Education environment: sustainability timescale timespan wisdom
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 1: Have Another Hit, Babe…
Walter and Nan Simpson have an excellent piece in the Buffalo News. Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:
Earth Day is more than celebrating the little things we do to protect the environment. It’s time to look more broadly at environmental policy and take our planet’s pulse.
Are we doing enough to protect nature and endangered species and reduce air and water pollution? Are we maximizing the green jobs and public health benefits of environmental protection? Are we rapidly developing new green technologies to compete with global green export leaders like China and Germany?
Daring to answer these questions honestly is difficult. We all have our own priorities and problems. We are endlessly distracted by cellphones, computers, video games, hundreds of TV channels, advertising and shopping. We lead busy lives, detached from nature.
Few people want to be troubled by “inconvenient truths” that require significant action and sacrifice. Besides, polluting industries and their friends constantly reassure us there’s no problem. Case in point is the 1,000- pound polar bear in the room — climate change — the most serious environmental problem ever.
More like this, please. Sent April 22:
The flotsam and jetsam of our chaotic information environment can distract us from attending to the environment that really matters. While more and more people are connecting the dots between extreme weather and the burgeoning greenhouse effect, there are an awful lot of people who believe what they’ve been told: there is no crisis; it’s all a fabrication of the so-called “liberal media”; it’s all an excuse for environmentalists to raise our taxes, etc., etc., etc.
But the problem goes beyond the preening megalomaniacs of right-wing radio. The transient, helter-skelter nature of our media conveys an equally misleading message: that the 24-hour news cycle is the only one that really matters. The timespans of Earth move far more slowly; if we are to restore equilibrium to our troubled world, we must learn once again to think in the long term. There is no wisdom in a two-minute attention span.
Warren Senders
Education environment: agriculture monocropping sustainability timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 19: Too Soon Old And Too Late Smart
The Peoria (IL) Journal-Star discusses a recent study by scientists from Arizona, on the impact of climate change on the “corn belt.” Hmmm…not so encouraging:
PEORIA —
The Corn Belt may be in trouble as the planet gets warmer, according to a decadelong research effort on climate change.
The study, published this week by a team at Northern Arizona University, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly.
Researchers found that long-term warming resulted in the loss of native species and encroachment of species typical of warmer environments, pushing the plant community toward less productive species, said Bruce Hungate, a Northern Arizona professor and a senior author of the study.
“Ecosystems have feedbacks. The initial response might not be the long term one,” he said.
Squirrel! Sent April 10:
The key word in any discussion of the Northern Arizona University study of plant survival in a transformed climate is “long-term.” For the past century, our civilization has steadily lost the ability to imagine a future more than a few years away. With the support of a complaisant media, our civilization has built a 24-hour news cycle and a fashion-driven consumer economy that is entirely dependent on the predictability and dependability of our food supply. Since scientists’ predictions have consistently underestimated the severity of climate change, it’s a fair bet that our agricultural infrastructure is far more vulnerable than any of us ever believed.
With enormous industrialized monocropping, we have accomplished prodigies of predictability and productivity — but lost our ability to think in the long temporal cycles that governed agriculture until the advent of chemical fertilizers and giant factory farms. To survive and prosper in the coming centuries, our species must reclaim this wisdom before it’s too late.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 18: More Pathetic Whining From Aggrieved Hippies
The Lincoln, NE Journal-Star has an editorial. It’s shrill:
Temperatures have retreated to levels closer to the norm in Lincoln, but the heavy green foliage of trees and the profusion of blooming flowers bear witness that March 2012 was the warmest on record in the Capital City.
Pleasant as it was, the numbers represent an extreme.
The average high was 69.5 degrees, 17.2 degrees above normal. The temperature soared to 91 degrees March 31, setting a record for that day and tying the all-time high for March. It was the second record daily high set during the month. A high of 83 degrees on March 13 topped the previous record of 80 degrees.
Still fresh in memory is the weather extreme of 2011, when snow and rain created record runoff of more than 60 million acre-feet of water in the Missouri River basin. The usual runoff is 24.8 million acre-feet. The previous record was 49 million acre-feet.
Such weather extremes should be expected more frequently as global warming continues, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2010, Russia recorded its hottest summer in 500 years. Last year, rainfall in Thailand was 80 percent more than average.
“It’s very clear that heat waves are on the increase both in terms of numbers and duration,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel. “Another important finding is the fact that extreme precipitation events are on the increase.”
