Photo: Adam D. SacksIn “The Fallacy of Climate Activism,” I suggest that we as climate activists are not telling the unadulterated truth—which seems to worsen daily—to the public. This is one critically important reason we’re making so little progress in changing behavior and politics commensurate with the drastic acceleration of global warming. We have hurled ourselves far beyond the point where simply reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will make a difference that makes a difference.
Having examined some of the what of our missteps in “Fallacy,” in this piece I take a look at some of the how: the timid, tentative, emotionally impoverished voice of our communications, the feelings unexpressed in the face of the premature and squalid end of so much of what we love, the unfathomable reluctance to speak to the depth of the grief we are bringing upon ourselves.
Global climate disruption—having graduated in short order from a spectre a century away to a battering present-day reality—foreshadows the demise of civilization, the failure of our life-support systems, and even, perhaps, the end of most life on earth. Yet most industrialized humans, to date, remain largely unaware and only marginally concerned. This is a remarkable puzzle, and were we to solve it perhaps we would take a major step toward addressing the climate catastrophe.
I offer you a key puzzle piece: The end of all that we have known is an unthinkable thought,[1] as are so many unprecedented abrupt and catastrophic events.[2] When a thought is unthinkable, it is invisible even when writ large—we simply can’t see it, even when we have reason to try.[3] If we do see it, it quickly falls from awareness. If, finally, we accept it, perhaps after months or years of getting used to the idea, we find that we’re alone, mostly talking to ourselves.
Then, when the reality strikes us all irrefutably, undeniably, without mercy, we are completely unprepared, asking incredulously, “Why didn’t somebody tell us?”
And what hasn’t been told?
To date, most of our arguments about the reality of global warming have been data-driven, psychically tepid litanies of climate science and industrial “solutions,” peppered with the heartstring-tugging of cute polar bears and sad stories of people in distant lands whom we don’t care about very much (well, of course we care, but we don’t know them and there’s nothing we can do to help anyway, except perhaps changing lightbulbs). Coastal insalination rendering vast swaths of farmland useless, houses plunging into the sea as permafrost melts, even wildfires threatening the City of the Angels, to name just a very few—these are far, far away and don’t really affect us. Or we don’t see it. (Yet.)
We climate activists are the ones who aren’t saying what needs to be said.[4] Our silence is not the lack of words, it is the absence of an essence in urgent human relationships, an essence with power to break the bonds of unthinkable thoughts:
Passion.
To illustrate, I would like to reproduce for you an excerpt from one of my favorite speeches of the 19th century. It is entitled “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July,” and was delivered by Frederick Douglass before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852 (he refused to speak on July 4, for reasons that will quickly become apparent). Douglass, as you may remember, was one of the great political thinkers and orators of that horrific era, an escaped slave who taught himself to read and went on to become an erudite, articulate, and passionate abolitionist, a writer, a sought-after speaker, and a guest of President Lincoln.
Here are his words:
... What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong?
... What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine, that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine!! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument has passed. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire, it is not a gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. ...
Well ...
Today we are addressing the end of the world we know, quite possibly the extinction of homo sapiens and most other species on earth, and we can do little more than cite statistics?[5] Surely an unravelled web of life, miserable ends for countless creatures great and small, and mass death of billions of human beings, mostly innocent, should call for “scorching irony,” at the very least.
Where are our fire, thunder, ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, stern rebuke? Why are we so polite?[6] Why are we so obedient? What are we thinking? What aren’t we thinking? What are we doing? What aren’t we doing? When do we start? [7]
I have a proposition for you. Try your hand at a letter—to an editor, or to a friend, or to a lover, or to a child—availing yourself of all the passion you can muster as we hasten blindly toward world’s end. Post it here for all to ponder—then we’ll send the collection to everyone we know, far and wide.
When do we start? Now’s the time.
Quill and ink (or keyboard) in hand, summon your muse and write for our lives!
—-
Endnotes:
[1] Timothy C. Weiskel, “Selling Pigeons in the Temple: The Danger of Market Metaphors in an Ecosystem,” Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, Harvard Divinity School, July 6, 1997. “In democratically organized societies thought is not overtly censored. We are not forbidden to think about particular topics, but thought control manifests itself nonetheless in the far more subtle form of self-censorship. It is not what it is forbidden for us to think, but rather what it does not occur to us to think, that establishes the bounds of publicly acceptable thought in democratic society.”
[2] These could be natural disasters, such as unforeseen volcanic eruptions, hurricanes or changing climate; or the result of human activity such as the overshoot and collapse on Easter Island or the invasion of Europeans and consequent sudden disruption and/or extermination of indigenous peoples and cultures. Prior to such occurrences, few if any members of the affected societies would have been able to envision the outcomes, and if told would likely have given short shrift to such “conspiracy theories.”
[3] John A. Livingston, pioneer environmentalist, preservationist, teacher, and writer, described his experience in addressing the challenges of giving voice to the realities of nature in our technoculture: “It is not that audiences disagree with us or resent our argument or are offended by it: it means that they cannot perceive it [emphasis is Livingston’s]. They literally do not know what we are talking about.” The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, p. 61.
[4] The scientists’ job is to be dispassionate analysts and observers, and they are doing it full well. The climate activists’ job is to put the science in the context of real lives, real communities, real future, and communicate with all the means at our disposal. So far, we have screwed it up, but good.
[5] For example, parts per million carbon dioxide is an obsession; necessary fundamental change in the ways we live on earth hardly merits a whisper. And by fundamental change I don’t mean switching to 35 mpg—or even 350 mpg—vehicles. That’s another obsessive and meaningless statistic among the many.
[6] Symptomatic of our wayward rationality is the data-driven response to climate “skeptics,” neo-classical economists, and other toxic relics of an unsustainable culture. They are paragons of delusion and dishonesty, unworthy of scorn and disdain, yet we respond to them as if we were having reasonable conversations with reasonable people. Not everyone will wake up (just ask ark-craftsman Noah), so let’s not waste our time, and spend our energies on the vast majority of people who are concerned about the future and willing to face it—if only we get around to starting a conversation about planetary realities.
[7] Of course there are some passionate writers who stir us beyond wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, but they are, to date, few and far between.
We have met the deniers, and they are us
Comments
View as Flat
Des Emery Posted 4:58 pm
14 Oct 2009
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canadaguy Posted 7:26 pm
14 Oct 2009
Do climate change deniers have the right to endanger the lives of millions, or is there a limit to free speech?
http://selfdestructivebastards.blogspot.com/2009/09/flat-earth-society-ain-so-bad.html
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Eeli Posted 5:39 am
15 Oct 2009
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greenpeacetempe Posted 9:02 pm
15 Oct 2009
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Eeli Posted 5:22 am
16 Oct 2009
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CuttingEmissions Posted 6:12 pm
18 Oct 2009
"Mr's Harper, Ignatieff, Layton and Duceppe,
Some of my nice friends have been writing to you recently about the importance of enacting Bill C-311 for cutting Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and showing that we as a nation have at least some spark of interest in seeing a favourable outcome at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen this December. That’s what we Canadian do; we write nice letters to our government with the belief that they will be read and help elected officials arrive at decisions in the public interest.
But say, hypothetically, of course, that our government is being run by arrogant, selfish, power-hungry men, who are both stupid and negligent? And who, if judged by future generations, will be found guilty of high crimes against their own people and the whole of humanity. (I don’t include you, M. Duceppe, as you differ from the three leaders of the other parties in that you have shown you have a conscience and have at least some awareness of the impending global warming crisis.)
Mr. Harper, Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Layton… public outrage is beginning to build against you. More and more of us are beginning to understand that you are unwilling to face the bad news about dangerous climate change and take appropriate action. You can’t go on pretending that we don’t have a serious problem. It is obvious to us there are so many global warming related elephants in the room, you can’t even get in the door.
There’s the excess carbon elephant, 300 billion metric tonnes worth, stuff that we have to get out of our atmosphere, because we can’t wait for our oceans to absorb it, can we? There’s no time left to wait for this, and the seas are already becoming too acidic as it is.
And there’s the 2.0 degree Celsius elephant. What makes you think that we’ll be all right if we don’t let our world warm more than this by the end of the century? Already, at .80 degrees, we’re losing the Arctic sea ice and may have passed a point of no return. You men just don’t understand what 2.0 C will mean for our planet, and it’s time you learned.
There’s the 4.0 degree by mid-century elephant, which looks very likely now. We don’t have any climate science advisors to our government, because you people want to keep yourselves and your country stupid, but other nations do. You should talk to the folks over at the Hadley Centre in the UK, or read what the chief science advisor to the German government H. J. Schellnhuber has to say in the audit conducted last month by the WBGU. He’s talking about the US, as the worst GHG emitter, needing to cut emissions by 100% by 2020, and Canada’s per capita emissions being about the same, this would pretty much apply to us, wouldn’t it?
How about the climate refugee elephant? This one is taking up almost as much space in the room as the others. By mid-century, in your own children’s and grandchildren’s lifetime, Central America, Mexico and the American Southwest will be uninhabitable. Where are all those people going to go? Think about it. Our own food and water resources will be dwindling, but these refugees will see us as a Garden of Eden compared to the lands they are abandoning.
Oh, and I almost forgot the Tar Sands elephant. This is an abomination, as you all know, and yet you, Mr. Ignatieff, continue to arrogantly promote more exploitation of this harmful resource, while from the other side of your mouth, you talk about seeing Canada as green and energy efficient. What extraordinary hypocrisy.
This doesn’t excuse you, Mr. Layton. You can always be counted on to do what you consider politically expedient, no matter what the cost to the people of Canada or the World. This would include choosing Mr. Harper for our Prime Minister, as you did, much to our shame, and at a huge cost to our world civilization and the natural environment of our planet.
Many of us believe the Bill C-311 is much too weak. Recent evidence shows that fast action and extreme emission cuts are crucial for our survival. Will any of you do what’s necessary? Or are you going to continue to plaster the rumps of elephants with band aids? Elephants with mortal wounds, bleeding all over the floor?
What did the nice people of Canada ever do to deserve a government such as we now have? Maybe it's time for us to stop being so polite."
Tomorrow is Monday, a work day on Parliament Hill, and I'm waiting to hear back.
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A Spencer Posted 12:27 pm
09 Nov 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:30 am
15 Oct 2009
It appears as if the adoption of politically convenient half measures and paltry economically expedient proposals could end up making bad matters even worse. Big problems require binding commitments and bold action.
Are our noticeably spectacular, recent failures to reasonably and sensibly confront the human-induced global challenges already visible to the human family in the offing not the fully expected, all-too-human-driven result of arrogance and greed ruling.........and ruling in the world so absolutely because these pernicious traits are dominant in many too many leaders in our time?
After 8 long dark years of avoidance, denial and extreme foolhardiness, perhaps new leadership will give rise to the occurrence of necessary change before it is too late for human-forced change to make a difference. Before nature takes its inexorable course, whatever that may be.
At least consider accepting more fully human limits to the unbridled growth of global overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities (as well as Earth's biophysical limitations) and then make the choice of behaving accordingly.
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skitters Posted 10:30 am
15 Oct 2009
http://envirogy.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/a-day-of-action-on-climate-change/
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roncastle Posted 10:56 am
15 Oct 2009
The Speech President Bush Should Deliver
by Ron Castle
My fellow Americans: I apologize to you for interrupting the final game of the Final Four but I figured this would be the best way to catch most of you in front of the tube. This evening I want to talk to you about an issue that is critical for the survival of the planet. Our way of life and the way of life of many of our allies and the other G8 members has the environment running in reverse.
In the past hundred years we have combusted most of the World's fossil fuels that took almost a billion years to create. Actually, substances like oil and coal have resulted from plant life that detoxified our planet home so that other forms of life might flourish, including human life, and by combusting these fuels at record rates, we are putting back into the atmosphere carbon and other toxic substances that have been locked away in safe storage beneath the surface of the earth for a billion years. As you know from your high school physics class, matter does not go away - it simply changes state - petroleum and coal, when combusted, create energy and visible and invisible garbage, which we have named pollution.
It is hard for us to imagine how human existence really fits in to the history of the World. David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club who passed away last fall, said it this way, comparing 4.5 billion years of creation to the six days of creation from Genesis: 'Sunday at midnight, the Earth is created. There is no life until Tuesday noon. Millions upon millions of species come during the week, and millions of species go. By Saturday morning at seven, there's been enough chlorophyll manufactured for the fossil fuels to begin to form. Around four in the afternoon, the giant reptiles come on stage. They hang around for a long time, as species go, until nine-thirty, a five-hour run. The Grand Canyon begins taking shape eighteen minutes before midnight. Nothing like us shows up for another fifteen minutes. No homo sapiens until 30 seconds ago. Let the party begin! A second and a half back, we throw the habits of hunting and gathering to the winds, and learn to change the environment to suit our appetites. We get rid of everything we can't eat as fast we possibly can, and that's the beginning of agriculture. A third of a second before midnight, Buddha; a quarter of a second, Jesus Christ: a fortieth of a second, the industrial revolution; an eightieth of a second, we discover oil; a two-hundredth of a second, how to split atoms.'
Using Mr. Brower's example, during the past eightieth of a second humans have put back into the ecosphere trillions of tons of visible and invisible garbage that were locked away two, three or maybe four days ago. Unlike any species in the history of the planet, humans have become an evolutionary force and we are evolving in reverse. In the course of a mere century we have undone the work that took Nature billions of years to do. If we compare the ten-mile deep atmosphere that surrounds our planet to one of those basket balls the players are handling this evening, the atmosphere would be about as thick as tissue paper and, about as fragile.
At the same time, human population has expanded to more than six-billion people and our numbers are predicted to reach ten-billion by perhaps as soon as the year 2040. Natural resources are shrinking and plant and animal species are being made extinct at a rate faster than any time in human history. If all of these people are to have the same energy wasting and over-consuming lifestyles as the worst of us on the planet - that is, living like you and me as Americans - then we will have to have at least three more planets and perhaps a fourth one, which should appropriately be named "Dumpster", since total annual waste in the U. S. alone now exceeds 50 trillion pounds.
Somehow, I do not foresee having any additional planets, despite the fact that I am the most powerful man in the world.
Instead, the future that we face is for ten billion people to figure out how to live adequately on 25 percent or less of the natural resources per capita that Americans presently consume. Most of you probably think that this is surprising news. You dont see much about the big picture in the press. And, many of you are probably wondering why no President has told you this before. The handwriting has been on the wall for at least forty years. No President has told you this before because they have lacked the courage and the will to tell it like it is. I am keeping my campaign promise that I will be compassionate, conservative and will work cooperatively on both sides of the aisle to make our Federal government work responsibly for ALL Americans. And, so I am. After all, conservation and conservative both come from the same root word.
Beginning tomorrow morning, I am establishing a new cabinet position, the Department of Natural Capitalism. We will begin laying the groundwork immediately to establish a master plan to get the environment out of reverse and into fifth gear by the year 2016. Our implementation policies will be divided into five each three-year spans, which we will name First Gear through Fifth Gear. We will work with the other members of the G8 and all nations and peoples in the world to transfer our planning ideas, implementation strategies and renewable technologies to all parts of the globe. This will be a huge undertaking unlike any in the history of man (including World War Two) and, to use my transmission analogy that I know ALL Americans can relate to, we may not have synchro-mesh but we will shift gears in a decidedly accelerating fashion until we restructure all human activities to be in harmony with the rest of life on the planet.
Unemployment will be eliminated. Every person can have a job restoring habitat, working in organic agriculture or working in the new industries that will emerge: public transportation; renewable energy; fuel cell manufacturing; zero emissions vehicles; watershed restoration; recyclable manufacturing; just to name a few. Making this transition will create new challenges and new opportunities for all of us.
Within the next 30 days I will submit two bills to Congress. The first is an Ecology Tax (ET) that will be evenly implemented over the next 15 years. ET will phone home by progressively raising the costs of all sources of energy production, transportation, consumer goods, chemical fertilizers and biocides and all forms of consumption that are harmful to the environment. Thus, for example, the costs of all fossil fuels and fossil fuel generated electricity will increase in a graduated manner so that all forms of renewable energy will become the least cost alternative. Organic farming, which values the life of microbes in the soil, will become the defacto method of agriculture. We will have clean water and clean air. These policies will both free us from a need for imported oil by the time we are at our shift point from Second to Third Gear but will also begin significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
At the same time our full employment policy will have millions of Americans planting millions of trees every day to restore denuded habitat, brown fields and riparian areas to protect our watersheds. In honor of my parents, we will call this our Planet Campaign for Bushes (PCBs) - bushes are trees, too, you know. In fact they are the only "trees" in West Texas. This will also help to clean up the atmosphere in the same manner that petroleum and coal were formed billions of years ago. This is a true recycling effort. And, finally, PCBs will become a good thing.
The second part of our economic program will be our End All The Income Tax Bill (EAT-IT). The government has been eating out of your pocketbook for decades now its your turn. At the same time that taxes are increasing on eco-damaging activities we will begin an incremental phase out of all personal income taxes. So, when coal fired electricity goes up in price every family will have a reduction in personal taxes that will allow you to continue your current consumption. But, if renewable electricity is cheaper - and it will be very soon - you can buy renewable and use your tax cut for whatever you wish. Organic produce may be a little more expensive at first but will soon become significantly cheaper than food grown with chemicals that harm our bodies, our soils and our water. Freedom of choice is a basic tenet of our economy and our way of life. Its your money you earned it and you are entitled to spend it how you wish. These economic adjustments will provide every family with more disposable income and the freedom to direct your personal spending in ways that will help rather than harm the planet.
America is not backing up on the environment any more. We are moving full speed ahead while reducing our emissions. I believe that if the rest of the world will immediately implement similar standards we will not need the Kyoto Treaty. There are many more exciting things that I could tell you this evening but I believe it is sound cooperative policy to allow the Congress an opportunity to work with my administration to put the finishing touches on these exciting new changes. I encourage each of you to contact your Senators and Congressman and tell them you want them behind these programs.
Finally, there are three things I want to say to you. First, special interest politics are dead. The Republican Party received over $558 million dollars in campaign contributions during the 1999 elections and we appreciate the support of our friends. The Democrats received over $382 million. But the health of the environment is more important than the special interests of any industry, corporation or individual. Imagine what almost a billion dollars could do to help the environment rather than politicians. We will all work cooperatively to make this transition happen and industries with invested capital will be treated fairly to rescue stranded costs. Second, as of today, by my Executive Order we are ALL environmentalists. To all of you who have been environmentalists for all of these years without an Executive Order, I salute you. Third, to all of you SUV drivers out there and especially all yall SUV drivers in the great state of Texas, I am sorry that the value of your vehicles will undoubtedly plummet. But, as my mom Barbara has always told me, if you would have put some thought into it you never should have bought such inefficient vehicles to begin with. In fact, I sold my Suburban last week.
In closing, I quote the words of one of Americas greatest conservationists, Teddy Roosevelt who said in 1907:
Here is your country.
Do not let anyone take it or its glory away from you.
Do not let selfish men or greedy interests
skin your country of its bounty, its beauty, its riches, or its romance.
The World and the Future
and your very children shall judge you
according to [the way] you deal with this Sacred Trust.
Today is the day that we begin taking these words to heart. Working together, my fellow Americans, we can save the planet. Thank you, God bless you, God bless American and God bless planet earth. Good night.
###
March 29, 2001
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reneearon Posted 12:09 pm
15 Oct 2009
I have to say, however, that I find this piece and many others like it, to be lacking in psychological 'depth' or know-how. First off, the language "end of the world" is a major trigger, often leading to the opposite response we are hoping for. Yes, you got it, denial, tuning out. Who wouldn't want to. I want to. I'd rather bid for stuff on eBay than contemplate the decline of honey bees or the specter of mass migrations and melting ice. Does this mean I am dispassionate... that I don't care... No. It does not.
I strongly and respectfully suggest the author consult with the range of psychologists, clinicians and therapists who are grappling with these very issues. My bet is on the people who work on the front lines of human suffering, the potential for change, addiction, dysfunction and how to support people living more authentic, truer lives. That means engaging with what is REALLY happening and responding accordingly.
- Renee Lertzman
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BrianF Posted 1:52 pm
15 Oct 2009
And don't get me started about the politicians! Their ignorance is astounding! They have no clue how dangerous this threat is. (Nothing compares except maybe an out-of-control nuclear war). They have no idea how little time we have. They rely on models that are way too optimistic in their predictions, as shown over and over when new data comes in, and as should be obvious because of the positive feedbacks they DON'T take into account. (Did you know the last time CO2 levels were this high for an extended period, the temperature was 5 to 10 degrees F hotter and the sea level was 75 to 120 feet higher than now? That means it is only a matter of time before our temperature and sea level will get that high, unless we bring CO2 levels down! See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm.) Politicians don't seem to realize the peak temperature and the other effects will last for 1,000 years (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903) or that it will take 100,000 years for things to return completely to normal after we stop our emissions (read "The Long Thaw", by David Archer). They don't seem to get that feedback could easily take global warming out of control. They don't comprehend this mean we don't get a second chance. If we don't reduce emissions enough and quick enough, that is it, end of story. When the risks are this high and the consequences this dire, global, and irreversible, you can't continue to play chicken with other countries, you can't delay, and you can't continue to do less than even the minimum scientists say is necessary! We should be doing way more than what the scientists suggest, to be safe. Why doesn't a single leader get it?
99% of the people in this country and probably the entire world are in SERIOUS DENIAL! We need to wake each other up, especially the people in power, NOW! We all need to take responsibility for this problem that we all helped create. Anyone out there who has even the least bit of respect for life, please do something, and do it now!
