President Obama at the 150th Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences

President Obama at the 150^th Meeting of

the National Academy of Sciences

George M. Woodwell

          It was an overflow crowd in the Auditorium in the newly renovated building of the National Academy at 2101 Constitution Avenue on the 29^th of April. It was first come, first served and some had been waiting for hours to hear the President of the United States address the Academy on its’ 150^th anniversary. Electronics expanded the audience to those far away who could listen as I did.  Many remembered when John F. Kennedy as President had taken the same podium just 100 years after Abraham Lincoln had founded the Academy.   John Holdren, President Obama’s Science
Advisor and a member of the Academy, said a few brisk, well spoken words of introduction before Ralph Cicerone, President of the Academy, introduced Mr. Obama.

            Expectations were high. There has never been a moment when a sitting president  faced more intense scientifically defined and obviously dangerous challenges to the public welfare than this president faces at this moment.  The global addiction to fossil fuels has been allowed to run its course beyond the limits of safety to the moment when the climatic change is tipping beyond the point of reversibility. Once that point has been  passed, if it is in fact real as experience suggests and many believe, the feedbacks will be in control and the earth will warm by many degrees despite our attempts to mitigate the process. We will have made a commitment to a rapid warming that can melt all the glacial ice in the world and raise sea level by considerably more than 200 feet.  Continental centers, already afflicted by persistent droughts, will be parched.  Regions will be periodically flooded. Millions will starve. Chaos will reign. The timing for these changes is not the indefinite future. It is now, today, conspicuous, and it is the next decades and the lifetimes of people now living.   

            To deal with this catastrophe we have powerful resources in the form of scientific insights and talents and energy. But all of that must be led and fed with political insights and skill, which is the realm of government. The initiative lies uniquely with the President of the United States and the Congress. It is true that this president has been repeatedly rebuffed by a House of Representatives dominated presently by vandals, a faction of Republicans, who do not believe in government and have done their best to dismantle it. But no one should yield to such vandalism, least of all a president. And a president addressing the pre-eminent scientific institution can assume he is among staunch friends and supporters. He can and must call on those colleagues to join him in a rapid national, and ultimately international, shift away from fossil fuels toward a world of  renewable energy and landscapes carefully managed to preserve their massive carbon stores in plants and soils.  Scientists can, and must, join in leading the way with new technology and existing insights into global biophysics, now ignored.  

             Alas, the President offered none of that. It was friendly talk. No challenge, no inspiration, no hope beyond soft platitudes.  He urged scientists to generate “science-based initiatives to help us minimize and adapt to global threats like climate change”.  It was a gracious, fine talk.  But on the most important scientific issue of his time in office and the next century he gave the day, and possibly the world, to the Republicans and their congressional and corporate friends.

Woodwell is  Distinguished Scientist at the NRDC and Emeritus Founder and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.  He is a member of the NAS.e is He is

The Ultimate Subsidy: Giving the World Away

The Ultimate Subsidy:  Giving the World Away

George M. Woodwell

            There has been a great deal of discussion of just how we subsidize the various segments of the fossil fuel business.  The basic assumption is that the energy is a necessary public resource and the corporations providing it do a public service. Access to the  raw material is facilitated at modest cost to the companies. Taxes are often either not assessed  or minimal. And mines and drilling sites are often not regulated or controlled to protect other resources or even the workers. In some cases direct subsidies are provided nominally to encourage production. Mines are notorious for disasters, all of which are predictable and preventable in well run operations. Similarly, oil and gas drilling are noteworthy for spills and  for air and water contamination as well as for serious accidents. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was the worst of many, but was also the product of careless management. These “accidents” all carry public costs that are not assigned to the industry but are virtually all accepted by the public as part of the cost of having the industry and the convenience of  cheap energy. They are in fact, public subsidies paid by all of us, but some more than others..

            In other cases direct financial subsidies have been provided by legislatures, including the US Congress to encourage local businesses.

