Ask (the Deniers) and Ye Shall Be Answered

Isn't synchronicity a wonderful thing? Just a couple of days after wondering, in last week's post, what it will take for climate change deniers to see the light (or should I say, feel the heat?), a book arrived in the mail. This book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer, had been recommended by a friend, and it came as if to answer my question.

The inside front flap explains everything, quite succinctly:

[A] network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs — that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom — are sincerely held.

I would like to invite these "exceedingly wealthy" people to never again use public services like highways and hospitals that were built and paid for by a government (that is, by your taxes). I know that lots more things are privatized in the United States than they are in other countries, but you can't tell me the US Government does nothing with the tax money it receives. Mind you, if Americans had health care and public schooling like the rest of us in the developed world, they wouldn't be complaining about taxes. Instead, they have crumbling infrastructure, the most costly health care system in the world and one of the worst education systems in the OECD. And they (well, some of them) will fight to the death to maintain their rights to crumbling and costly and lousy. (I have to admit that I keep wondering why they feel they have to spend over half of their taxes on their military — to protect what? Crumbling, costly and lousy? And the illusion of freedom? That's some weird arithmetic!)

I was asking what it would take to change the minds and hearts of climate change deniers, but I see now that the problem is an extremely deep and viscerally felt sense of disconnectedness and insecurity that (they believe) only greed ("intense and selfish desire for something"), mammon and "winning" can fill. This philosophical illness even has a name: pleonexia.

My sense is that only extreme shock therapy will ever have any hope of transforming greedy, insecure people who feel no connection to the future, to other people or to the rest of Nature. Perhaps it's a game to them ... let's see how close to the edge we can go.

Data visualization by Rosamund Pearce for Carbon Brief

Well, is this enough of a shock for them? Is four years close enough to the edge? A look (Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budget) at carbon dioxide emission numbers for 2016 shows that we only have 4.1 years left (at current levels of emission) if we want to stay below 1.5ºC of global temperature increase. You've seen the havoc wreaked by 1ºC — how much more of this before even "exceedingly wealthy" people will start to be impacted? (If one single denier ever has the nerve to say, "Why didn't they warn us?" I will not be held responsible for socking them in the mouth!)

This CarbonBrief paper finally mentions something that my hubby and I have been promoting since 2014 when the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report came out. RCP2.6 is a "representative carbon pathway" (I call it Really Cool Plan 2.6) described as:

[a] "peak and decline" scenario where stringent mitigation and carbon dioxide removal technologies mean atmospheric CO2 concentration peaks and then falls during this century. By 2100, atmospheric CO2 reaches around 420 parts per million (ppm) – about 20 ppm above current levels. In this scenario, global temperatures are likely to rise by 1.3-1.9ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Note that RCP2.6 is the only scenario that will keep us below a 2ºC global temperature increase. And if that doesn't sound like much, remember that +2.0ºC, before it became bandied about as though it's a target we're aiming for, was suggested as a safety guardrail. 

Now consider this: Once you've hit the guardrail, it's almost always too late — you're already spinning out, caught up in a catastrophic accident. 1.5ºC is those little bumps that wake you up when you fall asleep at the wheel and start swerving — oftentimes disastrously, sometimes luckily not. A 1ºC rise in global average temperature is the equivalent of all the lines painted on the road that we need and ought to stay within. And we're there already. If we keep veering all over the road, we're all going to die. Including the climate change deniers and the "exceedingly wealthy."

Photo by Roger Gendron

The Curse — and the Blessing — of Feeling Deeply

A lovely friend left this Earth on Monday. Rather than let cancer ravage her brain, she chose assisted dying -- while she was still joyful ... radiant ... luminous. With everything unimportant stripped away, she gained a wisdom beyond her years. Visiting her in hospital was like receiving darshan from a cherished guru.

I don't know what to do with all my mixed emotions. Grief at the loss of a friend (and at the thought of her partner's deep sorrow and loneliness). Gratitude that I have special memories of time spent together. A sense of purposelessness (after all, if it's that easy to no longer exist on this physical plane, then ...). Some (dare I admit it) anger that she didn't wait longer to give miracles a chance. Blessed to have been some small part of her living, and dying, well.

And yet I wouldn't trade these deep emotions and mixed feelings for anything. They are my lifeblood. They are what make me work so hard for the children of all species. The deep sadness and raging anger at the fossil fuel greed that is making the future a thing of the past juxtaposed with the utter joy and delight that children offer us. The sense of foreboding (knowing too much about how rapidly this climate change emergency is playing out, still with no concerted global mitigation) together with a complete sense of awe and contentment when the sun shines a certain way through the trees.

When I die, I want to be as lighthearted as my friend was. And my sense now is that the only way I'll be able to make that dream come true is to keep working, on behalf of all the children of all species, to avert planetary disaster.

My deep emotions keep me connected to the global problems -- and fighting for their solution.

Climate Change: What's Greed Got to Do With It?

Like many people around the world whose mediascape is (at times sickeningly) filled with sound bites and film clips, photographs and FB memes of candidates in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, I am trying to wrap my head around how far the American Republican party has strayed from its roots with their current choice of candidate. (Think Theodore Roosevelt. He was a(n admittedly progressive) Republican president, but also an environmental champion.)

You can probably guess why this American election (even though I'm not American) has had me thinking a lot about greed. And that, in turn, has got me thinking about the role of greed and greediness in the climate crisis. 