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Eeli Posted 1:59 pm
15 Oct 2009
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BrianF Posted 8:54 am
16 Oct 2009
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swan Posted 6:58 pm
15 Oct 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:38 am
16 Oct 2009
Given what many people worldwide are recognizing now as human-induced global challenges, it appears people with understanding and knowledge of such formidable and pressing circumstances as could soon be presented to the human community have what appears to me as a duty to warn. Those possessed of clear vision, coherence of mind, a capacity for intellectual honesty and moral courage are called upon to speak out loudly, clearly and often so as to make themselves heard as one voice.
If time for corrective action is short because life as we know it is threatened and of the essence, as it appears, perhaps needed changes for the sake of protecting human wellbeing and preserving Earth's ecology are coming which are predicated on our fulfillment of a collective duty to warn, one which leads the children away from unsustainable theories and activities resulting in biodiversity extirpation, environmental degradation and wanton dissipation of global resources to sustainable ways of living in the planetary home we are blessed to inhabit......and not ravage, I suppose.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:40 am
16 Oct 2009
Given what many people worldwide are recognizing now as human-induced global challenges, it appears people with understanding and knowledge of such formidable and pressing circumstances as could soon be presented to the human community have what appears to me as a duty to warn. Those possessed of clear vision, coherence of mind, a capacity for intellectual honesty and moral courage are called upon to speak out loudly, clearly and often so as to make themselves heard as one voice.
If time for corrective action is short because life as we know it is threatened and of the essence, as it appears, perhaps needed changes for the sake of protecting human wellbeing and preserving Earth's ecology are coming which are predicated on our fulfillment of a collective duty to warn, one which leads the children away from unsustainable theories and activities resulting in biodiversity extirpation, environmental degradation and wanton dissipation of global resources to sustainable ways of living in the planetary home we are blessed to inhabit......and not ravage, I suppose.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org
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Eeli Posted 8:02 am
16 Oct 2009
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reneearon Posted 8:29 am
16 Oct 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 8:36 am
16 Oct 2009
Perhaps you will kindly share a bit about what you are doing to reasonably and sensibly respond to the global threats to human wellbeing and environmental health that are looming so ominously before the family of humanity.
This is only a guess, of course, but I am imagining you might counsel more intellectual dishonesty and denialism and as ways to respond ably to global challenges.
EELI, thanks for commenting. Please say more.
Sincerely,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 10:29 am
16 Oct 2009
With all due respect, EELI has to be allowed to speak out and be heard, regardless of how he views my comments. The global threats before all of us appear formidable as well as imminent.
It seems to me that no good purpose is served by deleting EELI's comments regarding my perspective. I do not think it correct action to delete EELI's comments because someone else found his communication to be an example of "catty behavior". The stakes are too high for dialogues between intelligent people to be obstructed, as they so often are in our time.
If it pleases you, Adam, please encourage EELI and others to communicate without restriction. And EELI, I hope you will continue to report the way you see things.
Thanks to both of you for caring about the future of the children and the necessity of overcoming the daunting challenges my generation of leaders has a duty to acknowledge and address. After all, my admittedly not-so-great generation of avaricious elders does appear to have precipitated a lion's share of the emerging threats to human wellbeing and environmental health that the family of humanity is striving to confront sensibly and respond to ably.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
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reneearon Posted 11:14 am
16 Oct 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 11:47 am
16 Oct 2009
Thanks for your input. You are kind to respond just as you have.
Whoever is in charge of the blog needs to tolerate EELI's material, I believe. There are untold numbers of excuses given for disrupting valuable discussion about very difficult topics. It so happens the global challenges that appear before us now are more difficult than any I have ever imagined. Hopefully, we can make room for one another to speak out loudly and clearly with regard to problems such as climate destabilization, biodiversity extinction, overpopulation, and the conspicuous overconsumption and relentless hoarding of resources. Otherwise, I fear we will end up ignoring the vital issues rather than sharing an understanding of them. We will end doing too little that is actually sustainable. Greedy leading elders will go forward self-righteously to mortgage the childrens' future and just as recklessly threaten their existence. In effect, problems for which a single generation of avaricious elders are largely responsible will be dumped into the laps of the children.
Thank again for all you are doing and hope to do for the future of life as we know it on Earth. We are going to make a difference.
Always,
Steve
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Adam Sacks Posted 1:16 pm
16 Oct 2009
Thank you all for your earnest and heartfelt responses! Getting to the emotional core of climate disruption and its consequences is very difficult stuff. Which leads me, at this point, to repeat my original request:
"Try your hand at a letter — to an editor, or to a friend, or to a lover, or to a child — availing yourself of all the passion you can muster as we hasten blindly toward world’s end. Post it here for all to ponder—then we’ll send the collection to everyone we know, far and wide."
What I'm asking for is different from most responses to blog posts. It's intensely personal: How do we feel? What do we each say to someone close to us or important to us when we see life-threatening and society-threatening events heading our way. What do we say about possibly avoiding such consequences, about the changes and sacrifices we may have to make? What do we say about perhaps having to accept mounting catastrophe?
To be fair, I haven't yet done this myself - I have leaned on Frederick Douglass to avoid it. It's very painful even to contemplate a letter to my daughter, for example, who is only six months away from bringing another precious life into this terribly overcrowded and depleted world. How much do I tell her about our little one's precarious future? I don't want to say too much because I want to protect her, her partner and my grandchild - yet if I say too little I am committing a terrible sin of omission, for the less we understand our probable future the less we are in a position to act sensibly.
So, to be true to the intent of this piece - to recover the absent heart of the great climate affair - I will, in the next few days, post a letter of my own. Apologies for my timidity to date, I hope you will respond notwithstanding, and I look forward to your further words.
My best to you all,
Adam
P.S. - The editors and I do hope to publish a collection of letters if there is sufficient response (signed or anonymous, that's up to you).
Many thanks!
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Billhook Posted 6:03 am
17 Oct 2009
It was of course no fluke that the insipid terms 'global warming' & 'climate change' were applied to the issue by the Thatcher/Bush I axis.
Some of my passion gets used in response to the timidity of the green movement's platform - for instance, when did you last hear that the US is leading the way to the greatest genocide-by-famine ever imposed ? Yet with in-pipe climate destabilization, let alone Obama's ongoing prevarication, that is what the growing loss of global food production is very liable to achieve.
And as for the movement's campaigning, the equitable and efficient climate policy framework of "Contraction & Convergence" is now the official policy of major nations not because of the Enviro NGOs' efforts, but despite their unexplained opposition over twenty years . . . .
The belated 350.org effort exemplifies the half-heartedness I decry. While 350 is attracting support for widespread local protests, in strategic terms is it really more than a sink for dissenters' energies ?
Can anyone say just when 350 ppmv is needed ? Without a date the target is meaningless, so is it 2050 ? 2100 ? 2500 ?
And what is the proposed framework for international allocation of GHG emission rights under an agreed global cap ?
And which of the geo-engineering options are being sought by this organization to help achieve its target concentration x date ?
Without clear demands addressing these questions, why would politicians pay 350.org any mind ?
And 350 is easily the best participatory NGO the entire billion-dollar US Enviro industry has achieved to address climate destabilization ?
I'm afraid that US school's duty to indoctrinate nationalism has had a terrible impact on most Americans' interest in, say, children starving in Africa as a result of US pollution policy. The denial seems pathological, even with a president of African descent. Maybe a rising generation can sidestep this comditioning ? If so, maybe 350's real service is in 'encouraging' them ?
And there's the rub. If success in reforming the global status quo requires effective strategy, which requires a passionate commitment to progress, which requires the courage to face the task in the round, then I guess more Americans, particularly young Americans, need to find their balls - metaphically-speaking for one half of the population.
There was a banner used in the Czech revolution whose calm passionate message seems apposite :
IF NOT US THEN WHO ?
IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN ?
Regards,
Billhook
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 3:18 pm
16 Oct 2009
Between April 2004 and February 2009, my hometown newspaper, The Chapel Hill (NC) News published no less than 34 of my letters to the editor on the subject of global threats to human wellbeing and environmental health. Is there any way I can assist you in getting these re-presented now? I am certain the newspaper staff will work with you. The letters will not disappoint, I believe.
Thanks,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:22 am
17 Oct 2009
Because it appears so clearly to so many people that human beings are inducing the emerging global challenges that now threaten life as we know it, the integrity of Earth and the childrens' future, there has got to be more the human community can do to change its 'trajectory' from one that is soon to become patently unsustainable to another in which sustainable lifestyles and "right-sized" enterprises are incentivized. The way things are going now, we can see that many too many arrogant and greedy leaders among us have chosen to "drive" the great global civilization that belongs to the human community off a cliff rather than make distinctly human behavioral changes.
If you, Renee Aron, EELI or anyone else in this blogging community can think of responsible ways by which necessary changes of direction can begin to occur, please send word to me.
Sincerely,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:41 am
17 Oct 2009
Day Before Yesterday was "Blog Action Day --- Climate Change 2009". Bloggers were asked if blogging could save the planet.
I think blogging can save the world we inhabit. Blogging may be the only thing that can.
Perhaps we can choose to appreciate blogging as a form of music in new key. Let the sounds of silence spread through cyberspace until everyone is who is not stone deaf (and every intellectually dishonest denialist) can hear the words loudly and clearly.
Keep going.
All the best to you and everyone else at the Grist Mill who supports your efforts,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:27 am
18 Oct 2009
In a representative democracy 1) power resides with all of the people, who pass on this power to elected leaders for the primary purpose of serving the "will of the majority" and 2) the principles and practices of democracy aim to provide "the greatest good for the greatest number."
Perhaps we can agree that democracy stands out clearly in all the world as the preeminent form of government on Earth. There is no longer a question about democracy as the finest "tried and true" form of government ever established.
Let us consider for a moment what representative democracies are actually doing now to serve the will of majority and to provide as much of what is good in life for as many people as possible.
As we look back over the evolution of modern civilization, it seems to me that the implementation of democratic governance mechanisms has continously provided more of what is good to more human beings on Earth. That much appears clear. However, if we compare the absolute number of people living a good life with the number people on the planet at a single moment in space-time, it appears that the number of people living the good life, when compared with the number of people living on the planet, dwindles. Even though more people are living the good life with each passing year, as a percentage of the family of humanity the group of people living the good life is actually shrinking fast.
Who knows, as the human community moves forward from now/here, the actual majority might choose to assure a more complete realization of what democracy promises. As things stand now, millions of people in a single generation who are holding stupendous concentrations of money, after having commandeered, overconsumed and excessively hoarded a lion's share of the Earth's bounty, conspicuously live what is called "the good life" while billions of less fortunate human beings are going without substantial sustenance. Such an unbalanced, inequitable, unjust and consciously designed regime appears to be a woefully inadequate, perverse representation of democratic principles and practices.
Steve Salmony
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piglet Posted 9:09 am
18 Oct 2009
PLEASE SEE: http://thenaturaleye.com Article:AN URGENT MEMO TO THE WORLD
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 9:42 am
18 Oct 2009
An "International Day for Climate Action" is in the offing. If we continue much longer to delay necessary action because economic powerbrokers, bankstas and bought-and-paid-for politicians seek stupendous profits and are greedy beyond anything anyone has seen before; if the human community fails to act reasonably and sensibly because powerful profiteers refuse to pay for addressing the threats of human-driven climate destabilization, then the window of opportunity presented to us now/here could close. This is only a guess, but I am imagining that if the window of opportunity is allowed to close without decidedly forward movement occurring in the meantime, then the price to be paid by the children, the price that results directly from their elders' denial, delay, willful arrogance, avarice and extreme foolhardiness, will be colossal.
One day soon, the children whose future has been mortgaged and threatened by conspicuously greedy elders might ask, "What did you know? When did you know it? How could you choose to keep doing the very things that created "the big mess" in the first place? Have you not recklessly devoured and relentlessly hoarded a lion's share of Earth's resources? What about us?"
It is getting "late in the day" for the kinds of timely and necessary change that will afford the human family a chance of saving the planet and life as we know it. Perhaps on October 24, 2009 somewhere on the surface of Earth we will see evidence of the dawning of new beginnings instead of another day like every other day in which the patently unsustainable, too big to fail or succeed, business-as-usual operations of the gigantic 'corporate citizens' among us, the huge corporations that produced much of the difficult ecological mess for the children to clean up, are somehow sensibly replaced with sustainable, right-sized corporate citizens.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 10:00 am
18 Oct 2009
Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.
Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in their growth of human population numbers. These geographically localized counts need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.
Perhaps a “scope of observation” problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.
Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while localized reproduction counts are the latter.
From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the localized reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many locales, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.
In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 40 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process will occur; even so, population specialists seem to uniformly agree that population stabilization is a foregone conclusion and will miraculously happen soon.
We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050.
Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.
For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.
Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.
To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.
If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective.
According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimentel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more.
Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.
Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers.
The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.
Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities.
Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.
Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans.
Thank you.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
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Dave McArthur Posted 1:31 pm
18 Oct 2009
(Written for Copenhagen 2009)
Be mindful in every breath you give that the universe rewards your trust with life-sustaining air.
Be mindful that this air is a very rare and perhaps unique gift made of an exquisite arrangement of flowing gases in trace balances.
Embrace your role as a steward amidst the change, which is our atmosphere.
Enjoy the wisdom of the Conservation Principle of Energy, for it is as near as we have to a natural law.
Be mindful we human beings have the great capacity to live in acceptance of change/stewardship and know joy and we have the equally great capacity to live in denial of change/stewardship and know misery.
Know the power of symbols for they enable all life and especially human civilisation to exist.
Know information is physical and bricks, bullets, words and metaphors are equally vibrations.
Know our use of symbols reflects our total beings even as they generate our total beings.
Value and conserve the potential of our symbols so all human beings can enjoy vitality and harmony with the great trace balances that enable us to exist. Experience and embrace with each breath of our atmosphere the following:
Energy is the potential of the universe(s) and is so bountiful it can be considered a constant.
In any moment only a trace, trace, trace aspect of the potential is realised and manifest.
Energy constantly transforms and comes in myriad, myriad continually changing forms, all of which exist for trace moments including we human beings.
Any form can be known from many perspectives, including thermal, kinetic, electromagnetic, gravitational and other.
Energy is not any form or group of forms though all forms are of the potential, which is energy.
Energy cannot be created, generated, saved, conserved, destroyed, consumed, wasted or lost for energy is by its very nature conserved.
There are no energy crises, though we can experience crises in our use of energy.
The wise use of energy (energy efficiency) is not about using less or more energy but rather about using energy so our lives remain in harmony with the balances and flows that sustain humanity.
Power is the measure of the rate at which the potential, which is energy, is manifest.
There are myriad measures of power but power is no form.
Electricity does not exist though various electrical phenomena of very different properties do. Each has a symbol for you to use e.g. electric charges, electrical energy, electrons, electric currents, imbalances of charge, electric fields, voltage, electrostatic, electric power, electromagnetism etc.
Carbon is a vital and common flowing element of the universe(s) and provides the chemical basis of all living forms.
Like all elements of the universal potential, carbon is continually changing the forms it is manifest in.
Embrace our role as a steward amidst the carbon flux and know we can never offset, neutralize, devalue and trade away our use of the carbon potential. Beware of those who say otherwise for they are in deep denial of change/stewardship
Psychopathic constructs such as The Market can only put a price on carbon forms; only each human being can put a value on carbon forms.
Embrace taxes as a gift for enabling civilisation and know the ultimate tax is the one we each employ when we value and make use of any resource, which includes all carbon forms.
Know we are each Thermal Beings and part of the continual, great universal exchange.
Be mindful in every breath we give that we are warming as we are cooling, just as our planet is constantly warming and cooling with the day and the night.
Embrace warming and cooling with all your being, for in the balance of each thermal exchange all things can exist.
Conserve the potential of the warming symbol and do not confuse it with warming up, for warming up is a change in the balances that sustain life and to say warming = warming up is the ultimate denial of the thermodynamics of the universe(s). Likewise take care not to confuse the cooling and cooling down symbols.
Enjoy reverence for the atmosphere symbol and associate it with organic and dynamic systems in which the great powers of air for convection moderate the thermal balances of this planet.
Beware of those who symbolize the atmosphere as a greenhouse, blanket and other human engineered object for they deny the essential change, which is our atmosphere.
Conserve the greenhouse symbol so we can better create structures that make wise use of air as a thermal insulator by exploiting its great capacity to convect and small capacity to conduct thermal energy.
Embrace and conserve the balances of the gases that enable humans to exist and, in particular, teach of the Warmer Trace Gases (water vapour, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane etc), for these exist only as trace gases on this planet and yet their power is such that they work to keep Earths surface warmed to a comfortable life- enabling 15C.
Beware of those who describe the Warmer Trace Gases as greenhouse gases for they evoke images that deny change/stewardship of the atmospheric balances that sustain us.
Know we are not here to fight, combat and stop the change, which is our climate, but rather to live in harmony with Earths atmosphere.
Embrace climate change and do not confuse it with a human-inducted thermal build-up in the atmosphere.
Remember to lift thine eyes upwards from searching the ground underfoot for minerals to the plants around us and to the sun above and find symbols for all their great potential. Without those symbols their potential cannot be manifest.
Smile in the knowledge this planet did not begin with humans and most probably will not end with humans and it is not in need of saving it is our ingenious capacity for denial of stewardship/change that puts us at greatest risk and wipes out civilisations.
Be a true conservative, knowing this is the title most truly accorded to the person who conserves the flows and balances of resources that sustain humanity.
Beware of those who say science is a way of thinking and be mindful that it is a state of being born of compassion that enables the arts, language, civics and all that is civilisation.
Know that you and all human beings are born in the state of science and those that call themselves scientists deny this state of being.
Also know the state of science in us is revealed in our total lifestyle, not just in our knowledge of a subject.
Be mindful that the greatest teachers Jesus, the Buddha, Socrates, Blake, Confucius et al needed no plane or car and yet travelled far.
Enjoy compassion, search for the truth, reflect deeply and share knowledge freely for without compassion, experimentation, reflection and sharing science ceased to exist.
Be mindful we are Mirror Beings, exquisitely designed to detect and reflect the harmony (acceptance) and dissonance (denial) in others and thus we are each symbols, which is our lifestyles. We are inextricably our actions.
Experience all this and you can enjoy greater harmony with the universe(s). Use symbols thus and according to the Sustainability Principle of Energy you can transcend our great and ingenious capacity for denial of stewardship/change. Magic happens:
Every breath is a celebration and walking a joy.
A cottage becomes more luxurious than any mansion ever could be.
A nearby plot of soil and even a plant pot becomes a treasure.
The desire and need to own and use cars evaporates.
The use of jet travel becomes an anathema to the free spirit, an impossible notion.
The freed mind travels to places no car or jet can take a person.
The misery mongers, who are the merchant bankers and their media, lose their power over you.
Waiting for and using derelict mass transport becomes an opportunity for rewarding reflection and rich conversation.
Even as others reject, dismiss and abuse you as a crank one finds greater joy and humour in being amidst the variety and activity, which is humanity.
The desire to beget children fades as the children of the world become as one.
True friends are revealed and the love shared has richness beyond anything money can buy.
And miracle of miracles you may well find that without any sense of deprivation your emissions of carbon dioxide are less than 3 tonnes per year while your rate of destruction of our fossil fuel resource drops several fold. And thus you are at one with the billions of other humans who conserve our balances and you live in the knowledge our children may well be thankful for your existence.
Written this morning Sunday 18 October in response to two articles I read this last evening:
http://www.alternet.org/story/143256/without_drastic_co2_cuts_immediately,_the_world_faces_a_massive_'oh_shit'_moment?page=2
Without Drastic CO2 Cuts Immediately, the World Faces a Massive 'Oh Shit' Moment By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation. Posted October 15, 2009.
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-14-the-absent-heart-of-the-great-climate-affair
Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair.
Posted 2:45 PM on 14 Oct 2009 by Adam D. Sacks
Adam writes:
Try your hand at a letterto an editor, or to a friend, or to a lover, or to a childavailing yourself of all the passion you can muster.When do we start? Nows the time. Quill and ink (or keyboard) in hand, summon your muse and write for our lives!
Footnote: More on the Sustainabilty Principle of Energy at http://www.bonusjoules.co.nz I am currently creating a series of short video on our use and abuse of our prime symbols. The first two discuss the energy symbol and are at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66sbyWmdQig
What is Energy? 1:The Grand Denial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5N3_Rd6Gs
What is Energy? 2:The Potential, which is Energy
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 4:43 pm
18 Oct 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 4:46 pm
18 Oct 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:39 am
19 Oct 2009
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 8:00 AM
To: 'AdamSacks@grist.org'
Subject: RE: note to Adam Sacks/Grist
Dear Adam,
Thanks for all you are doing. Keep going. I particularly enjoyed
reading your recent comments in "The Fallacy of Climate Activism".
The two 'letters' I added to the blog this weekend were not published
letters in the Chapel Hill Newspaper. Because I am one who is haunted by the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth of the human
species on Earth, and in response to your request below, I picked out a couple of letters from the CHN collection to include here. Hopefully, they are helpful.
For the past several years I have commented on the Grist Blogs a few
hundred times. Thanks are due you, Dave Roberts, John Rynn, Joe Romm and
others who were willing to accept my perspective as part of many
discussions. In light of the fact that Dave has considered the
discussion of human population numbers as "the third rail" of public
discourse, I have been especially pleased by his tolerance. With the
exception of Andy Revkin at the Dot Earth Blogs, very few
environmentally-oriented blogmasters have been receptive to my
perspective over the past 8 long dark years.
Please let me know if you ever think of anything more I can do to
promote open discussion of the vital, human-driven challenges that
appear on the horizon. At least to me, widespread denial and delay among
many too many people with wealth and power, who own the mainstream media
and idolatrize business-as-usual, are making an apprehension of our
multi-faceted global predicament difficult for the human community to
see for what it is. This human-induced predicament appears to give rise to clear and present dangers both to human wellbeing and environmental health in our time. The way I see humanity's predicament, there is no time to waste and much to do, beginning now, if the family of humanity is to have a chance of securing a good enough future for the children.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Sacks
Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 11:54 PM
To: Adam Sacks
Subject: posting a letter
Hi Steve -
Why don't you post one of the letters to the newspaper that you feel is
most pertinent to the current discussion. Or write a new one.
