It Sounds Radical But It's Not, Not Really.

There's been no end of weirdness over the past couple of decades but, being the most adaptable species of complex life on Earth, the only creature able to inhabit every part of our land and ice mass, we've done what man has always done - we've tolerated change until we came to see it as our new normal. Maybe if we were less adaptable, more vulnerable... oh well.

The funny thing is that danger or risk is something we countenance especially in the face of significant cost or inconvenience for doing anything effective to deal with it. We want something done about it provided that something is free or really cheap. We want something done that won't put us out. We're all for change provided we don't have to change. We don't want to see the consequences and thus there's no need to put a price on future events.

One measure of selfishness is the frequency of responses from people of my age who say, "I'll be dead by then. Yes, it's a pity, but that's none of my concern and, besides, Oprah's on in a few minutes."

Climate change. Despite all the ongoing denialism and campaign of distraction, it's probably the best researched scientific theory of all time. The central theory has been tested against one scientific discipline, or specialty, after another. For example, a geologist might say, "If the central theory is right, there ought to be this sort or that form of geological evidence, corroboration. Let's have a look. Let's see." And so a mountain of research has been amassed - covering a gamut of scientific disciplines including geology, geography, hydrology, oceanography, atmospherics, glaciology, physics, biology, botany, marine biology, epidemiology, paleontology, and many more.

One discipline after another, the research poured in corroborating the central theory of anthropogenic global warming, AGW. There isn't a single scientific discipline that refutes the theory. Not one disproves AGW or calls it into question. Likewise in the developed world there's not one national academy of sciences that does not endorse the theory of AGW.

None of this puts off the denialists or their corporate backers. They're still free to attack climate change as an ideology, a belief. They don't engage the scientific fact of climate change. They don't refute the mountain of research and analysis. It's too conclusive, too sound to be challenged on any factual basis. And so they seize the narrative and transform it into a belief because nothing is easier to challenge and undermine than a belief. That's been the stock in trade of organized religion since it was invented. All you have to do is present an opposing belief especially if it's a belief that a lot of people find preferable to scientific fact.

(BTW - National Geographic has posted DiCaprio's climate change documentary, "Before the Flood," online.)

We've seen plenty of proof of the reality of climate change over the past twenty years. Severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity; floods and droughts on a scale we haven't known before; disease and pest migration (destructive beetle infestations, the spread of viruses - West Nile, Zika and Lyme disease, etc.); species migration, especially marine species moving poleward as their traditional waters turn too warm; the retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps; accelerating sea level rise; a steady progression of record hot years.

The next ten years will see the onset of something completely unknown to human civilization. It's called "climate departure." It marks a transition from the climate we've known for the past 12,000 years to a new climate in which, past the point of "departure" even the coolest year will be hotter than the hottest year experienced in the pre-departure era.

When it comes to climate departure, the closer you are to the equator the sooner it will set in. It's predicted to manifest within 10-years in parts of the Caribbean and Asia Pacific, spreading poleward until it engulfs most of the populated regions by mid-century. The Middle East will be hit in about 20 years. The populace in these areas impacted will find it very challenging to remain. Heat kills and it also wreaks havoc on agriculture and freshwater resources. Most of the cities of the world will have reached departure by 2047.

That sounds sufficiently dire that rational people would be spurred to action, immediately. Perhaps the problem is an even more dire paucity of rational people. They're practically an endangered species.

You see, you can't deal with climate change without also tackling its companion crises - overpopulation and over-consumption. You won't have a hope of fixing any of them unless you fix them all. So, what exactly have we got in mind for Existential Crisis B and Existential Crisis C? Nothing good.

Science has now figured that we, mankind, reached our Earth's carrying capacity when our numbers reached the low 3-billions sometime in the early 70s. That's an important date, do keep it in mind.

For several years the World Wildlife Fund, in conjunction with the Zoological Society of London and in collaboration with other groups including the Global Footprint Network have been producing annual Living Planet reports. One subject of focus has been our rapidly dwindling wildlife. Not the number of species but the overall tally of plants and animals - the totality of the other life forms with which we share Earth.