            But the largest subsidy of all is the acceptance of the wastes of the industry,  the carbon dioxide and methane and black carbon and noxious hydrocarbons dumped into the atmosphere globally at no cost to the industry and without limit.  The cost is appearing now: it is the cost to the public of the corruption of climate globally. Inasmuch as the climates of the earth are both result and cause of the natural communities that are the biosphere,  this corruption undermines all life on earth.  It threatens human welfare globally, destroys agriculture, increases mortality rates, and renders increasing areas uninhabitable for part or all of  the year.  Worse, the warming triggers feedback systems that speed the warming and make it more severe. If the warming continues it will melt all the ice on earth and  raise sea level by more than 200 feet. This subsidy is the ultimate in subsidies, the whole earthly environment, handed free of charge, to the fossil fuel industry to feed industrial profits. And those industries have not hesitated at all to deny the effects, obscure them, and insist on continuing the corruption as long as they can.

            We have handed the fossil fuel industry the entire future of the earth and all of human welfare. And we have done it willingly and openly, accepting the arguments of the industries that it should be that way.

            It is time now for an abrupt change starting with heavy taxes on fossil fuels as we close down their use rapidly and totally. Globally.

Dear President Obama

                                                                                                      February 27, 2013
Dear President Obama:

    We are scholars long involved in exploring the causes, effects and potential cures of the climatic disruption  We are certain that you are  aware that the crisis of climate is devouring the GDP’s of nations, and human welfare outside the GDP’s, as inexorably as its swollen storms and rising seas are filling New York’s subways. We deplore the hoax of Adaptation, and its forlorn corollary of muddling through, advanced by corporate interests in preserving the lucrative fossil fuels business as long a possible. We observe that you are, uniquely,  in the most powerful position at this moment to check the momentum and start a correction of the chaos that will end this civilization. The long-term objective, of course,  is a re-stabilized climatic system and a revitalized civilization built around renewable energy.  But for the moment we urge:

1.    Reject immediately the proposal for any pipeline or other innovations to support the tar-sand oil development.
2.    Simultaneously announce a  major US effort to meet the objectives agreed to by all nations under the  1992  Framework Convention on Climate Change, namely, stability in the composition of the atmosphere.
3.    That objective must be supplemented by a national program designed to help all nations join us in reducing the atmospheric burden of heat-trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide, over the next century, to 1900 levels.
4.    That objective will require an abrupt turn away from fossil fuels and their further production anywhere. Developing the alternatives opens large opportunities to industry that the US can subsidize and encourage in various ways, using those opportunities to leap over the fiction of a US financial crisis.
5.    The initiative will require a revision of forest management to the world’s everlasting advantage.  All remaining  primary forests must be preserved to avoid further releases  of carbon from deforestation. Second, forests can be restored to all normally naturally forested regions. That  is a necessary step to provide in part for the continued removal of  carbon from the atmosphere over the next decades. (The human benefits in land and water management globally are prodigious.)

    This transition is an essential turn in human affairs if we are to avoid a cascade of substantially irreversible changes in the structure of the biosphere that will make it far less congenial as a human habitat as the arctic and boreal zones warm over the next years and flood the world with carbon  The world is no longer large enough in proportion to human needs for us to shrug off corporate profligacy  and assume all will be well. Our world is now, as the subways of New York,  yielding and shrinking before a rising sea of troubles.

    Yours truly,     s/ 7.2 billion of us

GUNS

GUNS

2013

            Guns have one purpose.

            There was a time when I, as a young naval person stood deck watches in port on a small oceanographic ship. The Officer of the Deck normally carried a gun as part of his badge of office. But the rule was never to remove the gun from its very secure holster unless you intend to load it and use it. In my three years of experience it was never removed from the holster by anyone on duty.  

            Several months back I had an occasion to stay overnight in Riverside, California. The morning paper announced that the previous day two young men had been killed, shot dead , by two different police officers  in two different parts of town. Both young men had been driving and each had been stopped for a traffic violation. Each got out of his car carrying a gun. Each police officer, well trained, aware of well defined assumptions about guns and their only purpose, did his duty. Two armed fools died, killed by their own guns.

            Carrying guns does not provide safety or security. It opens a large new realm of hazards, insecurity, that few gun owners have given much thought to at all and the gun culture, gun clubs, and gun salesmen all want to deny. Further it invites the more foolish to treat guns as toys and indulge in play that can easily turn accidentally lethal, if not criminally so.

            And there are guns that should not be allowed at all. Automatic weapons have no use in hunting. Anti-aircraft weapons have no business in public circulation. 

