Aliens have invaded my computer, my car and front tooth--what's next? See post below.

The Daily Babble

It's been awhile since I've done one of these. Not to distract you from the really important news, like the attempts to exploit the addled rantings of an ex-congressman, or the Chief Justice's hissy fit. But I'm afraid I'm drawing attention to myself, something that of course the Internet doesn't usually permit.

I just wanted to warn you--both of you--that I might be "off the air" for awhile. My laptop more or less died a few months ago, and I've been slow to replace it. Now this computer, my main almost brand new desktop, has developed a problem, I think. I had trouble getting it to turn on yesterday (no 60s jokes, please, not here in Humboldt), and today it refused. I tried everything I could think of--plugging into a different power strip, disconnecting and reconnecting the power cord, and usually different rhythms in pressing the power button--one long holding it down, a bunch of short jabs, etc. but nothing happened.

I called the computer doctors who said it sounded like the power whatcacallit, only $50 bucks to replace plus the $80 an hour to replace it. And maybe 3 or 4 working days at best before I got it back. They said I might be able to recover some files while I'm there, so I can go on making a living.

Only trouble was I couldn't get it there right away, because my car won't start. Not an unknown problem for the last six months, but the mechanics can't tell what's wrong, and I'm contemplating a different approach (different mechanic, mainly.) So the old Volvo sits out there motionless.

I was about to head over to campus to find Margaret and see when she could give me and my computer a ride. I turned off the light, and as I passed it, I hit the computer power button one more time. It went on. So ever since, I've been backing up, doing the work I need to do for the rest of the week and into next, and sending it out. I had to cancel an appointment, and miss my discount day at the groc. But as long as the thing is on, so must I be.

My slowness in dealing with the car, as well as a few other things I should be taking care of, is partly due to a visit to the dentist. Where he told me that the work on one solitary tooth will cost me more than a new (quite used) car and laptop computer combined. It will cost more than I made writing my theatre column for the local weekly--for all last year. The work of 24 columns will disappear in two hours.

I got a second opinion--or rather, the same opinion from a second dentist, yesterday. So it will have to be done, and for the next year, I'll be working for the dentist. That's the one job. The other is the part-time "communications specialist" work for two university departments, both of which are currently on the list for "program elimination," as HSU has to cut another million plus from it's incredible shrinking budget. So money in is becoming a non-renewable resource. Can't say the same for money out.

Compared to the future I've been dealing with for planet Earth and human civilization, it's all pretty trivial. But it's my trivial. My little so-called life. And here on my little so-called blog, I can rant about it--at least until the computer goes off.

Well, be seeing you. Sometime.

Two views of Denali National Park in Alaska, one of the things we've done right, noted in the post below.

Some Things We've Done Right

When it comes to the human impact on the future, we have done some things right. I am often astonished that libraries still exist, for example, and that all you have to do to find the best and the latest thoughts, facts and dreams is follow the signs into the stacks to the right shelf, and there they are, waiting for you.

Something else came freshly to my attention over the weekend when I happened on a rebroadcast of the Ken Burns' series, The National Parks: America's Best Idea. (Maybe it was rebroadcast because this is the birth month of the first National Park. )

It's America's best idea all right, and also by now, one of humanity's, as the protection of wilderness, natural wonders and wildlife habitats is a worldwide phenomenon. I saw much of the last episode, which was replete with stories of lives transformed by family visits to national parks when children were at impressionable ages. I was getting wistful about not having had such an experience, when they showed the March on Washington in 1963--I was there for that, but hadn't ever really thought about the fact that it was held in a national park--that Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke with Park Rangers at his side.

But it was the more familiar kinds of parks that were most interesting, and you have to admire people who devote their lives to them--four generations in one family. This segment dealt with the 50s and 60s, the controversial improvements and expansions by our socialist President Eisenhower and JFK Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. And then the biggest additions to the parks system in the 70s, in Alaska. How controversial that was--how the first bill to create parks there sailed through the House but was blocked in the Senate by filibuster. How President Jimmy Carter then used executive authority to declare National Monuments to protect as much as he could. How Alaskans were outraged--burned Carter in effigy--threatened to shoot National Park Service rangers--threatened to secede from the union they'd just joined.

both photos: Denali National Park in Alaska

But five years after the town of Seward was in revolt, it was raking in quiet tourist dollars and happy about it, so eventually it would request that the park area be expanded. Eventually National Parks--as well as wilderness areas and wildlife refuges--were created. Some, of course, still controversial.

