Reading New Thoughts: What Do We Want the World to Be When We Grow Up? (Hiss, “Restoring the Planet”)

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

I have recently been reading “Restoring the Planet,” by Tony Hiss, and it has prompted some far more general thoughts about the endgame of successful climate change efforts.

Hiss book lays out, more or less, a global if North-America-centered effort to “set aside” 50% of all land from human use, to be achieved by 2050 (giving a nice slogan, “50 by ‘50”.)  He then discusses the ways in which people are using that effort to identify ecosystems and then as far as possible preserve or restore them, free from humanity’s touch. In other words, the areas being saved are then altered if necessary to create, as far as possible, functioning ecosystems having long-term viability without needing constant human intervention.

For example, one such effort seeks to “carve out” existing spaces where animals roam in fixed patterns and connect these via “corridors” that ensure that humans will not decimate the animals but still allow the animals sufficient range to be viable.  Another seeks to reserve remaining “wilderness” by establishing ownership of the property involved by entities dedicated to keeping it human-unaffected.

These efforts, and others, seem to me today to follow disparate ideas of what the endgame is and how to get there, only loosely coordinated if at all.  I believe that what I have seen can be more or less classified into five approaches, or movements:

1.       Sustainability

2.       Regeneration

3.       Human-designed ecologies

4.       No-human ecologies (more or less the approach described by Hiss)

5.       Human-included ecologies

Terms of Ecological Endearment

The approaches I have listed above overlap in some cases – a human-designed ecology may be aimed at creating a long-term sustainable ecosystem, or simply at regenerating an area to repair the damages of the recent past.  What matters, I think, is the goal of the approach, as an exclusive focus on one approach may or may not lead to the promised land of a low-carbon-emissions steady-state global set of ecosystems.  So it seems appropriate to examine each approach in that light.

Sustainability, it seems, it the most-known approach.  It explicitly requires setting up steady-state ecosystems, and only by inference those with low carbon emissions, since otherwise (one guesses) carbon-emission-induced climate change will make ecosystems unsustainable.  There is an unmistakable air of “whatever works” about the sustainability approach – it is thus entirely agnostic about regeneration and human-designed vs. human-included vs. no-human ecologies.

Regeneration, by contrast, seems to say that simply by restoring a previous state of an ecosystem will automagically result in a steady-state low-carbon-emissions environment, because the previous state of the ecosystem had this characteristic.  What makes this questionable is that one can’t walk through the same river twice: due to the Columbian Exchange, few ecosystems are the way they were 500 years ago, before carbon emissions started rising.

Human-designed ecologies is very much, I think, the province of the “new environmentalists”, those who think that we cannot restore ecosystems to a previous state and therefore we are forced to design new ecosystems, using existing tools, that will achieve a steady state.  Since this is a pragmatic approach, it leans toward leaving humans where they are and/or accommodating but constraining them as they continue expanding into the world’s ecosystems.  However, the question arises as to who decides what’s an appropriate end game – clearly, indigenous populations are not on the priority list of those who advocate human-designed ecologies.

No-human ecologies, by contrast, is the ideological leaning of the “old environmentalists”, who based on their experiences in the 1970s at the advent of the environmentalist movement tend to worry that humans, by and large, blight everything they touch.  I believe that this approach accords with the effort, in the US at least, to buy up everything possible not owned by the government (in Massachusetts, the aim is to acquire 80% of the land area) and turn it into places where humans go either not at all or only rarely.  Of course, the lands involved for the most part right now are the ones least subject to carbon pollution.  I would also guess that the main sticking point in the immediate future is places involved in mining, including those minerals involved in solar-power generation, not to mention installation of solar arrays in these areas.

I admit that I am fond of the human-included ecologies approach, because it seems to me more flexible than either the human-designed or no-human approaches.  That is, we make an exception to the no-humans approach where indigenous peoples have a strong track record of living sustainably on the land.  In many cases, these indigenous peoples have been strongly tainted by the modern economy and nation-state institutions, but there is clearly a case to be made that they still are the quickest way to restore a low-carbon-emissions steady state – not to mention the irony of visiting the worst consequences of a no-human-ecology approach on the worst sufferers from our previous “civilizing” emissions-hungry system.

In Which I Vote For All of the Above

I look at all of these approaches from the point of view of a climate-change person who is primarily concerned that we mitigate as fast as possible – that we reduce carbon emissions as fast as possible, with the ultimate steady state, if any, a secondary consideration for now.  Viewed in that light, I believe that each of these approaches is appropriate in a wide range of particular cases, and thus I am happy to “let a thousand flowers bloom” – i.e., encourage each of these movements.

At the same time, each time one of these movements comes into conflict with another, I think it is the right thing, not to commit to one side or another for the long term, but rather to establish rules of thumb for when a particular approach is most appropriate.  I would suggest that among these rules of thumb are:

·         When there are vested human interests in an area, pick the approach that impacts them least (but still minimizes carbon emissions)

·         Likewise, pick the approach that involves the quickest path to a healthy ecosystem (i.e., consider the needs of non-human animals and plants first)

·         Focus sustainability efforts on what seems irretrievably human-dominated – in other words, cities and their irreducible agricultural hinterland.  Since, in the foreseeable future, that comprises much more than half of humanity, but far less than a quarter of all of the land, that means both a human-designed and human-dominated ecology.

I would also bear in mind that each of these approaches, unlike mitigation, asks and tries to  answer the questions:  What do we want the world to be like if and when we cease our immature destruction of ecosystems and achieve a low-carbon-emissions world?  And, how can we ensure that we act maturely from now on and never again risk ourselves and our planet in this way?  For that reason, I would say that, while I would not prioritize any of these approaches over mitigation, they are every bit as important as adaptation to climate change’s effects.  If not more so.

