Thanksgiving and Climate Emergency

The US tradition of going home (usually driving) for Thanksgiving Day is being challenged this year by several very strong and large storms that might be called unusual, except strong and large storms aren't unusual any more.  This is but one way that Thanksgiving meets the Climate Crisis.

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Or this year, the Climate Emergency--a term that has emerged from recent protests, and has been proclaimed 2019's Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries, beating out other contenders such as "climate denial" and "eco-anxiety."  The urgency of climate has been both accidentally and deliberately minimized for years by the common nomenclature, from the scientific but overly cuddly "greenhouse effect" and "global warming" to "climate change" sponsored by Republican climate deniers.  It's only been in the past year or two that "climate crisis" has finally become common, only to be largely supplanted now by this better term.  For "climate emergency" it surely is.

But this year as well, "eco-anxiety" is a thing.  For some, the spectre of climate catastrophe sparks the fear that underlies denial, while for others it just promotes despair.  Despair is not usually congruent with gratitude.  So it's hard to accept that a planet's lifeforms on the way to extinction merits much in the way of thanksgiving.

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Reporter Cara Buckley explored her own climate angst in the New York Times.  "But how are we supposed to live in our hearts and souls with such an existential threat that is also, as birds and bees vanish and trees topple and die, so excruciatingly intimate?" she asked.

She sought answers at a Brooklyn workshop titled “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis,”  Denial turns out not to be one of the ways. "Lou Leonard, a founder of One Earth Sangha, a Buddhist group focused on the crisis, told me that living like climate change is real and that we can do something about it are signals to others — and can help shift cultural norms... 
“We need to break the cognitive dissonance in as many ways as we can in order to be more real with what’s happening,” Mr. Leonard said. Making seemingly inconvenient changes now, he said, can also prepare us for what might be to come."

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While all the little things we may individually do to lessen our carbon footprint etc. may not change much in the big picture, doing them may well be important to us and those we know.  Zhiwa Woodbury, an eco-psychologist (a job description that not so long ago didn't exist) suggests that "altering habits like how we eat can make people feel more empowered and less overwhelmed," confronting our own climate trauma while also shifting our relationship to the natural world.

In the Red Hook workshop, which used the pioneering decades-old work of the environmental grief activist Joanna Macy, the facilitator, Jess Serrante, said something that hit me like a thunderclap.

“Our pain for what is happening is the other side of the coin of our love for the world,” she told us. “We feel such depths of despair because we love the planet so much.”

Several psychologists told me they are telling the same thing to patients who are grappling with eco-despair: Feeling depressed about the crisis is actually a sane, healthy response. Yet as a culture, we pathologize depression as a personal failing, and as individuals, we avoid it, partly, Ms. Serrante said, out of the fear that if we dive in we won’t emerge. But that causes us to shut down. By jumping into the pain, it can alchemize into something bigger, Ms. Serrante told us, and reconnect us with our deepest selves."

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Towards the end of her piece, Buckley is paired off with "a man who worked in corporate disaster preparedness" to answer the facilitator's question of "why we were grateful to be alive at this time."  Buckley said because  “people are more aware than ever about what we have wrought? Because this is the logical conclusion to what the industrial revolution set in motion?”

“Wow,” the disaster preparedness guy replied.

He told me he was grateful that he was living at a time when we could see gorgeous animals, plants and sprawling wilderness that might not be around much longer. My breath caught. I hadn’t thought of that. Something shifted." 

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Part of the proper response to the climate emergency, I believe, is to be active in ways appropriate to yourself, in spreading awareness and accelerating political pressure.  Because efforts to address the causes may still work and may still be effective in saving the far future (though few if any of us will be alive long enough to know that.)  And because efforts to address the effects are crucial now, and will be increasingly so next year, the year after, and pretty much forever.

Addressing the effects and addressing the causes--particularly through the complete realignment of transport and the grid to clean energy--will be the work of the 21st century, at least.  Adults in position to do so may consider what occupations and projects they can undertake to do this work, and make that career change.  Younger people can guide their careers in those directions from the start.

But we also can't get lost in abstractions, for in the end they aren't sustaining.  We are here right now, and life is moment to moment.  Consciously being grateful for what natural world we have, and seeking out opportunities to experience the natural world that too often becomes abstraction and background--is also important.

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Joanna Macy was mentioned in this workshop.  She was a pioneer in bringing the insights of Buddhist meditation and ecology together with eco-activism.  She is also the author of the essay on gratitude I quoted here for a number of past Thanksgivings.  So for this Thanksgiving, here are three paragraphs from it:

"We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--it is a wonder beyond words. It is an extraordinary privilege to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness that brings awareness of our own actions and the ability to make choices. It lets us choose to take part in the healing of our world."

"Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction, which we could never of ourselves create."

"There are hard things to face in our world today, if we want to be of use. Gratitude, when it is real, offers no blinders. On the contrary, in the face of devastation and tragedy, it can ground us, especially when we're scared. It can hold us steady for the work to be done."

Too Bad To Be True: Famous Psych Experiments And How They Lied

Towards the end of my relatively brief sojourn in a small editorial services company in the early 1990s, I had an official conversation with a management consultant hired to help us to--well, I was never quite sure what he was hired for.

 But he was a genial and intelligent older guy.  In the course of our conversation he told me about what is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment: for a simulation of a prison, students were split into two groups: guards and prisoners.  The social scientist conducting the experiment took the role of superintendent, and his assistant played the warden.  (More details of the experiment are on the wikipedia page.)

During the experiment the guards became authoritarian and even sadistic.  The prisoners became passive, and turned on each other.  What this all meant, the consultant said, was that we inevitably become our roles in an organization.  No matter how we think we will behave, our position in the power structure dictates how we actually will behave.   There could be no doubt of this, he said, because the experiment has been replicated many times.  He seemed to suggest he'd taken part in a similar experiment.

