Discuss: Snap into Action for the Climate

Um, Paca,I dunno, it was just smart-sounding, a 50-center where a nickel’s worth would have been enough. Maybe related to geraniums?? You seem to have caught my drift…!

To Bob, Julianne and Paca,

Thank you all for your persistence in this online conversation. I find it to be a remarkable phenomenon, the first one I’ve ever participated in, actually. It’s a pleasure and privilege to be engaged with all of you in these exchanges, despite the periodic bolt of chagrin over misunderstandings and what-not. But as Paca pointed out, we all share much common ground. And as time rushes on, we may need one another more than we realize.

Also, please accept my apologies for having delayed so long in responding. A week’s worth of intense duties intervened. The age of responsibility does indeed take its toll.

First, I very much appreciate both Paca’s and Julianne’s considerate replies (85, 87, 88). Paca, you suggested that perhaps it was not your place to insert your thoughts into Bob’s and my wrangling. (Another opportunity for misinterpretation. Bob, I chose the term “wrangling,” not to suggest that something “harsh” was passing between us, but more simply as colorful language—like cowboys bulldogging calves in a rodeo, or some such thing. It was not a reference to a violent argument.) But your point of view is extremely valuable, and we all would have benefited more had you not waited so long to add something.

And Julianne, I understand and support your “grounding” work with the spading fork. So much of humanity’s suffering, after all, rises from our disconnection from the Earth as Holy Grail. Perhaps we need a new kind of prayer: dirt + hands.

Bob, I also accept your point that you recognize the value of both sides of our debate. Sometimes a conversation, especially one without “body language,” shipwrecks on nuance, and unnecessarily. At some point we might want to resume what I’m calling our “disputatio,” but for now let me just list a few elements of my “credo.”

1. Science and religion are both indispensible to the human project on earth. We cannot do without one or the other, in spite of the struggle between them for the past few centuries. Any attempt to eliminate either one will be disastrous. Thomas Huxley may have trounced Bishop Wilberforce in Victorian England, but the controversy between their descendents still rages, witness the recent flap over “creationism.”

2. But religion as we have known it is going through a profound transformation, and the institutions of the past are breaking up. What is taking their place, however, is not so much a burgeoning atheism, as it is a different kind of “spirituality.” Every possible avenue is being explored. Nothing is too far-fetched to warrant attention. This, of course, results in a lot of silliness, but there is a profound need underlying it. And out of it, eventually, will come a new dispensation based on personal experience, widely shared. And the revelations of scientific knowledge will form a crucial component of this new dispensation.

3. Notice that science is going through its own transformation, similar in scope to that of religion. And not because of cranks like me. It is because of the efforts of the most scrupulous scientists themselves. The old thought-forms of the reductive, mechanistic model are also breaking up, and a new paradigm is taking shape on the leading edge of science, in many areas. Paradoxically, science and age-old precepts of mystical and spiritual traditions are converging. And what is the meeting point? Briefly, the inter-connectedness of everything, and the presence of “mind” in matter. A new sense of reality is on our doorstep, thanks to science, yes, but thanks also to countless others who are working in areas far removed from science. It may take centuries to assimilate and formulate all of these elements, but their integration is inevitable.

Still, the old, conventional scientific model, especially as it finds expression within the industrial/technological complex, with its obsolete drive toward the domination, exploitation and control of nature, still has a tremendous amount of momentum and inertia. And a LOT of money is at stake.

What I would call “conventional science” and “conventional religion,” then, for all that they seem to be opposed, are both still so devoted to the materialistic principles of power and wealth, that together they form a formidable complex that may just prove to be our undoing.

4. Jung once said: “The whole world hangs by a thread, and that thread is the human psyche.” What could be simpler? What could be more profound? And in my view, what could be more evidently true? In view of the power we hold in our hands, we understand ourselves far too little. So I try to introduce a psychological perspective now and then—however alien it might seem—into the debate, along with a few historical considerations. I’m sorry if my formulations are obscure, too convoluted, poorly expressed, or if they go on too long. But it’s no small thing to digest something so unpalatable as the intellectual, spiritual and moral history of the West. And it is precisely that history that still drives the machine that we all serve, one way or another.

