as if Baldwin's words saved his life.

Vargas's essay was one of a whole series of writings about literary mentors by a spectrum of writers, drawn together with gorgeous sketches by Joseph Ciardiello, that luxuriates in literary remembering.

PDO turns positive: what does this mean for West Coast?

It's crazy how warm the Pacific is these days. Yet another story from the hard-working Chris Mooney at the Washington Post points to "the blob" of warmth in the Pacific off California.

Here's a map of sea surface temperature anomalies that gives an idea of that blob:

SSTanomalyApril2015

It's been extraordinarily warm in the Pacific, and in California, and that may not be a coincidence. Or so I hear. A scientist named Nate Mantua sees a connection with big implications for our future.

According to Mantua, the emergence of the new and consolidated “blob” may be a very significant development with global consequences. That’s because it may relate to a much larger pattern of ocean temperatures called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. A shift in this oscillation, in turn, may be a sign that the planet is on the verge of getting warmer, some scientists say.

Mooney writes:

Mantua also keeps an index of the PDO, and he says that at the moment, “my version has much more extreme positive values than theirs has.” But generally, the two indices are telling the same story, he says.

“In 2014 it went from mostly negative values to a very strong expression of the warm phase, and that’s present today,” Mantua says.

If the PDO is not only positive but is going to stay that way, it could be a big deal. Here’s why: Some scientists think a persistent cool phase of the PDO cycle may be a key part of the reason why there has been a much discussed “slowdown” of global surface warming recently. And if they’re right about that, then with the end of the cool phase, we may also see an end to any global warming “hiatus.”

Other scientists have linked the positive PDO to rainfall in Southern California, although an analysis by NOAA's Climate Diagnostics Center finds that statistically significant at only a marginal level.  

PdoviaCDC

Correlation: .25

Significance: 5%

Variance Explained: 6%

The correlation of PDO to rainfall in Southern California is barely statistically significant at the 5% significance level. The correlation only accounts for 6% of the variance that occurs in annual rainfall.

High temperatures off the coast last year correlated to high temperatures here in California, and from what I hear, that's expected to continue. What else might we expect?

That is the question I hope to be able to ask Nate Mantua next week at a drought conference in Orange County.  

Ventura County: Highest pesticide use in California

Spectacular story for The Food and Environment Network, published in The Nation, by Liza Gross.

For Ventura County and Oxnard, here's the nut of it: 

Use of many of these sixty-six pesticides has fallen statewide since 2007. But a handful of communities saw a dramatic increase. By 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, more than 29 million pounds of these chemicals—more than half the total used in the state—were applied in just 5 percent of California’s 1,769 census ZIP codes, according to an independent investigation by this reporter. In two ZIP codes that Zuñiga knows well—areas that include the Oxnard High neighborhood where she trained and south Oxnard, where she lives—applications of these especially toxic pesticides, which were already among the highest in the state, rose between 61 percent and 84 percent from 2007 t0 2012, records at the California Department of Pesticide Regulation show. Both are among the ten ZIP codes with the most intensive use of these pesticides in California. And both have sizable Latino populations—around 70 percent—thanks, in part, to the large number of farm jobs in the area. The great majority of the people who work in the strawberry fields in Oxnard, which hosts the largest population of farmworkers in Ventura County, come from Mexico.

DayaneZuniga

Read the whole thing. It's not that long. Really, give it a chance.

California’s water demand: a look at the numbers

Nate Silver's datalab, aka 538, takes a fresh look at the numbers that show California's water demand. Leah Libresco digs up some real gems:

California’s water problem won’t be solved by shorter showers or browner lawns.

In Gov. Jerry Brown’s executive order setting California’s mandatory water reductions in cities and towns, he called for 25 percent reductions in use that would save 1.5 million acre-feet of water1 over the next nine months.

By comparison, the city of Los Angeles uses 587,000 acre-feet in a year. In other words, L.A. would need to go completely dry for three years to cover Brown’s goals on its own.

California’s urban areas are responsible for only 10 percent of the state’s water use.

