Too late for a wake-up call, past time to get moving

This post is part of Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. Read a good, more light-hearted take on the subject over at Dane101.

The world is changing. That much is a given. But whether or not you believe that some of that change is due to human interference and is detrimental to our overall survival is an issue that has only grown more contentious as the evidence mounts in its favor.

For too many people on both sides of the debate, too, the argument has mutated into an ego contest: "I'm right, you're wrong, ie: a moron." But that isn't helpful to anyone, and certainly not our planet. This isn't about political parties or nationality. It's about the very long-term security and viability of our home: Earth.

I admit to allowing my temper to flare all too often when it comes to the topic of climate change. I've been studying the effects for as long as I can remember, and when the overwhelming majority of research and evidence points to massive disruption of the Earth's environment as the result of man-made pollutants, it's difficult to understand where those who so vigorously deny it are coming from.

It's easy to say that they just don't care, are selfish, deluded. And certainly, those people exist. But I think most folks are just confused, misled, and probably scared. Hell, I'm scared. It would be much less unsettling to just turn my head and say that everything we're seeing is merely the result of natural cycles, and that we've nothing to worry about. I would much prefer that be the truth.

But it comes down to simply not being willing or able to ignore the evidence. I've been fortunate to have had a very decent level of education in the sciences and scientific method. I've had good teachers who've explained the more complicated ins and outs of environmental science to me. Not everyone has had the luck I've had, though. And in the absence of good teachers, many people are left with politicians and the media as their source for information about climate change.

But soundbytes and talking points can't even come close to explaining what's really going on. They generally either come off sounding too preposterous and alarmist, or overly simplistic and ignorant. That's a major problem that needs to be addressed. We need far better general science education in this country, and we need people to point out the bull when they see it. We need accountability.

Americans especially also need to get over our deeply ingrained belief that the needs and desires of the individual should always trump those of the community. There's a balance to be struck. Individual rights and liberties are incredibly important, but they end when they begin to impede upon the rights and liberties of others. That's where the recognition of the importance of the greater community comes in. If enough individuals refuse to see that some of their actions cause harm to others, then we need to step up as a collective and stop them.

So you may not like littering laws, but the community needs to enforce them for the benefit of all. Interconnectedness. It's not just a hippie ideal. It's the reality on the ground of life on Earth. Our ecosystem is a delicate, finely tuned thing. And it's not as though we've only thrown a small wrench into its inner mechanics with our pollutants. We've been lobbing the equivalent of nuclear bombs at it for centuries now, and it's time to pass some serious nonproliferation laws.

Carbon dioxide is all well and good until it reaches extreme, high levels, at which point it becomes toxic. NASA scientists have already determined the the ideal maximum of CO2 in the atmosphere should be just 350ppm - but we've already outrun that, which means that it's time to make serious efforts at cutting back. Like a human body with sugar and fat intake, there's only so much CO2 the Earth can handle before things start going wrong.

And they've already started going wrong. The trick with climate change is that it isn't just about the average temperature of the planet rising bit by bit, it's also about wilder and more frequent extremes. More hurricanes. More draughts. Stronger storms. Hotter heat waves and colder cold snaps. The seasons shifting, little by little, from their usual patterns.

Right now it's all too easy for people living in better circumstances to ignore the very real problems caused by climate change. Because it's the folks who reside in poorer countries, and/or in places where there's less of a buffer between them and the environment, who feel the adverse effects first. There are even entire countries at risk of being wiped off the map because of rising ocean levels. Whole ways of life are threatened.

Short of the sky actually falling with a note attached that reads, "Due to human-caused climate change," I'm not sure what will convince some of the die-hard deniers. For some people, it's just too much to process. They argue that fighting climate change will result in unnecessary abrogation of rights and economic disaster. And they'll be right if we don't go about things with a clear head. But what they fail to see is that if we do nothing, in the long term, we'll end up with economic disaster and the dissolution of society anyway - only, on a much larger, more catastrophic scale.

We've missed our wake-up call. It's high time we got working.

Who gave this guy a column?

I mean, he's a blogger after all. It's generally good policy to just keep us relegated to our own personal web space. Especially if we birth such abortions of grammar, common sense, and logic such as can be found in James Widgerson's latest column at gmtoday.com.

