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: checking in on the California drought

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

New York Times, May 6, 2014

No, we can't say any particular weather phenomenon is certainly a direct consequence of global warming. But there sure are a lot of anomalies these days, among them the deep drought in California.

If you live in California, you might think: hey, it rained quite a lot last month -- haven't water conditions improved?

No, the drought is not over and April rains barely made a dent in the water shortage according to "Weather Historian" Christopher C. Burt at the Wunderground.

The water season (July 1-June 30) has, for all practical purposes, come to an end for California. Although May and June may see some additional precipitation (especially in the far north) it is unlikely that anything will happen to improve the prospect of a catastrophic drought this year for the state. ...

The final snow survey in the Sierra Nevada was taken on May 1st and the statewide snowpack was just 18% of average for the date. This compares to 32% as of April 1st. The situation in the northern section of the survey area was just 7% of normal. This is the 2nd lowest snowpack figure for May 1st (May 1, 1977 being the lowest on record).

Apparently the snow that fell in April melted right away because of generally sunny days and already warm conditions. We're still going to be parched.

Burt concludes:

The bottom line is that the rainy season is over and the next six months are going to be a severe test of the state’s ability to manage its meager water resources. We will probably see (and already are) clashes between agricultural concerns and urban consumers. The specter of an horrific fire season also looms over all this.

It has been 37 years since a drought of this severity has affected the state and since the drought of 1975-1977 the population of California has almost doubled (from about 20 million to 38 million). The consumption of water resources by the agricultural industry has also dramatically increased. The only mitigating affect of these changes is that per capita water consumption has decreased thanks to a number of conservation innovations and regulations.

We are reminded we live in a natural desert.

Warming Wednesdays: energy storage

Take it from Steven Chu, the Obama administration's first energy secretary:

Wind and solar power are going to keep increasing. Wind is already the second-cheapest form of new energy, after shale gas, and it will become the cheapest within a decade. Right now utility companies get about 4 percent of their power from renewable sources other than hydro—and that 4 percent is roughly all from wind. You want to see a day when renewables are 50, 60, 70 percent. Utility companies will need batteries to stabilize the flow of renewable energy into the grid, plus a better electrical control system to do the switching. People may have these batteries at their houses instead of generators.

[Locations now off the grid] will have solar and wind power—which, in 10 or 15 years, are going to be as cheap as any other form of energy, or cheaper. Once you have storage systems, you can put a little solar installation on your roof or a plot of land, and now you have your electric supply! It will be like cellphones’ leapfrogging the land-line era. It will transform the prosperity of the world.

Chu isn't predicting which of several battery breakthrough technologies will win out, but he says this is where the action is in getting the planet off carbon polluting fuels.***An installation south of Phoenix, the Solana concentrated solar power (CSP) plant, solves the difficulty of storing renewable energy supplies by using molten salt. Hal Hudson writing in the New Scientist, explains:

Opened in October 2013, it's a zero-carbon power plant that could underpin the energy grid of the future.

I'm standing on a raised platform at its centre, decked out in clunky safety boots and a high-vis jacket. Thick pipes run away beneath me like arteries, pumping oil out to the mirror field. There, it is channelled into thinner piping that runs right through the focal points of the mirror troughs, absorbing the heat of the Arizona sun until the oil reaches nearly 400 °C. It then returns to the plant, where the oil superheats water vapour that spins two 140-megawatt turbines.

Six enormous white tanks surround the platform. Filled with molten salt, they can store enough heat to keep those turbines spinning at full capacity for 6 hours. The oil from the mirror field unloads its heat into the salt when the generators are at capacity. These tanks are what make Solana truly useful, not just producing carbon-free energy for Arizona, but storing it for use whenever the grid operator needs it.

We've got the wits to invent these technologies; do we have the wits and determination to implement them over the opposition of entrenched owners of polluting systems?

Photo by way of 350.org.

Warming Wednesdays: the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel

Christopher Hayes has tried to quantify how much wealth the owners of known carbon-based fuels -- oil companies, the government of Saudi Arabia, tar sands magnates in Alberta, etc. -- would have to forgo to prevent civilization-destroying global warming.

... in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.

The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865 — and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.

Yes -- that's what it required of this nation to free the slaves who before 1865 filled an economic role very similar to that played by fossil fuels today.

The connection between slavery and fossil fuels ... is more than metaphorical. Before the widespread use of fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy (if not the main source) for societies stretching back millennia. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all energy to power societies flowed from the natural ecological cascade of sun and food: the farmhands in the fields, the animals under saddle, the burning of wood or grinding of a mill. A life of ceaseless exertion.