That's putting it starkly, But leave aside the problem-solving aspect for a minute, and look at these numbers as values, as shown by the amount of water we as a state/culture devote to them.

If forty percent of our water goes to agriculture, and ten percent goes to the cities/people, then where does the rest go? To the environment:

…50 percent of California [is] reserved for environmental use (maintaining wetlands, rivers, and other parts of the state’s ecosystem)…

Is this number a fluke? Arguably not. About a decade ago, among the "water buffaloes" who devote their lives to working out this issue, a conciliation was reach regarding reworking the water management in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

As many readers will know, this is where water is sucked into the State Water Project through enormous pumps. But the important point is, a consensus was reached, a decade or more ago, that the environment was put on a level playing field with our use, and declared a "co-equal goal."

As recounted by Doug Obegi of the NRDC, as of 2009:

Today, California's Governor is signing into law SB 7X 1, part of the legislative package to reform water policy in the state.  The bill being signed today builds the foundation for a sustainable 21st century water policy, which is built on two interrelated principles:

  1. Improving water supply reliability and protecting and restoring the health of the Delta estuary, and its native fisheries, are co-equal goals for Delta policy (See Sections 85020, 85054, 85300); and

  2. In order to achieve these goals, the policy of the state is to reduce reliance on water exported from the Delta and invest in alternative water supplies, like water efficiency, water recycling, and low impact development. (Section 85021)

So, I think, one can argue that we have at least achieved our equity goal, here in California, even if we have all too little water to actually share.

To attempt to put this question in perspective visually, here's a (state) Department of Water Resources picture of one of the new pumps used to suck water out of the Delta and move it south.

Hitachi pump

These pumps, which wear out by the way, are driven by 80,000 horsepower motors.

Understanding Tennessee: how he projected his “wound”

Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Barrios (who has written two plays about Tennessee Williams and Williams' two great loves, Frank Merlo and Pancho Rodriguez) interviews John Lahr, who just published last year an award-winning biography of Tennessee Williams called Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.

It's absolutely fascinating, "literary detection" as The Guardian says. What I like about it is that without condemnation it unearths the psychological mechanism by which Williams created his characters out of himself and projected on to others (his characters). It's not exactly pretty, but it's powerful. Lahr admires Williams' work passionately, but can dissect his method dispassionately.

What [Williams] was, as he said, was a hysteric. And performance is part of what a hysteric does. They perform their wound and project it onto other people. And there is that brilliant line in Sweet Bird of Youth where the Princess says, “I have this thing like a sculpture almost heroic that I can unveil.” And that’s it. That is what the negotiation is, both as an artist and as an ordinary citizen if you’re a hysteric. You are projecting your inner life into others and watching and enjoying their response, and controlling their response with your act. So the performative thing was always a part of Williams’s life.

Remember that essay he wrote about the sidewalk histrionics of a little girl? Dressing up, saying, “look at me, look at me.” I think he calls it “Sidewalk Theatrics” [actually, “Person-to-Person”]. It’s in his collected essays. And that in a cartoonish way is what a performer does. He is drawing attention to himself. He has a need for that attention. That’s part of the DNA of an entertainer.

Speaking of wounds, here's a pic of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, a character based on Pancho Rodriguez, a wounded man in his own right. Would love to see those Barrios' plays —

Marlonbrandoscreentest

Visiting with Emily Dickinson in a D.C. Museum

From Claudia Emerson, a poem about visiting with Emily Dickinson in a Washington D.C. museum.