Widgerson is bemoaning the recent report, Wisconsin's Strategy for Reducing Global Warming, and its apparently audacious assumption that global climate change is a real threat and that we ought to take steps to combat it.

Among the litany of already disproved allegations and assertions that Widgerson makes, we have the old "global cooling" bit, the "you can't tell me what to do!" line, the "they'll force us all to live in teepees and ride the bloody trains" hysteria, plus much, much more!

They’re not even acknowledging that global temperatures have leveled off, and that we may actually be entering a period of global cooling.

Eh, not so much. Global surface temperatures are increasing, and the global cooling idea has long since been debunked, even by one of the scientists who originally proposed it. Clearly someone forgot to read much of any of the current research on the subject, including the exhaustive IPCC study from 2007.

They want us out of our cars and riding trains. If we don’t abandon our cars, we are going to have to buy more expensive cars with higher emission standards. We are going to have to buy ethanol to fuel our cars. We are going to have to drive slower because they are going to lower the speed limits. Meanwhile, drivers will have the privilege of paying for new trains (like the ones keeping Waukesha residents up at night with their horns).

When did trains suddenly become the great bogeyman of Wisconsin? While certainly not the end-all-be-all of our transportation woes, trains and mass transit in general do serve the public quite well, both here and abroad. They help cut congestion on our costly highways, and reduce the amount of pollutants being spewed by taking cars off the roads. And ridership is up across the country, showing a growing demand for the service now that gas prices are so high (and don't look to be comin' down any time soon). The real question here should be, why not trains?

While I'm not an ardent supporter of ethanol (at least not the corn-based kind), I do believe higher emissions standards are important. They don't have to mean more expensive cars, either. That's the beauty of demand and innovation. The more people--with more cash--that put their minds to the problem, the more efficient and less expensive for the end-user things tend to become. And who doesn't want to get more mileage for their buck?

They even want to reduce the amount of miles we drive through "improved land use." You want to build that house in the country? Your dream will soon clash with the priority of reducing greenhouse gas omissions.

Heaven forbid we work to create more walkable communities, so you don't have to drive miles just to buy groceries or see a movie or go to the park. And take away those sprawling luxury homes on hundreds of acres of otherwise perfectly good land from the few people remaining wealthy enough to build them? Apparently that, too, leaves an awful taste in his mouth.

What's especially strange about this column is Widgerson's assertion that the people who want to implement these allegedly Draconian changes are just a bunch of "elitist" snobs. I guess those dream-house-in-the-country building, SUV driving, public transit abhoring people are just salt of the earth folk with barely two private yachts to rub together. And those elitist snobs? They want to build a more sustainable, healthier, more affordable and pleasant place to live for everyone. If that's elitism, then by gum, hand me a snifter of brandy and take me out to the Skull and Bones meetings because I want in!

A day (or 365) for the Earth

Happy Earth Day!

In anticipation of the holiday and in recognition of just how gorgeous it was outside yesterday, I dusted off the ol' Surly and went for a ride around the lake. Though a little out of shape from the winter, I was pleased to discover that I haven't completely lost all of the gains I made last year. But enough about me:

38 years ago, former Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson started Earth Day as a grassroots environmental teach-in effort. These days, its celebration has expanded to the point of qualifying as an Earth Week or even Month. That's definitely progress, but we'd also do well to apply its lessons and principles year-round.

I already posted a list of some of the Earth Day related events around town. Interestingly enough, that simple post elicited a rather impassioned response from commenter William, who apparently isn't convinced that global climate change is actually happening, or that humans are responsible for it. He, like a small but vocal group of people, believes that the media is one-sided in its coverage of the issue. I countered by arguing that, in an effort to appear objective, the media gives too much air-time to the deniers. Simply because a view point exists on an issue does not mean it should automatically be given the same credence as another take on the issue that has far more in the way of evidence to back it up (take Holocaust deniers, for example).

Climate change deniers overwhelmingly rely, perhaps unwittingly, on disproved, biased and/or highly flawed research. If a news report wants to include the voice of someone whose opinion is that it's not happening, fine, but to include false "science" on the subject is not good journalism. It's lazy at best, destructive at worst.

