Tag: McKIbben

Conference in Bolivia: who pays the price of change?

“We are very worried because we have no water. Half the people of this community have already left. Those who remain are struggling with the lack of water.”

 

Those are the words of a villager in a small Bolivian village called Khapi which is suffering from the effects of retreating glaciers in the Andes.  A BBC news report explains how it is for the villagers. Over the past 10 or 15 years, changing weather patterns have led to irregular water flows – the streams become torrents or dwindle to just trickles. “Our crops are dry now, our animals are dying; we want to cry.”

There are only 40 families in the village, but they’re ready to take their case to international forums. One of their leaders is Alivio Aruquipa (pictured):

“For the past two decades, we, the people from the Andean regions have been suffering because of the greenhouse emissions from the developed countries. If they don’t stop our glaciers will disappear soon. We want those countries to compensate us for all the damage they have done to nature…

“We don’t know how to calculate the compensation because we are not professionals, we are simply farmers. But we would like assistance, and then to receive some money and, with that money, to build dykes to store the water, improve the water canals.”

Hot Topic carried a post last November on the necessity of adaptation in Bolivia, following an Oxfam report.  The BBC news item is another example of the increasing body of evidence which bears out predictions of likely impacts of climate change. It will be discounted by some as anecdotal but there comes a point where the sheer volume of converging stories means they deserve credence.

The call for compensation is a just one, and rightly part of the price we should pay to assist poorer people already suffering the effects of human-caused climate change. In some respects it is in lieu of the price we ought to have put on carbon some years back. It’s a call which the Bolivian government is pushing. They would like to see an international environmental court where compensation claims can be made.

Bolivia is right now hosting its own international conference on climate change, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. It’s attended by a mixture of NGOs and government representatives, and in some respects it’s an attempt to recover the ground Bolivia considered was lost at Copenhagen when the Accord was put together by a small group of larger countries. Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s UN ambassador, who has been prominent in the organising of the conference says:

“The only way to get climate negotiations back on track, not just for Bolivia or other countries, but for all of life, biodiversity, our Mother Earth, is to put civil society back into the process. The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.”

Robert Eshelman describes the conference in the Huffington Post:

“…participants [include] Bill McKibben, NASA scientist Jim Hansen, Martin Khor, G77 + China negotiator Lumumba Di Aping, and Vandana Shiva. Throughout the conference, seventeen working groups will convene to discuss issues ranging from deforestation and climate migrants to the rights of indigenous peoples and developing technologies for poor and low-lying nations to adapt to the impacts of climate change.”

He sees divergence from the kind of path the US is wanting to follow:

“While the U.S. will use the Major Economies Forum and the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas to spotlight how small group and bilateral discussions among leading economies, rather than the 192-nation U.N. process, is the best way forward on climate negotiations, participants at the Bolivian conference argue that the conversation about, and the process for, developing strategies to address climate change needs to be expanded, not narrowed, bringing more voices into the debate around climate change.”

Hopefully this needn’t indicate stalemate, but both paths can be pursued. If they’re not there is real danger of the poorest nations suffering the injustice of neglect.

Weekend reading: dealing with noise

There’s no doubt that in the last few months the PR war against action on climate change has been fierce — and effective. Three articles I’ve read in the last couple of days throw some light on what’s been going on, and are well worth a few moments of anyone’s time. The first, and by far the most eloquent, is Bill McKibben’s The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century. McKibben likens the tactics of OJ Simpson’s lawyers, confronted with a huge pile of evidence that their client was guilty to the campaign against climate science:

 

If anything, [OJ’s lawyers] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared [LA detective Mark] Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instil considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

McKibben suggests that CRU head Phil Jones has been cast in the Fuhrman role, taking the full force of the attack. This personalisation of the process is exemplified by the McCarthy-like tactics of US senator James Inhofe, who has just released a report calling for investigations and prosecutions of leading climate scientists. Because they can’t change the evidence, however hard they try, they are reduced to shooting the messenger…

The robustness of the case for action is underlined in the new statement on climate science from NZ PM John Key’s science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman, Climate change and the scientific process, but Gluckman is also realistic about the difficulty of making policy in this area.

Although the risk to our future of not acting now is real, the scientific community has had and is having difficulty communicating both its uncertainty and the absolute need for action simultaneously. […] The ensuing political and economic debate on how best to respond to climate change should not be used as an excuse to gamble the planet’s future against the overwhelming evidence that humans are contributing to the world warming at an unsafe rate. The basic principle is no different to risk management in any other sphere of life.

