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Climate change

Doubt-mongering: Undead in Our Times

by fred on November 30, 2011

I’ll just give you home work this morning. Read all of the quote below from the book, Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes.

Watch the video of her presentation. (> 1 hr) Buy the book for yourself for Christmas, then loan it out widely among your doubt-ridden friends: it’s not entirely their fault. They’ve been intentionally infected.

Oreskes reads a passage from her book, including the following (starting at 38:10 in the video):

“Imagine a gigantic, colossal banquet. Hundreds of millions of people come to eat. They eat and drink to their hearts’ content, eating food that is better and more abundant than at the finest tables in ancient Athens, or Rome or even in the palaces of midieval Europe. Then one day a man arrives wearing a white dinner jacket.”

It is, Oreskes explains, the waiter — and he is holding the bill. She continues:

“Not surprisingly the diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal. One diner suggests the man is not really a waiter, but is only trying to get attention for himself or to raise money for his own projects. Finally the group concludes that if they simply ignore the waiter, he will go away.

This is where we stand today on the question of global warming. For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels and the bill has now come due. Yet we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes famously summarized all of economic theory in a single phrase: “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” And he was right. We have experienced prosperity unmatched in human history. We have feasted to our hearts’ content. But the lunch was not free.

So it is not surprising that many of us are in denial. After all we didn’t know that it was a banquet — and we didn’t know that there would be a bill. But now we do know. The bill includes acid rain, and the ozone hole and the damaged produced by DDT. These are the environmental costs of living the way citizens of wealthy developed nations have lived since the industrial revolution. Now we either have to pay the price, change the way we do business, or both.

No wonder the merchants of doubt have been successful. They’ve permitted us to think we could ignore the waiter, while we haggled about the bill. The failure of the United States to act on global warming as well as the long delays between when the science was settled and when we acted on tobacco, acid rain and the ozone hole are prima facie empirical evidence that doubt-mongering works.”

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Polar Bears Climb Cliffs to Eat Bird Eggs

by fred on May 27, 2010

So what if birds fly south later or polar bears have to leave the disappearing sea ice earlier. Big deal. What do we care, say those who are happy if their own personal plans are not threatened this week by global climate chaos.

Tell that to the snow geese and murres. Polar bears are becoming resourceful—apparently independently in different locations discovering the same new source of food—by going places they typically have not gone and anatomically are not designed to safely go.

Mountain goats, they are not. Look at the size of them, perched on the vertical side of a cliff, with their big soft, flat paws– not the spiked crampons of a mountain goat by any means. And the nesting birds are not adapted to hide or protect their nests, evolved where such predation has not until now been an issue.

This is just one instance of how global climate shift will continue to disrupt ecological relationships in place for tens of thousand generations and more. Little wonder the coming era is being called the Sixth Extinction or the “Anthropocene” and will likely extinguish an enormous number of the species we grew up with.

Have we grown so numerous and so invasive that there is no more “wild” left? Mankind has permanently altered nature to the extent that

* There’s nearly six times as much water held in storage (e.g., behind dams) as there is in free-flowing rivers.
* About 50 percent of the world’s surface area has been converted to grazing land or cultivated crops.
* And only 17 percent of the world’s land area in 1995 was untouched by the direct influence of humans (such as agriculture, roads or even nighttime lights

“There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people,” write the authors. “In the modern world, wilderness is more commonly a management and regulatory designation than truly a system without a human imprint.”

Bill McKibben says our children and all those who come after us will inherit a planet so foreign, we need to change its name—from the familiar Earth to the vaguely familiar alien-flavored Eaarth.

That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we’ve managed to damage and degrade. We can’t rely on old habits any longer.

Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

Someone asked me the other day if I didn’t feel like we were living in a science fiction novel of epic proportion. The answer is yes. But this is no fiction. And we are not characters stuck by fate in an unalterable script. But we are not far from that fate.

And in the novel, I imagine: the people out of necessity come to like the taste of ants and acorns.

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We Can’t Stop Climate Change. But We Can Act.

by fred on October 21, 2009

...for God so loved the world...

...for God so loved the world...

In the face of challenge, there is hope, McKibben said. “There’s no guarantee we’ve started in time,” he said of citizen action on the 350-goal. “But at least we’ve started.”

More than 4200 climate actions in at least 170 countries: yes, I think we’ve started. And finally, the churches are coming on board.  Here’s a good summary and recent talk by McKibben from the pulpit of Memorial Church as reported in the Harvard Gazette.

Join us (in the rain) in downtown Floyd on October 24 when our climate action (October 10) becomes a starting point for a future-generations focus on sustainability and resiliency in our local economy and community at the SplitRail Eco-Fair.

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