Finally, if my experience has shown to my satisfaction that dreams, in the aggregate, carry all the wisdom we need, why should I not try to advance them as being of at least potential value?

My best to all,

Paco

Dear Paca, Julianne, Paco,

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. I’d like to make (or repeat) three points.

1. The role and nature of science is something we each and all need to understand.
2. Aspects of science, as expressed in Paco’s recent post (90) bear careful examination.
3. As individuals seeking our own clear ways, and as citizens with any collective sense of conscious responsibility it is upon us to know more of science, of letters, and of history, and to act, to the best of our knowledge.

We, each and every one, need to ‘know’ as much as possible. In this exchange, I am hopeful that our dialogue, whether or not it specifically furnishes actual and useful information, can at least point in helpful directions.

I consider that I must respond to several parts of Paco’s last post, with apologies in advance if what I write appears provocative. I mean it to be informative, and to encourage critical (and creative) reflection.

.    ‘...something so unpalatable
.    as the intellectual, spiritual and
.    moral history of the West…’

May I boldly go to point out the inherent value-judgment, and dismissal, a priori, of the ‘...history of the West…’ in this phrase? Humbly, there IS much more; which we deserve. (I may be spoiled, in that every day I pass in the street the triumphs (See Note)  of Western art, science, religion, and history in all it’s dimensions, writ large in the landscape, architecture, art, civic life, and people of Italy.) May I inquire, does this dismissal imply that there is some other history (perhaps of the East?) that avoids the quagmire of ‘unpalatability’? One suspects…

.  ‘...the old, conventional scientific model,
.  especially as it finds expression within
.  the industrial/technological complex,
.  with its obsolete drive toward the domination,
.  exploitation and control of nature…’

Implicit value-judgment and dismissal, or more accurately, the assignment of very narrow ‘coded’ meanings for words like ‘domination’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘control’. Ask a scientist, better yet, an engineer about ‘control’! For example, the meaning of the engineer’s term ‘100-year flood’. The informed citizen needs to understand this sort of thing. Deserves to, in fact. Any engineer or scientist is a sort of realist (yes, I know that word too may be ‘coded’ but here I intend it in the broad sense found in the first listing in Webster) who can look you straight in the eye while she tells you how those terms, under nature, will be found wanting.

How much of our word choices are we REALLY to insist are literal? How many, metaphorical?

.  ‘Paradoxically, science and age-old precepts of
.  mystical and spiritual traditions are converging.
.  And what is the meeting point?
.  Briefly, the inter-connectedness of everything,
.  and the presence of “mind” in matter.’

Sometimes one thinks, like the kid at the Emperor’s parade, that it just becomes unavoidable to shout out, ‘no clothes’. This assertion is naked, I fear. Devoid of any dressing of significance or truth. What convergence (?) there may be is one of hard-headed interpretation from data (with tough-minded, skeptical peer review) from the sciences, encountering equally straight-laced understanding and acceptance of those discoveries, among the humanities and philosiphical communities. Even the Catholic Church is creeping that way, albeit (as usual) with a time lag that will probably span several centuries.

There is no ‘mind’ in ‘matter’.

.  ‘...the institutions of the past are breaking up.
.  What is taking their place, however, is not so much
.  a burgeoning atheism, as it is a different kind
.  of “spirituality.”’

While this assertion is too general to test, I’m assuming Paco, as a Stanford grad, was subjected to a Freshman course called The History of Western Civilization. I remember discussions and readings on the nature of the study of history itself, including a requirement to write on the differences, if any, that distinguish ‘reform’ from ‘revolution’.

.  ‘Thomas Huxley may have trounced Bishop Wilberforce
.  in Victorian England, but the controversy between their
.  descendents still rages, witness the recent flap
.  over “creationism.”’