The “debate”, such as it is, is not about the science. McKibben again:

…it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

Feelings can do more: they condition the way the think about things. This recent National Public Radio story, headlined Belief in climate change hinges on worldview explains the work of The Cultural Cognition Project:

To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it’s not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs. “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view,” Braman says.

“Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values,” says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work.

“If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way,” he says.

And if the information doesn’t, you tend to reject it.

This is what is happening with climate change. The polarisation is all too obvious in the blogosphere and the wider media. The CCP has also identified what it calls the “messenger effect” — where people tend to believe information if it comes from people like themselves. In the climate “debate” this becomes a vicious, inward-looking circle, with sceptic and crank arguments endlessly recirculating around blogs, boards and mailing lists.

All of these articles illuminate one central truth: all the noise about emails, IPCC “errors” and crooked scientists has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying science. Those who want to delay action on climate change have no hope of dismantling what McKibben calls the haystack of evidence, they can only pretend that finding a needle means the thing is not made of hay. But they can change the politics — the willingness of politicians the world over to take firm action now.

The answer, if it can be found, will not come from climate scientists. They need to do what they do best — study the planet in all its complexity, define and delineate the implications of what we’re doing to it. But we should not expect them to win hearts and minds, to build a global public consensus on the need for urgent action. That’s a matter for politics, not science. The lead has to come from elsewhere. My own suspicion is that nothing much will get done until the damage from change becomes too great to ignore — and I found an eery echo of that fear in my morning paper, in a story lifted from the Times about a new British report on likely land use changes in the UK over the coming century. One scenario considered is described thus:

Mass migration northwards to new towns in Scotland, Wales and northeast England may be needed to cope with climate change and water shortages in the South East, according to an apocalyptic vision set out by the Government Office for Science. […] In the most extreme scenario, world leaders hold an emergency summit in 2014 when it becomes clear that the impacts of climate change are going to be far worse and happen much sooner than previously envisaged.

The sad fact is that if we wait until the damage is too obvious to ignore, it will be too late to stop much worse impacts in future decades. McKibben says we need courage and hope. But we also need leaders who are prepared to take the evidence and act on it — and who will not be swayed by the denialist noise campaign. They need to recognise empty vessels when they see them.

Gaia in turmoil

Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis

The title attracted my attention: Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis. Plus the fact that it was a collection of writings, not another hammer blow from the father of Gaian science James Lovelock. The comforting name of Bill McKibben was there as writer of the foreword. I don’t mean to disparage Lovelock, whose early book on the Gaia understanding of Earth I read with appreciation a good many years ago. But his more recent climate-focused books, The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia , the latter reviewed here, have been relentless in conclusions which I find hard to bear.

Not that this book, edited by Eileen Crist and Bruce Rinker, is soothing, but its warnings are not quite so inexorable.  Also it has a wider focus that takes in more than the global warming issue.  Wide enough to make me wonder whether it was really suited for review on a climate change website, but I have persevered because it contains some climate change messages which I’ll concentrate on.

The Gaian perspective, which if you don’t respond to literary metaphor can be described as viewing Earth as a single organism, has been helpful in underscoring how the actions of humans in releasing the stored carbon of fossil fuels have caused a disturbance of the Earth system far greater than can easily be comprehended.  In the chapter on global warming Donald Aitken stresses that slight mismatches in the balance of energy flows can cause great destabilisation effects. Unbalanced flows occur naturally from time to time and are averaged out. But not in the case of the human burning of fossil fuels, which has gone out of bounds and is now leading to increasing destabilisation of the planet’s energy, temperature and climate systems. Evidence is seen in such phenomena as increased hurricane intensity, melting Arctic summer ice, reduced Greenland and West Antarctic ice,  a reduction in primary ocean productivity and ocean acidifcation – the usual suspects.  Aitken is an interrnational expert on renewable energy and considers that a combination of renewable energy resources and energy efficiency, the latter particularly in buildings, may well be enough to avoid the dangerous climate thresholds provided leaps in policies are taken by all nations. He contrasts the inertia of Earth’s physical processes with the capacity of humans to elect to change their social structures and adopt new global responsibilities on much shorter time scales. That’s in our favour, assuming we rise to the responsibility.