Shortly thereafter I left the organization, though not entirely because of this conversation, or the explanation it supposedly provided for how some people in the organization actually were behaving.  It was only recently that I learned that almost everything the consultant told me was untrue, overblown or based on fraud.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, a classic in psychology texts, was itself a fraud.  According to this recent article in Vox: "But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit."

The guards were coached, a prisoner was acting.  It was fixed.  But this blatant fraud is only one of many, many lavishly publicized experiments called into question or proven to be bullshit.  The Vox article has many links to the various problems.

As supposedly scientific experiments, the biggest problem has been how few of these startling conclusions could be replicated in subsequent experiments.  (The consultant was quite wrong in saying the Stanford study was often replicated.  It was never successfully replicated.)

But even studies that apparently were replicated are rife with problems that belie their conclusions, including the most famous: the Miligram experiments in which test subjects repeatedly gave what they thought was an electric shock to a person they thought was another test subject, because they were told to do so.  Results showed a high percentage of participants kept on giving shocks even when the receiver was evidently in pain.

That initial experiment has also been called into question: "In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired. She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter.""

But this experiment apparently was replicated many times with the same conclusions--or was it?  Critics point out that failed attempts to replicate were unlikely to have been published.  A statistical study of the later experiments in various places and under various conditions showed that the percentage of those who gave the full shock treatment varied from 28% to 91%, which suggests at the very least that time, place and choice of test subjects matters a great deal.

A lot of these psych experiments just don't pass the smell test--the experiments are poorly designed, and the subject pool is too small, too limited (mostly white college kids) to merit universal conclusions.  (If you don't believe me, that's the more seasoned analysis of the eminent professor of psychology Jerome Kagan.)

Yet those universal conclusions and even more universal extrapolations are made, and not just by management consultants.  They are made above all by best-selling authors like Daniel Kahneman,  Robert Sapolsky and Dan Ariely.

In a review of Ariely's 2008 book Predictably Irrational for the San Francisco Chronicle--a review I consider now to be one of the best I wrote--I noted some of the psychological experiments he wrote about--which, as it happens, includes at least one thoroughly debunked since, as noted in the above Vox article.  I expressed my doubts about their conclusions (due especially to the age, racial and cultural biases inherent in testing mostly or only college students) but I also questioned the author's overall assertion: "While Ariely's stated goal is to understand the decision-making processes behind behavior ("yours, mine, and everybody else's"), he may be overreaching in the applicability of his conclusions. "We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains," he writes, but he presents no evidence of this causal relationship."

That is, not only aren't the experimental conclusions valid, but the reason he gives, while typical, is totally unsupported by other evidence: it's because of the wiring of our brains.

The metaphor of our minds or brains as computers, with certain aspects being "hard-wired," is deceptive enough when not taken so literally, though indeed most people who use the metaphor do take it this literally.

Our brains may be like computers in some respects, but mostly, not at all. And our brains or minds are definitely not actual computers, any more than they were telephone exchanges or steam engines or clockworks, which were the metaphors (often taken literally) of previous times.

There are, for one thing, no wires in our heads, hard or otherwise. It's amazing how glibly psychologists and economists assert they know anything about "wiring" in everybody's brains.  I doubt they know much about the wiring in their cars.


The Miligram experiments have been an obsession with me for years because of a personal connection.  They were conducted at Yale for years, from the early 1960s into the early 1970s.  I was in New Haven in 1970, and answered an ad in the newspaper for participants in an experiment--the ad was nearly identical to the ones from the 60s to entice participants to the Miligram experiments.

Those experiments depended on deception, beginning with their purpose.  Subjects volunteered for what they thought was an experiment in memory.  I was enticed by the ad--mostly by the money offered ($25 sticks in my mind), as I was at loose ends at the time.  So I called the number but instead of making an appointment immediately, I asked questions first.  I got only vague answers and I smelled deception, so I didn't participate.

Later I read accounts of these experiments, at least one of which claimed that nobody had refused to give the electric shocks as ordered. (The actual percentage registered in the first series was 65% compliance.)  I was furious. If I had participated, I certainly would have refused.  When I told my story to a prominent social scientist, he cautioned that I could not know how I would actually behave in the circumstances.

I may not know how I would respond under all circumstances, but I certainly do know how I would have responded under those circumstances.  If for no other reason, it was 1970 and I was 24!  I had long hair, I was a veteran peace activist and Vietnam war protester with a record of defying authority, including college science departments.  What's the likelihood that I would inflict pain on an innocent person because some asshole in a white coat told me I had to?

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And of course it wouldn't just be me.  There were students on the streets angrily rebelling against college administrations, against participation of science departments in the military industrial complex, plus hippies and Yippies and so on gleefully defying authority in general.  The idea that any of them would sit there obediently pressing the button is ludicrous.

But then, they were unlikely to volunteer in the first place.  One also suspects that if they did, they likely would have been screened out.  Which is the larger issue in the test subject problem: who are these people who volunteer to be test subjects and why?  And conversely, who wouldn't even consider it?

What is the mindset of someone who volunteers, or who is doing it for the money?  If they do it for the money, aren't they predisposed to do what they're told?  And even volunteers--why would somebody volunteer for an experiment and then refuse to take part in it?  A volunteer would more likely have faith in the experimenters, in their expertise and in the scientific experiment.  These folks were self-selected to obey.

If the results were otherwise valid, some extrapolations might be possible--to volunteer soldiers following orders, or those who agree ideologically with the authority figures, or perhaps even with the social contract of doing the work you are assigned for the money you earn.  But not the kind of universal conclusions typically made because of what these experiments purport to prove.