Which, reform or revolution,  is occurring, today? The ‘recent flap over Creationsim’ is not, really, a controversy about science, but a panic-move by the ignorant. What we are witnessing, in the farthest camps of fundamentalism (Right-wing Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism, equally) is a reactionary, fearful retreat into what appears to offer refuge: a system, self-contained, tautologically understandable (and unassailable through ‘reason’) that seems to explain and palliate the anxieties and pain of modern life. I include the sub-refuges, accepted by many in the affluent First Worlds, of the ‘alternative’ healings, homeopathy, and so on, and on.

Folks, we’re out here, strapped onto the front of the bus (as the fellow who wrote ‘A Manual of Procedures for the Compleat Idiot’ back in the ‘60’s, on how to maintain your VW bus, put it) where we’ll be the first to go. It behooves us to know what we’re talking about! And we must, must take that into account as we act, as we vote, and perhaps above all as we speak/write/persuade our fellows.

It is that last, reading a discourse such as this one, that worries me most. We are in danger of lapsing into that comfort zone of preaching to the choir, here. And if we take that tone to the un-convinced, the un-commited, yes, even the un-washed, what will be? An arched eyebrow? Rolling eyes? Or worse?

Note: ‘Triumph’ certainly may also be taken as a code word. May I ask that it be treated as such in this context: to stand for the victory of consciousness over sleep, of active caring over apathy.

There may be a glaring inaccuracy as to the articles “latest” prediction as to arctic ice…I saw a Washington Post article about a month ago and they cited a prediction that the ice cover would be gone THIS YEAR.

I’ve read several books on global heating (not the nice sounding warming) and I came to the same conclusion as Tidwell…we are in it up to our necks now. But I disagree with him on several thoughts.

First, I’m his flip-side and am pessimistic as to American action, his snap. Our society has become a nation of meek followers, simply hoping things will change for any number of issues…for examples, the Iraq War, corporate power, widening income gap, I could go on. The leadership in the US has long since given up listening to the people, excepting during election season when our votes are temporarily needed. Incumbents almost don’t care if they lose anymore as some cushy lobbying job or Wall St. career will follow.

Second, we are in no condition as to infrastructure and manufacturing potential to quickly alter our ways. Mass transit is for the most part a joke. Our manufacturing base has been sent away (although I’ve been predicting that higher oil prices would eventually bring the manufacturing back to our borders, when is the question).

Switching over to an alternative vehicle is going to take too long. Notice how because of high gas prices the Toyoto Prius is in demand, but they can’t produce them for the demand AND this demand is from people with higher incomes. What about those of us making $50 grand or less? We can’t afford brand new cars of this price, that’s the majority of Americans. Combine this problem with a faltering economy of increasing unemployment and inflation of energy and food prices. The average American is going to be expected to “do their part” as to switching to alternative energy as they get pinched economically.

I’d love a solar panel or two for my home, a small wind turbine would be nice as well. Guess what? I can’t afford one as I’m trying to pay for gas and food today. Unless the government plans to give them away for free, I’m stuck in the old energy economy. Where I live I’d have to quit my job if I were to be forced to our vastly inadequate mass transit.

Our rail system in this country is in disuse and disrepair. It’s going to take a decade at least to get the rails to where we need them now.

Third, we have a very powerful moneyed elite that is opposed to losing their position of power and certainly if that loss of power were to be expected quickly. Even if masses of people were to SNAP into demanding immediate changes, those in power use the political system to thwart the pesky snappers.

I can’t stress enough how the marriage of corporate power and the political system has become so embraced as to leave the masses with no control. We’ve needed a new progressive era to change the political system for some time now. Everything from the voting procedures to how Congress does its’ business, I could name 10 reforms at least. Reforms are needed to break up that marriage before global heating would really be seriously addressed.

Fourth, Tidwell’s suggestion to “volcanoize” the atmosphere is interesting but I would never want to even attempt it until massive research about what might happen if we did, beginning with plugging into climate change computer models (as they do to predict global heating) what might occur.