This, of course, resulted in me being called "close-minded" and "self-absorbed," among other things. I can take the name calling. What I have a hard time dealing with are people who, for whatever reason, still stubbornly refuse to see what's right in front of their faces. This is too important an issue to play politics or personal pride with.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

Human activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide from combustion of coal, oil, and gas; plus a few other trace gases). There is no scientific debate on this point.

Emphasis mine, of course. There's a lot of good reading at that site, and I highly recommend taking a look.

The trick with a lot of this data is that it's incredibly complicated, and parts of it can appear, to the layperson (myself included), to contradict other data sets. For instance, while the trend in most parts of the world is toward warmer average temperatures, there are sections ("parts of the southeastern U.S. and parts of the North Atlantic") where the average is actually cooling. Do these seeming inconsistencies negate the entire debate? I wish.

Global climate change involves several large-scale changes, but it also manifests in many, more localized and varied forms. For example, we'll see longer, more harsh droughts in certain areas, while in other places we'll see greater flooding and more severe storms.

Point is, it's happening and humans have a pretty large hand in causing it. There is debate, however, as to the exact manifestations, consequences and time-line. Getting that right is important, and as such we should be fostering constructive debate and research on the matter. But we first need to move beyond questioning whether it's happening at all. It is.

A United Nations report ...by the world's top climate scientists said global warning was "very likely" man-made and would bring higher temperatures and a steady rise in sea levels for centuries to come regardless of how much the world slows or reduces its greenhouse gas emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is made up of scientists from 113 countries, was created by the U.N. in 1988 and releases its assessments every five or six years.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widspread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level," said the IPCC report.

As for the assertion that "hundreds of scientists have signed petitions that state climate change isn't a problem" (made by the commenter and in several other forums), I offer the following Royal Society paper debunking that and many other misleading arguments:

There are some differences of opinion among scientists about some of the details of climate change and the contribution of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels. Researchers continue to collect more data about climate change and to investigate different explanations for the evidence. However, the overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change agree on the main points, even if there is still some uncertainty about particular aspects, such as how the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will change in the future.

In the journal Science in 2004, Oreskes published the results of a survey of 928 papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003. She found that three-quarters of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the view expressed in the IPCC 2001 report that human activities have had a major impact on climate change in the last 50 years, and none rejected it. There are some individuals and organisations, some of which are funded by the US oil industry, that seek to undermine the science of climate change and the work of the IPCC. They appear motivated in their arguments by opposition to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which seek urgent action to tackle climate change through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

We've also been observing a far greater increase in arctic sea ice melting than previously predicted. According to a new study, only 13% of the new layer of ice formed last year survived the annual melt.

Research has linked the thinning of Arctic ice to warmer average temperatures caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases from human activities. Readings from U.S. submarines indicate a widespread reduction in sea ice thickness of 40 per cent since 1960.

The melting is also increased because the darker surface of open water absorbs the sun's rays as heat rather than reflecting them back into space like ice and snow.

Those people who live close to and rely on arctic ice already know this is happening. Inuit hunters are facing increasingly dangerous routes across thinning ice. Homes and other structures face instability as permafrost disappears. People in far northern climes are on the front lines and there's no doubt that something is drastically changing.

And the data, stories and research goes on and on.

Point is, we can't afford to debate if change is happening. It's far too late for that. What we must do is talk about and implement ways to counteract these negative changes--ways that don't themselves have negative consequences (take the current skyrocketing prices of corn and rice, for example).

Thankfully, not all is doom and gloom. While it is essential that we take this problem as being deadly serious, we can also take heart in the fact that many people have been working on creative and productive solutions for years now. The scale and scope is breathtaking. Everything from simple in-home green solutions to massive renewable resource projects have been and continue to be tackled. There are several great resources for keeping up on these developments, too:

• TreeHugger - a blog with frequent entries about various green technologies, toys, businesses and communities, etc.
• InHabitat - a blog that covers green building, technology and architectural developments.
• Haute Nature - ecologically based creative ideas, art and green products for your children, home and lifestyle.
• Ideal Bite - daily and easy-to-implement tips and tricks for making your life more environmentally friendly.
• Grist - environmental news that's "fiercely independent" and not boring.
  
• WorldChanging - "a solutions-based online magazine that works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us."

