A new study has mapped the impact of 17 different human activities on ocean ecosystems. [Link]
"This project allows us to finally start to see the big picture of how humans are affecting the oceans," said Ben Halpern, assistant research scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led the research. "Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me."
Austin Green Art!
I spent some time yesterday covering the Austin Green Art booth at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. Meanwhile Randy's been sending 'round the video below...
If you find this compelling (and why wouldn't you?) — donate to Austin Green Art!
Oceans = acid stewOcean pollution is creating an acid stew that could "distrupt the entire web of life," according to an article in the Independent.
Scientists have found that the seas have already absorbed about half of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity since the start of the industrial revolution, a staggering 500 billion tons of it. This has so far helped slow global warming – which would have accelerated even faster if all this pollution had stayed in the atmosphere, already causing catastrophe – but at an increasingly severe cost.
The gas dissolves in the oceans to make dilute carbonic acid, which is increasingly souring the naturally alkali seawater. This, in turn, mops up calcium carbonate, a substance normally plentiful in the seas, which corals use to build their reefs, and marine creatures use to make the protective shells they need to survive. These include many of the plankton that form the base of the food chain on which all fish and other marine animals depend.
As the waters are growing more acid this process is decreasing, with incalculable consequences for the life of the seas, and for the fisheries on which a billion of the world's people depend for protein. Every single species that uses calcium in this way, that has so far been studied, has been found to be affected. And the seas are most acid near the surface, where most of their life is concentrated.
IPCC Final Report: Climate Change Urgency
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published its fourth report, a synthesis of data from three previous reports.
While the United States, Saudi Arabia and China tried to change the text in order to play down the consequences of global warming, developing nations — which will bear the initial brunt of climate change — were much more forceful than at previous meetings in opposing these efforts, one scientist who was in the negotiating room said.
"I suspect that will continue,” he said. “As they feel more and more threatened by the sea and the storms they will insist that, as one of them put it, ‘We do not want this report to be warm and fuzzy when the reality is cold and risky,’ or something like that,” he said.
Link to the full Fourth Assessment Report]
Boring solar, "interesting" nuclearI introduced Bruce Sterling, who spoke to a crowd of Solar Austin adherents at Artz Rib House in Austin Tuesday night. He talked at length about solar, design, bright green thinking, etc. He said we would know that solar had arrived when it's really boring. "Nobody gets excited about a light bulb!" A few nights before that, Halloween, to be exact, I discovered a James Lovelock interview in the latest Rolling Stone. Lovelock isn't bored.
Until recently, Lovelock thought that global warming would be just like his half-assed forest -- something the planet would correct for. Then, in 2004, Lovelock's friend Richard Betts, a researcher at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change -- England's top climate institute -- invited him to stop by and talk with the scientists there. Lovelock went from meeting to meeting, hearing the latest data about melting ice at the poles, shrinking rain forests, the carbon cycle in the oceans. "It was terrifying," he recalls. "We were shown five separate scenes of positive feedback in regional climates -- polar, glacial, boreal forest, tropical forest and oceans -- but no one seemed to be working on whole-planet consequences." Equally chilling, he says, was the tone in which the scientists talked about the changes they were witnessing, "as if they were discussing some distant planet or a model universe, instead of the place where we all live."
As Lovelock was driving home that evening, it hit him. The resiliency of the system was gone. The forgiveness had been used up. "The whole system," he decided, "is in failure mode."
I found it interesting that Lovelock is arguing that "nuclear power is the only green solution." What do you think?
Photo: Bruce Sterling at Artz Rib House, where you could cut the smell of barbecue with a knife.
Here's a link to a 1272x948 animated gif of smoke from the California fires, as seen from space.
Buckley on global warmingWilliam F. Buckley seems to question why United States, though "easily the principal offender" in adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, should be expected to take steps toward mitigation if other countries (China and India) aren't doing the same.
As a practical matter, what have modern states undertaken with a view to diminishing greenhouse gases? The answer is: Not very much. What is being done gives off a kind of satisfaction, of the kind felt back then when prayers were recited as apostates were led to the stake to be burned. If you levied a 100 percent surtax on gasoline in the United States, you would certainly reduce the use of it, but the arbiter is there to say: What is a complementary sacrifice we can then expect from India and China? China will soon overtake the United States in the production of greenhouse gases.
He goes on to say that "it is estimated that if the United States had subscribed to Kyoto, it would have cost us $100 billion to $400 billion per year." Earlier in the same piece (after a straw man argument I'm not addressing here) he says
Critics are correct in insisting that human enterprises have an effect on climate. What they cannot at this point do is specify exactly how great the damage is, nor how much relief would be effected by specific acts of natural propitiation.
