Will plants and animals be able to adapt to climate change? For many of them, probably not.

One way in which deniers often try to say there’s no reason to worry about climate change, even if it is happening, is by saying that species will just adapt to it, and everything will be just fine. There are a number of other arguments tied up in this one, but only a couple of them are directly relevant to answering this argument. First, there is the question of the scale of the change. If we look at the current temperature, and assume that this is as warm as it’s going to get, then really, there’s no cause for alarm. Indeed, the letter from the Hudson Institute makes the case that in the last ten thousand years we have seen climatic changes like the current one, and in some cases higher temperatures. The article does NOT note that those events were regional, not global, and it also fails to take global CO2 levels into account.

NOTE: The relationship between CO2 and global temperature is not under debate by any reasonable people, and I don’t have space to address that issue here, so if you want to look into that, either send me a note and I’ll discuss it later, or go here and see if you can find your answers. It will have to suffice, for now, to say that the influence of CO2 on atmospheric temperature has been tested, calculated, retested, and confirmed repeatedly from the late 1800′s, through the military’s development of heat-seeking missiles, and is now the field of fourth-grade science fair projects.

So – while regional temperatures, may have risen comparable amounts in the last couple thousand years, what about CO2 levels? Since that’s what’s driving this temperature increase, and we know that when CO2 increases, it takes time for the temperature to rise in response, how does today’s CO2 level compare?

Temperature and CO2 since the last ice age. Data sources: Vostok, Law Dome, Mauna Loa.

Life, how you DO fill up; and Why Fear is a Bad Motivator for Progress

So for my hundreds of millions of adoring readers, I wish to offer an apology for my serial not-posting, as well as my excuses,  and share a little bit about the philosophy of live that I have begun to develop.

This is relevant to climate change – really!

So a few months ago, I came to the decision that I do NOT wish to pursue a graduate degree at this time, but I would prefer to spend that effort in other areas.

The first area is writing. I’ve got one novel finished and currently on a publisher’s desk, another novel almost finished, three sitting in the wings and prodding me to write them, and a non-fiction book that crawled in through my ear during a phone conversation last week. All that takes rather a lot of time.

The second is direct climate action. The key form this is taking is my involvement with the New Roroyare Climate Action Project, a fledgeling organization  being put together by a group of New England Quakers with the intent of providing land, and eventually money, for research and development of architecture, agriculture, and energy, with climate change adaptation and mitigation in mind and – and here’s the important bit (one of them, anyway) – at a scale achievable by individuals, families, or small communities.

Part of the notion behind this is that the ideologically driven gridlock in the United States federal government means that we can’t afford to wait for federal level action – it’ll take too bloody long (already has taken too bloody long) – so we need to work around the government so long as it is in the pocket of climate polluters.

With that in mind, I am also delighted to be serving as environmental policy advisor for the campaign for state rep of Mike Connolly in my home district. Mike is running on a independent progressive platform emphasizing the problems inherent in the influence of money in politics. As such, he is refusing to take one cent in campaign contributions, and is running a very low budget operation. Most of the campaign is taking place through volunteer efforts, the only major expense being the website. You CAN, however, go to the website and donate $0.00 in support.

Mike is focused on a few different issues important to the citizens of Massachusetts, but the one that he brought me on board for is climate change, and more specifically, state and local-level policy on climate change. What this means for me, right now, is a lot of research into what has been done, what has never been done, and what can be done.

And that brings me to the philosophy portion of this tirade:

The notion of what can be done, and how the source of our motivations influences our view of what is or is not possible.

The Five Scariest Things about Climate Change

Not sure if these are the five SCARIEST things, but with so many to choose from, there’s no need to be picky!

“Creative Destruction”

You know, I get the notion of creative destruction – I really do. If something is destroyed, it has to be cleaned up, and people have to do it, therefor the onward march of entropy drives economic growth.

The problem comes when you fixate on a decent idea, and treat it as if it is the ONLY idea. When you do that, as the GOP seems to have done, you start to actively pursue destruction for its own sake, always under the banner of “helping the economy”.

You can see it in all manner of policies – environmental policies that ruin the air we breath, thus creating more health care jobs, or education policies that worsen our nation’s schools, thus requiring more consultants to fix them, or military policies that require us to destroy countries and then pay people to rebuild them.

The larger the scale, the less effective creative destruction is at creating prosperity, and the more suffering it causes. In the case of Zorg, in the video above, the character has followed the theory to its illogical conclusion, and is working with an entity that is going to destroy the universe.

We’re not capable of that, but the point remains – even in that advanced, science fiction society, there’s nobody with the technology to fix the universe. Here, on our humble, wonderful planet, there is nobody with the means to fix the planet when we break it.

There is a version of capitalism that has become its own religion, but no matter how much faith you have in the Invisible Hand, it is still a figment of your imagination, and it cannot create a class of workers who will “repair” the planet. The GOP, it would seem, believes so much in “divine intervention”, they will, if allowed, push us to the point where such is the ONLY OPTION, and only THEN will they realize that nobody is coming to save us.

We’re all we’ve got.

Discussions with Strangers, Episode Two: Thinking about water

A British study on the impacts of climate change states, among other things,

By the 2050s, between 27 million and 59 millionpeople in Britain are likely to be living in areas suffering problems with water supplies, the report claims. Britain is predicted to have a population of about 77 million by 2050.

There a numerous other impacts listed, but one commenter focused on the water shortage claim, and more specifically, the span of 27-59 million people affected. 

slinkybro:
“By the 2050s, between 27 million and 59 million people in Britain are likely to be living in areas suffering problems with water supplies.” – Well which is it? 27 or 59? How worried should I be? Will I be one of them? If I’m not, what will cost me? If I am, I’m moving.

After getting the initial snark out of my system, I ended up giving more of a useful answer:

Discussions with strangers

So one of my hobbies is discussing climate change with people online, mostly on Huffington Post. I do this for a couple reasons. One is that it gives me a reason to keep up-to-date on what’s up in the world, and the other is that it gives me a chance to help provide solid information to those who may have use for it. Not all of my comments are worth reading, but a minority of them are pretty useful, and I’ve found myself going back to refer to them.

The ones that I think are good take a fair amount of time to research and put together, and so I’m going to start pasting some of them here, both for my own future reference, and for the benefit of anybody who might find it useful.

I’ll post the comment I respond to, and the conversation thereafter, along with a link to the whole thread. Other people’s comments will be in a different color from mine.

So here’s the first, without further ado (discussion excerpt below the fold):

Similarities

One of my hobbies is engaging in debates about climate change with random strangers on the internet. To a degree, it’s a little like this:

The reason I do it, though, is so I can provide careful, informative responses to denier rhetoric – not for the deniers, but for anybody reading who might be on the fence, or just confused.

In the last week, or so, in debating on a story about climate education, I’ve begun to notice a marked drop in the already small level of rational thought from the right wing.

It seemed awfully familiar, too.