And the list goes on.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. This is something that, in one way or another, impacts all 6 billion of us. Changing our ways to better the planet we live on doesn't have to mean crazy high prices, poor economies or massively restricted civil liberties. In fact, I'd argue that intelligently implementing positive changes to help save the world, as it were, would help us avoid all of those things. Green technology is, more and more, the money-saving choice. Improving conditions means fewer droughts and floods so that food sources aren't wiped out. It means less chance of massive epidemics. It means, if we keep at it, cheaper/renewable sources of energy. The crunch at gas pumps isn't going to get any better.

So go out and celebrate Earth Day, but be sure to take it and run with it. After all, the phrase may be a cliche, but it's still absolutely spot-on: make every day Earth Day.

UPDATE TO ADD: A great, comprehensive site on "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" - covers things far more comprehensively than I can.

Where's my tinfoil hat?

Isthmus letter to the editor (wait for the last bit, it's the punchline):

As a Ph.D. scientist well schooled in all aspects of thermodynamics, I take exception to Teresa Nyholt's letter on CO2 global warming (1/4/08). This hypothesis, extravagantly pitched by Al Gore for political reasons, is unsupported by peer-reviewed scientific publications.

In his infamous An Inconvenient Truth movie, Gore reported a global temperature increase, which when graphed was shaped like a hockey stick. The data used for this temperature graph were totally in error.

There was no exaggerated global temperature increase. His temperature levels were based on tree-ring growth data, which was invalid because of statistical errors and failure to correct for atmospheric changes.

Despite criticism from the scientific community, he continued to use fallacious data. His disdain for scientific truth qualified him more favorably as a politician than an aspiring scientist.

A simple graph of the gradual global temperature increase along with the vivid exponential increase of carbon dioxide since 1950 validates, beyond a shadow of doubt, that carbon dioxide has had no measurable effect on global warming.

The myth of human-caused global warming is the biggest public fraud since Franklin Roosevelt orchestrated the Pearl Harbor tragedy.

Remember folks, he's a Ph.D. SCIENTIST! Do you suppose that means he's got a doctorate in some branch of the sciences, or that he actually studies people with Ph.D.s? I can't tell.

The good, the bad, the ugly deniers

I'm reading about Fort Atkinson's very cool Heart of the City program, a voluntary "diet" that has citizens cutting their energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. It sounds like a great idea, and seems to have led to some serious savings, both in terms of energy and money, for the town.

But then, upon reaching the bottom of the article, I come across that chronic buzzkiller, the Global Warming Denier. It seems as though the WSJ Forums have picked up one of their own, as this forumite has been popping up in the comments section of many articles that, in one way or another, touch on the issue of global warming.

I understand that there is still debate in the scientific community over the severity and exact causation of the problem. The great thing about modern science, though, is that through use of the scientific method, we're able to sift and winnow our way closer to more and more truth every day. Still, there are those who would prefer to stick their heads in the sands (y'know, the sand that used to be fertile ground but that was ruined by human overuse and such?). They deny the very thought that humanity's actions may be interfering with the delicate balance of the Earth.

How they continue to live in such an anti-reality zone is beyond me, especially considering the wealth of research from all corners of the scientific spectrum to support the theory that yes, we are in fact changing our world, and not so much for the better.

Have some facts:

Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

• Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near Earth's surface. (See an interactive feature on how global warming works.)

• Humans are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

• These gases persist in the atmosphere for years, meaning that even if such emissions were eliminated today, it would not immediately stop global warming.

• Some experts point out that natural cycles in Earth's orbit can alter the planet's exposure to sunlight, which may explain the current trend. Earth has indeed experienced warming and cooling cycles roughly every hundred thousand years due to these orbital shifts, but such changes have occurred over the span of several centuries. Today's changes have taken place over the past hundred years or less.

Please refer to the IPCC's 2007 Report on climate change for more in-depth details and research.

You can deny until you're blue in the face, but it ain't gonna make the problem go away.

And hey, curious to calculate your household's emissions and waste? There's a very decent personal calculator available over at the Environmental Protection Agency. Looks like my house came in under the national average, which makes me feel good, but then I have to think about the bigger picture and the fact that, if everyone on Earth lived like I do, we'd run out of resources pretty much immediately. Yikes. Still, every little bit counts, especially if those little bits end up leading to bigger things.