I think the summary point of this op ed is that, because we don't know the extent of climate-related disaster we face, we shouldn't make economic sacrifices ostensibly required to mitigate the problem. Though Buckley is too smart to claim (as others do) that global warming is "fiction," his argument favors the same sort of outcome as Bob Murray's. Murray, CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, said
"Some wealthy elitists in our country ... who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived ‘global goofiness' campaigns."
This reminds me of "Jaws," where a massive great white shark is menacing a community whose mayor would rather ignore the danger in favor of the tourist trade. That's Bob Murray, and you can understand why he would radically ignore the danger. He's coming from a very emotional place, he can't really think clearly about a barely-perceived threat that he doesn't completely understand; all he can see clearly is the immediate economic side of the issue - if I close the beaches, the local economy will be devastated.
But you have to wonder about Buckley, who clearly knows better, yet subtly reinforces Murray's argument.
The real question, I suppose, is how many bodies must you find on the beach before you acknowledge that the shark is a greater threat than the economic disruption you get when you close the beaches?
TsunamiUpdate: this was later revised to magnitude 8.
Around four hours ago, there was an earthquake (7.6 magnitude) near the Solomon Islands, triggering a tsunami locally and a tsunami watch in Australia and other parts of the South Pacific. [Link]
Stewart Brand was a big influence on my thinking (and doing), so I
was interested in Jamais Cascio's response to a Sunday NY Times piece about Brand, "An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New Heresies." The article says Brand "has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found," but Jamais notes that the environmentalism of the article no longer exists; it's been replaced by the "bright green" movement a bunch of us have been pushing, more or less beginning with the Viridian Design Movement. We wouldn't necessarily find Brand's thoughts heretical, at least not for the reasons he thinks. [Link] My own thought about Brand is that he's never been a great thinker, but he's drawn out some great thinking from others... kind of a catalyst.Jamais really is smart, and he reads other smart people, such as David Roberts. Jamais paraphrases a Roberts argument re. nuclear:
the Bright Green reluctance about nuclear power has far more to do with it being centralized infrastructure and dated technology than with any fear or loathing of atoms. The environmental situation in which we find ourselves demands a fast-learning, fast-iterating, distributed and collaborative technological capacity, not a system that bleeds out investment dollars and leaves us stuck with technologies already on the verge of obsolescence....If we're looking for resilience, flexibility and innovation, the nuclear industry is not a good place to start.Jamais' conclusion about Brand:
The conventional meaning of "heretic" is one who goes against dogma, and the positions that Stewart takes here just don't meet that requirement. There's no doubt that it would be possible to find self-described environmentalists who fit the stereotype that Stewart is responding to, but one of the hallmarks of the modern environmental movement -- and the reason why the "heresy" model is arguably obsolete -- is that, when it comes to solutions, nothing is a priori off the table. All solution options can be considered, but they must be able to stand up to competing ideas. Even if some of us believe that some of the solutions he advocates don't stand up to the competition, we aren't going to try to claim that Stewart Brand somehow isn't an environmentalist. As long as he recognizes that the Earth's geophysical systems are under extraordinary duress, and that business-as-usual is driving us headlong into disaster, he's one of us -- even if the ways we want to avoid that disaster vary.
Fireworks, comet, lightning
Amazing photo by Antti Kemppainen, actually a composite of three photos shot at a beach in Perth, Australia: Australia Day fireworks on the left, Comet McNaught in the center, and a thunderstorm with intense lightning on the right.
Viridian VictoryI've been managing the Viridian Design Movement's web site since Bruce launched the movement around the turn of the century; I should note his latest Viridian Note declaring Viridian Note 00487: We Are Winning">victory. This is note #487 after around seven years, and in those years the environmental movement has clearly grown, evolved, and incorporated elements of futurism and design. There's a whole new approach, epitomized by Amory Lovins, Worldchanging, et al, that focuses on solutions over the handwringing of late 20th century environmental fatalism.
In the Viridan Manifesto, Bruce said
"Number One. Perhaps most importantly, this movement has a built-in expiration date. The problem with previous art movements is this unexamined assumption that they have discovered some eternal cultural truth, and that they will therefore go on forever. In point of fact, no matter how much truth they discover, movements never do last very long.
"So, this is where our movement gets it built-in expiration date. The date is 2012, a date in the Kyoto accords, when people are supposed to be engaged in a serious decline in CO2 emissions."