It’s often been said during the debate on global warming that “weather is not climate.” Weather is short-term. Climate is long-term.
Still, it’s worth remembering that in January the USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map that showed most of Nebraska is in a warmer zone than it was in 1990, the last time the map was updated.
The USDA cautioned that the change was based on only 30 years of weather data gathered from 1976 to 2005, and should not be considered evidence of global warming. The trend would have to persist for 50 or 100 years to be considered climate change, the USDA said.
So, in a long-term sense, the warmest March on record for Lincoln is just another dot that must be connected to many others to be considered a trend. Nonetheless, on a 91-degree March afternoon, it was difficult to believe that some still deny that global warming is real.
I haven’t checked the comments yet. I’m sure they’re full of denialist drivel. Sent April 9:
Yes, the unseasonably warm temperatures are a troubling omen of a future in which climatic extremes become the new norm — but they’re unlikely to change the mind of the climate change denialists who long ago decided global warming is a hoax/conspiracy/liberal plot. A mere plenitude of evidence would hardly be enough to convince people who have repeatedly shown their contempt for scientific truth, and indeed for science itself. The multi-decade effort by the Republican party to base policy on ideology rather than facts has been assisted by a complaisant media establishment that for years has abdicated journalistic responsibility in favor of a specious false equivalency between opposing viewpoints; the result may well be toxic to the survival of our civilization and our species. We — all of us — need to be thinking about the long term; if humanity is to succeed, both our politics and media must be transformed. Ideologically motivated ignorance is a luxury our species can no longer afford.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: analogies Buckminster Fuller slavery timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 14: Ventilated Prose Edition
Curse you, Jim Hansen! Why must you be right, all the time? The Guardian (UK):
Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen.
He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an “injustice of one generation to others”.
Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions.
In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.
“The situation we’re creating for young people and future generations is that we’re handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control,” he said. “We’re in an emergency: you can see what’s on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction.”
This is the first time I’ve been able to invoke Bucky Fuller in a letter. Sent April 6 (I’m now 8 days ahead — yay me):
Dr. James Hansen has it exactly correct. Just as the slave trade’s poisonous legacy continues to haunt the United States a hundred and fifty years after the “peculiar institution” passed into history, the consequences of a century’s worth of profligate carbon consumption will be felt by the next twenty generations of our descendants.
Since the advent of the industrial revolution, we have become accustomed to an apparently inexpensive and endless supply of what the futurist Buckminster Fuller called “energy slaves” — fossil-fueled technology that replaces captive human labor. But now, as climatology reveals the damage wrought by burning all that oil, gas and coal, it is becoming apparent: those energy slaves weren’t cheap after all, and the bill is coming due.
A globally-implemented carbon tax is essential if we are to transform our economic system into one that is not ruinous to the earth upon which all of us depend.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: sustainability timescale urban survival
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 10: People Get Ready…
The Salt Lake Tribune praises the city’s initiatives on climate change:
Climate change should be a matter of science, not politics. But only changes in public policy, which is often determined by political ideology, can reduce the human-caused warming that is threatening ecosystems around the globe.
In the end, governments, large and small, will be forced to confront the vast upheavals that climate change can bring if we don’t act now to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
That’s why it’s important that Salt Lake City is supporting a growing movement among cities to urge President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke the Clean Air Act to place limits on carbon emissions. The City Council and Mayor Ralph Becker collaborated on a resolution urging the federal agency to “swiftly employ and enforce” the act. Only Councilman Carlton Christensen voted against it.
The need to act is underscored by a new report on severe weather events related to global warming coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel, founded by the United Nations in 1988, is focusing for the first time on extreme weather changes, which have increased in number and intensity in recent decades.
Weather disasters including drought, flooding, hurricanes and rising seas cost the U.S. government an average of $3 billion a year in the 1980s. In the past 10 years, that figure has skyrocketed to $20 billion a year, adjusted for inflation.
Read the comments on this article if you want to be seriously depressed. Sent April 3:
Successful approaches to climate change must be polycentric — operating at multiple levels of geographical scale, from the individual home all the way to the national and global.
Urban initiatives like Salt Lake City’s are essential components of the total picture; without the engagement of cities, any attempt at mitigation and adaptation is doomed to failure. Similarly, no progress can take place without the commitment of dedicated people, families and communities, working together to reduce their carbon footprints and prepare for the infrastructural and agricultural disruptions that are now inescapable.