Similarly, that people may violate their own morality at the behest of authority figures, or that people may find themselves committing acts because of the role or situation they would not have believed they would commit, are phenomena that have happened under real world conditions.  Atrocities are real, and happen with alarming frequency. But these experiments, however sensational, are not necessary to confirm this.  They just don't seem to be very enlightening on the question of why, let alone who, when or where.

Instead, they lead us farther from possible insights, and suggest that such behavior is determined for us all.  Hard-wired.  That is perniciously false.

Behavioral psychology is probably at the apex of its power and acceptance, at the same time as its methods are falling apart.  Other kinds of experiments are also being called into question, based for example on faulty statistical methodology or deception,  as well as the still poorly understood phenomenon of confirmation bias applied to experimental design and findings.

But a kind of confirmation bias on a larger scale is the most troubling, because such experiments confirm an ideology of determinism, of only mechanistic explanations, that dominates science.  In the life sciences particularly, the bias is towards the destructive side of human nature: violent instincts, individual competition, fights to the death.  It is against--and often doesn't see--social and conciliatory instincts, cooperation and empathy.  These were ideologically judged long ago to be evolutionary losers, selected out by the struggle for existence. There is perhaps less of this now, but it still seems to be the prevailing ideology.

These inflated conclusions supposedly confirmed by science are especially dangerous, because we begin to base our beliefs about society and ourselves on them, and therefore our behaviors and expectations.

Our societies and our lives within them are based on cooperation, conciliation, compassion and a shared sense of fairness. As individuals as well as groups,
we are mixed creatures, we are complex, as life and the world are complex.  In literature, if characters are internally compelled to act contrary to their morality we call it tragedy, not hard-wired or human nature.  It is part of a much more complex human nature.  We can to some extent govern our behavior through educated self-awareness and through culture.   If science can't acknowledge that, it isn't telling the truth.

Climate Crisis: A Little More on Long-Lag

An additional thought on the long-lag problem as a concept.  There was a certain resistance to it, but people now generally accept that actions in the present can cause cancer in the future.  Smoking is the most obvious, but there are others such as exposure to certain chemicals, air pollution, etc.

So the idea of a long-lag is pretty clear.  This is despite the fact that most people have no idea of why smoking causes cancer, other than it ruins the lungs.  This is based on simple drawings (black smoke makes black spots on lungs etc.) that may not be all that accurate.  And they have even less knowledge on how various environmental factors cause cancers, partly because medical experts aren't entirely sure either.  But there's a cause and effect relationship.

People accept this long-lag effect even though it doesn't always work.  Some people smoke for forty years and don't get cancer.  Other people have never smoked and do get lung cancer.  It's a long-lag lottery.

The physical mechanics of the cause and effect of global heating are quite clear.  The phenomenon can be understood with basic physics, basic chemistry.  For science semi-literates like me there are simple models that explain it.  And there is plenty of historical and experimental evidence, as well as models that have predicted real world events.

 The cause and effect relationship of greenhouse gas pollutants and global heating (as well as generally from global heating to climate change) are much better understood and easier to explain than the cause and effect relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

Moreover, there is very little long-lag lottery about the climate crisis.  The chance of polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and ending up with no heating and no climate change is vanishingly small.  Especially since the effects of past pollution are demonstrably happening right now.

 Moreover, there is is at least as much consensus among scientists in the field on climate change as there ever was on cancer and smoking.  Yet that science and those scientists are disbelieved, whereas the long-lag causes of cancer are accepted.

So once again, the problem isn't understanding long-lag cause and effect relationships.  It's other stuff.

Climate Crisis: The Long-Lag Non-Problem

Futurist Jamais Cascio makes a distinction between long-run problems and long-lag problems.  Long run problems evolve over time, and can be addressed when they come to fruition as well as along the way.  Long-lag problems are consequences of what is done now that doesn't come to fruition for a long time, but by then it is too late to address them.

The climate crisis is a classic long-lag problem.  We pour carbon into the atmosphere now and in 20 or 30 years, the atmosphere has heated up proportionately and the climate changes.

Part of our difficulties in addressing the climate crisis, Cascio says, is that we're not good at conceptualizing long-lag problems: "We are kind of used to thinking about long-run problems: we know this thing is going to hit us in fifty years, and we’ll wait a bit because we will have developed better systems by the time it hits. We are not so good at thinking about long-lag systems: it’s going to hit us in fifty years, but the cause and proximate sources are actually right now, and if we don’t make a change right now, that fifty years out is going to hit us regardless."

"We’re not really good at thinking about long-lag problems."  And that's a problem.

Well, I don't buy it.  Humans have been thinking about long-lag problems since rudimentary civilization, probably since the Pleistocene.  For instance: if you eat all the food you stored for winter in the first week, before spring comes you will have starved to death.  If people hadn't figured this out, there probably wouldn't be people anymore.  Even animals have figured this out.

Most of the health warnings we get are long-lag warnings.  Smoke tobacco now and in thirty years you'll get lung cancer.  We may ignore that warning--and reasons that we might do pertain to how we respond to the climate crisis warnings--but we understand what it means.

So the basic thinking is not beyond even the average citizen, let alone scientists and leaders who are supposed to think about such things.  It's more about attitude and will and the irrational forces within us.

But I believe that it is precisely because we do understand the long-lag problem that these other factors get involved.  If we are afraid of certain changes in the present, if we are frightened at the prospect of future catastrophe that we've had a hand in causing, if our fears and selfishness overpowers our understanding, etc., that's going to set up conflicts within us.  And that's where the shadow can get thrown over the whole process of "thinking" about the climate crisis.

