All climate today in honor of COP26

My go-to source on all matters climate-related is David Roberts, formerly of Grist and Vox, now writing his own Volts substack. Nobody I know of is better at explaining what the human species has done to the climate and what we're up against.

A sample, Roberts' discussion of climate "tipping points":

This is the significance of tipping points: we are playing with fire, pushing Earth systems to the point that there is a small-but-real chance that some of them will break down entirely, entering phase shifts and becoming something permanently less stable and hospitable.

If that happens, we will have consigned all future generations of human beings to inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating conditions. It is a crime worse than any genocide, worse than any atrocity conceived or conceivable, and even if there is only a small chance that we might stumble into committing it, we should be hyper-cautious. We should spend a lot of money to reduce that risk, to insure against it.

But there is also no one else I know who is able to be such a combination of informed and judicious in weighing our stumbling progress toward containing the destruction we are wreaking.

Where but from Roberts would I learn that Illinois had enacted "one of the most environmentally ambitious, worker-friendly, justice-focused energy bills of any state in the country"? Illinois, remember, is a coal-producing state.

And, although there are some economists pushing along the same line, who but Roberts could I trust to introduce me, in a readable way, to climate analysts and engineers who see hope in technological progress? He introduces such thinkers and entrepreneurs as carbon analyst Kingsmill Bond, urging us to take a wider view of developments in clean energy all around us.

Roberts: Bond’s experience and research have led him to the conclusion that the shift to clean energy has become unstoppable and that it will be the dominant force shaping financial markets and geopolitics in the 21st century. He argues that we are on the front end of a massive, precipitous wave of change to rival the industrial revolution — one that will unfold even if policy support is weak and erratic, purely on the strengths of economics and innovation.

We need to update our mental model of climate mitigation, he says. It’s not about pain, about how to distribute extra costs and who will be the most altruistic. It’s about gain, about which countries will benefit most and fastest from the tapping of almost limitless new markets and opportunities for growth.

Bond: What's been notable throughout this debate, for the last 20 years, is that the ceiling of the possible is constantly rising. 

If you go back to how the debate was being held about 20 years ago, you'll see these very fancy letters from the Irish and German grid operators saying that variable renewables could never be more than 2 percent of the system, for a whole series of technical reasons which are beyond me.

But what's happened continuously is that people have come up with new solutions, be they demand-side management, supply-side management, bigger grids, batteries, interconnectors, better software, digitalization, smart meters, so on and so forth. There have been a whole series of different solutions.

... So it's worth standing back for a moment and recognizing that the real limits to growth are with the current system, not with the new system.

None of this means we humans don't have keep struggling against extinction by oblivious growth, most of it inherent in rapacious capitalism, the privileging of a very few to the detriment of the lives of the many. But Roberts' interviews have convinced me that the way out, if there is one, may have to go through rather than back or by swerving away.

Intertwined destinies

The story came down to me this way: in 1936, my mother contended she heard (on the radio through an Amharic translator?) the appeal by Ethiopian monarch Haile Selassie before the League of Nations for assistance against a murderous Italian invasion. The great European powers at Geneva -- France and Britain -- had pledged to protect the integrity of Ethiopia. They offered this black African ruler no help. Selassie insisted "it is international morality that is at stake ..." The dignified presence of this small man convinced my mother that someday a war would have to be fought against European fascists and Nazis. (I suspect this family story contained some hindsight, but Mother was definitely supportive of U.S. intervention in Europe long before Pearl Harbor, so there's probably also some truth.)

I thought about this history today when I read the response of another Ethiopian to Donald Trump's attack on his international organization.

“How difficult is it for humans to unite to fight a common enemy that’s killing people indiscriminately?” [Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general,] asked. “Can’t we understand that the divisions and cracks between us are to the advantage of the virus?”

Tedros warned that in most of the world, “the virus is not under control; it’s getting worse.” And he pointed out that the health systems of some of the world’s wealthiest countries have been upended, whereas nations of more modest means have had success.

“This once-in-a-century pandemic has hammered home a critical lesson: When it comes to health, our destinies are intertwined ...”

Washington Post

Certainly the W.H.O. is imperfect. But if humans hope to survive and thrive in the environment humans have made on this planet, we'll have to learn that what Dr. Tedros is saying makes sense -- and that what Donald Trump is doing makes none.

