Friday, December 7, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Civilization: Is It Worth the Trouble?
Civilization: Is It Worth the
Trouble?[1]
George M. Woodwell
I n 1946 the world faced the
troubling thought that the new weapon that had destroyed two Japanese cities had
raised the potential stakes in warfare to mutual annihilation. John Sloan Dickey left a high position and a brilliant
career in the Department of State to take the presidency of Dartmouth College. He opened that first post-war year with an
address to the College under the title: “Cassandra Sits in High Places Today”. We
have been successful now over nearly seventy years, albeit at prodigious
expense, in preventing another intemperate use and restricting the hazard,
however menacing, to mere threat. Meanwhile, a host of other changes have
occurred in fact that have moved the world as a whole several increments toward
the devastation we once envisioned as uniquely associated with a global nuclear
catastrophe.
Today’s daily
global news is a triumvirate of major crises of government, economics, and
environment. A world that was until recently thought to be large enough to
sustain virtually any experiment in government or industrial economic
development has suddenly proven vulnerable far beyond expectations or wishes of
political or economic leaders. The crises are linked through environmental
failures in ways that tax our best minds and assure that we are building a
potentially new world of misery and
chaos.Worse, the changes are rapid, accumulating, and potentially irreversible
in time of interest to those now living.
Seven billion of us today, nine billion tomorrow, are entering a new
world that is increasingly unattractive.
There is
nothing subtle about the changes that are bringing this new world. They are Hurricane
Katrina, strengthened by a super-heated Gulf of Mexico to the point of
destroying New Orleans; BP and its
pollution of the Gulf of Mexico, the largest single pollution event in history
and one of the most devastating; the destruction of the boreal forests of the
Athabasca Tar Sands of Alberta for oil to drive the global fossil fuel-based industrial world; the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters that
each removed thousands, possibly ten thousand, square miles of land from safe
human occupation; the sacrifice zone of
the Southern Appalachians where coal has been mined, the mountains pushed into
the valleys and the land left barren, useless in agriculture or as habitat for
people, the streams poisoned with
acid; the Bhopal Accident in central
India that killed outright in one evening
2-3,00 Indians in December, 1984; the heat of summers that raises the
death tolls of nations such as France and Germany in 2003 to a total of as
many as 30,000; similar heat and drought is said to have killed 50,000
Russians in 2010 when fires in the boreal forest kept Moscow under a cloud of smoke for weeks; and
they include the lives of thousands of substantially enslaved Mexican and other workers trapped in menial jobs in a
poisonous industrial agriculture in the
US for a lifetime. These are corporately generated waste lands, waste waters,
and waste lives , sacrifices to a totalitarian trend in a political-economic
system that is destroying itself while undermining the life support system of
the planet and corrupting the purpose
and potential of a rich and advanced civilization.
The entire
earth is caught in this corporate scramble for profits. It is most conspicuous
in dealing with fossil fuels. The raw materials are drawn from publicly-owned
resources, extracted from the earthly crust using various techniques that
affect the sites in various ways, often profoundly. Easily available oil and
gas supplies have been exhausted. Newer supplies are sought now at greater
depths and by new techniques such as high pressure fracturing to release both
oil and gas from tightly-packed shales. This ”fracking” involves serious
contamination of large quantities of water at great depths and on the surface
as well as destructive surface activities. Hazards from spills are serious and
spills are common as occurred in a deep water oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.
Coal mining on the surface devastates extensive areas as does the surface
mining of tar sands and oil-bearing shales. Those areas can usually never be
restored, at least in time of interest to us.
They, too, are industrial sacrificial zones, impoverished, even poisoned
in the extreme, that are released into public care, well off the accounting
records of the industries. Profits, of course, depend on avoiding as many
costs as possible. Costs that can be pushed into the public realm increase profits.
But then
there are the wastes produced in the use of the coal, oil and gas.. The wastes
are primarily, but not only, carbon dioxide and methane. These two gases are
accumulating in the atmosphere and, through the warming of the earth, poisoning
the world. The effects also are not part of the financial accounting of the
industries. And the industries, aware of
the problem, want to keep it that way and have worked diligently to deny any
problem. Meanwhile profits accumulate
and government, ever sensitive to the sentiments of business and run by
politicians whose re-election hinges on money to run political campaigns,
sustains the process. But the product, a degraded global biosphere, is clearly
not what one might call sustainable use of the biosphere. The climatic
disruption is especially acute in the Arctic where there are large deposits of
organic matter accumulated over thousands of years in tundra soils and in
marine sediments of the coastal zone. The thawing of the Arctic increases the rates of
decay of all organic matter and potentially releases the methane accumulated
through slow decay over thousands of years. The total amounts available are prodigious, enough to overwhelm any human
potential for controlling the crisis of global climate.
