Captain Future's Log

Globs of Warning

"Mass extinctions, more Hurricane Katrina-like disasters, widespread droughts: A majority of climate scientists say these are just a few of the roads ahead if our consumption of oil and coal go unchecked."

What far left blog or liberal magazine, or alarmist special interest is that from? Well, actually it's Wired magazine, introducing an interview with Lester Brown of Worldwatch, which also includes a couple of downloadable texts on the matter.

I have to admit that the blithely confident doubters are getting to me a little, but I'm determined not to waste too much time on convincing those who don't think gravity makes sense, or that the earth revolving around the sun is a government plot, or they have graphs which show that elephants are actually larger than Jupiter.

I understand a little about the psychology of denial. I certainly understand those who have a financial interest in selling as much oil as they can before they die, and the scientists and think tanks who wallow in oil company troughs. But some others stump me a little. Why do they insist their homemade science and primitive math is better than the most universally respected experts in the field, like James Hansen of NASA?

Is it that they hate government so much they will resist recognizing any crisis that might require governments as well as the rest of us to do something about it? I'd like to hear them explain that to their grandchildren in the not too distant future.

There is one person who has kept his cool long enough to compile detailed answers to the usual objections from the doubters. Coby Beck in his blog A Few Things Ill Considered offers a primer with links to individual topics called How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic. Bookmark it. I sure have.

For those with the patience I wish I had, the best suggestion I've come across is from Fran Peavy in her treatise on Strategic Questioning. She says one of her favorites is "What would it take for you to change on this issue?" This question lets the other person create the path for change. I'd like to hear an answer to this, but I suspect there isn't one, until maybe Ayn Rand rises from the dead to say it's okay to believe the scientific consensus, or Rush Limbaugh recants and decides obscuring the reality of the climate crisis is a liberal media plot engineered by Michael Moore and Bill and Hill Clinton.

Meanwhile, back in the real world... Real people are affected. In Wednesday's Washington Post:

The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.

"These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned," said Enosik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of male elders in this Inuit village. "We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns or the wind, or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed."

The Inuit alarms, once passed off as odd stories, are earning confirmation from science.

But it's not just hot weather in the frozen north, or those quaint residual populations and their Indigenous cultures--which I would argue are at least as necessary to our future as technology and western or eastern cultures--but the global effects (which, in case this news hasn't penetrated, doesn't manifest everywhere at every time as heat waves. Big snows can be global heating indicators as well. Of course that doesn't make sense, so it must be wrong. What electrons do doesn't make sense either, so that's why atomic bombs never explode.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the New York Times Wednesday did a story on a survey of climate crisis consciousness among major corporations in the world, and found that internationally there is growing awareness though the U.S. lags. And why is this Ceres, the outfit that did the study, so concerned? Are they a lefty George Soros moveon.org think tank, part of the liberal Big Government plot? Not exactly.

What upsets them is that companies not facing up to the needs of the future are real bad long term investments. "Dozens of U.S. businesses are ignoring the issue with 'business as usual' responses that are putting their companies, and their shareholders, at risk," said Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a group whose members control a total of $3 trillion in investment capital.

Did I mention James Hansen? The NASA scientists who other scientists say is the best on climate? Whose statements and predictions in the past have proven true? He was interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes last Sunday, and there's a story on the CBS site:

I can't think of anybody who I would say is better than Hansen. You might argue that there's two or three others as good, but nobody better," says Cicerone.

And Cicerone, who’s an atmospheric chemist, said the same thing every leading scientist told 60 Minutes. "Climate change is really happening," says Cicerone. Asked what is causing the changes, Cicernone says it's greenhouse gases: "Carbon dioxide and methane, and chlorofluorocarbons and a couple of others, which are all — the increases in their concentrations in the air are due to human activities. It's that simple."

The rest of the story is about how the Bush administration censors the science, muzzles scientists (or attempts to) and casts doubt where there really is none on the basic findings, as stated above. But the Bushites insist on keeping it fuzzy.

Annoyed by the ambiguity, Hansen went public a year and a half ago, saying this about the Bush administration in a talk at the University of Iowa: "I find a willingness to listen only to those portions of scientific results that fit predetermined inflexible positions. This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster." Since then, NASA has been keeping an eye on Hansen. NASA let Pelley sit down with him but only with a NASA representative taping the interview. Other interviews have been denied.

Later in the interview:

"We have to, in the next 10 years, get off this exponential curve and begin to decrease the rate of growth of CO2 emissions," Hansen explains. "And then flatten it out. And before we get to the middle of the century, we’ve got to be on a declining curve. "If that doesn't happen in 10 years, then I don’t think we can keep global warming under one degree Celsius and that means we’re going to, that there’s a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can’t tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can’t build a wall around the ice sheets. It will be a situation that is out of our control."

"I think we know a lot more about the tipping points," says Hansen. "I think we know about the dangers of even a moderate degree of additional global warming about the potential effects in the arctic about the potential effects on the ice sheets." "You just used that word again that you’re not supposed to use — danger," Pelley remarks. "Yeah. It’s a danger," Hansen says.

There are other reputable scientists who are much more pessimistic than Hansen, and almost none who say he is overstating things. We know global heating is happening. We know we're in the early stages of a climate crisis. An intelligent species with the ability to anticipate the future should be imagining possible consequences of what's already going on, testing hypotheses and preparing for possibilities.

An intelligent species that cares about its future and that of the planet that nurtures it would be doing everything possible to slow down and stop doing what's so demonstrably harmful, so that the kinds of life that are on this planet now (be it evolved or created) has a chance to continue into the future. Is that really so much to ask? Because change is coming. We can either deal with it, or it will deal with us.

UPDATE: Reuter's reports today: In an issue of the journal Science focusing on global warming, climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona reported that if global trends continue, Earth could ultimately see sea levels 20 feet higher than they are now. That's enough to wipe out Miami and some other coastal cities. His baseline is the last big melt 130,000 years ago, and he stresses that he's being conservative in saying it might take several centuries to melt the icesheets. We're on track to get as hot as that last time but we could easily surpass it, hastening the full meltdown. Plus global heating is global, whereas the last melt was due to warming in the northern hemisphere only.

The climate warming we're in now is global and it's year-round and it's due to human influences on the climate system," he said. "That will be more damaging to the ice sheets than the that warming we had 130,000 years ago."

The ice sheets are already melting, accelerated by relatively warm water that eats away at them, said NASA' s glacier expert Bob Bindschadler.

"It's not really a debate any more about whether sea level is rising or not. I think the debate has shifted to, how rapidly is sea level rising," Bindschadler said in a telephone briefing.

Leave it to those radical alarmists at Science and NASA to get us all rattled about mere seasonal variations they are too stupid to have taken into account in the first five minutes of their analysis. Better they should listen to rabid right wingers cooking their two-dimensional data in their bedrooms, and the libertarians who would rather be free of unpleasant knowledge, as would we all.