Reading New Thoughts: Hessen’s Many Lives of Carbon and the Two Irresistible Forces of Climate Change

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

Dag Hessen’s “The Many Lives of Carbon” is the best book I have been able to find on the chemical details of the carbon cycle and CO2-driven climate change (despite some odd idioms that make it difficult to understand him at times).  In particular, it goes deeply into “positive feedbacks” that exacerbate departures from atmospheric-O2 equilibrium and “negative feedbacks” that operate to revert to equilibrium.  In the long run, negative feedbacks win; but the long run can be millions of years.

More precisely, if humans weren’t involved, there are medium-term and long-term “global warmings” and coolings.  The medium-term warming/cooling is usually thought to result from the Milankovitch Cycle, in which Earth orbit unusually far from the Sun during winter (“rubber-banding” of its elliptical orbit), a more severe tilt of the Earth’s axis as it oscillates periodically, and “precession” (wobbling back and forth on its axis) combine to yield unusually low Northern-Hemisphere winter heat from the Sun, which kickstarts glaciation, which acts as a positive feedback for global cooling along with atmospheric CO2 loss.  This cooling operates slowly over most of the next 100,000 years to descend into an Ice Age, but then the opposite effect (maximum heat from the sun) kicks in and brings a sharp rise in temperatures back to its original point. 

Long-term global warming is much rarer – there are instances 55 million years ago and 250 million years ago, and indeed some indications that most of the previous 5 largest mass extinctions on Earth were associated with this type of global warming.  The apparent cause is massive volcanism, especially underwater volcanism (the clouds from on-land volcanism actually reduce temperatures significantly over several years, but then the temperatures revert to what they were before the eruption).  It also seems clear that the main if not only cause of the warming is CO2 and methane (CH4) released into the atmosphere by these eruptions – carbon infusions so persistent that the level of atmospheric CO2 did not revert to equilibrium for 50 million years or so after the last such warming.

For both medium-term and long-term global warming/cooling, “weathering” acts as a negative feedback – but only over hundreds of thousands of years.  Weathering involves water and wind wearing away at rock, exposing carbon-infused silica that are then carried to the ocean.  There, among other outcomes, they are taken up by creatures who die, forming ocean-floor limestone that “captures” the carbon and thus withdraws it from the carbon cycle circulating carbon into and out of the atmosphere.

Human-caused global warming takes the slow negative feedback of animal/plant fossils being turned into coal, oil, and natural gas below the Earth’s surface and makes it into an unprecedentedly fast direct cause of global warming, mostly by burning it for fuel (hence “fossil fuels”).   The net effect of CO2 doubling in the atmosphere is 2-2.8 degrees Centigrade land-temperature warming, but it is also accompanied by positive feedbacks (including increased cloud cover, increased atmospheric methane, and “black carbon”/soot decreases in albedo [reflectivity of the sun’s heat]) that, in a slower way, may take the net global warming associated with CO2 doubling up to 4 degrees C.  Some of this can be overcome by the negative feedback of the ocean’s slower absorption of the increased heat, as the ocean “sink” can take more carbon out of the atmosphere, but at some point soon the ocean will be in balance with the atmosphere and much of what we emit in carbon pollution will effectively stay aloft for thousands of years. 

My point in running through the implications of Hessen’s analysis is that there is a reason for scientists to fear for all of our lives:  The global warming that, in the extreme, disrupts agriculture and food webs extremely and makes it unsafe for most of us to operate outside for more than a short period of time most of the year, except in the high mountains, is a CO2-driven “irresistible force”.  There is therefore a good case to be made that “mitigation” – reducing carbon emissions (and methane and black carbon and possibly nitrous oxide) is by far the best way to avoid the kind of global warming that literally threatens humanity’s survival.  And this is a point that I have argued vociferously in past blog posts.

The Other Irresistible Force:  The Business/Legal Bureaucracy

And yet, based on my reading, I would argue that there is an apparently equally irresistible force operating on its own momentum in today’s world:  what I am calling the Business/Legal Bureaucracy.  Here, I am using the word “bureaucracy” in a particular sense:  that of an organization operating on its own momentum.  In the case of businesses, that means a large-business bureaucracy operating always under a plan to make more profit this year than last.  In the case of the law, that means a court system and mindset always to build on precedents and to support property rights.  

To see what I am talking about, consider David Owen’s “Where the Water Goes”, about what happens to all the water in the Colorado River watershed.  Today, most of that water is shipped east to fuel the farms and businesses of Colorado and its vicinity, or west, to meet the water needs of Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the like.  The rest is allocated to farmers or other property owners along the way under a peculiar legal doctrine called “prior appropriation” – instead of the more typical equal sharing among bordering property owners, it limits each portion to a single “prior claimant”, since in the old mining days there wasn’t enough water in each portion for more than one miner to be able to “wash” the gold effectively.  Each new demand for water therefore is fitted legally within this framework, ensuring that the agricultural business bureaucracy will push for more water from the same watershed, while the legal bureaucracy will accommodate this within the array of prior claimants.

To see what creates such an impression of an irresistible force about this, consider the need to cut back on water use as climate change inevitably decreases the snowpack feeding the Colorado.  As Owen points out, there is no clear way to do this.  Business-wise, no one wants to be the one to sacrifice water.  Legally, the simple solution of limiting per-owner water use can actually result in more water use from each owner, as seasonal and annual variations in water needs mean that many owners will now need to draw down and store water in off-seasons “just in case”.   The result is a system that not only resists “sustainability” but in fact can also be less profit-producing in the long run – the ecosystems shafted by this approach, such as the now-dry Mexican terminus of the Colorado, may well be those that might have been most arable in the global-warming future.  And the examples of this multiply quickly:  the wildfire book I reviewed in an earlier blog post noted the extreme difficulties in fighting wildfires with their exacerbating effect on global warming, difficulties caused by the encroachment of mining and real-estate development on northern forests, driven by Legal/Business Bureaucracy.

The primary focus of the Legal/Business Bureaucracy with respect to climate change and global warming, therefore, is after-the-fact, incremental adaptation.  It is for that reason, as well as the dangerous trajectory we are now on, that I view calling the most disastrous future climate-change scenarios “business as usual” as entirely appropriate.

