Discuss: Snap into Action for the Climate

And Paco, you helped me think things through a bit more clearly today when you asked me what “polar cities” are exactly:

Here is my response:

1. Polar cities are not located at the North Pole
2. Polar cities are not located “along the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean”, as the New York Times incorrectly phrased it in a blogpost on March 29
3. Polar cities are not underground cites made of glass and tubes, like these images sugggest to some (http://pcillu101.blogspot.com)
4. Polar cities are not cities at all (they are, rather, small villages and small towns, safe refuge communities of anywhere from 100 people to 4000 people tops)
5. Polar cities are not Gerbil Cities for pet hamsters, as one blogger joked (Google those terms)
6. Polar cities are not Habitrail tubes for humans, as another critic joked (Google again)

POLAR CITIES ARE:

1. future safe refuges built on high ground or inside mountain caves or caverns in northern regions of the world, from Juneau Alaska to Whitehorse Canada, and also Greenland, Iceland, Oslo Norway, Stockholm Sweden, Russia
-- even Boulder Colorado and Quebec region

2. There will also be some polar cities in New Zealand, Chile, Patagonia, Ecudaor high mountains, Peru, also in Antarctica research stations converted to polar cities

3.Polar cities will be administered, governed and guarded by UN agencies, or individual governments where they are located

4. Polar cities for survivors of global warming in year 2500 or so will be democratically-run lifeboats that will *NOT* discriminate on admitting residents based on gender, race, nationality, IQ, EQ or religious belief

5. Polar cities are envisioned as ADAPTATION RETREATS to ensure the survival of survivors of global warming’s catastrophic events in year 2500 or so

NOTE TO PACO and others: DOES THAT MAKE THE CONCEPT MORE CLEAR? I hope so.

By the way, Mike, who wrote this very good essay that started this discussion off:

I sent this letter to TIME magazine, following its greeen edition about global warming. I doubt it will be printed in the magazine, since they get over 10,000 letters per issue and can only use 3 or 4 of them per issue, so here it is:

Dear Editor:

When America decided to go the moon, we witnessed a nation divert
huge resources into achieving that seemingly impossible goal, and we
succeeded. The world is faced with climate disaster in the not so
distant future,
so why are not proportionately huge resources being diverted into
developing solutions? Are we incapable of acting pro-actively and
collectively?

Danny Bloom
Tufts 1971

I roundly applaud Mike Tidwell’s communication of climate urgency while deploring his harebrained stab at “solutions.”

There has been considerable effort to understand how to sequester CO2 the way nature does it: in soils.  If, along with zero emissions, we undertake grazer/grassland eco-restoration projects on half of the roughly 4 billion acres of devastated land worldwide, we can go back to the preindustrial CO2 of 280 ppm and possibly mitigate the effects of positive feedback loops.

For starters, check out http://www.holisticmanagement.org/ and http://www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com/.

Hi Danny,

I very much enjoyed your excellent, thoughtful—and sometimes humorous—replies.

I understand one of the Scandinavian countries is currently assembling a world seed bank, for precisely the survival purposes you outline in your project description. in the early nineteen-fifties Lewis Mumford used the phrase “saving remnants,” referring to small groups of people who would act as cultural seed-groups in the post-apocalyptic future. His immediate concern at the time was the destruction of civilization by nuclear warfare—which danger, we should note, has not diminished one whit— but he was also well aware of other ecological threats growing out of our mostly unconscious worship of all technologies great and small.

I find myself thinking often about that phrase, “saving remnants,” since I think it may just come to that—and well before 2500. (You must be an optimist!)

But because I’ve studied dreams and depth psychology for thirty-five years, I am still impressed by the transformative powers of the deep psyche. I’ve had several dreams over the years that show me a surprisingly different viewpoint from what I can achieve on my own. But, as I hinted in an earlier post, the images in those dreams show the “new” emerging from the wreckage of the “old,” and they even suggest that the destruction is being carried out by autonomous forces in the collective unconscious.

