Captain Future's Climate Crisis Log

Globe of Denial

Today we touch upon recent projections and calls for action, leading to ruminations on how to proceed in this corner of cyberspace, ending with examining the continuing dishonesty of Climate Crisis Deniers.

A group of British climate experts project that nearly a third of the Earth's land surface may face drought by the end of this century, due in large part to the Climate Crisis. That is, land affected by drought may jump from 1% currently to 30%, causing widespread crop failures, starvation and mass migration, often in the poorer parts of the world. Though the study is preliminary, "This is something we need to take extremely seriously. Even if droughts get only half as bad as we predict it will have a tremendous impact," said Vicky Pope, head climate prediction center of the Met Office Hadley Centre that issued the study.

In the U.S., a study issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists said (according to the Boston Globe) that the Climate Crisis could strain the Northeast's power grid, farms, forests and marine fisheries by the next century unless carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 3 percent each year...

This continuing parade of projections as well as hard data on present conditions are the kinds of information that likely prompted Rick Samans, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum, to call for strong and immediate measures to stop the worst from happening by cutting greenhouse gases. Speaking at a conference in Mexico of the world's top twenty polluting nations, he judged that efforts should have begun in earnest 10 or 15 years ago, but that the evidence is so strong now that businesses must act. Though the task is monumental, he said that if governments begin to lead, businesses will be able to move quickly. "If we organise ourselves better as an international community across the public and private sectors, there is hope," he said.

Others at the conference echoed these views. The arguments seem to be shifting from whether it is necessary to change, to how to change--and those arguments over which technologies and forms of energy should be employed and which should not are moving to the forefront.

Which leads me to this bit of musing...

In the past, on this blog and elsewhere, I've advocated for approaches I believed would help encourage a critical mass of attention to this most urgent and most vital of issues, including switching to a more urgent vocabulary, like calling this a Climate Crisis instead of climate change, or Global Heating rather than global warming. That's all well underway now.

Lately I've begun advocating for a dual approach, and the awareness that we must attack both the problems caused by the Climate Crisis as they occur in the present, and act to forestall even worse problems in the future--what I eventually took to calling the Fix It and Stop It strategy.

I will continue to do that, using whatever vocabulary seems to best get the idea across. But what else can I do in this corner of cyberspace, given limited time and resources? I would like to do more on this second phase--the evaluating of technologies and strategies to fix it and stop it. I don't know if I'm equipped to do a lot of that, but I'll explore it.

So I am tempted to leave behind the attempts to persuade, to address the Climate Crisis skeptic and Deniers, or their objections. Partly that's due to the limited time, partly to my uncertainty that there are that many actual skeptics left. That is, people with an open mind who still need to be convinced that the Climate Crisis exists, it is due largely to greenhouse gases, it is potentially catastrophic to the future, and it requires immediate action. Or at least those who would concede that even if they are not 100% sure, we have a responsibility to the future to take strong action.

Do they exist anymore? I don't know. The Deniers exist, but they are fewer, and when not deluded in the manner of the Flat Earth Society, often are paid Deniers, employing intellectually dishonest means to serve their political and corporate sponsors. Since they persist in making this a conservative Republican issue, for no good reason other than financial ties to some companies, I am tempted to forget about them, since they are likely to be losing their base of power in Washington over the next two years, beginning in November.

I'm hoping for example that Senator Inhofe will no longer be big cheese at the Senate Environment Committee come January, so maybe the budget he's got to fill airwaves and inboxes with his ravings will decline, and his more deadly obstructions will stop. (His latest "major" speech was discredited most thoroughly by Grist magazine.) But I have to admit I continue to learn something from these folks, not about the climate, but about their cynical and intellectually dishonest tactics, and the kinds of thinking and feeling they try to exploit.

For example, they haven't picked a fight with Grist that I know of, but they have with Miles O'Brien at CNN, who also refuted Inhofe's speech point by point. (Think Progress covers part of that controversy here and here. ) A further press release from Inhofe's office ridiculed O'Brien for basing a scientific observation on the fictional movie, The Day After Tomorrow. But even in the excerpts of the Inhofe-O'Brien interchange the release itself quoted, it was clear that's not what happened. Inhofe was repeating a favorite Climate Crisis Denier theme, which is partly a lie and partly a paradox that by now they are simply exploiting: that the same scientists who are crying wolf about global warming were speaking in similiar dire tones about a coming Ice Age, back in the 70s, and even more recently.

The lie is that climate scientists in the 1970s were saying this. There were sensational accounts in magazines, not in scientific journals. But more to the point, there is a theory that global heating could warm ocean waters sufficiently to change the path of the deep ocean currents that to some extent control climate in specific areas, like much of North America. There is in fact some evidence that this is happening. Such a change in one major current could lead to Ice Age conditions in North America. This was dramatized, Hollywood-style, in The Day After Tomorrow, and like any good communicator, O'Brien referred to it so more viewers would know what they were talking about.

It was dishonest to say otherwise, and it is intellectually dishonest at this point to pretend not to understand that heating of the earth's atmosphere can lead to all kinds of climate changes--from droughts to superstorms to Ice Age conditions in specific places. It is a seeming paradox that isn't contradictory. Yet to those who don't know the theory, it sounds like an obvious contradiction. And so the Deniers exploit that impression to discredit climate science.

How do they do this? Why do people fall for it? Why do they believe that these scientists are so naive or stupid that they don't see an obvious contradiction? I confess that trying to figure out the answers to these questions keeps me coming back to observe the Deniers and the skeptics they hope to exploit.

Nobody really wants to believe that civilization is doomed, that much of the life we know will disappear, that we will see widespread suffering, and our lives will change dramatically--and those of the children and grandchildren of today, even more dramatically. We'd all rather be skeptics. We would feel safer, more comfortable. But we have responsibilities to the future. We can't afford to indulge ourselves, and we can't afford to let these understandable feelings be exploited.