Force, Meet Force

It also seems to me that reactions to the most dire predictions of climate change fall into two camps (sometimes in the same person!): 

1.       We need drastic change or few of us will survive, because no society or business system can possibly resist the upcoming “business as usual” changes:  extreme weather, loss of water for agriculture, loss/movement of arable land, large increases in the area ripe for debilitating/killing tropical diseases, extreme heat, loss of ocean food, loss of food-supporting ecosystems, loss of seacoast living areas, possible toxic emissions from the ocean. 

2.       Our business-economy-associated present system will somehow automagically “muddle through”, as it always seems to have done.  After all, there is, it seems, plenty of “slack” in the water efficiency of agriculture, plenty of ideas about how to adopt businesses and governments to encourage better adaptation and mitigation “at the margin” (e.g., solar now dominates the new-energy market in the United States, although it does not seem to have made much of a dent in the existing uses of fossil fuels), and plenty of new business-associated technologies to apply to problems (e.g., business sustainability metrics). 

An interesting example of how both beliefs can apparently coexist in the same person is Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”, an argument that the “reason reinforced by science” approach to the world of the late 18^th century known as the Enlightenment is primarily responsible for a dramatic, continuing improvement in the overall human situation, and should be chosen as the primary impetus for further improvements.  My overall comment on this book is that Pinker has impressed me with the breadth of his reading and the general fairness of his assessments of that reading.  However, Pinker appears to have one frustrating flaw:  A belief that liberals and other proponents of change in such areas as equality, environmentalism, and climate change are primarily so ideology-driven that they are actually harmful to Enlightenment-type improvements, and likewise their proponents within the government.  Any reasonable reading of Jeffrey Sachs’ “The Age of Sustainable Development”, which I hope to discuss in a later post, puts the lie to that one. 

In any case, Pinker has an extensive section on climate change, in which he both notes the “existential threat” (i.e., threat to human existence) posed by human-caused climate change, and asserts his belief that it can be overcome by a combination of Business/Legal-Complex adaptation to the findings of Enlightenment scientists and geoengineering.  One particular assertion is that if regulations could be altered, new technologies in nuclear power can meet all our energy needs in short order, with little risk to people and little need of waste storage.  I should note that James Hansen appears to agree with him (although Hansen is far more pessimistic that regulation alteration will happen or that nuclear businesses will choose to change their models) and Joe Romm very definitely does not.  

One also often sees the second camp among experts on Business/Legal-Complex matters such as allocation of water in California in reaction to climate-change-driven droughts.  These reactions assume linear effects on water availability of what is an exponential global-warming process, and note that under these assumptions, there is plenty of room for less water use by existing agriculture, and everyone should “stop panicking.” 

So what do I think will happen when force meets force?

Flexibility Is the Enemy of Agility

One of the things that I noticed (and noted in my blog) in my past profession is that product and organizational flexibility – the ability to easily repurpose for other needs and uses – is a good thing in the short run, but often a bad thing in the long run.  How can this be?  Because the long run will often require fundamental changes to products and/or organizations, and the more that the existing product or system is “patched” to meet new needs, the greater the cultural, organizational, and experiential investment in the present system – not to mention the greater the gap between that and what’s going on elsewhere that will eventually lead to the need for a fundamental change.

There is one oncoming business strategy that reduces the need for such major, business-threatening transitions:  business agility.  Here the idea is to build both products and organizations with the ability for much more radical change, plus better antennae to the outside to stay as close as possible to changes in consumer needs.  But flexibility is in fact the enemy of agility:  patches in the existing product or organization exacerbate the “hard-coded” portions of it, making fundamental changes more unlikely and the huge costs of an entire do-over more inevitable.

As you can guess, I think that today’s global economy is extraordinarily flexible, and that is what camp 2 counts on to save the day.  But this very flexibility is the enemy of the agility that I believe we will find ourselves needing, if we are to avoid this kind of collapse of the economy and our food production.

But it’s a global economy – that’s part of its global Business/Legal-Bureaucracy flexibility.  So local or even regional collapses aren’t enough to do it.  Rather, if we fail to mitigate strongly, e.g., in an agile fashion, and create a sustainable global economy over the next 20 years, some time over the 20 years after that the average costs of increasing stresses from climate change put the global economy in permanent negative territory, and, unless fundamental change happens immediately after that, the virtuous circle of today’s economy turns into a vicious, accelerating circle of economic collapse.  And the smaller our economies become, the less we wind up spending on combating the ever-increasing effects of climate change.  At the end, we are left with less than half (and maybe 1/10^th) the food sources and arable land, much of it in new extreme-northern areas with soil of lower quality, with food being produced under much more brutal weather conditions.  Or, we could by then have collapsed governmentally to such a point that we can’t even manage that.  It’s an existential threat.

Initial Thoughts On What to Do

Succinctly, I would put my thoughts under three headings:

1.       Governmental.  Governments must drive mitigation well beyond what they have done up to now in their Paris-agreement commitments.  We, personally, should place climate change at the top of our priority lists (where possible), reward commitments and implementation politically, and demand much more.

2.       Cultural.  Businesses, other organizations, and the media should be held accountable for promoting, or failing to promote, mitigation-targeted governmental, organizational, and individual efforts.  In other words, we need to create a new lifestyle.  There’s an interesting take on what a lifestyle like that would look like in Peter Kalmus’ “Being the Change”, which I hope to write about soon.

3.       Personal.  Simply as a matter of not being hypocrites, we should start to change our carbon “consumption” for the better.  Again, Kalmus’ book offers some suggestions.

Or, as Yoda would put it, “Do or do not.  There is no try.”  Because both Forces will be against you.

Reading New Thoughts: Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands and Facing the Climate-Change-Driven Anthropocene Bottleneck

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

In my mind, David Grinspoon’s “Earth In Human Hands” raises two issues of import as we try to take a long-term view of what to do about climate change:

1.        How best do we approach making the necessary political and cultural changes to tackle mitigation – what mix of business/market, national/international governmental, and individual strategies?

