This is an extraordinary image (thanks to Trina for sharing): Polar bear confronts an icebreaker. And depending on your feelings about the collision between man and his technology and the natural world, it is profoundly sad.
Naturally, it cries out for a caption contest. Let me know what your caption would be. I’m going with:
“Will you just stop already!?”
Or maybe: “Back it up, Dude.”
(click image for full size)
A new campaign is making the moral argument for combatting climate change:
“We believe it’s time to talk about our moral obligation to prevent the human suffering created by climate change, to safeguard the poor and most vulnerable communities from harm they did not create, and to protect the natural environment that is the source of all life,” said campaign coordinator Bob Doppelt, executive director of the Resource Innovation Group, a nonprofit association affiliated with Willamette University.
My reaction is: Well, or course, and thanks for putting it so succinctly.” And: “Wasn’t it time to start talking about this about, um, 30 years ago.”
Anyhow, remember the sentiment, because it is the right one. But also remember that it comes way too late.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t address climate change. We should, because limiting it matters. But we are also in an era where we, and the biosphere, will be forced to try and adapt to enormous environmental change. And there is no knowing how that story will play out.
There’s a gazillion blogs out there, so you have to love any attempt to cut through the clutter. Here’s Outside’s take on the Ten Best Enviro blogs (click here to read about how they approached making this list):
10. Grist and Treehugger (Tie)
9. OnEarth Blog
8. The Guardian: Environment Blog
7. Discovery News: Earth
6. High Country News: The Goat
5. The Cleanest Line
4. The New York Times: Dot Earth
3. Mother Jones: Blue Marble
2. Yale Environment 360
1. The New York Times: Green
I was already on to about half of these. But #s 5-8 are new to me, and worth exploring.
Or should it be “We can’t handle the truth!”
This is all you need to know about the level of denial in our political culture regarding climate change: a new NOAA office to consolidate climate info has been shot down:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wanted to reshuffle its offices to establish a National Climate Service akin to the agency’s National Weather Service. It asked for no new funding to do so.
But in a political climate where talk of the earthly kind of climate can be radioactive, the answer in last week’s budget deal was “no.” Congress barred NOAA from launching what the agency bills as a “one-stop shop” for climate information.
Demand for such data is skyrocketing, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco told Congress earlier this year. Farmers are wondering when to plant. Urban planners want to know whether groundwater will stop flowing under subdivisions. Insurance companies need climate data to help them set rates.
But the climate service, first floated under President George W. Bush, became predictably politicized.
It would be nice if the story were more explicit about who politicized the idea, and killed it. But whatever.
Anyhow, of course there’s only one way to fittingly honor this willful denial:
It’s hard to know how to respond to the overwhelming sense that the priorities and inertia of human culture are trashing the planet. But I just came across a thought-provoking review of a fascinating book. Revolutions That Made The Earth, which helps frame the choices.
First off, the book is about how life on earth has previously adapted to dramatic change, and it argues something critical: that the forces humanity has set in motion, particularly with regard to climate, are going to cause major transformations to earth no matter what we do now. In other words, an Apocalyptic change is coming. Here is how the book explains it:
Even the normally cheerful and creative Jim Lovelock argues that we are already doomed, and nothing we can do now will stop the Earth system being carried by its own internal dynamics into a different and inhospitable state for us. If so, all we can do is try to adapt. We disagree—in our view the game is not yet up. As far as we can see no one has yet made a convincing scientific case that we are close to a global tipping point for ‘runaway’ climate change.
[…]
Yet even without truly ‘runaway’ change, the combination of unmitigated fossil fuel burning and positive feedbacks from within the Earth system could still produce an apocalyptic climate for humanity. We could raise global temperature by up to 6 °C this century, with more to come next century. On the way there, many parts of the Earth system could pas their own thresholds and undergo profound changes in state. These are what Tim [Lenton] and colleagues have called ‘tipping elements’in the climate system.
