hello Belmontl,
I understand what you are saying. So I should clarify that rejecting the dogma of man-made climate change is not the same thing as not caring for the earth or rejecting the necessity of good environmental stewardship. And it doesn’t preclude having a discussion about the carrying capacity of the planet nor is it the same thing as advocating for a license to ravage our earthly domicile.
Paul Watson, the cofounder of Greenpeace left the organization when he realized that it had become infiltrated and hijacked by politically motivated people who were not interested in the environment but were using the pretense of environmental objectives to further a political cause.
So my issue with the global warming meme is not only that it is not true but also that it is a wild goose-chase that diverts attention from real problems. The pursuit of a corrective to this non-problem has also diverted vast resources in a direction of total waste and also from areas where they could be much more benefically used.
Not only is there a substantial economic loss and a loss in human welfare fostered by this supposed remedial pursuit but it is in fact environmentally very destructive as well. I have seen estimates that to replace US electricity production with solar and wind energy you would have to cover a land area the size of California with windmills and solar panels. Then to replace transportation fuels with electricity you would have to use up a second California sized land area. Then you would have to run hundreds of thousand miles of transmissin wires. Then there is all of the extra mining and the toxic by-products of solar panel manufacturing and the toxic contents of used solar panels and the old batterys etc.
The windmills would devestate the bird population and their footprint and that of the solar farms would devastate the vegetative and animal ecosystems where they are placed.
Then in the end it would faill utterly to do what it is supposed to do as people with engineering expertise say you would end- up with totally unreliable energy and an unstable grid prone to frequent crashes long before it becomes 100% renewable.
So while the discussion of whether CO2 increase causes warming or not is a narrow one, the potential consequences of decisions around that stand to be enormous. If I reject that cause and effect relationship it doesn’t mean I am callous to the cause of environmental concern and nurturing.
In a world where we are already trillions of dollars in debt and our unwise leaders have bequeathed us a sick and unproductive economy where because of central bank and government policies we are actually consuming our capital instead of increasing it we can’t afford to waste more resources in the pursuit of a fools-errand while real environmental, economic and social problems remain unaddressed.
Correction–I think the name of the Greenpeace cofounder was Patrick Moore.
Old man… my overarching point is doing everything in our power with the best evidence data we have,
Predicting the future is very difficult:
"Prediction is very hard, especially when it is about the future." -- Yogi Berra (and other various authorities)/ <span class="writely- comment">Complexity Theory and Environmental Management, by Michael Crichton. Also see his article Why Speculate?"Most people assume linearity in environmental processes, but the world is largely non-linear: it's a complex system. An important feature of complex systems is that we don't know how they work. We don't understand them except in a general way; we simply interact with them. Whenever we think we understand them, we learn we don't. Sometimes spectacularly."Some botched predictions / 1927-1933 Chart of Pompous PrognosticatorsSome botched predictions made in some popular films. and in a 1958 Disney Animation.What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years, by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., Ladies Home Journal, 1900.Youtube video: Global Warming and Other Catastrophes Humorous (?) look at previous botched predictions of pending world catastrophes in the media (to the soundtrack of REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It")
Been reading this thread with interest. I am compelled to pipe up.
There are no solutions to the dying of our planet without a revolution in thinking, and even then any healing and especially any reversal would take generations to accomplish - which is just fine, but there is no palpable sign of any change of thinking beyond the fringes (not a perorative term), like this tribe. Of course, there would need to be a revolution that translates into political will to change course.
Revolutions tend to occur only when everyday life becomes practically impossible for the mass of citizens, or at least a portion of them - like the middle and under class. A group has to be “radicalized” in order to band together and force change. Things need to get pretty extreme for that to occur, and we aren’t there yet. Maybe the yellow jackets are getting there, although I am not clear what specifically underlies their malaise other than wealth disparity.
Chris is completely correct that we have been in the collapse for years, and that it is gaining pace and becoming more visible. But the reality is that until the everyday life becomes near or actually impossible for the mass of humanity, nobody is going to do shit beyond some form of prepping for themselves and their friends.