2.       For the even longer term, how do we tackle a “sustainable” economy and human-designed set of ecosystems?  Grinspoon claims that there are two opposing views on this – that of “eco-modernists” who say that we should design ecosystems based on our present setup, ameliorated to achieve sustainability, and those of “environmental purists” who advocate removal of humans from ecosystems completely.

First, a bit of context.  Grinspoon’s book is a broad summary of what “planetary science” (how planets work and evolve on a basic level, with our example leavened by those of Venus and Mars) has to say about Earth’s history and future.  His summary, more or less, is this:  (a) For the first time in Earth’s history, the whole planet is being altered consciously – by us – and therefore we have in the last few hundred years entered a whole new geological era called the Anthropocene; (b) That new era brings with it human-caused global warming and climate change, which form a threat to human existence, and therefore to the existence of Anthropocene-type “self-conscious” life forms on this planet, a threat that he calls the “Anthropocene bottleneck”; (c) it is likely that any other such planets with self-conscious life forms in the universe face the same Anthropocene bottleneck, and other possible threats to us pale in comparison, so that surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck is a good sign that humanity will survive for quite a while.

Tackling Mitigation

Grinspoon is very forceful in arguing that probably the only way to survive the Anthropocene bottleneck is through coordinated, pervasive global efforts:  in particular, new global institutions.  Translated, that means not “loose cannon” business/market nor individual nor even conflicting national efforts, but science-driven global governance, plus changes in cultural norms towards international cooperation.  Implicitly, I think, his model is that of the physics community he is familiar with:  one where key information, shared and tested by scientific means, informs strategies and reins in individual and institutional conflicts. 

If there is anything that history teaches us, it is that there is enormous resistance to the idea of global enforcement of anything.  I myself tend to believe that it represents one side of a two-sided conflict that plays out in any society – between those more inclined toward “hope” and those inclined toward “fear”, which in ordinary times plays out as battles between “liberals” and “conservatives.” 

Be that as it may, Grinspoon does not say there is not resistance to global enforcement.  He says, however, that global coordination, including global enforcement, is a prerequisite for surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck.  We cooperate and thereby effectively mitigate climate change, or we die.  And the rest of this century will likely be the acid test.

I don’t disagree with Grinspoon;  I just don’t think we know what degree of cooperation will be needed to deal with climate change in order to avoid facing the ultimate in global warming.   What he describes would be ideal; but we are very far from it now, as anyone watching CO2 rise over at Mauna Loa is well aware.   Rather, I think we can take his idea of scientifically-driven global mitigation as a metric and an “ideal” model, to identify key areas where we are falling down now by failing to react quickly, globally, and as part of a coherent strategy to scientific findings on the state of climate change and means of mitigation. 

Designing Sustainability

Sustainability and fighting climate change are not identical.  One of the concerns about fighting climate change is that while most steps toward sustainability are in line with the quickest path to the greatest mitigation, practically, some are not.  This is because, for example, farming almonds in California with less water than typical almond farming does indeed reduce the impact of climate-change-related water shortages, but also encourages consumption of water-greedy almonds.  I would argue, in that case, that the more direct path towards climate-change mitigation (discouraging almond growing while reducing water consumption in general) is better than the quicker path towards sustainability (focus on the water shortage).

This may seem arcane; but Grinspoon’s account of the fight between environmental traditionalists and eco-modernists suggests that the difference between climate-change-mitigation-first and sustainability-first is at least a major part of the disagreement between the two sides.  To put it another way, the traditionalists according to Grinspoon are advocating “no more people” ecosystems which effectively minimize carbon pollution, while the eco-modernists are advocating tinkering incrementally with the human-driven ecosystems that exist in order, apparently, to achieve long-term sustainability – thereby effectively putting sustainability at a higher priority than mitigation.

It may sound as if I am on the side of the traditionalists.  However, I am in fact on the side of whatever gets us to mitigation fastest – and here there is a glaring lack of mention in Grinspoon of a third alternative:  reverting to ecosystems with low-footprint human societies.  That can mean Native American, Lapp, Mongolian, or aborigine cultures, for example.  But it also means removing as far as possible the human impact exclusive of these cultures.

Let’s take a recent example:  the acquisition of Native Americans with conservationist aid of land around the Columbia River to enable restoration and sustainability (as far as can be managed with increasing temperatures) of salmon spawning.  This is a tradeoff:  In return for removal of almost all things exacerbating climate change, possibly including dams, the Native Americans get to restore their traditional culture as far as possible in toto.  They will be, as in their conceptions of themselves, stewards of the land. 

And this is not an isolated example (again, a recent book limns efforts all over the world to take the same strategy).  An examination of case studies shows that even in an impure form, it provides clear evidence of OVERALL negative impact on carbon pollution, while still providing “good enough” sustainability.  Nor do I see reflexive opposition from traditionalists on this one.

The real problem is that this approach is only going to be applicable to a minority of human habitats.  However, it does provide a track record, a constituency, and innovations useful for a far more aggressive approach towards mitigation than the one the eco-modernists appear to be reflexively taking.  In other words, it offers hope for an approach that uses human technology to design sustainable ecosystems, even in the face of climate changes, with the focus on the ecosystem first and the humans second.  The human technology can make the humans fit the ecosystem with accommodation for human present practice, not the other way around.

In summary, I would say that Grinspoon’s idea of casting how to deal with mitigation and sustainability as a debate between traditionalists and modernists misses the point.   With all the cooperation in the world, we still must push the envelope of mitigation now in order to have a better chance for sustainability in the long term.  The strategy should be pushed as far as possible toward mitigation-driven changes of today’s human ecosystems, but can be pushed toward what worked with humans in the past rather than positing an either/or humans/no-humans choice.

