1 week ago
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Elsewhere
Captain Toothpaste Returns
at Blue Voice.
Captain's Log at Soul of Star Trek.
UpDATe: 5/03: So I am in fact Elsewhere--in a cafe in western PA, and therefore safe and sound.
And soon, hours from now, I shall be Elsewhere, though where that might be is open to question. I'm supposed to be flying across the country, on what's forecast as a very stormy day. I've had a week disrupted by my bedroom being the site of destruction and construction, so I'm weak from lack of sleep, and since I carried those six boxes of fifty pound boards, my back hasn't been the same. So I'm setting out weakened and hurting for what looks like it well could be quite a trial. The last time I flew across country I wound up literally deaf for about a month from a cold and sinus infection that the airplane pressure made worse. I'm to be up at 5, flying out at 730 am, and scheduled to arrive at 9pm eastern, though that requires getting out of Arcata in the rain, into and out of San Francisco in the rain, into and out of Chicago where severe thunderstorms are forecast, and into Pittsburgh, where the thunderstorms should be coming with me.
Then supposing I arrive intact, there's the question of Internet service on the other end. So you may be dreaming up without me, whoever you are.
at Blue Voice.
Captain's Log at Soul of Star Trek.
UpDATe: 5/03: So I am in fact Elsewhere--in a cafe in western PA, and therefore safe and sound.
And soon, hours from now, I shall be Elsewhere, though where that might be is open to question. I'm supposed to be flying across the country, on what's forecast as a very stormy day. I've had a week disrupted by my bedroom being the site of destruction and construction, so I'm weak from lack of sleep, and since I carried those six boxes of fifty pound boards, my back hasn't been the same. So I'm setting out weakened and hurting for what looks like it well could be quite a trial. The last time I flew across country I wound up literally deaf for about a month from a cold and sinus infection that the airplane pressure made worse. I'm to be up at 5, flying out at 730 am, and scheduled to arrive at 9pm eastern, though that requires getting out of Arcata in the rain, into and out of San Francisco in the rain, into and out of Chicago where severe thunderstorms are forecast, and into Pittsburgh, where the thunderstorms should be coming with me.
Then supposing I arrive intact, there's the question of Internet service on the other end. So you may be dreaming up without me, whoever you are.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Climate Crisis Future
Will We Save the Future? (Part II)
The scientist who has probably produced the most dire prediction for the Climate Crisis future is James Lovelock, best known for his championing of the Gaia Hypothesis. His book, The Revenge of Gaia, looks at the interaction of phenomena that other scientists mostly study separately, and he sees the Earth inevitably changing because of greenhouse gases to a condition more like Mars--a barren desert, where fewer people than now populate the US may survive in a few isolated areas.
Bill McKibben, not a climate scientist but a writer thoroughly conversant with the science, and whose judgment I respect, describes Lovelock's position in the New York Review of Books:
He argues that because the earth is already struggling to keep itself cool, our extra increment of heat is particularly dangerous, and he predicts that we will soon see the confluence of several phenomena: the death of ocean algae in ever-warmer ocean waters, reducing the rate at which these small plants can remove carbon from the atmosphere; the death of tropical forests as a result of higher temperatures and the higher rates of evaporation they cause; sharp changes in the earth's "albedo," or reflectivity, as white ice that reflects sunlight back out into space is replaced with the absorptive blue of seawater or the dark green of high-latitude boreal forests; and the release of large amounts of methane, itself a greenhouse gas, held in ice crystals in the frozen north or beneath the sea.
As McKibben notes, not many scientists go this far, and Lovelock's book has not convinced many with its data or argument. Still, he does describe possible "feedback" and interrelated effects, that could happen. And as McKibben notes: Lovelock's flashes of insight about Gaia illuminate many of the interconnections between systems that more pedestrian scientists have slowly been trying to identify. Moreover, for the past twenty years, the period during which greenhouse science emerged, most of the effects of heating on the physical world have in fact been more dire than originally predicted.
McKibben doesn't dismiss Lovelock's intuitions about the interactions of Gaia. And when he turns to a climate scientist, a specialist with stronger data and a more solid reputation, NASA's James Hansen, he finds that Hansen says the world isn't doomed yet--we have "until 2015 to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere before we cross a threshold and create a 'different planet.'" He doesn't say Mars, but it's close enough.
McKibben reviews several other, more hopeful books: on the rise of solar energy, on transformation in China and elsewhere in the world, and calls for political will as well as community involvement. But he also notes that the Climate Crisis is actually gaining speed, in the sense that its effects are being felt and observed sooner than expected, and its getting worse faster, as well as the increasingly faster rate our knowledge of what's happening is increasing.
And as a kind of addendum to the previous post about 1989, in a March New York Review piece, he notes that Hansen first warned about global heating's potentially catastrophic effects in 1988, but the words of arguably the foremost climate expert in the U.S. did not lead to quick action. McKibben interprets a section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report as saying: if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now.
He calls the IPCC report "remarkably conservative," yet it forecasts: if we don't take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of— at the best estimate—roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that's enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a "totally different planet," one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.
The IPCC report does not take into full consideration the emerging study of the possible effects of melting polar ice, which is happening more rapidly than predicted--more rapidly than some scientists could even imagine. This melting is a good candidate for the tipping point factor--the phenomenon that interacts with others to send the planet on a self-reinforcing course of heating that nothing can stop.
We don't know that yet, and though we may have a much better idea about it in the near future, we probably won't be certain for decades. What we do know is that if we don't cut our current carbon emissions--the consensus is now that we need to cut them by 80% by 2050--we are likely to turn Earth into Mars.
There is more political movement to do so in the U.S. and in much of the world than ever before. But what if we don't? What will 2050 and subsequent years look like? If we act like we have for the last century or so, it will not be pretty.
[continued]
The scientist who has probably produced the most dire prediction for the Climate Crisis future is James Lovelock, best known for his championing of the Gaia Hypothesis. His book, The Revenge of Gaia, looks at the interaction of phenomena that other scientists mostly study separately, and he sees the Earth inevitably changing because of greenhouse gases to a condition more like Mars--a barren desert, where fewer people than now populate the US may survive in a few isolated areas.
Bill McKibben, not a climate scientist but a writer thoroughly conversant with the science, and whose judgment I respect, describes Lovelock's position in the New York Review of Books:
He argues that because the earth is already struggling to keep itself cool, our extra increment of heat is particularly dangerous, and he predicts that we will soon see the confluence of several phenomena: the death of ocean algae in ever-warmer ocean waters, reducing the rate at which these small plants can remove carbon from the atmosphere; the death of tropical forests as a result of higher temperatures and the higher rates of evaporation they cause; sharp changes in the earth's "albedo," or reflectivity, as white ice that reflects sunlight back out into space is replaced with the absorptive blue of seawater or the dark green of high-latitude boreal forests; and the release of large amounts of methane, itself a greenhouse gas, held in ice crystals in the frozen north or beneath the sea.
As McKibben notes, not many scientists go this far, and Lovelock's book has not convinced many with its data or argument. Still, he does describe possible "feedback" and interrelated effects, that could happen. And as McKibben notes: Lovelock's flashes of insight about Gaia illuminate many of the interconnections between systems that more pedestrian scientists have slowly been trying to identify. Moreover, for the past twenty years, the period during which greenhouse science emerged, most of the effects of heating on the physical world have in fact been more dire than originally predicted.
McKibben doesn't dismiss Lovelock's intuitions about the interactions of Gaia. And when he turns to a climate scientist, a specialist with stronger data and a more solid reputation, NASA's James Hansen, he finds that Hansen says the world isn't doomed yet--we have "until 2015 to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere before we cross a threshold and create a 'different planet.'" He doesn't say Mars, but it's close enough.
McKibben reviews several other, more hopeful books: on the rise of solar energy, on transformation in China and elsewhere in the world, and calls for political will as well as community involvement. But he also notes that the Climate Crisis is actually gaining speed, in the sense that its effects are being felt and observed sooner than expected, and its getting worse faster, as well as the increasingly faster rate our knowledge of what's happening is increasing.
And as a kind of addendum to the previous post about 1989, in a March New York Review piece, he notes that Hansen first warned about global heating's potentially catastrophic effects in 1988, but the words of arguably the foremost climate expert in the U.S. did not lead to quick action. McKibben interprets a section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report as saying: if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now.