So the collapse, in my view, is inevitable (although it may not need to be TEOTWAWKI - it only needs to be bad enough that people are forced to respond, but the damage by that time that will need be overcome will be far worse than now). Maybe it will create the revolution that leads to better times and better stewarded for the planet in scores of years to come. Because, as Jared Diamond writes in following the history of collapse throughout the history of civilization, the interdependencies between economies or ecocystems is the complexity that collapse unravels in what becomes a cascade - we are destined as a species to experience a collapse that is on an order of magnitude much greater than what has occurred so far (since clearly the world is still sleeping), and then seek to wake up and endure. Only a question of when.
In the meantime, I am grateful for my time on this planet and importantly for my memories of what the world looked like 50 plus years ago. I am grateful for the beauty that still exists around me. I grieve for the collapses to date, the collapses that are coming. But I have no larger solution beyond attempting to come to peace with it all and trying to leave a smaller footprint. If someone can point me to a group of souls who are prepared to take action in a larger way, I’d be interested to the pointer.
Good luck out there!
Here are a few things I know:
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Funding for climate-related science is pathetically small when compared to military-related or corporate-sponsored science. Climate-related science is one of the few non-corporate and independent fields of science left, and therefore one of the few areas remaining which questions and challenges corporate America. Since many of the climate-related scientists challenge things which affect corporate profits, and since many climate deniers have direct links to corporate backing, I tend to discount the latter and embrace the former as being objective here.
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Climate deniers often claim that there are “tons of problems” with the data being collected, but rarely offer any substantial data generated by actual field research which would directly refute the data gathered by climate-related science. Moreoever, deniers often point out how the “data has been wrong/adjusted,” ignoring the fact that this is how science works. The scientists directly related to climate research publish their data precisely because they want their peers to challenge it. When challenges prove successful, new data is gathered, old data is adjusted, and new conclusions reached. This is the process that leads to “scientific knowledge,” and it important to remember that a scientific majority is all we’ll ever have on any knowledge - there are always outliers who disagree. Yet none of the climate-science deniers are willing to go out, gather the data themselves, and then publish it in a peer-reviewed way. They just shout from the balcony like those two old guys in the Muppet Show.
But I don’t even need the science. The anecdotal evidence has been mounting for decades. Here in central Maryland, winters have been getting milder, springs and summers wetter, and temperature variations more extreme. For two winters in a row, we had the windows open and shorts on for Christmas Day. This week, while everyone bitches about the “artic freeze” (it is 4 degrees here today), no one is talking about the fact that within five days it is expected to reach 63 degrees. In February. In the summer in my youth years, riding the car with the windows down was a dubious thing, as I can’t count the number of times I’d have bugs/bees in my car afterwards, and putting your face out the window was eyeball suicide. After any longer drive, my windshield and engine grate looked like an extermination camp for bugs, whereas now I can’t remember the last time a single bug splattered on my car…and I live next to a wooded stream! Seagulls at Ocean City, MD used to be so thick you couldn’t move without almost stepping on one. These last few summers there have been a handful within view, at best. Beyond that, I can feel it in my core when I am gardening; I won’t say the “trees are talking to me,” but when I “listen” to the connection to nature within myself, it doesn’t feel positive. The biosphere around us is collapsing, and it will take most of us with it.
So, climate denial goes hand in hand with the existing paradigm that “everything is fine,” aligns perfectly with corporate interests, and ignores the anecdotal evidence on the ground that is mounting more and more every year.
That’s why, OldGuy, I don’t take anything you are saying very seriously.
-S
PS- I never name-called. I simply pointed out that Dr. Dyson has come up with some pretty hair-brained ideas which were based on a loose application of the laws of science, so he’s got no room to be pointing fingers. Name-calling would be if I called him an “idiot.” I simply discounted his viability as a source of true criticism. I stand by that assertion. A great physicist, yes. Qualified to speak on climate-related science, no.
PSS- OldGuy, if you are so convinced climate science is bogus, good for you! Go on with your life, content in the knowledge that everything is fine and you have no need to prepare for a darker future! Yay!
While I am open to the idea that there’s room to quibble over how to best measure something as tricky as the “average” temperature over something as large as the entire earth, I do know that as Snydemann has pointed out the data sets for temperature are among the most heavily gone-over that exist.
Lots of eyes on those. And, no, it’s not bad that they’ve been challenged and scrubbed and re-done. That’s how science advances. One successful challenge at a time.
What to make of this image then?