Reading New Thoughts: Lifton’s Climate Swerve and the Proper Attitude Toward Climate Change

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

One of the major issues among the “good guys” in climate change is, what attitude should we take towards the future in our political maneuverings?  Should we focus on the bright spots, the signs of hope, such as solar technology, knowing that we may be accused later of deception because these do not meet the needs of mitigating carbon pollution effectively?  Should we be brutally realistic, at the risk of persuading people that nothing effective can be done?

I find that Robert Jay Lifton’s “The Climate Swerve” provides a boost, more or less, to my own view of what we should do.  Based on his experience as a psychiatrist and physician fighting against nuclear war, he identifies 3 “psychologies” that dominate discussion of an oncoming catastrophe:

1.       Denial.  We are all familiar with climate deniers.

2.       “Psychic numbness”.  In this case, we “numb” the idea of nuclear war or climate change so that we can function in daily life without extreme anxiety.  The result of psychic numbness is that we feel that there is nothing we can do about the situation, and so we do very little.

3.       Facing the truth head-on.  The point here is that because we no longer self-deceive, this does not necessarily lead to extreme anxiety that makes one unable to function.  Instead, says Lifton, it leads to “realistic hope.”  That is, in terms of anxiety, in the long run some hope is better than none.  

Thus, Lifton’s “climate swerve” is a global “swerve” – a global change of direction in thinking, towards psychology (3) as discussed above.

Note that this analysis is not the usual glib, other-oriented, sickness-focused psychoanalysis.  Rather, Lifton is talking about a global set of non-patients and personal experience.  Also, he is talking about the long term:   While climate denial is usually evidence of the usual psychological problems right now, psychic numbness is akin to what most of us do often in our lives, and its costs often outweigh its benefits only in the long run.

Facing What Truth?

Climate change differs from nuclear war in one key way:  In nuclear war, the catastrophe is immediate and total, while in climate change, the largest effects in the catastrophe are always in the future.  That means that in facing the truth, we need to face two things:  (1) What is the sequence of catastrophe in “business as usual” climate change, and (2) What are the effects of our efforts to mitigate and adapt instead of “business as usual”?

I find that the best analogy I can come up with for climate change’s sequence of catastrophe is an image of an enormous rock rolling down hill, picking up speed and momentum (I wrote a “children’s tale” short story about this once).  At first, it only kills a few shepherds high on the hill; but next it will kill the poor folk partway up the hill that cannot afford the housing of the well-off and rich; and then, finally, it will roll over us, the relatively well-off and rich.  Crucially, however, the earlier we push back against the rock (mitigate, slow the rate of carbon emissions), the easier it is to stop it, and the higher on the hill it stops.  In other words, no matter whether we’re talking now or 50 years from now:

·         Some of the disaster to come is has already happened and will continue to happen; but,

·         A far greater amount is already built into the system; BUT,

·         A far greater amount than that is not yet built into the system; AND,

·         The more we mitigate now, the less of that not-built-into-the-system “business as usual” catastrophe will happen.

The details of the sequence of the “business as usual” catastrophe are still far from completely clear.  The best analysis I can find is a 2007 book called “Six Degrees.” I hope to write about that book at some point, but the main point to bear in mind is that the sequence of events still seems to be following that book’s horrifying projections, although each step they lay out may require more than 1 degree C warming over the long term. 

What about how we are doing?  What constitutes facing the facts about our efforts to mitigate?

Right now, I have argued in blog posts, CO2 readings at Mauna Loa tell us that all our previous efforts, if they have had an impact on carbon emissions, have had an insignificant one.  I ascribe part of this to a well-known IT law:  the actual implementation of a new technology or approach is actually far slower than what we perceive superficially from the outside.  Even with the best will in the world, the details of implementation slow us down drastically.  The other reason, of course, is the extensive denial and psychic numbness out there that lead to pushback and lack of implementation.

The other important point about our efforts to mitigate is that they are hindered by our institutions and our attitudes towards them.  History shows that looking for a purely market-based solution is not only far from optimal but a fantasy about a “free market” that never existed.  Governments and the global society are hindered by past assumptions, and especially in the legal system, about what can be done in a democratic government to face climate change.  A “face the facts” view of what is going on says that institutional efforts to combat climate change have an orders-of-magnitude greater impact on mitigation than individual efforts, and that these institutional efforts have barely begun. 

What hope are we left with?  This one:  that eventually our best institutional efforts will kick into overdrive and actually mitigate climate change significantly. 

Solar Vs. Fossil: One Step Forward, Two Half-Steps Back

I find that one way to summarize this view to myself is to put it in terms of the computer industry’s Agile Manifesto, where saying one thing should be put before another is saying not that the latter should not be done, but rather that I value the former more highly:

·         Realistic facing of present and future facts of climate change catastrophe before blind hope.

·         Institutional change before individual change.

·         Mitigation before adaptation.

·         Agility before flexibility (I’m not sure whether this should be included, but it would be a good way to improve our institutions to fight against climate change better).

How to end this?  Well, there’s always T.S. Eliot’s “As Wednesday” on psychic numbness:

“Because I do not hope to turn
Because I do not hope …”

First, face the facts of turning.  Then, understand the small hope in those facts.  Then you can hope to turn.

Climate Change and Breaking the World Economy By 2050

According to an article at www.climateprogress.com, a recent World Bank Reports finds that the worldwide cost of disasters increased 10-fold between 1980 and 2010 (using the ten-year average with 1980 and 2010 the midpoints), to $140 billion per year.  Meanwhile, the world economy is at about $78 trillion (“in nominal terms”).  Projecting both trends forward, in 2040 the cost of disasters will be at $1.4 trillion, and (assuming a 2% growth rate per year) this will be 1% of the world’s economy.  By 2050, with the same trends, the cost of disasters will be about $3 trillion, and the world’s economy will in fact be shrinking.

Up to now, the world’s economy has in effect been able to shrug off disaster cost increases by growing, so that we now have far more in the way of investment resources to apply to any problems than we did in 1980.  Sometime between 2045 and 2050, that process will go in reverse:  we may be growing, but next year’s disaster costs will swallow up the increase.  So if we have not put ourselves on a better disaster path by handling climate change better than we have before 2045, it will be far more difficult to avoid the collapse of the global economy after that – stagnation, followed by spotty and then pervasive national-economy downward spirals.