The Parks often had to deal with political opposition, and many were compromised--that still happens, as in the current corporate eating away at the Everglades. At the same time, environmentalists and Indian tribes sometimes opposed roads and "improvements." Yet somehow, in the general ravaging of the landscape, more of it remains than otherwise would, and millions of people visit. Some are changed by it. And many don't have to go--they just have to know these places exist.

We do have good ideas, we do dream up better futures daily. Sometimes we even act on them. I realize that recent posts outline a significantly challenging future. But there are ideas, like a couple previewed in Thomas Friedman's latest column, that might still improve the long-term chances significantly. Even in the Crisis and Cataclysm periods, there are ways people can make a positive difference. For those readers not yet scared away, I'll be writing about that, too, in future posts.

The First Stage of Grief

The first stage of grief is denial, and at the moment when the mortal threat to our beautiful planet is so painfully but definitely manifesting, the denial is most assured and quietly hysterical. That the same people who are so fixated on evolution are now involved in this denial, isn't surprising perhaps, but it's all immensely sad.

As is the latest study from the UK Met Office, which examined climate findings since the 2007 UN report, and says the evidence is now even stronger that human-caused climate change is upon us.

The study, which looks at research published since the IPCC's report, has found that changes in Arctic sea ice, atmospheric moisture, saltiness of parts of the Atlantic Ocean and temperature changes in the Antarctic are consistent with human influence on our climate.

"What this study shows is that the evidence has strengthened for human influence on climate and we know that because we've looked at evidence across the climate system and what this shows very clearly is a consistent picture of a warming world," said Dr Stott.

And another study suggests that methane is venting from part of the Arctic shelf. A significant release from the vast store of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from under the melting permafrost could set off abrupt global heating and runaway climate change (Climate Collapse.) This would likely happen if methane set off a feedback effect, which so far hasn't been detected. But the danger is clear, because it is past and current global heating that is releasing methane from the Arctic. So while grief--especially conscious grief--is appropriate, so is conscious determination and action toprevent the worst, and prepare for the worse.

Update: a RealClimate post urges caution on the methane research, and the whole question of methane's impact on climate change.

...And a Time to Vote

President Obama on Wednesday called for Congress to vote on health care reform within the next few weeks, with doctors and nurses who support his bill; (bottom photo) one of many demonstrations--this one in New York--saying the same. More about this and its importance to the future in the post below.

What Kind of Country

Almost exactly one year after launching his effort to effectively reform health insurance and health care in America, today President Obama called for a vote on the bill based on the legislation that both houses of Congress passed.

Not only is health insurance reform crucial to the lives of millions of Americans, and to the American economy, and to the federal budget, but it is a crucial step to a better future-- and a crucial test of whether this country can move towards that future. And by better, I mean better than what it will be if this isn't done, as well as with better health care for millions of Americans.

The process has been ugly and the legislation is imperfect. But it does address needs, and it can be the basis for more reforms. President Obama outlined what the legislation does:

Essentially, my proposal would change three things about the current health care system. First, it would end the worst practices of insurance companies. No longer would they be able to deny your coverage because of a preexisting condition. No longer would they be able to drop your coverage because you got sick. No longer would they be able to force you to pay unlimited amounts of money out of your own pocket. No longer would they be able to arbitrarily and massively raise premiums like Anthem Blue Cross recently tried to do in California -- up to 39 percent increases in one year in the individual market. Those practices would end.

Second, my proposal would give uninsured individuals and small business owners the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get for themselves -- because if it’s good enough for members of Congress, it’s good enough for the people who pay their salaries..."

Finally, my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions -- families, businesses, and the federal government.

The bottom line is our proposal is paid for. And all the new money generated in this plan goes back to small businesses and middle-class families who can't afford health insurance. It would also lower prescription drug prices for seniors. And it would help train new doctors and nurses and physician assistants to provide care for American families."

To walk away from this now is to give in to the extreme and cynical demagoguery that has been inflicted on these minimal yet important reforms, stopping unconscionable abuses and restoring fairness and humanity. If that kind of opposition succeeds now, it will be used again and again to kill the future.

President Obama ended his remarks with what's at stake:

" In the end, that's what this debate is about. It's about what kind of country we want to be. It's about the millions of lives that would be touched and, in some cases, saved by making private health insurance more secure and more affordable.