Before fossil fuels, the only way out of this drudgery was by getting other human beings to do the bulk of the work that the solar regime required of its participants. This could be done by using accrued money to pay for labor, but more often than not—particularly in societies like the Roman Empire that achieved density and scale—it was achieved through slavery. Slavery opened up for the slave owners vast new vistas of possibility. The grueling mundane exertions demanded of everyone under a solar regime could be cast off, pushed down on the shoulders of the slave.

So, as an industrial civilization -- a capitalist civilization if that is not a contradiction itself -- we substituted carbon-based fuels for human beings working in bondage.

Hayes looks for hope in the truth that extracting all of this oil and coal that will kill our civilization (and a lot of us) is incredibly expensive -- consequently popular agitation that leads to divestment, delay, and making extraction more expensive has a chance of keeping much of it in the ground.

I suspect he's onto something, given a response in the New York Times from Republican/libertarian Josh Barro. Barro thinks we'll have to buy off the current owners of unextracted fossil fuel. This is rather like the sort of gradual emancipation schemes that attracted even such moderate anti-slavery leaders as Lincoln before the slave owners decided to fight instead of switch. Interestingly, Barro thinks our economic system could absorb the costs of paying off the fossil fuel magnates, even if our political system might not accommodate this.

... reducing carbon emissions doesn’t have to be an either/or choice between buyouts and expropriation of existing resources. Sometimes, one will be more politically feasible than the other, and an effective policy approach can use a blend of the two. In particular, we can take advantage of the fact that a required reduction in fossil fuel production would be partly offset by a rise in prices for those fossil fuels that do get extracted. ... Proposals that give the value of the right to emit carbon to the existing carbon emitter may be a necessary and effective strategy to buy political support for carbon limits. These approaches look like a giveaway, but it’s worth making the giveaway if that’s what brings the benefits of stable temperatures.

I don't have Barro's level of comfort with rewarding the polluters; it is not as if they've been suffering without profits all these years. But "new occasions teach new duties" in the words of James Russell Lowell's anti-slavery poem. Global warming demands global changes we can barely envision, but move into a new paradigm we must.

Warming Wednesdays: Boycott and divestment?

A couple of weeks ago, the archbishop emeritus of Cape Town. South Africa, Desmond Tutu, wrote in the Guardian in full support of boycotts of the monster companies that are belching the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere:

Who can stop it? Well, we can, you and I. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so. It is a responsibility that begins with God commanding the first human inhabitants of the garden of Eden "to till it and keep it". To keep it; not to abuse it, not to destroy it.

The taste of "success" in our world gone mad is measured in dollars and francs and rupees and yen. Our desire to consume any and everything of perceivable value – to extract every precious stone, every ounce of metal, every drop of oil, every tuna in the ocean, every rhinoceros in the bush – knows no bounds. We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth. ...

It is clear that those countries and companies primarily responsible for emitting carbon and accelerating climate change are not simply going to give up; they stand to make too much money. They need a whole lot of gentle persuasion from the likes of us. ...

Tutu proposes boycotts and divestment from the fossil fuel giants.


I'm of many minds about boycotts. In the 1970s I worked as an organizer on the United Farm Workers Union boycotts of table grapes and some wines. These efforts were considered effective; they also took years of extremely dedicated work by ever growing armies of volunteers and consumers. And it is not even clear that the economic effect on the growers was what gave the workers a chance at a union. We succeeded in "giving a bad name" to a whole class of fruit; perhaps the growers, rightly, feared the long term effect of people learning to pass up grapes; certainly millions of folks stopped buying grapes for many years.

Tutu credits boycotts of South Africa with helping to bring down apartheid. Contemporary pro-Palestinian activists urge us to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over its dispossession of the native people of that land. In both those instances, the effect is probably not so much economic as on reputation. A growing boycott lets an offending state know it has crossed boundaries of what the world community thinks of as decent behavior. Such boycotts routinely evoke defiant objections from their targets, but they also seem to sting in some way that goes beyond their material effects.

Boycott and divestment from climate polluters is a tough project, one that starts with defining the appropriate targets. After all, we mostly all like living in a civilization that runs on abundant electricity and easy transport. But which companies are profiting without trying to adapt so as not to sink their own boat? The Institute for Southern Studies produced some lists. I'll just reproduce some of the publicly owned offenders in the United States:

• Chevron, San Ramon, Calif. (investor-owned)

• ExxonMobil, Irving, Texas.