But none of these will make sense without broader-scale government support. Just as the planetary environment supports a vast range of diverse and interdependent ecosystems, only federal government action can support the wide range of individual, local, and regional initiatives that are necessary to address the slowly unfolding catastrophes that are the inevitable consequences of the burgeoning greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: media irresponsibility timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 2: Relax And Float Downstream / It Is Not Dying…
The Christian Science Monitor runs a Reuters story on a recent study in Nature Climate Change, confirming that yes, we dunnit:
London
Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday.
Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming. The link between warming and storms was less clear.
“It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study.
The past decade was probably the warmest globally for at least a millennium. Last year was the eleventh hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Friday.
This is essentially a recycling of my usual irresponsible-media letter, with the addition of the mayfly/sequoia analogy. Maybe the CSM will finally publish me. Sent March 27:
Given the disconnect between the “if it bleeds, it leads” style of news reporting and the careful and deliberate style of scientific communication, it’s amazing that our media pays any attention whatever to issues of climate change.
After all, the transformation of the Earth’s climate takes place in long arcs of time: decades, centuries, millennia — while the longest span our media can competently address is the two-year gap between elections. It’s like asking mayflies to comment on sequoias.
What those climate scientists are telling us, in their careful and deliberate way, is that we’re already in a whole lot of trouble — and if we don’t act rapidly, it’s going to get immeasurably worse. While there’s no doubt that sensible energy and environmental policies are essential, it’s also incumbent on our news media to pay more, and better, attention to the gravest existential threat our species has yet faced.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: timescale wisdom
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 26: Go Slowly, Beloved
The Toronto Globe & Mail runs a piece by Rose Murphy that addresses long-term thinking:
Recently, David Finch, Paul Varella and David Deephouse – analyzing polling data around oil-sands development – explained that while climate change is seen as an important issue by most Canadians, it isn’t personally relevant because the most dramatic effects will not be felt until the end of this century.
I gave birth to my first child last year. According to the latest data from Statistics Canada, his life expectancy is 79; if he reaches that age, he will live until the year 2090. The normal anxiety I feel as a parent about my child’s future is heightened by what I know from a career spent considering the implications of climate change and analyzing the economic impacts of climate change policy. And for me, it couldn’t be more personal. The best information available today tells me this issue touches anyone who has a child in their life who they love. Action we take, or fail to take, right now to address climate change will profoundly affect their lives.
Well-said. I took advantage of my father’s address in Toronto to pretend a local affiliation for this letter, sent March 20:
As children, we are taught to value old things. Ancient monuments fill us with reverence, and we would never knowingly grind petrified bones into garden gravel — yet we have no qualms about using fossil fuels to power our lifestyles of convenience. The light bulbs illuminating both our productivity and our profligacy burn sunshine that once shone upon dinosaurs. If wisdom is the ability to conceive timespans longer than a single human life, it is obvious that our rapid-fire media environment needs to change if our species is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries. While the 24-hour news cycle may be keeping us “infotained,” it has failed to foster long-term thinking, which is another way of saying “sustainability.”
Nowhere is this failure more evident than in the case of climate change, a slowly-unfolding catastrophe triggered by the wasteful and thoughtless consumption patterns of our industrialized civilization.
Warren Senders
Education environment: economics really bad analogies timescale
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 29: Bad Cop. No Donut.
The Washington Post runs an article purporting to demonstrate strategic vision for the long term. It’s called “Global warming would harm the Earth, but some areas might find it beneficial.”
When you talk to climate scientists about winners and losers, a few words come up over and over again: could, might, maybe. According to University of Arizona environmental economist Derek Lemoine, local climate-change patterns are difficult to predict because uncertainties in the global model “are compounded when considering smaller scales.”
For this reason, it’s very hard to pin down climate scientists on local effects. Klaus Keller, an associate professor of geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University, is working to develop strategies to manage the effects of climate change. I posed a simple question to him: If the leaders of Russia or Norway asked whether their countries would be better off in 50 years if the temperature increased by a few degrees, what would you say?
Jeepers. I’m going to get out a package of “Seventh Generation” toilet paper and drown my sorrows. Sent January 23 (it’s a three-letter day for me!):
It’s hard to imagine positing winners and losers from a burgeoning greenhouse effect over a five-decade time scale, as suggested by Brian Palmer’s question to Professor Keller: “If the leaders of Russia or Norway asked whether their countries would be better off in 50 years if the temperature increased by a few degrees, what would you say?”
