Tag Archives: climate change

environmentalists and poor communication

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Here a marketing person criticizes the communication strategies of scientists and environmentalists.

our side likes complexity. And in communications, only simplicity works. Our side doesn’t like simplicity because they view it as manipulative or not capturing the truth. Without simplicity, people don’t remember anything. Another thing: The research shows and common sense tells you that that this is a really tough, depressing issue to get your head around. So they really can’t do it unless they know what can be done about it. And we don’t put forward a clear solution. Go out on the street and ask people, “What can we do about climate change?” They won’t know. So we have to make this a lot simpler…

Public interest types, across the board — we think because we’ve said something, know something, or done something, that everybody else knows it. We don’t realize the bubble we live in.  It’s only when you’ve said something so many times that you’re utterly and completely sick of it that someone has even heard it. Marketers understand this. Scientists and people from the humanities less so — they get bored by it. “We already had our op-ed in the New York Times! The world knows!” But it takes so much more repetition than that.

I mean, as a country, even the intelligentsia has not fully realized that we are in a planetary emergency and we are running rapidly out of time.

Actually, I get criticized by my fellow engineers almost daily for oversimplifying complex issues and for repeating myself to the point of annoyance. It turns out, maybe I have some communication instincts after all!

climate change and mass migration

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This article tries to make a link between current mass migrations of people and climate, giving Syria as one example.

There is not a migrant or refugee crisis. We’re in the midst of a global migration shift. While its unrelenting realities of forced displacement, whether from war, persecution or economic despair originate from disparate causes, they all share a singular fact: The nascent stages of this historical migration shift require long-term planning, not short-term designation.

Nearly 60 million people fled their homes in 2014, according to a recent UN report. Within a generation, according to estimates by numerous climate scientists and the international organizations dealing with migration, 150-200 million people could be displaced by the fallout of severe drought, flooding and extreme climate.

As the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted in a recent study, “the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought,” which has triggered some of the largest displacements of refugees across the Mediterranean, are a significant part of the roots of the Syrian civil war itself.

August 2015 in Review

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Negative stories (-12):

  • About 7-19% of cancers are caused by chemicals in the environment. (-1)
  • Steven Hawking is worried about an artificial intelligence arms race starting “within years, not decades”. (-2)
  • The anti-urban attack continues, based on the false idea that crowded, stressful living conditions are the only type of urban living conditions available, and people are being forced into them against their will. This is naked, obvious propaganda that must be rejected. (-1)
  • The more ignorant our species is, the more confident we tend to feel. (-3)
  • According to Naomi Klein, “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”  In related news, July was the warmest month ever recorded by humans, and carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest seen for millions of years. (-3)
  • The media buzz about a worldwide recession seems to be increasing. (-2)

Positive stories (+12):

  • The suburban vs. urban culture wars continue. Suburban office parks are tanking as young people prefer more urban job settings. Entrepreneurs are working on the problems of being car-less with children. (+1)
  • Steven Hawking has a plan to figure out if there is any intelligent life out there. (+1)
  • There are straightforward, practical ideas for dealing with the issues of loading, deliveries, and temporary contractor parking in dense urban areas. (+1)
  • Economists have concluded that preventing human extinction may be economical after all, because “reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable”. Is this kind of thinking really useful? (+0)
  • “gene drive” technology helps make sure that genetically engineered traits are passed along to offspring. (+0)
  • Technology marches on – quantum computing is in early emergence, the “internet of things” is arriving at the “peak of inflated expectations”, big data is crashing into the “trough of disillusionment”, virtual reality is beginning its assent to the “plateau of productivity”, and speech recognition is arriving on the plateau. And super-intelligent rodents may be on the way. (+1)
  • Honeybees may be in trouble, but they are not the only bees. (+0)
  • Robotics may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion, which will almost certainly be bad for some types of jobs, but will also bring us things like cars that avoid pedestrians and computer chips powered by sweat. I for one am excited to be alive at this moment in history. (+2)
  • Dogs can be trained to smell cancer. (+1)
  •  There’s promise of a vaccine for MERS. (+1)
  • It may be possible to capture atmospheric carbon and turn it into high-strength, valuable carbon fiber. This sounds like a potential game-changer to me, because if carbon fiber were cheap it could be substituted for a lot of heavy, toxic and energy-intensive materials we use now, and open up possibilities for entirely new types of structures and vehicles. (+3)
  • Robot deliveries and reusable containers could be a match. (+1)