Thanks - looking forward to seeing it!
Adam
This message was sent to you through your account at:
http://www.grist.org/
If you do not wish to receive further emails you can disable this
preference in your member profile page.
http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/letters/story/35881.html
Embrace change for planet's sake, CHN, January 2009
In calling for change in our time, scientists are speaking about what
could somehow be true, speaking out loudly and clearly to wealthy and
powerful people who adamantly insist that the "business as usual" status
quo be relentlessly promoted and ruthlessly maintained.
Industrial/big business powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for
politicians want to keep over-consuming, overproducing and
overpopulating in our planetary home as they are doing now, come what
may for children, life as we know it, and the integrity of Earth and its
environs. Many of our voices are needed to support these great "voices
of science," these exemplars who are courageously speaking truth to
those leaders who possess the power to authorize change. The provision
of a good enough future for our children is an achievable goal, but only
if we elders choose requisite behavior change now.
If changes in behavior are not initiated in a timely fashion, then a
sustainable world for our children may not be achievable. By doing
precisely what we are doing now, the limited resources of Earth could be
permanently dissipated, its biodiversity massively extirpated, its
environment irreversibly degraded and life as we know it recklessly
endangered. The current scale and anticipated growth of per-capita
over-consumption, global production capabilities, and human population
numbers worldwide could be simply, clearly and patently unsustainable,
even to the year 2050. Given Earth's limitations as a relatively small,
evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet, the projected
increases in unchecked consumption, unbridled production and unregulated
propagation activities of the human species could soon lead the human
family to come face to face with some sort of colossal ecological
wreckage.
Now is the time to speak loudly, clearly and often about what is true
for you. Forget about political correctness and convenience. Resist
economic expediency and greediness. Embrace necessary change rather than
waste another day perniciously defending an unsustainable, same old
"business as usual" status quo.
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill
_____
From: Salmony, Steven
Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2005 2:01 PM
To: Salmony, Steven
Subject: Fwd: letter to the editor
LETTER To The EDITOR, Chapel Hill News, 5/17/05
The invitation by our new editor, Mr. Mark Schultz, to respond to his
Commentary (Sunday, May 15, 2005) is irresistible. Thanks are due him
for giving us a professional's understanding of why editors cover some
stories and not others. Surely, his deployment of the word gatekeeper
is useful because it so well describes an essential responsibility of a
paper to its community. No one wants to be confused by being subjected
to illusions, mistaken impressions, and misperceptions when trying to
get a grasp of the requirements of reality. Facts, nothing but the
facts in the form of scientific data rather than widely shared
illusions, are what are needed in order to think straight, make sound
judgments and act responsibly.
As Mr. Schultz keenly notes, one has a big story "if it affected a lot
of people (impact)..." The story needs to be more about what is not
talked about than about what makes noise and more about "what's
happening" than "what happened."
Let us say we have a big story, one that involves every person on the
planet. It is not a story about "what happened" and is missed amid all
the noise. It is a story that concerns something happening now. We
have facts but they are not being shared widely for the benefit of the
community. Instead, there is a deafening silence. A potential problem
is ignored and becomes more formidable. That is what appears to be
happening now.
Take the example of unrestrained global human growth trends. If
unchecked, they could lead to the extinction of biodiversity, the
irreversible degradation of the environment, and the endangerment of
humanity itself, Because Chapel Hillians are nested within the great
State of North Carolina, that is nested in a country, that is nested
within the community of nations on the surface of a planet, we can see
how what happens in our town connects to the larger human community as
well as how the global community of human beings is joined to us right
here in Blue Heaven. The occurrence of global warming, that appears to
scientists everywhere to be at least in part the result of the rampant
expansion of the world's human economy by the "overdeveloped" world,
affects rich and poor alike; and the human population explosion in
countries in the "underdeveloped" world also affects everyone in
deleterious ways. Global pollution of the land, water and air resulting
from economic growth is well documented; and data indicate 200,000 to a
quarter million newborns are added of the world population every 24
hours. Can you think of one way in which our world would be a better
place for life if we had, let us say, 9 billion rather than the 6.4
billion people living together on Earth now?
We can readily recognize how it is that people say, "We are all in this
together."
The big story to which I want to bring attention, involving a problem
about which people are not talking enough, is that "human growth seems
to be unlimited" (CHN letters, April 20 and May 18, 2005) on our small,
finite planet. Given their current scale and rate of growth, certain
heretofore unregulated human activities -- per human over-consumption,
human over-production and human overpopulation -- could be patently
unsustainable in the tiny planetary home we are blessed by God to
inhabit.
Let's talk about human propagation, human consumption of limited
resources and the seemingly endless expansion of the world's economy on
Earth. Thank you.
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heart inspiration Posted 9:07 am
20 Oct 2009
Psychology has investigated this question of why people care but do not act. Responses to risk have been extensively studied. Here is a good article about the issue http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2467# and here is a whole 200+ page report about it http://www.apa.org/science/climate-change
My passionate letter, in brief: Compassion for our fellow human beings requires that we act. Stop buying stuff http://www.thestoryofstuff.com , stop eating so much meat http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/factoryfarming/# , start buying fair trade and local. Be good to other people, improve your karma, and preserve life on earth. All these good things go together. :)
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 9:19 am
20 Oct 2009
At least to me, the leaders of my not-so-great generation of arrogant and avaricious elders is irresponsibly directing the children down a "primrose path" to confront a world that is gravely depleted, degraded and denuded.
One day the children will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the way so many leaders and followers in my generation, who at least had the chance to try and mitigate the fully expected damages of pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, resource dissipation, biodiversity extinction and overpopulation, abjectly failed coming generations because we chose denial or delay or at best to play around the edges of the global challenges before us and refused to take demonstrably responsible action in the face of clear and present dangers. To sacrifice our 'sacred cows' and 'golden calves', often associated with being intellectually honest, earning wealth by doing productive work, exercising moral courage and making necessary changes, were too damn hard for so soft, satisfied, sanctimonious, selfish and stupid a generation, I suppose.
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Myotis Posted 12:13 pm
20 Oct 2009
I have tried to go there into the deep connection with my despair and grief, knowing that it could completely incapacitate me. So far, I haven't been willing to plunge all the way into what I know is an enormous black hole of sadness and rage. I haven't been willing to abandon my responsibilities to my children and my family, to my activism (perhaps my little bit will help? that is the thin thread of hope), nor my pleasures and satisfactions, in what I can still accomplish (e.g., suburban subsistence, raising a garden, putting food by) and enjoy (travels into the wilderness, time with friends, savoring moments of beauty).
Yet, I have been extremely frustrated with the lack of dialogue on this most important issue for the future of life on earth!! What the hell is going on?? Finding someone to engage with in a candid way has been nigh impossible. And I am surrounded by progressive friends, conservation activists, deep ecology thinkers, and adherents to earth-based forms of spirituality. You are absolutely right about the urgency of conversing with others with as much emotional authenticity--PASSION--as possible. Part of the picture is that passion itself is, at best, compartmentalized and safely boxed off from our "normal" lives, in this society. Passion is dangerous, because it is real and raw and unpredictable. Anyone willing to put their passion out for public viewing, unless acceptably framed as "art," is going to be deemed unhinged, unbalanced, or worse.
I am going to sit with your questions, and it may take me weeks or months to reply more fully. but I am buoyed by the fact that you have dared to ask them, and that gives me courage to find my own deeply authentic and passionate way of responding to this moment of life on earth.
With gratitude.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 12:28 pm
20 Oct 2009
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reneearon Posted 12:46 pm
20 Oct 2009
My feeling about this goes back to my frequent referral to what Freud and subsequently many thoughtful psychological and psychoanalytic thinkers have been thinking about, which is how humans respond to anxiety. Even more so, how we balance conflicting and often contradictory feelings and desires, fears and worries; feelings of genuine fear and also guilt; anger and sense of helplessness, and so on. I find these writings bring some depth to what can seem to be circular discussions around why there is a lack of 'passion' or heart. I don't believe there IS a lack of passion or heart. I believe it's there but people are too overwhelmed to feel it and lack the social contexts--even in one's family--to process and go through it. Again, so much has been generated in psychotherapy and analytic work around how people work through mourning and grief. Contrary to the 'stages' of grief model, I think it's more helpful to appreciate how difficult the work of mourning is, and what sorts of losses are occasioned by these issues. But it's not all about loss; it's also about creativity, about feeling spurred to meet huge challenges; this is also in our wiring. Some of us feel more spurred and motivated than others, and this is a very complex series of factors I think as to why that is the case. The personal biographical contexts cannot be separated from the social, cultural, gendered, class contexts we find ourselves in. I believe all contribute to either feeling more or less empowered, 'passionate' or in other words, whether we have internal or external locus of agency.
I must say, I find the idea that there is a lack of passion missing the mark. Maybe this is not the place to say this, because I want to also support the work here and the basic impulse that drives this piece. I relate and empathise with the frustration it is borne out of. But it is patronizing to assume there is a lack of passion or heart because people don't seem 'heated' up and adequately fired up about these issues. It's bewildering, yes. It's frustrating and terrifying, yes. I think we need to enquire very deeply into these matters; and to perhaps, try out thinking that the passion and heat and heart is there, all along but needs a bit of support, containment, encouragement.
My 2 cents!
Renee
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amazingdrx Posted 9:55 pm
20 Oct 2009
That's why we ought to stress leadership in renewable energy as an economic and not primarily a climate change issue. Jobs, jobs, jobs. China is pulling ahead in renewable energy right now.
Do we want to buy our solar panels and wind machines from China or do we want them manufactured here? Do we want to export these devices, most of which have been invented and developed here?
And we ought to note exactly how many people lose their jobs, healthcare and homes whenever a spike in imported energy, mainly oil, trashes the economy. This whole mortgage crisis turned worldwide credit crunch was brought on by soaring oil prices.
Sure it was and still is (no regulation has yet been instituted) a house of cards due to lack of regulation and 100 trillion dollar scamming with derivtatives and credit default swaps. But high oil prices set the stage for the crash.
Stick to green jobs and long term energy independence and financial stability to get the swing voters in on this fight. Climate change is an issue for us committed greenies. Any economy dependent on fuel based energy is inherently unstable, shortage and price manipulation will always destabilize that system at the very base.
Renewable energy is inexhaustable, there is no shortage or price manipulation problem. With fuel based energy, the more energy generation devices produced, the more fuel is used and the price climbs. With renewable energy the more solar panels and wind machines produced, mass production brings the cost of energy devices and thus the cost of renewable energy down.
Only those who understand the exponential nature of climate change are going to push hard on a cure for GHG and we are a small percentage of the voting public. That may not change anytime soon. In a recent math education ranking, the US is behind Kasikstan, yes the country that "Borat" lampooned in the movie.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:39 am
21 Oct 2009
Never in the course of human events have so few members of a single generation commandeered, consumed and hoarded so much wealth at the expense of so many other people. We have mortgaged the future of our own children. We are the "what's in it for me generation". We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to protect the environment from crippling degradation; a stunning lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with "feet of clay".
Perhaps my generation does live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will "have our cake and eat it, too." We own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. Remember, silence is golden. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world's wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our 'inalienable rights' to outrageously consume Earth's limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire. We never lie but also never tell the truth as we see it. The "thing" that matters most of all to us is "the only game in town". We are the reigning, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits. Of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms and any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations a finite planet such Earth naturally imposes.
We deny both the existence of human limits and Earth's limitations. Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making....a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre. Most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth's limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet's environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic 'wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed. Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing.....changes that save the global economy, life as we know it and Earth's body from being ravaged.
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Adam Sacks Posted 7:51 am
21 Oct 2009
This is a belated letter of the kind I suggested that you write (do as he says, not as he does!), a difficult letter to write indeed. It's to a group of college students with whom I've been working on global warming for the past couple of years. They are more knowledgeable than most about climate, and they are all concerned, on a scale from alarmed to desperate. They are impressively dedicated to turning this ponderous, crawling climate boat around, but they are also confined by the cultural myths, assumptions and preconceptions that hold most of us hostage. And in some ways, I think that youth are more conservative than those of us decades closer to the nether end of life, more enticed by the siren songs of culture (even though I suspect some might disagree). That makes our mutual task no easier.
Adam
==================
Dearest young friends,
The time has come for me to write you all a letter. I've known some of you for almost two years now, and have joined you in welcoming many others along the way. I treasure the times we have spent together thinking, playing, discussing, organizing, arguing, cooking, eating. It has been a great pleasure being among you as one of you, a most refreshing reprise which you have generously allowed me, even though we have forty years worth of difference in our perspectives and in our lives.
And of course our worlds are indeed fundamentally different, which is the way it works in our frenetic industrialized civilization, which is the way it works when you're new as opposed to not so new any more, which is the way it works growing up in the 1950s, which was so very different from growing up in the 1990s.
That doesn't mean we don't have much to offer each other. Indeed we do. I think we learn far more from bridging gaps than by simply hanging out on our own side of the chasm. Would that we could all do this more, everywhere.
From where I sit, and as a parent, I know that you have to find your own way (please forgive the clich�s, I'm afraid this will start to sound like a commencement speech - well, in some ways, I suppose it is). You have to learn, to experiment, to make your own mistakes just as I did, as your parents did, as we all do. You have to figure out how to chart your paths, how the world works, how to improve it, how to thrive. I hope I've contributed in some small way to the brew of your lives by tossing in a bit of what I flatter myself to think are wisdom, experience, knowledge.
But there's a problem. In the 1960s we figured we had time to figure out what was up and what was down. We desperately wanted to break from the brutal past, and we tried, and they were turbulent, difficult years, as well as exciting and world-shaking (though the fundamental changes some hoped for never came to pass - witness the current state of affairs). True, the nuclear threat was ever with us then, I grew up with nightly terrors of mushroom clouds, but as it turns out that was strangely under the control of some sort of mutually assured destruction (aptly called MAD), and in fact post-World-War-II nuclear holocaust never materialized (and we continue to hope).
But today there's tragically little time left of the kind we had back then. The threat - global climate disruption - is much worse, madder than MAD, to date under no one's control, and it has already begun to materialize, in spades.
Your normal and rightful course of learning, experimenting, thriving, has been cut short.
It pains me terribly to say this, with the darkest of clouds in your skies, and I'm only recently growing able to write such blunt words, but we're approaching some sort of expiration date, and you no longer have the luxury of growing older and wiser, not in the usual way. The physical world is changing far too fast, and your elders are stuck, but good - dare I say that many if not most of us are worse than useless. You will have to skip many steps, and learn immediately what we don't know, the hidden truth that civilization has forbidden:
We cannot go on living this way.
Industrialized society has been a bit of fun while it lasted, I suppose, although disconnected from the meaningfulness of a life rooted in earth, instead full of angst, doubt, terror, war. But it's had its short-term advantages of sorts. In sixty-four years I have never, not for one single day, had any doubt that I would have my next meal, or water to drink, or a roof over my head. And lots of toys and trinkets along the way.
Unfortunately, in pursuit of my privilege many people and other creatures on earth have suffered terribly, without their consent, on my behalf. They have given of their labor, their bodies, their lives to me - to us - for little or nothing in return.
Nature will allow it no longer.
Sadly, the overwhelming thrust of climate "solutions" has been to maintain our endlessly growing culture of consumption, despite all arguments to the contrary. We imagine we can substitute our way out of this, with Priuses and funny-looking lightbulbs. The result is a major split in our lives, for at the same time we want to heal the world we climb on airplanes, scurry about in our cars, buy food from thousands of miles away, pay taxes for ever longer wars, elect the same people who blindly persist in futility for short-term gain, and prepare for professions detached from the soil which gives us life. We are dependent on computers, iPods, cellphones. We are part of a process that must take, exploit, ruin much of the earth, and even though now there's little left we continue anyway, hell-bent to extract the very last drop.
We are determined to exceed local and planetary carrying capacity, to overshoot our life support systems, to witness collapse before our very eyes as millions of people currently live without hope, starving worldwide, dying from thirst, watching their all their means for survival vanish.
What we fail to appreciate to date is this: We are not exempt.
So here's what to do, I will help you however I can, with all my heart, I fervently believe that you can engage and change the course of human events if you so decide. I cannot provide you with details, only a roadmap, and a poorly charted one at that. But it's a start.
The most important step by far is to learn the fundamental laws of nature, the laws which inflexibly govern life on earth. We are practically all eco-illiterates, even climate activists and environmentalists. Once we understand our planetary rules and limits, we won't for a moment fall for cultural sucker plays like 150 mpg vehicles, or wind turbines, or low-carbon diets, as we will recognize impossibilities for what they are. We will learn that the only way to live on earth is by sharing equally and sustainably of the commons, with a lot less of everything but enough for everybody (assuming many fewer of everybody as well, especially us industrial resource hogs, reducing population by intelligent, peaceful and consensual means, we devoutly hope).
The next step: We learn why eco-literate behavior isn't obvious and happening as it should. This requires a deeper study and understanding of culture and history. It is a much longer discussion that we've had in small doses; I hope we can pursue it further. Suffice it to say that the culture will not tell you how to go beyond itself, it comes with no instructions for disassembly, we have to figure it out. There are many hints in our 200,000-year history of often sustainable living, and in the current movements to relocalization and eco-restoration - what we don't know is how to get past the cultural brick walls to make it happen. That's a crucial part of your job, once you embrace it.
And finally, know that government doesn't work as advertised. Most of what it recommends for redress of wrongs are simply energy sinks to ensure that nothing fundamentally changes and to keep us busy while the world burns for the benefit of a very few.
But political reality is, ultimately, irrelevant. The only reality that counts is nature's reality. When we start from that premise, then we refuse to be seduced and co-opted, and start organizing in ways that move us forward ever faster.
I think we pretty much agree that the climate situation is, as the silly parody on the Fed Ex package says, Extremely Urgent. It's no longer about the wellbeing of your children or grandchildren a hundred years hence, it's about you, and your parents, and even some of your younger grandparents. To everyone's astonishment, it's all happening that fast.
The question for you now is how to proceed. How much of your time do you devote to this daunting, unprecedented task, fraught with uncertain outcomes? What should you be doing? Can you assume that a future world is like the one you're in now - and if not, should you be in college at all? What skills and knowledge are essential for navigating the brave new twenty-first century? How do you acquire them? What do you do with them? How do you thrive, or even survive?
I'm afraid these are unsettling questions with no easy answers. Those are the cards we have been dealt, and they are for the most part, I am deeply sorry to say, in your hands. Yet as bleak as it may seem at times, there are many things we can do to turn this around, but only if we see clearly, beyond all comfortable assumptions, beyond the limits of current experience.
Let us have at it together.
My love to you all,
Adam
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amazingdrx Posted 8:55 am
21 Oct 2009
The world will not end as human civilization ends. It will change. Much like rats and cockroaches and bacteria and algae and other survivor species, humans will most likely adapt to radical climate change, most likely in vastly reduced numbers.
Invoking cultural suicide won't get the political change we need to overcome climate change. The peaceful effective path is to get any of us who realize that zero carbon footprint living is prefferable onboard to change our own lives as an example to the rest. That is around 10% of us. We are more than willing to sacrafice to do this.
But we need to convince enough of the rest of humanity that it is in their economic interest to support change in order to start up exponential shift to renewable energy and agriculture. The basic financial security issue is what motivates most people to pay attention to politics.
We have already got a movement with a heart, it is just too small to overcome corporate lobbyists. To do that we have to convince people that their short and long term financial security depends on green jobs and a shift to renewable energy device manufacturing.
If we continue to develop these machines in our research institutions, but let other nations manufacture and sell them, your job, your healthcare, and your home is at risk. Keep voting to send your jobs to China and other nations and the slide will continue.
Take a trip to Detroit, look at all the empty homes just waiting to burn in the next Halloween arson spree, that is the future of your neighborhoods if we keep on exporting jobs. How do we swing voters to a green economic agenda? That's how.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 9:09 am
21 Oct 2009
Please know how much it means to speak out openly about what could be real and true. Thanks to all of you for providing this forum to speak what could somehow be truth, as best we can.
Before we can respond ably to the global challenges before us, I suppose it helps to understand why we are now presented with such a formidable, distinctly human-driven predicament. Imagine that the Earth is our patient and is suffering from an illness. Al Gore has said that the Earth has a fever. Until we can have make an accurate diagnosis of what is causing this illness, there is little chance of finding an adequate way to engender healing. Because the predicament before the family of humanity appears to be human-induced, there are sure to be reasonable, sensible, humane and responsible ways of addressing whatsoever poses itself as a threat to human wellbeing and environmental health. Please bear with me for a few more moments.
Each human culture presents its many members with knowledge of reality and with longstanding, adamantly held perceptions that are illusory. For example, unverified cultural transmissions can give rise to widely shared distortions of what could somehow be real about the world we inhabit whenever mistaken impressions or misperceptions are consensually validated as if they represent what is real.
In these instances, humans ubiquitously emit culturally biased, preternatural, scientifically unsupportable communications that confuse human reasoning and often promote a certain cortical conceitedness that is not useful in acquiring an understanding of the requirements of practical reality.
Over long time periods, preternatural ideas are occasionally passed down from generation to generation, with an unintended result. Such distorted perceptions of reality are shared and validated among many people, thereby confounding the very best of human efforts to share an adequate awareness of how the world we inhabit actually works.
When the best available science emerges, it is initially disturbing because this new science usually challenges already established but unrealistic ideas about what it means to be human; the “placement” of the human species within the natural order of living things; and particular requirements of biophysical reality. New scientific facts of this kind are uniformly difficult for people to apprehend because unexpected evidence exposes the hubris of experts to view by the community at large. What has been regarded as real by the members of a culture is seen as preternatural.