Civilization
stands on a triumvirate of systems that must function together complementing
one another in the interest of public welfare. They are:
1. A Governmental System that assures the
human birthright to clean air from the first breath forward throughout a lifetime, clean water, food and a place to thrive in peace and safety. That
latter, peace and safety, has been protected
in every culture by some form of the golden rule well known in our own legal culture as the Principle of Sic Utere. Sic
utere tuo ut alienum non laedas. Use
what belongs to you in such a way as to protect the interests of others.
In the
nominally democratic nations we elect, from the public, individuals to work in government to set the rules under which we live in
equity with one another, have equal
access to resources, and to protect the
public welfare in general. (Some
nations operate outside such norms with a “bunch of thugs in power”. These ABOTIP
nations are outlaws, not models.) Protecting corporate profits at the expense of human morbidity and mortality is not
forthrightly a governmental purpose.
2. An Economic System that offers the tools
for negotiating the necessities of life in a finite world. The economic
system requires firm regulation by government
to deflect the persistent dream that the free market is adequate to protect human rights and common property
such as air, water, and land as well as human
aspirations. It is essential to realize and accept that the purpose of business
is profit, not human welfare. Many fail to realize that the free market system
has produced slavery persistently in the past and produces it in the present when allowed. It has also produced a
chain of corporate disasters, all fed by greed.
It is entirely possible to establish corporate interests and businesses that serve, and are required
to serve, the public welfare. J.G. Speth in his recent book America
The Possible (Yale 2012) treats the topic in detail. He points to the lax regulation of corporate purpose by
pointing to a corporation chartered in Virginia under the title: “License
To Kill” with the purpose of using tobacco to kill 400,000 people a year.
3. An Environmental System that is intact and
functional in maintaining a biosphere
that is self-sustaining and stable as the habitat of all life. Such an objective requires continuous insights from
science as to what is functional and what is not.
These
requirements seem simple enough as the core expectations of civilization. But
they are not now met, locally or globally. And the New World entrained and
already emerging promises far more difficulties than we have seen so far….as
the basic laws of a biophysically limited Earth
are compromised to accommodate political and economic interests.
The core
failure here is the corruption of
governmental purpose by political and economic interests largely focused
on profits. The growth of the corporate culture now dominates. It has grown so
large and wealthy as to constitute what
the political philosopher Wolin at Princeton has called “inverted
totalitarianism” . The Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court only
closes the loop and reinforces the trend. It has put the government in the
hands of corporate interests whose primary purpose is financial profit, not the
public welfare. Corporate interests argue in self-interest that poisoning the world is a small issue,
necessarily secondary to profits, for, of course, if profits fail, so does the
business.
Can we
change this course from a cascading disaster to a New World we can admire and
enjoy with pride as we pass it on to our children?
We can.
1.
The Wolin insight defining the inversion of structure as corporate
totalitarianism is appropriate and, once identified, must be corrected. It is a
fundamental change, essential in an ever tighter world. Money must be taken out
of politics and the core purpose of
government restored. Sic utere applies at all levels.
2. In a finite world the basic laws of
biophysics are immutable. We can return to
recognizing and defending the physical, chemical and biotic integrity of
the biosphere. Several big changes are necessary, two immediately:
a. Reverse
the trend in climate and return over the course of the next century to the 1900 level of heat –trapping gases in the atmosphere, about 300 ppm carbon
dioxide.. (It can be done as I show below.).
b. Correct
trends in industrial activities that lead to chemical corruption of the biosphere. (Close industrial and municipal cycles to
contain wastes specifically to preserve the physical, chemical and biotic
integrity of the biosphere.) There can be no more sacrifice zones, giant mines,
or callous industrial corruption of atmospheric or marine chemistry as we bring
the fossil fueled age to an abrupt close.
What will
it take to reverse the climatic disruption?
At this late date it is a major challenge for a world that has so long
steeped itself in the indulgence that nothing need be done. Now, with a world crisis underway, the change
is the only sensible course.
Here is
what can be done now.