In this latest Viridian note, he says
(((We Viridians have beaten that clock. There is no need to wait for distant 2012 to declare victory in our war to make green trendy and to create "irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade." Green will never get any trendier than it is this year. The atmosphere upgrade is on the way. That process won't be pretty, but it's going to happen.)))
(((The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))
((When the Davos Economic Forum steals your clothes, there's no reason left to wear them any more. We are winning. The Great and the Good agree with us. They're more scared than we ever were.)))
Early in this latest note, Bruce says "This is number 487. I doubt we will ever reach 500 of these." I suppose we'll maintain the Viridian Design site, at least for a while, as an historical archive.
Loren Coleman blogs about "a mystery millionaire who will pay a high bounty on the capture of giant owls." Evidently there's a rumor that a large owl can turn its owner into a millionaire (but if you're already a millionaire, do you really need the owl?) The story's more convoluted: is the CIA using the owl hunt as a ruse to find Osama? Is a giant owl terrorising the UK? Are the owls actually intellligence operatives? Was James Bond a birder? Loren Coleman rocks. [Link]
A new volcanic island just appeared near Tonga. [Link]
The crew of the Maiken, a yacht that left the northern Tongan islands group of Vava'u in August, reported on their Web log on August 12 that they saw streaks of light, porous pumice stone floating in the water -- then "sailed into a vast, many-miles-wide belt of densely packed pumice."Alan AtKisson on the Tällberg Conference
They posted photos of huge "pumice rafts" that they encountered after passing Tonga's Late island while sailing toward Fiji.
"We were so fascinated and busy taking pictures that we plowed a couple of hundred meters into this surreal floating stone field before we realized that we had to turn back," wrote a crewman identified only as Haken.
Alan's report on the Tällberg Conference is sort of disturbing for its sense that we might have to resign ourselves to our inability to do serious, effective, and proactive work required to ensure the survival of the fancy monkeys. The Tällberg Conference may be as good as it gets, and not good enough. [Link]
Al's slideshow Marsha and I finally saw An Inconvenient Truth last night, and (as so many are saying) it's an important film that everyone should see. It's based on a slideshow about global warming Al Gore's presented, he says in the film, over a thousand times over the years since he wrote Earth in the Balance. If you've been writng and talking about global warming for years, as I have, you probably won't learn anything new about the subject, but you'll get a better sense of Al Gore's importance as a leader, whether he runs for office again or not.I confess that on Day 1, I had hopes that Tällberg Forum would "do something." Or perhaps "be something." A turning point. A new start. A breakthrough. A time of serious new commitment to change. I know that is unrealistic, but I have embraced the Buckminster Fuller dictum, "Dare to be naive." It is the only way such things can be made the least bit possible. It is the only way to avoid the far worse trap of cynicism. There was significantly less cynicism than usual on display at Tällberg, which is perhaps one of the greatest compliments one can give to an international conference on the problems of our time. It seemed quite a number of people, including some relatively powerful people (when in their public roles), were also daring to be at least a little naive.
But by Day 3, I had made my peace with the fact that the Tällberg Forum was what it was: a good conference, with a particularly interesting assemblage of people, in a particularly nice place. The musicians, led by multi-instrumentalist Ale Möller and serving up a pot pourri of world music, were superb and inspiring. The Tällberg organization itself was also "tight", just as one says of a good band. They struggled with timing, but they kept the whole thing moving forward, broke it up with artistic interludes, created an atmosphere that created, in turn, a good place to talk.
And the talk? Well, as one of my colleagues reminded me, "This is as good as it gets." He explained that he had attended quite a number of "high end" conferences recently, including Davos and others, and that one just should not have very high expectations about the world's capacity for serious, searching dialogue about global direction. Tällberg was, for him, an indicator of how well the world was thinking about big issues, in a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural way, because it represented a kind of peak in how such dialogues occur. This was a sobering reflection.
But perhaps the trend is in the right direction. To my mind, the world is not anywhere near as "serious" as it needs to get about the complex problems we face in this century. But the Tällberg motto, "Getting Serious", implies that this is a process. We will need to keep working, as a world, on "Getting Serious" for a long time to come.
Is the presentation completely accurate? Pretty much. According to the climate scientists at Realclimate.org, it has only a couple of questionable moments, and they're minor.
Indonesia Quake ResourcesI made a brief post at WorldChanging.com with links to Yogyakarta Quake Resources.
