Big heat, big shrug?

[imomus]

Last night I watched Al Gore's documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. I found it beautifully presented, thoroughly convincing and deeply moving. It is, I think, the major issue of our time, and the basic observation that the climate is changing would be undeniable even if there were no scientific data at all. Spring comes earlier, summer gets hotter, storms and typhoons hit harder.



The scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Scientists' stark warning on reality of warmer world was a headline story in yesterday's Guardian. And news stories don't come much bigger than this one. "Hundreds of millions may be put at risk... The world's scientists yesterday issued a grim forecast for life on earth when they published their latest assessment of the impacts of climate change. A warming world will place hundreds of millions of extra people at greater risk of food and water shortages and threaten the survival of thousands of species of plants and animals, they said. Floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts are all expected to increase, with people in poorer countries suffering the worst effects... Complaints of political interference with findings."



The question is, who needs to see this film? Who needs enviro-consciousness raising? The answer is, of course, everyone, but particularly Americans. Al Gore is pretty downbeat in the film about whether his nation is listening. "I've failed to get the message across," he says, tracking his disillusionment with congressional committees over the last twenty years. He's also aware that even when the message does get across, people may well pass directly from denial to despair.

Is Gore right that Americans aren't listening? Almost everyone in advanced nations -- 91% of Americans, and 99% of Japanese, as opposed to only 12% of Pakistanis -- has heard of global warming as a news story. That doesn't mean they accept it as a serious problem, though. Gore shows how near-unanimity in the scientific community turns, in the US press, into misleading "balance" -- with more than half of all American press reports saying that global warming may not be happening, and may not be hazardous. That's not balance, at this point: it's obfuscation.

According to the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, there's a big gap between the amount Americans are concerned by global warming and the amount others are. The highest percentage of those "a great deal" concerned by the issue is 66%, and that's in Japan. The least "greatly concerned" nations are the US, China and Britain, at 19%, 20% and 26% respectively. These also happen to be some of the biggest polluters, and the nations where stringent emissions legislation could make the biggest difference. The US not only hasn't signed up to the Kyoto agreement, but has actually plotted to undermine European support for the emissions trading scheme.

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, outlines why Americans may be hearing but not listening to the global warming message in his book America Against the World: How we are different and why we are disliked. Americans tend to be more optimistic than others, says Kohut, extrapolating from five years of Pew attitudes surveys. They put more faith in technology, and more faith in God than any other advanced nation. Their attitudes to God and religion are closer to those in the Muslim world than to those in other advanced nations. "This pattern recurs time and again," says Kohut in the book. "Americans are different from Europeans, especially Western Europeans, but they are closer to people in developing countries on many key attitudes and values.” And people in developing countries, although they'll be hit harder by climate change than anyone else, at the moment haven't heard about it.

Kohut's attitudes surveys, summarized in his book (and in this very interesting hour-long video interview he gave Book TV) show why it's so hard to make the world's biggest CO2 emitters care about global warming. Americans are individualistic and differ from other industrialized states in that they don't want government to play a big role. They don't think government schemes should save individuals (social safety nets) or the planet (emissions trading schemes). People, in the American view, prosper by their own efforts, and thanks to God, with capitalism as a "hidden hand". The trouble is that when it comes to global warming, only concerned and united government-level action can even make an effort to save the planet.

Last week's supreme court decision that the EPA must regulate carbon emissions signals the start of regulation via a domino effect of law suits against polluters. And global warming will be a big issue at the next US election. "There are multiple climate change bills before Congress," says Donald MacKenzie, who gives the Kyoto emissions trading structure a big thumbs up in this week's London Review of Books. "The most high profile is co-authored by John McCain, with sponsors including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Although capping carbon has been an idea more strongly welcomed by the Democrats, Republican strategists will have noted that the announcement of the Californian scheme gave Governor Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings a healthy boost, helping him do better in November’s elections than many of his fellow Republicans. Large sectors of industry in the US would much prefer a nationwide carbon market with uniform, stable rules to a patchwork of incompatible, unpredictable state markets, so it’s not impossible that a new president prepared to lead on the issue would find significant industrial support."

For MacKenzie, turning emissions into an economic cost makes it capitalism's problem, and unleashes capitalism's resourcefulness on the problem. After all, capitalism is pretty flexible when local labour costs too much, shipping its operations over to the other side of the planet. Why not give it a good reason to respond equally radically to environmental costs? Why not force that hidden hand?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The paleo-geological record accounts for nothing then does it?
Al - who of course has no vested political interest - in theorising within accepted orthodoxy is basing his postulations on a period of - as I remarked below - unusually stable planetary climate.
It a little like discarding the paleontological evidence for the existence of dinosaurs.
Thomas S.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well, the only people who might be happy about the rising temperatues and higher CO2 are rose garden enthusiasts--apparently roses love it.

There's also research that shows that plant growth will be accelerated with the higher CO2 content, although the plants will be less nutritious. The Jurassic was a period very high in CO2 (multiple times the present levels--we'd have a very hard time breathing in most ancient atmospheres). That might explain why herbivore dinosaurs had to be so huge--large guts to process the low-nutrient plant life.

Yes, by most accounts the weather patterns since the recent ice age have been unusually stable (with the exception of the Little Ice Age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the year 1816--the year without a summer). One might say we've become a bit spoiled by it, since it is certainly an aberration and not the norm. That said, we still don't have a real handle on paleoclimatology in general, and the factors that influenced it (some scientists say that the last ice age--a period of 200,000 years--ended within forty years. An incredibly abrupt time).

Even in worst case scenarios, the global temperature will hardly match the warmest period this world has seen--the Eocene, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene) when forests grew on the poles.