The annual
accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere is between 4 and 5 billion tons. That
is the amount to be removed from current emissions to stabilize the atmosphere
at the present carbon dioxide concentration now approaching 400 ppm. That
residue, 4-5 billion tons of carbon, is
about 50% of the total annual release of
10 billion tons as shown in the table below. It can be removed, reduced
to zero, within a few years by global action in. The first step is clear and
simple: stop further deforestation of primary forests, globally. Such a step
desirable in any case for these forests are one of the earth’s great wonders.
They have many functions in running the biosphere and should be passed intact
to our successors.
Second,
reforestation of normally naturally forested zones to the extent of 1-2 million
square kilometers will store a billion tons of carbon annually. Again, there is
nothing but good for the world in such a change. That leaves at most 1,5-2.5 billion tons of carbon to be removed
by reducing the use of fossil fuels immediately, a 20-33% reduction on a global
basis. It can be done almost immediately
by firm steps in conservation without great harm to any aspect of human welfare
and with many immediate advantages.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Emissions of
Carbon into the Atmosphere Annually
~10
Components Burning Fossil Fuels: ~8.5
Deforestation: ~1.5
Residue accumulating in the Atmosphere Annually 4-5
NB
about 50% of total emission is absorbed into
oceans and terrestrial vegetation..The
residue
accumulates and is the current problem.
Potential for Correcting
Stopping deforestation: ~1.5
Reforestation: 1-2 million. sq km
1-2
Residual to be removed from fossil
fuel emissions now to reach
stability now: 1.5 – 2.5
or
20-33% of the remaining 7.5
emissions under the
least
favorable assumption.
Table 1. Annual
Global Carbon as Carbon Dioxide in billions of tons of Carbon.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Such a step
will meet the objective agreed to by all the nations in the 1992 Framework
Convention on Climate Change .The Convention has been ratified by all nations
including the US, so it is universal law.
But we must
go farther almost immediately to return over the next decades to the approximately
300 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that existed in 1900, only slightly
above the 280 ppm that had existed for 800,000 years before we started the
current excursion of atmosphere and climate. That means an abandonment of
fossil fuels starting immediately and extending over the next very few decades
with the objective of
reducing the atmospheric burden. Speed it important to
deflect the Arctic carbon bomb whose fuse is already burning. There will be
pains in such a transition, environmental, economic, and governmental pains.
But the alternative is an open-ended, accelerating disruption of the earth with
all the sequelae of drought, storms, heat, hunger, disease, sea level rise,
civil unrest and human misery. The New World, if we reach for it effectively,
will be a treasure.
The
transition will entail:
-An
immediate shift away from fossil fuels toward energy conservation and renewable sources of energy using
technologies already available.
-Immediate
steps to produce conveniently available solar powered hydrogen as a way of
storing energy and moving it around.
-A massive
program to put solar hot water panels on every roof nationally and around the
world to provide hot water for all purposes including heating needs.
-A parallel program with solar electric panels
and simple technologies for using the power.
- Developing fleets of solar
charged small electric vehicles for
short-distance travel including
commuting.
- Develope local agricultural
production along with local markets for food.
- Institute major programs for
closing municipal cycles of water, wastes and energy.
The possibilities are infinite and the pleasures, too, But the core
change is in recognizing that the biosphere is, first, a living system, the
product of evolution just as the rest of all life. And it requires our close
attention and care.
I came on a book by Diane Dumanoski
recently. She wrote, “For some, including the
distinguished physician and science essayist Lewis Thomas, the picture taken of
Earth from the moon left little doubt that it was a living whole that inspired
reverence and wonder: [Lewis Thomas
wrote) ‘Viewed from the distance of the
moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth, catching the breath, is that it is
alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the
foreground dead as an old bone. Aloft floating free beneath the moist, gleaming
membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising Earth, the only exuberant thing in
this part of the cosmos… It has the organized, self-contained look of a live
creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun’.
“It is absurd:” she wrote “to insist upon the
sanctity of humans while denying the sanctity of this larger life that enfolds
us. Of the overarching process that gives the Earth its green vitality and has
done so for a longer time than the human mind can conceive, is there not
sacredness as well in the living Earth?”
