Author: Bryan Walker

Got myself arrested

“More than 200 years after the founding of our nation, we face a great moral crisis. Human-made climate change pits the rich and powerful against the young and unborn, against the defenseless, and against nature. The moral issue is comparable to slavery and civil rights.”

James Hansen was speaking at Freedom Plaza in Washington this week prior to a march and a sit-in in front of the White House, an act of non-violent civil disobedience which resulted in his arrest along with a hundred or so other participants. They were protesting against the Appalachian mountain top removal coal mining.

Hansen’s speaking style is hardly that of an orator, but his address included some striking statements which convey very adequately the urgency he feels as the result of his work as a climate scientist.

“First, the government is failing to protect the future of young people, knowingly allowing and even subsidizing actions that benefit the few at the expense of the public and at the expense of all life sharing this Earth.

“Second, the legislative and executive branches of government knowingly propose actions that demonstrably and utterly fail to preserve our climate, and the environment for life.

“Third, our government allows and contributes to a great hoax, perpetrated on the public by moneyed interests, aimed at confusing the public about the reality of climate change.

“We are in danger of becoming the land for the rich and the home of the bribe.”

This is not the first time Hansen has been arrested. And it may not be the last. He was arrested in June of last year when with others he deliberately trespassed on the grounds of the Goals Coal plant, in Sundial, West Virginia, again to protest mountaintop-removal mining.

A parallel with the civil rights struggle is very much in his mind. After the words which open this post he went on to point out that the solution for civil rights came from a combination of street protests and the courts “which provided equal protection of the laws and ordered desegregation.”

He looks to the possibility of similar court action on the issue of climate change, and rightly stresses the focus of civil disobedience on achieving change:

“We should not be begging courts to forgive the brave people who protest. We must ask the courts to order the government to present plans to phase down fossil fuel emissions at a pace dictated by science, a pace stabilizing climate, preserving nature and a future for young people, providing young people equal protection of the laws.”

But whatever path may be open for action in the US Hansen continues to put emphasis on the education of the public.

“We can bring that case. But we can win only if the public understands the situation, sees through the lies of the moneyed interests, sees what is needed to solve the problem.”

As a scientist who has done a great deal to explain the situation resulting from rising greenhouse gas emissions and to articulate the solutions Hansen has already contributed greatly to the educational process.  His willingness to engage in civil disobedience highlights the gravity of what he and other scientists have uncovered in our deteriorating environment. We salute him for his continuing engagement.

[Gomez]

The Climate Connection

The Climate Connection: Climate Change and Modern Human Evolution

The authors of The Climate Connection: Climate Change and Modern Human Evolution are deeply aware of the threat to human survival accompanying our rising greenhouse gas emissions. Renée Hetherington and Robert G.B. Reid suggest that a better understanding of our past evolutionary relationship with climate may point to how we may yet make the future more hopeful than it presently seems. Not because the climates homo sapiens has had to live with in the past resemble what we are laying up for our future, but because the authors see elements in past human responses from which we might learn if we will.

The book covers a wide field, dealing with the emergence of modern humans, the dispersions and migrations of human populations, the climate changes of the last 350,000 years and the interaction between climate and humans during that time, concluding with reflections on our future in a very different climate environment. The survey is designed for those with courses of study in view or already working in the area and is hence often demanding for the general reader. It contains much detailed and carefully referenced information in its pages. However its underlying themes are regularly stated and provide ample bearings for readers for whom the territory is not familiar.

In discussing human behavioural evolution the authors espouse the working hypothesis that from the outset homo sapiens has had the potential to express the same thoughts, ideas, communication, spirituality, artistry and technical complexities as our own brains. But a combination of environmental conditions, both favourable and stressful, and increased social complexity was needed to bring out that potential. Robert Reid, a biologist, is a proponent of emergent evolution and a critic of the adequacy of natural selection theory. The book argues that environmental and climate connections have elucidated rapid changes in human behaviour in the past. Adaptability is required under conditions of stress and climatic instability which demand disregard of old ways and the adoption of new. Such adaptability has been demonstrated in human populations.

The book makes a long and careful journey looking for times when rapid behaviour change might have occurred. The “out of Africa” hypothesis underlies the authors’ survey, with much attention paid to early human mobility and migration. Geographical barriers to human movement, expansive coastal plains exposed when sea level fell during glacial periods, possible congregation of populations in productive refugia in glacial periods leading to increased genetic exchange, are among the factors the book considers as it surveys the evidence of the dispersal of behaviourally modern humans in the various regions of the world. The authors give especially close attention to the Americas where they have a greater research background.