            Cars have the same lethal potential. We register them and license their drivers. We also tax both.  We regulate the quality and safety of cars and the competence of drivers. There is every reason to do the same with guns and those who own or use them for any purpose. And the ammunition can be labeled as well, each projectile and shell can be marked indelibly so there is no question as to ownership. These innovations are not intrusions on freedom. They are an obviously necessary step in protecting the freedom of all, the health and safety of the public. Such regulations are an essential part of civilization, a reason for establishing and maintaining competence in governments.

            The size of the gun lobby and the magnitude of the economic interests in guns only confirm the propriety of putting the entire industry under a clear and fair regulatory regime immediately. We must do that to avoid the obvious dangers we all face from an unregulated industry that is poisoning society as surely as any other unregulated industrial poison that can circulate in the biosphere and corrupt all life.

                                                            G.M.Woodwell.

                                                            Woods Hole. Massachusetts

                                                             January 10, 2013

  

           

HAITI 2013

 HAITI 2013

            Why?

            Why does Haiti remain, year after year, leader after leader, hope after dashed hope, program after program, perpetually a candidate for the top place, the most impoverished and wretched of the three or four conspicuously failed nations of the world?  Why is there no reprieve despite the millions, billions in fact, in aid and the activities of  countless benevolent agencies and the sympathy of all the world? Why? Why? Why?

            Philippe Girard, an historian with a background of experience in the French Caribbean, has provided a richly detailed political and economic history of the nation in a 2010 book: Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation.. It is a fluent, astonishing account of the contagion of corruption including mass murders that have dogged successive regimes in Haiti’s 500 year history.  Even Aristide, who started as an humble priest, three times arrived as President and found himself drawn into the murderous culture of his predecessors and competitors in ultimately losing attempts to stay in office.  

            The erosion of public purpose and public welfare in favor of personal interest and welfare was persistent if not universal.  Over-population and a chaotic free market destroyed the landscape, the fuel supply, the water system, the fisheries and ate all the agricultural land under slums and erosion. Storms, the flood of September 19^th 2004 following tropical storm Jeanne, washed soils off the treeless slopes and filled valleys with feet of sediments. Three hundred thousand were said to have been left without housing.[1] Fifteen hundred were killed. It was but one storm.

            The earthquake of  January 12, 2010 was worse. It may have killed 250,000. It  left the government and the public in a hopeless chaos of collapsed buildings and homeless citizens, broken families and thousands of severely injured survivors.  Water supplies were non-existent or contaminated with sewage. Early in the efforts at recovery  cholera, not surprisingly, entered the mix and added to the mortality[2]. Haiti, the nation, had no resilience, no capacity to restore itself, no effective governmental leadership and no potential to implement a plan if a plan for recovery were available. The free market system sold food to those who could pay, wherever the food came from. Others starved. 

            Murderous, brutal governmental corruption in Haiti appears to be contagious and universal and extends to the destruction of the government itself and its potential for restoration of the public welfare as a purpose. One cannot avoid a comparison with current political trends in the US as historic barriers are crossed by political leaders in and outside government.  In elections distortions and slander on one side invite similar  responses from opponents. The process moves to a newly depraved low in performance  and in expectations. Inside government, when civil rights are abrogated by an administration, as they have been, a new administration, although committed to correction, finds it difficult to impossible to stop the machinery established earlier and the corruption becomes the new standard, the new status quo. The quality of government erodes and the erosion becomes irreversible.

            Education is ever a victim and has been in Haiti. A viable democracy requires an educated populace aware of the issues and capable of  understanding the reasons for having a government and how a government must behave to assure the public welfare. Starving school systems of money, even closing schools, is an excellent way to destroy all public purpose and deflect resources to enrich those in office.  So, too, in the US efforts to defund school systems and issue “vouchers” to be used in any “school” are clear steps in that direction…. and intended to be.      