-
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
A Committee on The Future - July 2012
g
A Committee on The
Future
Future
July 2012
I came back
to my real life this morning from the relative isolation of a day on the farm
in Maine to discover that the world had changed
quite suddenly and drastically. The front pages of the papers looked pretty
much the same except that the Mayor of New York, Mr. Bloomberg, was asking our two candidates for president
just what they proposed to do about the widespread availability of guns like
the automatic weapon used recently to kill and maim Coloradans at a movie. And
both the candidates were bumbling about what a bad thing it was to treat
Coloradans that way but without a single suggestion that anything might be done
to stop such outrages. And on the web Bill
Moyers was pointing out that it was costing the nation billions, perhaps 75
billion, to kill tens of thousands of citizens with guns annually. And the gun
lobby was saying the shooting might have been stopped if there had only been
more guns around to stop him by, presumably, have a gun battle in the movie
house. All of this seems a bit beyond
the edge of civilization.
But then I
turned to the OpEd page of the NYT where a major full column article asserted
that the banks are too big to be regulated, a new thought. They have made a
terrible mess internationally and have lied about their activities. Then they
lobby the Congress and protect their rights to cheat the public and make large
profits for their officers. The article, by Gar Alperovitz, a professor of
political economy at the University of Maryland, says the banks should be
nationalized because “With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed
regulation …big banks can never be controlled as private businesses.” That explains a lot. And I thought we had financial matters well
worked out at his stage in the progressive development of civilization.
Then
daughter Caroline called my attention to Bill McKibben’s latest outburst on the
climatic disruption in which he says all the things we scientists predicted
thirty years ago and wrote about and delivered in testimony to the Congress as
threats are now facts of our world and the sure cause of chaos yet to come
unless we get quickly about the obvious solutions. But those who would cure
demented murderers with more guns would cure environmental destruction and
misery with more heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. McKibben proposes
appropriately that a tax on fossil fuels would help. If only we could extract such sense from
political leaders who are heavily influenced by the wealth of the corporate
lobbyists who have different objectives. McKibben suggests that a systematic effort be made by universities
and retirement funds to divest themselves of
investments in those rogue corporations. They are rogues because they
are still promoting and profiting from oil and coal and gas and clearly wrecking
the earth not only in mining but also by dumping their wastes into the
atmosphere without corporate cost or consequence. The efforts at dis-investment
worked in changing the politics of South
Africa and it might work now here.
Bill is right on almost all points. But a careful
scientist might say “He is probably wrong”
on the assertion that there is still room for more releases of carbon
into the atmosphere. The present burden is already triggering significant
further releases of carbon dioxide and, worse, methane, from soils globally but especially from the
extensive peat of Arctic and boreal forest soils. That statement is fact. Even
the careful scientist would agree that release is likely to grow large enough
to snatch the cure out of human hands and….. assure the collapse of this
civilization. The probability of that event is great enough and the horror of
it is sufficiently real that a shrill warming from science is appropriate. Bill
needs to refreeze the Arctic! Now. that
objective has nothing to do with the dream that a 2 degree C rise might be
tolerable. There is no safety in the 0.8 degree we have now. We seem again to be allowing our corporate
institutions and our governmental control to slip well out of the normal
context of modern civilization.
Then I
stumbled into the discussion between Bill Moyers and Chris Hedges about Hedges
new book. Hedges picks up in that discussion on the same theme: the corporate
wrecking of the earth driven by greed and profits. The wreckage includes the
gross and irreparable impoverishment of land and people. He is rich with examples: the Southern
Appalachians, destroyed completely as a
viable landscape by coal mining; Camden, New Jersey, once a thriving commercial
manufacturing center, now a waste land with wasted people; the Athabasca Tar
Sands, another landscape destroyed for energy.
He marches on:to the whole earth,
climates destroyed undermining all life, by greedy corporate interests
allowed to mine and sell their products without any responsibility for their
wastes that poison the atmosphere of the entire earth.
The cure he
says is a renewal of faith. Faith in people and their interest in treating
others as they wish themselves to be treated.
The responsibility must apply as well to corporations whose systems must
be closed to prevent poisoning or otherwise corrupting the interests of others.
The list
goes on: the future is at risk and there is no clear course. It is time for an
earnest reappraisal of just where we are going. What will work in keeping a
civilization, not on the edge of collapse, but clearly developing onto an earth
capable of supporting organized life indefinitely. It is a scientific challenge
as well as a political and economic conundrum. But the biophysical requirements
seem seriously in question. It is time to organize a high level scientific Committee on the Future. Right now.
