Friday, January 27, 2023
Stop Gulping Kool-Aid!
Ok, I admit I’ve been sipping Kool-Aid, the hopium of these
bright young Brits who rationalize this slippery world, its calibrated risks,
but most of all, trade on my love of my fellow humans and their magnificent
potential. Though Ord places climate
change fourth on his list of risks, it is the one that is most apparent for
anyone with eyes open. Reading that it
is fourth in his list of existential risks did not make me focus more on the
other three for very long, since I know a lot less about them. But it did have the effect of getting me to relax
more about the huge climate shifts that are accelerating. This was a mistake, a failure of moral imagination. Huge shifts are already underway. To be
honest, we are in Earth Overshoot, and that alone is enough to render our
continued existence a vanishing hope.
Like Ord, I love humanity, though shudder at the power of our
mistakes, which we still keep making, with planetary consequences. We are as
gods. And Ord struck a chord when he spoke of the impossibility of voluntarily
resetting at a more primitive level, for in the Anthropocene humans are needed
to shepherd Creation that we have so disrupted, and that is now colonized as our planetary realm of control. This is
true for our species in terms of economics, agroforestry, and all levels of
growth, with the dream of “sustainability,” mainly to be found in gene manipulation
and the possibilities of geoengineering. But it is also true of the role of scientists
and conservationists in preserving plant and animal species, which gives support
to our continued role as ecosystem manager (Eugene Odum).
What is our responsibility to the future? Our village of Celo, NC is sponsoring its annual Cabin Fever University,
and spurred by reading Ord, McCaskill and other Oxford philosophers, I am hosting
a discussion of this topic next month.
Human, Earthly, and Post-Human Futures: What is our responsibility to the future? Whose future?
We will explore the notion of long-termism presented in works like To
Be a Good Ancestor, The Precipice, and Effective Altruism founder Will
MacCaskill’s What We Owe the Future?
One of the key questions raised in these works is: does the Earth, or the
universe for that matter, have value without homo sapiens or some other self-reflective
species embedded within it? Thomas Berry
formulated a similar question in The Universe Story ( with Brian Swimme, 1992),
affirming that the Universe knows itself through our participative deep
listening, postulating this was a fundamental and necessary quality of the
universe.
When we are facing possible near-term extinction, our
responsibility to the future is hugely relevant. What’s odd about this is that
I’ve circled back to my roots (Sunderlal Bahuguna, Thomas Berry, ecotheology)
by taking what feels like a detour through a group of neo-Utilitarians. I am
certain that Jeremy Bentham never imagined that his simple guide for right and
wrong would turn out to be a recipe for human colonization of the universe. Such is the power of instrumental, technological
science unleashed by the return to Robber Baron capitalism, combined with
Bentham’s shallow operative morality.
Regarding near-term extinction, The Guardian published
a recent article featuring the latest climate science to forecast a range of temperatures for tipping points. We are at the
lower threshold of four now: West Antarctic ice sheet, Greenland ice sheet,
northern permafrost belt abrupt thaw, and tropical coral reef mass die-off.
The Greenland ice sheet collapse is the highest probablility
of already being in collapse state, at the present 1.2 degrees of warming. My
denial, which refuses to completely go away, makes me look to the mid-range, hoping
beyond hope that surely we aren’t there already. But we know that in almost every instance thusfar,
climate scientists have underestimated the speed of change, starting with the consensus
that held from the late nineties until the Paris Accord that the magic number
was 2 degrees C. Now even 1.5 looks too
optimistic for several tipping points.
And they interlock, producing a cascade effect.
And that methane burp?
Scientists do not have a clear understanding of how and when this might
happen, but some of them (Peter Wadhams) think it could happen at any
time, with immediate catastrophic consequences.
