After Pearl Harbour

Following my comments yesterday about the disparity between the catastrophic potential of climate change and the mild words and actions even of those who accept the science, I was interested to see David Spratt address the same topic,

After Pearl Harbor, the US government told Detroit to stop manufacturing automobiles for private use, and start building tanks and other war materiel. Automobile production was 162,000 in 1941 and zero in 1942. Tank production was <300 in 1940 and 25,000 by 1942.

When the US does act decisively on climate, the government will tell the private sector to stop burning coal and start getting power from renewables within one year, and they will do it because it feasible. The US can't solve the climate crisis unilaterally, so we will pay for China to go solar in exchange for shutting down its coal mines (the two nations control 40% of the worlds coal reserves), just as we couldn't win the war alone, and paid the Soviet Union to keep the second front open.

Our agenda must aim for that level of action, nothing short of it is sufficient, and the details will not be worked out beforehand. Our present agenda, focused on US domestic emissions and anything-is-better-than-nothing, has more in common with the pre-war policies of isolationism and appeasement.

Hear! Hear!

I read that the last time CO2 levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. Global temperatures were 5-10°F higher than they are today, the sea level was about 75-120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.

The geological record suggests that the current acidification is potentially unparalleled in the last 300 million years of Earth history. Researchers say this is worse than during any of four of the major mass extinctions in history.

What is a proportional response to this situation? I don't think more bicycling and worm farms will do the job. As David McKay says,

If everyone does a little, only a little gets done.

David McKay, Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air

Just as the attack on Pearl Harbour brought a massive response, so it is inevitable that climate change will foster an all-out response at some point.

As individuals we can advocate for change and prepare ourselves by making adaptations ahead of the curve. See the Take Action tab above for things you can do.


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News of the day on the Transformations menu tab.

8 June 2012. Emirates Airlines' 2012 environmental report shows that in the year to March 31,  the Emirates fleet burned 22.5 percent less fuel (litres/passenger km) than the IATA global average as well as emitting 18 percent less fossil sourced carbon by the same metrics. Most of the advantage is due to having a younger, more fuel-efficient fleet. Source: Climate Spectator.

On our watch

A disaster is unfolding on our watch.

What is happening? Are the guards asleep on duty? Do they not believe their eyes? Are they afraid to call out? Are they shouting in the wrong language? Are we ignoring those that do call out? Are we confused because the leaders say it's bad, really bad, while doing nothing about it?

All of the above.

Many of us understand the calls, but we can't quite grasp the magnitude and urgency of the situation. We nod our heads and wait for our governments to show leadership. We're waiting to see what our fearless leaders do.

KC Golden urges us to stop waiting,

We need to stand tall – with both feet, whole hearts, and strong, explicit words – on the side of the truth.

KC Golden, Climate Solutions

In a similar vein, Kate Lovelady, Leader of the Ethical Society of St Louis, ruminates on the need to bring our carbon actions in line with our values when she asks what message she conveys when she flies to a conference instead of taking a train.  

Action is by far the most powerful communication.  Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden replaces a thousand speeches about healthy food and active lifestyles.

So, how do we bring our words and actions in line with the real urgency of the situation?

Climate Solutions draws on this study to suggest that the tactical risks of talking explicitly about climate are overblown. Yes, it can be a “loser” as a “message,” but generally only when we talk like losers – when we internalize and reiterate our opponents’ bad frames. They find that focusing on climate is generally a “winner” when we:

• Invoke a strong sense of human agency and responsibility. We’re causing it. We should fix it.
• Foster engagement and efficacy. Futility is the enemy of responsibility, and it’s rampant in our political culture. But people remain hungry for solutions, and eager to participate. Pollyannish optimism? No. Can-do determination to build a better future? Definitely.
• Embed (don’t bury) climate in the challenge of freeing ourselves from fossil fuel dependence. Almost everyone at least suspects that fossil fuel dependence is a dead end, and feels victimized by the forces that perpetuate it. Climate solutions can free us!

KC Golden again,

• My primary point here is not:  “Talk more about climate because it’s not as bad of a message as you think.” My point is: Talk about climate because we must – because tackling it is a moral imperative, and we’ll never convince anyone of that if we keep dodging and weaving around it.

KC Golden, Climate Solutions

It's happening on OUR watch. We need to meet it head-on, hug the monster, and get on with the job of mobilising all our forces to head off catastrophe.

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New today on the Transformation page (see the tab up there?).

8 June 2012. Amazon deforestation is at a record low. Data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research shows that 6,418 sq km of Amazon forest was stripped in the 12 months before 31 July 2011 – the smallest area since annual measurements started in 1988. Since the peak deforestation year of 2004, the rates of clearance have fallen by almost 75%. Most (81%) of Brazil's original forest remains – one of the highest levels of any country. Source: The Guardian.

The Great Game – superpower rivalries

The Great Game is the setting for Rudyard Kipling's Kim, where Kim enters the world of superpower espionage along the North West Frontier of India/Pakistan/Afghanistan. It tells the story of a clever boy who gets caught up in the machinations of British and Russian imperial power.