Biodiversity depletion figures strongly throughout the book, particularly in a chapter by Stephan Harding.  We are in the throes of a mass extinction entirely due to the economic activities of modern industrial societies.  Species are disappearing at a rate up to 10,000 times the natural rate. This is not all down to global warming, by any means, but it is part of the same heedlessness which treats the natural world as ours to do with as we will. Climate change is exacerbating the biodepletion, with the capacity to transform the Earth into a biological wasteland. It works both ways, for biodiversity also affects the climate.  Harding identifies some of the intricate ways in which this happens. Diverse ecological communities on land can increase the absorption of carbon dioxide. It is almost certain that biodiversity in the ocean also enhances this effect, through the presence of larger phytoplankton more often found in diverse communities.  Transpiration and evaporation are greater when there is diversity of land plants and can enhance cloud-making and energy distribution.  The roughness of mixed vegetation increases air turbulence which may well influence weather patterns. Harding rounds off his biodiversity chapter with the challenging observation that ultimately we may not be able to save what we do not love.

Lovelock himself makes a brief appearance in the book, in which he asks why the science of Gaia is still regarded by many as New Age mysticism and not part of science. He puts it down mainly to the stunning success of the reductionist approach to science, examplified in such triumphs as those in molecular biology and the deconvolution of the code of life.  The slow change to Earth system thinking would not matter so much if we humans had secure tenure on the Earth, but the climate changes we have set in motion appear to be changing the planet radically to one of its hot states. He ponders how Darwinian evolution might have been shaped had Darwin been aware that much of the environment, especially the atmosphere, was the product of living organisms. With such awareness he thinks Darwin would have realised that organisms and their environment form a coupled system and that what evolved was this system. Had Gaia been part of Darwin’s concept of evolution we might have realised sooner the consequences of deforestation and of adding greenhouse gases to the air.

Lovelock cops some criticism from Karen Liftinin her rough sketch of the principles of Gaian government. She acknowledges his great service in sounding the alarm on global warming but finds his policy prescriptions insensitive to social, ethical, psychological, and smaller scale ecological questions. One-sided engineering panaceas and technocratic elitism won’t do.

Mitchell Thomashow proposes curriculum development in schools which will train a generation of students who see the biosphere in every habitat and organism, who are equipped to interpret environmental change, who are keen to observe the natural world, and who know that their very survival may depend on it. I thought while reading his chapter of the Enviroschool programme open to New Zealand schools, for which the Minister of Education has unbelievably stoppped funding, but which appears likely to be rescued by funds from other government sources. I have seen the programme in action at a grandchild’s primary school and appreciated its potential for informing the full range of a child’s education. I recall the very sensible call in David Orr’s book Down to the Wire for a shift in education methods so that learning is relative to the biosphere and ecological awareness.

The various contributions to the book cover a wide range Gaian science, ethics and philosophy.  One Grand Organic Whole is the title of the editors’ opening chapter. They acknowledge that the early strong Gaia hypothesis that the biota controls the global environment in an almost purposeful fashion will not stand. The weak hypothesis that life physically and chemically influences the environment is too self-evident. They see the studies in this book as exploring the mid terrain between these two positions. When it comes to action enlightened realism acknowledges the need for preservation and restoration of Gaia’s natural systems. This requires sustainable retreat -– scaling down our consumption, shrinking our ecological footprint, and generously sharing the biosphere with all living beings.

After Copenhagen: new world disorder

coplogoIt’s a bit like reading the runes — trawling through reactions to the events of the last couple of weeks, trying to work out what the Copenhagen Accord means. I don’t mean a parsing of the words, though translating the language of diplomacy is never trivial, but what the various parties to the Accord, and the rest of the world, think it means — and crucially, what that implies for future action to reduce emissions.

For background, read this excellent BBC analysis of Copenhagen, and Joe Romm’s interesting take at Climate Progress (which refers to Bill McKibben’s reactions at Grist, plus there’s a more considered McKibben article at e360), but the article that really helped to crystallise my thoughts is Mark Lynas’ insider’s account of the final phases of negotiations:

Continue reading “After Copenhagen: new world disorder”

Nine ways to stuff up a planet

How is humanity stuffing up the planet — shall we count the ways? There are nine, according to new work by a multidisciplinary team lead by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre — full paper and supporting materials (with videos of authors explaining key points) here. The diagram above (from Nature’s coverage) shows the nine “planetary boundaries” within which humanity would be wise to operate. The good news is that on five of the measures we’re still in the safety zone. The bad news is that we’re well over safe limits for climate change, biodiversity loss, and interference with the nitrogen cycle, and we don’t know the limits for the final two factors. Here’s the full table:

Continue reading “Nine ways to stuff up a planet”