A substantial section of the book examines climate during the last glacial cycle in considerable detail. It includes an excellent description of climate change forcing mechanisms. The authors have recently used the UVic Earth system climate model, which they describe as of intermediate complexity, in a project to understand the world’s changing climate over the last 135,000 years. Combining modelling with proxy indicators they try to reach a best estimate of the climate and its effects on vegetation over a number of different stages during that time. This is the changing world that our ancestors moved through and inhabited.

What did the changes mean for those ancestors? The book frankly acknowledges the huge gaps in any picture we can hazard constructing. The words ‘may’ and ‘likely’ occur frequently.  But it painstakingly matches any fossil and archeological evidence that can be matched and emerges with some general observations which certainly seem worthy of consideration. One in particular sounds a theme recurrent in the book. In the course of the glacial cycle they see probable migration out of deteriorating regions and into more habitable areas where disparate groups would be periodically placed in social contact with one another. It is this sort of social interaction that they consider likely to have stimulated the emergence of intelligence and the development of new ideas and technologies. Eventually the relatively more settled climate of the Holocene led to the development of agriculture which allowed humans to directly manipulate the unpredictability of nature, albeit sometimes precariously as the chapter surveying the history of agriculture makes clear.

Is all this any help as we face a climate changing because we are causing it to change, with prospect of an altered kind of world from that in which human civilisation developed?  We’re in a different situation from our roving ancestors. The authors point out that there are 6.75 billion of us now, expected to rise to over 9 billion by 2050. The global dominance we have achieved as a species has been achieved as we have discovered how to manipulate our environment. But with environmental manipulation has come the unintended consequence of human-caused climate change bringing the threat of severe economic and social instability. On a planet so heavily populated and whose resources are so stretched it is not possible to replicate a past when humans could migrate to new regions relatively unobstructed.

What then can we learn from the past experiences of our species?  It has to be said that the authors are hardly confident as they address the question towards the end of the book. However they do their best. In our past real changes in behaviour occurred when humans experienced significant environmental stress. They note that major environmental stress is clearly predicted in our future, so behavioural change may potentially be on the way. But they recognise that the problem is that we must change now before climate change puts us under those stresses. In effect, then, they suggest anticipating the stresses and opting for changes before they are forced upon us. Even as they do so they recognise that it’s by no means clear that we can manage this. For example they rather chillingly refer to Jared Diamond’s Collapse which speaks of ‘creeping normalcy’ as a major reason why people fail to recognise a problem until it is too late. Further, they note that Diamond states that even when the problem is recognised societies frequently fail to solve it because people are highly motivated to reap big, certain and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals.

Nevertheless in spite of all the negative possibilities the authors emphasise that the important message from past human interactions with climate is that we should work co-operatively in finding innovative solutions which will lead to the global sustainability which we have placed under threat. Revolutionary ideas have been stimulated in the past in response to rapidly changing environmental conditions and as a consequence of concentrating populations. Reluctance to change leaves us highly vulnerable to decline, and even extinction.

This advice is hardly new. It comes at us from many directions. But for the authors of this book it is reinforced by all they know of the long story of our species. The intrinsic interest in what they have to tell of that story is enhanced by their ever present sense of how it might assist us in understanding and confronting the challenges ahead for our species.

[More at Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK, with free worldwide shipping)]

Climate action: the moral dimension

Joseph Romm sounded the theme of moral obligation in a post on Climate Progress this morning as he directed readers’ attention to an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University. Appiah was reflecting on what future generations might condemn us for. He instances practices in the past which are now regarded with abhorrence. Men dutifully beating their wives and children, the execution of homosexuals, the practice of slavery, denying women the vote, lynch mobs, are among his examples. We look back and ask: What were people thinking?

What in our own time are our descendants likely to look back on and ask what we were thinking? Appiah identifies four contenders, some which go beyond the scope of Hot Topic’s focus, but before he does so he suggests three signs that a particular present practice may be destined for future condemnation. What especially attracted my attention was his use of the institution of slavery to illustrate the signs.

“First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

“Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)

“And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.”

