There Are So Many Things We Can Be Doing!

I think I'm just going to make a list today. I haven't offered this sort of thing in a long time, but we attended a meeting the other night where lots of ideas for what a nearby city (and the capital city of my province in Canada) can do about the climate crisis. I'll add in some of my own ideas.

Change now, as philosopher Krishnamurti taught. Picture … dream … envision how the world needs to be: free of war, terrorism, violence, cruelty and slaughter. A world free of fossil fuels, a “golden age” of zero-carbon renewable energy, will be safer, cleaner, kinder, healthier, more equitable, and more peaceful. It’s a beautiful vision, isn’t it?

For the sake of the children – of all species – find the strength, the courage and the compassion to truly feel the pain of the climate crisis. Next, lament. And then, get active. Remember that the most vulnerable are being impacted worst and first, but we are all impacted. People around the world are losing their lives or their loved ones, their livelihoods, their food security and water sources, their homes and entire homelands, in extreme weather events caused or exacerbated by climate chaos. We also need to understand this from the perspective of indigenous people, who have nowhere to move to because they are their land.

If you and your family are not already eating a plant-based diet, go vegan now, for the sake of your own health and the health of the planet. It’s the quickest – and most significant – way to lower your greenhouse gas emissions. Further, how can we create peaceful transformation in a world filled with slaughter and cruelty?

The Burning Age is over. Support a carbon fee and any other strategy that will encourage people to switch their investment money to zero-carbon, non-combustion renewable energy. Work towards a combustion-free society by transitioning away from the internal combustion engine.

Call for your government to keep its pledge to end taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel industries. According to the International Monetary Fund, every year governments around the world give $5.3 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuel corporations. Just think how much faster we’ll make the transition to zero-carbon, non-combustion energy when all that money is switched to renewables.

Make a plan for reducing your family’s carbon footprint as rapidly as possible. Invest in the future by ensuring that your investments are ethical and green. Divest from fossil fuels. Vote with your dollars. Invest in a heat pump for your home to lower your heating bill. If you need to drive, save up to purchase a hybrid or electric vehicle. Figure how far you and your family are willing to walk, bicycle, take public transit, car share, etc., and set up systems to help you use these greener modes of transportation more often. Be willing to make changes, compromises, even sacrifices for the sake of the future.

Support fair elections and electoral reform so that governments are made up of elected officials representing all voices, not just those beholden to fossil fuel industries.

Learn the basic science of the unprecedented crime of greenhouse gas pollution and the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate and oceans crisis it has led to. Then learn why climate disruption and the trifecta of ocean heating, ocean acidification, and ocean de-oxygenation represent an urgent emergency. Understand that the climate change denial campaign is deliberate and extremely well funded. They can sound convincing, but don’t be fooled. Do your own research, check your sources, and stay strong.

The greatest immediate threat is food and water insecurity. After all, we have evolved over the last 10,000 years into a species dependent on agriculture – and agriculture is dependent upon a stable climate, which we’ve had globally for the last 10,000 years – until now. Encourage ecological and regenerative agricultural practices and the implementation of permaculture principles. Mulch your garden. Plant trees. Lend support (time, money, energy, expertise) to food-growing programs for children and schools. We can’t grow food overnight; nor can we learn to grow food overnight. Be a champion for a different kind of education … one that will help create the world we need.

Permaculture the heck out of your community. Turn public spaces and boulevards into food forests. Build food security, food sovereignty, food resilience. (If climate chaos is going to lead to worldwide hunger, at least we'll be among the last to go.)

Get your local municipal government/s to declare a climate change emergency. (The Climate Mobilization can offer guidance with this.)

Protest outside of any bank that is investing in global destruction. Divest while you're at it, and put your money into a community bank or credit union.

Pull off some "intersactions." Take your protest signs to the busiest intersection in your community and keep crossing the road when the walk sign is on walking around in a square. Get it? High visibility. Not illegal. Drivers won't be turned off because you're not blocking traffic.

Remember to make your planning meetings and your public actions inclusive (invite others who might not normally participate) and accessible (for example, to people with disabilities, to parents with small children). 

Finally, do your spiritual work – pray, meditate, dance, go for walks, whatever – but don’t stop there! Remember, we all have at least a little bit of time, money, energy and/or expertise to share.

 And hey, if none of these actions feels right to you, you can always bake muffins for those on the front lines of saving the world. Even protestors have to eat!