What they have found is that we, mankind, are squeezing out other species, plant and animal. Since 1970 their numbers have declined by more than half. The Living Planet 2016 report estimates that the decline could hit 67% by 2020, just a few years from now. We are constantly pushing back their habitat to make room for our burgeoning global population and we're consuming ever more of the resources without which their numbers collapse. This is real "uncharted waters" stuff.

In just one lifetime, my own, mankind's population has tripled. It took us 11,000 years of civilization to grow to just one billion. We doubled that in a century. In under 70-years we tripled that again to over 7-billion. What grows like that? Not much - bacteria in a petri dish, cancer cells - oh yeah, and us. Now Africa and Asia have developed huge population bombs - with hundreds of millions about to enter reproductive age. Hang onto your hat. We're going to hit 9+ billion before you know it.

Then there's the business of over-consumption. The Earth, as you might have heard, is finite. It's about the same size it was when multi-cellular life first appeared way back when. Yet, starting in the early 70s, we began to exceed our biosphere's carrying capacity. By "we" I mean humankind. When it comes to natural resources, everything from fresh water to biomass, there's only so much the Earth can replenish in a given time, say a year. Right now we've exceeded that replenishment rate by a factor of 1.7. It's the equivalent of taking home a thousand dollars a month but spending 17 hundred. Not good.

Part of our quandary arises out of sheer numbers. The other part comes from how much each of us consumes. Here's the thing. Take per capita energy consumption, for example. In 1820 that stood at a steady 20 gigajoules of energy per person per year. By 1970 (there it is again) that had grown to 50 gigajoules per person per year. Half a century later, today, it's 80 gigajoules.

So we've gone from one billion people, each using 20 gigajoules of energy per year, to more than seven billion people, each using 80 gigajoules of energy per year in a little under two centuries, a blip in mankind's 12,000 year history. Do the math and you go from 20 billion gigajoules in 1820 to 560 billion gigajoules today.  Can you get a sense of the enormity of what we're doing?

If you can get a sense of the enormity of what we're doing, if you grasp how our population is burgeoning even as our consumption levels skyrocket, if you appreciate how we're gutting pretty much every other life form on the planet - if you get all this, then I'm proud to include you in the "rational" group I spoke of earlier on. You're in a decided minority.

Can you guess who is not in that minority with you? That would be those holding the reins of power, our political leadership. Not just Canada but globally. Here's the giveaway. They are absolutely obsessed with the pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth in GDP. They are devout adherents to a world of ever growing extraction, production and consumption. The International Energy Agency believes them. It predicts overall energy demand will grow by upwards of an additional 40% by 2050.

So, you see, despite the fact that the Earth is essentially finite, despite the fact that we're now utterly dependent on continuing to deplete its resources ever faster than they can be replenished, despite the fact that we have wantonly exceeded our biosphere's environmental carrying capacity, despite the fact that our specie's numbers are more than twice what our planet can support, despite all this and more:

Our political leadership, in conjunction with our economic leadership (you don't understand that?), are so utterly irrational that they ignore everything that's been happening since the early 70s, all the signs, all the science to continue their pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth, the very foundation of what's predicted to be the 6th major extinction event.

Stopping this, breaking this bleak and self-destructive pursuit, sounds radical but it's not, not really. When you've got a three pack a day habit, there's nothing radical about quitting.

October 9. Miami's Day of Reckoning.

On October 9, the Earth, sun and moon will align just so to create a King Tide, the highest tides of the year.   In Miami, all eyes will be on the rising seas.

On high tides or in the event of storm surge, Miami streets are awash in sea water.  Storm sewers back up or the ocean can simply rise up through the porous limestone bedrock. 

There's something of an epiphany under way in south Florida.  For years sea level rise was ignored.  In Miami, the construction industry is still buzzing building condos and shopping malls.  Now the obvious can no longer be ignored.  What will come of it is unclear.  No one has any ideas yet how to hold back the sea, particularly when it rises beneath your feet.