Fifty years is an infinitesimal span of geological time. In the context of global climate change, changes in national well-being after such an interval are analogous to the health impact of a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the next two minutes; the brief stimulation offered by these fast-acting drugs doesn’t translate into benefits in the long run.
Humanity’s near-universal incompetence at long term thinking will have catastrophic consequences for our survival. A climate-changed 2060 may well see some nations temporarily ascendant, but having the best seat on a sinking boat is no consolation.
Warren Senders
environment: economics timescale
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 28: I’m Writing Four Days Ahead Of Schedule. Is That Long-Term Enough For You?
Long Island’s “Newsday” runs a thoughtful piece from Kavita Rajagopalan, titled “Climate-change waiting game.” It’s worth a read:
It’s the end of another year, a time to look back and take stock, maybe even make a resolution or two for the future. And there’s no bigger future to contend with than that of the planet. Unfortunately, after two weeks of intense negotiations at the 17th United Nations conference on climate change earlier this month, leaders from nearly 200 countries resolved to . . . wait.
Holding off on serious and coordinated global action to reduce emissions not only drives us closer to irreversible climate change, it gives us the false sense that we really aren’t in the grave danger that we are.
Although delegates agreed to draft a new treaty holding all nations to the same emissions standards and rules, they also agreed they it wouldn’t come into force until 2020. In the meantime, the contentious and flawed Kyoto Protocol emissions standards — which the United States never ratified — have been extended by another decade.
We don’t have another decade to put off a global resolution on climate change. The Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking climate change data, recently reported that global carbon dioxide emissions increased by 5.9 percent in 2010, the largest ever recorded annual jump. This amounts to an additional half billion tons of carbon in our air.
In the last decade, global carbon emissions rose by an average of 3 percent each year, up from the 1 percent annual growth rate of the 1990s. Despite increasingly urgent warnings from leading scientists all over the world, the move toward a concerted global effort to bring down emissions and work together to mitigate climate change has been slow.
Why?
It’s interesting, trying to learn what our tribal ancestors did without thinking: incorporating long-term impacts into our collective decision-making. Sent December 24:
If the industrialized nations are to respond successfully to the challenges posed by the climate crisis, we must change more than our patterns of energy usage. Those ways of living are symptoms of some very deeply rooted misconceptions which must be transformed if the struggle against a changing climate is to end well for us all.
Because Earth’s resources are finite, we can no longer idealize an economy based on the notion of continuous expansion (as Edward Abbey put it, “growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell”). Because the atmospheric changes wrought by our past century’s extravagant consumption of carbon fuels will take thousands of years to go away, we can no longer afford to focus only on the satisfactions and frustrations of the present moment. To accomplish a sustainable society, we — all of us — must learn to think in the long term.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility timescale
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 27: A Long, Long, Time Ago In A Galaxy Right Here
The North Island Gazette (BC) runs a vaguely philosophical column on Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto and all that it implies:
Canada is the first country to formally pull out of the Kyoto Accord. Of course with this comes all the politics of lies sitting under the tongue like salted honey from all political corners.
Elizabeth May of the Green Party says it’s going to be a disaster.
Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien used good old fear factoring when he said: “Next may be a woman’s right to choose, or gay marriage,” implying the Conservatives will shut them down.
The drama of Earth’s climate has unfolded over such a long period of time it is almost impossible to comprehend as humans, as a species we barely register in the annals of Earth’s history.
If climate history was condensed into one year, the entire evolution of our species would have occurred just over four hours.
It’s nice to see someone writing about timescale issues. Sent December 23:
Most human endeavors operate on short timescales: months, years, decades. Consequently, it’s extremely difficult for us to grasp the implications of the changes industrialized civilization has made to the atmosphere — implications unfolding over centuries and millennia. A thousand years ago Europe was in the middle of the Dark Ages. A thousand years from now, the CO2 we’ve emitted over the past century will start to dissipate. If our species is lucky, by 4011 our descendants will learn about the Hot Ages in history class.
As a citizen of the country with the world’s highest per capita greenhouse emissions, I am sorry to see Canada joining the United States in rejecting meaningful policies for addressing the coming climate catastrophe. The corporate forces of climate-change denial have a strong hold on the news and opinion media of both countries, and are equally enmeshed in their politics — a recipe for disaster.
Warren Senders