They warrant a book by themselves, so we will just touch on them briefly here. The tipping elements include the great ice sheets covering Greenland and West Antarctica that are already losing mass and adding to sea level rise. In the tropics, there are already changes in atmospheric circulation, and in the pattern of El Niño events. The Amazon rainforest suffered severe drought in 2005 and might in the future face a climate drying-triggered dieback, destroying biodiversity and adding carbon to the atmosphere. Over India, an atmospheric brown cloud of pollution is already disrupting the summer monsoon, threatening food security. The monsoon in West Africa could be seriously disrupted as the neighboring ocean warms up. The boreal forests that cloak the northern high latitudes are threatened by warming, forest fires and insect infestation. The list goes on. The key point is that the Earth’s climate, being a complex feedback system, is unlikely to respond in an entirely smooth and proportional way to significant changes in energy balance caused by human activities.
Okay, let that sink in for a bit.
Then, as mathematical physicist John Baez on his Azimuth blog notes, they suggest two responses to this Apocalyptic scenario, which Baez quotes:
RETREAT:
A popular answer to apocalyptic visions of the future is retreat, into a lower energy, lower material consumption, and ultimately lower population world. In this future world the objective is to minimize human effects on the Earth system and allow Gaia to reassert herself, with more room for natural ecosystems and minimal intervention in global cycles. The noble aim is long-term sustainability for for people as well as the planet.
There are some good and useful things we can take from such visions of the future, especially in helping to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, achieve greater energy efficiency, promote recycling and redefine what we mean by quality of life. However, we think that visions of retreat are hopelessly at odds with current trends, and with the very nature of what drives revolutionary changes of the Earth. They lack pragmatism and ultimately they lack ambition. Moreover, a retreat sufficient to forestall the problems outlined above might be just as bad as the problems it sought to avoid.
REVOLUTION:
Our alternative vision of the future is of revolution, into a high energy, high recycling world that can support billions of people as part of a thriving and sustainable biosphere. The key to reaching this vision of the future is to learn from past revolutions: future civilizations must be fueled from sustainable energy sources, and they must undertake a greatly enhanced recycling of resources.
Baez writes that he thinks that we could have a combination of Apocalypse and Revolution:
For now, I would just like to suggest that ‘apocalypse’ and ‘revolution’ are not really diametrically opposed alternatives. All three previous revolutions destroyed the world as it had been!
For example, when the Great Oxidation occurred, this was an ‘apocalypse’ for anaerobic life forms, who now struggle to survive in specialized niches here and there. It only seems like a triumphant ‘revolution’ in retrospect, to the new life forms that comfortably survive in the new world.
So, I think we’re headed for a combination of apocalypse and revolution: the death of many old things, and the birth of new ones. At best we have a bit of influence in nudging things in a direction we like. I don’t think ‘retreat’ is a real option: nostalgic though I am about many old things, time always pushes us relentlessly into new and strange worlds.
And I would say I agree. Except I want to add that this does not seem like a very appealing future to me. Both Baez and Revolutions That Made The Earth more or less dismiss Retreat as unrealistic (though Baez does indicate he would find it appealing). They could be right. They probably are right. But Retreat–with its emphasis on conservation, anti-consumerism, and balance with the natural world–has to be the central theme of the Revolution (though I wouldn’t call it Retreat, I would call it something more positive). In fact, it is the key to real revolution. And while technology, which seems to be at the core of the Revolution scenario, might give us a world in which we can survive, it doesn’t really promise a world in which we can LIVE.
Humanity may not have developed a lot of wisdom about how to live in harmony with the earth, but we sure have developed a lot of smart technology. And given all the global trend lines (climate change, resource depletion, pollution) the ever-expanding (encroaching?) human experiment has set in motion, and the inability for politics or culture to slow or reverse them, you have to pray that technology, somehow, will help bail us out.
Here’s the sort of tech that feeds that hope: the potential for electric cars to store and feed power back into the grid when needed (and, most important when it comes to human behavior, make the owner money).
This story explains how it all works, and it sounds pretty promising (though, of course, car manufacturers are resisting):
For 15 years, [Willett] Kempton, who directs the University of Delaware’s Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration, has pushed the idea that fleets of electric vehicles — rather than being another big draw on the electric grid — could provide valuable backup power on demand to utilities. This would reduce the need for costly new generating plants, and help ensure a reliable supply of electricity.