We're living in the Pyrocene

(Thinking of my California friends.)

... humans turned from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones in the form of fossil fuels. That is the Big Burn of today, acting as a performance enhancer on all aspects of fire’s global presence. So vast is the magnitude of these changes that we might rightly speak of a coming Fire Age equivalent in stature to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Call it the Pyrocene.

So there does exist a narrative, one of the oldest known to humanity, and one that has defined our distinctive ecological agency. It’s the story of fire.  Earth is a uniquely fire planet – it has been since life clambered onto the continents.  Equally, humans are a uniquely fire creature, not only the keystone species for fire but a species monopolist over its manipulation.  The fires in the Arctic testify to the planetary antiquity of fire.  Nearly all are kindled by lightning and burn biotas nicely adapted to fire; many could be suppressed, but extinguishing them will only put off, not put out, the flames. By contrast, the fires in the Amazon bear witness to a Faustian pact that hominins made with fire so long ago it is coded into our genome.  They are set by people in circumstances that people made, well outside ecological barriers and historical buffers.
 
This is a narrative so ancient it is prelapsarian. Our alliance with fire has become a veritable symbiosis.  We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food.  We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes.  Now we have become a geological force because we have begun to cook the planet.  We have taken fire to places and times it could never have reached on its own, and it has taken us everywhere, even off world. We have leveraged fire; fire has leveraged us. ...

Steve Pyne, emeritus professor at Arizona State University, is the author of the recently updated and revised Fire: A Brief History from which this is excerpted.

A day of Global Climate Strike begins in Aquinnah

Under the auspices of the Aquinnah Cultural Center (that's a community institution through which the Wampanoag Tribe interfaces with the white residents of their lands) we marked the morning of the international cry against enveloping climate disaster at Martha Vineyard Island's western tip.

Pipe music set the mood ...

... as a somber crowd gathered in the glorious morning light.

After a young man shared his hopes and fears, an elder offered a benediction for the day:

"Go in peace. But always go in purpose."

Climate chaos has partisan political impacts

I'm a sucker for maps, so this grabbed me. Mark Muro and David G. Victor explain what we're looking at:

Scanning the map, you can see that while the projected economic impacts of climate change are widely distributed, they are especially concentrated in the American Southeast, the Gulf Coast, and Florida. In these places, many counties will see 10% to 20% or more hits to their aggregate income. ...

Drill down on the political geography of climate damage, and it becomes clear that in much of the country, Republicans are voting for people who are opposed to climate policy, even as they are most exposed to climate damages. 

... The pattern is unmistakable. Many of the states with the most to lose from climate change voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016, thereby electing a president who has disavowed his own government’s National Climate Assessment and systematically moved to dismantle former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and regulatory initiatives to reduce carbon emissions.  ... Nine of the 10 states contending with the highest losses of county income voted for President Trump in 2016, including Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama. 

And all those states have the usual complement of two Senators who represent largely rural square mileage, not numbers of residents; many boast fossil fuel extraction industries. Their elected representatives are not going to support nationwide efforts to mitigate climate disaster anytime soon.

I'm reminded of the popular refrain of the '00s: What's the matter with Kansas? -- meaning why would a once economic populist state be so bamboozled by fear of Feminazi abortionists and the Gay Menace that people would elect politicians aligned against their economic interests? There aren't any simple answers to that sort of cognitive displacement. The answers, if there are any, are likely multi-faceted.

Sure, in the urban areas of these heavily impacted states, people get it. Miami will struggle to do something to prevent chronic urban flooding; tourists and locals prefer not to get their feet wet. Houston has suffered two 100-year floods in the last decade; yes, Houston does have a problem and knows it. But their states continue to block progress through an anti-democratic Senate.
...At CNN in 2018, electoral analyst Ron Brownstein looked at the partisan alignment of Senators based on relative carbon emissions from their states.

... before November's election, Republicans controlled 32 of the 40 Senate seats from the 20 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output. ... before the election Democrats controlled 32 of the 40 Senate seats from the 20 largely coastal states that emit the least carbon per dollar of economic output. Those numbers didn't change in November, as Democrats gained one Senate seat from these lower carbon states (in Nevada) while surrendering another (in Florida).