            The solutions to the Haitian nadir by historical economists including Girard are stereotyped:  move a simple factory to Haiti and hire the unemployed to build an economic success which will enable a political and economic recovery.   South Korea is the example, a glowing one, so far successful.  But South Korea had not reached the depths of the Haitian debacle with a virtually totally dysfunctional landscape vulnerable to any storm and a complete breakdown of social and political order. There are real environmental limits on economic and political ventures.  One essential resource is a reliable system for supplying clean water. Another is food for all at prices and in circumstances that assure that those who need food are fed.  Both require the functional integrity of the landscape, the physical, chemical, and biotic integrity of land and water. The requirement is even more demanding on an island where resources are obviously finite and the marine resources are a part of the support system of the entire island. In Haiti the marine resources have been destroyed by the siltation of coastal waters carried from the eroding landscape. It is a futile hope that civilization can be restored  through a few jobs from a shot of industrial exploitation without a comprehensive plan for restoring a functional landscape and accommodating all the human population.

            The answer to “why” is too complicated, too expensive, and too intrusive in that it will require a renovation in land use, a restoration of  functional landscapes, drainage basins that are stable, land appropriate for small scale agriculture, the re-establishment of public schooling for all, and rebuilding the infrastructure, the roads and public buildings required for contemporary civilization. And it will require a renewable energy supply system. All of these innovations will be futile if there is no acknowledgement of the necessity for limiting the human population and a plan for doing so. The challenge is of the order of, but far greater than, the original Tennessee Valley Authority, to rebuild a landscape and its occupied places into a sustainable future.

            Interest in success extends well beyond the geographic boundaries of the nation.  The world shares not only the human misery of a failed state but must also respond to the inevitable and continuing hegira in search of alleviation  in any degree.. Few nations are prepared to accept the human overflow which is turned back to intensified misery at home. Beyond that, the nation is a necrotic sore, a  biophysical as well as a social and political and economic burden  on the world as a whole. The world does not need a model of national failure. Quite the opposite. It needs an example of  restoration, the Pearl of the Caribbean restored as a model for the New Post-Industrial World of  self-sufficiency, renewable energy, and closed-cycle living. Where better to do that than on an island? And who can better do it than the wealthy industrial world as it moves into the post fossil fueled age?

            It can be done, but the challenge is a large one, far larger than most economic historians or even practicing politicians are willing to contemplate. It is an appropriate new vision, a mission for science, politicians and economists, all focused on rebuilding civilization in the ultimate failed state. No one is in a better position to show us all how than Jim Kim in the World Bank as he sets forth in the next stage of his longtime mission in advancing human welfare.  The world needs an example of that sort of success.

            Now.

                                                                        GM Woodwell

                                                                        Woods Hole

                                                                        January 6, 2013

             

           

                                                                                      

---

[1] Girard, P. 2005. Haiti. Palgrave Macmillan. New York. p203.

[2] Farmer.P. 2011. Haiti After the Earthquake.  Perseus Books, NY

THE TRANSITION

THE TRANSITION

OPPORTUNITY AFTER

FORTY YEARS OF OBTUSE DENIAL

                      In the summer of 1970 a small group of ecologists and climatologists met as a part of a larger group assembled by Carroll Wilson of the Sloan School of MIT to consider the agenda of the first Earth Summit planned for Stockholm in 1992.  One of the most prominent topics was the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere and its implications.   

                        It was a rich discussion. By then the trend of accumulation of carbon dioxide had been well established by David Keeling’s data from Mauna Loa and the South Pole. Infra-red gas analyzers had been in use for more than a dozen years.My colleagues and I had been using them to measure the metabolism of plants and plant communities, especially forests, and had watched the changes in the atmospheric burden in central Long Island over a decade.  But we had never had a chance to explore with climatologists what they saw as the implications. And here they were, climatologists from their own new, enviably nurturing institute, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.  I was delighted and found them wonderful friends and colleagues.

                        We talked. The story seemed clear enough to me. The heat-trapping capacity of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane is great enough that it can be used as the basis for measurements of those gases in air with precision,  virtually at the molecular level. By then we and others  had such measurements from many places in the world extending over more than a decade. The data were unequivocal. The concentrations of both gases in the global atmosphere were rising and the implications were that the earth would warm substantially in the coming years. To an ecologist there seemed to be no question of the implications: the earth would warm and the effects could be devastating.  The trend was alarming and we had an obligation to say so.