Heavy weatherThe 2006 Atlantic Hurricane Outlook published by NOAA suggests an 80% chance of an above-normal hurricane season, i.e. as bad as last year. " The main uncertainty in this outlook is not whether the season will be above normal, but how much above normal it will be." Batten down the hatches!
Cloud House
Like Kevin Kelly, I'd like to make a yurt. Kevin reviews a guide to yurt construction called Mongolian Cloud Houses, noting that a yurt is a "tent house" which, unlike a tent, is not very portable, though you can move it if you have to. You can build a yurt yourself, though there are commercial versions (which aren't has loose and funky).
ApocaphiliaInspired by Bruce Sterling's grounded response to James Lovelock's mind at the end of its tether, Jamais coins a new term, apocaphilia. Perfect. [Link]
America's discovery rediscovered
A Chinese map supposedly drawn in 1418 shows the Americas, and if the date of origin is confirmed, we'll have yet another group claiming to have discovered America before Columbus. All pretty meaningless – I mean, there were people in America when the Vikings, Chinese, Italians et al arrived. What did they discover?
State of the World 2006
Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.
India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.
The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.
The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.Another big quake, closer to homeVia usgs.gov: A magnitude 6.7 earthquake IN GULF OF CALIFORNIA has occurred at:
Quakes du jour
28.10N 112.07W Depth 10km Wed Jan 4 08:32:31 2006 UTC. [Link] According to the San Jose Mercury-News, the quake is unlikely to have caused significant damage because there are few people where it was most severe. Interesting to check out quake activity for the North American Region over the last week – one other mag 6 quake farther south, near Panama, with a few mag 5s clustered nearby.I subscribe to quake notifications via email, and earlier today I noticed a 7.3 earthquake near the South Sandwich Islands. About an hour ago I got notification of a 7.1 quake in the Fiji region. These quakes are the large orange squares on the quake map posted above. (USGS also has a list of quakes that are magnitude 5 or greater). Given the magnitude of the quakes and the fact that they're both at sea, I wondered about tsunami potential. According to the Pacific Tsunami Center, no tsunami resulted from the Fiji quake... but there's still no tsunami warning system for the Atlantic. I did find an article saying tsunami is unlikely. It's been a year sense the devastating Southeast Asian Tsunami, so I'm surprised there's no warning system for the Atlantic... evidently there's a plan, at least.
Texas Weather ReportTexas is officially a disaster area (especially since Republicans like Rick Perry are a little sensitive about disaster response these days). This time it's not a hurricane, but more than 70 wildfires across the state, according to CNN. We haven't seen any fires around Austin so far, but we're definitely dry these days – lake levels are 'way down and water conservation is already becoming an issue as we experience one of the driest years on record. Temporarily back in Austin after a year in California, Bruce Sterling blogged about the Austin Statesman's "typical climate change article that numbly fails to cite climate change." Meanwhile cedar pollen's hitting the air, which means that some of us can't breathe even if we're not on fire yet.
Gulf Stream weakeningThe current that drives the Gulf Stream has weakened by 30% over the last twelve years, evidently due to global warming (I prefer to say global climate change). The effect of this change may be cooling rather than warming, and "the final impact of any cooling effect will depend on whether it outweighs the global warming that, paradoxically, is driving it." [Link]
More earthquakesEarthquakes struck China and Iran over the last couple of days. If you look at the quake map for Asia, there've been several large quakes in the area over the last week. Look at the map of the world, and you can see that there's a whole lotta shakin' going on. The recently launched Dubai Metroblog has more info about the quake in Iran, which was also felt in Dubai.
Patenting landThis looks pretty critical: congress may allow the patenting of public land. This post to a diary at Daily Kos includes a scary bit of info from the LA Times:
There are plenty of examples of how companies have used the 1872 mining law's patenting provisions to get their hands on public resources dirt cheap. In 1970, Frank Melluzzo "patented" -- bought -- public land near Phoenix for $150. Ten years later, he sold it for more than $400,000. Today, the Pointe Hilton Hotel in Phoenix sits on this mining claim. In 1983, Mark Hinton patented national forest land adjacent to the Keystone ski resort in Colorado. He later sold the parcel for more than 4,000 times what he paid for it. In 1994, American Barrick Corp. patented about 1,000 acres of public land in Nevada. That land contained more than $10 billion in gold reserves. But under the 1872 mining law, it paid only $5,000 for the land and paid not a dime in royalties to the federal Treasury.Congress banned the patenting and sale of public lands a decade ago, but a California Republican rep named Richard Pombo has attached what amounts to a "public land giveaway" to a House deficit reduction measure. More info here. Inside the BowlInside the Bowl is a New Orleans blog started by Steve Seebol and Elizabeth Kahn, who've just returned to New Orleans. It's the first specifically post-Katrina blog I've seen, and I think it's going to be a powerful force for the reconstruction of the spirit as well as the physical infrastructure of the city.