He calls the IPCC report "remarkably conservative," yet it forecasts: if we don't take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of— at the best estimate—roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that's enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a "totally different planet," one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.
The IPCC report does not take into full consideration the emerging study of the possible effects of melting polar ice, which is happening more rapidly than predicted--more rapidly than some scientists could even imagine. This melting is a good candidate for the tipping point factor--the phenomenon that interacts with others to send the planet on a self-reinforcing course of heating that nothing can stop.
We don't know that yet, and though we may have a much better idea about it in the near future, we probably won't be certain for decades. What we do know is that if we don't cut our current carbon emissions--the consensus is now that we need to cut them by 80% by 2050--we are likely to turn Earth into Mars.
There is more political movement to do so in the U.S. and in much of the world than ever before. But what if we don't? What will 2050 and subsequent years look like? If we act like we have for the last century or so, it will not be pretty.
[continued]
The Long Hot Crisis
How it's going to end up is a guess. That it's going to keep getting worse until mid century at least no matter what we do is just about certain. So what might it be like?
Millions of people driven from their homes, thirsty, starving. Unknown numbers of deaths and diseases related to Climate Crisis phenomena--everything from frail elders dying in heat waves to even more babies with malaria. The IPCC says all this, though not that boldly.
But old people are old and the ones who will die will probably be poor. Money and/or a rich industrialized society will help insulate Americans--not so many starving here. But...let's remember the social equivalent of Gaia. We live in an increasingly dependent society--we're dependent on more and more outside our homes and communities, and at the same time, on fewer and fewer resources and institutions. Global GPS goes out and we're all literally lost. Our public health in particular is so shoddy now, our government so lax in protecting our food and water and medicines, that small crises can become big ones, and persistent problems can fray the fabric until it breaks.
War. That's what the military is worried about. Over water, probably. Darfur may already be largely about that. How about India and Pakistan, with nukes?
It's not only the climate crisis: the effects on the planet of industrial gases and chemicals, the destruction of forests and sealife and life in general--all combine with climate change to make the future very dicey. We're in the midst of a major wave of extinctions unlike any since the dinosaurs, even apart from the polar bears and penguins. That could well affect us in ways we can't predict and may not be able to control. Right now there's the mystery of the honeybees dying off. That may not seem like a big deal, but as Einstein once pointed out, if the bees disappear and pollination stops, the human race could die out in a few years. It's not just a matter of being kind to animals and hugging trees, though we might be more worth saving if we did that. Keeping life flourishing is about our survival.
But if we're speculating about the future, let's go to a futurist, and a science fiction writer as well. In his 202 nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling wrote that "The greenhouse effect is the dirty little sister of nuclear Armageddon." He writes that humans in poor places will suffer food shortages, but that the rest of life on the planet will bear the brunt. If we ignore the problem and just try to survive, we'll do so using more fossil fuels until the whole planet looks like Blade Runner.
But Sterling is more specific, more graphic and more apocalyptic on the Internet, on a site called the Viridian Design Movement. At the moment the post at the top is crowing victory. This year, he writes, we've turned the corner and we are going to confront the Climate Crisis. But for what that means for the future, you need to read further, and look at some back notes.
Even in victory he warns: The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))
In an earlier post: In the 2060s, damage from climate change is supposed to outpace the planet's entire GNP. That means ALL the funding and ALL the focus get used up by one issue: climate crisis.)))
How it's going to end up is a guess. That it's going to keep getting worse until mid century at least no matter what we do is just about certain. So what might it be like?
Millions of people driven from their homes, thirsty, starving. Unknown numbers of deaths and diseases related to Climate Crisis phenomena--everything from frail elders dying in heat waves to even more babies with malaria. The IPCC says all this, though not that boldly.
But old people are old and the ones who will die will probably be poor. Money and/or a rich industrialized society will help insulate Americans--not so many starving here. But...let's remember the social equivalent of Gaia. We live in an increasingly dependent society--we're dependent on more and more outside our homes and communities, and at the same time, on fewer and fewer resources and institutions. Global GPS goes out and we're all literally lost. Our public health in particular is so shoddy now, our government so lax in protecting our food and water and medicines, that small crises can become big ones, and persistent problems can fray the fabric until it breaks.
War. That's what the military is worried about. Over water, probably. Darfur may already be largely about that. How about India and Pakistan, with nukes?
It's not only the climate crisis: the effects on the planet of industrial gases and chemicals, the destruction of forests and sealife and life in general--all combine with climate change to make the future very dicey. We're in the midst of a major wave of extinctions unlike any since the dinosaurs, even apart from the polar bears and penguins. That could well affect us in ways we can't predict and may not be able to control. Right now there's the mystery of the honeybees dying off. That may not seem like a big deal, but as Einstein once pointed out, if the bees disappear and pollination stops, the human race could die out in a few years. It's not just a matter of being kind to animals and hugging trees, though we might be more worth saving if we did that. Keeping life flourishing is about our survival.
But if we're speculating about the future, let's go to a futurist, and a science fiction writer as well. In his 202 nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling wrote that "The greenhouse effect is the dirty little sister of nuclear Armageddon." He writes that humans in poor places will suffer food shortages, but that the rest of life on the planet will bear the brunt. If we ignore the problem and just try to survive, we'll do so using more fossil fuels until the whole planet looks like Blade Runner.
But Sterling is more specific, more graphic and more apocalyptic on the Internet, on a site called the Viridian Design Movement. At the moment the post at the top is crowing victory. This year, he writes, we've turned the corner and we are going to confront the Climate Crisis. But for what that means for the future, you need to read further, and look at some back notes.
Even in victory he warns: The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))
In an earlier post: In the 2060s, damage from climate change is supposed to outpace the planet's entire GNP. That means ALL the funding and ALL the focus get used up by one issue: climate crisis.)))
Sterling's style in these "notes" is to add his interpolations to some other text. Perhaps his most provocative prediction is for the rise of what he calls the "khaki green" For example, responding to Bush's comment that crises like Katrina may require the Army taking charge, he agrees that the Climate Crisis future will overwhelm "the pretense of civilian capacity. It's not about Bush power versus government power. We don't yet have a society capable of responding to genuine Greenhouse enormities." The reason is: The organizational problem at hand would be much better understood as a train of Katrinas. It's not that a big storm comes and you pass the blame buck. It's that big storms come all the time.)))
In fact, according to Sterling, these weather-related crises (monster storms, forest fires) will require more than the Army. (((I'd be guessing we run out of soldiers well before the ocean runs out of storms.))) There's no cure for demolished cities that a contemporary army can give. A plethora of Katrinas doesn't mean Army control of evacuation. You can't park the populations of drowned cities somewhere off camera while Delta Force rebuilds their town. The only effective response to really savage and continuous weather violence has got to be vigorous civil defense and a paramilitarized general populace. Those millions of evacuees who were cluttering highways this week – they're the labor force. They and no one else are the ones who will have to do the heavy lifting, because it's their cities and their world that has been destabilized by climate change.)))
This is the "khaki green" concept--more than a little chilling in this formulation. While there's an image there of a total society working together, it also conjures images of local warlords and national dictators as well as paramilitary justice.
Sterling sees this as a result of fear--so very realistic in terms of what seems to motivate our politics now. But this is not the only way this would have to go. It could also be people helping people out of community and compassion, organized and directed by democratic government. More like what the National Guard is supposed to be. (Perhaps the real realism is a combination of these.)
But there are so many tasks ahead that the vision of a fully mobilized society, or at least a completely transformed culture, is a possibility worth pondering. Beyond responding to these spot crises, there are the other ongoing ones: building seawalls, dealing with epidemics, feeding people, monitoring during heat waves. So another model may be more of NGO relief agencies, only ones that don't leave their own country. Or the model of the volunteer militias of the states in American Revolutionary times, only with shovels and medicines instead of guns. A real domestic Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America. Or the ideals of dedication, service and selflessness, wedded with high degree of organization and training, and an ethic of watching out for each other: the kind of ideals that antimated Robert Heinlein's dream of the Space Patrol, or Gene Roddenberry's of Starfleet. Force as the last resort, not the reason for being. And not on the high frontier. Right here.
All that is pretty certain is that changing your lightbulbs is not going to be the extent of the changes required to confront the Climate Crisis. Understanding that, getting prepared for all the issues that could arise, is the reason to contemplate such extremes now.