`
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Harper’s Canada Rips a Hole in the Global Ship of State
Harper’s Canada Rips
a Hole in the Global Ship of
State
George M. Woodwell[1]
Woods Hole,
Massachusetts
Sometimes
we have to ask just what the purpose of government is. In the nominally democratic nations we elect
our fellow citizens to public office to help define and defend the public
welfare. In the normal course that welfare starts with establishing and
defending rules under which we live with one another. Rules provide equity in human affairs,
including our dealings with each other, and in access to essential resources,
especially those resources that we take as a human birthright: air, water, land, food and a place to live in
peace. The rights are embraced in every
culture and commonly start with the golden rule: deal with others as you would have
them deal with you. Governments build
elaborate laws around that purpose. Courts amplify the laws over decades. And
the rules apply in a well-regulated world of thoughtful and responsible
nations.
As human
numbers increase and technology expands, so do the interactions and points of
friction. Corporate and national and personal interests compete. The frequency
of interactions rises much more rapidly than the numbers of people. It rises in
fact exponentially and the need for regulations protecting the interests of all
soars with it.. Simple arithmetic puts the lie to the common assertions of Tea Party conservatives in the US and of all
others, including Canadians, who claim
that growth in all aspects of human affairs is possible with fewer regulations.
Destruction of laws and regulations developed over decades is willful
destruction of a nation and puts the nation on a rapid slide toward chaos. Commerce
does not regulate itself. Worse, wise
regulation requires detailed insights from science as to how the world works, a
continuing flow of insights as to what will work in defending welfare of the
public.
So it is at the moment in Canada as
the Harper administration systematically destroys laws, regulations and
institutions developed over a century to protect public resources. Jim
MacNeill, a well known Canadian diplomat and former OECD officer in Paris
recently suggested to me that Canada is a model of what the Tea Party and the
rabid right are trying to bring to the U.S.:
“….(Harper) is
now …stripping the statute books of the environmental laws and regulations that
we have fought for since 1968. He is eliminating one environmental program
after another and reducing the environment department to a shadow of its former
self.
“At
first… he talked like a disciple of George W. Bush -- environmental protection
is a burden on the economy which reduces economic growth and kills jobs…..
“A
month ago his Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, on the eve of the
environmental hearings into the Gateway pipeline to China, wrote condemning ‘environmental
and other radical groups’ …(who were later called) ‘terrorists’”.
Elizabeth May, a brilliant and fearless Member of the
Canadian Parliament and long-time conservation leader, wrote to me recently. She could have been writing about
our own House of Representatives which stripped our Science Advisor, John
Holdren, and his Office of Science and Technology Policy:of funds:
“…One of
his first decisions was to unburden himself of the Science Advisor to the Prime
Minister. Dr. Arthur Carty…... When his term ended, it was not continued,
and the position dissolved.”
The Harper administration also has
been cutting budgets for climate science for more than a year. March
ended funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.
A $110 million program over tend years for research on climate in Canada’s
major universities has been eliminated. The entire Adaptation to Climate Change
Research Group was disbanded along with the group within Natural Resources
Canada working on Arctic ice
cores. An 80,000 year climate record in ice cores is to be abandoned
The Canadians have a long and
distinguished and widely used record of research in the Arctic. The global
scientific community was stunned to learn that the Polar Environmental and
Atmospheric Research Laboratory on Ellesmere Island is to close. At 80
degrees north latitude, PEARL was the closest such lab to the North Pole
The Canadians also have a unique
background of experimental data on aquatic ecosystems largely through the
efforts of a single scientist, David Schindler, who had the vision as to what
should be done and led the way through his own distinguished career. Now a rich
resource, the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario is to close. Fifty-eight
fresh water lakes 250 kilometres east of Winnipeg have been the testing ground
for freshwater research since the late 1960s. .In the House a week ago,
the Parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Fisheries announced that it will
be sold to private interests.
The list goes on. The Yukon Research Lab at Yukon College
in Whitehorse is to close. The $2.7 million facility only opened last
fall – October 2011- is to focus on research that is “business-led and
industry-relevant”.The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is ending its
national contaminants programme. 75 scientists, many with long careers invested studying
marine toxicology across Canada, are being laid off. According to Dr. Peter Ross “The entire
pollution file for the government of Canada, and marine environment in Canada’s
three oceans, will be overseen by five junior biologists…” These cuts are being
made as huge areas of the Beaufort Sea are being leased for oil drilling.
The common assumption of such libertarian
views is that the market system is adequate to protect essential resources and
ration them to all users. But the failures of the market to protect the public
welfare are legion and conspicuous around the world. The market system gave us
slavery and will again, given the chance.