So at stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem. The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I do not know how this plays politically, but I know it's right. "

A Teachable Moment

The news has given us examples of politicians making despicably distorted use of the snowstorms in the eastern U.S. to stupidly mock the onrushing reality of global heating. But it occurred to me that for younger and more inquiring minds, these snows presented a great opportunity for science teachers. Kids love to unlock apparent paradoxes, to see how things are not always what they seem. So I hope that legions of science teachers are demonstrating to perhaps temporarily attentive students just how a warming planet can produce more snow, how their cities can grind to a halt--even Washington DC!--in what is likely to be the warmest February on record.

These students should be receptive, for even a Republican Senator recognizes that the young are attuned to the message of the Climate Crisis. "I've been to enough college campuses to know," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, "if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It's a value."

Update: Maybe I should say clearly what I implied by this suggestion: the physics and chemistry involved in explaining these snows in a warming world is so basic that children can understand it.

The Climate Future

Following up on some recent posts about climate and the future, as well as the reading that prompted these posts, I've formed a kind of working future history--a kind of outline, that provides a time-framework for thinking about things to come.

This is based on informed speculation but it is also a first attempt, and subject to revision, perhaps early and often. But at the moment it seems realistic to me. Basically it divides the future into three phases:

1. Now to circa 2035: Climate Crisis
During this period, the evidence for human-caused climate disruption increases, as does the evidence for ongoing effects of past greenhouse gas pollution. Awareness and acceptance also grows, but for the rest of the current decade at least, much of the public will (for one reason or another) fail to connect the dots, and Climate Crisis denial will reach a fevered pitch.

However, a minority that recognizes at least part of the crisis will be very active, though in different pursuits. Some will recognize that immediate and long-lasting change is necessary to keep the Climate Crisis from becoming the ultimate catastrophe in the next century. Some will recognize the imminent danger of effects now inevitable in the near future due to past greenhouse gas pollution. A smaller number will realize both. But everyone will choose specific areas in which to concentrate their own efforts.

Some will concentrate on alternative energy, and on developing technologies to deal with effects. Some will try to figure out how to deal with the effects when they become dominant, and the entire society has no choice but to change. Some will work on political change, or try to increase public awareness and acceptance. But due in part to the violence of the denialists, I suspect many will work as quietly as possible to be ready for future changes.

Those changes will probably at first be unrelated responses to specific catastrophes, threats and emergencies. Eventually, the role of climate in these accumulating problems will be accepted. Perhaps that will lead to conscious strategies, and the work of those who were preparing may then see the light of day.

So the tasks of the Climate Crisis period will be: develop and institute the changes necessary to drastically cut greenhouse gases so runaway climate collapse doesn't happen in the far future, while preparing to deal with the effects of inevitable climate cataclysm already beginning, and becoming dominant in...

2035 to 2090: Climate Cataclysm.
Scientists estimate that it takes about thirty years for greenhouse gas pollution sent into the atmosphere to have direct effect on the planet. So the gases now being produced will have impact on climate in 2040. By the same token, the changes in climate today are largely the result of the lesser amounts of pollution that entered the atmosphere in 1980, as well as the cumulative effects of some greenhouse gas pollution prior to that.

And that's what's apparently got scientists and other careful observers really worried. According to their pretty reliable models, the polar ice melts observed in real time now, shouldn't be happening for many years. Which suggests that things are worse than they thought, and are likely to keep getting worse than that for the forseeable future.

Even within the relatively conservative estimates of the most recent UN climate report, the near future is going to have serious problems. A Brooking Institutions report published in 2008 looked at possible consequences of the three climate scenarios (which might be classified as bad, worse and worse yet)--the volume is titled Climatic Cataclysm.

But data since that UN report, particularly the sea ice melts, suggest to some (such as David Orr in Down to the Wire) that the effects are going to be a lot worse: sea level rises wiping out coastal cities, storms, heat and drought, diseases, possibly resource wars, large-scale human migrations, and all the attendant problems of multiple disasters. Futurist and s/f writer Bruce Sterling has been warning for years that the effects will be so extensive that virtually everyone's lives in this future will be completely dominated by climate change.

The dates I selected are a matter of splitting the difference between estimates various scientists have made informally (as for example, here) on when climate cataclysm effects will become undeniable. Some say ten years, some say thirty, and of course, no one knows.