I have often detected parallels between the struggle to get action on climate change and the past struggle to have slavery abolished, but have tended to draw back from pointing to them because the content of the struggles is different and the comparison may seem rather harsh on the opponents of climate change action. However the three signs Appiah nominates seem to me apposite to climate change inaction, and I hope I can point this out in sufficiently general terms to avoid appearing to accuse anyone of gross inhumanity.

First, we have been aware of the dangers of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, not for centuries admittedly, but for long enough for governments to be apprised of the information.  The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has been in force since 1994 and enjoys near universal membership.

Second, many of the arguments against effective action invoke economic necessity ahead of environmental responsibility.  In the case of the slave trade and slavery the argument was strongly urged that economic ruin and decay would result. Somehow that trumped any humanitarian issues. In the case of climate change the issues are not presented so starkly. We are assured that the environmental questions are not overlooked, just pushed down the list. But the obstinate fact remains that the economy comes first, and moreover the economy as it is presently conducted and understood, not as it might become when greened.

Thirdly, strategic ignorance is deeply involved in the continuance of many of our present climate unfriendly activities. It relates to those in poorer countries already suffering the effects of climate change as well as to our grandchildren and their children who will be struggling with the massive problems we are bequeathing them.  If anyone tries to make a connect between the floods of Pakistan or the wildfires of Russia and our greenhouse gas emissions they are accused of falsely attributing natural phenomena to human causation. If they point to the storms ahead for our grandchildren they are dismissed as alarmist.

The Quakers had an honourable part to play in the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. I was interested a year ago to read a book by a group of modern Quakers, academics and entrepreneurs, on the kind of changes needed to produce an ecologically sustainable and socially just economy. Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy was its title and I reviewed it on Celsias. Why I mention it here is because the authors deliberately place themselves in the tradition of the 18th century Quakers who engaged in the campaign to end British participation in the slave trade and abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. They see their book as a moral challenge to today’s growth-driven economy, and take inspiration from their Quaker predecessors who “eventually won the day and brought down the economic interests that argued for the ‘natural law’ of profit over all”.

To return to Appiah and the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, the environment is one of the areas in which he foresees future generations asking what we were thinking.

“It’s not as though we’re unaware of what we’re doing to the planet: We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions — the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they won’t be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to.”

Joe Romm’s complementary comment on that paragraph is just right:

“Also, unlike most other condemnable immoral activities in history, by the time this is obvious to all, there will be no undoing it by passing a law or establishing new social norms. And that’s why we all have a moral obligation to condemn what’s happening now in the strongest possible terms.”

It’s the moral dimension which makes it not unreasonable to see parallels between the obstinate refusal or delay to face up to the consequences of our climate inaction and the stubborn persistence of those in the 18th and 19th century who staved off action on slavery for so long.

Rees: scientists are citizens too

The BBC’s HARDtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur engaged this week with the eminently reasonable Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. The interview covered a range of topics, and climate change was among them.  It could hardly not be, given the seriousness with which Rees regards it.  Sackur chose to introduce the subject by suggesting that some of the confusion over climate change among the general public may be “because some scientists can’t decide whether they’re scientists – completely impartial, independent, guided only by data – or whether they’re campaigners”. Who he had in mind he didn’t say, or more likely didn’t know. Perhaps he was suggesting Rees falls into that category.

If so, Rees didn’t rise to the bait but took the opportunity to affirm that there is wide acceptance in the scientific community that climate change is a matter for serious concern and that nothing that has happened in the last year weakens the evidence for this.

 

He acknowledged, however, that there is plenty of scope for debate as to what we should do about it because we have to decide what sacrifices we make now in order to guard against risks of uncertain magnitude in the future.

Incidentally, when Rees mentions the uncertainties of future predictions it should be noted that he means that it is uncertain whether the level of warming this century will be two degrees or as much as a catastrophic five or more degrees.

Confronted with Monbiot’s latest fear that climate enlightenment is dead Rees replied that he wouldn’t go as far as that but hoped rather that the debate could be reinvigorated. At this point he mentioned the article he and Anthony Giddens have just written and which has now been posted on Hot Topic. Sackur pounced, asking how that can be done by scientists who must follow the data rather than campaign.

Rees patiently agreed that it is important to separate out the science, which is the basis for the policy decisions, from the policy decisions themselves. As a scientist “I see it as my job to ensure that the science with all its uncertainties is made available to politicians.”

But then came the telling aspect of scientific responsibility: “But as citizens I think we want to make sure that issues which are longer term and important don’t always get trumped by the urgent and immediate.”