How do we do better than we have?  Three keys:

1.       Mitigation before adaptation.  Delaying the rise of atmospheric carbon gives us more time to adapt, and less to adapt to.

2.       Long-term adaptation rather than short-term.  Our flawed forecasting, shown repeatedly to be too optimistic, has led us to rebuilding for 2030 at worst and 2050 at best – meaning that we will have to spend far more at 2050 to prepare for 2100.

3.       Moderate rather than modest added spending.  Studies have shown that taking steps to deal with climate change as per preliminary plans costs little in addition.  That means that we should be planning to do more than the “minimal” plan.

We assume that our “self-regulating” world economy can handle anything without slipping permanently into reverse.  Unless we do something more, it can’t, as it has shown over the last 35 years.  And not just our grandchildren but many of our children, children of the rich included, are going to pay a serious price if we fail to do so.

The Climate Science Global Warming Model, Part II: Implications for Action

To repeat:  In this series of blog posts, I attempt to give an overall view of the physics/chemistry-based climate science dealing with climate change and today’s global warming.  I do so because I can’t find an overall summary such as the one I’m about to try to create.  My hope is that readers will understand why this science makes me so alarmed and seemingly so pessimistic.  As always, misunderstandings and misstatements are my fault and do not reflect on the science itself.

Implications from Climate Science for Action on Global Warming

I don’t want to stray too far from the science in discussions of implications for actions in fighting today’s global warming.  However, it seems to me that there are very clear links between the science and certain strategies that are worth discussing.  Here they are:

1.       Mitigation is far more important than adaptation.  Here, mitigation means action directly aimed at ceasing carbon emissions, e.g., converting a house to solar heating/cooling, while adaptation means changing our environment to handle present and future changes in it due to global warming – for instance, changing the mix of heating and cooling devices to emphasize greater efficiency at cooling a house, or moving away from ocean shorelines.  The point that climate science makes is that when we are choosing between $1000 of spending on mitigation and $1000 of spending on adaptation, in the long run, we are better off spending on mitigation.  Remember, many warming-related damages increase exponentially, and that increase is happening extremely fast, and therefore the increment of comfort gained now, even if it suffices to handle the changes arriving 40 years from now, is not equivalent to the lesser damage caused by doing mitigation now, even with a reasonable NPV factored in.  This is particularly true when we assume, as seems likely, that your behavior replicated over a major proportion of a global population will have a major impact on the effectiveness of mitigation.

2.       Certain key complementary strategies are also vital to success.  In particular, we may cite reductions in emissions of black carbon; strategies aimed at keeping a large proportion of reserves of oil, natural gas, oil shale/tar sands, and above all coal, in the ground for the next 2000 years; water conservation and better soil-erosion handling to allow the maximum of future arable land; cessation of fertilizer and garbage runoff into the oceans, to delay or mitigate killing of ocean life/food; and investment in the lands that we are likely to move to and their future ecosystems, so that we may eventually move to them at low cost and live in them with low carbon emissions.

3.       There should be investment in moving to low-carbon-emissions technologies, products, and services at a much greater and/or more rapid rate than we are doing now.  Climate science – in particular, the records of increases in atmospheric carbon at Mauna Loa, Hawaii – tells us that our present efforts are not yet having a really detectable effect on the exponentially increasing amount of atmospheric carbon.  We need to do much more, as soon as possible. 

Conclusions

I first began to read and write about climate science – peripherally – about 6 years ago.  At that time, the core climate science as I have laid it out here was in existence.  In the last 6 years, all that has happened has given greater detail, firmed up the data behind some of the conclusions, and fleshed out the model with particular cases such as the effects of a lower Arctic-northern America temperature gradient.  As science, it is more solid than ever; but I knew that then.

Almost all the climate science news since then that I did not anticipate but recognized was possible has been negative.  The visible effects of climate change have showed up in dramatic form 15 years earlier than I expected – Hurricane Sandy, 60 degrees in Boston on Christmas Day.  The ancillary effects have moved the consensus estimate for effects associated with a doubling of atmospheric carbon from 2-3 degrees C to 4 degrees C.  Permafrost has begun to melt earlier than hoped, and the Antarctic land ice at a greater rate than first estimated.  At least the research on what it would take to turn Earth into Venus has given us 900 million years of breathing room.

As a model explaining the workings of the world, I find climate science breathtakingly elegant and beautiful.  As a new way of seeing the world I live in, it is a constant revelation.  As a pointer to the implications of today’s global warming, I find it hard not to feel sick.  How would you feel, if you thought there was a significant likelihood that the vanishing of 90% of arable land would mean the death of at least ½ of all of today’s great-great-grandchildren (and yes, that includes those of the rich)?  And that that likelihood turned into a probability if we continued to do pretty much what we have been doing for another 60-100 years or so?

I am reminded of Lincoln’s tale of the little boy who stubbed his toe.  He was too old to cry, he said, but it hurt too much to laugh.  I appreciate climate science very much; but its implications hurt too much for me to revel in it.

Happy New Year.

More Fun Global Warming News

I along with many others noted the milestone of CO2 atmospheric concentrations passing 400 ppm last month – but that’s not all the data are telling us.

I recently checked Mauna Loa (and global) CO2 for the first time since Mauna Loa crossed 400 ppm for a day. It appears that in the last week in May, it was above 400 ppm on average for a full week, and on one day it approached 400.5 ppm. For the month of May, Mauna Loa CO2 was nearly 400 ppm (399.77) and was approximately 3 ppm higher than last year. It appears that so far this year Mauna Loa and global CO2 are averaging close to 3 ppm above last year, which would be a figure well above all other years since 1998 (2.93 ML). Btw, last year's was the second largest increase on record (2.65).