His conclusion is that the political fight between the parties is primarily in those states in a middle tier of 20 carbon emitters. Those states (with their ranking as carbon emitters) include the Democrats targets, Michigan (22), Wisconsin (23) and Pennsylvania (24).

Thinking about climate provides another lens on the partisan predicament we're in. Let's hope our stasis doesn't kill too many before nature's message gets through.

Oddments from Lincoln, Nebraska

Today we barreled down the interstate behind this. Naturally I distrust their slogan: "DOING OUR SHARE FOR CLEANER AIR." Politifact declared this mostly true:

"(Koch Industries) is among the worst in toxic air pollution in the entire United States ... and churns out more climate-changing greenhouse gases than oil giants Chevron, Shell and Valero."
— Harry Reid on Monday, July 11th, 2016 in remarks on the Senate floor

Interesting that they think they need to paint their trucks with this message. (At least so I assume; have found nothing to contradict that this is the spawn of Koch Industries.)

Much earlier in the day we saw row on row of windmills on ridges in Wyoming. Wind energy is big business in Wyoming -- along with coal, uranium, natural gas, and crude oil.

The bison is the official Wyoming state animal, but on the road it feels as if it ought to be the Sinclair dinosaur. Nice gas prices though.

Morty endures as we hurtle eastward. Sometimes we suspect him of Siamese ancestry. But he seems to be holding up well.

One path out of the woods?

Sometimes I get an inkling that our infuriating, endlessly clever, too frequently self-absorbed, species may -- just perhaps -- figure out how to avert the most devastating consequences of climate crisis.
Here's a woman with a consequential good idea -- and it has already gone into production.

Once and future fears

Seventy-four years ago today, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, incinerating some 100,000 people and blasting into being one facet of the era of existential species instability.

To mark the anniversary of one of humanity's greatest atrocities and in light of the Trump administration's choice to trash the longstanding (and perhaps creaky) Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, here's Jeff Schogol who has made a journalistic career of covering the our muscle-bound military from close up.

We're all going to die.

That doesn't mean we're all going to die tomorrow, but before we delve into the United States government's withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, it's worth remembering that we are all mortal and our corporeal existence will end one day even if the world is not consumed by a nuclear holocaust or global warming or the heat death of the sun (Your daily motivation courtesy of your friend and humble narrator).

... On Friday, the United States formally withdrew from the INF Treaty. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement claiming, "Russia is solely responsible for the treaty's demise."

For defense industry, the end of the 32-year-old treaty meant to prevent Armageddon is surely more exciting than Christmas, July 4th, and the Super Bowl all wrapped up in an orgasm. Expect to see companies rolling out new lines of missiles for Prime Day; after all, nothing says "I love you" like a $500,000 million gift card for Raytheon.

... In other words, the Pentagon is free to become more lethal, and if there's one thing the U.S. military loves, it's lethality, which top civilian and uniformed officials are known to mix with baking powder and smoke it like crack cocaine. ...

Read it all.

While we persist and resist oblivion, we cannot forget.

Climate change is NOW

Before Hurricane Florence slammed into the Carolinas, scientists were already prepared to state publicly that the storm's ferocity and potential damage were a result of climate change. Researchers were certain that the storm would drop 50 percent more rain than it might have in the past, because of warming waters. It did and those of us lucky enough not to be under the deluge can contemplate images of destruction.

Scientists know they have to be careful about making definitive statements of fact: they can't let their pronouncements get ahead of their data. But, on the other hand, excess caution has meant that studies which concluded that particular weather events were compounded by climate change have only emerged months or years after disasters. But this time scientists felt sure they knew what they were talking about and predicted extreme rains and flooding in advance. Media have been reluctant to link catastrophic weather events to human-induced climate changes, but this time the scientific conclusion broke through.

The new study addresses a psychological barrier that has long plagued climate communication: Rather than presenting climate change as a past or future threat, it portrays it as a present danger.

... So did the study have an impact? The research was covered in articles by the New York Times, National Geographic, Buzzfeed News, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and NPR, among others, and was mentioned on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story program and CBS’ online streaming news service.

But the media were still slow to connect the dots.

Even though the information was out there, the media did a shoddy job overall in connecting Florence to climate change. According to a new report from Public Citizen, only 7.5 percent of stories about Florence in the top 50 U.S. newspapers mentioned climate change in the week leading up to September 16. That’s actually a small bump: Less than 5 percent of these top newspapers mentioned climate change in articles about hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate last year.