It shouldn’t require a Sam Bankman-Fried crypto meltdown to see
through the shallow morality of the neo-Utilitarians. Their problem is an inability to see that
humans are not the apex of evolutionary history, which is continuous, and thoroughly buying into the
concomitant myth of infinite (human) progress. In the next series of posts, I
will look at our responsibility within the context of evolutionary history at
the end of the Anthropocene, the shortest geological period in Earth history. This
will be from the perspective of my personal wrestling with Overshoot and looming
climate catastrophe, aided by a tiny group of friends. I invite us all to embrace the metanoia of letting go of denial and techno-fixes and accepting the necessity of collapse - and into the Mystery beyond.
Labels: EarthOvershoot, Effective Altruism, Eugene Odum, JeremyBentham, near-term extinction, Peter Wadhams, the Precipice, Toby Ord
Thursday, June 27, 2019
How Long Do We Have? (Part Two)
The
answer to the
question
highly depends upon feeding the masses. "There are no seasons
anymore. Agriculture is a gamble." A woman farmer in Uganda is
speaking to Mary Robinson (former Irish president, eloquent
spokesperson for climate justice) in 2009. Peter Sawtell quotes her in a post at Ecojustice Notes on
the summer solstice, which is predictable, as the seasons, and
agriculture, are not anymore.
Genesis
seems to say otherwise. "As
long as Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer
and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Gen 8:22). James
Imhof, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, frequently quotes this verse
to prove that climate change is a liberal hoax; God has promised not
to allow it.
As
a Christian theologian, Sawtell wrote Imhof an open letter pointing out
that what the Genesis writer was pointing to was the dependable
journey of the Earth around the sun on its axis. But
we
humans can still sin, and since our technological prowess, multiplied
by our numbers, has allowed us to be giants in the Earth, we have
taken sin to new levels.
We are, as Brian Swimme says, a "planetary power,"capable of
ecological
sin, with our initially "innocent" use of fossil fuels now
turned monstrous.
The bottom line for all life to
flourish on the Earth is respiration, food and water, and a
temperature range in which the organism can function. Agricultural
output for a species now numbering well over 7 billion is one
important subset of this process. So the unpredictability for
farmers in the ongoing collapse of seasons is a key to the question
of survival. Farmers are adaptable, but there is only so much they
can do in response to the accelerating disruption of growing
conditions. To paraphrase the hymn, they have the whole world in
their hands.
For the Beauty of the Earth....
But what of the other aspects of
climate disruption? Losing the seasons is a loss of stability, and
of the aesthetic delight we have been blessed with for much of our
history (the exceptions being ice ages rather than rapid warming,
which we have never before encountered species-wide). Every time I
hear birdsong I say a prayer of thanksgiving. It is no longer
something to take for granted. The same is true for cool breezes,
refreshing water for recreational bathing, and the wildlife I see in
my yard. And as I wrote here a couple of years back, it is true
of looking up and seeing blue sky, since rapid warming will soon
probably result in deployment of sulfur aerosols at the poles to
dampen incoming solar radiation, causing the skies to turn gray. For
as long as we seed the polar stratosphere, it will be the atmospheric
equivalent of a continuing eruption of large volcanoes, and there
will be serious side effects, chiefly the loss of the monsoon winds
upon which South Asian farmers depend. No blue sky, no monsoon, even
as the Himalayan glaciers, mothers of the major South Asian rivers,
are on course to completely dry up before mid-century.
So, Peter Wadhams' testimony
aside, we will last awhile, but only through the continued
application of human ingenuity, which got us into deep trouble in the
first place. In the end, only restraint of our appetite for comfort
and the easy path, driven by corporate greed and nationalism, will
save us and the rest of the biosphere from ourselves. We have missed
the window for climate mitigation, and now must achieve the miracle
of transformation of global civilization to one of cooperation, even
as nativism and reactionary denial of our crisis have become the
rule. Adaptation, which is so often framed as a technological feat by
individual nations and city-states, is ultimately a social problem.
And that social problem is the key evolutionary issue for our species
in the face of its greatest challenge ever. Sadly, the odds favoring
abrupt climate change dwarf those for rapid evolutionary change.
The human experiment hangs in
the balance. As you go forward with your life, restrain your
consumption of fossils, pray for resilience, and recognize the
possibility, however slim, of human and divine miracles. Above all,
have compassion for everyone you encounter.