In describing the despicable machinations of Senator Inhofe, who peddles his fossil fueled denialism relentlessly while his own state of Oklahoma suffers from extended drought, one recent commentator suggested that Inhofe doesn't care about the future consequences of his actions because he will soon be dead. That may be so. But these visions are about a future that I will not see much of either. I may live to see the American culture so transformed as to make today seem like a twisted fantasy--I believe that could happen in the next decade or two. But getting older can also make the present more precious, the past more real, and the future--the future we won't see--more important.
But I do understand the natural tendency, particularly of younger people, to resist such visions of doom, or alternatively, to wallow in them. Dealing with visions of doom has been a large and difficult task for my generation, and speaking for myself, with mixed results. The end of the world as we know it is pretty overwhelming. But there are reasons not to push away the possibility. First, because what people do now may prevent the worst of it. Second, because things are happening now, and are going to keep happening, that are part of this crisis, and if we are to cope with it at all, and deal with it intelligently, it's best to understand what's really going on.
However, it's not all happening at once. Unlike nuclear apocalypse, it will play out over many years, and probably centuries. That is both comforting and daunting. But it is very likely the truth.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Climate Crisis Future
Will We Save the Future? (Part 1)
One can imagine the next US President galvanizing the nation, leading a concerted effort to address the Climate Crisis as the ultimate challenge to human civilization that many reputable observers believe it well may be. Or even if it is a lesser threat, the effort to mitigate its effects and stop the likely critical threat to future generations, become a national and finally a truly international priority.
One can imagine the American public responding to such leadership--beginning perhaps with transforming their homes and businesses with solar power, once the government puts real incentives in place, as is happening now in Germany. Or taking advantage of other incentives to buy fuel efficient cars and use different fuels, while supporting those manufacturers who respond to their incentives, as well as responding to the carbon caps some major corporations have already requested.
One can imagine thousands of new jobs in new industries that address the Climate Crisis locally, and nationally, and globally. One can imagine this President appearing weekly on TV and the Internet to report on progress, new efforts and new science, and everyone watching and listening, and talking about it. And watching commercials that advertise products and services based on their energy efficiency and innovation, and how they work together to create new relationships of community and culture.
One can imagine it because one did imagine it, more or less, in 1970. I recall accompanying a friend to an auto repair shop in Buffalo, New York, a few days before the first Earth Day, and somehow in the discussion that ensued with people who worked there, outlining just such a vision. Talking about it in terms of responding to environmental needs, as both opportunity and response to crisis, like the national response to World War II, which involved the kind of work people did, their attitude towards it, and such aspects of everyday life as recycling and conservation. And having one of the skeptical mechanics say, "Now you're getting me excited about this."
One can even argue with some ready justification that the public is much more ready for that today, and despite the misgivings expressed in the New York Times poll this week, that people are ready to adopt change, as long as it makes sense to them. (Things that cost them directly have to make sense to them. That nothing Bush does seems to cost anyone at the moment is the secret of his former success. )
So is it likely? Will we save the world? Well, let's just say, one can find plenty of reasons to say no. [Continued below.]
One can imagine the next US President galvanizing the nation, leading a concerted effort to address the Climate Crisis as the ultimate challenge to human civilization that many reputable observers believe it well may be. Or even if it is a lesser threat, the effort to mitigate its effects and stop the likely critical threat to future generations, become a national and finally a truly international priority.
One can imagine the American public responding to such leadership--beginning perhaps with transforming their homes and businesses with solar power, once the government puts real incentives in place, as is happening now in Germany. Or taking advantage of other incentives to buy fuel efficient cars and use different fuels, while supporting those manufacturers who respond to their incentives, as well as responding to the carbon caps some major corporations have already requested.
One can imagine thousands of new jobs in new industries that address the Climate Crisis locally, and nationally, and globally. One can imagine this President appearing weekly on TV and the Internet to report on progress, new efforts and new science, and everyone watching and listening, and talking about it. And watching commercials that advertise products and services based on their energy efficiency and innovation, and how they work together to create new relationships of community and culture.
One can imagine it because one did imagine it, more or less, in 1970. I recall accompanying a friend to an auto repair shop in Buffalo, New York, a few days before the first Earth Day, and somehow in the discussion that ensued with people who worked there, outlining just such a vision. Talking about it in terms of responding to environmental needs, as both opportunity and response to crisis, like the national response to World War II, which involved the kind of work people did, their attitude towards it, and such aspects of everyday life as recycling and conservation. And having one of the skeptical mechanics say, "Now you're getting me excited about this."
One can even argue with some ready justification that the public is much more ready for that today, and despite the misgivings expressed in the New York Times poll this week, that people are ready to adopt change, as long as it makes sense to them. (Things that cost them directly have to make sense to them. That nothing Bush does seems to cost anyone at the moment is the secret of his former success. )
So is it likely? Will we save the world? Well, let's just say, one can find plenty of reasons to say no. [Continued below.]
What Isn't Happening
Though it might seem (as Al Gore promises) that just about any candidate for President in 2008 of either party is going to address the Climate Crisis in much more realistic and positive terms than the Bushite denialists, that may not be enough. There has to be a real change in the political dialogue, the political direction and perhaps in politics itself. And there is scant sign this is happening.
Yes, there are encouraging signs--in the states, the regions, in certain powerful Democrats in Congress, in the advocacy of Al Gore, John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Bill Clinton, as well as celebrities who've made this their cause. But is it enough to provide weight and momentum to leadership? I wonder. I worry.
Let's take this week's first debate among Democratic candidates for Prez as exhibit the first. There were no questions on the subject of the Climate Crisis or the environment, just as there seldom were in the past two elections. There were actually more answers than questions--a couple of candidates mentioned environment and at least one even mentioned global warming. But there was no indication it is anyone's priority. There was no sense of urgency.
More importantly than even this depressing lack of focus, was the general tenor of the campaign's beginning. That Iraq is sucking most of the oxygen (but not the CO2) out of the political atmosphere isn't surprising. But in the debate there was that question about what each candidate would do as President if there were two simultaneous terrorist attacks on U.S. cities. Hillary Clinton got a big bounce out of using the word "retaliate." It proves she's tough enough to be president, that she'll "keep us safe." The media conventional wisdom was fawning all over her for this.
Haven't we learned anything? We've been pathetic sheep following Bush over the cliff because he claimed he was tough. And apparently we're ready to do it again. Does anybody seriously believe any of those candidates would be "weak" (you know, reading a children's book while the Towers fall) or wouldn't respond? But of course that isn't the point. The point apparently is that all we care about is bombing terrorists.
How discouraging is that? Hillary said this would be a "change election", but I didn't see it. I saw this as yet another fear election. And this was not all manufactured by the media, for apparently Hillary's people are actually attacking Barak Obama for not being violent enough in his response.
Keep us safe? What are we--infants? Apparently, yes. We need Daddy or Mommy to save us from the mean mean terrorists, who killed three thousand of our people on one day six years ago. Not from the health insurance terrorists, the credit card terrorists, the forget Habeas Corpus terrorists, the forget your retirement terrorists, not the destroy an entire country terrorists, inprison people you're afraid of without trial terrorists, build concentration camps for Mexicans at the border terrorists, kill more than 3,000 of your own young and maim thousands more plus hundreds of thousands of foreign innocents for a preemptive quaqmire born of lies and greed terrorists, and meanwhile the blatant thieves embodied and empowered by this administration who've stolen the future from babies not yet born.
Our politics remains infantile. Our ignorance has been carefully cultivated and nurtured by those who profit from that ignorance. For a brief shining and apparently illusory moment--the late 50s and 60s--we in America looked like we might be growing up. But we've actually gone backwards. Martin Amis called the 80s the "moronic inferno," and we've been swimming in the ashes ever since. We've gone backwards in the direction of the Dark Ages (only this time with Blackberries) intellectually, culturally and morally. Our culture and much of our government and military are in the grip of totalitarian fundamentalists, for whom their particular brand of Christianity and their particular reading of the Bible is the only truth. They are the mirror image of the totalitarian fundamentalists wreaking havoc in other parts of the world.