I wonder whether acid rain would drastically increase thereby killing off more trees which are CO2 sinks. And since CO2 that has been produced by humans lasts a 100 years, would we have to sulfur the atmosphere for a similar time frame? What about human respiratory health? Tidwell’s suggestion seems to be put forward in a panicked mood. This cure might be even worse than the ill, we obviously don’t know.

I agree that global heating is happening faster than anyone expected. The real basis of the problem has been rapid population growth and no solution can be valid without accepting that we have to decrease population. All the technology at our disposal even if applied in snap fashion can’t overcome continued population increases. But of course, no one wants to be the person that advocates that the world’s population needs to do some dieing off, and soon.

We already know that even if the entire worlds’ population were to disappear in a snap the Earth will warm another two degrees celsius regardless. But to stop it at just the two degrees our carbon emissions must be cut drastically and fast and that’s really going to take cutting population. An unpleasant thought and I guess this thought although not stated is why Tidwell suggests the sulfur solution.

I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that we are just going to have to adapt to the wild weather, the droughts, the rising oceans, etc. Certainly we need to take actions as a world (and the US should be leading the way), but it just isn’t going to happen fast enough. Chances are that global heating will cause a population slowing or even decline as a result. We are entering a species extinction event, humans will survive (maybe) but so many other species are doomed. There’s nothing we can do now about it, except try to reduce the toll. No snap is going to change that. we are living in a sad time.

For ‘jonb’, gee! How to stay ‘light’ and ‘serious’ the same time. If it’s all as hopeless as that maybe what we’d all best do is ‘party’ - in whatever mode one prefers, from gettin’ down to getting high to getting to church. ‘Whatever’ (sic).

If I may.

Waaaaaayyyyyy baaaccck in the Pre-Cambrian Age of the Nineteen And Seventies I performed geologic studies preparatory to the city of Buffalo, New York, deveoping a metro or subway line. The purpose of the study was to arrive at a price tag for the project.

As the chips were falling into place the project manager and I were chatting one day, and he said to me, ‘You know, underground metro lines are dandy, but they could take half the money in the estimate, buy a fleet of nice new buses, and invest the other half, using the return to run that system forever and nobody would even have to put a penny in the farebox!’

Smart guy.

I concede to jonb, and share with him at least a few drops of pessimism about politics and greed. All the same I wonder how very many similar forks in the road are in front of us. Buffalo may be a bad example - or a great one. It’s been a dying city for longer even than since that ancient age when I spent a winter there. But what if the city had taken the other road? (It now ‘boasts’ a metro line, in fact, but I wonder who rides it?)

The stark choices, as if life ever resolves so neatly, are to engage and push for political action, particularly on issues parallel with the ‘metro or bus’ kind of thing; or to escape into the mountains, the desert, the jungles of Chiang Mai - wherever we imagine we’ll find solitude, slip the bonds of worry.

Except that there is no desert, nor jungle, wide or deep enough.

I’m sorry for, yet sympathetic to, jonb’s sadness. I wonder though. We’ve been here before. What did the world look like during the Thirty Years’ War? The epidemics of the plague? Look at the paintings of Bosch…. Or, more to the point, LOOK! At the paintings. Here is a witness. Did he panic? Did Durer?

If they did, they kept their wits well enough to make, and leave for us, such elegant and eloquent testimony. And we, that collective, ancient ‘we’ persevered.

Here we are…

Hey BobT,

My sadness is in a broad sense. Humanity will survive in some sense, adapt, after all we do have the most control over our species than others do. My concern is more for all the other life on Earth.

I’ve read several books on the Permian age and the following extinction event and am in awe of the vast change that occurred, an estimated 90% of all life went extinct, extraordinary. We are in the early stages of the 6th extinction event and the curiosity in me wonders what percent survives this time and further which forms of life do continue on.