But we are already getting hints as to what the near future may be like. Just in the past month or so, the world has experienced destructive earthquakes in Haiti, Japan and Chile, with significant quakes elsewhere. At the same time as emergencies in Haiti and Chile are ongoing, there have been several record snowstorms disabling the big cities of the North American East Coast and U.S. Middle Atlantic, and killer storms in Europe. Some of these events are climate-related, others perhaps not, but the point is: these are large and complex crises, affecting millions of people, requiring lots of resources and attention, while disrupting normal economic and other activities. As the number and extent of such crises increase, their effects accumulate.

This is partly why Orr and others have adopted Jim Kunstler 's term, the Long Emergency. A lot of small emergencies become one. And also because, once the climate heats up and feedback effects set in, feedback will extend to the social and political effects. It won't be a matter of meeting an emergency and going back to normal. There won't be a normal, or not for long. It's likely to be one Long Emergency, always changing.

It is possible that changes will be made in the interim to make coping with this period not as traumatic: more flexibility from decentralized renewable clean energy, a quicker and more general awakening to what's really happening that motivates societies and maybe even the world to act quickly and consciously. It's possible. Some seeds are being planted in our Climate Crisis era.

On the other hand, we don't really know what will happen when the dominoes start to fall. Already our biodiversity is dwindling fast, and we don't know at what point the web of life that supports us will shatter.

The tasks of the Climate Cataclysm period will be to cope with the effects in real time, as well as resisting the temptation to abandon efforts to end greenhouse gas emissions, even though the climate has clearly changed. Because, if those efforts aren't successful...

2090-12090: Climate Collapse

There's no avoiding the Climate Cataclysm years. We've made that bed. But it may still be possible to avoid the ultimate apocalypse of Climate Collapse--otherwise known as runaway climate change. This would result in a planet so hot that human civilization and perhaps human life will be unlikely, except maybe for a small fraction of today's population. It would be a planet so hot that most animal and plant species on the planet today will be extinguished. This would happen over a century, maybe two, maybe even three. But it will last for hundreds of thousands of years. I made it just one hundred thousand, because I'm so lame at math.

But I repeat: the difference isn't between the climate we have now and Climate Collapse. The climate we have now will very likely be history in the Climate Cataclysm period, and it will not return to this state for at least thousands of years.

So all the efforts to reduce carbon emissions, create a global cap-and-trade market, etc., all the meetings and treaties like Kyoto and Copenhagen and upcoming in Mexico City--they are all bascially about preventing Climate Collapse. Not everybody knows that, or thinks so, but that's the probability, as far as I can tell.

And we don't really know how much time we have to get this done, except that it's probably not very much time, and it may in fact be too late, because we don't really know what effects are going to show up in the next 30 years: basically, how things will interact or create feedback loops, so the effects of global heating accelerate more heating. Scientists like James Hansen have developed what they think is the upper limit, and while we haven't yet reached it, if we keep going as we are now, we soon will.

When I started considering all this, especially as I was reading the Orr book and seeing related conclusions popping up, I was of course pretty shocked. I thought I'd accepted that there were going to be inevitable effects in the near future. I just didn't realize they would be so severe, and especially would last so long. We're changing this planet to something we wouldn't recognize, probably forever! That's incredibly awful, and hard to face with anything but numb despair.

Maybe it's that psychological predisposition to concentrate on the practical aspects and even on the positive elements, once you've accepted that catastrophe is inevitable. But I've found there is plenty to consider and think about, and especially plenty to do, both to prepare for the Climate Cataclysm near future, and to continue trying to forestall the Climate Collapse of the far future. And that's what I'll be writing about, in the very near future.

Today in Schizoid History

On March 1, 1872, the U.S. established Yellowstone National Park, one of the first examples on Earth of protecting a vast natural area as a park. On March 1, 1954 the U.S. detonated a hydrogen bomb off Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, causing one of the worst and most notorious radiation releases in history, leading to, among other things, Godzilla.

Push-Back on Climate Crisis Denial Follies

Some notable push-back on the Climate Crisis denying that is endangering the future by providing excuses for not dealing with either the causes or effects of climate change.

What's getting the most attention is Al Gore's oped piece today in the New York Times. Sympathizing with the impulse of denial, Gore is brutal about the consequences. If only the Climate Crisis weren't real---

"But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands."

"I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer. "

After disposing of the UN panel controversy and the DC snows red herring, Gore notes the record of recent failures:

"Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them. And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act."