Individually, in families and maybe communities (physical and virtual), we can be sophisticated in our judgments and tolerant, generous and compassionate. But as a polity, as a nation, we're hopeless. Our politics as well as our commercial culture evoke our worst traits: fear, greed, hate, anger, sentimentality, laziness and conformity. And the industrialized commercial culture we've unleashed globally vies with totalitarian fundamentalism for apocalyptic potential.
Because of its nature and extent, the Climate Crisis calls for a leap forward in realizing our potential as human beings together on this planet. It's within our grasp. But we seem to be mostly going in the direction of becoming more simplistic, self-righteously selfish and willfully stupid. This is certainly the impression one gets from the newspapers and particularly from cable TV. Maybe it's distorted. One can only hope so.
But of course debating "will we save the future" is nonsense unless it's still possible to save the future. Is it?
Continued tomorrow.
Though it might seem (as Al Gore promises) that just about any candidate for President in 2008 of either party is going to address the Climate Crisis in much more realistic and positive terms than the Bushite denialists, that may not be enough. There has to be a real change in the political dialogue, the political direction and perhaps in politics itself. And there is scant sign this is happening.
Yes, there are encouraging signs--in the states, the regions, in certain powerful Democrats in Congress, in the advocacy of Al Gore, John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Bill Clinton, as well as celebrities who've made this their cause. But is it enough to provide weight and momentum to leadership? I wonder. I worry.
Let's take this week's first debate among Democratic candidates for Prez as exhibit the first. There were no questions on the subject of the Climate Crisis or the environment, just as there seldom were in the past two elections. There were actually more answers than questions--a couple of candidates mentioned environment and at least one even mentioned global warming. But there was no indication it is anyone's priority. There was no sense of urgency.
More importantly than even this depressing lack of focus, was the general tenor of the campaign's beginning. That Iraq is sucking most of the oxygen (but not the CO2) out of the political atmosphere isn't surprising. But in the debate there was that question about what each candidate would do as President if there were two simultaneous terrorist attacks on U.S. cities. Hillary Clinton got a big bounce out of using the word "retaliate." It proves she's tough enough to be president, that she'll "keep us safe." The media conventional wisdom was fawning all over her for this.
Haven't we learned anything? We've been pathetic sheep following Bush over the cliff because he claimed he was tough. And apparently we're ready to do it again. Does anybody seriously believe any of those candidates would be "weak" (you know, reading a children's book while the Towers fall) or wouldn't respond? But of course that isn't the point. The point apparently is that all we care about is bombing terrorists.
How discouraging is that? Hillary said this would be a "change election", but I didn't see it. I saw this as yet another fear election. And this was not all manufactured by the media, for apparently Hillary's people are actually attacking Barak Obama for not being violent enough in his response.
Keep us safe? What are we--infants? Apparently, yes. We need Daddy or Mommy to save us from the mean mean terrorists, who killed three thousand of our people on one day six years ago. Not from the health insurance terrorists, the credit card terrorists, the forget Habeas Corpus terrorists, the forget your retirement terrorists, not the destroy an entire country terrorists, inprison people you're afraid of without trial terrorists, build concentration camps for Mexicans at the border terrorists, kill more than 3,000 of your own young and maim thousands more plus hundreds of thousands of foreign innocents for a preemptive quaqmire born of lies and greed terrorists, and meanwhile the blatant thieves embodied and empowered by this administration who've stolen the future from babies not yet born.
Our politics remains infantile. Our ignorance has been carefully cultivated and nurtured by those who profit from that ignorance. For a brief shining and apparently illusory moment--the late 50s and 60s--we in America looked like we might be growing up. But we've actually gone backwards. Martin Amis called the 80s the "moronic inferno," and we've been swimming in the ashes ever since. We've gone backwards in the direction of the Dark Ages (only this time with Blackberries) intellectually, culturally and morally. Our culture and much of our government and military are in the grip of totalitarian fundamentalists, for whom their particular brand of Christianity and their particular reading of the Bible is the only truth. They are the mirror image of the totalitarian fundamentalists wreaking havoc in other parts of the world.
Individually, in families and maybe communities (physical and virtual), we can be sophisticated in our judgments and tolerant, generous and compassionate. But as a polity, as a nation, we're hopeless. Our politics as well as our commercial culture evoke our worst traits: fear, greed, hate, anger, sentimentality, laziness and conformity. And the industrialized commercial culture we've unleashed globally vies with totalitarian fundamentalism for apocalyptic potential.
Because of its nature and extent, the Climate Crisis calls for a leap forward in realizing our potential as human beings together on this planet. It's within our grasp. But we seem to be mostly going in the direction of becoming more simplistic, self-righteously selfish and willfully stupid. This is certainly the impression one gets from the newspapers and particularly from cable TV. Maybe it's distorted. One can only hope so.
But of course debating "will we save the future" is nonsense unless it's still possible to save the future. Is it?
Continued tomorrow.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
This is one of those new imagings of the sun. It makes the
coronal loops around it visible. But the latest amazing
finding is that they are not only visible--they are audible.
These hot coils of electrified gas thrum like a musical
instrument. Go to this site and you can actually HEAR
what they sound like.
Climate Crisis Future
Greenhouse Summer: Memo From 2050 (Via 1989)
We called it Greenhouse Summer. Chicago had seven days over 100 degrees F, and a string of 18 straight over 90. Pittsburgh had more than five times the average number of days above 90, making 1988 the hottest summer in a century. In more than 70 US cities, hot weather exacerbated lingering and dangerous air pollution.
With the heat came drought, especially in the Midwest and South, where it contributed to a 31% decline in the country’s grain harvest. In the West, forest fires lingered into autumn. Titanic fires in Yellowstone resulted from the worst heat, drought and wind conditions there in 300 years.
The phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect and the predicted catastrophes of CO2-induced global heating were not new in 1988. The first research began in the 1950s, the first tentative conclusions were being drawn in the 1960s, including the possibility of apocalyptic consequences. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned it in a casual conversation with playwright Arthur Miller, as Miller noted. Kurt Vonnegut described the same theory we know today as told to him by a young visitor, in an article published before the first moon landing. By the first Earth Day in 1970, many of us just out of college knew about it.
It was the fact that it was a known theory that made people sit up and take notice in the hot summers of the late 1980s. So in 1989 and 1990, the first spasm of articles and books came out (Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature; the more specific Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle.) I believe it was around then that one of the TV networks did a miniseries about it, similar to The Day After (if anyone knows the name of it, please share.) But it was definitely in 1989 that James Burke made a two-part television program called After the Warming.
James Burke was known in the US for at least two fascinating and provocative television series seen on PBS, both relating the history of technological development to other aspects of history, such as politics, warfare, social change, even fashion. They were Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.
Burke was so good on television because he explained things simply, yet the connections he made were dazzling in their complexity. He was a lively, even aggressive presence, but engaging. You had to watch him. He came at the end of a short golden age for these series, beginning perhaps with Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. The most elaborate, most famous of them—and just about the last one—was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
I don’t know when it was actually broadcast in the US. I happened to see the second part on TV some years ago, but it was only in the last few years, when I found the two-VHS tape set in the library, that I saw the whole thing. It is revelatory in so many ways, and I’m now about to describe it in detail.
We called it Greenhouse Summer. Chicago had seven days over 100 degrees F, and a string of 18 straight over 90. Pittsburgh had more than five times the average number of days above 90, making 1988 the hottest summer in a century. In more than 70 US cities, hot weather exacerbated lingering and dangerous air pollution.
With the heat came drought, especially in the Midwest and South, where it contributed to a 31% decline in the country’s grain harvest. In the West, forest fires lingered into autumn. Titanic fires in Yellowstone resulted from the worst heat, drought and wind conditions there in 300 years.
The phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect and the predicted catastrophes of CO2-induced global heating were not new in 1988. The first research began in the 1950s, the first tentative conclusions were being drawn in the 1960s, including the possibility of apocalyptic consequences. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned it in a casual conversation with playwright Arthur Miller, as Miller noted. Kurt Vonnegut described the same theory we know today as told to him by a young visitor, in an article published before the first moon landing. By the first Earth Day in 1970, many of us just out of college knew about it.
It was the fact that it was a known theory that made people sit up and take notice in the hot summers of the late 1980s. So in 1989 and 1990, the first spasm of articles and books came out (Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature; the more specific Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle.) I believe it was around then that one of the TV networks did a miniseries about it, similar to The Day After (if anyone knows the name of it, please share.) But it was definitely in 1989 that James Burke made a two-part television program called After the Warming.