Despite that mainstream media’s general neglect of the link between storms and climate change, extreme weather has become the No. 1 symbol of climate change (no offense, polar bears). Over the last decade, the number of people who name extreme weather as a knee-jerk association with climate change has quadrupled, according to research from Yale University and the University of Westminster.

“People think of climate change as something that’s either going to happen far in the future or far away,” Hunter Cutting says. “This kind of work [the Florence study] highlights that it’s something that affects everybody, whether you’re talking about wildfires in the West or coastal flooding in the East.”

Full disclosure: Climate change warrior Hunter Cutting is an old friend and a wise thinker when it comes to getting the media to tell unpleasant truths, whether about race or about climate.

Rising temperatures and sea levels

If you are like me, you probably saw a headline like this one the other day: U.S. Report Says Humans Cause Climate Change, Contradicting Top Trump Officials

And if you are like me, you may not have read the story. How could I stand absorbing yet another hopeless attempt by scientists to get through to the fossil-fuel deluded numbskulls who control climate policy? Besides, understanding the science is hard; I trust the scientists and usually stick to thinking about the politics, more in my line of expertise.

But while searching weather reports, I came across a succinct description of the National Climate Assessment by Bob Henson: Humans Likely Responsible For Virtually All Global Warming Since 1950s. It seems worthwhile to share some of the main points.

On temperatures:

• Warmest in more than a thousand years. A major paleoclimate study has shown that for each of the world’s seven major continental regions, the average temperature for 1971-2000 was the highest in more than 1300 years. There is significant uncertainty around these estimates, but a separate study found that temperate North America as a whole (including most of the contiguous U.S.) is having its warmest 30-year periods in at least 1500 years.

• It’s going to get a lot warmer in the coming decades. Temperatures across the contiguous U.S. have risen about 1.8°F (1.0°C) over the period 1901-2016. “Surface and satellite data are consistent in their depiction of rapid warming since 1979,” the report notes. By the period 2070-2100 (when today’s infants will be elders), U.S. temperatures may be 2.8 to 7.3°F warmer than the 1976-2005 average if greenhouse-gas emissions are reined in strongly—or 5.8 to 11.9°F warmer if emissions continue to grow at the pace of recent decades.

On sea levels:

• U.S. coasts will experience more than the global average sea level rise from Antarctica Ice Sheet melt, and less than the global average from Greenland Ice Sheet melt. These results are both produced by what’s called static-equilibrium effects—basically, how the planet’s gravity and rotation are affected by moving huge volumes of water from polar ice sheets into the global oceans.

• The Northeast U.S. coast is expected to see additional sea level rise because of a gradually weakening Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which helps power the Gulf Stream. Much as the polar jet stream separates air masses of different densities, the Gulf Stream separates warmer, less-dense water and higher sea levels on its southwest side from denser, cooler water and a lower sea level on its northwest side, toward the Northeast U.S. coast. Any long-term weakening of the Gulf Stream would be associated with a reduced sea-level gradient, and that would mean a drop in sea level toward the southeast and a rise toward the northwest (on top of any global-scale changes, of course).

• Regional sea level rise is being exacerbated by withdrawals of groundwater off the Atlantic coast, and withdrawals of both fossil fuels and groundwater off the Gulf Coast. If these continue, so will the regional effects.

And that's just a sampling. Read it all. Our only hope of interrupting greed and stupidity depends on daring to face the violence our species is doing to our only home.

Man-made hazards

Before wildfires slip down the memory hole among those lucky enough not to have suffered direct losses ...

This story from Grist contextualizes what those of us who live in drought prone areas are facing.

Portugal’s wildfires this year have brought sharp focus on the escalating risk of these blazes — and what little officials have done to prevent them. Popular backlash prompted the resignation of a senior government minister and a formal request for a vote of no confidence in the ruling party. But they have also brought a lesson for the rest of the world: As climate change escalates, wildfires are a problem without an easy solution. (Just ask California.)

In a struggling post-recession Portugal, suppliers to its huge paper industry have accelerated a switchover from native species to faster-growing eucalyptus. Since trees consumed by fire can now be replaced more quickly, fire prevention — simple actions like trimming branches and clearing underbrush that could greatly reduce the country’s fire risk — has fallen by the wayside due to cost cutting. Add to that, more and more people are fleeing Portugal’s rural areas — leaving an aging population behind — it’s not clear who will be able to do that work even if resources were available to fund it.