I'm far, far more concerned about destruction of habitat and pollution than climate change. That said, the Earth has endued much worse (Permian-Triassic extinction, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event) anyone?)--and so have we. The Earth will survive. We won't.

That said, Gore's film does much to bring attention to a serious issue. The climate in recent years has certainly fluctuated, and will likely continue to do so, whether it is caused by humans or not. If trends continue, the bay town I grew up in will be gone in fifty years, as will much of the world's wetlands, which will cause untold extinctions in birds and marine life, both of which use such places for migration stops and breeding/feeding grounds.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

More on the Eocene:

Climate:

"Marking the start of the Eocene, the planet heated up in one of the most rapid (in geologic terms) and extreme global warming events recorded in geologic history, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or Initial Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM or IETM). This was an episode of rapid and intense warming (up to 7°C at high latitudes) that lasted less than 100,000 years. The Thermal Maximum provoked a sharp extinction event that distinguishes Eocene fauna from the ecosystems of the Paleocene.
The Eocene global climate was perhaps the most homogeneous of the Cenozoic; the temperature gradient from equator to pole was only half that of today's, and deep ocean currents were exceptionally warm.[2] The polar regions were much warmer than today, perhaps as mild as the modern-day Pacific Northwest; temperate forests extended right to the poles, while rainy tropical climates extended as far north as 45 degrees latitude. The difference was greatest in the temperate latitudes; the climate in the tropics however, was probably similar to today's.
Climates remained warm through the rest of the Eocene, although slow global cooling, which eventually led to the Pleistocene glaciations, started around the end of the epoch as ocean currents around Antarctica cooled."

Flora:

"At the beginning of the Eocene, the high temperatures and warm oceans created a moist, balmy environment, with forests spreading throughout the earth from pole to pole. Apart from the driest deserts, Earth must have been entirely covered in forests.
Polar forests were quite extensive. Fossils and even preserved remains of trees such as swamp cypress and dawn redwood from the Eocene have been found in Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. The preserved remains found in the Canadian Arctic are not fossils, but actual pieces preserved in oxygen-poor water in the swampy forests of the time and then buried before they had the chance to decompose. Even at that time, Ellesmere Island was only a few degrees in latitude further south than it is today. Fossils of subtropical and even tropical trees and plants from the Eocene have also been found in Greenland and Alaska. Tropical rainforests grew as far north as the Pacific Northwest and Europe.
Palm trees were growing as far north as Alaska and northern Europe during the early Eocene, although they became less abundant as the climate cooled. Dawn redwoods were far more extensive as well.
Cooling began mid-period, and by the end of the Eocene continental interiors had begun to dry out, with forests thinning out considerably in some areas. The newly-evolved grasses were still confined to river banks and lake edges and had not yet expanded into plains and savannas.
The cooling also brought seasonal changes. Deciduous trees, better able to cope with large temperature changes, began to overtake evergreen tropical species. By the end of the period, deciduous forests covered large parts of the northern continents, including North America, Eurasia and the Arctic, and rainforests held on only in equatorial South America, Africa, India and Australia.
Antarctica, which began the Eocene fringed with a warm temperate to sub-tropical rainforest, became much colder as the period progressed; the heat-loving tropical flora was wiped out, and by the beginning of the Oligocene, the continent hosted deciduous forests and vast stretches of tundra."

Fauna:

"Eocene mammals were only 60% of the size of the primitive Paleocene mammals that had preceded them. They were also smaller than the mammals that followed them. It is assumed that the hot Eocene temperatures favored smaller animals that were better able to manage heat.
Early forms of many other modern mammalian orders appeared, including bats, proboscidians, primates, rodents and marsupials.
Reptile fossils were abundant such as python fossils and turtle fossils.
During the Eocene, plants and marine faunas became quite modern. Many modern bird orders first appeared in the Eocene."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We are the earth intruders (http://www.zshare.net/audio/bjork-earth-intruders-radio-edit-mp3.html), as Bjork puts it.

[unluckymonkey.livejournal.com]

rather flip for something you think is so important even if it IS a sham.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well...we're no more intruders than elephants who denude tracts of land as they graze. We're just better at it, damn us all.

Paleontologists figure that most top-end predator species have an average run of five million years. At about 500,000, we're certainly on a fast burn. (http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/61/300px-Statue_of_liberty_in_planet_of_the_apes.jpg)

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

Well, if we're intruding upon Earth, I'd certainly like to know where we come from so I, for one, can go back.

big bugs

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

W.

I am watching a copy of Hellstrom Chronicles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellstrom_Chronicle) do you know it?
Its quite funny in a chilling way. The "scientist" camps it up something awful with the insects will inherit the earth schtick.
Great soundtrack from Lalo Schifrin and frankly a tremendous film with some dreamy soft focus sharp focus shifts in the excellent camera work.

Re: big bugs

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

No--but it sounds like a good wine-and-wisecrack movie.

[shadowshark.livejournal.com]

See, you're partially right, but you're talking about world temperatures. The thing about problems with the NADW circulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NADW) is that the fluctuations will be very uneven. The US is more likely to go into an ice age while a lot of high population centers around the equator turn into desert.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"I'm far, far more concerned about destruction of habitat and pollution than climate change."

Absolutely with you there.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Of course, rising sea levels contribute to the pollution and habitat destruction, too--but you get my drift.

I'm not sure where the balance is to be struck as far as allowing the Earth's climate to follow its natural patterns. There have been very abrupt climate shifts in the past, causing extinctions galore. But then, such changes also gve rise to new species.

In the long run, getting in the way of the destruction/growth cycle can prove disaterous, as we've seen happen with massive wildfires out in the American west that are caused by decades of blaze suppression. On the other hand, if humans can intervene with nature to its detriment, we should be able to do so to its benefit as well.