• ConocoPhillips, Houston, Texas.

• American Electric Power, Columbus, Ohio

• Duke Energy, Charlotte, N.C.

• Berkshire Hathaway, Omaha, Neb.

• Ameren Corp., St. Louis, MO

and then

• there's the real monster among dirty energy energy purveyors: the U.S. Government.

We may not be able to divest from the Feds (or even want to) but we sure can see one entity that citizens ought to be targeting here.

More from Tutu:

Tutu says an apartheid-style boycott would be a way to curb polluters' stranglehold over energy policy. "We cannot necessarily bankrupt the fossil fuel industry," he wrote. "But we can take steps to reduce its political clout, and hold those who rake in the profits accountable for cleaning up the mess."

Warming Wednesdays: Science Guy against scientific ignorance

Bill Nye explains:

We got to have scientifically literate people to solve the world's problems ...

So he created the Science Guy for our delight and his.

I'm pretty much a scientific illiterate, but I know our civilization and our wellbeing depends on taking what science can tell us seriously. So every Wednesday, I post about global warming and our apparent political and moral incapacity to mitigate and/or prepare for what we are doing to the environment in which we are the alpha species. This doesn't come naturally to me. There are hundreds of other topics I'd prefer to explore. But nobody gets to sit this one out. We're either making solutions or we're deepening the problem.

IPCC Climate Change report got you down?

It should.

At the blog DeSmog Canada, Carol Linnitt has pulled out a great list of "All the Positive and Helpful Things in the IPCC Report No One Will Talk About." Since the Conservative Stephen Harper government has thrown itself into making the country a C02 exporting "superpower," Canadians who care about the climate need all the encouragement they can get. So do the rest of us. Here are a few of the items Linnitt found in the scary report:

• 1. Start by making changes at the local level where and how they make sense.
  There’s no single catch-all solution when it comes to a complex problem like global climate change. The report’s authors recommend taking a local approach that addresses “risk reduction and adaptation strategies” that attend to specific socioeconomic processes and needs. Oh, and don’t wait for the perfect local strategy — just pursue all solutions simultaneously, even if they overlap.

• 3. Make everything better for everyone and that will help the climate issue. Seriously.
  If you work hard to “improve human health, livelihoods, social and economic well-being, and environmental quality” you’re pretty much guaranteed to make progress on the climate file. Governments should start working double-time on these fronts as a part of their climate change adaption and mitigation efforts. Co-benefits!

• 4. Don’t be so single-minded.
  Climate change in a way is the result of pursuing the objectives of a small sector of society. If we started to recognize “diverse interests, circumstances, social-cultural contexts, and expectations” that could “benefit decision-making processes.” So, if local communities are suffering as a result of new refineries, coal-fired power plants, oil export pipelines or the expansion of the oilsands — take the interests and needs of those local communities to heart. Giving too much sway to vested fossil-fuel interests is exacerbating climate change, after all. And anyway, “Indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of community and environment, are a major resource for adapting to climate change.” We’ve got to stop ignoring these alternative perspectives.

• 11. Start immediately.
  It turns out the sooner we get started limiting climate change, the more time we’ll have to adequate prepare for adaptation. Mitigation, the report’s authors state, “reduces the rate as well as the magnitude of warming.” So, best to get started right away.

There are nine more items in Linnitt's list. Go read them all. Despite the wrong turn taken by their government (and ours!), we still can look for hints from our northern neighbors.

Warming Wednesdays: takeaways from IPCC Climate Change report

You don't need me writing about this; the news is everywhere. The relevant question is: how do we live inside a civilization that can see what's coming, but seems incapable of altering its path so as to, at least, mitigate the damage and pain?

Red indicates areas of projected drought. Via MoJo.

I'll just repost (by permission) this Moyers and Co. summary. Note the piece ends with the rudiments of an action suggestion. It's never over til it's over ...
***

Five Key Takeaways From the Frightening IPCC Climate Change Report (via Moyers & Company)

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report today. It focuses on how climate change will affect human society in coming years painting a picture of a world destabilized by a rapidly changing environment…

---

Warming Wednesdays: why we don't act on climate change

Weatherdem thinks he knows:

... the screaming isn’t helping, is it? You’re not an idiot. The volume of words isn’t the issue. The issue is you are motivated by things outside of the climate realm – things like having a job; a job that pays a living wage so you can pay for your mortgage and car payment and keep your children educated and happy. An existence in an affluent world that allows you the time and energy to think of complex problems beyond your perceived immediate needs. If those needs aren’t met – if you have insecure affluence – you place climate change and the environment far down on a list of priorities – just like a majority of other Americans.