The lesser noted but even more direct push-back came from U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia, who went after the Senate for failing to even consider the Climate Crisis legislation that the House passed:

" I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets its head out of its rear end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country is literally at risk."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases, it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

--John Keats, Endymion. Photo: broken Arctic sea ice, National Geographic. Click photo to greatly enlarge.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"That the contents of the world's libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age."--Jason Epstein, New York Review of Books. Photo: rock strata, from Featherheart's Weblog. Be sure to click and enlarge to get the full effect.

Melting ice at the poles from 2007 to now constitutes the most potent warning sign of Climate Crisis. See post below.

When the Climate Crisis Changed

The change in the prevailing view of the Climate Crisis, now still emerging, may eventually be traced back to 2007, and the Arctic ice. The Arctic sea ice melts observed in 2007 were so much more extensive, and so much sooner than the consensus of climate science had predicted. Once the meaning of it began to sink in, the extent and speed of climate change, and the extent and speed of the damage it would cause, suddenly became much more cataclysmic. “Instead of the long, slow problem many had imagined climate change to be," writes Bill McKibben, "we seemed to be staring at a dynamic system bent on flipping into some new state.”

The melting signalled that past greenhouse gas emissions were more consequential than previously thought, and since this was so, the near future might not escape catastrophic consequences, including a rise in sea levels that would devastate certain island countries and certain low-lying cities, and possibly endanger many more coastal cities, where much if not most of the world's population lives.

It also suggested the possibility of immense feedback effects. For example, the melting of permafrost could unleash enough frozen methane--another and possibly even more lethal greenhouse gas--to set in motion runaway climate change, which would heat the world for thousands of years, and could well be the end of human civilization as well as most other species.

The science of ice continues to yield data and conclusions in this direction. Monday: Scientists who challenged the possibility of catastrophic sea level rise in coming decades have retracted their argument. That's the meat of it. The technical story is that a couple of scientists who argued that estimates of catastrophic levels by 2100 were too high, asked that this conclusion be retracted from the journal where it was supposed to be published, because they were now convinced by the data that indeed sea levels could get that high.

But as is all too tragically common, the retraction was misreported--even in the often reliable Guardian--to imply that it was the higher estimate that was retracted.

Also reported Monday, concerning the opposite polar region, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded: "Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide."

(Let's pause for a sec and parse "if warming continues." If warming is caused by greenhouse gas pollution--and scientists say that today's effects are largely caused by pollution of 30 years ago--it stands to reason that warming will continue, since that pollution has only increased in the past 30 years. So this is a scientific caveat that perhaps hides the reality.)

The 2007 Arctic observations led to new science and new warnings, as well as worldwide demonstrations on behalf of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases to a level that many scientists believed (or hoped) would keep runaway climate collapse from happening. This recent history is narrated in the current New York Review of Books (March 11) in an article by Bill McKibben (online paygo or subscription only), as the background to the wishes and disappointments of the Copenhagen conference. (See an interesting sidelight to that at American Dash.)

Apparently by barging into a meeting uninvited, President Obama got a resistant China to agree to a fairly vague accord promising action. Now the Obama administration has announced it wants to cash in that promise--as well as match it with a U.S. commitment--at the meetings in Mexico later this year:

The U.S. said it wants to reach a legally binding climate-change agreement at a summit in Mexico in December, a sign President Barack Obama hasn’t given up the fight for a global accord to limit greenhouse gases.
The pact should cover “all major economies,” and include elements from the non-binding Copenhagen Accord made in December, the State Department said in a letter released today by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.

If such a binding agreement were made, and it set sufficiently high goals, it would be a political miracle, at least as much as the event in the 1980 winter Olympics known as the Miracle On Ice. And of course a whole world more significant.

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"At the end of our tether we must imagine the unimaginable: a world rid of nuclear weapons and a world powered by sunlight, safe from the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Utopia? Hardly. But those are the only realistic options we have."--David W. Orr

For background on this paragraph, check what I've added to the Down to the Wire Review at Books In Heat. You might also be interested in my post at 60's Now on Kumbaya: Then and Now, a version of which was a Rescued post at Kos on Sunday. Otherwise, enjoy the photo: of sugar maples, dying out in New England now due to climate change.

Emerson for the Day

"The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible."

Emerson ("Nature"). Photo: Andromeda galaxy, NASA, from first Wide-field Infrared Explorer images.

Hope v. Optimism

Just to clarify the difference between optimism and hope I tried to make in a post a few weeks ago, here's a similar distinction made by David Orr in Down to the Wire, which (by the way) I review at Books in Heat (double meaning where this book is concerned, I guess, given its topic.)

"Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up," Orr writes. "Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds. Optimism, on the other hand, leans back, puts its feet up, and wears a confident look, knowing that the deck is stacked."

He quotes Vaclav Havel: "Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons...Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well...but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good."

“I know of no purely rational reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future,” Orr writes. Indeed, given events since this book was written--the weak agreement of Copenhagen and subsequent international murk, the Obama administration's loss of momentum and the apparently fated showdown with the reactionary ultra-minority in collusion with the most monied interests--the outlook is even bleaker for a relatively painless and positive transition. There just isn't enough time anymore for this two steps forward, one and a half steps back. One positive is the work people are doing now, scientists and others, in developing knowledge and tools to be ready when people are ready to face this, which will likely be after a set of catastrophes that can't be ignored or rationalized. I'll be writing about that work here.

Those folks are doing the work of hope, at least according to my perhaps even more restrictive definition. I see hope as a commitment of the present, that works towards an envisioned good future, but has no expectations of the outcome of those efforts. I admire those who have faith in the future, who have that kind of vision. And I see reasons for that faith, in the human potential. I don't necessarily have it. Imagination has to be in some way its own future, just as imagining and working for a human future must be its own reward.

I've postponed this post, partly because I like seeing that photo of the snow leopard at the top of the blog, looking out. The best substitute I could come up with is the slightly smaller version, which for now I'm posting in a permanent position, top left. It's not quite as good--something missing from the eyes and the expression in the smaller version. So maybe I'll have to repost the original from time to time.

New DNA tests suggest that tigers evolved as a sister species to snow leopards (top photo), and are a far older species that previously believed. This comes at a time when both species are very close to extinction. The largest subspecies of tiger may already be fated for extinction. But these heart-breaking extinctions only suggest the much larger problem. We're losing thousands of species every year. The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment says that nearly two-thirds of the "services provided by nature to humankind" are in decline worldwide. The planet we know and that has always supported us is dying, and humanity is both largely the cause and the only species capable of addressing this crisis, if indeed that's still even possible. One likely reason we aren't addressing it is suggested in the post below.

The Evolution of Ignorance: Television

"Even though the mass extinction of species and the wholesale decline of ecosystems have yet to trump contemporary fixations on the economy, politics, peak oil, terrorism, and entertainment, biodepletion will undoubtedly be judged, in retrospect and not soon enough, as the most momentous, far-reaching event of our time."--Eileen Crist & H. Bruce Rinker, "One Grand Organic Whole" in Gaia in Turmoil (MIT Press.)

You would reasonably expect that if there is substantial evidence that an intelligent species is systematically destroying what supports its existence, that species would focus on the issues involved. You might even consider such a focus to be a reasonable definition of an intelligent species.

You might reasonably expect that such a danger would be the main topic of inquiry and debate. Our species has in place the communications media to involve pretty much the entire planet in such an urgent and thorough discussion of the mortal danger to the biosphere, including the ominous threat of the Climate Crisis. But we're not using it for any such intelligent purpose.

We don't even use it for serious exploration of issues of the economy, terrorism and the rest of that list. We do use it to display some of our species other great qualities--wit, imagination, music, physical achievement in sports. But then there's the degradation on parade called reality TV. And the money-making games called politics.

What we don't have--or have enough of-- is what got us here. We developed as an intelligent species by looking ahead, at future dangers and opportunities. But our greatest means of communicating fails entirely to focus on the greatest dangers we have ever faced.

The pioneers of television stressed its vast potential for education. Even as commercial interests took it in other directions, the educational mission held on, undernourished until it starved to death.

What did it in was a numbness to consciousness, to the ability of the medium to involve and expand consciousness. That hasn't died completely--you see it in programs that still inspire awe, both fact-based and imaginative. But it's been largely numbed, and overwhelmed by the purposeful evolution of ignorance.

In 1957 Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders. It exposed techniques being used and developed for advertising, especially television commercials. Shocking in its time, it's a modest description of normal television today. But among the essential elements of these persuaders is that they remain hidden. They operate by direct appeal to the unconscious.

Today's commercials are layered with irony, yet the same appeals are made in basically the same ways. American men will do anything for beer. Etc. While we may laugh at the stereotypes, we basically identify with them, and assume everyone else basically does, too, because that's what we're supposed to be, and what we're supposed to care about.

The commercials define us. They define what we are and what we aren't, and what we expect. The programs permitted on television are those that support the appeals and the stereotypes created in the commercials.