One of the salient features of such strong currents from the unconscious (characterized as denial or projection or whatever) is that they convince our conscious mind that they are rational.  Like the logic of dreams that seems perfectly reasonable during the dream, and totally whacked out when you wake up.

The real problems are more on the order of facing that I don't care enough about my children's and grandchildren's world to sacrifice or risk anything in my present, but I can't admit that, especially not to myself.  So I deny that there's a problem.

Or that the future is always at least a little uncertain so maybe it won't happen (maybe I'll discover a new food source before spring), so I don't have to deliberately do anything now, because I lack the will.  And if I can get a few others to agree with me, I feel safer, at least in the present.

This is apart from believing what someone is paying you to believe.

So I don't buy that it's a conceptual problem basically.  There are conceptual problems in dealing with complex systems and so on, that pertain to addressing the causes and effects of the climate crisis--lots of problems.  But the time lag isn't it.  It's the complex of conflicting feelings that the climate crisis stir up.  That's the crisis within.

The Death of Superheroes

Superheroes have never been bigger box office. Legions of dedicated fans parsing each new film across the Internet sit among other less intense moviegoers out for spectacle, preferably in IMax and 3-D.

After some false starts in previous decades, the Marvel comic book-based movie franchise has hit upon its formula of combining groups of its copyrighted superheroes into several movies a year, still adding new characters from its comics to the mix (most recently Dr. Strange.)

The other comic book franchise, DC Comics, is trying to do the same with its formidable stable of superheroes, including the very first: Superman. Though its attempts to apply the Marvel formula have met with mixed results, it continues to stir fan interest as it adds more of its characters to its movies. Both franchises are expanding their demographic reach by transforming formerly white male characters into women and people of color.

Moreover the superhero movies are of a piece with other “tent pole” movie “franchises,” notably Star Wars and Star Trek. They also combine visual effects action on a huge scale with character repartee. At a recent screening of Dr. Strange, the trailer for the next Star Wars movie show it to be indistinguishable from past Star Wars movies. Meanwhile the music for Dr. Strange is almost indistinguishable from the music for the Abrams’ Star Trek films (particularly the first), by the same composer.

But in their escalating scale, the superheroes are losing their reason for being, apart from visual thrills and commerce. Superheroes now exclusively battle super villains, when they aren’t fighting each other. They are gods fighting other gods. They fight ostensibly to save humanity, but they are completely detached from people.

That’s not how they started, or what first endeared them to readers and made them heroic.

Superman, the first superhero, was born in the Great Depression. Jerry Siegel was 20 when he and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1934, influenced, he recalled, by “President Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats...being unemployed and worried during the Depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany...seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden...”

Siegel was also reading about crusading heroes and seeing them in the movies. He wondered how he could help these victims of the 30s. “How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer.”

Strikingly unlike today’s superheroes, Superman’s first exploits were saving an unjustly condemned woman from the electric chair, and stopping a wife-beater. In his 1930s adventures, he rescued miners in a cave-in, battled stock market manipulators and munitions manufacturers fomenting wars to sell their wares. He fought crime, but also poverty and unsafe labor conditions. He came to the aid of individuals in trouble, and was devoted to the common good. He was a selfless, high-spirited and humorous hero of the people.

Later superheroes, like Batman and Spider-Man, were motivated by a sense of justice, partly because of past trauma involving crime committed against parents or parental figures. These days some superheroes (like Batman) and action movie villains tend more towards elaborate revenge fantasies.

Born in the early 1960s, Spider-Man achieved heroic status partly by battling powerful villains but also through navigating the difficulties of ordinary life. Like Superman, he had a secret identity and led a double life, which grounded him. His relationships and affections—with his parental figure elderly aunt his love interests and friends—as well as his un-superhero-like problems with a nasty boss gave him a human dimension. His exploits were often related to actual people he was trying to protect or rescue. The success of the Spider-Man comics jump-started the Marvel brand, and set the template for several of its other superheroes.

Today’s superhero movies are almost completely detached from recognizable people in individual trouble, or even groups of people in specific situations of danger and tyranny. With the violent abstraction of video games, they battle across interchangeable urban landscapes that are little more than visual Lego constructions to twist and destroy. This is not to say they are without value, or do not offer some ethical and philosophical points of view. But for all their manipulated excitement and cleverness, there is an emptiness at their center.

In some sense, movies like a lot else that depends on technology, do what they do because they are capable of doing it. I counted at least a dozen visual effects companies in the credits to Dr. Strange.

Beyond delivering new and more elaborate effects, it could be that this turn in superhero movies speaks to our sense of powerlessness over the forces that confront us. Perhaps when the climate itself seems to be turning against humanity, it seems too large to be addressed by the civilization that is thoughtlessly causing the climate to deform. It’s apparently a matter for cosmic forces, for the gods and their evil counterparts. But in these movies their battles are meaningless—just elaborate versions of fistfights and wars, that reveal nothing and accomplish only wish fulfillment victories.

But the dangers that confront us may not be beyond human capabilities to address. It even seems that soberly dealing with the climate crisis should be a fairly ordinary extension of current civilization, even if it requires heroic measures.

But perhaps it’s felt to be beyond ordinary, and beyond us altogether. That may be partly because as a culture we’ve avoided talking about it. It requires more: a vision of what is possible, and models that realize those possibilities. Some versions of the hero—of the original superhero-- might help. But that’s not what we’re getting in today’s popular culture.

Climate Crisis: Extremes and Extremists

Summer begins with an intense heat wave in parts of the western U.S.   Monday record-breaking heat in Phoenix, Arizona pushed the 115F mark.  Several deaths are already attributable to the heat.