... Like previous efforts, [the latest American Association for the Advancement of Science report] will not spur people to action, mostly because the actions listed are about limits, stopping, restricting, reversing, preventing, and regulating. The conceptual model from which these words arise works in direct contrast to the fundamentals of American culture. We are a people who are imaginative, who innovate, who invest.

As I have written before, there is no way we will achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions without substantial investment into innovation of new technologies that we research, develop, and deploy at scale. There is nothing limiting or restrictive about this framework. It it the opposite of those things. This framework recognizes and sets out to achieve opportunities; it allows for personal and cultural growth; it is in sync with the underlying cultural fabric of this country. It directly addresses people’s perception of the security of their affluence in the same way that developing countries’ economic growth allows people to move beyond basic material needs to higher order needs.

The reality of insecure affluence among many Americans today might be an indirect outcome of the 1%’s efforts to increase wealth disparity, but it is real. We have to address that disparity first in order to address the real, valid perceptions of insecure affluence. Only after Americans feel their personal wealth is secure will they have the resources to devote to higher order needs such as global climate change. That can happen with concerted focus on investing and innovating a post-carbon economy. But you won’t see that at the top of any policy prescription from the majority of climate scientists.

He's not so much saying that we have break the stranglehold of the one percent here, but that if scientists really want action, they'll put as much effort into imagining how we can use their expertise to innovate out of the civilizational carbon trap as to bemoaning that we are in it. I don't know whether that is realistic, but there is something to this.

Warming Wednesdays: "“No snow. Zip. Zero. None.”

What's a 975 mile sled dog race across Alaska look like in our warmer world? How about this:

350.org photo

We all know that no particular weather event can be firmly tied to global warming, but things are sure getting weird. More from Think Progress.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science plans to try to pound the message that we must cut CO2 emissions now into our public discourse.

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.

Warming Wednesdays: a rebuke to the rule of the market

Cyclones, blizzards, drought, fire and flood -- scientists can't say any particular weather event is a direct result of global warming, but they are quite ready to say that "extreme weather" will be one of the consequences of our heating up the planet.

Writing in February as the south of England was engulfed by flood waters, Seumas Milne sought to explain how climate change denial could be on the rise as the evidence of our senses points to massive disruptions.

What lies behind the political right's growing refusal to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus? There's certainly a strong tendency, especially in the US, for conservative white men to refuse to accept climate change is caused by human beings. But there shouldn't be any inherent reason why people who believe in social hierarchies, individualism and inequality should care less about the threat of floods, drought,  starvation and mass migrations than anyone else. After all, rightwing people have children too.

Part of the answer is in the influence of some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world: the oil, gas and mining companies that have strained every nerve to head off the threat of effective action to halt the growth of carbon emissions, buying legislators, government ministers, scientists and thinktanks in the process. ...

But climate change denial is also about ideology. Many deniers have come to the conclusion that climate change is some kind of leftwing conspiracy – because the scale of the international public intervention necessary to cut carbon emissions in the time demanded by the science simply cannot be accommodated within the market-first, private enterprise framework they revere. ... In the words of Nicholas Stern's 2006 report, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".

My emphasis.

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.

There's a new widget on the sidebar here ...

I mean that maroon thing headlined "Nowhere to hide ..." right below the archive list.  It's designed to visually demonstrate how rapidly the earth is accumulating heat from the greenhouse effect that human emissions of carbon dioxide gas have stimulated. According to the folks from Skeptical Science:

The earth has warmed rapidly over the past century due mainly to human activity, and especially over the past few decades. The increased greenhouse effect has warmed the land and air and melted ice, but most of it (about 90%) has gone into heating the oceans. ... for recent decades the earth has been heating at a rate of 250 trillion Joules per second.

“Joules per second” is a difficult unit of measure to appreciate, and is especially foreign to people who are unfamiliar with science. This widget attempts to put that heating into terms that are easier to visualize. 250 trillion Joules per second is equivalent to:

• Detonating four Hiroshima atomic bombs per second

• Experiencing two Hurricane Sandys per second

• Enduring four 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes per second

• Being struck by 500,000 lightning bolts per second

• Exploding more than eight Big Ben towers, with every inch packed full of dynamite, per second

Since I'm in San Francisco, I set up the widget to display the heat increase in "6.0 earthquake equivalents." I started the clock in 2005, because that's when I started this blog. By clicking on the icons at the bottom, you can see the other measures of heat energy. Under the "i" icon for each of them, you are led to further information.