For more of the soggy future in store for Miami, check out this article from Rolling Stone.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, science is girding for a battle with the state's political caste to get the truth out about what sea level rise means for coastal residents.  The state boasts a string of low-lying barrier islands, many of them featuring grand southern mansions and high-end resorts.  There's a lot of wealth tied up in the state's coastal properties and the rightwing legislature is loathe to put property values at risk by loose talk about storm surges and sea level rise.

North Carolina legislators tried to limit state scientists from forecasting anything more than 8 inches of sea level rise this century but the scientific community dug in its heels.  The legislators then fell back on a compromise, a new report limited to a 30-year time frame.

The report will anticipate a foot of sea level rise by 2045 and, while the rate is expected to increase significantly in the second half of this century, the legislature doesn't want to hear about that.

Why the English-Speaking World Resists the Reality of Climate Change

You would think if you were a country particularly prone to being mugged by severe storm events of increasing intensity, frequency and destructiveness you might be just as particularly receptive to overwhelming scientific evidence of the causes.  However if you happen to be one of the major English-speaking countries you are and you aren't.  When it comes to Australia, the United States, Canada and Britain, all four countries are being hammered by climate change impacts yet remain among the countries least likely to accept the scientific evidence.

All four countries are governed by right of centre legislatures in which denialism runs deep.  All four countries are also big into fossil fuel production.  All four countries have an overall right of centre media that is collaborative with right wing government and energy producers.

What this chart also reveals is that, even in the United States where denialism is at its strongest, a solid majority of the public accepts anthropogenic global warming/climate change.  In all four countries, the government is plainly at odds with its people when it comes to climate change.  

Well if our Anglosphere isn't working for our peoples, who do these governments serve?  Oh sorry, I don't know what I was thinking.  Forget I asked.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet - "Rational" People Will Be Convinced By the Science - IPCC

There are encouraging signs that, this time, climate scientists are coming prepared for a fight against the forces of denialism.

You can tell the Fossil Fuelers and the rest of their supporting cast in the denialist community have their knickers in a bunch over the pending release of the next IPCC report on climate change.

Their worry over the report's findings has sent them into a tizzy rehashing the "5 Stages of Denialism" - 1. Deny the Problem Exists; 2. Deny We're the Cause and Deny the clear Scientific Consensus; 3.  Deny It's a Problem; 4. Deny We Can Solve It; and, 5. Claim It's Too Late for Anything but Adaptation.

Now the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, has fired a shot across the denialists' bows, saying "rational people" will be convinced by the science in the new report.

"There will be enough information provided so that rational people across the globe will see that action is needed on climate change," Pachauri told a conference call.

"I really wouldn't want to say anything about any perceived effort for a pushback," he went on. "We are doing our job and we are reasonably confident that rational people in government and all over the world will see the merit of the work that has been done."

Organisations that dismiss the science behind climate change and oppose curbs on greenhouse gas pollution have made a big push to cloud the release of the IPCC report, the result of six years of work by hundreds of scientists.

Those efforts this week extended to promoting the fiction of a recovery in the decline of Arctic sea ice.

Denialism 2.0 - Even More Dangerous Than the Original

By and large, the pioneers of climate change denialism have moved on.   Those who used to lead the campaign claiming that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is a hoax, a conspiracy, a fraud or  fundamentally flawed, have retrenched.

In his final column for The Guardian, Leo Hickman warns these veteran denialists have morphed into something far more dangerous:

What we are now seeing more of, though, are climate policy sceptics. Yes, some of these are the same characters as before, but who have subtly, artful repositioned themselves over recent years. So rather than claiming that climate science is a hoax, a fraud or fundamentally flawed, they now say the proposed climate policies will have little, if any, impact on the planet's temperature gauge and are therefore a waste of time and money. They know that this is a more tenable (and electable?) position from which to argue their point. (In the UK, only two political parties – Ukip and the BNP - proudly state in their manifestos that they doubt, or reject, climate science; proof, if it were ever needed, that climate scepticism is predominantly built upon a foundation of ideology rather than science. Additionally, the work of James Painter at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has also highlighted how cultural/media support for climate sceptics varies greatly from country to country.)