Adapted from Henry Van Dyke

Scientists Displaying a Different Kind of Denial — A Different Kettle of Fish

A Different Kettle of Fish by DeviantArt.com

My husband and I have noticed that ocean and marine scientists seem to either understand better or care more deeply (pardon the pun) about the climate change crisis than scientists in many other fields. I figure it's because ocean and marine science is about life, or always comes back 'round to life (unlike pure chemistry and physics, for example, or geology and atmospheric science). There's still lots of scientific modelling in this field, but the modelling seems to be about life (often in some form of "seafood").

This is why the new kind of denial of the climate change emergency that I witnessed recently is so disheartening. As a guest at the conference my husband attended this past week, I was able to sit in on a couple of sessions. During the first, a bioscientist at a marine laboratory explained the impacts that ocean acidification is having (along with a whole host of other depredations, including atomic testing!) on coral reefs. He walked us through the graph showing the different scenarios that he and his colleagues had run. And then he stepped in it. 

Perhaps you'd like to read the background to this first. In a world where scientists keep abdicating from telling the full truth about the urgency of this spectacularly serious problem because, in their words, they don't want to give policymakers an excuse to do nothing about climate change, they have given policymakers no reason to do anything! Not only that, but the notion that scientists don't want to "be political" went out the window the moment they made a decision about which and how much science to share with policymakers.

This fellow told his huge audience that he insisted to his research / modelling team that they run a fifth — and totally unrealistic — scenario through the model, a good news scenario where we all stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow and everything gets pretty much back to normal. He thought this was necessary so that policymakers wouldn't lose hope.

Dude! You've once again given policymakers a reason to do nothing! Policymakers don't deserve hope, Mr. Scientist. They haven't earned it. They haven't taken action yet. But you scientists haven't given them reason to take action, so who's to blame?

You say the scientist's job is to provide "the best available science" (I would add "within the context of the precautionary principle"), and yet you provided them a way out. You gave them a big, fat "See? Things will be just fine again!" With one little line on your graph that goes up when it should have gone down.

But that wasn't the worst of it. I stayed for the next plenary session, which was entitled Why Aren't They Listening? Ironically over half the audience walked out before this one even began (hence the name of the session could have been Why Aren't Half of Us Listening?). (Granted, it was verging on the lunch hour, and scientists get hungry, too.)

The panelists proffered some good suggestions:

• Make this (climate change) issue an issue that governments already care about (jobs, economy, health).
• Offer to help politicians and policymakers make sense of the climate science.
• Say "As a scientist, this is what I see. As a concerned citizen/parent, this is what I feel."
• Create a human connection with the people you're communicating the climate science to.
• The information is out there. Appeal more to people's emotions and values. 
• In the United States (I can't imagine that this is true in very many other places), the sector with the highest credibility is the military. Remind people that militaries around the world, but especially in the US, see climate change as a security issue.
• Do all this, but keep working on your tenure and promotion first and foremost.

No, wait. What? Work on tenure and promotion? As though there's a normal future for these young scientists? WTF? Is this panel not discussing climate change?

There it is. They slipped it in, but there it is. Their denial of the climate change emergency. Although they're ocean scientists and they can see what's happening (especially with ocean acidification), they keep living, working, and giving advice to young scientists as though nothing has changed.

What a Broken Ankle Can Teach You About Climate Change Denial

I'm in a warm place. I mean that literally, not figuratively. Going someplace warm (actually, it's swelteringly hot and humid here) in the winter is something I haven't done since I learned about climate change almost 20 years ago. But we're here on "business" — the business of climate change. 

Yeah, yeah, I know. Flying somewhere to talk/teach/learn about global warming and ocean acidification is the act of a crazy person — or a desperate person. I can't disagree and I do feel guilty. But here we are at an important conference, so we're making a vacation of it.

Unfortunately, I'm here with a broken ankle, a walking cast and a cane. Today, while eating a picnic lunch on the beach, I started feeling sorry for myself. The first warm water I've encountered since 1996 and I can't take advantage of the recreational opportunities like surf lessons and learning how to paddle board. I couldn't believe my bad luck.

After a little pity party, we walked (slowly) to an outdoor art festival and then hung out at a different beach for a while. I could not believe how many people I saw who had canes, crutches and wheelchairs! The moment I really got it — that I need to stop my whingeing because I'm quite blessed generally and particularly blessed to be visiting this land of warm beaches — was seeing a brand new amputee wheel up beside us, alone. Self-pity turned to embarrassment for my thoughts and admiration for his gumption.