“It really is a textbook example of wildfire as a socio-natural hazard,” José Miguel Pereira, a forest ecologist at the University of Lisbon tells Grist via email. Or to put it another way, human activity is making wildfires worse. These infernos are a product of our disregard for the fact that nature is now almost entirely something we’ve created — these disasters aren’t natural.

And as you know, our influence goes beyond simply neglecting tree management. There’s a growing consensus that the most important reason behind the recent surge in megafires is weather. September was the driest month in Portugal for at least 87 years, and this summer was among the hottest ever measured. All that’s led to a wildfire season that’s 525 percent worse than normal.

Climate models show that a warmer world will mean a drier southern Europe, and increasing ocean temperatures will likely bring more hurricanes further northward. That combination will boost the frequency of massive wildfires in Europe, especially in places like Portugal. On our current warming track, recent research shows the Mediterranean will cross a threshold into megadrought in the next few decades. Many of the trees in the region will likely go up in flames before next century.

What we can make, we can work to prevent.

Resist and protect much.

They know

In Waslala, Nicaragua, on the edge of what we might call civilization, they know. Climate is changing and how humans live in the only world we've got has to change. This sign hangs in the office of El Porvenir in the town. This non-governmental organization, on whose board I have the honor and responsibility to serve, collaborates with rural communities to build water and sanitation facilities while protecting and preserving the health of forests, watersheds, and the land itself. In the Anthropocene age, we're all responsible, for worse and possibly for better.

How's this for a lovely site for a water tank, 1.5 kilometers from most of the clump of 65 families this little system serves -- and another several kilometers from the spring water source on the hill in the distance?

Intrepid members of the board had to scramble down muddy roads and ford a flooding stream on local horses. I'm sure our kindly Nicaraguan hosts thought many of us pretty inept!

Here's a San Francisco-based engineer from the board mugging with the Nicaraguan engineer who is supervising this project. There is joy in this work.

Of course the real payoff will be when the system is hooked up and taps like this one begin to provide water to each household.

Water does not remain clean and available without our cooperation; that's a message for our time. The good people touched by El Porvenir remind themselves and their communities of this every day. There are no days-off. But there is much we can do, together.

For a wintry Sunday morning

Go ahead, give nine and half minutes of your life to watching this video. Set the image to full screen, relax and enjoy.
This put me in mind of Psalm 19:

1The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
3They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them. ...

Then consider this:

Unprecedented: Simultaneous January Named Storms in the Atlantic and Central Pacific
As we ring in the New Year with record to near-record warm temperatures over much of Earth's oceans, we are confronted with something that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago: simultaneous January named storms in both the Atlantic and Central Pacific. The earliest named storm on record in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Pali, formed on January 7, and now the Atlantic has joined the early-season hurricane party, with Subtropical Storm Alex spinning up into history with 50 mph winds in the waters about 785 miles south-southwest of the Azores Islands. The average date of the first named storm in the Atlantic is July 9; the Central Pacific also typically sees its first named storm in July.

Dr. Jeff Masters, Wunderground

The Anthropocene makes for interesting times.

H/t Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

In which the Prez educates and persuades

Friedman asked the President if he ever wants to "just go off on the climate deniers in Congress."

"Yeah, absolutely," Obama responded. "Look, it’s frustrating when the science is in front of us. ... We can argue about how. But let’s not argue about what’s going on. The science is compelling. ... The baseline fact of climate change is not something we can afford to deny. And if you profess leadership in this country at this moment in our history, then you’ve got to recognize this is going to be one of the most significant long-term challenges, if not the most significant long-term challenge, that this country faces and that the planet faces."

TPM

Our oh-so-cautious president is on the case at long last.

All the amplifiers chime in. Here's Charles Blow writing on the peculiar shape of religiosity in this country:

What worries me is that some Americans seem to live in a world where facts can’t exist.

Facts such as the idea that the world is ancient, and that all living things evolved and some — like dinosaurs — became extinct. Facts like the proven warming of the world. Facts like the very real possibility that such warming could cause a catastrophic sea-level rise.