Crucial to their successful operation in getting us to buy their crap is that they keep us ignorant, and happy to be ignorant. And so we are. And it is the very crap we buy that largely is destroying our future. As a society we have not yet been overwhelmed by a new Dark Ages. But television pretty much has. It is a mirror held up to our decadence and willful ignorance. But we've been persuaded that it's all ok.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobel Prize Lecture

Messages of the Snow, part 2

One more snowbound Washington photo--a great one that accompanies an LA Times story. It appears to be the Supreme Court building, lost in the clouds, which perhaps is where they found their decision on corporations as individual citizens. The story under this photo is another on the relationship of the snowstorms to the Climate Crisis debate. In a terse Q & A format, it also debunks the Deniers, emphasizing the scientists saying that snow is in some ways a symptom of relative warmth--those of us who grew up knowing that it often was 'too cold to snow' also know this kind of clinging snow is evidence of warmer temps. In fact, the average temp in DC in January was about a degree warmer than normal for the past 40 years.

This part did surprise me: Q. How will the snow affect the politics of the climate bill? A. Probably not much, because proponents are pitching the bill as a boost to national security and a creator of clean-energy jobs, as opposed to a curb on global warming. The swing voters who will dictate the bill's fate are senators who more or less say they accept the science behind climate change.

Update: stats showing more snow in warmer winters.

Messages of the Snow

Beauty and majesty, the harmony and humanity of shelter and warmth in the cold, as well as inconveniencing a badly organized civilization, the snow has many messages. But for some of the wrong ones, see post below.

The Bare Minimum

There are aspects of the Climate Crisis that are intellectually, emotionally and psychologically challenging. But even to get to the more complex aspects just of the facts of what's happening requires understanding and accepting apparent divergences or even apparent paradoxes that aren't all that new.

But in the public discourse, we're failing even at that.

At the moment--which in some ways is the worst possible time--Climate Crisis skepticism appears to be growing, based on two bits of demagoguery that seems to be accepted at face value. The first has to do with errors in some data and conclusions by climate scientists, and several purloined emails among climate scientists that suggest attempts to push a conclusion.

It's not an unprecedented trick to use one error or deception to call into question unrelated data and an overall conclusion that these errors or deceptions don't really affect. But in this case, we seem all too ready to fall for it.
One of many articles about this--this one in the New York Times-- say basically what all the sane ones do: while they do their "on the one hand this and on the other hand that" reporting of the charges and counter charges, they conclude that, regarding the 2007 UN report quantifying the reality and danger of the Climate Crisis, "The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions."

The more recent and in some ways more depressing assertion is that the big snows in the Eastern U.S. prove that Earth is not warming, and the Climate Crisis is phony. Again, the Times states what has been repeated over and over again before: particular weather events aren't evidence for or against climate change, except that "Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events." In fact, the most authoritative federal report on climate last year predicted more frequent and larger snowstorms in the northeastern U.S.

It's the kind of paradox that's funny in an uncomfortable way, but to take it as serious evidence that the planet isn't heating, is just willful ignorance. It doesn't require a major step in thinking. Not compared to the steps involving lag times, feedback loops, tipping points, etc. We don't have to understand the intricacies of ocean temperatures and air currents that result in more snow in one spot when the Earth gets hotter. We just have to understand that it happens, and that it isn't nonsense.

There is even a possibility--still a live one--that greenhouse gas heating will cause a climate jolt--called rapid climate change--that could shift ocean currents to bring a sudden Ice Age to parts of the globe. This more robust paradox was not thought too complicated for moviegoers to understand, as it was the premise of so far the only Climate Crisis disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow.

If people can't think their way through these bare minimum steps, we're going to end up destroying the planet we know and that some of us love. But it's probably not so much a problem in understanding as in acceptance. We're still stuck in the first stage of grief for our dying world: denial.

And by concentrating on this fluff, we're ignoring several realities, one of which is also staring us in the face: we're apparently not prepared to cope with these kinds of crises. The snow has paralyzed the East, Native Americans are freezing in the West, homes are being swept away by mudslides in southern CA, and then there's Haiti, where torrential rains are coming, on top of the struggle to cope with the earthquakes' effects. All this is apart from the largely unreported consequences on peoples' lives as well as the landscape, all over the world, due directly to global heating.