What the dreams have not said is how much wreckage there will be, or what the “timetable” is. As far as I can tell, much depends on people’s awareness and their ethical responses to what is happening. The importance of wakefulness should not be underestimated.

It is stunning to me to see how few people even want to think about the “intolerable” future you and I are contemplating. I still hear people saying that “global warming” is a natural climate fluctuation not caused by human activity. Amazing.

So, I applaud your conscientiousness and wish you great success in your project.

Thanks again,

Paco

Poor, poor Mr. Tidwell. He’s got it right. Partly.

First off, scientists have been RIGHT about climate change all along, and for much longer than Mr. Tidwell apparently has searched the literature. Articles published in 1996 and 1997 defined with utter clarity the relationaships between dissolved CO2 levels in the Greenland ice cap and historic temperature and climate fluctuations.

Second, that work and at least twenty years of preceding research demonstrated beyond doubt that climate shifts had been - and perforce could be - large. And very rapid, that is taking place in a period of decades down to years, and not over long stretches of centuries and millenia.

The data, the interpretations, and the conclusions were stark, incontrovertible. And who listened? Not non-scientists, for sure. Raising the topic at dinner was a sure-fire yawn-producer.

The other side of the coin, which Mr. Tidwell salutes but dismisses with a wave (and some entirely unsupported wishful-thinking scenarios for ameliorations if we follow his suggestions about adding sulfur and so on) is that climate also swung the OTHER way, from warmer to colder. And with equal swiftness.

All without human input, if we disregard the controversial but very likely influences from burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

And, not geologically based, Mr. Tidwell politely refrains from noticing the steep up-ramping of energy release in developing countries. Ssssh. Wouldn’t want to seem impolite among the cocktail gentry…

A very spirited piece but we don’t have governmental system capable of such radical remedies. It would be nice to think society had the integral feedback systems that all other species need to survive but there is no indication of this. Moreover our democracies have economies which rely on ever increasing consumption - and this promise is renewed at every election.

Many of these responses seem insightful but being and old geek, I have to wonder what it is about us humans that we have such a long history of preferring pleasant lies over unpleasant facts.  Remember Malthus, back at the turn of the nineteenth century?  I became convinced that human history was about to reach a crisis of unprecidented proportions after reading Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” Both of these men made s strong argument that we need to control our number.  Again, president Carter made it clear that world consumption of oil was not sustainable. We’ve had convincing evidence that the burning of fossil fuels would destabalize global climate since the 1950s, but no one made a serious proposal that we should reduce consumption till the last few years.
Well, no one knows the future, but as evidence continues to be compiled, several possible scenarios are coming into sharper focus, and none of them jibe with what economists, polititians and techno cheer leaders are telling us. What we have alwsys knows is now becomeing undeniable: the growth rate of our population is going to reach zero, with births equalling deaths, and we can be sure that the total population of the world will be much smaller than it is now.  The growth rate of our economy is eventially going to be zero, and at a substantial reduction in total wealth.  All of this will happen in the not-to-distant future.  There really is a reality outside our heads.
It is too late to avoid The Crisis. We don’t even know what we will have to face. Evidence from ice cores and elsewhere tell us that climate has made many abrupt changes in the past, and one of the scenarios suggested by the ice data is that the sudden melting of polar ice can trigger sudden cooling, at least in some areas.  In the face of all these uncertainties, I am concerned about our social response to crisis.  Will be learn to cooperate more and form decentralized civil societies or will we follow leaders into wars, or plunge into chaos? I am as worried about us as what we face.
If a revolution can help us maybe we should get more curious about ourselves.  We badly need another period of enlightenment.

Paco,

thanks for a very good discussion of all these issues, and thanks esp for the Lewis Mumford coinage of “saving remants”. I had not heard of that term before, and I like it. I will entered it into my conciousness as of today.

More later

Danny

if ever wish to chat offline my email addy is danbloom GMAIL