....Many older people who evacuated could not deal with the stress. They left, but in many cases their health problems were more then they could handle. These deaths are not in the official death total, which is really just a body count. These people died in Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge or lord knows where. They might have passed away anyway, but the storm didn’t make it easier.Climate debate is heating up
One of those who died, while evacuated, was my friend and father-in-law Fred Kahn. Fred had been sick for awhile. But when faced with the arduous task of leaving the city that he was born in, he rose to the occasion with oxygen tank at hand got in the car and left for the 7 hour trip to his daughter’s house in New Iberia, LA. We were all staying there for the first 3 weeks, and it was painful to watch Fred’s energy wane and his concentration falter. He knew there was a storm and that the world was no longer the way he remembered it, but he wasn’t sure what was going on directly around him. Fred was in exile 2 months slowly losing ground before he slumped over while watching a football game and left us. It makes me very sad that he had to endure so much hardship at the end of his life. He was a sweet and decent man. We miss him.A few scientists may still question growing evidence of global climate change, others wonder if the evident warming trend signals something even more extreme, a catastrophic "super-interglacial" state. [Link]
They emphasize that within a century global warming will probably exceed the Eemian temperature maximum and thus obviate all the models that have made this their essential scenario. They also suggest that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a real possibility -- an event that would definitely throw a Younger Dryas wrench into the Gulf Stream.Alan AtKisson at Earth Charter
If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of a runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations marked "Altithermal" and "Eemian." "Outside the envelope," moreover, means that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic parameters of the Holocene -- the last 10,000 years of mild, warm weather that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and urban civilization -- but also those of the late Pleistocene that fostered the evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa.WorldChanging blogger and sustainability consultant Alan AtKisson has been appointed International Transition Director for the Earth Charter Initiative beginning in January. My first experience of Alan's work was in the 80s, when he was editor of one of my favorite magazines, In Context
Earth Charter is an organization, but it's also a document that defines sustainability. You can download a pdf of the charter, Here's an excerpt from the preamble:
The choice is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We have the knowledge and technology to provide for all and to reduce our impacts on the environment. The emergence of a global civil society is creating new opportunities to build a democratic and humane world. Our environmental, economic, political, social, and spiritual challenges are interconnected, and together we can forge inclusive solutions.WilmaHurricane Wilma is yet another category 5 hurricane; I just heard that it's now the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record. Check out a high res image. The projected path has it strkiking the Yucatan Penninsula, and glancing off to the right into Florida.
South Asian Quake Help BlogThe same group who created the Tsunamihelp blog as well as the hurricane help wikis have created a South Asia Quake Help blog. (Thanks to Dina Mehta for this info.) The death toll from the quake is mounting, nearing 20,000. There's also a Pakistan Quake 2005 blog.
Good morning!?After attempting a day off on Thursday and playing catchup on Friday, I'm spending Saturday at a business conference sponsored by TiE Austin. Meanwhile this morning there's news of a devastating earthquake in Pakistan, magnitude 7.6, and less than an hour ago the latest aftershock was a 6.3. The earthquake map shows 43 earthquakes in the vicinity of Asia over the last week, and 162 quakes worldwide, many around mag 5. Meanwhile in Texas the news is all about conflict: the notorious Texas vs Oklahoma football game, first and foremost, and for those who ignore football, there's always Tom DeLay vs Ronnie Earle.
Update: The earthquake killed more than 18,000 people.
The casualty toll from the 7.6-magnitude tremor rose sharply Sunday as rescuers struggled to dig people from the wreckage, their work made more difficult as rain and hail turned dirt and debris into sticky muck. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's chief army spokesman, told Pakistan's Geo TV network early Sunday that more than 18,000 had been killed _ 17,000 of them in Pakistani Kashmir, where the quake was centered. Some 41,000 people were injured, he said.Let's just melt, then.The Arctic is melting, and it's melting fast. According to MSNBC, "scientists stopped short of directly blaming the melting trend on global warming but said they have few other explanations at this point." It's important to note here that scientists hypothesize rather than proclaim, which is why they "stop short." That doesn't mean that they don't think that the global climate is changing - it's obvious. Laymen will try to tie specific events to that change, but most scientists won't leap without more data, whatever they might suspect. (The Union of Concerned Scientists is a little more forthcoming: "Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and practical solutions already at our disposal."