That seems pretty straightforward and takes Stan’s “I’ll see your continent wide observation (Australia) and trump you with my local dust bowl anecdote” rebuttal to the rubbish bin. Of course, I also happen to agree with Stan that there are far better and more direct methods of communicating with people than via climate change which I explain below.
The above picture speaks a thousand arguments to me…
I am also quite sensitive to the idea that modeling the climate is well beyond our capabilities at present. Even trying to model known complex systems that are simple (in the sense of having very few, well-known inputs or variables) eludes us so what chance do we have of modeling something consisting of literally thousands of intertwined complex systems where many of the inputs aren’t even known?
Pretty much none, which is why I don’t put much stock in any of the efforts to try and contain warming to some number like 2 degrees C. We could already be well beyond that and our models wouldn’t even know until it showed up.
But I do know that the ecosphere is collapsing. SHE is dying, and I can, also like Snydemann, feel that in my guts. I just know it.
I also know that humans are 7.8 billion and headed to ~ 10 billion at current trajectories. I also know that we are eating, walking, talking above-ground oil. Chemical energy in the ground is converted, at a loss, into food energy above ground and we eat it and expand our numbers.
Somehow we need to reverse that trend. So the question becomes what’s the best method of communicating and achieving that?
I’ve long avoided “climate change” as the means of rallying people to the cause of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels because it violates most of the rules for effective personal change. Climate change is:
Complicated and statistical (meaning uncertain)
Going to bite at a future date
Routinely violated by individual’s local weather observations (“brrrr…it’s cold today!”)
Something over which an individual has no sense of agency at all
Does not have ‘a face’ that we can hate.
In other words, it’s distant, uncertain, and something my personal actions will not change in the slightest and the worst part is the ‘face’ I have to hate is my own staring back in the mirror.
But it’s also true that showing people all the data about fossil fuel dependency and population growth elicits virtually no reaction from most people even thought that data is both linear and easy to connect, model and explain.
So the question becomes…what is the best way to reach people that leads them to action?
My students, today, when hearing that it was 4 degrees this morning but will be in the low 60s in five days, said “What the hell is going on here?” whereas the adults I talk to say “Oh thank god it will be warmer. I’m so cold.” Maybe the young will figure it out, but I no longer hold much hope for us older folks to. May God grant that the young have time enough to do so, but I have my doubts there.
To answer your question, though, my personal solution is to teach as many young women as possible what really faces them, rather than the irrationally optimistic view other adults are peddling. I’m also preparing my homestead and children to face what will be a challenging, perhaps grim, future. I think all solutions must be local ones, because I no longer believe any systemic ones will come in time.
-S
I don’t have all the answers, but I believe we need to act together as quickly as possible. The individual prepping is ok, but we’ll accomplish more when we work together in “tribes”. The solutions won’t come from the top down. They’re going to have to come from the bottom up.
My city of 6,500 people has an affordable housing problem. We’re also one of the coldest cities in the US (but not today, we had a normal -20F this morning, which we’re used to, unlike the midwest which is suffering under colder temps as the jet stream deflects and the polar vortex is distorted. Brrrr…). The city is offering land for affordable housing develoment. I teamed up with a local green builder to propose energy-efficient, high-performance homes, build with non-toxic sustainable materials and financed by local capital. We were up against traditional developers and modular home builders. We probably placed 3rd of 5 bidders, but the shortlist hasn’t been issued yet. I don’t know if anyone sees our vision, but the day will come when a neighborhood of 900-ft2 passive solar homes will be the MOST desireable place to live in town because, hey, who wants to freeze to death and die when the natural gas stops flowing?
I didn’t use the term “freeze to death and die” when I spoke to the community forum on Tuesday night. Perhaps I should have. Seems I’ve developing a reputation as a “crazy person”. But who cares about ego, image, reputation? There’s too much at stake here for the earth and all sentient beings.
Don’t wait for someone else to do something. Stand up, and speak, and work toward solutions. Any solutions.
Which city, Waterdog?
It’s good news, but I’d like to watch what happens to that plan.
I forgot to mention - Working with others is really difficult for me. I was raised in a US culture that valued rugged individualism, by a father that beat the crap out of anyone who disagreed with him. “Class projects” in school seemed to pull everyone down to a level of mediocrity that I found interolerable. I’d rather work alone, in a silo. But beyond individual prepping, our solutions won’t come from silos. So my challenge and goal for the next several months/years is to work on being more accepting, work on team-building, and learn to work collegially.