Since humans are shaped early and pervasively by a superabundance of culturally derived transmissions in our perception of reality, it becomes an evolutionary challenge for human beings to see the world as it is and to gain knowledge of the human species as one of many miraculous creatures that inhabits this wondrous planetary home in which all God's creatures have evolved.
When a scientist-practitioner of psychology such as myself thinks a patient is suffering from mental illness, that determination is an evidence-based clinical judgment. However, cultural standards of normalcy are not as carefully developed or rigorously scrutinized as are the diagnostic guidlines of clinicians, but instead are more casually agreed upon and promulgated as social norms and conventions that include scientifically validated perceptions of reality as well as misperceptions of what is real.
Because some distorted impressions of the world are valued by those who share them, these misperceptions are readily passed from member to member within a culture, among both peers and the generations.
Deeply disturbed mental patients distort reality so drastically that their incorrect impressions of reality do not become established by being passed along to many other people and incorporated into a belief system. By contrast, “normal” people in instrumentalities of governance, social organizations and cultures appear not to misperceive reality so sharply, yet distortions of what aggregations of normal people perceive do remain. Everyone knows now that the Earth is not flat and boundless, not like a mother's teat at which the human community can eternally suckle. While virtually everyone possesses this knowledge, experts on the global political economy, for example, appear to disregard this knowledge. Most economists tell us Earth is a cornucopia. Here is the rub, I suppose. Experts ignore what is a fact, according to well-established scientific evidence, and espouse an obvious distortion of reality by claiming that the distortion is an aspect of what could be real and, by so doing, having that erroneous misperception spread throughout the culture as if it were accurate.
A term of art in psychology is useful here, folie a deux. The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, folie a deux million for a government agency or political party, folie a deux cent million for a social order or folie a deux billion for a culture. These terms refer to misperceived aspects of reality held, commonly shared and judged to be real by many people of a government, a society or a culture.
At least one way to define the highest standard of normalcy for people in these aggregates is in terms of being able to adequately distinguish what is illusory from what is in scientific fact real.
Perhaps we can begin by at least attempting to share an understanding of what could somehow be real. If the Earth is finite and its ecology frangible, can the gigantic scale and fully expected growth of global human overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities now overspreading the Earth in our time be sustained much longer? If so, then fine. Let us agree to follow the business-as-usual path to the future that is being so adamantly advocated by many too many leaders now. But, if the seeming endless growth of consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species could probably become patently unsustainable soon, then the human family has much to do fast by beginning now to limit the growth rate of ever enlarging, large-scale production capabilities; to regulate the rate of increase of absolute global human population numbers; and to restrain unbridled per-capita consumption and hoarding of scarce natural resources.
Comments from one and all are welcome.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
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matthewrsparks Posted 1:31 am
22 Oct 2009
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"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."
-Frederick Douglass
Dear friends, family, and readers of my blog,
I recently read a fantastic but terrifying Grist.org article (and subsequent letter found near the bottom of the comment section) by Adam D. Sacks. Here is the link: The Absent Heart of the Great Climate Affair.
In it, he spoke of dour topics and dire times, how our collective ways of living are unsustainable, leading us to imminent environmental disaster, but that very few people seem to have the foresight, passion, and will to create the changes so desperately needed. This means, in less ambiguous terms, that it is quite likely that WE WILL ALL DIE if we don’t get our act together IMMEDIATELY.
Sacks inspired me to write a letter of my own, to spread the fire of passion and help create a new (or is it old?) way of life required of our species at this point in history.
When I read apocalyptic news stories, I try to read between the lines and understand what the story is really trying to tell me. The big picture that comes through loud and clear, over and over and over again, is that we’re all screwed. We’re killing our skies, our oceans, our fresh water, our weather, our farmland, our forests, our biodiversity, and our brothers and sisters, with a speed and scale unprecedented in all of earth’s history. (If you’d like me to send you credible links documenting the million and one ways we are in such trouble, I will, but for now, I’ll let the point stand.) Then we lamely justify doing so and our reasons for not changing our ways. Worse yet, we deny these problems even exist problems to begin with, preventing any Hail Mary solutions from possibly being put into play.
However, I don’t really believe that. At least not the part that we’re all screwed. Not yet. Those of you who know me well are likely unfortunate enough to also know that I’m a fighter when provoked. I don’t believe in violence, but I also don’t go down without a fight, and I don’t fight without the belief that I can win, no matter how long the odds. I feel the same about our current environmental predicament.
I’m reminded of the end credits of the movie WALL-E, wherein a sequence of images depicts humans rebuilding civilization out of the rubble of a wasted planet earth. The people appeared to have finally learned some valuable lessons about sustainable living. They used technology to improve their lives, but didn't worship it. They acted as stewards over the land. They didn't pollute. They were nice to each other. And so on. Not only did they live more sustainably, it looked like a pretty fabulous lifestyle as well.
I realize this amounts to nothing more than an overly-idealized cartoon, but perhaps that's the point. To date, I've only come across a handful of vivid visual or written representations of how we can do things differently as a society. I'm sure there are many that I just don't know about, but the small stack of positive alternatives barely registers in comparison with looming tower of apocalyptic movies, frightening documentaries, grisly news stories, and purple-faced pundits dominating the various media.
I wonder if the inaction Sacks wrote about results partly from a dearth of our collective imagination. That is, a lack of viable depictions of a happy, sustainable future is somewhat to blame for the shortage of proactive responses. I know that I all too often watch, read, or hear about some terrible thing that could or will destroy us all, but without an idea of how it could be different, I throw up my hands, curse the tragedy, and return to my own little world.
Conversely, after watching WALL-E for the first time, I planted an organic vegetable garden and put a beehive in my front yard. After stumbling upon a simple sketch of a parking garage and mall turned into a verdant urban oasis, I bought an abandoned triplex walking distance from downtown Denver and transformed it into a happy, healthy living space and artist colony. I'm not telling you this to impress or to pat myself on the back, but rather to support my theory that sometimes it's easier to work toward creating something good than it is to fight something bad, provided that we have a clear idea of what a new reality could actually look like. Without that vision of how it could be any different, how can we fathom taking action?
So what am I, personally, going to do about it? For starters, think, speak, and live with more passion. Fight the good fight. Write more letters, article responses, and blog posts like this one. Hold politicians, CEOs, and other leaders accountable for their actions and inaction. Educate myself. Live sustainably in a big way. And, perhaps most importantly, hold a vivid vision of what’s possible.
I expect you, my friends, family, and blog readers, to hold me accountable, just as I'm holding you accountable, for our respective responsibilities in creating our shared future. I’m grateful to Sacks for laying down a rough road map of where to go from here. I’ll do my part and try to add in what few details I can. I pray you’ll join me.
Sincerely,
Matt Sparks
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:02 am
22 Oct 2009
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dalbert Posted 10:18 pm
24 Oct 2009
The popular science webpages and scientific journals these days are peppered with frightening observations about the condition of the oceans and atmosphere. It seems that scientists are going out of their way to communicate with us. In his book "Under a Green Sky," University of Washington professor Peter Ward takes the reader along his journey of discovering the connections between greenhouse gas concentrations and changes to the ancient oceans. He calls the book his "silent scream." Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Center is telling the UK that they and other industrialized nations should be cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2020 to have a chance of avoiding warming above 2 degrees centigrade, and potentially catastrophic consequences. The United Nations Environment Programme's Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, which is a collection of climate science updates since the nobel-prize-winning IPCC 2007 report, says that the actual emissions growth rate from 2000 - 2007 exceeded their worst case projections for 2000 - 2010, and that since the 2007 report there is a decline in the efficiency with which the oceans and land can absorb carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, governments and politicians demonstrate by their inaction that they do not understand the implications of these observations and warnings.
If this were an academic exercise, I could watch it passively. But my grandchildren will live in this future we are creating. In 2050, my grandchildren will be in their 40's and 50's, possibly with grandchildren of their own. By then, it is likely the world will already be warmed by more than the 2 degrees centigrade which the scientists warned us we should not exceed. Who knows how many governments will remain stable through the population displacements, water shortages and famines which are already inevitable? The polar ice caps will be gone, and the dark ocean will retain the heat the ice caps used to reflect, creating additional warming in the north. Who knows if the permafrost will still hold its massive stores of carbon dioxide and methane? Who knows if the methane now frozen in the ocean depths will still be safely stored there? In 2050, what will scientists be telling my grandchildren about what 2100 will be like? Will their grandchildren have any future?
How will our grandchildren think of us in 2050, when they look back to 2009? I wince when I hear climate activists say that people won't give up their cars, or airline travel, or meat, or consumptive lifestyle. Are we saying that people would rather have these things than to give the next generations a chance to have adequate food and water, and stable governments? Are we really going to be the generation that could have saved the world, but decided it was too much trouble?
I testified at a coal plant permit hearing a few weeks ago. I started by reading the names of my four little grandchildren, but broke down in tears and was unable to continue. They let me sit down and recover while others testified. I kicked myself for being such a wimp, pulled myself together and read my comments. I suspect that most of the people there did not understand why I was crying, although I tried to explain. I see the potential futures my grandchildren will inhabit. Some are worse than others, which is why I participate in climate rallies and testify at hearings, and ask for my government to enact policies which will quickly reduce our fossil fuel emissions, and emissions from land use change. I hold on to the hope that hidden in the complexity of earth's systems, some resilient characteristic will save us from runaway climate change, and give us a second chance. But that is a faint hope. I see 2050, and that makes me cry for all our grandchildren. -- Donna Albert
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:03 am
25 Oct 2009
The immense problems associated with the losing balance present the human community with challenges that seem sufficient for any species concerned about extinction. Unfortunately, as seriously as the loss of balance is, human beings face something at least as significant and ultimately as destructive of itself, sad to say.
The search for and discovery of what could somehow be true and speaking it loudly and clearly is not a balancing act. Truth helps us find balance; but finding balance and telling truth are two different activities.
Perhaps the Grist community and the family of humanity have two separate goals to achieve in our efforts to preserve the human species and life as we know it:
1) Discover what could somehow be true because whatsoever is is, is it not?
2) Find balance and maintain it because, ultimately, increasing imbalance leads to extinction, does it not?
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 8:08 am
25 Oct 2009
Such a colossal failure to acknowledge good science and respond ably and humanely to the threats presented in our time to human wellbeing and environmental health by the skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers could lead to an unimaginable catastrophe, the likes of which only Ozymandias has witnessed.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 4:26 am
26 Oct 2009
Very few people speak with such clarity and perspicacity.
It looks to me as if many too many people do not believe anything except that which they want to believe and their leaders feed them precisely what many too many leaders in our time want them to believe. Hence, what is illusory is uniformly presented by leadership as if it were real and greed rules the world.
Always,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:03 am
26 Oct 2009
If many too many leaders of the family of humanity keep adamantly advocating and relentlessly doing the very same things being done now (ie, unbridled overproduction of unnecessary stuff, ravenous per-capita overconsumption of limited resources and unregulated overpopulation of Earth), would you please comment on how much longer you believe the Earth can continue to sustain human habitation and life as we know it?
When the fully expected size of the human family reaches 9+ billion in 2050, what chance is there the children will find that our planetary home is a fit place for human habitation?
Comments from one and all are welcome.
Sincerely,
Steve
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reneearon Posted 7:31 am
26 Oct 2009
I can't comment on this question you pose, but I can say it does seem bleak. Adam asked me to post a comment that was perhaps more expressive of my 'heart' or 'passion' with regard to these issues. It is true that I feel physically sick each time I read a news article that suggests we are going in the wrong direction, such as a clause in the climate bill that may allow forests to be ruined for palm oil production. I am deeply despairing primarily about the plight of vulnerable, non-human creatures who are at the complete mercy of our reckless and selfish practices.
But I will say this: I believe that whether or not I express my emotional passion about these issues is not entirely relevant. We do need to connect with our pain and feelings about this and to find support in this process; this is what Joanna Macy has been advocating for decades, and she is on to something. However, emotional catharsis is not the only answer. Nor is getting people to connect with their emotions necessarily the answer or straight forward, for the simple fact that humans engage in a variety of strategies to avoid distress and to protect themselves from dissonance. This can lead to denial, projection on to others and so forth; it's well documented. It depends entirely on our positions in relation to what is going on; if we are working in industry, in sciences, or are just ordinary people trying to live our lives and cope with the constant stream of terrible news coming through. I believe that even those working on the front lines of environmental degradation, who see first hand the devastating consequences of human activities--whether it's scientists studying endangered species, or those protecting forests from development to feed and support a growing population--experience very difficult emotional dilemmas, pulled in many directions. If a scientist trying to protect an endangered community of species comes into a meeting with stakeholders, and starts wailing, what would we think. Yes, we must not numb ourselves to our emotions and feelings about the situation we are in. There are strategic and smart ways of engaging with pathos. We need to ask ourselves when expressing our pain and distress is productive and when it is not productive; being sensitive to social and cultural contexts, and being in the end, rhetorically adept to use whatever available means of persuasion given the constraints (a paraphrase of Aristotle).
I believe this post and these issues would be greatly enhanced and supported with an active dialogue with those in the psychological fields, specifically clinical and therapeutic fields, who know a thing or two about humans. I am not speaking of behavioralists but those who work patiently and steadily to support people in making life changes. I have said this before and I will say it again. It will do us no good to accuse humanity of greed, selfishness and so forth, rather we must try, in the spirit of Freud all those years ago (and by many others, since) to understand the human psyche so we can figure out how to get out of this mess. How we relate with nature is so complicated, we must not fall into crude analyses. We must bring humanities, passion, heart and experience into the sciences, and vice versa. We must encourage the psychological, arts and philosophical communities to throw themselves into these issues.
I do not subscribe to 'end of the world' rhetoric no matter how bleak things may seem because at bottom I believe in life affirming forces and I do not feel 'the end of the world' is useful for my work. We can say, perhaps, 'end of the world as you know it' with regard to lifestyle and so forth, but scaring people witless, is simply not effective. there is a balance to strike with fear-based appeals as much research has already supported (see Susanne Moser's work on climate change communication, for example, along with many others). Some alarm or anxiety can be productive, ONLY if there is a context and support for action that follows.
That is about all I have to say on this topic for now....
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roncastle Posted 9:04 am
26 Oct 2009
I am not a demographer or a scientist, just an old dog who has been interested in sustainability, land conservation and agriculture for over 40 years. I am not likely to be around in 2050 and I don't think we will ever reach 9 billion. There are too many negative trends in play that are likely to be short term irrevisible. Read Lester Brown's "Plan B 4.0" and his post here at Grist last week about environmental refugeeism.
The coming scenarios are what I have been referring to as depeopling (a good 10 letter Scrabble word), the results of overpopulation, habitat destruction, declining fossil fuel dependent agriculture, rising sea level and the changes in weather and rainfall as the result of global warming.
The point is that the Earth cannot sustain human life as we know it. But I don't see that a species as adaptable as humans will be made extinct by this evolutionary process.
I heard on NPR last night an interesting previously recorded interview with Robert Thurman about his book "Why the Dahli Lama Matters" which reinforces my belief that it is the evolution of the human spirit that is most needed to create true sustainability.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 9:10 am
26 Oct 2009
Wonderfully well put. Thanks. I am for balance but, as I have said elsewhere, it appears as if the "window of opportunity" for necessary behavioral change appears to be closing. Hopefully, I am mistaken about that because we surely need time to respond ably to the global challenges before us.
Since 2001, I have been searching for a 'formula' to use, a balanced way to go forward, in order to bring this global, human-induced predicament to the attention of more than a few other people because the awareness of a few people cannot make a difference that makes a difference in such a huge and complex situation. More people with greater awareness of the predicament, I am supposing, can choose to move cooperatively toward sustainable ways of living and away from patently unsustainable lifestyles. During the past 8 years, I tried different approaches in order to raise awareness of certain looming threats to human wellbeing and environmental health. Nothing appears to have made a real difference, at least not yet. A deafening silence has prevailed over my efforts to raise awareness.
In 2001 I started the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population. In 2002 I travelled to South Africa for 16 days to Earth Summit on Sustainable Development where I employed some of the strategies you have mentioned with no success whatever. In 2003 I was in Amman, Jordan on a UN Mission, during which time I met with four members of the staff of HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, who was then the President of the Club of Rome to talk about what CoR has called for 40 years the "world problematique". In 2004, to Bellevue, Washington as a participant in a Foundation for the Future workshop entitled "This Tiny Planet". A year later to the Annual Meeting of the International Club of Rome. Then, in 2006 to the State of the Planet Conference, Columbia University. To Ottawa in 2007. Along the way I attended ceremonies at the United Nations where the UN Population Award was presented to Werner Fornos; a World Water Week conference in DC; and organized five Earth Day Summits on the Human Population. Thirty-plus letters to the editor have been presented in my local newspaper and four letters were published in the journal, "Environmental Health Perspectives". I am not going to bore you with many other details of this unexpected personal journey. Suffice it to say, that the point of all this activity was to sensibly try to raise awareness in any and every reasonably way possible. So far, there has been little that appears to have made much of a difference. Many too many leaders with responsibilities to assume and duties to perform have chosen to remain electively mute with regard to acknowledging the global predicament.
From my perspective, time does not appear to be on the side of those who intend to assure a good enough future for the children. I cannot tell anyone what is the right thing or the wrong thing to do in such incredible circumstances as the formidable ones looming ominously before the human family in our time; but I can say that I will not remain silent, and cannot give in or give up, no matter what. I have done all I could think of to do in the best ways I know how and intend to keep going.
Please know that I am greatly encouraged and emboldened by the new and courageous leadership of the Nobel Laureate and US President Barack H. Obama. Perhaps forward movement toward necessary change is in the offing.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:34 am
27 Oct 2009
I do not know anything about "the evolution of the human spirit" except to say that I agree with the words of Rabindranath Tagore, "Human beings are cruel; humanity is kind." It does appear to me that we need a transformation of human consciousness if we are to protect the planet, life as we know it and a future for the children.
More has to be done starting now to preserve the Earth. It is not sufficient to keep doing the very same things we are doing now that relentlessly dissipate resources and degrade the environment, ruthlessly extirpate biodiversity and endanger the future of the children because arrogance, avarice and extreme foolishness happen to be recklessly ruling the world in our time. The unbridled greed, pathological arrogance and intellectual foolhardiness of a tiny, over-educated minority, when coupled with the deafening silence of the great majority, results in nothing necessary happening. What is happening to the Earth is what will keep happening to the Earth. Nothing of consequence will change.
Human beings appear to be inducing an entangled set of global environmental challenges for the human family to acknowledge, address and overcome in our time. Necessary change needs to begin now. Today not tomorrow or the day after. We simply cannot continue to deny our duties to at least try and ameliorate the potentially catastrophic consequences of unbridled global overproduction, unrestrained overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities for which my generation of leading elders bears some responsibility.
If the human community does not come together reasonably, sensibly and humanely to elect ways to check the increase of its large-scale production capabilities, its per-capita consumption and hoarding, and its overpopulation activities on Earth in a timely fashion, then real threats to human wellbeing and environmental health will not be acknowledged, let alone addressed and overcome. Acknowledging only "symptoms" that threaten humanity as if they are our only real problems, while denying scientific evidence implicating humanity itself as the most probable cause of certain global environmental challenges, appears somehow not quite right.
The determination of many too many to willfully deny peer-reviewed scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth could precipitate a colossal tragedy because the denial of the science of human population dynamics, in particular, grossly complicates and dangerously obstructs human efforts to comprehend that humankind, given the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth rate of absolute global human population numbers, could be the most probable cause of the global challenges that are presenting themselves to us symptomatically as entangled environmental problems. We could end up acknowledging only the symptoms of what threatens the human family in our time and ignoring the understanding that certain, entangled global threats to humanity and Earth's ecology are human-driven results, symptoms if you will, of our own unsustainable designs, constructions and activities.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 8:35 am
27 Oct 2009
You made reference to the Dalai Lama. One of my children introduced me to the perspective of this great person years ago. Somehow the following quote from him seems timely and well-placed here.
In the present circumstances, no one can afford to assume that someone else will solve their problems. Every individual has a responsibility to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes are not sufficient; we must become actively engaged.
- Tenzin Gyatso (The Dalai Lama)
As ever,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 10:23 am
27 Oct 2009
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Dave McArthur Posted 4:51 pm
28 Oct 2009
He is something of an expert on the teachings of the Buddha, a person who is perhaps the greatest psychologist-physicist in recorded history. The Buddha understood well our grand capacity to develop incredibly sophisticated systems of denial of change/stewardship.
Over a decade ago I realised that the communication of the nature of energy and of how the climate works is characterised by a peculiar lack of science. “Energy experts” and climatologists consistently deny change, especially the change they called for. Very often they are symbols of what they speak against. For example they jet around the world exhorting people to stop jetting. I realised this inherent dissonance was manifest in myriad ways in their lectures. Having attempted to practice a little meditation I have long been aware of my own mind-boggling capacity for self-deception and realised we needed tools that enable us to transcend our egos.
I drew on the greatest insights that psychology-physics has to offer us and attempted to crystallise them into a single principle, which I am tentatively calling the Sustainability Principle of Energy. My latest project, now completed, has been to create a Youtube video of this principle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fCqBG8URTg
I hope it makes good sense to you. My contribution in response to Adam’s call was to create and post a Copenhagen Manifesto. Perhaps this video will help you realise the high level of science underpinning it. Thank you everyone.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 3:07 am
29 Oct 2009
How do we go slow and yet move far forward fast?
Perhaps our efforts to provide at least the chance of a good enough future for the children depends upon the practical ways this question is reasonably, sensibly, humanely and responsibly answered.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:41 am
29 Oct 2009
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oilcrash Posted 1:45 am
31 Oct 2009
About 10 years ago I heard a website mentioned on the radio, the conversation went something like Want to view a radical website? Have a look at this one http://www.vhemt.org.