John Abraham made an astute point the other day when he said that it rarely gets noticed that climate sceptics have actually conceded a lot of ground over recent years when it comes to the science. Many have begun to adopt a so-called "lukewarmer" position, which means they now accept the basics of climate science but don't think it's worth investing heavily today to prevent or limit a problem that will increasingly hit home in the decades ahead.

...Nothing exposes our species' "future flaw" more than climate change – rarely, if ever, have the history books demonstrated a generation acting selflessly, or with sacrifice, for the sole benefit of generations to come. We are an extraordinary animal in so many ways, but one of our weaknesses is that we operate firmly in the present tense. We jump only when we are in imminent danger ourselves. If not, we prevaricate, delay or turn our heads away. Climate change requires us to fast overcome this flaw…

Hickman, who is moving on to WWF-UK, hits the nail on the head.  The denialists have come up with a better plan.  Instead of their failing campaign to undermine science they've realized it's far easier and more effective to exploit a flaw in human nature, our proven inability to accept sacrifice for the benefit of future generations.

"In America truth is offensive, If you tell the truth, you are offensive."

So writes former U.S. deputy treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, in his column for CounterPunch, America, Land of the Lost. 

Roberts recently published the e-book, The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism, reviewed on this blog three weeks ago.   Plenty of offensive truth-telling there.   Now, Roberts confronts the shrill unacceptability of being both honest and open in modern Western culture.

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered.  It is the same today.

 If you tell readers what is really going on, they want to know why you can’t be positive. Why are you telling us that there are bad happenings that can’t be remedied?  Don’t you know that God gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs?  What are you?  Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie?  If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

Roberts notes the irony in the treatment of Julian Assange by the U.K. and the U.S. when contrasted by China's treatment of its own truth-telling dissident.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK, the “authoritarian,” “communist,” “oppressive” Chinese government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold international law.

Insouciant Americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process, and executed on the whim of some executive branch official without due process of law.

Most Americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as Americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid catastrophe, but America can provide neither intelligence nor leadership. America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands of those who are concerned only with their own power. Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses the largest concentration of evil on the planet.

Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

There are those of us who persist in telling the truth even when it is unwelcome and who are standing by ready to rise up to confront the poison that has spread throughout our own government.  Yet there are not many.   Indeed there are far, far more who style themselves progressive who would readily embrace complacency and submission.  Far more.  Ask yourself what side of the line are you on?

Nothing Convinces Quite Like a Taste of the Lash

The onset of extreme weather events is rapidly culling the ranks of climate change skeptics.    Megastorms, droughts, heat waves and floods are prevailing as science never could, especially in the home of denialism, the United States.

A poll released on Friday by the Associated Press-GfK found rising concern about climate change among Americans in general, with 80% citing it as a serious problem for the US, up from 73% in 2009. Belief and worry about climate change were rising faster still among people who do tend not to trust scientists on the environment.

Some of the doubters said in follow-up interviews that they were persuaded by personal experience: such as record temperatures, flooding of New York City subway tunnels, and news of sea ice melt in the Arctic and extreme drought in the mid-west.

About 78% of respondents overall believed in climate change, a slight rise from AP's last poll in 2009. The result was in line with other recent polls.

Among climate doubters, however, 61% now say temperatures have been rising over the past century, a substantial rise from 2009 when only 47% believed in climate change.

The change was not among the hard core of climate deniers, but in the next tier of climate doubters, AP reported. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along," Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University psychologist who studies attitudes to climate change and consulted on the poll, told the news agency.

But getting the public to accept the fact of global warming is still a long way from gaining their support for mitigation or adaptation measures.   They may accept it, they may agree that change is needed, that doesn't mean they're about to give up the SUV.

This began and was always going to be "a day late and a dollar short" struggle.   Success lies in getting ahead of the onset of global warming and its impacts but we're still running far behind even as we collectively purport to "get it."