Any way you measure it, we're emitting a lot of heat and if we don't slow and stop it, we can expect to fry.

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.

Warming Wednesdays: New York Times obfuscation

That's the headline in a recent Times article. Here are the 7th and 8th paragraphs of the story:

California has been warming along with most regions of the United States, and temperatures in recent months have been markedly higher than during the 1976-77 drought. In fact, for some of the state’s most important agricultural regions, summer lasted practically into January, with high temperatures of 10 or 15 degrees above normal on some days.

The consequence, scientists say, has been that any moisture the state does get evaporates more rapidly, intensifying the effects of the drought on agriculture in particular. “We are going through a pattern we’ve seen before, but we’re doing it in a warmer environment,” said Michael Anderson, the California state climatologist.

That is, the drought as we are living it, is unequivocally shaped by climate change. What is in doubt is how much of this particular drought's origins and effects should be attributed to periodic variations and how much to the incontestable reality of global warming. That human-induced general temperature increases are playing a role is simply not in doubt.

The headline is willfully misleading.

Warming Wednesdays: a Chinese car share venture

This video is quite fascinating and worth watching. (You can turn off any ad that pops up by clicking the x.) Smart entrepreneurs are looking to meet rising demand for individual autos among China's growing middle class with a sophisticated urban electric vehicle sharing scheme. This extends the principle of bike share programs to cute little smart cars stored in vending machine-like garages.

It all looks like a great idea and might make China's notoriously smog-afflicted cities more liveable.

But such a program won't necessarily do anything about the quantity of invisible carbon pollution that growing Chinese affluence adds to the planet's CO2 load. China currently gets nearly 80 percent of its electricity from coal-fired plants and looks to be still getting 66 percent of a vastly larger quantity in 2040.

Emissions from burning coal are the most significant contributing factor in carbon pollution that is warming the globe. Yet the rest of us can hardly deny over a billion Chinese the conveniences we accept as necessities. That's the global bind.

Warming Wednesdays: who pays for climate denial?

Via laci the dog

Recently on the NPR interview program Fresh Air, host Dave Davies had this exchange with author McKenzie Funk, on book tour talking about Windfall: the booming business of global warming.

DAVIES: … Do you see either the private interests or the governments deliberately influencing public policy to discourage efforts to halt global warming? Are we seeing people who will, you know, happily destroy the planet to make a buck?

FUNK: I have not seen that, no. I think it's an important point to say that the people I have talked to, I don't think they were necessarily bad people. Now, they were looking to make a buck but I don't think many of them were wanting, OK, let's let the planet burn so I can make this buck. It's more that they were sort of hopeless about the prospects. And I don't think there's any lobbying against sort of climate action.

The book sounds interesting. If we're going to respond to climate change, we'll need entrepreneurs. But Funk didn't help his credibility with that claim for his subjects.

It's pretty clear that efforts to obfuscate and suppress the scientific evidence about global warming have been paid for by fossil fuel companies with Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers in the lead. As denial has become a more untenable posture, this sort of traceable funding seems to have disappeared into what Scientific American calls "dark money" vehicles. Relying on a Drexel University study, the magazine explains:

… the amount of money flowing through third-party, pass-through foundations like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital, whose funding cannot be traced, has risen dramatically over the past five years.

In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.

Meanwhile the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, has disappeared.

Climate change obfuscation creates the milieu in which the entrepreneurial efforts of McKenzie Funk's subjects expect to thrive. They may not be bad people, may in fact be perfectly nice to their own children and pets. But they intend to profit from society's learned hopelessness, a hopelessness that large amounts of cash to willing shills have helped create. I certainly think that is morally culpable self-centeredness.

Warming Wednesdays: it is cold outside

Artist Randall Munroe suggests we pass this cartoon on when friends complain about the winter weather.

Here in San Francisco, we're basking in one of the nicest summers in years during this winter -- no fog, clear sunshine, and shorts weather. Of course this is the consequence of drastic drought -- the mountains have about 20 percent of the snow pack they would have been expected to have at this time of year. Come summer, there are sure to be water shortages.

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.