From there I went to http://www.dieoff.org also known as Brain Food, this is a description of the site I doubt it's humanly possible to read every one of these outstanding works -- at least not without suffering mental illness. This lead me to many many hours of reading and self education, as prior to then I hadnt heard of things like peak oil, climate change, economic collapse, over population, or the many problems we now face.
I was deeply concerned about climate change and was convinced that to bring a child into a world so badly damaged and getting worse would be a mistake, like buying a flat on the top floor of a burning high rise, and that if my child was alive 40 years hence it would be having a hell of a time surviving. This thought made me have a vasectomy, and change my middle name to Thankyoufornotbreeding, as a publicity stunt and in the hope that I would get some value from the $96.00 it cost. Over the years Ive had 1 radio interview and at least 2 newspaper articles about my name, so maybe value for money?
I wasnt overly worried about my own situation until I started to understand peak oil.
I would drive around Lower Hutt thinking how dependent we were on oil and how it was hard to see anything wrong with life, with all the lawns mowed and everything in order.
I started writing to Politicians, which was a big stretch as I couldnt type or spell to save myself. So maybe you cant blame them for ignoring this barely literate mad man. I got the normal idiot replies from the letter openers, except one from Jeanette Fitzsimons Youre quite right. Shell Oil International is working on the assumption that between 2005 and 2010 world oil demand will outstrip the capacity of the wells to supply. March 23 2000, so Shell Oil knew it and a politician knew it also.
This amazed and frustrated me, the Government were saying 2037 at the earliest http://oilcrash.com/articles/hodgson.htm , and planning accordingly while all I was reading said 2005 2010. Most of the authors were independent so maybe more free to write the truth?
Ive pushed my comfort zone from then on, believing the only way to address these problems was educating society http://oilcrash.com/articles/alerting.htm , with one of my first one man actions being handing out about 3,000 Running on Empty leaflets around Wellington. I eventually had 10,000 copies printed, I gave out all but 500, and some friends gave those out at a Green Party convention (love in or what ever they called them?) in Nelson in around 2001.
Ive personally handed several Politicians copies of the Running on Empty leaflet http://oilcrash.com/articles/running.htm as well as posting 5 copies each to every Politician in the 2001 government. I am not the only person sending mass mailings to our Politicians, I know of several people who have sent a lot of similar information to all Politicians over the past ten years, if nothing else there must be a lot of secretaries and so called public servants who have been well informed. Ive sent over 600 DVDs to Parliament, all individually addressed to Politicians. Others have given selected members several DVDs. The Maori Party have distributed about 150 DVDs within Parliament over the years, which I supplied them with, and have called for a cross party commission on peak oil and climate change, their request has been ignored 4 times.
Ive never liked putting myself in the public view, I always hoped the so called leaders would have shown some backbone and started preparing New Zealand instead of carrying on this charade that we can continue to grow on a finite planet.
I've spent the best part of $25,000.00 on this campaign, along with giving away about 14,000 DVDs. I've asked several times for financial help from the Government, one such request - http://oilcrash.com/articles/concernd.htm
Along with several friends we have had 2 meetings with the Ministry of Economic Development, I gave them enough information for them to hold a week long seminar, or at least give the politicians a full and frank explanation of the facts, yet as is patently clear by the past 10 years of inactivity the MED has clearly under performed as a taxpayer funded entity, their advice and actions can only be described as treason.
This from Harry Duynhoven September 2001: I understand from Caroline Parlane in the Ministry of Economic Development that you are in regular communication with her and have sent her a wealth of information? Articles, CDs and tapes on the issue of oil supplies. She has undertaken to let me know if she finds anything in that information of which I am not currently aware or of which she thinks I should be informed. http://oilcrash.com/articles/duynhovn.htm
I have also had 2 x 30 minute meetings with Darren Hughes, at our last meeting he showed a glimmer of acceptance that such things as Kiwi Saver were a joke and that most 'investors' will get zero return on their deposits. Also at our first meeting he stated that the global economy was cyclical and New Zealand would see a reverse of it's abysmal balance of payments some time soon, well 7 years later it is looking worse ... funny that?
Nathan Guy has also received a lot of information, but holds to the idea that having children is one of his life's ambitions, feeding them and watching them grow old is secondary it seems? Nathan is a big supporter of Transmission Gully, the Western Link Road, and any other project his masters want him to push. Nathan has also received many DVDs from me.
John Key (along with many of New Zealand's so called top decision makers) was at the Al Gore 'Inconvenient Truth' presentation in Auckland on November 14th 2006, where I gave him (and 99 others, including Tipper Gore) 16 documentaries on 4 DVDs http://oilcrash.com/articles/algore01.htm (this cost me $900.00).
I handed Bill English a folder full of information when he was leader of the opposition, at a meeting in Waikanae, asking him to view the information through the eyes of his youngest child. This was at the same hall that Nathan Guys campaign manager threatened to shoot me and my dogs a few years later http://oilcrash.com/articles/natnl_01.htm .
This is an incomplete list of some of the people I've informed http://oilcrash.com/articles/whatinfo.htm
In one act of insanity http://oilcrash.com/articles/natnl_01.htm I attacked 2 of the National Parties billboards and spray painted www.oilcrash.com across the billboard and traitor across Helen and Dons chests, this ended up costing me $1,600 paid to Steven Joyce as the then National campaign manager, (so yes the current man responsible for building fool hardy structures, such as these new mega roads has also had the opportunity to look into peak oil). I also had to do 50 hours community service. On my way out of town I saw another National Party billboard, I nailed about 5 small oilcrash.com signs near, but not on, the bill board. This cost me another $100.00 (to cover the cost of removal of my signs) and another 100 hours community work . With this comment from the fool judge Mr. Atack this might teach you how to help the community kind of what Id been putting my heart and sole into the past 5-6 years (at the time).
I then fell off a ladder and fractured my back, I was left unable to work for about 8-10 weeks so, in desperation to bring some reality to the political debate, I ran in the 2005 Elections. Another opportunity the other candidates missed to become informed, and again I ran in the Kapiti local body Elections for Mayor or Local Body Councilor, I was never interested in an elected position and was only using the election system to push the real issues we face, not the petty things, like will we get Transmission Gully this side of 2100? I find it a shame that KCDC cant accept the truth and start to prepare this community, as a true leader should do?
Jenny Rowan, who claims to understand a few things about the environment, has shown no change from the previous mayor Alan Milne, whom I spent over 30 minutes discussing the issues back in 2003 (ish) and whom I gave maybe 15 to 20 DVDs to while he was Mayor. Once I even lent him a DVD player and offered to hire him (handing his secretary a $50.00 note for his time), she gave me the money back and I collected the DVD player a few weeks later. Did it do any good? Well as an Orwellian joke he became an Environmental Adviser to the Waikanae North mega (environment killing) subdivision, after leaving his mayoral position. He thanked me for the loan of Jeremy Leggetts book Half Gone This was my bed time reading for December. I found it very illuminating. Thank you for the loan Alan 24/01/07.
During the election period for Mayor I handed most candidates peak oil information, and many DVDs. At the first public meeting I gave each Mayoral candidate a copy of the September 8-14 issue of the Listener with an article subtitled The global oil crisis will hit home in just five years. How will New Zealand cope? This article highlighted the IEAs 2007 energy report which stated oil production had stagnated and in many regions, declined . That is long hand for peak oil.
Within the first 2 weeks of becoming Mayor, Jenny Rowan turned the first sod on a new stop bank in Otaki, which coincidentally will allow the building of 5,000 new houses adding 20,000 more water users to the drought affected 'Nature Coast'.
And at her very first Council meeting, KCDC approved the construction of a burnout pad for the Lawton memorial burnout competition, this involves using lots of fuel to make car tyres spin fast to in effect cause them to burn, even though it is against regional council bylaws to burn tyres or anything that causes excessive pollution.
Jenny has since stated New Zealand needs a change of leadership at all levels of Government due to the abysmal actions she and her peers have taken on environmental issues.
I finished school at the end of the forth form, I was bottom of the class in nearly every topic. For most of my life Ive looked up to politicians, teachers, police, and the older generations. It has been extremely frustrating to see my so called superiors so closed minded, when it only took me a few weeks to work out how dependent we are on oil and all resources and how we needed to prepare for this moment. Yet even friends of mine have made the ultimate gamble and had children. I am not against children, I just think there is a good chance most born today will be facing very different lives than what we have had, and I am not talking better. I think not having children is the best way to reduce future suffering; this is where our leaders and teachers need to be helping to educate the country, all the information is available, to those with a mind to look. Our future looks bleak, and ignoring this message will only make it worse.
I don't know my HT from my ML and have had a lot of help from friends with my website, specifically Aldo in Italy, without whom my site would have never turned out so well. In the beginning I just took things from another site and as I improved my meager skills, I (via Aldo) started filling the site with letters to and from our Members of Parliament, also highlighting mine and others actions of trying to inform the general public and the politicians, as long as the internet survives (which is dependent on the power grid), there is a record of who knew what and when.
If you see a problem in the world and you have the ability to do something about it then its your duty to take action.
Don Brash National Party leader 2005
Unfortunately the people do not want to know, our so called leaders know this also, or are part of the happy ignorant, so my efforts and those of many others has been pointless. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlYTJ9JHY4A
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:43 am
31 Oct 2009
You have at least one more friend. Here I am. Thanks for all you have been doing. Please do keep going. We are going to make a difference.
If it pleases you to do so, please consider the following the exchange of views I just had with a respected colleague.
begin -----
Dear Gene G,
You report, ".............. no one can seriously argue that for sure the timing for repair requires that it be done now or that the damage that results is not reversible. THE SO CALLED SCIENCE IS SIMPLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH NO MATTER HOW MUCH THE ALARMISTS INSIST OTHERWISE. ANYONE WITH AN OPEN MIND WILL AGREE. You cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear and if you try, China will do it better and cheaper. As I have said many times before and will keep repeating; to insist otherwise is either stupid, ignorant, folly or motivated by greed or related objective."
Gene, what concerns me is this. If we wait for you to become certain about what the science tells us before making necessary behavioral changes, then it will be too late for humanity to respond ably by taking corrective action in the timely way. Many scientists have declared clearly, loudly and often that extant scientific evidence makes it clear enough right now what distinctly human-driven global threats to human wellbeing and environmental health are looming ominously before the human family.....threats already visible on the horizon which need to be addressed and overcome while there is still time to act honestly, morally and responsibly as the capable stewards of the Earth we know ourselves to be. Can humankind afford to wait? What about the children and life as we know it?
With many thanks, Gene, I remain
Sincerely,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:49 am
31 Oct 2009
Greed-driven, unbridled economic growth rules the world and greed rules the world absolutely in our time. On a relatively small, noticeably finite and evidently frangible planet with size, composition and environmental characteristics of Earth, such reckless growth and greed as we see today cannot be sustained much longer, much less forever. To adamantly, willfully and idolatrously espouse adherence to the seemingly endless expansion of "big business as usual" overgrowth activities now ravaging the Earth will likely be seen by the children as the greatest crime in human history............a culturally prescribed and condoned, elite-driven crime against nature and humanity.
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isaacschumann Posted 8:42 am
31 Oct 2009
this is why no one listens to climate change activists.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:20 am
01 Nov 2009
What concerns me is that we will argue until it is too late to do anything reasonable and sensible to correct the problems we are precipitating.
I believe the human community is grossly underestimating the pernicious character, immensity and time-warping speed of the approaching human-driven global predicament that could soon be confronted by humanity.
While I do not make any claims to knowledge of what humankind needs to do beginning tomorrow, I can say one thing unequivocally. If the human community keeps doing the things we did over the past 8 long, dark years and refuses to make necessary changes in our behavioral repertoire from what is patently unsustainable to what are sustainable lifestyles, then I fear for the future of the children, life as we know it and the Earth as a fit place for human habitation.
Everyone in the Grist community appears to be beginning to struggle in one way or another with these unwelcome circumstances. Please, everyone, do keep going.
And a special "thank you" to Adam for making this open discussion possible. Let us hope that Adam, Renee, Ron, Dave, Des, Myotis and Dr.X, keep the discussion going, regardless of the willfully pernicious efforts of the arrogant and avaricious ideologues among us who regularly attempt to disrupt open discussions like this one. Adam's work is vital. I think of him as a canary on Earth. As long as people like Adam D. Sacks are singing their songs, all will be well eventually. Of course, it would be wonderful to hear many more canaries singing loudly and clearly.
Many too many of those people have been consciously promulgating gag rules, obstructing dialogues, spreading disinformation, and doing everything other thing in their power to "poison the well" of public discourse about what Adam is trying to communicate. Shame on them.
The deniers and deceivers know who they are. Too many are our leaders.
Sincerely,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 8:48 am
01 Nov 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 7:07 am
02 Nov 2009
Perhaps we can agree that the business-as-usual activities which have been adamantly advocated and relentlessly pursued during the past 8 long, dark years need not continue.
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isaacschumann Posted 8:28 am
02 Nov 2009
thank you for politey responding to my comment. my point is that it is my belief, as well as the belief of many esteemed scientists, that many of the most dire predictions for climate change are unfounded. I am a microbiologist, so i dont have specific expertise, but here is a quote from a very well respected ecologist, Daniel Botkin, that summarizes my view. "The most extreme concerns about global warming assume that life and its environment must remain as they were around 1960. This assumption is common among climatologists who argue that global warming is happening and will be disastrous. In contrast, ecologists have established that ecological systems are not steady-state and that species not only have evolved and adapted to change, but in fact many, perhaps most, require change." I find in my own experience, that writing about climate change as adam does, while not only being, in my opinion, unscientific, also leads most people to tune out. the other response is what you see above in the comment section, where one commenter muses on whether climate deniers deserve constitutional rights. both responses are bad. The worst effects of global warming are based solely on computer models, which are not science in and of themselves until they are analyzed against real world observation of what they are supposed to predict. I find in the apocalyptic view of global warming a profound disrespect for the vitality of nature, assuming that any small change in ecosystem will doom a species, despite significant scientific evidence to the contrary. I strongly suggest that you go to http://www.danielbotkin.com, it will surely enhance your understanding and appreciation of the natural world. In short i profoundly disagree with your assertion that we have only a brief window to act before things spin out of control, there is absolutely no scientific basis for tipping points and the like. The type of activism you promote leads to hysteria and inaction, and both of those are in great supply right now.
i would love to hear your thoughts on these topics
cheers,
Isaac
ps. i am personally most concerned about the acidification of the oceans as a result of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. this will not result in ecological collapse, but a significantly different ecology in our oceans, and i tend to be pretty fond of what lives there now.
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Des Emery Posted 7:31 pm
02 Nov 2009
You acknowledge that the oceans are undergoing acidification because of excess CO2, but seem to accept that occurrence as a natural event. We don't. We see that as unnatural, and as one of the harbingers of global tragedy. Of course the sea will change - the shorelines erode here and grow there, the corals grow and turn into atolls, some fish-stocks decline while others increase. But all of that should only happen over thousands and millions of years. We are concerned that it will happen within our own lifetime. And we see deniers of climate change as being more concerned about immediate profits at the expense of long-range planning which we know will cost much more but which will serve as an S.O.S. -"Save Our Souls!"
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BrianF Posted 7:50 pm
02 Nov 2009
Of course life is not static. Life evolves. But sometimes the environment can change so drastically that most of life dies out. I assume you are aware that the earth has experienced "great extinctions" several times in the past. If it happened in the past, surely you must agree it could happen in the future. Rapidly increasing greenhouse gas levels were a part of (in fact, many scientists say they were the cause of) most of the past great extinctions we know about. Whether greenhouse gases are released by volcanic activity or humans doesn’t make much difference in respect to the effects on life.
Botkin is wrong if he says the most extreme concerns about global warming assume life can’t change. The ones I’m aware of make no such assumptions, and I’ve read over two dozen books and countless articles on the subject. They do take into account the speed at which species can adapt though. Scientists used to think that climate changes in the past always happened slowly, but that has been replaced with hard evidence that climate has sometimes changed dramatically in only a few years. Specifically, I have read that to change between an ice age climate and a climate similar to what we have now can take as little as 5 to 20 years.
That is the scientific basis for tipping points that I know about. What caused the climate to go between ice age and warmer states like now are orbital changes, which happen very slowly and gradually. The climate also changed slowly and gradually up to a point, and then it changed rapidly and suddenly. The only explanation scientists have come up with that I am aware of is that positive feedbacks occurred. At a certain point, which some call the tipping point, positive feedbacks took the changes rapidly to a very different state.
I visited the link you posted, but it seemed to be an art site for a different Daniel Botkin. The correct link is http://www.danielbbotkin.com. I read what he had to say about tipping points. Near the beginning, he said, “Underlying this belief that our environment has tipping points and we might be nearing one is a deeper belief: that the Earth’s environment is stable, that undisturbed by human influences it would be constant, or close to it.” Nothing could be further from the truth! I don’t think he has taken the time to look into where the tipping point idea comes from. It comes from measurements of the past, which show that the environment (climate) was very dynamic in the past. It has been relatively stable in the more recent past, while human civilization was forming, but it has never been static. That is what the paleoclimatoligists say. I have never heard any say it was stable!
I think maybe the disagreement or misunderstanding comes from the fact that he is talking about life as a whole. He says, “Tipping points don’t work for non-steady-state ecological systems, because they are always changing, kind of sloshing around from one condition to another, and they don’t really have cliffs to fall off of.” That has been true for life as a whole, but it definitely is not true for individual species, or even entire ecosystems. Most species that existed in the past have already fallen off the cliff of extinction. Yes, they evolved and branched out, and some survived, but most of those branches died off. And entire ecosystems of the past have ended too, because the vast majority of species that made them up died off, or the climate they depended on changed. If that isn’t going off a cliff, I don’t know what he would call going off a cliff.
Also, he says tipping points only happen to steady-state systems. If that is true technically, then tipping point is not the correct term for what I’m talking about. But it is silly to dismiss an entire body of scientific work based on the definition of a term. The climate is not a steady-state system, but it undergoes dramatic, drastic changes sometimes. Whatever you want to call those, that is what people are worried about.
It takes much longer to develop new life forms than it does to kill off existing ones during an extinction event. In the past, after great extinctions, it took hundreds of thousands of years for biodiversity to return to where it was before the extinctions. Sometimes even greater biodiversity came than before the extinction began, and so in that sense I guess you could say the great extinction might have been a good thing for life as a whole. But it was not a good thing for the species that went extinct, or for individual living things during that time. I’d much rather live in a world like we have now than one with many fewer species, and I’d never want to live through an extinction event.
I recently read that species are currently going extinct at a rate either 100 or 1000 times the norm (can't remember which, but either is shocking). I don't think global warming is causing most of that, I think humans are causing it in other ways. But global warming is already endangering many species, and it will get much worse before it gets better.
I am worried about ocean acidification, like you are. I’m worried not just because I am fond of what lives in the oceans now, but also because I am pretty sure most of the seafood that people currently eat would not survive, definitely not in quantities to provide a major source of food as it does now. The way we are overfishing the oceans will only make this happen faster. But some of the predictions for even a little more global warming are that major food producing areas will suffer mega-droughts (California, for example) or turn into deserts (the Great Plains). That takes care of most of the food currently produced in the U.S., but it will happen on every continent (other than Antarctica). For example, the Himalayan glaciers that supply water to over a billion people (and their crops) could dry up as early as 2035. I’m very worried that before the end of the century, humans will experience worldwide famine on a scale we’ve never seen before. If you look at that from the point of view of a biologist, that might seem like just a normal part of life. But from the point of view of a human who cares about the quality of human life in the future, who might even have kids that would have to go through that, I want to prevent it if at all possible. I don’t think this is a radical point of view.
During some of the great extinction events of the past, the oceans changed dramatically. The deep oceans, sometimes even the surface waters of the more shallow parts, became anoxic. This was because global warming caused by greenhouse gases switched off the ocean currents and the winds that mixed oxygen into the water. Most life that existed in the ocean before the extinction was replaced by bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Some of them released hydrogen sulfide, which killed off most of the other life that remained, either directly or indirectly by damaging the ozone layer (which killed of most plant life on the surface). This is what will happen again if we release too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases. This is not just some wild guess from a model, this is what actually happened in the past. Yes, life survived, and I am sure life will survive again if it happened again. But I don’t think humans could survive if something this bad happened, and the suffering during those last years would be unimaginable. Some scientists have a hard time thinking in terms of the effects the things they talk about will have on real lives.
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amazingdrx Posted 10:09 am
02 Nov 2009
Since we know there actually is a scientific basis for human caused GHG climate disaster, and we realize individuals with your point of view can't be convinced by scientific evidence, we choose to stop trying to convince you.
We will stick to convincing swing voters instead, people in the middle of the political spectrum. Extremists are being marginalized daily as their spokespersons rant.
Feel free to further this cause. It helps get the majority to vote for a climate curing, job creating green energy and ag revolution. We will continue to emphasize economic stability and financial security by advocating independence from imported energy and chemical fertilizer (yes, that's right, ammonia fertilizer is now brought in on ocean going tankers from Russia).
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Votes, votes, votes. Stall out this new energy economy with denier talking points and all those jobs continue to be exported.
It's the same result of "death panel" talking points in the healthcare debate, 10s of thousands of families losing their homes and 1000s dying every month because they don't have health insurance.
Millions losing their jobs, healthcare, and homes because US industries can't/won't compete in this worldwide renewable energy race. It feeds into the same decline brought on by the Reagan revolution. Thank you Reaganites and conservatives, you have turned US into a debtor nation dependent on imported energy and manufactured goods and a second class world power rapidly dropping down the list in every category used to measure national success.
Maybe more Reagan de-regulation will help quicken the slide? Let's just let the "free" market build more coal and oil lubricant under this melting glacier. Woooosh! The US economy dropping into the ocean of counterfiet (100s of trillions) electronic currency disguised as "credit default swaps" and "bundled mortgages" and "derivatives".
US credit meltdown. How long will china conytinue to lend US our money back to buy more stuff from them?