James Burke was known in the US for at least two fascinating and provocative television series seen on PBS, both relating the history of technological development to other aspects of history, such as politics, warfare, social change, even fashion. They were Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.
Burke was so good on television because he explained things simply, yet the connections he made were dazzling in their complexity. He was a lively, even aggressive presence, but engaging. You had to watch him. He came at the end of a short golden age for these series, beginning perhaps with Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. The most elaborate, most famous of them—and just about the last one—was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
I don’t know when it was actually broadcast in the US. I happened to see the second part on TV some years ago, but it was only in the last few years, when I found the two-VHS tape set in the library, that I saw the whole thing. It is revelatory in so many ways, and I’m now about to describe it in detail.
The premise of After the Warming is that Burke is speaking from the year 2050, when the world has changed enormously because of climate change. He is looking back on the past fifty years or so, describing how human civilization dealt with the challenge.
But the first 50 minutes goes back much further than that, to describe the influence of climate on human history---beginning with pre-history.
Humans became human, Burke says, during the Ice Age, and perhaps because of it. Because game became scarcer, hunting was more complicated, and required cooperation and communication. Humans responded by inventing language. Because plants were scarcer, humans explored for food, and with sea water frozen and sea levels down in such areas as the Bering Straits, they were able to migrate farther. Then the planet warmed, the seas rose, and the populations of the Americas and Australia were separated from Europe and Asia.
The warmer temperatures and abundance of water led to better growing, more population, the beginning of agriculture and cities. There was so much grain in Iraq in 7000 BC that a system of accounting was needed, so writing was invented.
In 3000 BC drought struck the prosperous area of Egypt. The Nile was the only reliable water source when it flooded, which led to developing systems of irrigation and a host of related innovation: “maps to design the irrigation network, surveying and engineering to lay it out, mud and straw bricks to build it, geometry to measure reservoir volume, metallurgy to make the tools, a calendar to get the river flood date right, management to run it all, tax collectors to cream off the profits, and a state bureaucracy to spend them.” That is, the basics of modern civilization, according to Burke.
Climate changes didn’t have to be global or even very large to have major effects. A change in rain patterns doomed the great civilization of Mycenae, where because of shifting cold air patterns, it didn’t rain for a hundred years.
By 300 BC it was warm and moist again in Europe. The Alpine passes in northern Italy became open year round, allowing Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world. China seized the same sort of opportunity in its part of the world. Good weather opened up the “Silk Road” and sea routes, so these two superpowers began trading. But in 500 AD, the global temperature went down. The Huns of central Asia suffered freezing drought, and invaded the south, displacing other “barbarians” who eventually overran the Roman Empire and ushered in the Dark Ages.
A half century later, the temperature went up. Vikings colonized Greenland, where there was grass for sheep. Then it turned cold again in 1300. Greenland had no trees, and soon sea ice isolated it. By 1408, the last colony died out. The Little Ice Age gripped Europe in the 16th century, but in England, new technologies were developed to cope with it. Burke demonstrated the innovations of the new manor house: “Stone walls and gravel surround to keep out wet and mud, no more open colonnades and courtyards, steep roofs and guttering to handle a lot of rain, but in spite of the cold they put in big glass windows. New technology… changed their lives.” Like chimneys and fireplaces to heat up small rooms separately. Everyone no longer living around one central fire in a big common room. Those smaller rooms had tapestry, paneling, plasterwork and curtained beds to keep the warmth in and cold out. So now there was privacy. And with those private beds, romance.
The chimney allowed for heated offices, so accounts could be kept all year, instead of stopping when the ink froze: more business. The cold meant more life lived indoors, and led to indoor entertainment, like making music.
Then came three decades of warming. With hot, moist summers and warm winters, crop yields in England were at historic highs. Food was cheaper, work was plentiful, and in these prosperous times, people had more children. More households created the need for more household goods. Here’s where Burke shines, with one of those very specific chains of circumstance and (perhaps) causality: the demand for more household goods included iron cooking pots. But to heat the iron to make the pots required wood, which was in dwindling supply. There was lots of coal, but impurities in it spoiled the iron—until someone figured out how to burn out the impurities, to make coke that would be used to make iron. It was at this point that James Watt figured out how to make a steam engine, but he needed high quality iron to make it work. Now he had it. The industrial revolution began—all because of improvement in the weather.
It is at this point that FutureBurke pauses to note the irony in iron: the growing populations and now the steam engine began the era of mass production, and expanding economies and populations. Europe needed more natural resources to keep the machines going, and so the era of colonialization began. From coal-fed railroads to oil-fed cars and the next round of petroleum-based innovations—in an age of moderate climate—the cause of the next great climate change was literally being manufactured.
And it would be greater than any of the climate shifts humankind had experienced. The world would be on the way to becoming hotter than ever in our species existence.
But the first 50 minutes goes back much further than that, to describe the influence of climate on human history---beginning with pre-history.
Humans became human, Burke says, during the Ice Age, and perhaps because of it. Because game became scarcer, hunting was more complicated, and required cooperation and communication. Humans responded by inventing language. Because plants were scarcer, humans explored for food, and with sea water frozen and sea levels down in such areas as the Bering Straits, they were able to migrate farther. Then the planet warmed, the seas rose, and the populations of the Americas and Australia were separated from Europe and Asia.
The warmer temperatures and abundance of water led to better growing, more population, the beginning of agriculture and cities. There was so much grain in Iraq in 7000 BC that a system of accounting was needed, so writing was invented.
In 3000 BC drought struck the prosperous area of Egypt. The Nile was the only reliable water source when it flooded, which led to developing systems of irrigation and a host of related innovation: “maps to design the irrigation network, surveying and engineering to lay it out, mud and straw bricks to build it, geometry to measure reservoir volume, metallurgy to make the tools, a calendar to get the river flood date right, management to run it all, tax collectors to cream off the profits, and a state bureaucracy to spend them.” That is, the basics of modern civilization, according to Burke.
Climate changes didn’t have to be global or even very large to have major effects. A change in rain patterns doomed the great civilization of Mycenae, where because of shifting cold air patterns, it didn’t rain for a hundred years.
By 300 BC it was warm and moist again in Europe. The Alpine passes in northern Italy became open year round, allowing Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world. China seized the same sort of opportunity in its part of the world. Good weather opened up the “Silk Road” and sea routes, so these two superpowers began trading. But in 500 AD, the global temperature went down. The Huns of central Asia suffered freezing drought, and invaded the south, displacing other “barbarians” who eventually overran the Roman Empire and ushered in the Dark Ages.
A half century later, the temperature went up. Vikings colonized Greenland, where there was grass for sheep. Then it turned cold again in 1300. Greenland had no trees, and soon sea ice isolated it. By 1408, the last colony died out. The Little Ice Age gripped Europe in the 16th century, but in England, new technologies were developed to cope with it. Burke demonstrated the innovations of the new manor house: “Stone walls and gravel surround to keep out wet and mud, no more open colonnades and courtyards, steep roofs and guttering to handle a lot of rain, but in spite of the cold they put in big glass windows. New technology… changed their lives.” Like chimneys and fireplaces to heat up small rooms separately. Everyone no longer living around one central fire in a big common room. Those smaller rooms had tapestry, paneling, plasterwork and curtained beds to keep the warmth in and cold out. So now there was privacy. And with those private beds, romance.
The chimney allowed for heated offices, so accounts could be kept all year, instead of stopping when the ink froze: more business. The cold meant more life lived indoors, and led to indoor entertainment, like making music.
Then came three decades of warming. With hot, moist summers and warm winters, crop yields in England were at historic highs. Food was cheaper, work was plentiful, and in these prosperous times, people had more children. More households created the need for more household goods. Here’s where Burke shines, with one of those very specific chains of circumstance and (perhaps) causality: the demand for more household goods included iron cooking pots. But to heat the iron to make the pots required wood, which was in dwindling supply. There was lots of coal, but impurities in it spoiled the iron—until someone figured out how to burn out the impurities, to make coke that would be used to make iron. It was at this point that James Watt figured out how to make a steam engine, but he needed high quality iron to make it work. Now he had it. The industrial revolution began—all because of improvement in the weather.