On the way home, my hubby and I talked about the fact that I never usually notice people with canes or wheelchairs, but here I'm seeing lots and lots. Is it because I'm currently "among them" that I'm noticing more of these people lately?

And that got me wondering (make the leap with me here) ... are people who have been impacted by climate chaos more likely to acknowledge the climate change emergency? Apparently, research shows that to be true ... but it's fleeting. And I suddenly understood why.

I want to get back to normal. I want my ankle to be mended, my foot to be healed, and the whole thing to be a fading memory. Of course! If I had been hit by Hurricane Sandy or a horrific heat wave or a terrifying flood, I'd want to forget it as quickly as possible, too!

So in the case of those already touched by climate disruption, denial is more a case of forgetting. Or wanting desperately to forget and get on with normal life. Even though "normal life" no longer exists. And for some (impacted by life-changing illness, injury or extreme weather events), simply still being alive is the blessing. Millions weren't that lucky.

Pinocchio Strikes Again! Mistruths about Ocean Acidification

Our local climate change denialist greeted the new year with a column in a local paper (which I won't read anymore, but this one jumped out at me when I was starting a fire while housesitting at a friend's house) saying that ocean acidification is "absolutely rubbish."

Instead of publishing my response locally, I'm going to place it here, with the hope that it will get wider notice.

Tim Ball is such a pain in the climate change #!% that he has my husband and me arguing over which of his mistruths to spend time responding to (something we vowed today never to let happen again).

So here is my response to his innocent-sounding column, "What is Ocean Acidification?". I should point out that he opens with this quote from Marie Curie:

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."

Ball then starts this way: "Scare tactics to create fear," and finishes up with "The entire story is scientific rubbish and part of the ongoing exploitation of fear and lack of understanding Marie Curie identified." Methinks perhaps he was describing his own column!

My Letter to the Editor

I have been a fervent watcher of Tim Ball's dangerous climate change denialist antics over the last few years. He never fails to amaze and entertain me with his ability to knowingly (he is not a stupid man) make so many mistakes in such contorted ways while trouncing on the work of so many scientists. Other readers, however, may have become somewhat confused about ocean acidification after reading his December 31, 2010 column so, with your permission, I would like to clarify a few things.

If ocean acidification (OA) had been invented by governments or climate change activists, then perhaps Ball's statement that OA is "[s]care tactics to create fear" would be correct. However, ocean acidification is a phenomenon that has been observed and is now being studied by scientists, especially those in biogeochemistry and marine biology. (Ball's PhD-level dissertation on 18th- and 19th-century climatic change in north central Canada was in geography, not biology, geology, chemistry or physics.)

Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being absorbed by the oceans, making seawater (as Ball fastidiously points out) less alkaline (which, in scientific terms, including medicine and food science, is called "more acidic"). As scientists working with Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry (OCB, the program that Ball cited) point out, "The word 'acidification' refers to lowering pH from any starting point to any end point on the pH scale…. even though seawater's pH is greater than 7.0 (and therefore considered 'basic' in terms of the pH scale), increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are still raising the ocean's acidity and lowering its pH. In comparison, this language is similar to the words we use when we talk about temperature. If the air temperature moves from -40°C to -29°C, it is still cold, but we call it 'warming.'"

Unfortunately, marine creatures that have evolved over the eons within a limited pH range don't care what language we use if their habitat has become inhospitable to them. This is what is happening to many marine organisms; coral reefs have become the canary in the oceans. As an expert on weather patterns in the Hudson Bay area of Canada, perhaps Ball just doesn't care about coral reefs. But the Convention on Biological Diversity gives a sense of how important they are: coral reefs provide work for 100 million people, are worth US$30 billion annually (tourism and fishing), buffer coastlines from ocean storms and surges, and contain about 25% of marine species even though they cover only 0.2% of the sea floor, ensuring marine biodiversity (http://www.cbd.int/doc/bioday/2009/banners/cbd-ibd-banners-5-en.pdf). (And as something that could really turn around and bite us in the butt, corals absorb CO2 to make their shells, so if CO2-absorbing corals die, where will all that extra carbon end up? I dunno, just a question.)