            My climatologist colleagues, much senior to me and distinguished specialists, were adamant. Yes the gases were accumulating but there was no evidence of an effect. There were no data showing a change in the temperature of the earth and we could not say then that we had a serious problem. They were scientists, fundamentally conservative,  sensitive, perhaps at that time to the unbridled barbs being aimed at environmental interests challenging industrial rights to poison the public realm.  

  

            I was astonished, even alarmed. For me at that time it was the equivalent of holding a hammer, finding a new large spike that needs to be driven to strengthen the scientific structure of civilization, and denying its use because, while it has in fact  worked on smaller nails, jt has never been used on larger ones. I found myself appalled and withdrew from the conference, more than disappointed.   

            The Conference produced a report, objective, reasonable, not alarming, although the information was from my perspective devastating.   There was a major challenge for science in developing effective techniques for measuring the temperature of the earth. It took more than another decade for enough measurements to accumulate that Jim Hansen would announce that he could show that the earth was warming. His announcement in a Congressional hearing brought ire from the Reagan administration and praise from all others.

            Since then as a result of the activities of scientists the Framework Convention on
Climate Change was signed in Rio in  1992 and ultimately ratified by all nations. The world  acknowledged the problem and agreed t o stabilize the composition of the atmosphere at safe levels. No progress has been made in those twenty years. The 18th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention is underway in Qatar at this moment. No further progress is expected from this meeting.. Meanwhile, the world is suffering grievous change with further prospects that are frightening.  

            The world of 2012 contains just twice as many people as the world of 1970. And we have set in motion a series of changes in global climates that systematically undermine the potential of the earth for supporting such a population. The prospects for the next decades are now well documented as the climatic disruption proceeds along predicted lines.

            There are many changes in the world when additional energy accumulates in the atmosphere. I emphasize but two of these for they are compelling. First,  the changes in climate are continuous, not simply a change to a new climate to which all life can adjust and continue under slightly different circumstances. There is no prospect of adaptation or accommodation to continuously accelerating and severe disruption.

            Second, the warming has built into it a powerful feedback system that will take over the climates of the earth and move the potential for control outside our reach. That transition is now in process.  It is the differential warming of the high latitudes  that guarantees that there will be a large and increasing release of heat tapping gases as the earth warms. While the total release possible is probably unknown, it  is far in excess of the current atmospheric burden. The current burden, if not reduced, is enough to have triggered the thawing of  Arctic soils and the initial stages  of the massive feedback releases from the northern forests and from the extensive Arctic tundra.

            The Antarctic is vulnerable, too, but the vulnerability extends less to climatic feedbacks than to sea level rise as the southern oceans warm and the continental glaciers  collapse, contributing to raising sea level by feet in decades. The now famous storms Katrina and Sandy have been early warning signs of the transition.  How much ADAPTATION can we afford at  $50 billion per storm and one coastal city at a time?

            Such is the transition of all of civilization at the moment as we proceed with allowing both the human population to expand toward 9 billion and the climatic disruption to devour resources in monster gulps as it devoured New Orleans and sections of New York and New Jersey.

            While the combination of sea level rise and the increase in severity of storms works on the coastal regions, the continental centers become increasingly arid.  The rich food basket of the continental US, despite the richest soils in the world and their  potential for agriculture, is vulnerable and already affected. Again, ADAPTATION? To what?

            Such is the transition underway. It is a transition to chaos and universal poverty. It is brought to us all by the grace of the fossil fuels industries that have allowed their greed to undermine systematically the facts of the transition and the reality of the threats to human welfare globally.

            There is one cure and one cure only. It is to make the TRANSITION, a change not to progressive impoverishment and global chaos, but to a fossil fuel free world, powered by renewable energy . The transition must start now. Immediately. While we have several helpful tools such as the management of forests and soot and other heat-trapping gases, the key is fossil fuels whose waste products can no longer accumulate in the atmosphere. 

            It must start in the US, which can offer both a model for the world and a massive program of assistance to others in making the transition globally,   It is necessary, the only course open, and it is an unbelievably  rich opportunity to turn the world to constructive pursuits in the interest of all.  The transition is the end of the fossil fueled age and the beginning of the Age of Renewable Energy and its host of new opportunities.     

             

George M. Woodwell

Woods Hole

 December 3, 2012

   .

THE TRANSITION