“Scientists need to get noisier do they?” asked Sackur.

“Not just scientists, but many people who are concerned about the long-term future of the environment and the climate need to urge our politicians to give some weight to long-term issues.”

Behind the politeness and carefulness of Rees’s statements there is clearly a refusal to accept the foolishly simplistic notion that climate scientists should be corralled in the domain of their science and should leave the policy makers of the world to work out for themselves whether they are going to respond to the science and how. The fact of the matter is that politicians need to be constantly challenged to face up to the seriousness of the issue. And scientists are citizens with the same interest as the rest of us in an appropriate level of political response to a grave threat.

The dichotomy which Sackur used to get the discussion under way is a false one. It’s also a very tired one. I was surprised that an accomplished interviewer such as Sackur wasn’t ready with an approach which showed a more alert awareness of why scientists like Rees are impelled to sound alarms. It seemed to fit with a critical Climate Progress post from Joseph Romm recently on what he discerns as a decline in the BBC’s coverage of climate change. In the post he  reports hearing from a former BBC producer colleague that internal editorial discussions now under way at the BBC on planning next year’s news agenda have explicitly parked climate change in the category “Done That Already, Nothing New to Say”!

Reinvigorating the debate, Rees’s preferred path, is not going to be made easy. But we can be thankful that he and other scientists are committed to the effort.

Tropical ice land: climate change hits Peruvians

It may not be strictly scientific, but anthropological observation like this is invaluable because in the end, people’s interpretation of the events they see around them count as much as or more than any peer-reviewed paper.” Guardian journalist John  Vidal has been with other writers on an Oxfam-guided tour of Peru and Ecuador  to see on the ground how changing weather is affecting human development in the Andes. He’s been blogging as he goes. No doubt there will be longer and more carefully constructed articles to follow, but these reminders that already people are suffering the effects of climate change, often severely, are worth immediate attention. I agree entirely with the quote from Vidal which opens this post, and last year welcomed a number of Oxfam reports which recounted many human stories from frontiers of climate change in Bolivia, Nepal, the Pacific Islands, and elsewhere.

 

Vidal reports meeting Julio Hanneco, “possibly the world’s greatest potato grower”. He grows 215 varieties of potatoes in the high Andean region of Peru.

“…folk like Julio and their extraordinary diversity of crops are critically endangered by the massive changes they observe taking place in the High Andes. When Julio was a boy, (he’s now in his 50s) a glacier was just two minutes walk from his door. Now it is a nine-hour hike away.”

In Julio’s own words:

“The seasons used to be very clear, we knew when to plant. Now we have less water. We used to get the water from the glacier. Now we have twice as many mosquitoes. We have no light from the glacier. I don’t understand what is going on. We feel very disoriented. I think that I will have no water and that will be the end of the world for us.”

Peru has more than 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers. Vidal reports most in rapid retreat, leaving behind devastated farmers and communities short of water.

In another blog post Vidal reports massive protest in the Espinar region. The Apurimac river “is about to be hijacked”. The Peruvian government has signed a memorandum of agreement with the neighbouring province of Arequipa, to build a giant reservoir from where the water would be used to provide hydroelectric power and irrigation. But it will not benefit the people of Espinar who stand to actually lose the little water they have. The benefit will be exported to rich farmers growing food for export on the Pacific coast.

Vidal’s group found a massive strike under way in the city of Yauri. They spoke with the leader who described it as a climate change strike.

“They are condemning us to a slow death. In the future we know we will have less water. We cannot trust the rainy season any more. Every year the water levels are diminishing. Climate change and global warming indicate in the next years we will have even less. You don’t need to be clever to see climate change is affecting everything here.”

Out in the villages in the hills, whose inhabitants expressed solidarity with the striking townsfolk, the story was the same.

“Here we had snow and ice on all the hills. We don’t any more. All these lands had water but no more. Our grandparents lived very differently to us. It used to rain from October to April, and May, June and July were frosty. We used to use the snow melt water. Now we have nothing. Before we could have 300 to 400 sheep and llamas; now we have 20 to 30 and no more.”

Oxfam and a local NGO partner are working to demonstrate adaptation measures to cope better with the semi-permanent drought which now afflicts the region. There are grounds for hope that these will be effective.  But civil unrest is rife, with numerous ongoing conflicts over water.

Vidal asks “Is this the future everywhere? Have the climate wars begun?”

[Fiery Furnaces]