My own swirling thoughts have gone something like this: Greed, at its deepest subconscious level, must be a form of defensiveness, a seeking of security in people who don't believe in the abundance of the Universe. Which means there must also be a streak of ecological illiteracy inherent in greed, as greedy people don't seem to understand the collaborative nature of, well, nature (of which we're a part), and the fact that there is enough for everyone's need (as Gandhi pointed out).

The catch-22 is this: How do we help the greedy people who are ruining the biosphere feel more safe and secure at a time when their greed has made the climate (and therefore life itself) less safe and secure? Bad timing, eh? It feels like we're hooped. 

I decided to do a smidge of research to see what others put greed down to. The dictionary says that to be greedy is to have or show an intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth or power. (That certainly describes a certain Republican candidate.)

Thought leader (I love that term! I want to be one!) Frank Sonnenberg also equates greed with selfishness. "Greed is a term that describes ruthless people with naked ambition, people with an insatiable appetite for riches, those who give new meaning to the word selfish." We're living in a time when rich people can't have as much as they might want, because it all comes with carbon emissions that the world can't afford anymore. Maybe we just have to tell people like Donald Frump and the Rhymes-with-a-Soft-Drink Brothers that -- literally -- enough is enough. But that's going to take a huge shift in worldview, isn't it? After all, we're fighting not just hundreds of years of capitalism, but also a couple of decades of woowoo new age you-can-attract-everything-you-want brainwashing.

Sonnenberg quotes the character Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street: "It’s not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses." And yet, in ecosystems, there are no winners as long as there are losers. So are greedy people those who (think they can) live above the laws of nature? Is that why they just keep burning fossil fuels with nary a care for the biosphere -- because to them, metaphorical "winning" is more important than actually surviving?

Now as Sonnenberg points out, it's unfair to automatically "equate success and wealth with greed. The fact is, many successful people give generously of their wealth and/or their time. It’s also true that you don’t have to be particularly wealthy in order to be able to give.... [Some] people without means contribute generously of their time and skills every day, yet others don’t. Greed doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor."

But according to Oxam, when it comes to global warming and climate change, the world's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, while the poorest half of the world's people contribute to just 10% of emissions.

Let's wrap our heads around that. "An average person among the richest 1% of people emits 175 times more carbon than his or her counterpart among the bottom 1%, Oxfam said." So in order not to be considered a greedy bastard, I guess one really has to consider -- and lower -- one's sense of entitlement, and then one's carbon footprint. 

So yeah. Greed => climate change.

p.s. Check out Oxfam's report, Extreme Carbon Inequality: Why the Paris climate deal must put the poorest, lowest emitting and most vulnerable people first, here.

How Climate Science Gets Tossed Around and Misrepresented

Exactly, xkcd! Thank you.

A couple of things this week helped me finally grasp that the field of climate change science is like any other human endeavour -- rife with human foibles, especially greed and ego.

First up, from Climate Parents, a little tale of greed (profit before integrity) [emphasis in original]:

Two major publishers have drafted new social studies textbooks for K-12 students in Texas that are filled with misinformation about climate change. Since Texas is the ... second largest buyer of textbooks [in the United States], books produced for the state are often sold nationwide.  

Among [the] egregious errors, the draft textbooks from McGraw-Hill and Pearson assert there is an active dispute among scientists about the primary cause of climate change. The climate change-denying Heartland Institute is given equal footing with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which integrates the work of thousands of credentialed, peer-reviewed scientists. 

McGraw-Hill and Pearson need to correct the many factual errors about climate change before its books are presented to the Board for final approval. Otherwise, students across the country could be denied accurate information about the biggest global challenge their generation will face.  

The publishers are responding to pressure from climate deniers on the Board of Education, who are determined to stop students from learning the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. It's crucial that we send a strong message right away that censoring climate science in order to sell books is unethical and an unacceptable disservice to students, and must be corrected.

You can sign their petition here, asking McGraw-Hill and Pearson to, you know, tell students the truth. (I'd hate to see what their science textbooks have to say about climate change!)

Next up, here's a tale of ego before integrity -- and science by haiku (which is a shortcut to misunderstandings). It seems the climate change blogosphere has been lit up with the story of a Twitter lynch mob at a recent fancy dancy scientific meeting. 

As a nonscientist who doesn't even make it onto the cartoon up top, it's been fascinating for me (while recuperating from the flu) to watch the perps and their groupies cry foul. "He hit me back first" sort of stuff. I figure if you're going to dish it out via Twitter, you'd better be able to take it in complete paragraphs. 

Anyway, it sure seems to be a case of the new (climate modellers) trying to oust the old (field scientists) -- a territorial thing? An ego thing? The only humour I've found in the whole sordid affair is that the main tweeter has two degrees, both in ... can you guess? Math. (See cartoon above.)

Here's an example of how the science got tossed around and misrepresented. 

The head honcho tweeter tweeted: So and so "clearly states that there is no physics behind his extrapolations." But here's how someone who was in attendance heard the same Q&A: Such and such "raised his hand to ask 'Is any of this based on Physics?' to which So and so replied 'no' referring to the fact that it is collected observational data." See the dangerous difference between what was communicated at the meeting and what was communicated in 140 characters? 

Perhaps those precious mathematical modellers are simply so high up there on their pedestals of purity that data collected through years of field studies is piffle to them -- even if it's data that, if extrapolated properly (and that's where peer review and scientific debate -- not condescending tweets -- come in), is quite foreboding. 

Man, talk about bursting my balloon. After all these years of thinking that scientists were somehow superior to us lowly humanities types, it turns out they're just human, too.