Why actually manufacture anything? That's for suckers, right?
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isaacschumann Posted 10:55 am
02 Nov 2009
i work developing chemical processes to turn agricultural and municipal waste into valuable fuels and chemicals through yeast, fungal or bacterial fermentations. i have made it my lifes work to change the way humans create and consume energy. i also do real science in the real world, so i dont appreciate being talked down to by a political hack. i spend my work day furthering renewable energy, while you write bs on the internet. you have a rudimentary grasp of the science, but, like every other "activist" you pass yourself off as an expert, while choosing only the bits of climate science that support your political agenda. I hate how anyone who disagrees with people like you is a "denier" and a tool of the oil industry. i work very hard and do not make very much money (the company i work for is tiny and i also dont have health insurance) If you dont like debate, than dont talk about the science this and the science that. I say that there is no scientific basis for tipping points in nature because nature is a non-steady state system and tipping points only apply to steady state systems; there has to be a continual, persistant set of baseline conditions to tip away from. furthermore, believing in human induced global warming is not the same as believing in tipping points. i believe in human induced warming because there is considerable evidence in favor, i do not believe in tipping points because they are based in an outdated view of ecology that sees nature as steady state system.
heres a question for you concerning u.s. manufacturing; the u.s currently produces about 20% of all manufactures in the world, down from around 50% immediately following the 2nd world war. Why is it fair that 1% of the worlds population gets to do 20% of the worlds manufacturing? A more equitable world will see the u.s. lose even more manufacturing, or are all those foreigners undeserving?
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amazingdrx Posted 6:40 am
03 Nov 2009
You mean like the yeast in snack foods derived from papermill waste? Let me guess, the clorine (that introduces dioxin into our food supply) used to eliminate competing microorganisms in the process is failing, so the next big thing is GMO yeast and a version of "roundup" for microorganisms?
No wonder you are defensive.
"i dont appreciate being talked down to by a political hack"
Hehehey, good obfuscation here though:
"Why is it fair that 1% of the worlds population gets to do 20% of the worlds manufacturing?"
Why is it that 20% consume 50% of the world's resources in a way that is catastrophically changing the biosphere? Should we increase this destructive consumption in order to increase fairness?
Nope. We should manufacture a renewable technical civilization. With technology that does not consume our living planet, the use and manufacturing of products will increase as the standard of living of everyone on the planet imptroves.
Lift all boats or go for the corporate bottomline in the next quarterly report? The yeast food additive model is an example of the pervasive short term bottomline world view. So what if the current GMO/toxin cycle is ineffective next year? We can make money now, then develop a new GMO/toxin pair next year. It's all/only about the short term dollars.
Your tipping point, point is ludicrous. How can anyone in the biological sciences not understand exponential growth? Your job involves the conditions for growing microorganisms that display this fundamental trait of life itself. Math illiteracy is rampant in media and our culture in general, but even in the sciences? Yep.
That's why the "political hacks" pushing denier talking points have such a liesurely time finding scientists to tout their nonsense. Evidently you are actually volunteering to help out? Amazing.
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isaacschumann Posted 7:09 am
03 Nov 2009
thanks for the response, i agree with much of what you said, adding increasing amounts of CO2 will accelerate this change and cause huge problems, im not arguing with that. You are right that huge changes n prehistoric temperature caused massive dieoffs, but there have also been countless rapid changes in prehistoric temperatures, of the magnitude predicted today, that did not cause those mass extinctions. we know this because the traditional view of climate was that it did not change more than 1 C per millenia, and we only recently have discovered that this is not so. so if rapid changes in temperature indeed did cause mass extinctions, we should have had all sorts of unexplained extinctions in the past to correspond to warming we had not seen. Mass extinctions are a rare event, while rapid changes in temperature are not. (though, yes, recently the climate has been far more stable) My point is that many of the remedies proposed by the activist community are immediate and severe. if we were to take the mission statement of 350.org seriously, they would have to stop ALL emissions around the world, thats every single car, power plant, factory... most everything, and then wait a few hundred years for the CO2 to dissipate out. this is not a serious proposition for combating climate change. I come to this sight to spark discussion, because most people here would be opposed to what i see as the most realistic solution to climate change, a set of binding agreements to cut emissions with meaningful penalties. developing countries would have to cut less with a longer time frame to do so. Countries could use whatever means to cut emissions so as many ideas can be tried as possible, but an indepentent body would verify. These cuts would be phased in over a long time, so that the individual politicians would no longer be in office as they would be far more likely to agree to real cuts. The problem with the climate bill now is that it gives away 85% of the permits, making it a near useless excercise (im supportive nonetheless)
My problem is that many bold claims are made about what will happen in the future that will not come true. On daniel botkins site you should check out his article on making predictions called "what idiot said that?" where he recounts making bold assertions about how all the trees in north america would be extinct from climate change by the year 2000. the process he was describing is actually happening, yet all peolpe will remember was his spectacularly wrong prediction. (apologies for the wrong link) In short, im far more worried about deforestation, overfishing and the like than climate change just yet. I dont know how many activist friends i have that go gobble down sushi every chance they get without giving it a second thought, yet will go on and on about how climate change will destroy life in earth. clamouring for immediate action of the like that will not happen only encourages politicians to do what they have now, give us a climate bill in name only meant to appease their activist base while not pissing off their corporate donors. human beings are far more likely to agree to painful changes if they can put them off and phase them in. the important thing is to have meaningfull and BINDING cuts with penalties to ensure compliance.
i really appreciated hearing your thoughts and hope for a response
cheers,
isaac
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BrianF Posted 1:37 pm
03 Nov 2009
It looks like you and I agree on many things but disagree on some important things. For example, I agree that we need a set of binding agreements to cut emissions with meaningful penalties, and I agree industrialized nations should cut emissions more in the beginning. But I think the situation is very likely to be much more urgent than you think, and I think we should reduce emissions as quickly as possible. This does not have to be as painful as some people say. The Union of Concerned Scientists came up with a plan that would reduce emissions way more than the bills currently in Congress, yet it would actually save the average family over $900 per year by 2030, at least according to their estimates. If we made the changes the right way, it would cost a little initially, but then we’d save more than that from efficiency and from not having to extract and process all those fossil fuels. It would be a good idea to make these changes even if global warming were a hoax, in my opinion. But global warming means the changes are no longer optional and we can’t wait too long to make them.
I agree it is very difficult to make specific predictions, and some things have not happened as quickly as predicted. You refer to a forecast of trees being more vulnerable to insect attacks and blights. Maybe the changes did not happen as rapidly as he predicted, but they definitely have been happening for a while and are gradually getting worse. A paper in Science said that background mortality rates for trees have been doubling every 17 to 29 years and that regional warming and water deficits are likely contributors. It also mentions “recent outbreaks of tree-killing bark beetles in the US, which have been linked to a rise in temperatures”. See http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/23/science-global-warming-is-killing-us-trees-a-dangerous-carbon-cycle-feedback/, http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/01/climate-driven-pest-devours-n-american-forests/, and http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/25/nature-on-stunning-new-climate-feedback-beetle-tree-kill-releases-more-carbon-than-fires/.
There is quite a bit of uncertainty, so we may have more time than I think. I certainly hope so. But when the stakes are this high and the future this uncertain, I think it would be extremely foolish not to err on the side of caution. Instead, we are so far doing the exact opposite. The best thing the United States has been able to come up with so far is not even close to the minimum the scientists have said is necessary for industrialized nations, and that was the science from a few years ago. Plus the method of carbon credits they plan to use hasn’t worked very well so far in the rest of the world. And most people think there are many things more important and more urgent than global warming. I think scientists (with a few exceptions) have been way too cautious in the way they have explained things to the public. And there has been a huge propaganda effort funded largely by the fossil fuel industry. So I think we need to be more forceful in our urgency, not less. Let me tell you some of the things that make me think the situation has a good chance of being much more urgent than most people think.
First of all, if you followed news stories related to global warming and climate change over the past few years, you must have noticed that time and again new scientific findings showed that things were getting worse faster than most scientists had predicted. I already did not trust the models they used very much, not just because it is such a difficult job to model something so complex, but also because they did not include feedback in their calculations. The models failed to mimic the rapidity or severity of past big changes when run backwards in time. It seems probable that the future big changes would also be more severe and faster than the models predicted, at least when the feedbacks they left out kicked in. And lately we have seen that many things, from the levels of greenhouse gases to the melting of Arctic sea ice, have worsened much faster than any of the models or scenarios predicted. For more, see this press release from the UNEP (you can also get the full reports from that link too). The first sentence of the press release reads, “The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).”
The individual reports I had been reading were scary enough, but the pattern scared me even more. In 2007, this made me think that feedback might have already begun. Then in 2008 I read that Hansen said one of the feedbacks had kicked in, and that was the Albedo effect. Although this was supposed to “only” raise global temperatures an extra 0.3 degrees C, that is almost half as much as temperatures have risen since preindustrial times. Also, melting permafrost is already releasing more CO2 and methane, and even some methane hydrates in shallow oceans are releasing their methane, according to Russian scientists. I don’t think these are yet releasing enough to think feedback going out of control is imminent, but it’s probably the main reason methane concentrations rose recently for the first time in many years, and it is probably one of the reasons CO2 levels rose significantly faster than any of the IPCC’s scenarios predicted. Another reason may be that the oceans and other sinks are removing less CO2 from the atmosphere than before. What concerns me most is that nobody knows when these feedbacks might get so bad that they take the process out of our control (so that reducing our emissions would no longer be sufficient to stop rising temperatures or greenhouse gas levels). Since nobody knows, we should err on the side of caution and reduce emissions more than the models say we should, not less. People should be much more worried than they are, not less.
You bring up a good point, that many rapid temperature changes of the past did not cause great extinctions. But let’s look a little deeper. If you are talking about the various ice ages and warmer periods that occurred during the past several hundreds of thousands of years, those changes were between states like now and colder states, not hotter. The most recent mass extinction was almost 50 million years ago, when the CO2 level and temperature were both higher than now. In fact, every great extinction happened when CO2 levels and temperatures were higher than now. Also, there were many lesser mass extinctions in the past. I don’t want us to be the cause of one of those either. I don’t know how many of those corresponded to rapid climate changes of the scale we may be headed for, but I would bet many of them did. Our extinction rate is already very high, and I think this indicates that many forms of life are in a vulnerable state and that it would take less to push them into extinction than it would have in past times. Do you realize that the IPCC projections that predict a certain percentage of species could be at risk of extinction before 2100 do not take possible or even known feedbacks into account? They are based on those same models that can’t model those rapid changes of the past, so this is what they think will happen with only gradual changes. Even if those gradual changes did not cause too much extinction in the past, humans have changed most of the world in ways that make extinction more likely. For example, roads, farms, deforestation, and other changes mean that many species are boxed in and will not be able to migrate to avoid extinction like they normally would. These are the types of things that those scientists are taking into account that would make the extinction numbers worse than you might expect by looking at the past. But if feedbacks do occur, things will probably be much worse than they predict.
You said in another reply, “when we keep emitting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere (which we will, though i hope less than we do now) over the next ten or twenty years and the apocalypse fails to happen, think about the things that you said today, and realize what a tool you are.” I’m pretty new to Grist, so maybe in discussions I have not seen people are saying that apocalyptic changes are going to come in the next 10 or 20 years. But I have never heard any scientist say that, nor have I heard non-scientist climate activists make claims like that. What many of them are now saying is that we must begin to reduce emissions substantially in the next decade or two. This is not because of immediate changes to the climate that will occur, but because of the changes that will happen decades later. This is an extremely important distinction, and one that many people miss. There are some pretty bad changes that could happen in another 20 or 30 or 50 years, such as mountain glaciers that supply billions of people with water being completely melted in the summer. That will cause really bad situations for a huge number of people, and I wish we could prevent it, but I’m virtually certain it is too late to prevent this now, because of the decades-long lag time between when emissions are released and their full effects are felt. I think you realize that CO2 levels naturally fall very slowly, so we should reduce emissions long before any huge calamities occur, not after. When I say the situation is extremely urgent, this is what I mean. I don’t mean that things are going to get really horrible tomorrow or ten years from now. I mean we have to change long before things get that bad, because they will continue to get worse for many decades after we drastically reduce our emissions. It seems to be against human nature to plan so far ahead no matter how strong the warning signals, and this worries me greatly.
I want to bring up one more reason I think the situation is actually more urgent than even scientists like James Hansen have been indicating. Just last month a UCLA scientist reported that her team discovered a method to measure CO2 levels accurately going back much further than was possible before. The method matched the ice core data from the past several hundred thousand years well, which indicates that it is probably an accurate method. They found that the last time CO2 levels were as high as now for an extended period was 15 to 20 million years ago. I think it would be a shock to the scientists that created the models to learn that at that time sea levels were 75 to 120 feet higher than now. Since we know CO2 stays in the atmosphere a very long time, and since we know we will probably keep emitting enough to increase atmospheric levels quite a bit more, I think sea level is probably destined to rise at least that much again. Because the sea level rise will probably take a long time, that is not what worries me the most about this report. What worries me more is that temperatures then were 10 to 15 degrees hotter than now. (Here is an article about the paper: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm.) 10 to 15 degrees F is much higher than the predictions I have heard for the current CO2 levels, and that makes me think that the current levels are already high enough to cause feedbacks. I don’t know how else to explain such high temperatures. I also don’t know how quickly the temperature will rise, but I’m sure more quickly than sea level. It all depends on when the feedbacks kick in, and that is currently impossible to predict. I hope they are not right about this, because if they are, I think it means we not only need to decrease emissions drastically very quickly, it also probably means we need to find a way to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than is removed naturally. The mega-droughts, desertification, and melted glaciers that I mentioned in my last posting are predicted to occur with only about a tenth that much further temperature rise, and that alone could devastate our food supply, causing a horrible state of worldwide famine. It probably would not cause the next great extinction, unless it triggered feedbacks that caused greenhouse gas levels to rise quite a bit more, or unless we emit too much. But worldwide famine alone is a bad enough result that I want to prevent it if at all possible. And the famine is really only part of what would happen. Food prices would rise so high that people could not afford to buy other things, and that would wreck the economy way worse than a mere housing bubble. Unemployment levels would skyrocket. And there could be millions of climate refugees trying to migrate to find land to grow crops or places with more jobs.
We could probably turn things around with much less money than the current economic crisis has and will cause the United States government, but we don’t take the threat seriously enough, and because of that I fear much worse things for our future. I don’t think people will take this threat seriously until the consequences are explained in terms that bring them home. The dust bowl and great depression are nothing compared to what we have in store, and that is if temperature only goes up a few more degrees. And of course the worst outcome would be that feedback that releases more greenhouse gases (from permafrost, peat, methane hydrates) and that cause less to be taken back (by oceans and land plants) would take global warming totally out of control. That is what really could cause the next great extinction, and nobody knows how far we can push things before that happens. So that is why I think it is unwise to make people feel like we can wait many years or even decades before taking very aggressive action. I think it is past time for reasonable people to start panicking, if you want to know the truth. People are way too complacent about this.
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isaacschumann Posted 7:56 am
04 Nov 2009
cheers
isaac
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BrianF Posted 11:45 am
05 Nov 2009
You could very well be correct that some mass extinctions were caused by temperature/CO2 drops. I got most of my mass extinction information from a book I’m currently reading, but it agrees with things I’ve read before. The book is “Under a Green Sky” by Peter D. Ward, Ph.D. He is a paleontologist who has been studying mass extinctions for a while. I thought I read somewhere in this book that all of the biggest mass extinctions (except for the K-T extinction, caused by a meteor) may have been caused by high CO2 levels, but I could be wrong about that. The important point is that CO2 can cause them (assuming he’s correct).
On page 135 of that book is a chart that shows 9 mass extinctions, together with CO2 concentrations. The caption says, “Each of the open bullets designates a mass extinction, and they can be seen to correspond either with high or sharply increasing carbon dioxide levels.” One very important point: for every extinction on this chart, the CO2 levels were much higher than now. I don’t think a mass extinction comparable to one of these will happen from global warming unless feedback takes us there (or unless we put much more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere). But I do think such a feedback is possible, and I think the higher we cause CO2 to rise, the more likely it will cause feedback strong enough to cause another mass extinction.
Although it’s true there were many other things happening when these past mass extinctions occurred, according to Ward, CO2 was the driver (or you could say the driver was the volcanic activity, just as you could say human activity is the driver of global warming now). CO2 and temperature pretty much always have gone up and down together in the past. (Read “The Long Thaw” by David Archer for the best explanation of CO2 and climate I’ve seen. He says it is unusual to see two things that correlate as well as CO2 and temperature have over time.) Either temperature or CO2 can initiate the process, but they both drive each other (which is all feedback requires, I think).
For the ice age cycles, my understanding is that the initial cause was orbital variations, which caused temperature changes, which caused CO2 concentration changes, which caused further temperature changes in the same direction, and that feedback caused rapid climate change at a certain point. So in that case the temperature change came first. But for the mass extinctions Ward talks about, the CO2 (and methane) rose rapidly first, which caused temperature to rise rapidly, which disrupted the ocean circulation systems, which caused anoxic ocean bottoms, and when the anoxic waters rose to the level where light could penetrate, the hydrogen sulfide excreting bacteria multiplied. Hydrogen sulfide gas in the atmosphere combined with high temperatures caused mass extinction on land, and when hydrogen sulfide broke down the ozone layer, UV radiation killed much of the photosynthetic phytoplankton. So CO2 didn’t cause the extinctions directly, but it caused the other factors that caused the extinctions, according to Ward. I’ve read in other books that other related feedbacks may also have been involved, such as methane hydrates releasing their methane because of the warmer oceans, and I think melting permafrost too. That makes sense, especially since we are seeing some of that now. So the volcanic activity would not have had to produce all the CO2 necessary for a mass extinction (and neither would human activity now).
I’m not sure how accepted this explanation is, but there seems to be a lot of evidence to back it up, and it makes enough sense that it’s definitely plausible. It’s true that volcanic activity and much higher temperatures are not present now, but human activity is a substitute for volcanic activity as far as greenhouse gases goes, and as I mentioned in an earlier comment, the last time CO2 levels were this high temperature was 10 to 15 degrees hotter, so the temperature must still have a lot of catching up to do, especially since CO2 levels are bound to rise even more. It will probably take decades for this to happen, unless some feedback mechanism speeds up the process.
But I didn’t mean to give the impression that I think a mass extinction comparable to the worst ones from the past is imminent or that the current CO2 levels were high enough now to cause one. I do think a more minor extinction event is getting increasingly likely. Extinctions are already happening because of global warming (amphibians seem to be especially vulnerable), and it will get worse as temperatures rise. And if feedback does take the process over, then a mass extinction becomes a much more likely possibility.
The IPCC predicted that if the temperature reaches around 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels, up to 30% of species would face “increasing risk of extinction”, and if it reached around 4.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels, 40% could become extinct. This could be way off, but I have no reason to doubt that many more species will go extinct if temperatures continue to rise, and the higher and quicker the rise, the worse it will be. I also think the rising acidity of the oceans alone could cause the extinction of a huge number of species. And there are many species that live at fairly high altitudes that are currently moving higher to compensate for the warming. Eventually, there will be no more higher altitudes for them to go, and since plants migrate much more slowly, any animals that depend on certain plants could go extinct even before they run out of higher ground.
But maybe the most important point is that I don’t think we have to have anything close to a mass extinction before the effects of global warming have what I would call catastrophic consequences, at least for humans and many other species. I think a worldwide famine would be catastrophic, or the loss of water for a large portion of the world’s population (I read once that half of the world’s population gets its water from glaciers), or the mass migrations and conflicts that food and water shortages could cause. I think all of these things are very likely to occur just from the effects of the greenhouse gases we have already released and will release in the near future (assuming we don’t reduce emissions drastically very soon).
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isaacschumann Posted 9:09 am
10 Nov 2009
sorry for the long reply time, digesting what youve said and its definitely changed my outlook. i generally believe that life and the environment are far more resilient than many environmentalists claim. heres a quate from a book i was looking at that deals with much the same theories as "green sky" called "with speed and violence" by fred pearce:
"Nature is fragile, environmentalists often tell us. But the lesson of this book is that that it is not so. The truth is far more worrying. She is strong and packs a serious counter-punch. Global warming will very probably unleash unstoppable planetary forces. And they will not be gradual. The history of our planet's climate shows that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure, whether from sunspots or orbital wobbles or the depredations of humans, it lurches - virtually overnight."--from the Introduction
i am still generally of the opinion that if swift alterations in climate are far more common than mass extinctions, than that would lead me to believe that life is far more able to weather the rapid changes in climate that we are subjecting it too. call me an optimist:) but your point concerning the fragile situation of so many species in the world today and how this makes them far more susceptible to climate change was well taken, i had never thought of this (tho it seems so obvious, thanks for enlightening me). but i still feel that this puts even more emphasis on preserving habitats as this is easier to do and less controversial and would go along way to fighting climate change.
the one small quibble i still have is that i dont think that most climate change activists have the same appreciation for the uncertainty of science and the time frame were dealing with as you do. the title to the article we are commenting on is "dispassion as the world ends", you cant get much more immediate and apocalyptic than that. It does not reflect the processes that you are describing very well, in my opinion. this is more what i am referring too, more an issue of tactics.
ill definitely take a look at "green sky" sounds very interesting. but i have a question you may be able to answer before im able to read the book; what keeps feed back loops from constantly spinning the climate out of control since not every instance of warming results in such catastrophic changes? to be more precise, the global temperature is always moving up or down, and feedback loops are constantly acting on it in various forms, yet it rarely spins out of control. If our position is so precarious because of feedback loops making warming irriversible, what has kept this warming from being irriversible in the past? under this logic, each time the earth started to warm naturally and ice began to melt, the albedo effect would inevitably kick in, (or any of the other natural feedback loops) why wouldnt the results be the same as is predicted now?
i look forward to hearing from you,
cheers,
isaac
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BrianF Posted 5:08 pm
10 Nov 2009
Feedback happens all of the time, but it takes certain conditions for it to loop out of control. The simplest example might be the feedback that occurs between an amplified microphone and a speaker. Normally the feedback is so small compared to the person’s voice that you can’t hear it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s just that the sound coming from the speaker is pretty much the same as the sound coming from the person’s mouth, but it is delayed slightly and not nearly as loud to the microphone. So it is more like a subtle effect, so subtle that it might not be noticeable at all. But if you point the mike more towards the speaker, or turn up the amplification, or decrease the distance between the microphone and speaker, the feedback can get so strong that it drowns out the person’s voice. That causes the loud screeching sound that I’m sure you’ve heard before. You’ve probably noticed that when it happens, the volume of the screech usually goes up quickly (like an abrupt climate change). Sometimes it reaches a new “steady state”, and the screech continues at that very loud volume until someone lessens the feedback by turning off the mic, changing the mic’s position, or turning the amplification down. If the feedback gets strong enough before someone cuts it off, it could even blow out the speaker or the microphone, destroying the system itself.