While we're here, I should mention the post at Realclimate yesterday on pseudo-scientist Michael Crichton's visit to the U.S. Senate, joining global warming skeptic Senator James Inhofe and hurricane forecaster William Gray in a parade of "half-truths and red herrings."
More on global warming and hurricanesFirst, let's be clear where there is agreement. Climate science doesn't deal in certainties - it deals in probablities and the balance of evidence. We agree with Crichton's statement that 'Prediction is not fact'. That certainly doesn't mean, however, that projections of possible future climate changes are not meaningful or useful, as Crichton claims.
Crichton seemed to imply that "prediction" (such as that provided by weather or climate models) is useless in the decision making process. (As an aside, we wonder how Gray, who is largely known for prediction of hurricane behavior based on (statistical) modeling, felt about this?). We fundamentally disagree. All science is about observation, understanding and prediction. When those predictions work, you make new predictions. When they don't, you revisit the observations, attempt to improve your understanding of the underlying processes, and make a new prediction. And so on. In the case of climate models, this is complicated by the fact that the time scales involved need to be long enough to average out the short-term noise, i.e. the chaotic sequences of 'weather' events. Luckily, we have past climate changes to test the models against. Even more to the point, successful climate predictions have actually been made in past Senate hearings. The figure at the end of this comment by Jim Hansen demonstrates that projections of global mean climate presented in a 1988 senate hearing (17 years ago) have actually been right on the money ...
Hurricanes either are or aren't affected by global climate change, according to a CNN article. Meteorologists are saying wild and woolly hurricanes like Katrina and Rita are part of a natural cycle that could last another decade or two. Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center in Miami sez "The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations (and) cycles of hurricane activity driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along with the atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming," This is despite a study suggesting that global warming is making hurricanes "more ferocious." And CNN has a quote from that side of the aisle, too:
Brenda Ekwurzel, climate scientist of the Union of Concerned Scientist National Climate Education Program, told CNN that while global warming might not be causing hurricanes, it already is making them more intense.Conflating various facts and issues doesn't help, maybe we should decouple...
"We would never point to a single weather event and blame global warming," she said. "While hurricanes have bedeviled the Gulf Coast region for years, global warming is making matters worse."
As a somewhat well-informed layman, I accept those last two as fact, but it's okay with me if you want to challenge 'em. Whatever the case, I think we have enough data to confirm that the climate is changing, and we have to think about adaptation. Rita
- global climate change is a fact
- human impact on climate change is arguable
- impact of climate change on hurricanes is arguable
It's sunny and hot in Austin, though we're starting to see the clouds thrown forward by Hurricane Rita as she approaches the coast. The only real effect of storm preparations I've seen is in the grocery stores: our local HEB had no water on the shelves when I was last there, and no bread. It was packed, too, with many dutifully buying a week's supplies, as instructed by local news anchors and the experts standing somewhere, invisible, behind 'em. It hit us as we left the store that we couldn't imagine a scenario for Austin that would require a week's supply of food.
Knowing we'd be busy this year, we'd already decided to sell our ACLFest tickets. We were glad to find a buyer - it's uncomfortably hot and humid today, more so that we expected this late in the month, and tomorrow we'll be slammed by wind and rain, though we'll miss the full force of the hurricane after its right turn (an earlier path projection had it reaching Austin, possibly as a cat 1 hurricane).
I'm still not making any bets on landfall or path. I figure at this point we can officially classify Rita as Texas weather, therefore completely unpredictable.
RitaDepending where it hits, Hurricane Rita, now a category 4 hurricane, could devastate parts of the Texas Gulf Coast. A projected landfall at Galveston could flood the city that was slammed once before, in 1900, the infamous "Isaac's storm." Taking no chances in the 21st Century, Galveston's evacuating. Many evacuees are heading for Austin, which will already be crowded with the Austin City Limits Festival happening. Could be a real mess if Rita hits Austin as a strong tropical storm.
Dreaming a New New OrleansWorldChanging contributor Alan AtKisson worked with regional leaders in New Orleans on a plan for southeast Louisiana's future, sponsored by Greater New Orleans, Inc. Alan says his team had to overcome a surprising sense of fatalism within the region before the project could move forward. But "there was hope stirring in the city"...