It is at this point that FutureBurke pauses to note the irony in iron: the growing populations and now the steam engine began the era of mass production, and expanding economies and populations. Europe needed more natural resources to keep the machines going, and so the era of colonialization began. From coal-fed railroads to oil-fed cars and the next round of petroleum-based innovations—in an age of moderate climate—the cause of the next great climate change was literally being manufactured.
And it would be greater than any of the climate shifts humankind had experienced. The world would be on the way to becoming hotter than ever in our species existence.
The second fifty minutes of After the Warming begins in our recent past, moves into what was the future in 1989 (when the show was made) but is now also in our past, and then into what is still the future.
Burke reviews the discovery of the CO2 based global warming phenomenon beginning in the late 1950s with the same experiments and measurements in Hawaii that Al Gore describes in An Inconvenient Truth. He described the early manifestations of heating, and the endless studies. He projects inaction into the future, into the 1990s.
But in his scenario, a series of devastating droughts resulting in hundreds of thousands starving in Third World countries, plus food shortages in the US, and a series of wars in the Middle East over oil, pushed the United States into finally supporting action on global warming…in the year 2000.
Think about this for a moment. There have been devastating droughts in Africa and Asia, and hundreds of thousands have died in wars and genocides (as in Darfur) that are likely related to them. There’s been drought in the American West for several years, though globalization has kept food supplies up in the US. And we’ve certainly had wars in the Middle East, though no one announces that they are about oil. Burke’s description may turn out to be how the historians describe our recent past. But we don’t allow ourselves to see it that way.
Burke next posits something startling, based on something that hasn’t happened—but might yet. In his year 2000, Pacific nations had become major powers, to the extent that they led the fight to address global heating. Burke named Japan, which probably seemed more reasonable in the 1980s than now. But how many decades are we from a China and perhaps an India so economically powerful that world leadership does fall to them?
In any case, Burke posits something that by the realities of our 21st century, we might well find incredible: a Planetary Management Authority to organize and enforce efforts to address global heating.
The efforts themselves are familiar to us now, however strange they might have seen in 1989, like carbon trading. But there’s a twist in Burke’s history of the future that is just beginning to be talked about: how to get less developed nations into the process. Burke’s PMA manages a system in which advanced nations trade expertise for carbon use rights, as they cut their emissions. That expertise is applied to helping less developed nations become prosperous with clean technologies, as well as to create better health care and education.
The methods used to cut emissions are startlingly familiar: everything from the end of incandescent light bulbs to tax credits for energy efficiency and computer controlled homes to manage that efficiency, plus various clean energy technologies including solar and wind.
Burke throws in some realistic details, some of them already on the mark: beginning in 2008, there are several years of devastating tropical storms that kill hundreds of thousands in Australia, Bangladesh and Florida. By 2010 there are refugees and military confrontations at borders over food and water shortages.
Burke reviews the discovery of the CO2 based global warming phenomenon beginning in the late 1950s with the same experiments and measurements in Hawaii that Al Gore describes in An Inconvenient Truth. He described the early manifestations of heating, and the endless studies. He projects inaction into the future, into the 1990s.
But in his scenario, a series of devastating droughts resulting in hundreds of thousands starving in Third World countries, plus food shortages in the US, and a series of wars in the Middle East over oil, pushed the United States into finally supporting action on global warming…in the year 2000.
Think about this for a moment. There have been devastating droughts in Africa and Asia, and hundreds of thousands have died in wars and genocides (as in Darfur) that are likely related to them. There’s been drought in the American West for several years, though globalization has kept food supplies up in the US. And we’ve certainly had wars in the Middle East, though no one announces that they are about oil. Burke’s description may turn out to be how the historians describe our recent past. But we don’t allow ourselves to see it that way.
Burke next posits something startling, based on something that hasn’t happened—but might yet. In his year 2000, Pacific nations had become major powers, to the extent that they led the fight to address global heating. Burke named Japan, which probably seemed more reasonable in the 1980s than now. But how many decades are we from a China and perhaps an India so economically powerful that world leadership does fall to them?
In any case, Burke posits something that by the realities of our 21st century, we might well find incredible: a Planetary Management Authority to organize and enforce efforts to address global heating.
The efforts themselves are familiar to us now, however strange they might have seen in 1989, like carbon trading. But there’s a twist in Burke’s history of the future that is just beginning to be talked about: how to get less developed nations into the process. Burke’s PMA manages a system in which advanced nations trade expertise for carbon use rights, as they cut their emissions. That expertise is applied to helping less developed nations become prosperous with clean technologies, as well as to create better health care and education.
The methods used to cut emissions are startlingly familiar: everything from the end of incandescent light bulbs to tax credits for energy efficiency and computer controlled homes to manage that efficiency, plus various clean energy technologies including solar and wind.
Burke throws in some realistic details, some of them already on the mark: beginning in 2008, there are several years of devastating tropical storms that kill hundreds of thousands in Australia, Bangladesh and Florida. By 2010 there are refugees and military confrontations at borders over food and water shortages.
By 2010 the global temperature has gone up by 3 degrees F, and water levels have risen by over a foot. Two million have died by starvation. A temperature rise of 5F is forecast for 2020.
In that decade, there is greater concentration on local energy systems. Societies are reorganizing into smaller communities instead of big cities. Forestry is a major career.
Water is a greater problem. Major rivers in the US and Russia have gone dry. Sea walls are going up to protect coastal cities. Though there is grain growing in the far north, and being transported through newly opened Arctic waters, there is severe drought in the US. And despite the ongoing transformation, the effects of past greenhouse gas emissions continue to multiply and create feedback loops. Ocean plankton, which now absorbs CO2, begins dying because of the hotter water temperatures, and that CO2 is no longer being absorbed.
Without plankton, the only hope for absorbing CO2 becomes the forests. When several South American nations fail to halt deforestation, the PMA organizes a sea and land blockade to force enforcement. Because of the land required for cattle that had resulted in decades of deforestation, beef is so highly taxed that it disappears from most tables.
Still…by 2020 the temperature has risen 5.4 degrees. The sea has risen 2 feet. Between 2025-2040 it has risen 3 feet, breaking into sewage treatment plants and toxic waste dumps, and spreading disease. In 2050, the PMA assesses its half century of crisis management. There have been 20 million deaths by starvation, but only one nuclear exchange (in the Middle East.) Kansas and the Riviera are arid, there are palm trees in Massachusetts. But the civilized world is very different than it was in 2000, and carbon neutrality has been achieved.
But then data from the deep ocean comes in, indicating that melting ice and rain in the far north has added so much fresh water to the oceans that the great ocean conveyor—the deep currents snaking in a particular pattern that sets our climate—is slowing down. The result of warmer water is less carbon being absorbed, so the globe is heating twice as fast. The PMA concludes that carbon emissions will have to be reduced to almost pre-industrial levels of the year 1800.
FutureBurke, who has been upbeat throughout, and lives in a prosperous looking if conspicuously energy efficient dwelling with lots of computerized technology, now mentions that the prospects beyond 2050 could have been a lot better if humanity had used that 20 years---between 1980, when global warming became apparent, and 2000, when the PMA was established—to start action instead of arguing.
He ends with a joke from our era. The one about the man who falls from the top of a skyscraper. As he passes the 17th floor somebody asks him how he’s doing. “So far, so good,” he replies.
So here we are. There seems little use in reciting again what has already happened and is happening now: the hundreds of millions of people displaced by drought and natural disasters, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic, the slowing down of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle, the dying and migrations of animal and plant species everywhere, the increase of pest-borne diseases with increased heat. The droughts, the storms, the heat waves—they’ve all become background noise. We’ve had many hotter summers after Greenhouse summer. Flying coast to coast in the US is becoming increasingly difficult because of weather-related delays and cancellations, but it’s just one more of those things, like the idiocy of removing our shoes for Homeland Security.
Clearly there is increasing concern, and even increasing political pressure. Al Gore says that no matter who is elected President in 2008, dealing with the Climate Crisis will be high on his or her agenda. But time is increasingly the problem.
As for our future, a similar speculative program would differ in details, both in terms of what could happen and what the responses would be. But in outline, it's striking how little would be that different. The time scale would probably be extended in some instances, while phenomena we're already seeing isn't predicted. In terms of response, probably no PMA, and maybe new technologies not conceived in 1989 or even now, could be applied. But the basic transformation of energy, society and economies looks realistic---for a scenario that, if it isn't exactly the Best Case, is somewhere in the middle of likelihoods and possibilities.