Climate feedbacks behave like this, but of course the situation is much more complex. There is more than one feedback, and many interacting systems. But just as someone’s voice can be amplified at different levels without the feedback going out of control, the temperature of the earth can go up and down a certain amount without feedback taking over. It’s only when the temperature gets below a certain point that the Albedo effect takes over and causes a “snowball earth”. And it’s only when the temperature goes high enough that positive feedbacks will get so strong that we humans will no longer be able to stop the warming. Since we’ve never done this before, we don’t know exactly how much we can push things before feedback takes over. We also don’t know how far it will go before it hits a new steady state. There is more than one (relatively) steady state. The climate we’ve had the last few thousand years is one steady state, an ice age is another, snowball earth is another, and there are other hotter steady states, up to the one where all the water evaporates. The abrupt climate changes happen when moving from one relatively steady state to another, and usually the change in one direction is more abrupt than the other direction. I don’t think there is much chance of the water evaporating and all life ending. Hansen says he is pretty sure this would happen if we burned all the fossil fuels we could extract, but I think we will stop before that. If nothing else, the effects of warming will lower the population, which will lower our emissions, but also I think once we see some really horrible consequences, we will get serious about reducing emissions voluntarily. But I’d rather avoid those consequences, if possible.
The uncertainties worry me. Scientists know of several warming feedbacks and think they will kick in at different temperatures. One feedback could raise the temperature enough to cause the next feedback, and so on. This could easily change the climate so much that we would live in a very different world. It could be like times in the past when there was little to no ice or snow and tropical plants and animals lived close to the poles. I think the human species could adapt to this, but I don’t want us to have to go through the process of adapting to such an extreme change, which would be full of suffering and I think probably the death of most humans. Also, warming might cause anoxic oceans and the release of hydrogen sulfide, which could kill off all humans (although we might figure out a way to survive even that).
Saying the world is ending may be going too far if you take it literally. The world will not end even if all life is gone, and I don’t think even the end of life on earth is likely. But if you are talking about the end of the world as we know it, including the end of a huge number of species, I think that could easily happen before the end of this century. What we are doing right now could be enough to cause that when combined with the cumulative effects of what we have done in the past. Many very bad effects are probably now virtually inevitable for our future, and if we don’t lower our emissions very soon, even worse things will be inevitable, including more extinctions. In that sense, the world as we know it is ending, and we as a whole are not concerned or passionate enough to stop it. It would be hard for me to distill all this into a short title that conveyed the feeling better than “dispassion as the world ends”. On the other hand, we do have to be careful because someone is bound to take it literally, and if the world is still here a year from now, use it as proof that global warming is a hoax.
I agree that preserving habitats is one of the easiest things we can do. In our country and in other industrialized countries, preserving rainforests would be less controversial than abolishing coal power plants, but in countries like Indonesia the opposite would be true. In any case, neither of these alone would be enough. I read recently that rainforest destruction is equivalent to all the transportation in the world, in terms of how much it increases the atmospheric CO2 levels. They each supposedly account for roughly 20%. But even a 40% reduction will not be enough, unless you are talking about the very short term, like over the next 10 years, and only if all other causes, like coal power plants, did not increase their emissions. That is why I think our only chance now is to make our utmost effort in every area and as quickly as possible. It really doesn’t matter how controversial the changes are. We still have to make the changes, or suffer the consequences.
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witsendnj Posted 6:28 pm
10 Nov 2009
Anyway, you are having a very interesting exchange and I just wanted to add a few thoughts.
One, I think the notion that nature is resilient as reflected in Fred Pearce's book With Speed and Violence, is a misinterpretation of what he was saying. He was talking about Nature's ability to exact retribution, not the ability of species to survive abrupt temperature increases.
It seems to me that if you accept the theory of Darwinian evolution you have to understand that any major and rapid change in the environment - whether average temperature, the composition of gases in the atmosphere, the PH of the ocean waters - must inevitably cause mass extinctions, for the simple reason that individual species have evolved over thousands of generations to occupy their very own particular niche in an ecosystem.
When that ecosystem is disrupted in a fundamental way, the species whether plant or animal can't adapt. Merely migrating, assuming that is possible, can't possibly do the trick either, because the other components can't migrate at the same rate. It's not a linear, gradual process.
One particularly poignant account of this I read somewhere or other, a teacher in Mexico. She described how earlier warming meant that the annual arrival of monarch butterflies no longer coincided with the blooming of the cacti, and the butterflies were essential to pollination. Thus the cacti have been dying out for some time. Some species take their triggers from the hours of light, and others from the temperature.
This basic example is indicative of the chaos we have created by burning fossil fuels, heedless of any consequences.
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isaacschumann Posted 7:36 am
03 Nov 2009
the work i do has nothing to do with gmo crops or food additives, and no, we dont have any problem fermenting paper waste, nor do we use "roundup for mo" whatever that is. the kind of green jobs and "renewable technical economy" (where do you come up with these terms?) is what i do for a living, for you its just fancy words to sound smart and "cool". (just like all those cool celebreties, man youre a dbag) what i do does not consume the living planet, it consumes the waste products from other human activities. you also sound pretty proud that you knew what exponential means, thats grade school math. i know that CO2 emissions are growing exponentially, i wasnt taking issue with that. the results over the next few decades will not be catostrophic, we will have slightly higher sea levels, warmer temperatures increased tropical storms and less glaciers, none of this is catastrophic. these effects will get worse, which is why i am wholeheartedly in favor of curbing emissions. The legitimate uncertainty of science will always give skeptics and deniers opportunity to poke holes in theories like global warming, this does not bother me nor am i afraid of that criticism, science always wins against idiocy. only small minded people are so threatened by such attacks. when we keep emitting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere (which we will, though i hope less than we do now) over the next ten or twenty years and the apocalypse fails to happen, think about the things that you said today, and realize what a tool you are.
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isaacschumann Posted 8:16 am
03 Nov 2009
thanks for reading the link, tho i agree, botkin was a little off in his assertion that all climatologists think like that. his main point was that their models assume a steady state, mostly out of necessity though. i dont think that he is the be all end all in ecology, i just find him insightful and interesting and i hope you did too. you make a point about the number of species going extinct and correctly state the cause, human destruction of habitat, yet i hear far more about the effects of climate on species, which their is not a strong link. yet human action that are not climate change, result in the vast majority of extinctions, if not all.
I feel the way that i do because i am tired of having to defend the theory of climate change from the age old argument "well some scientist made some prediction that was totally wrong, therefore global warming doesnt exist". i live in indiana, and the rural folks where i live disbelieve wnat environmentalists say as a pure knee jerk reaction, and this is sad.
thanks again
isaac
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isaacschumann Posted 8:47 am
03 Nov 2009
i dont think that acidification of the ocean is a nutural occurance, i said it was the most worrying aspect of rising CO2 emissions to me. i completely agree with you, i dont want a radically different ecology in the oceans either.
thanks for the polite response,
isaac
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amazingdrx Posted 11:33 am
03 Nov 2009
"...nature is a non-steady state system and tipping points only apply to steady state systems; there has to be a continual, persistant set of baseline conditions to tip away from"
Nice gibberish! It's the same old nonsense though, just an excuse to proceed with business as usual, guzzling gas and removing mountaintops to get more coal, with some extra eco-destructive GMO biofuel scams thrown in to look green.
And you also know that turning the biomass waste stream into corporate products will take vulnerable genetically modified organisms (microorganisms in this case), just like chemical ag uses GMO to design plants that are resistant to herbicides.
The whole idea behind burning biomass as fuel, cellulosic ethanol or biodiesel, is to come up with new patentable microorganisms to do the job more efficiently so that biofuel can compete with petroleum and battery based transportation.
Poison the biomass to be processed to kill all the competing micoorganisms, then let the frankenbugs take over. Control temperature and Oxygen/CO2 levels and out pops the gas guzzler fuel of the future! The claim that you never heard of this is a bit strange. Maybe it will give you a new research direction.
And are you asking us to believe that you don't just flat out deny human induced GHG climate change when you are with other deniers?
Oh sorry for the new terminology, but most of it isn't new at all, it's evolving along with the new energy and ag economy. A "renewable technological economy" was what I was going for. One that does not consume the biosphere, but still uses science and technology..as opposed to a renewable economy that uses labor intensive organic ag and shuns technology. The back to the horse power movement. Agrarian primitivism.
Biodigestion of the biomass waste stream to produce biogas energy (preventing huge amounts of methane and nitrous oxide entering the atmosphere) and organic fertilizer using regular old naturally ocurring bacteria combined with solar powered robotic agriculture, that's the sort of technology I'm talking about.
Keeping the productivity of modern industrial ag, but throwing out the GHG/fossil fuel intensive, chemical toxin/GMO methods.
BTW: you might consider improving your ad hominem skills, try upping your intake of beckscrement and drug limboob. Good luck with that! Hehey.
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isaacschumann Posted 12:14 pm
03 Nov 2009
why are you telling me about "the new energy and ag economy? i work in it. people pay me to tell them about it. heres a free lesson, stupid terminology means nothing, what matters is what you can actally do.
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isaacschumann Posted 12:05 pm
03 Nov 2009
i apologize for being insulting, i work for a small company (4 people) and we are by no means rich. its offensive to be accused of complicity with huge energy companies. if you really want to know about bacteria, ive done quite a bit of work with them. algae is also very promising as it takes little more than CO2 to grow.
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amazingdrx Posted 10:31 pm
03 Nov 2009
Dig this crazy bioreactor algae idea. Jimson weed concentrates heavy metals in soil, actually extracts it. What if algae with this genetic trait could be developed (good GMO, recombinant?).
Heavy metals, mercury, radioactive metals removed from soil and water by the algae could then be biodigested down to just the basic elements and the metals recycled. Could PCBs be treated similarly by the right algae?
Pretty interesting stuff, something like it might already be in the works somewhere. What do you think?
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isaacschumann Posted 8:35 am
04 Nov 2009
algae is an amazing organism, ive done only a little work with it, so my knowldege is not great. they are composed of varying amounts of carbohydrates, lipids and protien depending on the strain. these are all useful products to humans. ive heard of the ability of some plants to suck up heavy metals out of the environment, and it sounds like a really cool idea, tho i dont know too much about it. (if you hear anyhting send it my way, id love to know more) our expertise would be in converting the carb section of algae to chemicals. furthermore, on the biofuels point, we dont think that they should be seen as a method to grow our own fuel, lots of good studies have shown the ecological consequences of this. its our opinion that biofuels should be seen more like recycling. i believe the government should only support biofuels projects that use waste products as a feedstock. this is a more modest and less profit intensive veiw of biofuels than many would like (including our clients). i see far more substantial long term contribution to our energy needs from solar. id appreciate your thoughts on this.
My occasional frustration with articles like the one were commenting on(i find most articles on grist to be interesting and informative) is that they further entrench climate change as a partisan issue, rather than a common sense issue that effects all of us. i always try to separate environmental issues from partisan politics. while i would agree that pretty much all political republicans are a lost cause, most run of the mill conservatives are very persuadable. the notion of environmental stewardship has broad appeal, ive found in my own experience. (i live in rural indiana) an example of the kind of common ecological values im talking about can best be seen in farmers markets, i love farmers markets. you see people of the most diverse political and ideological backgrounds enjoying an apolitical experience: consuming good food that was sustainably produced. i firmly believe that nothing meaningful will be done on climate change until it becomes a common, uniting issue, which it should be. I come across as being angrier than i am because i tend to hold people that i agree with to a much higher standard, intellectually, i dont spend any of my time debunking patently ludicrous arguments against climate change because i dont think that they are a threat, the science will move on without them. im more opposed to the politicization of climate change(AGW becoming simply a partisan issue, not political action on climate change in general, im for that) to me it seems like it is becoming just another issue in the culture war, which it is not.
cheers,
isaac
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amazingdrx Posted 11:29 pm
04 Nov 2009
Yep, I will let you know if I hear of research on algae based contamination cleanup. Bioreactors that float in the Hudson River and use the moving river energy and solar power to extract the PCBs from the mud? It's a possibility.
I like the idea of taking all the nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer and manure runoff back out of lakes and wetlands with algae, then biodigesting it for biogas energy. Organic fertilizer would be left over.
If the toxic metals like mercury or plutonium could be removed in a section of a bioreactor with specialized algae, the final result would be mercury free fertilizer. The special algae could be processed separately and the metal recycled.
This is an area to look for new up and coming bio-technology companies. Eco friendly bio-technology, as you state, using the naturally ocurring microorganisms. Maybe sdelective breeding to get the desired biochemical activity.
Yeah actually getting past the politics just might get to solutions faster. I'm a free market, pro-capitalist, pro-regulation, anti-corporate monopoly and corruption, pro-socialized healthcare and education, pro-government supported science, research and development sort of political organism, hehey.
And I like a government like ours was in WW II when it guided war production, we need to return to yesteryear to get this green re-evolution going strong. Strong enough to restore jobs and end dependence on imported energy and the world at war over oil.
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isaacschumann Posted 8:42 am
05 Nov 2009
your political views are exactly how i would describe mine, pro-capitalist, but also pro socialized healthcare. im for good regualtion, not more, or less regualtion, but good, effective regulation that prevents monopolies and harm to the environment. id have to say im a little more cautious than yuo on the governments role in this as ive worked in the biofuels industry for a few years now and have seen the havoc and waste that the uninteded consequences of policy can create. im not opposed, just far more cautious of the unintended consequences, and i encourage you to be too. (if you havnt read "big biomass, big problem", you should, its an example of what im talking about.)
your idea about floating bioreactors is great, never heard anyone think of this before. that type of out of the box thinking is exactly what the world needs. take something bad for humans like CO2, heavy metals, whatever, and find something, some process or organism that requires this stuff and then make something that is either a) not so bad anymore or b) actually valuable. CO2 is the 19th most USED chemical in the u.s., its used in hundreds of chemical processes and industries; and its also one of our biggest problems! were doing research right now on a bacteria that turns CO2 into valuable organic acids, yet we have to BUY the CO2 to feed them! i see alot of opportunity for creative solutions. keep it up. the science aside, people get behind and are motivated to action by well grounded optimism, and thats what i think this movement needs more of. lets get out there and get creative!
cheers,
isaac
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amazingdrx Posted 9:24 am
05 Nov 2009
Yep, biofuelishness is rampant, blending subsidies, burning rain forest to make palm oil, and so forth are the result of criminal corporate lobbying.
On waste stream biomass though, the future is bright. Not only from traditional sources, sewage, farm waste, factory waste, manure, garbage, and waste wood. Think of all that weed and algae overgrowth clogging waterways, a fantastic resource for clean energy to backup a renewable distributed smart grid, GHG prevention, organic fertilizer, toxin removal, and a great opportunity to restore healthy biodiversity to lakes and rivers.
A combination of aqua-culture and algae energy and organic fertilizer alone could be huge. Imagine a supply of fish that pregnant women and kids could eat safely (minus the mercury and stray hormones) and that helps relieve pressure on wild fish.
An eco-capitalist's dream. Onward. Do good, do well.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 8:49 am
04 Nov 2009
Please note that I am a psychologist....without expertise in population biology, demography or "the environment". For the first 50 years of my life I seldom paid attention, let alone thought deeply, with regard the matters that occupy my mind now and often awaken me at night. Suffice it to say that I am unprepared and poorly equipped for the task that was set before me in 2001 when I began the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population. So many roadblocks and other obstacles have presented themselves to me since that starting time, that I can say the campaign has accomplished nothing to speak of to date. Some of the 'brightest and best', most influential people I could find on the planet remained silent when presented with scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth. Over these years, I have learned some lessons. Leaders do not want to have questions posed to them for which they do not have attractive answers. Truth becomes a casualty if it conflicts with what leaders believe to be politically convenient and economically expedient. One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, I trust the human family will get down to the real work of assuring the wellbeing of the children and coming generations; protecting biodiversity and global ecosystems; and preserving Earth's finite resources. Despite what many leaders appear to advocate so adamantly, a single, not-so-great, generation of arrogant elders does not actually possess 'inalienable rights' to commandeer, conspicuously overconsume and excessively hoard a lion's share of Earth's limited resources nor does one arrogant and avaricious generation have the right to cavalierly mortgage and recklessly threaten the future of its children.
Adam, thanks again for exemplifying the behavior others are evincing now and here. Such honesty, courage and openness are rarely seen in the behavioral repertoire of the so-called leaders among us. After what has occurred during the last 8 long, dark years I can speak authoritatively about the dangers to human wellbeing and environmental health that are posed by leaders who extol as virtues their own arrogance and avarice. Perhaps a new day is dawning, a new direction is being deliberated and a new values held up as virtues. Nobel Laureate and US President Barack Obama is surely a real source of hope in our time. After so much wrongdoing by a confederacy of intelligent fools during the past eight years, new leaders like President Obama have a great deal of catch-up work to do. It could take until 2050, if life as we know it survives that long, to undo such extraordinary damage.
So much of the scientific evidence regarding the human predicament that looms before the family of humanity is unwelcome. It appears to me that the human family finds itself in a dangerous situation and, however logically contrived, the pernicious efforts of the greedy among us who willfully seek to deny, deceptively disinform, dishonestly minimize and otherwise gloss over the global challenges already visible in the offing are not doing anyone but themselves any favors.
Pathological arrogance, unbridled selfishness and wanton avarice of a tiny minority of humanity who "make the rules" and effectively rule the world has got to be honestly acknowledged and realistically addressed soon. Powerful, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us set the policies by which the great majority live. The self-aggrandizing and recklessly avaricious behavior of those with great wealth and purchased power has got to be overcome, I suppose, if we are to stop the patently unsustainable overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities that are ravaging the Earth now and to replace those destructive efforts with ones which are sustaining of life as we know it as well as protective of the finite resources and frangible ecosystems upon which life utterly depends for its very existence.
Can there be any longer a reasonable doubt about one thing: if the humanity community keeps doing the very same big-business-as-usual things we are doing now and members of the human family keep getting the things we are getting now, then the future of the children will likely be placed in peril soon?
Finally, let me say that I am prepared to admit that my sight is diminishing, my faculties are waning and that I may have lost not only my mind but, even worse, touch with science itself.
Thanks to all for participating in the spirit of Adam and Issac.
Sincerely,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:38 am
05 Nov 2009
From my humble vantage point, it appears that there has been but a single discussion by top-rank scientists of new research regarding human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel. This occurred 7 years ago in 2002 in Washington, DC at the "Conference on Ecosystem Health." The highlight of the conference was a panel of discussants that included Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Dr. Lester Brown and Dr. E.O. Wilson. During the question and answer session following their presentations, Dr. Alan Thornhill, Executive Director of the Society for Conservation Biology, asked the panel members for comments on the new scientific evidence relating the size of the world's human population to food availability from Dr. Hopfenberg and Dr. Pimentel.
Such open discussion is what I would like to engender here, now (and have been trying unsuccessfully to encourage for the past 8 long dark years of denial). If we were to set aside this momentary look at this new, unexpected and apparently unforeseen research of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth that occurred in 2002, I cannot point to any other open discussions by such esteemed experts of what appears to be vital scientific evidence. Silence as a response to science cannot be condoned. Perhaps we are dealing with evidence that brings nature and theory into closer agreement than was objectively evident before. In any event, scientists are duty-bound by a preeminent fidelity to science, I suppose, to rigorously scrutinize new theoretical and empirical evidence, even if this evidence necessitates the scientific community's rejection of once time-honored science.
If human beings evolved on Earth (did not descend from heaven or come here from some other place in the Universe) and the emerging evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of our planetary home are somehow on the right track, then humanity could soon confront daunting global challenges.
Perhaps hubris and greed confuse human reasoning about the placement of humanity within the natural order of living things. There is the rub, I suppose. We have learned from Gods great gifts to humanity --- natural philosophy and modern science --- that Earth is not the center of the universe (Copernicus); that we are set upon a tiny celestial orb among a sea of stars (Galileo); that such things as the Law of Gravity and the Laws of Thermodynamics affect living things equally, including human beings (Newton, et al); that humankind is a part of the general biological evolutionary process (Darwin); and that people are to a significant degree unconscious, mistake what is illusory for what is real and, therefore, have difficulty adequately explaining the way the world works and consciously regulating our behavior (Freud).
Now comes unanticipated and unfortunately unwelcome research from Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel contradicts established scientific theory and indicates we have been widely sharing, consensually validating and holding fast to an inadequate, preternatural understanding of human population dynamics and consequentially refusing to appreciate the necessity for regulating certain distinctly human global overgrowth activities. That is to say, humanity could soon be presented with a colossal predicament resulting from 1) increasing and unchecked conspicuous per capita overconsumption of limited resources, 2)seemingly endless expansion of large-scale overproduction capabilities in a finite world, and 3)unbridled species propagation.