When we recently updated the indicators for Top 10 by 2010, we were ourselves amazed to discover that whatever was happening in New Orleans was quickly being noticed elsewhere. In just three years, on the Forbes/Milken list of Best Places for Business and Careers, the New Orleans region had climbed from number 194 (out of 200) to number 110, a jump of 84 places. Suddenly, cracking the Top 10 by the year 2010 -- a goal that looked wildly ambitious and unrealistic in 2001 -- actually seemed possible.Now "the worst has happened. The city has, in functional terms, been destroyed. Fatalism has had its ultimate day....From here forward, New Orleans can choose its own fate." Alan suggests five principles for building a "bright, green, safe New Orleans." [Link]A New New Orleans must be a city dedicated to the genuine well-being of all her citizens. Poverty had been reduced in the 1990s; but pockets of terrible, entrenched poverty were still far too common in that city prior to its deluge. Those pockets are the one thing that must not be restored; instead, the city must charge into rebuilding with an eye to reducing poverty drastically, by reducing the conditions that create it. The now-destroyed, once-crumbling houses in the 9th Ward (the poorest section of the city) must be replaced with decent, modern, and yes green housing (see below). The people who live in New Orleans must be employed in rebuilding it, thereby gaining marketable skills in the process.Bruce Sterling: "New Orleans has become an awesome Y2K survivalist dystopia"
While simple morality should make this principle clear and sufficiently compelling, it also behooves the nation to rebuild the city in a way that uplifts even its poorest residents, for simple security reasons. The alternative is chaos, and the scenes of looting, shooting, armored vehicles and violence that followed eerily in the hurricane's wake are but a foreshadowing of what New Orleans could become, semi-permanently, if a truly visionary and socially just rebuilding does not occur.Bruce Sterling on New Orleans after Katrina:
I wonder how many of these "unprecedented" eventsKatrina update
the American public is going to take before they get
it about climate change. And what then? It's going
to be interesting to live in a society where climate change
and energy are the major everyday topics. "Nine-eleven."
We lost a couple of buildings then. This is an
entire city.
NASA satellite photos show the New Orleans flood (with a "before" shot for comparison). The disaster just gets worse - a minute ago CNN was reporting a fire in the French Quarter, and there's "a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and still no clear sense of the death toll, though the mayor of New Orleans speculates that thousands may be dead. [Link]
Worldchanging I'm on an island in the Pacific Northwest talking and thinking with my Worldchanging.com colleagues, pretty exhilirating and a welcome opportunity to rub many minds together in a face to face context and see if we can start a fire. I personally feel a sense of urgency about doing more to kindle solutions as environmenal and sociopolitical issues loom ever darker, not on the horizon but just overhead. (Ed Burtynsky has joined us; he has compelling images that show dramatically the human impact on the environment - worthwhile to look through his site.] Sunny Siberia!
- Link to Earth Observatory Images
- Link to Missing Persons Board
- Katrina Help Wiki
- Donate to the Red Cross
Get ready to adapt; Siberia appears to be melting, and if it is, the implications are far-reaching, according to an article in the UK Guardian:
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.According to the Guardian, "Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world....as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates" the rate of warming overall. Even worse, the Siberian bog could contain 70 billion tones of methane that could be released gradually as it thaws. Jamais Cascio discusses this in a piece at WorldChanging.com, noting that methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Jamais discusses possible mitigation via terraforming. Flooding in BombayMy WorldChanging colleague Rohit Gupta wrote me that it was raining in Mumbai, and I wrote back that we'd driven through what we call a gullywasher here in Texas a few days before, and Rohit explained that the rain in Mumbai was a whole nother level of storm. Mumbai flooded completely, and it was still going to rain for at least 30 more hours. News reports today show 37 inches of rain and counting. [Link]
Google SightseeingIf you find yourself playing for hours on end with Google Maps' satellite view, and/or you're into virtual travel, this site's for you. The above image is Black Rock City, aka the Burning Man site. [Link]
OilIan Gilfillan posts a good analysis of the impact of oil price increases as shortages grow worse. Nobody's dealing with the consumption problem, but the market will have its effect.
The transport and airline industries would take serious strain. Investment in renewables and nuclear (I talked about the high road of renewables versus the low road of nuclear in my post George Monbiot and the looming energy crisis) is lagging, so the effects cannot be other than a recession. This recession would hit developing, oil-dependent countries hardest. New technologies would first appear in developed countries, meaning that there would be shortages in developing countries, and of course exchange rate fluctuations would again hit developing countries hardest.On the other hand –Some positive effects would ensue. Local goods would be more attractive as they gain a greater relative competitive advantage. A Cuban-style model (where urban farming boomed after Soviet funds dried up) would ensue, while American-style suburbs would become less sustainable as it becomes less feasible to commute long distances, and ship goods in from afar. The eventual decrease in oil consumption can only have good effects on the planet's health.Political Religion and DoomsdayThis is a followup to my last bleak post. Nicole Boyer pointed me to a new piece by Bill Moyers, "Welcome to Doomsday", which, she says in her a post on her blog, Fuzzy Signals, "describes chillingly well the antagonistic relationship between the evangelicalism of the American Christian Right variety and environmentalism." While some of us plan to stay around for a while on an earth that will hopefully remain viable for human and other life, some evangelical Christians have an exit strategy, "the rapture". Why would they worry about any future beyond the apocalypse, which should be any minute now....