First Emerson describes a talk given about the reclusive Dickinson, and why that might be, and then:

EmilydickinsonOn display:
one of her beloved nephew Gilbert's
boyhood suits, velveteen, and beside it
the contents of his morning's pocket—a bullet's
spent casing, a wad of tangled string; drafts
of more famous poems bearing clearly
the needle-piercings where she sewed one
to another—the sutures of a fascicle's
finishing undone; what is thought to be
the only image ever made of her,
of which she disapproved, here, itself,
as yet without compare;
                                   and next to it,
the something rare, unexpected, lock
of her hair—the shape and circumference
reminiscent of a sparrow's nest, the color
she likened to a chestnut bur. She had brushed,
cut, coiled, and folded it into an envelope,
then sent it to someone, letter-like. Everyone
lines up to photograph it with their phones,
when what they must truly desire is to
touch it, as though they might feel the sheen
it retains. And while they can never
get close enough, they will never be any
closer than this to what it does not tell them,
and they are desperate for all that that might mean.

The sound and sights of the California drought

As noted here a week or so ago, Ronald Reagan's close friend and confidant George Shultz published an op-ed declaring that if Ronald Reagan was president today, he would take action to restrain climate change. Along similiar lines, this week Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon published a tough warning about drought and California that began with a great/horrifying lead:

“The heart of the West is a desert, unqualified and absolute,” wrote prescient 20th century Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb. Nearly six decades later, the desert is returning to claim its own.

Cannon surveys the parched state, nodding at desalination, frowning at the exploitation of deep aquifers containing the water of thousands of years of rainfall, and ultimately concluding that California farmers are living "in a dream land"…and that the desert is coming back. 

He didn't even mention the pictures of the dry Sierra Nevadas, as seen from satellites or on Gov. Brown's snow survey, or in charts. It's a scene depicted as amusingly as possible by Steve Breen:

Droughtsierranevadasnowglobe

Nor did Cannon mention any of the latest research, which continues to sound alarms:

Wenju Cai and colleagues report that increased land warming relative to the ocean and an increased frequency of extreme El Niño events, are setting the scene for these events every 13 years compared with a past frequency of one every 23 years. They use a collection of global climate models, selected for their ability to simulate extreme La Niña events, to investigate how the frequency of those events will change with global warming. The authors find that extreme La Niña events will increase in frequency and that approximately 75% of this increase will occur immediately following an extreme El Niño event. The implication of this is that weather patterns will switch between extremes of wet and dry.

Kind of like now, only more violently. What is the sound of a drought? 

Tom Toles has an idea: 

Droughtcrack

Who would Jesus’s flock be today? Farmworkers

The Abundant Table is a small but mighty non-profit farm education outfit in Santa Paula, founded by a group of idealistic CSU – Channel Islands students a few years ago. One of them, the eloquent Erynn Smith, director of farm education, explained to me in an interview last year that they had been inspired by the example of Christ, and the way he saw "the marginalized" of his time, the people and the suffering that others overlooked.

They asked themselves, if Christ was alive today and looked around Ventura county, who would be his people? What suffering would he see that others did not and do not? And they agreed that he would see the people who pick our crops, who work our fields, who apply our presticides. And so part of their mission, beyond environmental sustainability, was decent, healthy work for farmworkers. This they have done, I believe, on a small scale, but across this country, two million people work on farms, and all too many of them must struggle to survive.  

A few facts Foodtank, on March 31st, Caesar Chavez day, set aside to honor farmworkers:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked the agriculture industry as one of the most hazardous workplaces in the U.S. While in the fields, farmworkers are at risk for both fatal and nonfatal injuries, lung and skin diseases, and certain cancers associated with chemical use and prolonged sun exposure. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor reported at least one farmworker death per day, as well as hundreds of injuries due to work-related accidents—an injury rate 20 percent higher than that of the private industry.

Farmworkers are typically socioeconomically vulnerable immigrants with low levels of formal education. They receive low wages—in 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that agricultural workers earn an average annual income of US$18,910—and one-quarter of the farmworker population live below the national poverty line. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, almost half of farmworkers lack work authorization, which, in addition to deficient resources, has created a population with little power to speak for themselves. 

The Ojai Chautauqua will discuss Immigration: American Dream or American Nightmare? on April 12th, at the Ojai Valley Community Church, with a panel of experts, and, God willing, a good representative of our local immigrant community. Boy have I been looking!

Farmlabor

You wouldn't think it would be difficult, but life is ever surprising.