And here's Paul Krugman employing his acerbic intelligence on global warming denialists:

Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.

And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.

When a President uses his elevated perch to lead, others -- often proponents of far more disruptive stances -- can take more of the field. Is noting this Green Lanternism?

Will the Prez kill the Keystone XL pipeline and upset the rogue petro-state across our northern border as well as the coal barons? Has our species dawdled so long that avoiding the most drastic consequences of a couple of centuries of unbridled capitalism has become impossible? Our descendants will find out.

We're a murderous species with a capacity for virtue

Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is one scary book. New Yorker stalwart Kolbert wandered the world, interviewing scientists, accompanying their expeditions into remote environments, and listening to their conclusions:

"One-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion ... And the losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific, in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and in the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.

This book is not another plea that we humans recognize human-caused climate change, though it certainly includes that message. Rather, this book documents that human activity, the ordinary life of our inventive, fertile species, has been and continues to precipitate a mass extinction event of an order of magnitude seen only five previous times in planetary history. That's what we do, mostly inadvertently; we kill off other living things; we might be on the way to killing ourselves off too.

I want to pull out a few conceptual frames that are important in Kolbert's narrative, not so much because they are novel, but because they are helpful to understanding what we can know about the world we live in.

• New Pangea: Three hundred million years ago, scientists believe that the planet had only one land mass, a supercontinent they call Pangea. Over a long, long time span, Pangea broke apart. Evolving life forms ceased to interact and branched off in unique directions. Eventually island continents arose; life forms evolved away from their ancestors even further; eventually the planet threw up (most obviously) Australia with its unique flora and fauna.
  
  Today our ability to move around the world rapidly is bringing together organisms of all sorts that never encountered each other in their original habitats. Often what we label "invasive" species easily supersede (kill off) the former inhabitants. That seems to be what is happening with the rapidly spreading chytrid fungus that is killing many frogs. Rapid dispersal of novel life forms is also, of course, a threat to humans as we carry around previously localized diseases such as eboli, HIV, SARS and now the camel virus MERS. This is the New Pangea.

• Anthomes: Once upon a time, it would have been accurate to describe the planet as consisting of discrete environments -- biomes -- in which evolving humanoids were simply one species among many natives. We called these "grasslands," "rain forests," etc. Now some thinkers use a different mental map for segmenting the planet. No part of the world is untouched by the activities of our species. There is nowhere that is truly "wild." Hence the concept of Anthomes, areas whose environment bears a particular relationship to the activities of the naked ape, such as dense settlements, croplands, and "semi-natural" remnants. This a different way of looking at how life survives, sometimes thrives, and everywhere is undergoing of sort of accelerated struggle to adapt and evolve to the rapid changes we are injecting into the places where it lives.

• the Anthropocene: Geologists, paleontologists, and earth scientists employ a geologic time scale for measuring past events in the planet's history. You've probably heard some of these terms like "Jurassic" or "Paleozoic," etc. If you are not a scientist, you probably never tried to keep them straight. "Anthropocene" has been formally proposed to geologists for adoption as the name for the current "epoch" -- the time frame in which humans have been rapidly altering the planetary reality. Many scientists have adopted this usage.

Kolbert is not sanguine about the future we are creating. She concludes the book with a review of what is known about our ancestor's successful extermination of large animals in the Americas, our present pressure on the few remaining large mammals in the present, and finally, our apparent elimination of close cousin humanoids -- the Neanderthals -- some of whose DNA we carry.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did. ...

... As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world. ...

... With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it ....

Yes, this is a scary book. And there can be no question that, unless we deflect ourselves, humans are on a glide path to mass extinction that includes our own. Much destruction is already underway, irreversible. Should we choose to survive what we have made, we'll need to cultivate and make actual the sort of virtues that human thinkers have propounded from ancient times: courage, practicality, prudence, hope and faith. Mere glibness and self-interest aren't enough.

Warming Wednesdays: enough already, no more

This sculpture by Issac Cordal in Berlin is called "Politicians discussing global warming." Via Sierra Club

If you are not deaf, dumb, blind and incurious (or a Republican), you know that human-caused global warming is rapidly altering the planet we live on. Human ingenuity, greed, and ignorance are causing changes so rapid that a recognizable habitat for us and everything else may not survive this century. Why just today, we read that a large segment of the Antarctic ice shelf is collapsing, meaning higher seas that will drown many coastal areas within the lives of today's young people.