Living beyond our meansClever humans have found so many ways to grow, build, and put resources to destructive use that we've managed to use up two-thirds of the planet and imperil ten million other species, along with our own. This according to a report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries, which is certain to be controversial, especially in the U.S., where we don't dare put on the brakes for fear of economic losses (thinking of Bush's position on the Kyoto treaty). However it's not the end of the world – without pesky life-forms to muck it up, the planet should do very well, eventually. [Link]
"That is what this assessment has done, and it is a sobering statement with much more red than black on the balance sheet," the scientists warn. "In many cases, it is literally a matter of living on borrowed time. By using up supplies of fresh groundwater faster than they can be recharged, for example, we are depleting assets at the expense of our children.""Islandboy no more"Flow from rivers has been reduced dramatically. For parts of the year, the Yellow River in China, the Nile in Africa and the Colorado in North America dry up before they reach the ocean. An estimated 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators - tuna, swordfish and sharks - has disappeared in recent years. An estimated 12% of bird species, 25% of mammals and more than 30% of all amphibians are threatened with extinction within the next century. Some of them are threatened by invaders.
A powerful, touching piece by Morquendi (Sanjay Senanayake), who's been covering the tsunami at Chiens Sans Frontiers, about his love of the sea... and the sea's betrayal of that love. [Link]
August last year I was chasing Indian trawlers off the coast of Pesalai in Mannar. They were coming in from Rameshwaram and fishing in Sri Lankan waters. The fishermen wanted the story broken. I wanted a big story to break. So there we were, me and my crew, on a motor boat rigged with two engines for double the speed, racing through the seas in the Palk Straight, chasing trawlers with Rameshwaram registration. After a few minutes we couldnt see land and I was exhilarated. We did catch them. I got my story and the fishermen got the exposure they wanted. But that is another tale. On our way back to shore I asked how deep the sea was. We were about 5 miles from shore. They told me it was about a hundred feet deep. I took off my t-shirt and jumped in right off the moving boat. I dove to see if they were kidding about the depth. At about twenty feet when my ears began to hurt I swam back up. Ill never forget that. Surrounded by nothing but the sea on all sides. No shore in sight.Earthquake RSS FeedThe USGS site has an RSS feed for earthquakes worldwide. [RSS 2.0 link: Earthquake Activity]
Quake/Tsunami Relief and ResourcesVolunteers have set up a The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog to gather and coordinate information about resources, aid, donations, and volunteer efforts in response to the devastation in Southeast Asia. There are several posts at WorldChanging.com about the catastrophic effects of the great quake. WC will follow up soon with a more comprehensive post, and thoughts about how such tragedies might be averted in the future. Here's an excerpt from a message I sent in a private email earlier today:
Humans have the gift of potential foresight yet we're in denial about our fragility and vulnerability to exceptional natural forces. I think that's the real story here. More so than developed vs developing nations... consider that Thailand had tsunami warning systems but hadn't thought to deploy them on the West Coast. India and Sri Lanka hadn't joined the international warning system because tsunamis are less frequent in the Indian Ocean, as if something like this could never occur. The Indonesian quote says they couldn't afford the equipment, but I suspect that means they hadn't given it priority.I wonder if there'd been any kind of risk assessment to suggest that tsunami detection might in fact be a priority?
And what other risks are we ignoring? We pay at least some attention to potential asteroid collisions, but what action would we take if we did spot an asteroid on a collision course with the earth? I suspect that scenario hasn't got the attention it deserves.
We see this with global warming. We see this with some volcanoes - Yellowstone is an excellent example. If Yellowstone blows, and it very well might, we'd potentially have a world-killing catastrophe. How much thought have we given to preparation/mitigation?
So I think this is about understanding potentially catastrophic forces, creating strategies for prevention, warning, mitigation, whatever, and getting buy-in on those. Perhaps we need a set of potential catastrophe scenarios with probability ratings for prioritization, and proposals for response.