You might think I rigged that to come out even, but I didn’t.

pneumatic chutes

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They have pneumatic chutes on Roosevelt Island, in New York City’s East River. I think this technology has promise, especially in a high-density urban future. A long time ago, we decided we wanted our sewage out of site in tubes underground, but for some reason we are still trucking garbage around on the surface. Theoretically, you could have one tube system to collect all the organic waste (human waste, kitchen waste, yard waste) and take it to a central point for aerobic composting or anaerobic digestion, yielding useful products like energy (electricity, heat, natural gas) and fertilizer. Mixing high-carbon sewage and yard waste with high-nitrogen kitchen waste can also create a more balanced waste stream for digestion. Using suction instead of gravity to transport sewage opens up a new world of no- or low-water transport of waste, which is simply the direction we have to be headed in many warming, drying, and densely populated parts of the world. And sucking stuff through a tube has to be cleaner, safer, and quieter than a fleet of diesel-powered trucks.

Taking this even further, if you generate methane gas you could feed it into a fuel cell, creating electricity and clean water, and potentially sequestering carbon although I don’t fully understand where the technology is at the moment. But this seems to me like a very nice water-energy-waste system that could work at a building, institutional, or neighborhood scale, not exactly a closed loop but much more efficient than the production-use-disposal system we have now.

warmest month ever

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Eric Holthaus continues his entertaining, slightly sensationalist climate change coverage in Slate:

All this warmth on land is being driven by record-setting heat across large sectionsof the world’s oceans. The NOAA report notes that the warmest 10 months of ocean temperatures on record have occurred in the last 16 months. This is mostly due to a near-record strength El Niño, but the current state of the global oceans has little historical precedent. Since it takes several months for the oceanic warmth of an El Niño to fully reach the atmosphere, 2016 will likely be warmer—perhaps much warmer—than 2015. And that poses grave implications for the world’s ecosystems as well as humans.

We’ve recently entered a new point in the Earth’s climate history. According toreconstructions using tree rings, corals, and ice cores, global temperatures are currently approaching—if not already past—the maximum temperatures commonly observed over the past 11,000 years (i.e., the time period in which humans developed agriculture), and flirting with levels not seen in more than 100,000 years.

But this is the scary part: The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any point since humans first evolved millions of years ago. Since carbon dioxide emissions lead to warming, the fact that emissions are increasing means there’s much more warming yet to come. What’s more, carbon dioxide levels are increasing really quickly. The rate of change is faster than at any point in Earth’s entire 4.5 billion year history, likely 10 times faster than during Earth’s worst mass extinction—the “Great Dying”—in which more than 90 percent of ocean species perished. Our planet has simply never undergone the kind of stress we’re currently putting on it. That stunning rate of change is one reason why surprising studies like the recent worse-than-the-worst-case-scenario study on sea level rise don’t seem so far fetched.

Naomi Klein

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Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is coming out in paperback. (Does that matter in the digital age?) She is pretty scathing when she describes how her fellow humans are messing up our civilization project (this is the New York Times book review):

To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” On the green left, many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.

That philosophy — ­neoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, ­carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.” …

In democracies driven by lobbyists, donors and plutocrats, the giant polluters are going to win while the rest of us, in various degrees of passivity and complicity, will watch the planet die. “Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews,” Klein writes. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”

DoD and Climate Change

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The U.S. Department of Defense believes in climate change:

DoD recognizes the reality of climate change and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally. The National Security Strategy, issued in February 2015, is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.1 These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.