My overall conclusion: I don't know if this will affect overall weather the way 1998’s record CO2 increase may have (the year of the global yearly temp record, which has not been surpassed in a major way since, although we're getting pretty darn close). But it does add a potential major temperature booster. It does seem to confirm that CO2 atmospheric concentration continues to increase exponentially rather than linearly. And it does present a bleak prospect for the next few years.

What do I mean?

Still “Business As Usual”

The usual phrase for following the CO2-emissions track we have been on for the last 160 years, and especially the last 35 years, is “business as usual”.  We see a lot of planning and some hopeful examples from nations like Germany and Sweden in trying to get away from this kind of inexorable percentage increase in emissions that results in exponentially increasing CO2 concentrations and leads to temperature increases from now on well above the 2 degrees C (actually, 2.6-2.8 C according to what I know of the latest credible research) that everyone seems to be trying not to surpass.  In fact, “business as usual” has been estimated to result in perhaps 9 degrees F of global average temperature increase and 16 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Considering the fact that the models saying this are not nearly adequately factoring in permafrost melt that will lead to major additional CO2 releases to the atmosphere (and a few harder-to-estimate factors such as likely major increases in methane emissions), you should view the temperature figure as one that we will achieve only with extreme luck. Me, I’m guessing more like 12 degrees temperature rise and 20 feet sea level rise (plus 20 feet increase in storm surge).

What the Mauna Loa and global CO2 figures are telling us is that our present efforts are still not having a significant enough effect on “business as usual.”  This suggests, for example, that the US figures showing perhaps a 7% reduction through 2011 or 2012 (figures for 2012 represent a preliminary estimate that has been shown in the past to underestimate actual emissions) probably represent the US multinational companies exporting their emissions to countries like China and India.  They also suggest that the US switch to natural gas has far less effect on CO2 emissions than anticipated, and that announced Chinese efforts to reduce emissions have had a minor (if any) effect on what is now the world’s greatest CO2-emissions ramp-up.

A Call To Face Real Reality

It seems to me that much of the commentary about what to do about this simply does not comprehend the full dimensions of “business as usual” as we have been practicing it for the last few decades, including the ongoing efforts to do something about global warming.  So here’s my initial attempt to summarize the way I see it.

Roughly speaking, political reality breaks down across the globe into three groups:

1.       Climate deniers, or those who would effectively pursue policies that ramp up CO2 emissions further.

2.       Political and economic ameliorators, who would attempt to respond to their understanding of the scientific research while placing first and foremost no or little change in the political and economic strategies that are presently being pursued, especially the ones that involve government regulation.  That is, they seek to achieve what in the past has been change by achieving what is close to a positive-sum game for everyone.  By the way, even carbon taxation right now falls under this heading.

3.       The few (like me, unfortunately) who are calling for major changes now now now.

Responding adequately to this global warming crisis, it seems to me, requires that we face two unpalatable realities:

A.      Neither group 1 nor group 2 will likely avoid the catastrophes that will result from “business as usual.”  I’ll explain why in a minute.

B.      However, things can always get worse.  In other words, if we throw up our hands and say why bother to try if we can’t figure out how to do major changes, then, as in the case of handing matters over to the climate deniers, the catastrophes will be worse, and sooner.

Why do I say we can’t avoid catastrophes via group 2’s strategies?  Let’s think of Japan just after WW II – about as devastated economically as it was possible to be.  And yet, 30 years later, we found ourselves worrying if Japan was going to become the #1 economy in the world.  It’s a story we have seen repeated over and over, and it involves the fact that as long as there is an outside world to take a hand and as long as the economy can piggyback via investment on its core labor and resource assets (I’m including farming here) underlaid by government regulatory “rules of the game”, the body of understanding of how to run a modern economy and government allows springing back to somewhere where you were before catastrophe struck.

But global warming’s effects, it seems to me, for the first time in human history, make this an approach that will break down sooner or later.  In effect, in systems analysis terms, this is simultaneous strain on all key components of the system, increasing exponentially, that you respond to by fixing problems only after the fact and only to handle last year’s strain.  In other words, while you are handling last year’s disaster and spending money to buy levees to handle that unprecedented disaster, another exponentially greater disaster is on the way, on which you are going to have to spend more money than this year’s.  And this is happening on such a widespread scale across the world that all of the multinationals and all of the nations are facing these increasing strains simultaneously – and so their attempts to help each other are more and more limited. 

At a certain point, then, things begin to operate basically in reverse.  Political elites reflecting economic elites react to the rising costs by failing to serve greater and greater segments of the population in order to keep up the economy.  This creates unrest and government breakdowns, which add yet more economic stress.  This also means that governments and political elites will decrease efforts to cut emissions, continuing the emissions rise that counteracts to some extent the effects of the shrinking economy.  And, at a breaking point, there is a major downward economic shift that represents a major decrease in the global economy’s ability to handle the increasing catastrophes.

All this sounds theoretical.  I would suggest that the likely proximate cause of the breaking point will be agriculture – in other words, feeding ourselves.  I am not just talking the developing world here:  I am talking about the developed nations.  A projection of the world in 2050-2090 shows most temperate-zone areas in extreme drought.  Add to that drawdown of aquifers, loss of winter melt-off, and 55-odd feet of increased reach of salt water into today’s deltas and estuaries that comprise 1/3 of global food-growing, and we are talking about losing up to 90% of the world’s present growing areas, much of this occurring somewhere between 2050 and 2100.  For example, California’s growing areas east of San Francisco provide an amazing amount of the world’s food.  Presently proposed fixes to the dams that keep salt water out of this area, even if they ever get them done, are probably only going to be adequate to handle matters until 2050-2060.  And there’s no obvious comparable area to move that production to.

Is there really anything to be done about all this?  Lots.  But it all involves (a) being far more aggressive on emissions reduction (“mitigation”) and (b) spending much more money now to handle oncoming disasters much further into the future (“adaptation”).  (a) is our only hope for avoiding things being even worse than this; (b) is our hope for making things more tolerable in the horrible future world that we have already created for ourselves, and so increasing our chances of doing (a) well. Let’s be clear on this: even good adaptation won’t avoid the consequences of failure to mitigate.  Protection for our food sources will sooner or later have to face the fact that we will have perhaps 10-20% of the food sources we have now.  Whatever else we do, we need to mitigate first and foremost.