Such temperatures are the beginning of a practical education in extreme heat.  Because at a certain point it is not just hotter.  It is extreme, with its particular and extreme consequences.  For example: "Health experts say even a difference of a few degrees outside can cause the body temperature to spike, potentially affecting the brain and other organs."

Update 6/23: Scientific American: "As many as 3,331 people annually could die from heat waves by 2080 in New York City alone if no steps are taken to adapt to warming temperatures and reduce emissions, a new study warns."

Extreme heat is quiet --it isn't as dramatically obvious as a tornado or a monsoon.  But as a Weather Channel feature titled You Will Never Guess What Kind of Weather is Deadliest says:"Violent winds from a hurricane or tornado, lightning from thunderstorms, and rising floodwaters come to mind. But the weather event that actually produces the greatest number of fatalities is heat."

Extreme heat also has consequences for the natural and human-made environment, including infrastructure.  In part of Arizona yesterday it was even too hot for airplanes to fly safely.

Despite the now routine warnings that come with news of extreme heat--including that due to the climate crisis, there's going to be more of it--extremists still deny the connection, and are therefore less likely to prepare for this onrushing future, personally and at any level of community.

How is this possible? To admit this is something other than some freak weather is to accept the reality of the climate crisis--which is to begin to accept the climate crisis future.  And to realize that there is a discouragingly noisy and contemptuous group that constitutionally and perhaps professionally, deny it and any efforts to address it, and do so with violence.

Even now, it is possible to avoid some of the most ominous signs of the climate crisis.  Maybe news about the increasingly alarming Arctic warming is just too far away.  Or the invisible carbon pollution, that scientists at the same Hawaii observatory that made the first carbon measurements in the 1950s saw spiking to the  level of 400 parts per million--a measurement since confirmed by every observatory in the world, including Antarctica.  This is the highest level in 400 million years, and is unlikely to fall below this level in the lifetime of anyone alive today, implying grave consequences.

Even global temperature rise--which not surprisingly broke records for the 13th straight month in May--are not obvious everywhere.  But the consequences are increasingly obvious, and the situation is so pronounced that scientists are no longer shy about linking effects like the recent European flooding to global heating as a cause.

Some of the tepid or inconstant response to the climate crisis is probably because it's a brand new danger, at least consciously.  Seeing its dimensions, its ramifications to consider when making decisions, requires big adjustments.

So maybe it isn't too surprising that Americans are once again moving in greater numbers to the South, looking for lower living costs and jobs, even though that's where heat and related factors are going to be pronounced.  And again they're moving to Florida, where its already inundated coasts and general low-lying relationship to sea level rise get added to heat and the predicted ferocity of hurricanes.

But a lot is stubborn denial--and denial by its nature is stubborn.  Some denial is healthy, and might even be courage, although in extreme heat, bravado can get you killed.  But a lot of denial is not healthy, and is something like cowardice.

Denial is a powerful habit, a protective mechanism against fear and the necessity of changing to confront dangers.  In his long professional life from the 1930s into the 21st century, American writer Arthur Miller concluded in his autobiography that nothing is more politically powerful and culturally pervasive than denial.

Extremists who huddle together in systematic denial may sooner or later need to confront phenomena like extreme heat, extreme storms, extreme fires, while they deny the causal relationship that could help prepare for dealing better with these effects, and help address the causes that might prevent even worse consequences in the farther future.

By now we know they are always with us, in however dwindling number, and like the extremists who with a straight face can vote against denying guns to terrorists, their residual power--and the power of denial--can still warp our world.

But those who know better and are young must take leadership in saving the future. In a different context recently, history filmmaker Ken Burns quoted Abraham Lincoln, but one part of the quote especially pertains to how we choose to address the climate crisis future: "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth.”

The Future of the Climate Crisis is the Climate Crisis Future

It's finally beginning to sink in.  The future is going to be very different, because of the climate crisis.

Global heating is going to have consequences for the near future, since it is caused by past greenhouse gases pollution.  We should be preparing to address the effects, but apparently we're just starting to understand the breadth and depth of those effects.

From Reuters last week:

Climate change can be expected to boost the number of annual premature U.S. deaths from heat waves in coming decades and to increase mental health problems from extreme weather like hurricanes and floods, a U.S. study said on Monday.

"I don't know that we've seen something like this before, where we have a force that has such a multitude of effects," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told reporters at the White House about the study. "There's not one single source that we can target with climate change, there are multiple paths that we have to address."

Heat waves were estimated to cause 670 to 1,300 U.S. deaths annually in recent years. Premature U.S. deaths from heat waves can be expected to rise more than 27,000 per year by 2100, from a 1990 baseline, one scenario in the study said. The rise outpaced projected decreases in deaths from extreme cold.

Extreme heat can cause more forest fires and increase pollen counts and the resulting poor air quality threatens people with asthma and other lung conditions. The report said poor air quality will likely lead to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, hospital visits, and acute respiratory illness each year by 2030.

Climate change also threatens mental health, the study found. Post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and general anxiety can all result in places that suffer extreme weather linked to climate change, such as hurricanes and floods. More study needs to be done on assessing the risks to mental health, it said."

These effects include more widespread disease borne by insects whose warm-weather range is increased, which may include the increasingly worrisome Zika virus.

Science Daily offers more details from this multi-agency, peer reviewed report, particularly about the mental effects.  But it also includes this interesting key to the future:

Emerging evidence also shows those who are actively involved in climate change adaptation, or mitigation, might experience considerable health and well-being benefits, the report adds.

Translated into human, it means that people who work at addressing the causes and effects of the climate crisis  are likely to benefit themselves as well as others.  But doing good--and doing something--may well provide more than better health.  Either gradually or suddenly but pretty certainly eventually, a lot of the economy is going to be devoted to addressing the effects and the causes of the climate crisis.  That means more jobs--and what may well be seen as more vocations, more calls to service--in areas like clean energy, public health and new infrastructure.  (See the efforts for 1 million climate change jobs.)