Evidence regarding the recent explosive growth of absolute global human population numbers, that has been consciously ignored by many too many experts and leaders, indicates simply that human beings directly and primarily account for the excessive extinction of biodiversity; creeping and irreversible environmental degradation; reckless dissipation of finite resources; and potential endangerment of human wellbeing in our time.
Surely the emerging and converging global challenges visible on the horizon appear formidable. Please consider that these huge threats are posed to the family of humanity by unregulated consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species which are overspreading Earth in our time. If this could somehow be correct, then we can choose to take the measure of the looming challenges before us and find solutions to what threatens human wellbeing and environmental health that are consonant with universally shared, humane values. Any human-induced challenge can be acknowledged, addressed and overcome by the human beings working cooperatively together, as we are certainly capable of doing.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
http://www.panearth.org
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 1:36 pm
05 Nov 2009
Blogging is a bottom-up vehicle not a top-down vehicle for transmitting necessary news. Blogs are vehicles that makes it possible for many people in many places worldwide to share an awareness of the huge global predicament that is already visible on the far horizon to a relatively small number of people. Because the wealthy people deploy their 'purchasing power' to defend the status quo and make the rules that rule the world, the discomforting awareness of emerging and converging global threats to human wellbeing and environmental health will not be transmitted from the top down to the family of humanity at large. The 'rulers' promulgate gag rules and other devices of censorship that effectively serve to prevent such a thing from occurring. That is why the issues discussed here are seldom discussed honestly in public discourse and rarely transmitted to people everywhere by the predominant corporate giants who manage the mainstream media outlets primarily for the benefit of those self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe and their many minions who rule the world in our time. Raising the awareness of the human family to the forbidding global challenges looming before all of us will have to be transmitted from the bottom, as it were, and not by the leaders from whom most people would expect to receive this unfortunately unwelcome news.
Sincerely,
Steve
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amazingdrx Posted 10:35 am
06 Nov 2009
Taken all together, all over the internet, these individual comments might just help convince 10% of the humans on planet earth to awaken to our collective plight in time? And realize the solutions will restore prosperity to the developed world and bring the vast majority of humanity that is in poverty up to some sort of comfort and security level.
Prosperity and doing the right thing can go hand in hand. All it takes is 10% of us to realize that and the green energy, agriculture, and manufacturing re-evolution will proceed on it's own momentum. 10% is a big number in terms of commercial and political/cultural trends. It doesn't seem quite so daunting to get to that fraction on grass roots, blogland people power.
The great progressive Howard Dean showed the Obama forces the way. We need to learn from their excellent examples.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 11:50 am
06 Nov 2009
Thank you.
The challenges before look so forbidding to people when first sighted that there is often a reflexive determination that nothing can be done. Years ago, that was my reaction initially to the sight of these leviathan-like, human-forced threats. I recall feeling like I did when standing at the foot of high mountain in childhood. I looked up and immediately concluded that was no way I could make it to the top. Thankfully, someone in our group said that mountains only appear tall when viewed from the base camp. Once you get to the top you can see how easy it can be to make the climb.
I have had a substantial number of years to consider and examine the huge challenges before us and have learned a few things that lead me to say now: there is no point in giving up or giving in before we even begin to make the climb.
Taking the measure of the challenges before us and finding solutions may not actually be so difficult as they appear from our current position at the bottom of the mountain. To the contrary, it appears to me that much can and will be done......if only we responsibly commit to address and overcome the threats before all of us.
But before action comes awareness. Many people have to become aware of the predicament we are soon to confront. Otherwise, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us will surely keep doing the very same things that gave rise to the colossal mess with which we must deal now, or else continue to deny these challenges so that they automatically fall into the laps of the children. Such an unacceptable outcome is anathema to me.
DrX, you and I are members of a single generation that has demonstrated a capacity for arrogance, selfishness and greed that appears to be unmatched in human history. Never have so few fortunate people commandeered, consumed and hoarded so much and left so little for so many of the less fortunate among us. As a dear friend of mine has put it elsewhere,
"As Richard Dawkins wrote recently, "More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we--and by implication all of life--were created by God within the last 10,000 years." Those people are going to dismiss research about global temperatures 15 million years ago as balderdash. I don't know how you reach them, but their numbers are large enough that we must. Otherwise, they remain "easy pickins" for Rush Limbaugh, Oklahoma's Senator Inhofe, and others who trash science even as they help gut the very economic system that is producing most of our serious environmental problems.........the modern neoclassical economic system may be about to run its course. The system has created incredible riches for a few, has lifted a billion or so of Earth's 6.8 billion people into a lifestyle of abundance, and has left Earth's ecosystems scarred for millions of years to come.
He continues, "Our modern neoclassical economic system defies gravity; it fails to realize that Earth is finite and it fails to believe that resources are not infinitely substitutable. It is less science than theology, steeped in its own internal logic and incapable of seeing ultimate scientific truths, including this: The economic system is embedded within Earth's ecosystem, period. One of our great national myths is that of abundance--we will always be richer and greater than everyone else, no matter what we have to do to get there. Neither the myth nor the current neoclassical economic system can continue without producing ever more environmental devastation because the environment is excluded from virtually all consideration. It is treated as an infinite source of resources on the one hand and a vast dumping ground for the detritus produced by production and consumption on the other. With one billion people we could get by with much that we cannot now get by with as Earth approaches a population of 7 billion. Solid evidence, not shouting and throwing sand in each other's eyes, must move all discussions of economic, social, and environmental problems forward."
One generation has allowed its collective efforts to become corrupted by narcissism, arrogance, greed, dishonesty and double-dealing for sake of self-gratification. My generation could be remembered as the worst generation in history because it did what it did with such self-aggrandizement and without a moment's concern about the consequences of its outrageous collective behavior for the children, coming generations, life as we know it, or the integrity of Earth and its environs. Such colossal wrongdoing may only be matched by the gigantic global ecological wreckage such stupidity and recklessness could soon precipate.
Perhaps necessary change toward living sustainably on Earth, as human beings with "feet of clay" are clearly capable of doing, is in the offing.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
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rpauli Posted 12:59 am
07 Nov 2009
However, I am pretty sure that writing a letter to the editor of local papers is not going to do much. And at the other extreme, the ultimate power of bloody violence should be avoided, withheld, saved only for final, desperate expressions of endgame futility.
Somewhere between the two is the sweet spot of powerful political expression. How we act, how we spend dollars - or refuse to spend and how we link it to a message is key. Could our current recession/depression be expression of understanding for this situation? What laws should we choose to obey, and which to challenge? And selecting targets of non-violent civil disobedience is key. Where do we march and when? Abbie Hoffman tossed dollar bills onto the Wall Street trading floor and the riot of traders shut down the market. "No business as usual" was the slogan. And our song and theater and culture will carry the movement without regard to corporate media control.
Unspoken so far is the most important exhortation: compared with a pathetic acceptance of human extinction, almost any political expression is appropriate.
Exciting times.
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witsendnj Posted 8:38 am
07 Nov 2009
The comment made by Adam Sacks about how much to say to his pregnant daughter resonates with me. I have three grown daughters, and work with young parents every day. It is an intimidating task, to enlighten and prepare them without delivering the soul-crushing news that everything the expect and hope for isn't going to be. There is much ugliness ahead.
For my own part I started a blog where I record my observations and document with photographs and links to scientific research, partly in an attempt to raise general awareness but also as a message to my beloved children. Someday I hope they will understand that I'm not crazy!
Yesterday I came across a concept that is one I never pondered before, that of "shifting baselines". It was written about in the context of Jacques Cousteau, who began as a spear fishing enthusiast and wound up an impassioned conservationist. One of his movies was in the Mediterranean Sea, where he returned 30 years later only to find that the thriving sea life was completely gone. The idea behind shifting baselines is that people either never saw, or forgot, what the ecosystems really looked like before we humans degraded them.
It is a useful notion for me because it helps explain why I seem to be just about the only person who is aware that toxic greenhouse gas emissions are poisoning the vegetation on the East Coast - and quite likely elsewhere. The leaves fell off the trees at least a month earlier than normal this fall, and nobody but me seems to have noticed. When I mention this to anyone they invariably change the subject, as though I had said nothing at all. It's quite astonishing that even scientists who acknowledge the poisonous effects of ozone and other pollutants do not recognize the damage that is being done.
http://www.witsendnj.blogspot.com
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Steve Wineman Posted 7:45 pm
07 Nov 2009
I have a son, Eric, who is 18 years old.
Four years ago, when he was 14, I read The Long Emergency by James Kunstler, and my view of the world – my view of the world Eric would grown up into, my entire concept of his future – changed forever.
It's not that I had a particularly rosy view of the world before I read The Long Emergency. Very much to the contrary. I saw it as a place rife with violence and domination; privilege, greed and inequality; enormous suffering and trauma, often unacknowledged; and environmental degradation that would one day come home to roost. I saw humans as containing an enormous range of possibilities – all the way from Hitler to Mandela – and I viewed the industrial age as an era when forces had coalesced to magnify our destructive potentials. George W. Bush was in the middle of his presidency; 9/11 had happened.
“Environmental degradation would one day come home to roost” is the key phrase in the last paragraph. For all the horrifying things I saw and knew about in the world, there was still a baseline of day-to-day normalcy and material security for those of us with the privilege to live in the US above the poverty line. That was my view of how the world would remain for the rest of my life and, more important, for the rest of Eric's life. I knew that eventually it could not stay that way. A system based on mindless exploitation of the earth could not help but crumble. Maybe in a hundred years. But for me, living my life and doing my part of raising Eric on a day-to-day basis, that was an abstraction.
Then I read The Long Emergency and my assumption about the world of the next 50 years, the next 25 years, even the present-day world was shattered. Kunstler walks you step by step, in excruciating and compelling detail, through what happens when a world that runs on fossil fuels loses its oil supply and at the same time the climate becomes grossly destabilized. What happens is that multiple systems disintegrate, systems that we rely on for our most basic needs. The food supply of the wealthiest nation on earth becomes scarce as we can no longer ship food thousands of miles. In vast areas water becomes scarce and land becomes uninhabitable. Huge swaths of suburbia, organized around driving long distances for goods that are shipped from all over the world, become completely dysfunctional. Coastal areas flood. There are millions of displaced persons. The changing climate breeds disease. Scarce resources get funneled into resource wars until they diminish to the point where the wars can no longer be fought.
In the space of a few days of reading Kunstler's book, I came face to face with the excruciatingly real possibility that much or most of Eric's life would be lived in nightmarish conditions. And since then, the nightmare has become increasingly real. Climate change repeatedly exceeds scientific predictions, positive feedback loops escalate at a horrifying pace, fires rage in California and Australia, and US politics proceeds business as usual without the slightest hint of recognition that we are facing a life-threatening emergency on a scale that almost defies imagination and with a rapidly shrinking window for (maybe) preventing catastrophe. Meanwhile the economic collapse of 2008, preceded (though not directly caused) by oil prices at $150 per barrel, showed how incredibly brittle the global economy is and how susceptible it is to disruptions which to date have paled compared to the looming blows which will be dealt by catastrophic climate change and peak oil.
How do you respond emotionally to the specter of your child living most of his life in a world of disintegrating conditions that render human life (and the life of so many other species) increasingly untenable? I am almost 61, and I do think about how the emergency will affect my old age, but by now I have lived most of my life and the impact of the catastrophe on my own life does not loom large in my emotional response. But my feelings do go well beyond my son, though he is always the centerpiece. How to respond emotionally to the specter of such vast, almost unimaginably vast suffering among humans and the many other species being affected? How to respond emotionally to the pandemic denial and inability or unwillingness to do what is needed that are also so vast that it's hard to take in?
Well. My first responses four years ago were terror, and a falling-out-of-the-bottom-of-my-stomach that I don't have a word for, and then quickly on the heels of those a feeling, a determination that I needed to take action – and that has driven my activism ever since. Along the way I have felt many other things. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of the changes that are needed and how little time we have to make them happen. Powerlessness. Despair. And the truth is that a lot of the time I numb out, alternately distracted from my feelings about the emergency by the demands of my very demanding day job, or ironically distracted emotionally by the nuts and bolts of climate activism (all those emails!), or dealing with family stuff, or trying to make space in my scant spare time to write a novel. And the truth is that my climate activism is only partly driven at this point by that initial determination to act; just as often I'm acting outside of my feelings – the ones of powerlessness and despair – and keep going from inertia, or because I have taken on responsibilities and don't want to let people down who are relying on me. It is such a heavy load to live every day with an awareness of the enormity of what is coming down, to walk to work and see roads clogged with cars spewing carbon, and to see all the many many many other indicators that with every passing day the time to avert catastrophe is running out and that we have barely made a dent.
I say this as someone who has, from a narrow view, had a lot of “success” with my climate work in the last four years. I helped to start a green neighborhood group that is still running. Then I helped to start the Home Energy Efficiency Team, which holds weatherization barnraisings that have drawn hundreds of people to our events in Cambridge, MA and has inspired similar initiatives in 20 communities in Eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Upstate New York. I initiated a campaign which resulted in the Cambridge City Council passing a resolution recognizing that there is a climate emergency, followed by a hearing on the emergency, and the Mayor of Cambridge has just issued a call for a Climate Emergency Congress to meet in Cambridge in the next two months.
This seems like a lot, but when I take a step back and hold it against the magnitude of what needs to be done, it simply pales. I've recently started to think – and feel! - that I'm bailing water on the Titanic with a teaspoon.
One notable feeling that doesn't come up for me much is anger. It's not that I'm a stranger to anger in my life – very much to the contrary. I'm a survivor of childhood trauma, and I've spent large portions of my life being enraged at the people who abused me when I was little. Lots of other things make me good and angry. It may be that my anger about the destruction of our environment, and anger at the people at so many different levels who are grossly failing to do what needs to be done, gets swallowed up by my numbing. But I think there are other reasons. One is that my reaction to the looming catastrophe is much more about sadness than anger – sadness and a very deep grief. It's like being an addiction counselor watching billions of addicts on a collective overdose.
Another thing that moves me away from anger is that I can't place the problem “out there” in a bunch of bad people who are fundamentally different than me. What's going on is so huge that it has to be about the human condition, about our fundamental vulnerabilities as a species, and not about some bad apples at the top who are screwing the rest of us. The bad apples at the top also have children and grandchildren; they're screwing themselves every bit as much as they are screwing the rest of us. And the rest of us for the most part are driving and buying widescreen TVs and eating factory farmed meat and doing all the rest of the “little” things that cumulatively are destroying the planet. This is not about villains. It is, as my friend John Pitkin says, a crisis of the human spirit.
If there is a glimmer of a reason for hope, it is that the human spirit, in the language of Whitman, is large and contains multitudes. We all contain within us the entire range of potential from Hitler to Mandela. The Hitler end of that spectrum is horrifying, but we all have the capacity to access and act from the Nelson Mandela in us. Let's hope we can realize that capacity, collectively and in massive numbers, in the nick of time.
--Steve Wineman
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witsendnj Posted 8:14 pm
07 Nov 2009
That was a beautifully written treatise.
I have arrived at enlightenment more recently than you - until just over a year ago, I expected climate change to be a gradual, steady warming, that would confine any particularly nasty aspects to exotic locales, in the distant future. I guess, partially I was to blame for my blissful ignorance - but also, the experts were and still are pulling the punches. Only recently did they start linking Hurricane Katrina directly to climate change, before that, they pussyfooted around the connection - "oh, no particular weather event can be blamed blah blah blah" and also, the scientists by way of consensus say things like, sea levels MIGHT rise and droughts COULD occur. All of which is nonsense, they should be saying, sea levels WILL rise and droughts ARE occurring!
Anyway... as an avid gardener, I began to notice that the trees were looking very sick, and I started reading up on their symptoms, and realized that for whatever reason - drought, or acid rain, or lack of snow - by the times the symptoms or wilted, singed leaves appear, they are already in irreversible decline. Irreversible. Trees are the foundation of our terrestrial ecosystem, just as coral reefs are the foundation of life in the sea - without them, all the other species that are dependent upon them will perish.
I attribute the damage to vegetation to the "other" greenhouse gases - ozone and nitrous oxide pollution - although in the longer term CO2 induced warming will guarantee the collapse of many species. My observations of trees led me to read every book I could find about climate change, and I had a similar awakening as you describe.
By its very definition, evolution ensures that climate change is always followed by mass extinctions, it cannot be otherwise. Species can't just migrate to cooler latitudes or altitudes and survive - if the even can migrate from their niche, they leave its shelter and food sources behind them. This is just obvious and logical, and indelibly recorded in the paleoclimatic record. "With Speed and Violence" by Fred Pearce is an excellent introduction.
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dalbert Posted 10:29 pm
07 Nov 2009
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 4:18 am
09 Nov 2009
Go forth and multiply. We Masters rule. Forget about humanity.
Plunder, gorge yourselves and hoard 'til you are sated. Satisfy your unfulfilled wishes. Greed rules. Forget about humanity.
Build McMansions, pleasure centers, hideaways from the world, skyscrapers, faster cars, bigger cars, mega-yachts and polluting aircraft for personal aggrandizement and gratification. Greed rules and rules absolutely. Forget about humanity.
In times of danger to self and others, with a single exception, you have an inviolate "duty to warn". In the "stand alone" case the rule is to be set aside: You can forget about humanity.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 8:37 pm
09 Nov 2009
Perhaps you can help me out here. Does anyone understand how Gold Man Sacks manipulated democratic principles; infiltrated democratic institutions; and ended up commandeering a lion's share of the world's wealth and ruling the world for the benefit of a tiny minority of people?
Imagine for a moment that lowly, obscenely-enriched minions of the super-rich and powerful on Wall Street are running a new scam, but this time not to dupe ignorant homeowners but in their stead cash-poor holders of life insurance policies; that a Vice-President and senior henchman publicly pronounces that "Main Street " is going to have to get used to annual, billion dollar bonuses on Wall Street; and that a Master of the Universe proclaims to all the world that he is a banksta doing the work of God.
Would you believe it? What would you think? Have the brightest and best, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe somehow managed to surreptitiously "manufacture" another financial bubble; duplicitously claim once again their uneconomic ponzi schemes as actual economic growth; and, of all things, diabolically confuse God and Mammon in the process? Would such malignantly narcissistic and pathologically arrogant behavior be yet another deceitful expression of the goodness of greed run amuck?
Perhaps I am missing something. If you please, can someone provide assistance?
Sincerely,
Steve
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witsendnj Posted 5:03 am
10 Nov 2009
http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/25/survivaballs-take-manhattan-and-pittsburgh/
The odd thing is, I don't think that's really going to work for anybody in the long run, no matter how wealthy or how much food they've stashed in a northern mountain cave.
Although, I did read somewhere that survival counseling has become a growth industry.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:26 am
10 Nov 2009
Yep, well said. I cannot imagine how many people in the Grist community know someone who lives the lifestyle of Gold Man Sacks (no offense intended to Adam D. Sacks). If you have seen one of these Masters of the Universe, you will have seen them all. What I have seen is unbelievable. Although I have not seen SurvivaBalls anywhere, at least not yet, what I have seen is no less absurd. Just as you are reporting, it is unlikely that the Masters of the Universe among us will do well for long once 'the world changes', given the potentially profound ecological wreckage that their obscene hyperconsumptive lifestyles (the leading-edge factor of the coming apocalypse) could soon precipitate.
In any event, the blogs are making it possible for the great majority of the human family to see how Gold Man Sacks not only confuses human reasoning and insults human intelligence but assaults efforts of the human community to achieve sustainability as well. Blogs like this one are overcoming the "silence that is golden", upon which Gold Man Sacks has relied (with the constant complicity of the corporate giants managing mainstream media) to keep what they call 'the only game in town' going without allowing the human community to understand the dishonest things that are being done for the immediate gratification of a tiny minority of people as well as at the expense of the great majority of humanity.
Please note that in a time on "Main Street" when 45 million people have no health insurance, 7 million jobs have been lost, and tens of thousands of people are newly homeless, the most arrogant and avaricious on Wall Street are bonusing themselves billions of dollars. That is to say, the people who bear a large share of responsibility for the recent collapse of the global financial system and the cratering of the world economy have determined that they, and they alone, will go on as if nothing has happened. They will pay no price for dishonesty, the invention of dodgy financial instruments, the promulgation of pyramid schemes and their continuing failures to add anything of real economic value to the global business activity. The Masters of the Universe in our time are like the alchemists of yesteryear; but these modern alchemists spin gold out of thin air. Their alchemy is called financial engineering and their 'gold' is magically spun from nothing of value into exchange-traded derivatives such as currency futures and stock options as well as OTC derivatives like currency swaps, outright forwards and interest rate caps.
Gold Man Sacks is the poster child for illegitimate monetization and manipulation; for acting in bad faith; and for behaving in patently unsustainable ways.
Thanks again to all. Keep going.
Sincerely,
Steve
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 1:44 pm
10 Nov 2009
Wanton selfishness and greed of a tiny minority of humanity who make the rules by which all live and effectively rule the world have got to be honestly acknowledged and realistically addressed soon. Powerful, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us set policies and practices primarily for their own benefit as well as make it possible for the great majority of humanity to exist somehow in love and squalor. The self-aggrandizing and recklessly avaricious behavior of those with great wealth and purchased power has got to be overcome by the sensible imposition of limitations on individual hyperconsumption and excessive hoarding.
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:35 am
11 Nov 2009
In such circumstances, do knowledgeable people who choose to remain electively mute end up complicitly appointing themselves mortal enemies of the future of life? Or not? If not, how is this behavior to be reasonably and sensibly characterized?
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Steven Earl Salmony Posted 6:11 am
11 Nov 2009
Is it not yet self-evident that the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us live in patently unsustainable ways as dangerously disordered greedmongers, plunderers, hyperconsumers and hoarders and that the human beings among us with feet of clay are unexpectedly the very people to guide the human community toward sustainability because they retain the capability for doing so?
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