Warming Wednesdays: Ford goes light weight

If, like me, you've watched a lot of football on TV lately, you've probably seen this ad for the Ford F-150. There can be no doubt it is a butch ad -- addressed to the brotherhood of working men who get dirty every day and shower after work instead of before, who need to drive a truck as strong and tough as they are, who yearn to show the other guys they deserve to be in the tribe.


Subjected to a heavy dose of this pitch, I found it fascinating to learn that Ford has decided that in order to preserve its F-150 stud vehicle's market share, the truck needs to become more fuel efficient. And that in order to accomplish this feat, the company is going to make new models of the truck 700 pounds lighter by replacing its steel body with aluminum. Only, according to reporter Craig Trudell, the automaker doesn't much want to advertise this innovative break with automotive tradition.

The buzz entering the Detroit auto show that began today was that Ford Motor Co. would deliver one of the event’s most important introductions, an F-150 destined to be the first high-production vehicle with an aluminum body.

While Ford didn’t disappoint, its official presentation was almost absent any mention of the word “aluminum.” In prepared remarks as a series of new F-150s burst through paper walls onto the floor of Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena, Ford executives used “tough” to describe their newest pickup at least eight times. Raj Nair, the automaker’s product chief, underscored that the new vehicle’s frame is made of steel -- stronger, he said, than the steel the company’s competitors use in their heavy-duty models.

Only after that was the word aluminum uttered, and those in the stands heard it once.

I think what's going on here is representative of how this country will go about coming to grips with climate change. Established institutions -- the automakers, insurers of property, even utilities -- have begun to grasp that their future success is going to depend on adaptation to a changing climate. They aren't going to want talk about this, to engage in the ideological battle over global warming. But the more functional ones will take incremental measures to ensure their own survival. They'll evolve.

These measures probably aren't enough. The changes human societies have set in motion are too vast to be met by the smarter elements in an anarchic market. But all of us need to be flexible enough to look at where we might find allies in the climate crisis in unusual places. This challenge needs everyone's best energies.

Warming Wednesdays: why you are freezing your butt this winter

Just in case you run into Ted Cruz or Rush Limbaugh who think that current freezing temperatures in the central and east United States prove that the planet isn't warming, here's a video that explains why melting arctic ice leads to bitter cold weather. Meteorologists call what is happening "arctic amplification." The Jet Stream -- the motor of "the weather" -- both passes further north in its gyrations and also gets "stuck."

Brrr.

H/t Climate Progress.***And then there's what happens under that freezing weather. Several years ago in a column on gay aging, I highlighted the story of a 93 year old man who froze, apparently as a lethal consequence of social isolation and cold temperatures. That's one predictable result of very cold winters: more lonely deaths. So, naturally, our politicians are cutting subsidies to poor people for heating costs through sequestration and the deficit slashing mania.

Warming Wednesdays: seasonal disorder

It's happening. Reportedly supplies of the ubiquitous Christmas evergreen are falling as a consequence of rapid global warming.

The first report of Christmas tree shortages has arrived, with Fox News 44 reporting that tree crops in both Vermont and New Hampshire have been seriously compromised this year following an unexpected early heat wave in March and a summer of flash floods.

Though the young trees — some growing for a few years — had been able to withstand the warmer temperatures in late winter, they were unable to hold up to the subsequent flooding in the summer, tree farmer Bob White told the station. “It probably took out as much as half the farm,” he said. “You get used to 20, 30 years of how everything works, and now you don’t know anymore.”

… Most farmers said the death of trees wouldn’t reflect in Christmas tree prices this year, but the loss had left some farmers saying they wouldn’t replant. So even though the full-grown trees are still widely available, the crop set to be fully matured six to 10 years from now might be at risk.

Climate instability means tree farmers no longer know what to expect and consequently will leave the dicey business if they can.

That's bad in itself. Plant biologist Clint Springer, of Saint Joseph’s University, explains:

“At this time of year, choosing a real Christmas tree is one way that an average person can make a difference in terms of climate change,” Springer says. “A study as recent as 2009 (Ellipsos) concluded that a 7-foot cut tree’s impact on climate is 60 percent less than a 7-foot artificial tree used for six years. So while cut trees are not carbon-neutral, in terms of carbon-use, they are better than artificial trees.”

We've decided we have to forego a tree altogether this year; Morty the cat is an inveterate, uncontrollable climber. A tree wouldn't last long. But I'll be sad if we're coming into a time when this indulgence in northern European winter rites is entirely replaced with plastic.