Management of human affairs and essential resources lies at the very
core of governmental function. Harper’s minions and the US far right, including
the Tea Party, deny the core purpose of government.
>
G.M.
Woodwell is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole
Massachusetts, scientist, member of the
NAS , author and lecturer.
[1]
Woodwell is Founder and Director
Emeritus, The Woods Hole Research Center; Member, NAS; conservationist, author, lecturer.
Monday, April 16, 2012
IPCC 2012 A Reasonable Objective-An Unfortunate Emphasis
IPCC 2012
A Reasonable Objective-An Unfortunate Emphasis
George M. Woodwell
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been regularly attacked by
critics for representing the scientific community’s experience and data on the
global disruption of climate as a global problem. Their treatments of that
topic, however, have been scrupulously probing and objective despite the
obvious threats to human welfare. Their
objectivity has been guarded by scientists who in my view have weakened interpretations
of existing data, sometimes their own, and limited their presentations unnecessarily
to avoid criticism from more conservative scientists and from the political
right, ever poised to leap on any sign of opinion. The entire process of
publication is open to political review and criticism before publication,
further extinguishing any flicker of bias or opinion. The institution has done well in suppressing
judgments and presenting well-defended data. One of the effects of that highly
refined approach has been to limit
participants, excluding de facto potential scientific participants. Some
scientists of whom I am one, are alarmed by the consequences of changing
climates out from under all life. They are impatient and unwilling to concede
ignorance of consequences that are known to be real, however unpopular with others.
Eliminating such perspectives introduces
a clear bias never discussed.
A new
report appears in its title to abandon that carefully crafted objectivity.
“Managing The Risks of Extreme Events and Disaster to Advance Climate Change
Adaptation” can be interpreted as accepting the awkward but unfortunately
popular conclusion that nations can muddle through by accommodating the
climatic disruption…and the scientific community will help tell how. The report
itself does little to alter that impression offering as it does a clinical
dissection and interpretation of ‘risks’ in
500 page document. It might have been much more effective as well as
appropriate to avoid the suggestion of
“adaptation” as a policy and emphasize “mitigation’ of both cause and
effects throughout. Otherwise the merchants of poison appear to get all that
they want. Mitigation is in fact the
only realistic objective, for the disasters discussed are unacceptably multiplying
tragedies, however modulated in the dissection . A journalistic propensity for
a balanced treatment might lead to a discussion of what can now be done to
stabilize the composition of the atmosphere.
All nations have agreed to do so under the Framework Convention on
Climate Change of 1992, a very important treaty that was virtually universally
ratified and cannot be ignored. Such an analysis might reach even further to what
might be done to reverse the trend, however difficult and long-term that process
may be.
“Adaptation”
to accelerating continuous climatic disruption as a policy is optimism run
wild. Those advocating it set conditions that make it sound reasonable: ‘we
must accept the changes already induced and correct for them”; “we shall continue
to work to halt the trend and reverse it, but meanwhile, we must adapt”. Alas,
those palliatives are attractive but misleading. This document unfortunately
suggests the acceptance of a decision to allow the continued accumulation of
the tragedy. Such an acceptance would be a confession to the industrial world
that we shall continue on a suicidal course and the scientific community will
help. Surely, the IPCC can emerge with a more powerful statement of the most
serious disruption of life on earth short of social and political collapse into
universal war.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
The Upper Amazon: February 21, 2012
The
Upper Amazon: February 21, 2012
The following is a brief word from
Foster Brown, the WHRC’s staff member and decades-long resident of Rio Branco
in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon Basin. He offers a glimpse into the future
of climatic disruption’s ramifications. GMW
Here in the southwestern Amazon we are undergoing floods of historic proportions. Already more than five thousand displaced persons are living in public shelters. The flooding in the Peruvian border town of Inapari extended more than an kilometer from the normal banks, a flood exceeding all previous floods in living or recounted memories. I had the strange experience of cruising up main street in a civil defense boat, watching our wake lap against shopping windows.
We are anticipating that the flood crest of the Acre River should peak today in Rio Branco, which is already at the second highest level in 40 years. My job has been to help implant a early warning system for flooding; the system worked but needs improvements. However, since everyone in the region has been hit with the metaphorical two-by-four to get our attention, my guess is that we will have a better system working shortly, just in time for the fires of the dry season.