Near the end of his column on OA, Ball plagiarizes (or perhaps it was simply a typesetting error) from the Ocean Acidification Network, which is made up of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, UNESCO - Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and the International Geosphere - Biosphere Programme. In a form of "cherry picking" made infamous by climate change denialists of many ilks, Ball picked one sentence out of an explanatory paragraph, fixed a spelling mistake, did not offer its context, and then twisted its intent to support his hypothesis that it's all "rubbish." Here's the original:

"The ocean absorbs approximately one-fourth of the CO2 added to the atmosphere from human activities each year, greatly reducing the impact of this greenhouse gas on climate. When CO2 dissolves in seawater, carbonic acid is formed. This phenomenon, called ocean acidification, is decreasing the ability of many marine organisms to build their shells and skeletal structure. Field studies suggest that impacts of acidification on some major marine calcifiers may already be detectable, and naturally high-CO2 marine environments exhibit major shifts in marine ecosystems following trends expected from laboratory experiments. Yet the full impact of ocean acidification and how these impacts may propogate [sic] through marine ecosystems and affect fisheries remains largely unknown."

Their Ocean Acidification Summary for Policymakers 2009 states: "Sixty-five million years ago, ocean acidification was linked to mass extinctions of calcareous marine organisms, an integral part of the marine food web. At that time, coral reefs disappear from the geologic record and it took millions of years for coral reefs to recover. Today's human-induced acidification represents a rare event in the geological history of our planet."

When Ball offers up charts of CO2 levels over the last 600 million years, this is when his denialism becomes truly creepy — and disingenuous. CO2 is at its highest in 800,000 years, but surely Ball realizes that the problem isn't CO2 per se, or even global warming per se, but the fact that Homo sapiens, only about 200,000 years old, has evolved over the last 10,000 years of stable climate into an agricultural species. Our survival now depends on food growing (versus foraging, scavenging and hunting), which is threatened by climate disruption (floods, droughts, heat waves). If we're threatening the food chain in the oceans as well, then it is definitely not "exploitation of fear" we need to be afraid of.

121 to Go - The "Other" CO2 Problem: Ocean Acidification (Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid)

From a Macleans.ca article by Nancy Macdonald.

Scientists ... say the oceans are facing a terrifying new threat that will affect the entire marine food chain: the water is slowly but surely becoming more acidic.

More than 80 per cent of the heat generated by climate change and a third of all carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere winds up in the ocean. That carbon dioxide - a whopping 118 billion tons - is not innocuous, as scientists once thought. When it dissolves in briny seawater, it produces an acidic molecule known as carbonic acid (the same substance used in soft drinks). Seawater pH is now between eight and 8.3 in most areas, 30 per cent lower than in pre-industrial times....

In 1998, before the issue had hit even the scientific radar, oceanographer Joanie Kleypas was at a Boston conference with top U.S. biologists. With access to early experimental data, she was doing "back-of-envelope" carbon calculations relating to ocean pH when, "all of a sudden," she realized the math was spelling a potential marine disaster. She was so shocked by the magnitude of the problem that she ran from the boardroom and threw up in a nearby bathroom. 

The geological record is "terrifying," she says from her Boulder, Colo., office at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The last time the ocean's pH changed anywhere nearly as rapidly was 55 million years ago in an event oceanographers call the "Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum," or PETM, and there was a mass extinction of calcareous organisms. Now "we seem on track to do in about 300 years what PETM did over 3,000 years," says Debby Ianson, a climate modeller with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans [in Canada].

While sea grasses and jellyfish will thrive in a more acidic environment, marine organisms with calcium carbonate shells likely will not. Indeed, shells and mollusks start to dissolve within 48 hours in seawater as acidic as the oceans are projected to be by the end of the century. So does coral - which is already suffering the impacts of global warming, local pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction.

Battered by so many stressors, coral reefs, which are home to 25 per cent of all marine life, will almost certainly disappear, robbing fish of the crevasses and critical refuge from the awaiting "wall of mouths," says Simon Fraser University biologist Nick Dulvy. Some 20 per cent of all coral reefs have already been destroyed, including a full 80 per cent of all Caribbean reefs, while another 50 per cent teeter on the brink....

It's early days yet, but the acidification process is happening 10 times faster than previously believed, according to the latest science....

Ocean acidification is "essentially irreversible" during periods measured in mere decades, according to Britain's Royal Society.... In geologic terms, a quick change occurs over 10,000 years, but the acidification of the oceans appears to be happening over a period of 50 to 100 years.