There is one known successful model for doing this: it’s called WW II in America.  We accepted drastic changes in the economy, decreases in food supply, and disruptions in life in order to win the war.  That is what the world could do, or what nations could do – except that this is a war of all against ourselves, in which we do not destroy the enemy unless the enemy effectively resists major changes in its economy and its peoples’ lives.

Failing that, I simply assert from long familial knowledge of politics and governments that there is far, far more that could be done about global warming under the covers than is being done now.  Fundamentally, the ameliorators don’t really believe that this is anything new in human history.  So they don’t take the political chances that they could get away with, and they don’t play dirty politics with the deniers. 

And that brings me back to facing reality.  For the ameliorators, for us all, a key part of the answer lies in facing the realities that I have outlined – and especially the part about the less you do, the worse things get, even beyond where they are now.  And so, my own personal response is simply to say, it ain’t so, rather than keep silent – while making it clear who is worse than whom, and why that matters.

How should we react to the continuing exponential rise in CO2 atmospheric concentration? I would suggest that we begin by facing the real reality of its effects and of our failure to deal with those effects.

 

Yet Again, More Thoughts About Climate Change

Brad deLong just pointed to an article about an interview with Marty Weitzman, an economist who apparently continues to peddle the notion that climate-change-related effects are very uncertain and catastrophic effects very unlikely, but we should do something because the costs of such an unlikely event are very large.

Here's what I said:

With regard to Weitzman:  This might have been a valid point 10 years ago.  Instead, the science has moved on far beyond the 2002 assessment codified as "conservative conclusions" in the 2007 IPCC report.  So let's summarize:

1.  IPCC was not the most likely scenario, merely the minimum scenario of which they could be scientifically certain.  Better assessments have shown that 400 ppm corresponds to an increase of 1 degree F beyond what has happened now globally and 14 degrees in the Arctic, causing a cascade of effects which 3 million years ago resulted in a 100-foot rise in sea level. This would wipe out at least 1/2 the Earth's arable land (in deltas).

2.  It will effectively not be possible to return to a 350 ppm (similar to 1990) climate within the next 1000 years.

3.  The follow-on effects of Arctic melting (e.g., more albedo-related absorption of the sun's heat) will lead to an additional 1 degree F heating due to permafrost melt within the next 70 years, with an additional 1 degree possible from methane release.

4.  Increased water vapor absorption in the atmosphere leads to an increase of perhaps 10 feet higher storm surge and double the wind power of storms per 1 degree Celsius, as already reflected in Hurricane Sandy and to some extent in recent tornadoes.  Movement of the "temperate zone" north in the next 40 years leads to catastrophic drought over almost all of the area from Canada/Soviet Union south to about Argentina/South Africa.  As in the Dust Bowl, periodic torrential rains merely bounce off the hard dirt. Loss of snow cover removes much of the runoff for agriculture, with aquifers now in danger from over-use. Present projections are that this will occur by between 2050 and 2070.

5.  Following on to the September melting of the Arctic ice cap on or before 2016, accelerated Greenland and West Antarctic melting leads to a rise in sea level of 1 foot by 2050 and 15 feet by 2100.  The 100-foot rise in sea level would therefore occur by about 2200.

6. Failure to cut carbon emissions in absolute terms compared to today (that includes the 4.2 reduction by the US -- pathetically inadequate -- over 2008-2011 and the more-than-offsetting increase by China) will lead to 1000 ppm by 2100.  Reaching 550 ppm would lead to an additional 2 degrees C of warming and reaching 1000 ppm would add almost 2.8 degrees beyond that.  We are thus talking about perhaps 13 degrees Fahrenheit rise by 2100, the way we are going.  Sea level would therefore be on a track for a total 220-foot rise, while acidification of the oceans would kill off most sea species and foster iron blooms that might periodically release toxic sulfur fumes on sea-bordering land.

7. "Adaptation" is not a solution by itself, and especially because we are consistently finding solutions that are outdated by the time they are implemented. Cf., again, Sandy and the proposed fixes.  Extremely rapid "mitigation" -- reduction in absolute terms of carbon emissions -- is the only thing that will avoid a situation worse than the one described in 1-4, and somewhere around 2035 the "business as usual" scenario cited in 5 and 6 above becomes the most likely outcome, if we continue as we are.

8. Natural gas (due to methods of production) yields very little mitigation.  Nuclear power is not feasible on a large scale in the next 20 years, and will have difficulties with sea rise and water temperature rise.  Use of all tar sands and oil shale will not only create a worse picture than the one I have painted for 2100, but will put us in serious danger of a "runaway greenhouse gas" effect that would end all life on Earth forever (cf. Venus). 

9. Under "business as usual", today's 0.1% decrease in world GNP growth per year due to climate change would reach the 2-3% level by about 2060, due especially to loss of food supply, but also to governmental coping with disaster.  From then on, the world's economy (including in developed countries) would decrease and the ability of the world to take action about climate change will also decrease. 

10.  There is one possible "magic bullet" (injection of sulfur in the air) via geoengineering, but it would have serious health side-effects and would need to be calibrated and escalated for the next 1000 years, at best.

I repeat, 1-4 is the minimum scenario and 5-10 the presently most likely scenario.  And by misrepresenting the science by casting things in terms of "very low risk of anything bad happening", Weitzman makes his economic analysis wrong and useless.

If you want a reasonable summary of the science, Joe Romm at www.climateprogress.com is probably as close as you're going to get.  Rather than quoting Weitzman as if he offered any useful economic analysis, I suggest that you think carefully about what Joe is saying and develop your own economic analysis.

I suppose I have to repeat yet again the obvious:  this is the opposite of an excuse to throw up your hands and say it's all hopeless.  The longer we delay doing something, the worse it gets, faster and faster.