Others on this site have mentioned that a radical cultural shift will be required, if any of us are going to survive the post-carbon future. The cultural shift will require deep personal transformation. Meditation helps. If I can do it, anyone can!
Chris wrote:
I've long avoided "climate change" as the means of rallying people to the cause of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels because it violates most of the rules for effective personal change. Climate change is: Complicated and statistical (meaning uncertain) Going to bite at a future date Routinely violated by individual's local weather observations ("brrrr...it's cold today!") Something over which an individual has no sense of agency at all Does not have 'a face' that we can hate. In other words, it's distant, uncertain, and something my personal actions will not change in the slightest and the worst part is the 'face' I have to hate is my own staring back in the mirror. But it's also true that showing people all the data about fossil fuel dependency and population growth elicits virtually no reaction from most people even thought that data is both linear and easy to connect, model and explain.I avoid the climate change debates because, as you say, it's incredibly complex and we can't possibly understand it and know what's going to happen. Like Chris, what I do know is that we are poisoning ourselves and disrupting natural systems we need to survive and yet don't understand. A large dose of humility, caution and self control are called for. My preferred phrase to describe what's happening is "climate weirding" because that much is certain and, for me personally, leads to humility, caution and self-control. In my mind I'm concerned about a warming environment but I've also got my eye on the solar minimum and the possibility of a cooling cycle. Whereas I don't have to choose a side in the debate about warming and cooling, what I did have to do is decide where to live when I retire. I chose New Hampshire, partly because it's as far north as I can get without leaving the USA while staying in the eastern half of the country (for personal reasons). Otherwise, I might have chosen Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, or even Costa Rica. IF things get warmer and warmer that will lengthen our gardening season in NH and that will be good because we're going to need it. IF things get colder, we'll have to cope. I don't have a clear understanding of all the natural dynamics, but I know something is badly wrong. I'm strategizing and acting on the basis of partial information and intuitive leaps, because I have to.
So the question becomes...what is the best way to reach people that leads them to action?The older I've gotten the more pessimistic I've become about my power to "reach people" for understanding and action (about pretty much anything). Inertia and denial are waaaay more powerful than I am. But I have seen the kinds of things that do lead large numbers of people to wake up, change their mindsets, and begin acting in significantly different ways. That's the good news and the bad news. These are the kinds of things that I've seen have a big impact on people. 1. The death of someone close to them. 2. Getting married or becoming a parent. 3. Losing a job, a home or an important relationship (eg. divorce). 4. Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. 5. Being the victim of a violent crime, like being shot or stabbed or robbed at gunpoint. This includes the credible imminent threat of the same, whether at the hands of criminals or government. 6. Being so poor as to have a daily diet of 1,200 calories or less imposed on them, and the uncertainty of not knowing if you'll have any calories tomorrow. It's the same with not having enough clean water to drink to slake even your subjective thirst, much less provide for an objective amount necessary for good health. 7. Being physically very uncomfortable and unable to sleep due to cold, heat, and wetness. I'm in the camp with many here in my conclusion that the great majority of people and our leaders are not going to wake up until hunger, violence, and disease have already overtaken us. We just need to be as prepared as we can for that inevitability for our own survival and to be able to take advantage of that awful "teachable moment" when it arrives for those around us. People will be much easier to reach when they're hungry, wet and tired; people are shooting at them; and Ebola is spreading in their area.
This confirms my observations from last summer. I thought that, because I saw more monarchs on my property, it might have been because I have been consciously letting more milkweed grow for many years. But no, it appears to be a widespread phenomenon. However, scientists suggest this may have been a one off in a discouraging trend.
Monarchs 2018
31 January 2019
James Hansen
Looking for good news? Last summer we were so pleased to see so many Monarchs in Pennsylvania and New York, more than we have seen in a decade. Eagerly awaited number of over-wintering population in Mexico confirms this impression. See updated graph below, and link to an article in the Guardiian.
This refers to the Monarchs in most of North America, which over-winter in Mexico. The Western Monarchs are a different story, not surprisingly, given the climate chaos there. An 8 January article from EcoWatch.
Making progress with Sophie’s Planet – in Chapter 28.
Especially when it’s been building for years.
https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-revolution-then-and-now/29660285.html