And speaking of Climate Crisis fictions, in the first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy on the subject, the U.S. government begins to take the Climate Crisis very seriously after Washington is flooded. So it is a tragedy of the absurd that the actual flooding of Washington comes in the form of snow, and we're not smart enough to see the connection, or sane enough to admit it.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Dear friends, the swarthy earth shoulders into the stars here.

The slopes are possessed of many trees.

The gracious sun visits daily the open parks,

and a chaperone mountain serves all the canyon west.

Deer timid through shadows. Birds fly across from cliffs.

Mostly silence rises and moves up the slopes

past enchanted white spikes of yucca.

This is the land we are exiled to from a world fighting.

We look at each other and sing all the songs we have heard."

William Stafford

Connections

I still scan Daily Kos, though it seems to have become a kind of political social networking site, and the Kos Borg seem way younger and not often that interesting, when they aren't maddening. But there's usually something that catches my eye, and the place in general does redeem itself every once in awhile.

Like this week, when it seems to be the most prominent place on the web that is consistently following the hardships on Native American reservations, especially in South Dakota, where the very bad winter has hit very hard. With the single-disaster media attention split between Haiti and Snowmageddon in the eastern U.S., nobody is noticing the emergency needs of people within our borders who are living close to the edge anyway.

But at Kos, there's been a recommended diary every day, with lots of information on how individuals can help. The latest one has a little more--in fact, it's less about the poorest and now coldest places in the country--in South Dakota--than one of the wealthiest, in northern Virginia.

Yet this diary weaves a story with multiple connections. It tells us just enough about a few people to imagine them beyond what their job descriptions or ethnicity would suggest. And there's kindness, a sense of rightness and justice, even a kind of heroism, along with unexpected connections.

This story resonates with me for another reason. When things get tough--as they do in temporary emergencies like these snowstorms, or the mudslides in southern CA or the hard cold in the Dakotas, or earthquakes wherever they happen--and as they will in the coming Long Emergency of the near future, brought on by the Climate Cataclysm--these are the kind of connections we will all depend on.

We will depend on kindness, compassion, empathy. On cooperation and spontaneous organization--I've heard more than one story about neighbors getting together to dig themselves out of the snow.

We will depend on making alliances with former strangers. We will depend on people who know how to do things and have the tools to do them, and who see the need for their service and respond. On being willing to use our skills and strengths to help those who need them. And we will depend on the fuel of gratitude.

The people in this story not only made a connection, they discovered an existing one. Six degrees of separation will come in handy, too, once we discover what it means when we need a service, or need to provide one.

Beyond the Radar

Some of the news comes in under the radar, and some of it is just apparently beyond it.

Washington is choked with snow, so if anyone noticed, it was apt to be rueful, but the Obama administration put another piece in place for the future. They announced Monday the creation of a new federal agency focused on gathering, studying and communicating information on climate.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, will be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington and will have six regional directors across the country.

Lubchenco [Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] also announced a new NOAA climate portal on the Internet to collect a vast array of climatic data from NOAA and other sources. It will be "one-stop shopping into a world of climate information," she said.

This is the latest of relatively quiet recent steps to focus federal science on the largest problem for the future. Another was the subtle re-purposing of NASA, which will be doing more to study Earth and its systems from space.

Who Dat!

Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints for the team's first Super Bowl victory ever, and to the courageous city of New Orleans. It was a great game, the Who rocked at halftime, the commercials were appalling. (More, eventually at American Dash.)

Snowmageddon!

The view from space of yesterday's epic snowstorm in the eastern U.S.

Silence in the Snowy Field

"His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

In anything that he constructed, so frail,

So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

He became an inhabitant, obedient

To gallant notions on the part of cold."

--Wallace Stevens

Cheers to all our family and friends in the Middle Atlantic and East Coast states where the snow is falling. And piling up. And so on. While all we get here is rain and earthquakes. Seriously, appreciate it while you can, as our planet does.

The top photo is from the Twin Cities--somewhere near them in Minnesota I recall standing in a field reading Robert Bly out loud to a laughing dark-haired girl, a long time ago. The bottom photo is mine, also from long ago, of snow in the yard in western PA where I played as a boy.

...For the similarly deprived out here on the West Coast, a neat bunch of snowy scenes.

Update 2/6: Wooah! Snowmageddon! I didn't mean to be insensitive to problems created by monster snowstorms in the East. Maybe I posted in haste, before the fact. Still, I'll bet it's possible in some places at least to appreciate and maybe even enjoy a nice big snowfall ?