Labels: ecological sin, Genesis 8:22, Himalayan glacier melt, James Inhof, Mary Robinson, Peter Wadhams, sulfur aerosols
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
How Long Do We Have?
Last week, I ventured into the
chilling territory of the Artic News blog. I don't do this
regularly, because invariably the news is terrifying. For years, I
have feared a potential rapid extinction event from a huge upwelling
of methane from the shallow shelves of the Arctic (East Siberian)
Sea. The man who posts this material is the affable Peter Wadhams, expert on all things Arctic. This time, he makes the case for a potential mass
extinction event in 2026, trumping Guy McPherson, who has predicted
mass extinction in the northern hemisphere by 2033. The next morning
I woke with the thought, "My cat will still be alive then."
As I went through my annual
fact-checking ritual, I found once again the reasons I was able to
sleep again last time, with peers arguing for a much more gradual
process of climate disruption, and the surprising response from Gaia:
methane-eating bacteria populations seem to increase every time
methane bubbles do.
One of the articles that popped
up from an online search really caught my eye. A contributor to Skeptical Science, a site that debunks climate
prediction errors (Wadhams has been cited twice before) made the
point that, despite the fact that Wadhams was an "alarmist"
whose claims needed to be tempered, he was nevertheless a "respected
scientist," and that climate deniers were far more egregious in
the damage they did. So, the writer argued, the site needed to work
much more vigorously at countering their falsifications than
scientists like Wadhams.
I still live far from where most
of the climate disruption occurs, and it is hard to remember on a
mild summer day in the southern mountains that we are encountering
tipping points that make a mockery of humanity's slow awakening and
politicians' gradualist approaches (I include the Green New Deal). Wadhams and folks like him remind us that the stakes are huge,
and that time is of the essence.
One of Wadhams' claims is that
the jet stream, driven by the polar vortex, will likely collapse
within five years (a factor in his 2026 warning), bringing a wave of
heat from the Equator to the North Pole. This would exacerbate the
already rapid warming of the Arctic, now averaging more than 3C,
versus 1C for the planet, and all the processes driven by that
warming. (Last spring, there were spikes in spring temperature in
Siberia 35C above average, with the average daily temps up to 20C
higher than average for the Arctic overall.) One of the biggest
concerns is the effect upon the mid-northern latitudes, humanity's
breadbasket. Instead of the gradual shift northward of the grain
belt predicted by the IPCC, such an event would effectively end grain
production overnight, due to the huge, sudden increase in
temperature.
My searches to corroborate this
position, however, have found nothing to support Wadhams' assertion.
Climate modeling once predicted a tightening of the polar vortex,
moving closer to the north pole. Then scientists started using a
"gray radiation scheme," which omits the effects of water
vapor and clouds, which reflect incoming radiation. This model
predicted that the jet stream would shift towards the Equator, which
is what we have observed in recent years, the telltale wobble that
has led to extreme weather events, of both hot and cold. Last
spring, Arctic temperatures were far warmer than in Europe, which has
unusual cold temps and snowfall.
But the most recent research corroborates a shift of the jet stream northward (wobble
continuing, because it continues to weaken), by employing a "simple
four-factor long wave radiation scheme" that re-incorporates the
effect of water vapor on the system. (Question: why in the world
would scientists ever leave out such a huge factor???)
What I gather from a 48-hour
review of a dizzying amount of information is that climate science is
exceedingly complex, and that predictions like those from Wadhams are perilous. As for the effect to date on grain-growing, the
net effect up to 2016 has been to increase corn yields in the
American Midwest (as predicted in early studies of climate change),
due to more rainfall. This spring, however, catastrophic flooding
has prevented farmers from planting. Jet stream wobbles mean that
the uncertainties associated with farming are amplified, but it is
not leading clearly - at least not yet - to a breakdown of the polar
vortex altogether.
Labels: arctic methane emergency group, grain yields, gray radiation scheme, Green New Deal, Guy McPherson, human extinction, jet stream, Peter Wadhams, plar vortex, Skeptical Science
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