Will the U.S. public finally be ready to just laugh science-denying Presidential candidates off the stage next year?

July 2015 in Review

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I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

everything I know about cities is wrong?

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Planetizen called this anti-urban article “frank, tough talk at it’s [sic] most provocative”. It sounds somewhat scholarly on the surface, but dig in and it stinks. They use the same scare tactics Joel Kotkin used recently, descriptions that suggest people are being forcibly marched out of the countryside and into urban high-rise towers. Sure, that has happened in a few places and times in history, but it is not the norm. In fact, you could argue that history’s greatest tragedies (if you measure simply by body count) were caused by the exact opposite, people being marched out of cities and onto rural farms at gunpoint, only to starve in the tens of millions (Ukraine, China, Cambodia). For the most part, cities form organically when people concentrate in pursuit of economic opportunity. Agriculture and mining are just as necessary as they ever were, but we don’t need large numbers of people engaged in these any more because they are largely automated. For large numbers of people to achieve a high living standard, the bulk of us have to be working together in higher-tech pursuits like manufacturing, design and invention of new products, processes, and ideas. This is the direction our species has evolved, and there is no stopping it now.

Much of their argument rests on the idea that cities can be stressful, and that they are linked to diseases of the affluent and physically inactive such as diabetes and heart disease. Concentrating people certainly gives rise to obvious stressors like noise, air pollution, heat, and traffic deaths, and less obvious ones like reduced leisure time and contact with nature. Richer and more egalitarian-minded cities are doing more to mitigate these stressors, while developing cities and cities where the pursuit of profit dominates everything else are doing little. There are ways to mitigate the stressors – noise abatement, non-motorized transportation, parks and green infrastructure to name a few. We need to focus on maximizing the positive aspects of cities while removing the stressors.

We should all welcome serious, scholarly thinking about the form future human settlements could take to maximize the potential and minimize the impact of all of us, but this is not serious scholarly thinking so let’s not take it seriously.

the economics of extinction

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Here are some economists tying themselves in mental knots on how you would do cost-benefit analysis on complete annihilation of humanity.

…estimating these benefits means that we need to determine the value of a reduction in preventing a possible future catastrophic risk. This is a thorny task. Martin Weitzman, an economist at Harvard University, argues that the expected loss to society because of catastrophic climate change is so large that it cannot be reliably estimated. A cost-benefit analysis—economists’ standard tool for assessing policies—cannot be applied here as reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable. Other economists, including Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University and William Nordhaus of Yale University, have examined the technical limits of Mr Weitzman’s argument. As the interpretation of infinity in economic climate models is essentially a debate about how to deal with the threat of extinction, Mr Weitzman’s argument depends heavily on a judgement about the value of life.

Economists estimate this value based on people’s personal choices: we purchase bicycle helmets, pay more for a safer car, and receive compensation for risky occupations. The observed trade-offs between safety and money tell us about society’s willingness to pay for a reduction in mortality risk. Hundreds of studies indicate that people in developed countries are collectively willing to pay a few million dollars to avoid an additional statistical death. For example, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recommends using a value of around $8m per fatality avoided. Similar values are used to evaluate vaccination programmes and prevention of traffic accidents or airborne diseases…

The value of life as a concept is a natural candidate for a tentative estimation of the benefit of reducing extinction risk. Yet the approach seems somewhat awkward in this context. The extinction risk here is completely different from the individual risk we face in our everyday lives. Human extinction is a risk we all share—and it would be an unprecedented event that can happen only once.

I’m not sure we want to turn over the keys to civilization’s future to these guys, who insist that their science must be values-free. In other words, they try to discern people’s values through their actions and statements, but try to make no ethical judgments independent of those observations. I think there is room in this world for ethical principles of right and wrong that are not economic in nature, and more of us need to be actively thinking every day about what those might be. Even though all 6 billion of us would certainly not agree on the details, we could certainly come to a consensus on the broad outlines. Couple this with better mental tools for understanding the complex nested systems we are embedded in, and it could really guide our choices as a civilization in a better direction.