Utilities pay each other billions of dollars a year for such backup power through wholesale electricity markets, and Kempton believes that a hefty slice of that pie could be paid to electric-vehicle owners instead. Some industry analysts agree that the approach, known as “vehicle-to-grid,” could take off; a December 2010 report from the business research firm Global Data conservatively projected a global market for vehicle-to-grid that would pay $2.3 billion to electric vehicle owners by 2012 — and $40 billion by 2020.
Kempton, according to the story, earns $300 a month with his car, a Scion xB, which makes me want to re-think my car ownership.
Cars did an awful lot to help create our mess. This is a perfect example of how technology can be transformative.
Here’s a bit more on the idea, from DiscoveryNetworks:
Well, even something short of that would not be good. But over at Grist, climate economist Nicholas Stern explains why the answer is “yes.”
Lord Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most prominent climate economists, believes that failure to address global warming could eventually lead to World War III. In 2006, he produced the “Stern Review” on behalf of the British government, clearly laying out the potentially catastrophic economic consequences of failing to address climate pollution. Since then, the scientific understanding of the damages from global warming has grown, and Stern has warned that his report “underestimated the risks.” In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Stern described his current understanding of the stark consequences of inaction, which defy the scope of standard economic language. If no global policy to cut carbon pollution is enacted, there is about a 50 percent risk that global temperatures would rise above levels not seen for 30 million years by 2100, an extraordinary rate of change. The “potentially immense” consequences of this radical transformation of our planet, Stern explained, include the “serious risk of global war.”
Okay, he also seeks relevance. But in an age where we know the way we live is completely out of synch with the world we live in, you have to take answers (or suggestions) where you can find them. So while it would be easy to dismiss the plummy tones of this latest jeremiad from HRH, The Prince Of Wales, it’s more important to consider the fact that he is, well, right.
Here is the trailer for what he is on about.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The full Harmony website is here, and thanks to NBC you can watch the whole Harmony program on Hulu. If it moves you, there is some cool social media to play with, and lots of action to take.
The scale of change required, of course, is far beyond what most people–even those who like what HRH has to say–are willing to contemplate. More on that later.
But it doesn’t hurt to be talking about it, especially in such an interesting voice.
Americans like things BIG: cars, serving portions, houses.
So how much more space per capita does the average American new home have compared to the rest of the world? Plenty.
Next it would be interesting to know how much more energy per capita our large houses consume, but you get the picture.
We are entering an age in which we need to scale back. A lot. Good to know that there is plenty of excess to trim.
Check out the world’s smallest house, which measures in at 96 square feet.
Here, take a tour:
When President Carter called for a 55 mph national speed limit in response to the 1970s Arab oil embargo there was a national outcry, and car manufacturers were not far from a decades-long binge on massive cars with powerful engines that could propel them nicely at speeds far in excess of the pokey 55 mph (recent research indicates that given an open road, Americans choose to cruise at 70 mph).
But with oil saturating the Gulf of Mexico, billions of American dollars a year going to nasty, hostile, dictatorships, and climate change slowly throttling the planet, I’ve been waiting for someone, somewhere, to make the case again for slowing down. And according to WIRED, someone has. And the new number is–drumroll–50 mph!
Everyone knows easing up on the accelerator can improve your fuel economy and reduce your emissions. But what kind of impact would it have on the environment if everyone had to slow down?
A potentially big one, as it turns out.
Dutch researchers say lowering the speed limit to 80 km/h (50 mph) would cut transportation-related CO2 emissions by 30 percent. Less drastic cuts in maximum speed would yield reductions of 8 to 21 percent, according to the study by CE Delft.
How?
Beyond significantly reducing the amount of fuel vehicles burn, a strictly enforced 50 mph speed limit would increase the time required to cover a given distance. That would lead many people facing long commutes to ditch cars in favor of other modes of transport, like rail. Longer term, the impact could prompt people to move closer to urban centers.
Okay, I’ll give it a shot. There’s no reason to rush anymore, anyhow, because we are still fully plugged in via our smartphones, even when we are stuck in a car (kidding, cyclists, kidding. Sort of…).
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