Lots of Climate Change Deniers at Today's Meeting
One of the presenters at today’s practice session for the Clean Business Investment Summit has a cool idea with respect to fire suppression, the details of which I’m sure he’d rather that I not divulge. But that’s not the point anyway; rather it’s that he began with this blockbuster: In the United States, there have been more “megafires” (those burning more than 100,000 acres) in the last 10 years than in the 100 previous years.
I noticed that the three (previously vocal) climate change deniers in the room were struck mute at that.
Facts are facts. Ecosystems are pushing northerly. Seasonal events are shifting to earlier in the calendar year. Forests are dieing due to beetle infestations. When the entire forest is dead, that run of the mill lightening strike has quite a bit of opportunity to start a fire. What else does someone think will happen?
Here, for those whose heads are not too deeply and comfortably buried in the widening sand, are a few notable excerpts from Bill McKibben’s recent article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”…
“June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
“Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the ‘largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.’ The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history…
“So far, we’ve raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. ‘Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,’ writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, ‘and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank’s chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: ‘If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.’…
“Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (‘Reasonable,’ in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)
“This idea of a global ‘carbon budget’ emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we’ve increased the Earth’s temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we’re currently less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we’re already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.
“How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they’re exact, but few dispute that they’re generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
“2,795 Gigatons …this number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.
“The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world’s major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers aren’t perfect – they don’t fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don’t accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia’s Lukoil and America’s ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.
“We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.
“Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.
“If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists, and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends.”
McKibben provides intensely sobering data, and he has spotlighted the motivation of some folk who work against change. That $27 trillion sounds like quite a lot of motivation for the interested parties to throw considerable financial weight behind the denial circus. It graphically reveals as patently absurd by comparison all the deniers’ desperate accusations of ‘fudging science to get grant money’ against the scientific community. If scientists were so willing to sacrifice their ethics for cash, they’d run away to the circus.
Can anyone rationally believe that sucking up and digging up prehistoric carbon and dumping it into the modern atmosphere by the gigaton every month for decades should not be expected to have an undesirable impact? No, not rationally. Expectations aside, climate disruption by human activity is an observable fact, and it presents severe consequences if it continues unchecked – consequences that will be creating ever increasing grief of many colors for us and for our children long into the future.
Timothy D. Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University. He has illustrated grimly fascinating themes surrounding the relationship between available food and lawful civilization. His examination of human history reveals consistent parallels in the perception of resource security and the propensity of societies to remain at peace. In short, a full belly is a peaceful belly, and an anxious heart is far more easily led to war. Indeed, nearly all wars have begun over resources of one kind and another – whether they be water and grazing land, or coal, oil and iron.
This aspect of the human psyche has profound bearing upon our present circumstances and our impending future – namely that people have become increasingly civilized and humane in recent decades as we have successfully used fossil energy to revolutionize agriculture so as to make food scarcity ever less frequent and less severe. As fossil energy becomes ever more costly and modern life – such as has been conceived and implemented – becomes progressively less sustainable, the ever greater will become our predisposition toward upheaval and violence.
Since the turn of the twentieth century we here in the US have been engaged in repeated wars, “police actions” and foreign occupations involving coveted resources – particularly fossil fuels. Even so, we had also accomplished the greatest advances yet in the realms of human liberty, common prosperity, wide-ranging knowledge and technical capability in the history of our species. The triumph of our kind is in realized the growing influence of principles like those embodied our Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – principles that have only begun to be duly expanded upon and truly been brought to life over the last few decades.
The endurance of these crowning achievements is anything but guaranteed. Already these jewels begin to slip from our grasp amid contrived economic turbulence and exaggerated concerns for national security. Yet far greater and more genuine threats, long of our own making, loom on our horizon and even now snake their ominous tendrils into the present. To restore hope, for ourselves and for our future, we must end our pathetic dependence upon dwindling and destructive resources for every aspect of our infrastructure and our product streams.
The permanent solutions have already arrived:
• Harvest energy directly from the sun using solar thermal and molten salt storage, for all our manufacturing, transportation and communication, and transmitting power over a high voltage direct current grid
• Grow complimentary mixed crops with organically maintained soil and natural pest control to yield nutritious food, durable cloth, cellulose for factory plastics, and seed oils for mechanical lubrication
• Control population growth through a massive public awareness and free contraception campaign
Such a transition is neither impossible, nor even wrenching, if pursued wisely. Human societies have undertaken very rapid changes before.
In America during the short period surrounding the American Civil War, the population of the US moved from agriculture to industry with stunning speed. Before the war most labor took place on farms, afterward most labor was in factories. In 1860, American shops and factories produced less than $2 billion worth of goods. Thirty years later, in 1890, American factories produced $10 billion in goods.
A generation ago, we transformed our society from single income families to families where both parents work, and did it in little more than a decade. Indeed, between 1970 and 1980, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force participation rates of women in the 25–34 and 35–44 age groups increased by 20.5 percentage points and 14.4 percentage points, respectively. No other labor force group has ever experienced an increase in participation rates of this magnitude in one decade. Of course, women had always worked in the home and made a fathomless contribution to the welfare of their families, and the results of this change are therefore arguably mixed.
Nevertheless, both these changes show clearly that we here in this country in particular are quite capable of adapting our way of life to perceived necessity. Now we just have to perceive the necessity.
We don’t have much time. The transformation must be completed before we have irrevocably splintered the biosphere on which we will always depend, and before we’ve used up the sufficiently inexpensive fossil energy we need to build the new infrastructure components.
Truth
Non-Violence
Cooperation
Direct Action
Perseverence
While exceptions exist, people today are different than long ago. If you are not over 50 you wont see my points. Something has been changed in the essence of the average attitude. a willingness to bust ass to serve responsibility is only one aspect I observe. Another is tolerance for the same. I am scared for what I will see next.
Greg Chick