Several years ago, I felt I had to devote at least one day a week of this political/reflective blog to global warming in response to the imperative that we come to grips with what our species and our social systems were doing. That intent had at least the benefit of forcing me to read a lot more popular science than I would have without it. When I started, these posts got the lowest number of clicks of any in a week; now they get the most. This is no huge spike, but it seems real.

Despite this relative interest, 144 posts later, I'm retiring this section tag. We know. The question becomes what are we going to do about it; what are we socially, spiritually, and politically capable of doing about warming and its many accidents?

As well as my many other concerns, I'll continue to write about these issues, probably mostly about their political implications, since that's my area of experiential expertise. But instead of a weekly post on climate change developments, I'll write whenever and however seems appropriate/needed/I have something to say. From here on in, these posts will probably mostly be tagged "sustainability," "climate," "annals of the anthropocene," or whatever else seems required. I'm not "giving up" -- destructive as we naked apes are, persistent and determined are also part of what it means to be human.

Warming Wednesdays: can we survive on a hotter planet?

Ricky Rood is a professor at the University of Michigan who leads a course on climate change problem solving. He also blogs at what used to be the Weather Underground where he presents our situation in relation to runaway human-caused climate change starkly.

It is crystal clear that we cannot address our energy challenges and expect to automatically address our climate issues. Short-term energy and economic issues will always trump climate change. We [are experiencing] a technological development that by all indications makes global warming worse. We have great challenges in finding safe, secure sources of energy. Our easiest approaches to the energy security problem make the climate change problem worse.

We cannot solve the climate change problem with fossil fuels – remember it is the accumulation of carbon dioxide, not the instantaneous emission of carbon dioxide that matters. All that is emitted stays with us for a very long time. Therefore, new technology that makes it possible to exploit unconventional oil and gas, which might make the U.S. energy independent, puts multiple stresses into the effort to address climate change.

We have ingrained behavior and practice that continue to reward exploitation of fossil fuels more aggressively than renewable energy. Though the World Bank analysis comes to the conclusion that “a 4 degree Celsius warmer world must be avoided,” we have no energy policy, we have no climate policy, and hence, there is little indication that we will take steps to avoid that world.

In early December 2013 I was on a flight sitting next to a man who drives trucks in the Bakken Shale Oil Fields of North Dakota. In North Dakota they target, primarily, oil extraction. The man told me that they were mostly burning off the methane. He was thriving, growing a business. He was caring for his family and looking to the future. A curious statement he made was that the only problem was that all of money up there was coming from other countries.

This just brings home our immediate energy future. We have made the exploitation of fossil fuels as cheap as apparently it was in the year 1300, when Marco Polo wrote of coal in China. We have beaten peak oil. The World wants these fossil fuels to run its economies. We want the jobs to run our economy. We cannot deny our drive to live comfortable lives, our drive for security. The ease of fossil fuels will keep their use growing. The reality is that our “built-in” climate change needs to accommodate the increment that will come from the emissions that cannot be denied.

Let me restate that with less precision but more affect: our sort of civilization (technological and capitalist) requires and rewards use of carbon-polluting energy. We've found ways to "Drill, baby, drill!" We've figured out how to release far more of carbon-based energy than looked likely 20 years ago. Human demand will cause the release into the atmosphere of most of that carbon, regardless of any bumps that climate activists manage to create along the way. It doesn't just "go away" -- especially when we burn off methane, one of the most potential sources of CO2.

Our problem becomes, can we find a way to survive the horror show we will create?

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

A little bit of crazy from an ocean farmer

My friend Bren Smith farms seaweed -- kelp -- in Long Island Sound. High end restaurants in New York City have made the plant a delicacy. Here's a recipe by way of the food magazine Bon Appetit. Kelp also can serve as biofuel and the farm also raise clams and shellfish, For Smith, it all started with the oysters …


Don't miss the moment when Smith explains

"I'm not a foodie -- I eat at the gas station most nights …"

Then listen up as Smith describes his work -- also explained at the site Thimble Island Oyster Company.

For decades environmentalists have fought to save our oceans from the perils of overfishing, climate change, and pollution. All noble efforts — but what if environmentalists have it backwards? What if the question is not how to save the oceans, but how the oceans can save us?