In today's world, the Great Game has played out between countries fighting for control over energy supplies. Oil reserves have made the Middle East a hotbed of conflict, and wars have been fought in Kuwait and Iraq. 

Like Kim, I am playing a role in the Great Game. Kim acted for one of the protagonists, but I have rolled up my sleeves to diffuse the situation.

With my solar PV, I am making fossil fuel reserves less important and not worth fighting over.

In Australia in August 2011, solar PV contributed 2.3% of total electricity production, and capacity continues to increase dramatically. Commenters call this the democratisation of electricity. This occurs when millions of homes and businesses have more control over their power production and consumption.

Democracy is about power, but it also has the moral dimension of fairness and justice. This is true whether it applies to political democracy, information democracy or electricity democracy.

The consumption of energy is no longer just an economic act—this is becoming a conscious act and an act of conscience. This will likely intensify in the coming years.

 Joseph Stanislaw

All our acts are moral acts. When we choose renewable energy over fossil fuels, we make powerful economic and moral statements.

When millions of us bring our actions in line with our moral compass, the world changes without benefit of politicians.

This has me thinking deeply and I'll write more about it tomorrow.


 Via Elisa Wood at RealEnergyWriters.

Angry Birds is a game. Climate change isn't.

Like half the planet, I love Angry Birds. Apart from the intricate challenges of figuring out trajectories and new strategies, the game taps into a brutal and primal delight in the fierce battle for survival. Playing it on the train without the sound effects almost misses the point.

The battle between the birds and pigs fits one of the great archetypes of human experience. The birds face a life-or-death challenge to save future generations by reclaiming the eggs stolen by the pigs. It tells the same survival story as Homer's Odyssey,  the Mahabharata, and the legends of King Arthur.

In the past year, climate change advocates have become less like ivory tower academics and more like Angry Birds. More than anyone else, they know that the battle for minds over climate change is a battle for the future of human society. 

After decades of political shilly-shallying, climate change advocates are getting impatient and angry. They're dropping the political niceties and calling it like they see it.

James Hansen wrote recently in the New York Times,

Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

KC Golden takes him to task for the sporting metaphor "game over" and  comments on the seriousness of climate disruption as the great survival story of the generation, and possibly of the species.

It’s no game, and it is never over.  Whatever you do now to improve the situation is crap I don’t have to shovel later.  So quit crying in your beer and DO STUFF.

Get in the game Dadddyyy, ’cause when it’s “over” for you, it’s on for me.

Hansen and Golden are not disagreeing with each other. They're both getting angry and calling it like it is.

Nothing but relentless, dogged and unforgiving persistence will get us through this one. The kind of persistence the Angry Birds show. The kind of persistence parodied in this Israeli comic skit.

Are you up for it? Check out my 'Take Action' page and practice some dogged persistence!





Image source: Cakes by Becky.

Not my grandmother's weather

Grandma Blanche

When my Grandma Blanche was 70 years old, she came to visit me in North Queensland. She lived all her life in the coal mining villages and towns of Country Durham in the north of England. She was entirely used to the grey skies and bleak streetscapes of mining villages pictured in films like Billy Elliot and Brassed Off.

Spennymoor

You can probably tell from her piled-up blonde hair and magenta lace dress that Grandma Blanche was not your usual storybook grandma. She had an appetite for life.

As you'd expect for somone who was a teenager in England in WWI, Grandma found North Queensland wonderfully strange and exotic. 

Ingham is in the tropics at latitude 18 S which is about the same distance from the equator as Jamaica. It sits in the fertile Herbert River valley where sugar cane is the main crop. We showed her around the local sights – the cane fields, the river and the cemetery, famous for its elaborate Italian family graves.

Ingham cemetery

My friend Ann and I took her along with us when the young men from the Sugar Mill invited us to a Champagne and Chicken Breakfast.  (It *was* the 1970s!).  After making merry on champagne and chicken and being very rude about one young man's brand new Holden Monaro, we drove home through the strange green light thrown by towering tropical storm clouds.

Just as we got home, large splats of rain started to pelt down, as big as eggs. We ran for the house – laughing, wet and a bit tipsy.

Then the heavens opened in a mighty downpour. Thunder crashed overhead and lightning zagged everywhere. We were glad to be indoors, safe from the deafening sound-and-light show. Grandma was a bit quiet.

Like most tropical thunderstorms, this one soon passed and sunlight sparkled on a wet world.

Then Grandma asked questions, and we realised that in all her seventy years she had never seen anything like it. We tried to get our heads around the different world she lived in. A world without thunder storms. She knew the quiet mystery of English snowstorms but she only knew of thunder storms from books and movies.

I think of my grandmother when I read scientists' predictions for future climate.

If we were to ... continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

James Hansen, NYT

Just as I had to work to get my head around the idea that someone could live their whole life without experiencing thunderstorms, so I also have to work to envision the inevitable climate change future. It's not a theory, it is a direct consequence of burning fossil fuels.

The coal mines of Country Durham fueled the Industrial Revolution. My Grandma lived opposite the first-ever passenger railway station. My ancestors dug that coal and worked on the world's first railroads.