The barriers to understanding and accepting all this are due partly to the climate inside.  In addition to denial, this commentator suggests dissociative behavior in response to predictions and now the realities of the climate crisis are due to societal trauma going back generations.  (He even uses the authentic version of a widely misquoted Jung quotation.) He suggests this trauma must be recognized and dealt with before society can really face up to the climate crisis future.

That future of dramatic effects may be coming soon.  In addition to last week's news about the possible effects of faster polar melting, there's this new study that suggests the cooling effect of clouds has been overstated. "If the findings are borne out by further research, it suggests that making progress against global warming will be even harder," notes the NY Times.

There is a range of uncertainty in all these figures.  But they can safely be regarded as minimums.  That's only prudent.  While scientists and statisticians do their research, leaders and parents ought to be facing up to the general outline of this future, dominated by the climate crisis and its effects.  People will live and work in this future, and how to do that constructively, to minimize suffering and try to prevent even worse outcomes, is the work of the future that starts now.

Climate Sea Changes

We live on land--so we're obsessed with the impacts of the climate crisis on land areas, or at least the interaction of water, especially sea levels, and land.

But the biggest potential threat to humanity has always been the effects of global heating on the oceans.  We know very little about that.  The oceans are worlds in themselves, as ecosystems and other phenomena inhabit various depths, for instance.

We've known that the oceans--covering 3/4 of the planet--have been absorbing most of the heating--up to 95%.  A new study starts quantifying that:

Gleckler is the lead author of a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change finding that, in the past two decades, ocean heat content has been rising rapidly and that, much more than before, heat is also mixing into the deeper layers of the ocean, rather than remaining near the surface.

The Washington Post story goes on to conclude:

The consequences of upper-ocean warming are well documented. From the bleaching of corals to the potential for more-intense hurricanes, a warmer surface has profound consequences for anything living in the oceans (this is where most sea life is) but also on land. Heating the ocean also raises sea levels, because warm water expands.

The consequences of warming the middle and deepest layers are less clear and less immediate to those of us living at the surface, but they are also sure to be significant. The new study provided a global overview of increasing ocean warming, rather than any specific prediction of regional consequences. But warming the deep ocean could lead to changes in its circulation, Gleckler said.

Ocean circulation is a powerful driver of global climate.  Other weather-makers that begin in the oceans include hurricanes and the big daddy of the day, El Nino.  In an article tracking changes in the oceans over the past generation, Forbes begins by noting new research that concludes: While we can’t say that climate change causes El Nino, the evidence is mounting that the warming of our planet could be intensifying the natural phenomenon, which in turn can lead to some extreme weather events.

What we apparently don't know is the effects on ocean life, which is another existential threat.  We do know humans have been overfishing for decades, and yet another study says it's worse that we thought.  Partly through cynical manipulation of data, the amount of overfishing has been grossly underestimated, and as a consequence the quantity of fish being caught in recent decades has declined more than reported.

This means there is less resilience out there that previously believed, as the consequences of global heating play havoc with sea life.  That's apart from the effects of pollution, of huge dead zones and floating countries of garbage.   Millions of people depend on seafood, and ultimately we all do.  We've felt it locally in the US as species that used to be plentiful have all but disappeared.  As other easy sources of land-based protein become unsustainable (and unhealthy), we're growing more dependent on the oceans.

The effects of global heating on the oceans is still being determined.  On land, the effects are easier to see.  They finally were visible to the economists and others who gathered for the annual World Economics Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  Just last year there was a book of articles by various economists looking ahead a hundred years.  Few of them even mentioned the climate crisis as influencing the future.  But this year, a survey of 750 experts named climate change disasters as the biggest potential threat to the global economy in 2016.

So what's behind this change?  Nothing particularly has happened, other than the steady acceleration of accumulated disasters, requiring massive spending that rarely enters political discourse.  Maybe it's a psychological change.

Psychology itself is suddenly getting interested in the climate crisis, in the comical way today's psychological establishment does.  So far they think denial has something to do with it (big insight there), although they do come up with some fascinating examples: people so deep in denial that they contradict themselves within minutes.

Nobody wants to believe this is happening.  We all wish it weren't, and we'd all like to hide from it as long as we can.  But at certain point the weight of evidence and argument shifts the conventional wisdom, and what's acceptable, and accepted: a sea change.  This seems to be happening with the climate crisis.  Better late than never, maybe.

P.S./Update: The numbers are in and to no one's surprise, 2015 was the hottest year on record.  The newsworthy evidence though is that it was the HOTTEST year on record.  

Climate and Violence

The terrorist attacks on Paris--ostensibly over French participation in the Syrian civil war--so close in time to the upcoming international climate conference in Paris, brought the two subjects together.

While many US Republicans are trying very hard to push the terrorism fear button, in part to drive out any other issue, Senator Bernie Sanders was quick to assert that the climate crisis remains the most dangerous challenge, in part because of its role in ongoing wars, including in Syria.

The latest to be mocked for saying this--but also the latest to inspire stories that make the link--is Prince Charles of the UK, who will speak at the conference in Paris.  Others also have been making this case.

But we don't need to debate the past, or the present, to see the potential for climate-related violence in the future--and the more extreme the climate crisis, the more extreme is the potential violence.

Recently an acknowledged scholar of the Nazi Holocaust argues that the climate crisis could bring about another genocide.  His contention is based on his research into the history of  Germany under Hitler, and the causes of German aggression.  An ideology of superiority and destiny justifying any action was crucial.  But what has been forgotten is the prime motivation: Hitler's conquests to obtain resources, especially natural resources.