About 200 Haitians in Inapari have suffered a double whammy of being barred from entering Brasil and then flooded out of their temporary refuge in a Catholic church. I have met several who manage one meal a day, if they are lucky."
---------
It is becoming virtually impossible
to write realistically, or to report honestly, the details of systematic global disruption now underway
without appearing to be slipping into hyperbole. The statement below on “Adaptation”
for instance was rejected recently by
Bruce Alberts, Editor of Science, as “unbalanced”. One wonders what “balance”
might be and just how objective perspectives are even at Science.GMW
Monday, February 6, 2012
ADAPTATION: Adrift in a Cloud of Fantasy
________________________________
ADAPTATION: Adrift in a
Cloud of Fantasy
January 2012
There is virtually no aspect of
human affairs that is not affected by the cloud of uncertainty enveloping the
earth as the climatic disruption proceeds. The density of the cloud varies with
the beholder. At one end there is imaginative and vigorous denial based on financial interests in the commerce
of energy. Among scientists, too, there is a range of views
from skepticism to hyper-objectivity bordering on denial, to deep concern. Many
of these latter recognize that changing climate out from under all life,
including oceans, forests and agriculture, presents a lethal threat to this
civilization in the short term of years to decades. They understand that the
current slide can easily become a cascade into a chaos that will reduce the
human population to a fraction of its current
seven billion. That slide may be anticipated as the large pools of
carbon stored in the Arctic peats and in the trees and soils of the Boreal
Forest are mobilized by the warming and cook the planet. The fuse of the potential
carbon bomb of high latitudes in the northern hemisphere is now lit. The only sure cure is stabilizing, and then
reducing, the temperature of the earth.
The most common response appears to
be exasperated cries for “realism” and for simply adapting to the changes as
they occur: business as usual. “Realism”
as envisioned by economists and an increasing number of scientists asserts no
chance of success in abandoning fossil fuels. In that view there is the
necessity for adaptation, accepting the changes already experienced and
anticipating more. That process becomes the policy, sustained by the hope of
muddling through. But the “policy of
adaptation” is blind to the lethal feedbacks that take the climatic disruption
to new and unacceptable extremes. A
limit on the extent of the warming has already been established in the public
eye as a two degree C rise in the average temperature of the earth. That limit
was a compromise established as a political and economic convenience, not a
scientific consensus. The possibility of allowing the earth to warm to that
level and not higher has never been established, only asserted on the basis of
dreams supported by wishful thinking. The warming that has already occurred is
at least marginally controllable by bold action now. Would control still be possible after an
average change in the temperature of the earth of two degrees and the Arctic
warmed by as much as 4-6 degrees? Almost
certainly not.
Despite the success of the
Framework Convention on Climate Change signed in Rio in 1992 and subsequently
ratified universally, seventeen Conferences of the Parties have failed to
produce progress. Progress would
constitute effective action toward
stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere with respect to the heat
trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide.
Over the years immediately following such a success, emissions from
fossil fuels would have to be reduced further to maintain the equilibrium and,
if the concentration in air were to be lowered further as it should be, fossil
fuels would have to be substantially abandoned over several years.
While an honest judgment may
require skepticism as to the possibility of political action in abandoning
fossil fuels, this skepticism should not be confused with skepticism towards the evolving facts of climate
science. Basing policy on political or
corporate opposition and the myth of adaptation amounts to an abandonment of
hope and is a commitment to runaway climatic disruption. The response to such
an assertion is, of course, denial: “we shall take every opportunity to reduce
emissions and deflect the course of the warming”. Meanwhile, that policy
accedes to the skeptics’ position and reduces substantially to zero any
possibility of success in deflection. It assures the economic, social and
political chaos of environmental collapse.
The only viable stance for
scientists and politicians is persistent, relentless optimism supported by
imaginative and equally relentless efforts in research and public affairs: insistence that the
remaining primary forests globally be conserved as is, that 1-2 million square
kilometers of normally naturally
forested land be reforested with natural
forests, and that fossil fuels be systematically abandoned within the decade
before 2020. The transition can be to a new world, one our children can, and
will want to live in. It will not be the analog of Haiti and Somalia of this
moment, but a variant of new “green cities” and “transitional towns”
set in an environment wherein forests
and fertile soils and all other life are as protected as in a park. We must
envision, design and start building them now. There is no other way.
George M. Woodwell
Woods Hole, Massachusetts
January
2012
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