But we’ve let more than those 20 years go by. Thanks to the Bushies and the soporific effect they’ve had on the media and the public, we’ve lost critical time since 2000, when Bush reversed his campaign pledge to seek mandatory carbon caps, and began the disinformation campaign to question the premise of global heating. How critical? Another speculative view of the Climate Crisis future, next time.
In that decade, there is greater concentration on local energy systems. Societies are reorganizing into smaller communities instead of big cities. Forestry is a major career.
Water is a greater problem. Major rivers in the US and Russia have gone dry. Sea walls are going up to protect coastal cities. Though there is grain growing in the far north, and being transported through newly opened Arctic waters, there is severe drought in the US. And despite the ongoing transformation, the effects of past greenhouse gas emissions continue to multiply and create feedback loops. Ocean plankton, which now absorbs CO2, begins dying because of the hotter water temperatures, and that CO2 is no longer being absorbed.
Without plankton, the only hope for absorbing CO2 becomes the forests. When several South American nations fail to halt deforestation, the PMA organizes a sea and land blockade to force enforcement. Because of the land required for cattle that had resulted in decades of deforestation, beef is so highly taxed that it disappears from most tables.
Still…by 2020 the temperature has risen 5.4 degrees. The sea has risen 2 feet. Between 2025-2040 it has risen 3 feet, breaking into sewage treatment plants and toxic waste dumps, and spreading disease. In 2050, the PMA assesses its half century of crisis management. There have been 20 million deaths by starvation, but only one nuclear exchange (in the Middle East.) Kansas and the Riviera are arid, there are palm trees in Massachusetts. But the civilized world is very different than it was in 2000, and carbon neutrality has been achieved.
But then data from the deep ocean comes in, indicating that melting ice and rain in the far north has added so much fresh water to the oceans that the great ocean conveyor—the deep currents snaking in a particular pattern that sets our climate—is slowing down. The result of warmer water is less carbon being absorbed, so the globe is heating twice as fast. The PMA concludes that carbon emissions will have to be reduced to almost pre-industrial levels of the year 1800.
FutureBurke, who has been upbeat throughout, and lives in a prosperous looking if conspicuously energy efficient dwelling with lots of computerized technology, now mentions that the prospects beyond 2050 could have been a lot better if humanity had used that 20 years---between 1980, when global warming became apparent, and 2000, when the PMA was established—to start action instead of arguing.
He ends with a joke from our era. The one about the man who falls from the top of a skyscraper. As he passes the 17th floor somebody asks him how he’s doing. “So far, so good,” he replies.
So here we are. There seems little use in reciting again what has already happened and is happening now: the hundreds of millions of people displaced by drought and natural disasters, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic, the slowing down of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle, the dying and migrations of animal and plant species everywhere, the increase of pest-borne diseases with increased heat. The droughts, the storms, the heat waves—they’ve all become background noise. We’ve had many hotter summers after Greenhouse summer. Flying coast to coast in the US is becoming increasingly difficult because of weather-related delays and cancellations, but it’s just one more of those things, like the idiocy of removing our shoes for Homeland Security.
Clearly there is increasing concern, and even increasing political pressure. Al Gore says that no matter who is elected President in 2008, dealing with the Climate Crisis will be high on his or her agenda. But time is increasingly the problem.
As for our future, a similar speculative program would differ in details, both in terms of what could happen and what the responses would be. But in outline, it's striking how little would be that different. The time scale would probably be extended in some instances, while phenomena we're already seeing isn't predicted. In terms of response, probably no PMA, and maybe new technologies not conceived in 1989 or even now, could be applied. But the basic transformation of energy, society and economies looks realistic---for a scenario that, if it isn't exactly the Best Case, is somewhere in the middle of likelihoods and possibilities.
But we’ve let more than those 20 years go by. Thanks to the Bushies and the soporific effect they’ve had on the media and the public, we’ve lost critical time since 2000, when Bush reversed his campaign pledge to seek mandatory carbon caps, and began the disinformation campaign to question the premise of global heating. How critical? Another speculative view of the Climate Crisis future, next time.
Monday, April 23, 2007
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
"In Shakespeare's world, character is not pre-determined. People become themselves through action, dialogue, the process of thinking. Drama is a basic tool for discovery of the self, achieved through exile, disguise, solloquy, and scenic counterpoint. For Shakespeare, value is not absolute. It depends upon reflection...Shakespeare's theory of human relativity is made possible by his dramatic medium, by double plots, contradictions between word and action, and the constant presence of a questioning audience."
Jonathan Bate, general editor of a new edition of Shakespeare's Collected Works, in Harper's magazine, April 2007, on the occasion of Shakespeare's 443rd birthday.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
"All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Timequake
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Timequake
Global Days for Darfur
The situation in Darfur continues to be dire. And confusing--as optimistic headlines are quickly followed by contradictory ones. There still has been no effective protection for either the population or aid workers. While the US is bogged down with many thousands of troops in the fruitless quagmire of Iraq, it's been said that as few as 2500 US troops in Sudan could make all the difference.
Half a million people have been killed and millions displaced in the violence in Darfur. A UN report warns that an entire generation of children is at risk. The Bush government has given the latest in a series of warnings to the government of Sudan, which is responsible for enabling the violence in the Darfur region, but the US continues to delay doing anything, even in terms of economic pressure.
April 23 to 30 are the Global Days for Darfur--some 332 events in 246 U.S. cities are planned so far. (Check here to see what's happening in your neighborhood.)
A form of protest that proved effective in changing the future of South Africa is being applied to this genocidal crisis: divestment. Eight states in the U.S. (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon and Vermont)are beginning that process by withdrawing state pension funds from any companies doing business with Sudan. Colorado just became the ninth. Dozens of US universities have also divested.
Another form of economic pressure is withdrawing businesses. Rolls-Royce is the latest international company to leave Sudan in protest. (Known here for its classic cars, the company is the second largest manufacturer of aircraft in the world, and the largest British based industry to leave Sudan.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that a possible alliance between Arab and non-Arab rebels against the Sudanese government could change the nature of the conflict.
The situation in Darfur continues to be dire. And confusing--as optimistic headlines are quickly followed by contradictory ones. There still has been no effective protection for either the population or aid workers. While the US is bogged down with many thousands of troops in the fruitless quagmire of Iraq, it's been said that as few as 2500 US troops in Sudan could make all the difference.
Half a million people have been killed and millions displaced in the violence in Darfur. A UN report warns that an entire generation of children is at risk. The Bush government has given the latest in a series of warnings to the government of Sudan, which is responsible for enabling the violence in the Darfur region, but the US continues to delay doing anything, even in terms of economic pressure.
April 23 to 30 are the Global Days for Darfur--some 332 events in 246 U.S. cities are planned so far. (Check here to see what's happening in your neighborhood.)
A form of protest that proved effective in changing the future of South Africa is being applied to this genocidal crisis: divestment. Eight states in the U.S. (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon and Vermont)are beginning that process by withdrawing state pension funds from any companies doing business with Sudan. Colorado just became the ninth. Dozens of US universities have also divested.
Another form of economic pressure is withdrawing businesses. Rolls-Royce is the latest international company to leave Sudan in protest. (Known here for its classic cars, the company is the second largest manufacturer of aircraft in the world, and the largest British based industry to leave Sudan.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that a possible alliance between Arab and non-Arab rebels against the Sudanese government could change the nature of the conflict.
Elsewhere
The latest in the Trekalog series, considering the film Star Trek: Generations is available for reading at Soul of Star Trek.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Designing a Better World
Earth Day brings out the optimism, so as it gets closer let's focus on some positive ideas. The World Changing site is doing a series of Earth Day statements and interviews, and two of the first were with designers/architects with the kind of expertise and vision to actually build the constituents of the future.
One is William McDonough, a vital visionary who isn't nearly well enough known. He may turn out to be the Buckminster Fuller of the Climate Crisis era, with actual designs that arguably are more practical. His "cradle to cradle" concept accentuates the positive, in more ways that one:
We can envision and design, for example, buildings that purify air and water and produce more energy than they use. Design can eliminate the concept of waste, producing perpetual assets rather than perpetual liabilities. An architecture of abundance would create objects and energies that are socially, economically, and ecologically delightful.