Our event began to be recognized even before global heating became common knowledge. Then, we blamed humans for our impact such as land and sea use. Now we know that our way of life as to carbon culture is also part of the equation. It might have been easier to slow this extinction event if it had been simply stopping the cutting of the rain forests, cease over fishing the oceans, and end pollution of land and rivers. But such an overhaul of our carbon way of life is more daunting.

You seem to think “we been here before” and I don’t see that at all. Global heating will affect every corner of the globe in some way, from the poles to the newly formed deserts to the inundated shorelines. And the human reactions to all these problems and all others will not be smooth and well debated.

In fact, it’s more likely to be hectic. Dafur is really about global heating as the further desertification of the region is forcing the grazers onto farm land, two ways of life clashing. Today, the Midwest is seeing flooding of rare history (at least written history) and it’s looking as if this years corn crop in that area is going to be ravished (at a time of already high prices).

We are at war in Iraq for a declining natural resource, oil. And it doesn’t seem unlikely that the Middle East will be a war zone for the foreseeable future. Nothing would surprise me in the waning year of Bush as we keep hearing Iran, Iran, repeatedly. So, it sure seems that the oil economy will continue full force even if it takes force, and the CO2 keeps on heating.

I see some good things coming out of Europe as Germany has become the leader in solar power and Denmark in wind turbines. But what we do here in the USA can and does negate the good they do.

The biggest problem for humans is going to be food supply. Places of high agricultural yields will be affected. That’s happening now. Australia’s wheat output is faltering after droughts, our Midwest (mentioned above), our Southeast and Southwest is certainly going to experience even worse droughts than even today. Most global climate modeling predicts our former prairie region (now wheat, sow) will revert back to desert, possibly as soon as two decades.

Food of course requires water. Fresh water is another developing problem. Many of the world’s largest rivers (Nile, Colorado, etc.) don’t even reach the ocean anymore as diversion for irrigation and other human uses drains those rivers before they see the sea. Ground waters are drying up from pumping, again I can cite our Great Plains for this. Mountain snow pack in the West is waning every year and will affect water supplies coming from the rivers of that melting snow. Other areas of the world will get too much water from rain that previously the particular regions didn’t get.

No time in history have we ever had the mass amounts of humans we do today all relying on a stable climate. In the past it was a bit easier to migrate away from areas of drought, today with borders all over the globe and packed populations, migration might be out of the question. Look at the controversy surrounding our Mexican border.

You mentioned facing plague in the past, well, that may come as well. There have been many warnings from health experts that we are a worldwide epidemic waiting to happen. Imagine adding something like that into the mix. Which would be more important, epidemic or global heating as the problem for immediate attention?

We are staring at many stressful issues now and in the near future. I’d call it the “perfect storm” if it didn’t sound so contrived.

Addressing the “snap solution” again. The more I try to think of sometime in American history that we did come together over a major important issue with speed, the more I can’t come up with a precedence. Always, issues were divided in some way. Always, only the result in retrospect or revisionism could we say we “came together.” And never was it easy, it usually took deaths to resolve.

From the Revolutionary War (insurgents and Loyalists), slavery (North and South), labor reform (workers and industrialists), Jim Crow South, Abortion, etc., etc.

Today, there are far too many Americans that have no interest in changing their lifestyles (even if they believe in global warming…it sounds good for us Northerners) beyond maybe using energy efficient light bulbs. And there are powerful interests that will fight change all the way. If you think the Right Wingers are going to join in singing some sort of Kumbuya with the Left to ending global heating, I’ve got some future desert land to sell you.

Just yesterday I was driving along the road with a Hummer speeding to ultimately not make every traffic light as I would roll up a few minutes later…to then watch the Hummer speed off at the green for me to meet again at the next stop light. There are a ton of attitudes to change.

Dear jon b, good! Send me coordinates/price per acre for some of that soon-to-be desert land. I might be interested. Bob

Well Bob,

You’ll have to wait until I buy the property. I suspect some McMansion properties outside of metropolitan Southern Western cities will become available cheap in a decade or so. There might even be some old rusting SUVs abandoned in the garages as well.