The scholar Timothy Snyder put it this way: "[Hitler] led Germany into a war to seize the fertile territory of Ukraine. That’s what the war was actually all about. The western front, which we focus on, was a distraction for Hitler. The main thing was the eastern front, destroying the Soviet Union, seizing Ukraine."

This seems to contradict the way many understand World War II, and Hitler's "inexplicable" turn to Russia after the fall of France, when invading England seemed the next logical step.  But Snyder's view is not 21st century revisionism.  Some observers at the time believed this as well.  Journalist Pierre van Passen also believed Hitler's turn to the Soviet Union was about resources, although he emphasized iron ore.  Others claim that the Holocaust was in part a trial run for the genocide of Slavs, and the conquest of  farmlands of Poland and eastern Europe.

The first climate related (specifically drought-related) genocides may have already happened in Africa.  Extreme climate often destroys resources, with too little water or too much, with the devastation that continues after extreme weather, including disorder and disease.  People will fight over food, and groups--ethnic groups, nations--will fight for access to food and other resources.  To minimize those conflicts and that suffering in the future as well as understanding it and dealing with it appropriately in the present, requires addressing the causes and the effects of the climate crisis.

Climate Crisis: Convincing and Communicating

A Pew study released the other day compared two recent surveys which asked the same basic questions of two groups: scientists and non-scientists.  Some of the questions were general ones about science and society, others were about "beliefs" on specific issues.  These got the headlines, because of the difference between the percentage of scientists versus the percentage of non-scientists on what they believe is proven fact on "key scientific issues."

One of the issues that got into news stories was climate change, and predictably, a higher percentage of scientists than other citizens believe it is caused by that nebulous euphemism, "human activity."  The very high percentage of scientists (87%, which is about 10 points lower than climate scientists alone) probably is expected, but notable was the size of the gap between them and others, and the low percentage of non-scientists (50%).

Perhaps even more alarming, or maybe more telling, was another comparison, between a similar Pew poll of citizens in 2009 and this one.  In 2009, 11% of those surveyed said there was no solid evidence the climate is warming.  But in 2014--after mounting and very obvious evidence in every region of America over those 5 years--it was up to 25%, fully one quarter.  Opposite to the evidence.

One could point out that this means that 75% at least do accept evidence and experience on this topic. But it must raise again the question (which it perhaps answers) of what if any evidence will convince enough people to stop wasting energy and attention on denial, so our society gets into the fast lane of addressing the climate crisis?

There is a lot going on here.  Attitudes towards science and scientists is a complex area (or a tangled morass) that would take many words to even approach.  Then there is the fear factor of all the implications of the climate crisis that amps up denial, so that the perception of climate change actually intensifies denial of its existence or causes.

All of this bears upon questions that recur in many forms almost constantly. How can the climate crisis be communicated effectively, so that at last society addresses it with the necessary unity and dedication?

Scaring people won't do it, says Dean Ornish, you need a positive approach: "If we are going to find sustainable ways of dealing with global warming, we have to base it on love and feeling good, not fear and loathing. If it’s fun, then it’s sustainable."    

Science won't win over climate sceptics, asserts Adam Comer in the Guardian--we need stories. But what kind of stories?  Comer also suggests the positive--stories about low-carbon solutions.

Or maybe personal stories of the negative effects.  Climate scientist Heidi Cullen admitted in a New York Times oped that she found these more powerful than scientific facts.  But will they, as the headline promised, change minds? Maybe, she writes, in combination with factual documentaries and works of fiction that both evoke feeling and offer a broader humanized perspective.

Others agree that negative stories get to people better.  But which ones?  David Roberts notes that environmentalists have been tearing their hair out trying to figure out what horror will get the attention --drought?  Disease? Sea level rise?--that will finally turn the tide (so to speak) and galvanize action.  His own candidate in this piece is flooding, some of which happens regularly right now due to sea level rise in several coastal cities.

Or the story doesn't have to even be related to climate, like the man who is walking 3,000 miles across America to increase awareness of the issue, and who gets attention for it by the fact of his walk, and how he relates to people he meets.

Do any of these actually work?  Who knows? In a different piece, David Roberts links to some of his posts analyzing the complexity of responses by those he calls conservatives, while debunking claims (desperate claims in some cases) of psychological etc. means to convince them.

Bill McKibben, who has been writing about climate change probably longer than anyone, takes the "ignore them" route by continuing (for example) his series of carefully written and assessed evaluations of where we are in this area (many of them over the years, like last summer, in the New York Review of Books) that appeal to believers monitoring the changing situation,  while simultaneously organizing activists--particularly young ones--to turn this into the civil rights movement of the age.  Presumably, at least until the old denialists die, he's given up on the "emotional consensus" he once called for, though perhaps I'm the only one who remembers these words, which he uttered in an interview or press conference I saw eons ago on C-Span.)

Naomi Klein has joined the fight, admittedly late in the game, with her political and economic perspective, and eloquent support for activism as well.  Like many, she sees the climate crisis as requiring major change (though few disagree on scale, they don't always agree on the time scale) and the nature of these changes being beneficial in a much wider way than only addressing the climate crisis.
(Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker was skeptical of Klein's prescriptions.  Their dialogue is worth a look.)

But the problem remains, so it isn't surprising that it is the headline for a recent Atlantic article: How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen/
Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here's how we can move beyond the impasse. Unfortunately the long piece that follows, a serious analysis with some convincing and unconvincing conclusions, isn't about this.  Yet another product perhaps of the articles and the headlines written by two different people, possibly two different species.

But the writer (Charles Mann) does suggest that the issue that might finally galvanize action is the threat of the technological "solution" of geoengineering, which is dangerous in palpably scary ways.  So he comes down on the fear factor as the motivator of acceptance.