The best options for dealing with global warming began slipping through our fingers probably as far back as the late 60's when we simply didn't know any better.   A number of those once-best options have now been foreclosed to us for all time.   That leaves us with a deck of next-best options and these too, by turns, are slipping through our fingers.   At some point, when the impacts are great enough and we're far down the deck of next-best options, we will be forced to accept whatever options by them remain to us or to the future generations to which we bequeath this as our lasting legacy.

It's Like Living With Crazy People

Case in point.  A great guy.  We've been friends for almost 40-years.  He's devoutly Conservative and has been actively involved in the party longer than I've known him.  Well educated, well traveled, well spoken.  He has had a career as a lawyer, judge and an elected official in two levels of government.  He remains a backroom guy in his party.

We happened to get on the subject of global warming a couple of weeks back.  I told him how we see it setting in out here on the Wet Coast.  He came back with the standard denialist retort.  It was all a hoax by the scientists.  The earth has always warmed and cooled in the past.  Global warming is a myth.

I asked my friend how he would have handled the global warming argument had it come before him when he was sitting on the bench.

One side, seeking to legally prove the fact of global warming, adduced a mountain of peer-reviewed studies from top climate scientists in the broad array of "earth sciences" including geology, hydrology, botany, biology, meteorology, chemistry, epidemiology, atmospherics and so on, all of which corroborate the greater theory of global warming.

On the other side, the denialists.   Now they didn't have any prominent earth scientists or any peer-reviewed research or studies.  Worse still, they didn't even directly address any of the science the other side had amassed.   They simply stood up and said it was a hoax..  because they said so.  They argued the earth had warmed and cooled in the past so there was no need to consider what all that science was demonstrating.  That was it, case closed.

Now my friend could see where this was going and he knew he was getting boxed in so he deftly derailed it by saying he couldn't respond to a hypothetical scenario.

Then I fell back on the "scientific method" argument, how all this mass of global warming science stood unrefuted, how the scientific method invites others to show it erroneous.   And I asked how, with trillions of dollars potentially at stake, the greater fossil fuel industry wasn't even trying to use science to disprove the link between carbon emissions and global warming.  I asked what it said that the fossil fuel industry was using public relations, not science, to fight back?  I asked why the fossil fuel industry wasn't spending at least several billions of dollars on its own research if it even suspected the conventional science was flawed?  Follow the money.

By this point my friend became exasperated, apparently feeling beset.  He couldn't respond to any of this.   He didn't even try.  He simply blurted out "it's a myth" and that was that.

In subsequent conversations I began to discover what was behind his seemingly senseless denialism.   My friend is a devoted, loving grandfather.  Accepting the reality of anthropogenic global warming to him means admitting that his grandkids and all the other grandkids in the world are facing a very troubling future, one that we have handed to them, one of our making.   His moment of contrition came when he said, "I think they're going to hate us."  And then the moment passed, my friend hit his internal "reset" button and it was - as it began - all a hoax.

-------

And, just minutes after posting this, I stumbled across a piece from the Washington Post exploring the divergent political psychology of conservatives and liberals.  Part of this is described as "the need for cognitive closure."

This describes discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to resolve it into a firm belief. Someone with a high need for closure tends to seize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or ambiguity, and then freeze, refusing to consider new information. Those who have this trait can also be expected to spend less time processing information than those who are driven by different motivations, such as achieving accuracy.

A number of studies show that conservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals, which is precisely what you would expect in light of the strong relationship between liberalism and openness. “The finding is very robust,” explained Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland psychologist who has pioneered research in this area and worked to develop a scale for measuring the need for closure.

...Anti-evolutionists have been found to score higher on the need for closure. And in the global-warming debate, tea party followers not only strongly deny the science but also tend to say that they “do not need any more information” about the issue.


For Conservatives it's a "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up already" world.   They can reach certain conclusions, not for want of facts but because facts aren't wanted or welcome.

And that's how we wind up in a society where one part insists on living in reality and the other part is equally insistent on living in beliefs even if they border on outright fantasy.   A divide like that is a perfect opportunity for those who peddle wedge politics using fear and anger as their currency.   It's a world tailor made for creatures like Stephen Harper.

It's like living with crazy people.