His World Changing statement is here, and his website is here (it's also in the Climate Crisis Links column to the left.)
John Thackara is another designer and visionary of the practical/physical world. His statement begins:
William Gibson's take on the subject has become a classic modern aphorism: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." Most elements of a sustainable world exist. Some of those elements are technological solutions. Some are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. The majority, I suspect, are social practices - some of them very old ones - learned by other societies and in other times.
Thackara can also be found at Doors of Perception. I recommend his book, In the Bubble, as well. I reviewed it for the San Francisco Chronicle, together with a couple of others.
Environmentalists are often their own worst enemies, either losing themselves in bureaucratic envirospeak or getting lost in the ozone layer of their worst stereotypes. And architect/ designers have their own problems with relevance and direct language--but I'm forgetting this is an optimistic Earth Day post. Let's try and extract the really good practical ideas and the really healthy and inspiring visions. We've got a few days left.
Earth Day brings out the optimism, so as it gets closer let's focus on some positive ideas. The World Changing site is doing a series of Earth Day statements and interviews, and two of the first were with designers/architects with the kind of expertise and vision to actually build the constituents of the future.
One is William McDonough, a vital visionary who isn't nearly well enough known. He may turn out to be the Buckminster Fuller of the Climate Crisis era, with actual designs that arguably are more practical. His "cradle to cradle" concept accentuates the positive, in more ways that one:
We can envision and design, for example, buildings that purify air and water and produce more energy than they use. Design can eliminate the concept of waste, producing perpetual assets rather than perpetual liabilities. An architecture of abundance would create objects and energies that are socially, economically, and ecologically delightful.
His World Changing statement is here, and his website is here (it's also in the Climate Crisis Links column to the left.)
John Thackara is another designer and visionary of the practical/physical world. His statement begins:
William Gibson's take on the subject has become a classic modern aphorism: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." Most elements of a sustainable world exist. Some of those elements are technological solutions. Some are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. The majority, I suspect, are social practices - some of them very old ones - learned by other societies and in other times.
Thackara can also be found at Doors of Perception. I recommend his book, In the Bubble, as well. I reviewed it for the San Francisco Chronicle, together with a couple of others.
Environmentalists are often their own worst enemies, either losing themselves in bureaucratic envirospeak or getting lost in the ozone layer of their worst stereotypes. And architect/ designers have their own problems with relevance and direct language--but I'm forgetting this is an optimistic Earth Day post. Let's try and extract the really good practical ideas and the really healthy and inspiring visions. We've got a few days left.
Monday, April 16, 2007
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
"I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to 'hold a horse together' in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Timequake
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Timequake
The Weekly Babble
Eye on the Ball/Prize/Future
I actually watched the NCAA Women's Final between Tennessee and Rutgers. It was a better game than most of the men's Final Four. Those two teams were fast and skilled, and played a fast-paced, exciting game. Rutgers held their own for much of the first half, but Tennessee wore them down with experience and a deeper bench. If I'm remembering correctly, the announcers said that most of the Rutgers starting players were freshman. Tennessee is a big time sports school, while Rutgers emphasizes academics, and hasn't played for the championship of anything for a very long time.
The furor that unwound all week over Imus' remarks about the Rutgers women was remarkable. It came to be about race and gender, about children, about the media and its diversity, and lack thereof. It was also about our basic standard these days of accepting whatever leads to making a lot of money or getting a lot of power.
Thanks in part to Congress being out of session, and the Administration and presidential candidates saying or doing nothing very new, it completely dominated the airwaves all week and all weekend. Now Congress is coming back, and the Justice Department and White House are going to be back on the hot seat. And so is Iraq, where the violence continues and grows.
Here's why there was nothing in this space last week about any of this: apart from weariness of the repetitive nature of these events and controversies, and as important as they are, they will pass, and we'll still be facing the future, and in particular the Climate Crisis.
For instance, Iraq. It can end the future for people there, for people who go there. But there is nothing new about it essentially, and from now on there probably won't be anything new. The talking heads on TV are saying pretty much the same things they were saying a year ago. And nothing really new is going to happen. Now it's just a matter of watching this sickening spectacle play out. By 2009, it will pretty much be over, and it probably won't be over much before that.
That's how it was with Vietnam. By 1971 everything had been said and done, and it was just a matter of how badly the war would end, and when. It's the same with Bush and Cheney. It is very likely they are criminals by statute as well as international law, and Constitutionally they are begging to be impeached. Those wheels are not yet turning and they probably won't because there isn't enough time. It could happen, it should happen, but it probably won't. But it's going to be ugly from here on out, with more outrages to come. And then in two years they'll be gone.
But the Climate Crisis will not be gone. It's clearly here--as the East Coast is currently learning--and it's going to get worse. There are always going to be outrages and crises and controversies over race, politics and American Idol. If all we do is devote saturation coverage and total obsessive attention to each of them as they burn through cyberspace and cable TV, we'll certainly lose the future, which is currently a scary background to the present, but will eventually fill up the present like a flood. And then it may be too late to talk about what to do.
I don't mean people shouldn't be interested or concerned about these matters, or that they shouldn't protest or take political action. It's just that there ought to be some people who keep their eye on what in the present is likely to have the greatest effect on the longer term future, if any. And these days, it feels like one of them would be me.
I've got another blog (Scorched Mirth) which I can use for snark and venting on these daily nightmares. These days however I find that the need or even the desire to do so doesn't last long, and I seldom devote the energy to it. All that news is old news, really, even before it happens. Saving the future is the story worth the focus.
I actually watched the NCAA Women's Final between Tennessee and Rutgers. It was a better game than most of the men's Final Four. Those two teams were fast and skilled, and played a fast-paced, exciting game. Rutgers held their own for much of the first half, but Tennessee wore them down with experience and a deeper bench. If I'm remembering correctly, the announcers said that most of the Rutgers starting players were freshman. Tennessee is a big time sports school, while Rutgers emphasizes academics, and hasn't played for the championship of anything for a very long time.
The furor that unwound all week over Imus' remarks about the Rutgers women was remarkable. It came to be about race and gender, about children, about the media and its diversity, and lack thereof. It was also about our basic standard these days of accepting whatever leads to making a lot of money or getting a lot of power.
Thanks in part to Congress being out of session, and the Administration and presidential candidates saying or doing nothing very new, it completely dominated the airwaves all week and all weekend. Now Congress is coming back, and the Justice Department and White House are going to be back on the hot seat. And so is Iraq, where the violence continues and grows.
Here's why there was nothing in this space last week about any of this: apart from weariness of the repetitive nature of these events and controversies, and as important as they are, they will pass, and we'll still be facing the future, and in particular the Climate Crisis.
For instance, Iraq. It can end the future for people there, for people who go there. But there is nothing new about it essentially, and from now on there probably won't be anything new. The talking heads on TV are saying pretty much the same things they were saying a year ago. And nothing really new is going to happen. Now it's just a matter of watching this sickening spectacle play out. By 2009, it will pretty much be over, and it probably won't be over much before that.
That's how it was with Vietnam. By 1971 everything had been said and done, and it was just a matter of how badly the war would end, and when. It's the same with Bush and Cheney. It is very likely they are criminals by statute as well as international law, and Constitutionally they are begging to be impeached. Those wheels are not yet turning and they probably won't because there isn't enough time. It could happen, it should happen, but it probably won't. But it's going to be ugly from here on out, with more outrages to come. And then in two years they'll be gone.
But the Climate Crisis will not be gone. It's clearly here--as the East Coast is currently learning--and it's going to get worse. There are always going to be outrages and crises and controversies over race, politics and American Idol. If all we do is devote saturation coverage and total obsessive attention to each of them as they burn through cyberspace and cable TV, we'll certainly lose the future, which is currently a scary background to the present, but will eventually fill up the present like a flood. And then it may be too late to talk about what to do.
I don't mean people shouldn't be interested or concerned about these matters, or that they shouldn't protest or take political action. It's just that there ought to be some people who keep their eye on what in the present is likely to have the greatest effect on the longer term future, if any. And these days, it feels like one of them would be me.
I've got another blog (Scorched Mirth) which I can use for snark and venting on these daily nightmares. These days however I find that the need or even the desire to do so doesn't last long, and I seldom devote the energy to it. All that news is old news, really, even before it happens. Saving the future is the story worth the focus.
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