Let me give the short version of my answer.  First, I believe communicating clearly and more effectively on this issue is essential.  Second, while I believe that "conservatives" and others suspicious of science and today's scientists raise other issues that ought to be recognized and addressed,  and I suspect the increase in total denial is partly due to failures to communicate clearly, I don't believe it all is, and I don't believe evidence, or stories of any kind will convince everybody.

While we're dealing with a crisis of an unprecedented nature, within a particular historical context, we're also operating within political constraints that may well be centuries old. In the 19th century for example, John Stuart Mill theorized that under most circumstances the masses are always innately conservative--in the sense of not wanting to risk change--while liberals are always a minority, and must find ways towards a temporary majority on specific matters.  That's part of our context.  It's there underneath the fear and ideology, and the greed that also takes advantage of it.

Nevertheless, there is a public out there that's close to (or already is) an effective majority on this issue, though it may take more than that to overcome entrenched power.  I support communicating evidence (and repeating it, because what you may lose in attention by repetition you may gain in understanding among nonscientists) and arguing for specific solutions to specific problems (ways of cutting down on carbon pollution, directly and through alternative energy sources)--because there are an awful lot of people who are listening, even if only now and again.  I support activism, from demos and creative variations on attention-getting actions, to divestment campaigns. I support positive stories (though Ornish obviously doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis) and I support negative stories, and I see dangers in both.  So in terms of strategy, I'm for all of the above.  Because in the end it's individuals at a particular time, so it's serendipity, before it's a politically effective constituency.

Third: what I fear will be a consequence of this stubborn inability to reach "emotional consensus" and common effort.  I am afraid that the current complacency riding the undercurrent of denial will suddenly become panic (my guess it will be the result of sky-high food prices, already going in that direction.) And that panic could demand unfortunate reactions.

  There are ways to prepare for that, to make it less consequential perhaps, and ultimately overcome it.  Our politics now aren't encouraging in this respect.  But not everything is politics.  I'll have a post (much shorter I hope) on one aspect of that soon.

2014, 2015 and the Climate of History

     Not my photo of Clam Beach (it's from here) but it's been this kind of day.

It's hard to complain about our weather here.  It was a rainy December until Christmas, and it's pretty much been sunny ever since.  Warmer than usual for winter, and at times, warm enough to think it might be summer.

Clam Beach is only 8 miles away on the 101, but we don't usually think of it, especially in winter, because it's so open and often windy.  But we've been there twice in the past week or so, two warm, windless golden afternoons, among the families and their sandcastles, kids with kites (new kinds to me, small low-flying ones, shaped and colored like butterflies), dogs frolicking with their humans and each other, (mostly) girls on horseback trotting on the sand.  Though once, at sunset, we saw two horses a-galloping at water's edge, moving silhouettes against the burnished sky and glittering water.  With men in the distance grouped to fish, and some people with sticks down near the waterline with the shore birds, clamming.

Sure, it should be raining. With a rainless January in SF and north, the CA drought is worse than ever. The West in general is unusually hot, and south of us the heat has melted much of the snowpack in the Sierras built up in November and December, all but very high up.  A lot of places depend on that spring melt for their water.

We're hoping here for a rainy February and March, like last year.  But the unseasonable, even unprecedented perfection of our recent weather isn't the only reason it seems otherworldly.  It's that the weather doesn't make sense anymore.

It was apparently a pretty temperate 2014 on the East Coast, too. At least until this snowy winter, including the latest storm, all of which is fed and made more intense by warmer ocean water.

 Unfortunately, the big picture was not so good.  Despite the slowing in the global warming rate that still has scientists scratching their heads (Ocean capture?  Volcanoes?) and despite the temperature neutral bust of this year's El Nino, both NASA and NOAA culled their data to declare 2014 was the Earth's hottest year on record, which means from 1880 at least.  The ten hottest days in that period have all happened since 1997 or 2000, depending on whether you throw out 1998 as freakishly hot.  For the entire state of CA it was also the hottest year on record (by 1.8F), and December the hottest month.

There's more evidence, accumulating faster, is it worth it to recite it? Carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2014, growing at the fastest rate in 30 years. More and faster melting in Greenland.  More land species on the brink.  The crashing of marine life is just beginning.  And so on.

But as Amy Davidson's piece in the New Yorker was headlined: Our Hottest Year, Our Cold Indifference.  Denial and indifference have definitely emerged as factors as potent as greenhouse gases in determining the future of civilization.  It doesn't look great in either category.  No wonder the atomic scientists who used to monitor the danger of nuclear apocalypse in their calculations on the likelihood of doomsday, this year have named the climate crisis as a chief reason they've shoved the Doomsday Clock hands forward to three minutes to midnight.

So that's where we are.  Lots of people are pushing back, organizing, speaking out, acting and trying to act--much of which is coming to a crescendo this year, as the world's nations meet to make or not make serious commitments to address the climate crisis, both causes and effects, but especially causes.

There is a kind of orchestration, you might even call it a chess game beginning.  Two of the major players (both on the same side) are President Obama and Pope Francis.  Obama has already secured some commitments from China.  He made a point of pushing India in the right direction during last week's visit.  And he's done more than any other U.S. president to act effectively here.

The word has been out for weeks that Pope Francis is about to take the highly unusual step of issuing a papal encyclical on the moral necessity of addressing the climate crisis.  For Catholics this is especially serious, because encyclicals invoke papal infallibility on faith and morals.  But it is important beyond active membership.  It has already caused some grumbling, and will undoubtedly be met with vituperation when it happens.  But Pope Francis will have confirmed his status as the most progressive pope since John XXIII, and he will be a beacon and a hero to many.  This issue can never have too many heroes.