Durham's coal mines are closed now because the coal has been used up. We are staring at a situation where working coalmines all over the world will need to close in order to reduce carbon emissions.

It is 25 years since Grandma Blanche died, and already world weather is not the weather she grew up with. If we don't reduce carbon emissions, Grandma Blanche's descendents in County Durham won't have to travel half-way around the world to experience tropical thunderstorms. They'll get them at home, and the tropics will be uninhabitable.

As James Hansen says,

The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose!

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose! That's the rallying call for the Dillon Panthers.

Last night we watched the much awarded Friday Night Lights on DVD. We're up to Season 3.

Landry dumped his cute little blonde girlfriend to take up with Tyra again. On again, off again, what will happen next?

And Smash got dumped from TMU, just a couple of episodes after all the drama about whether he would get attractive offers and whether he'd make wise choices. On again, off again, where will he end up now?

We don't know, we just follow along from episode to episode. But somebody does know. Somebody has a pretty fair idea about the overall story arc.

The writer, producer and actors have a general idea about the long narrative arc for the series and for its characters. Actor Jon Hamm knows that Mad Men is intended to run for another three seasons and knows how it will end. Of course, he's not saying.

In life, we go along day by day, episode by episode, writing the script as we go along.

Weather happens day by day too, and we get the impression that we can't know what lies ahead, other than assuming more of the same.

But that's not quite true. Climate scientists who study the long term patterns (the larger story arc) have a pretty fair idea of what is coming in the longer term. They can read the signs.

They are saying things like,

Oceans are now 30% more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution. The last time the oceans were as acidic as this was 65 million years ago. The acidity caused mass extinctions at the bottom of the food chain and the dinosaurs died out.  

 Tim McClanahan

The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.

 Aradhna Tripati

Given their insider knowledge, and the future they are staring at, it is little wonder that climate scientists are taking a more active role in communicating the facts to policy makers and the general public.

We need our policy makers to have clear eyes – they need to look unflinchingly at the best scientific evidence. 

They need to have full hearts – passion and commitment.

Then, indeed, we can't lose. 

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose! Go Panthers!

Who to believe? Grandma or NASA?

I grew up in Queensland, the tropical State in Australia's north east. Apart from sugar cane, macadamia nuts, mangos and pawpaw, Queensland is famous for its distinctive houses, called Queenslanders. These timber houses emerged in the 1800s, influenced by the bungalows that were common in India (one of the world's oldest civilisations).

Quite a number of British Raj types chose to retire to Australia rather than go back to damp and dreary Britain, and they brought this tropical housing style with them. Here, it was interpreted in a uniquely Queensland way so that the more elaborate examples have fancy painted lattice or iron lacework.

The houses I grew up in had the four distinctive features of the typical Queenslander:

• Wide verandahs for shade and sheltered outdoor living spaces
• Lifted off the ground to allow cool breezes to circulate
• Timber construction which allows the building to cool at night
• High pitched metal roofs – the metal was reflective and cooled quickly at night

I remember lying in bed at night listening to the house creak and crack as it adjusted to cooler nightime temperatures. It was a friendly sound. And, oh! the secret adventures we had in the cool dark spaces under the house. Here's a poem about my sister's house.

Queenslanders were built from the 1800s through to the 1920s when Californian bungalows influenced the classic Queenslander. The climate-friendly features still prevailed.

After WWII, houses got wonderfully modern and all four climate-friendly features were ditched. Brick replaced timber, verandahs and window awnings were old-fashioned, houses were built on concrete slabs, and roofs became fashionably coloured. Increasingly, air-conditioning replaced ceiling fans.

All this came flooding back to me when I saw this Climate Progress article about an initiative in New York to paint roofs white.

A NASA survey of New York City’s rooftops last July showed that dark, heat-absorbing rooftops were up to 42 degrees F hotter than white rooftops. And that difference in heat can make a big difference in on-site energy use; painting a roof white can reduce air conditioning demand as much as 20 percent.

I slapped my head and stomped around the house for a few minutes, muttering,

We're going to hell in a handbasket! What have we come to that we need the Big-Bertha-gun-scientists at NASA to tell us to paint our roofs white?

It's not rocket science. It's common sense.

In Grandma's day, we listened to the traditional wisdom of our elders and made some sensible decisions. Now we get rocket scientists to tell us what to do (and then a whole bunch of people diss it anyway).

After I calmed down a bit, I took heart from a recent resurgence of the vernacular Queenslander house style. Lots of builders now offer Queenslander designs. You can even buy kit homes (exported world wide).

Here in New South Wales we don't build Queenslanders, but 12 years ago the State government implemented BASIX (Building Sustainability Index) to require all new dwellings and renovations to have climate-friendly features like insulation, window shades, and, yes, pale roofs. Roofing manufacturers now specify how their products comply with BASIX colour classifications.

NASA was not involved. All it took was dedication and commitment from a bunch of bureaucrats in the Department of Planning. Go bureaucrats! Grandma is proud of you!