That is what a growing network of scientists, ocean farmers, and environmentalists around the world is trying to figure out. With nearly 90 percent of large fish stocks threatened by over-fishing and 3.5 billion people dependent on the seas as their primary food source, these ocean farming advocates have concluded that aquaculture is here to stay.

But rather than monolithic factory fish farms, they see the oceans as the home of small-scale farms where complementary species are cultivated to provide food and fuel — and to clean up the environment and fight climate change. Governed by an ethic of sustainability, they are re-imagining our oceans with the hope of saving us from the grip of the ever-escalating climate, energy, and food crises.

… We face a bitter new reality: Mitigating the effects of climate change may force us to develop our seas to save them — and planet. This re-imaging of the oceans will be heart-wrenching and controversial. Our waters are revered as some of the last wild spaces on Earth — ungoverned and untouched by human hands. If we develop our oceans, farms will some day dot coastlines, mirroring our agricultural landscape. But in the face of the escalating climate crisis, we have little choice but to explore new ways of sustaining humanity while protecting the planet.

People like this give me hope our species can adapt in the Anthropocene age our activity has brought us into.

Bigger, better, faster athletes; how about better humans?

I find it intriguing to try to imagine how The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Sports Performance by David Epstein will hold up in ten years. The Sports Illustrated senior writer has digested the current state of genetic and sports knowledge and presents a vast compilation of that research in accessible, journalistic prose. I enjoyed it and learned from it. We're beginning to know a great deal about who is born with what sort of athletic capacities and what training can do to enhance that genetic inheritance (often as not much as we hope.) But the field is advancing so rapidly that many current conclusions may look primitive in the near future.

What's less likely to change is that this sort of research into human capacities will have us delving into terrain that can be upsetting to accepted social varities. The book's website offers a list of such touchy questions:

1. Are black athletes genetically predetermined to dominate both sprinting and distance running, and are their abilities influenced by Africa’s geography?

2. Are there genetic reasons to separate male and female athletes in competition?

3. Should we test the genes of young children to determine if they are destined for stardom?

4. Can genetic testing determine who is at risk of injury, brain damage, or even death on the field?

And we worry about "tracking" in education -- the practice of separating students into different levels largely based on performance on standardized tests! Think what we might do to people if our use of genetic information is ill-considered or simply bigoted. Yet we're going to find out.

Can better understanding of the implications of our individual, inherited genes -- who is naturally super fit (6 in 1900 according to one study) and who is a naturally high responder to athletic training (perhaps not the same individuals) -- end up reducing participation to only those few who happen to have been born with a particular positive genetic profile? Historically we've identified who will get the best results in which sports with a lot of trial, error and accident. But in the context of the "winner-take-all" market in sports (a concept Epstein credits to Robert H. Frank) will there be any room for the merely enthusiastic mediocre athlete?

As the customer base for viewing extraordinary athletic performances expanded, fame and financial rewards slanted toward the slim upper echelon of the performance pyramid. As those rewards have increased and become concentrated at the top level, the performers who win them have gotten faster, stronger, and more skilled.

Sure, that's how a market is supposed to work: sports uncover winners and we delight in the performances of these genetic outliers.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics only about 20 percent of us in the United States get the quantity of exercise that is currently considered healthy. (I'm not convinced that we have a scientifically based definition of what healthy activity would require for particular individuals, but I'm sure some kind of activity is healthy.) We've evolved a civilization in which exertion is optional. We aren't about to revert to painful drudgery if we can help it.

To survive in the social context we've created, we need to find ways to identify what activities might provide satisfaction to non-elite individuals. The potential to do this is implicit in the research Epstein describes; let's hope we choose to advance in that direction at the same time we devote resources to the few who can stretch the limits of human performance. What we do with the insights of performance genetics will be about social choices we make; that's a feature of being human in the age of the Anthropocene.

Annals of the Anthropocene: dare we think about it?

The term "Anthropocene" refers to a paradigm we might as well get used to. It represents

the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force.

Iraq war vet Roy Scranton reflects on the implications of this construct, which is rapidly gaining currency among scientists, in a discursive meditation in the New York Times, titled Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, to food and energy markets, or to our “way of life” — though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years — within three to five generations — we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher than they are today.

We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.

… The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. ...

Read the whole thing.