The digest of today’s Daily Climate news review … and I would highlight 3 of the headings.
The first is the article in the New York Times that draws attention to the quantity of carbon frozen in the thawing permafrost and the reality that we haven’t a clue what will happen when it thaws completely.
The second is the Climate Central report about the effect of the Thai floods on the cost of Computers and hard drives. It drives home the whole interconnectedness of the human family and the global environment.
The third article is National Geographic’s warning about the effect of drought in Africa. Yes, our lives may be “inconvenienced” by having to pay more for electronic gadgetry. This will be nothing compared to the “inconvenience” that, probably millions, of Africans will experience when they have no water …. unless of course we welcome them into our communities.
Ha!!!!!!!!!!!
Europe’s clogged arteries drive up transport costs and uncover old bombs. Germany’s driest November has shrunk Europe’s rivers, creating month long delays for oil- and ore-carrying barges, while uncovering the continent’s deadly past. Bloomberg News
As permafrost thaws, scientists study the risks. A recent estimate suggests that permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere. Temperatures are warming across much of the region and signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable. New York Times
Despite delay, the 100-watt bulb is on its way out. On Friday, the House voted to delay enforcement of the new light bulb standards until at least Oct. 1, with the Senate expected to agree, as part of a last-minute budget deal to keep the government operating through the rest of the fiscal year. Republicans have vowed to press for a full repeal of the new rules. New York Times
Carbon dioxide offsets used to be a hot topic. What happened? Just a few years ago, it seemed carbon offsetting might be one of the best responses to society's emissions-heavy habits. Winnipeg Free Press
Breakthrough could double solar electricity ouput. A new discovery from a chemist at the University of Texas at Austin may allow photovoltaic solar cells to double their efficiency, thus providing loads more electrical power from regular sunlight. Los Angeles Times
China's growing share of solar market comes at a price. If Chinese solar companies are eating our lunch, they’re also choking on it. Growth in global solar manufacturing capacity is outpacing global demand, and prices of solar energy products are plunging. Chinese solar companies are suffering from some of the same ills afflicting their U.S. competitors. Washington Post
Thai floods give high-tech sector a climate primer. If a new PC or hard drive is on your holiday wish list, you may be in for a rude surprise: Supplies are running low and prices have skyrocketed, all because of an extreme weather event that took place halfway around the world. Climate Central
Endangered reindeer. Reindeer – also called caribou – are ubiquitous in the world’s northern latitudes, but the populations closest to the North Pole are dwindling because of climate change. Now there is a push to list the large deer as endangered. Living On Earth
Africans must adapt to drought in warming world: Report. Flexible farming methods and the ability to quickly change tactics to deal with unpredictable swings in rainfall will be vital if African nations are to survive climate change in the coming decades, scientists say. National Geographic News
Egg gas finding a rotten result for free-range hens. Eggs from caged hens produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than free range eggs, a new report has found, prompting calls for carbon footprint labelling to be used on all food products in Australia. Sydney Morning Herald
China to unveil new energy consumption strategy. China is set to unveil a plan to impose controls on total energy consumption, said Zhang Ping, director of the National Development and Reform Commission on Friday. China Daily
WWF: Asia Pulp & Paper misleads public about its role in destroying Indonesia's rainforests. Asia Pulp & Paper continues to mislead the public about its role in destroying rainforests and critical tiger habitat across the Indonesian island of Sumatra, alleges a new report from a coalition of Indonesian environmental groups. But APP is sharply contesting the claims. Mongabay
Greens call out Keystone XL deal. Senate Democrats accepted a provision Friday forcing a decision in two months on the Keystone XL oil pipeline as part of the must-pass payroll tax cut package, leaving the White House on the brink of a meltdown with environmental groups. Politico
Europe's plan to 'decarbonize' by 2050 will use natural gas as a bridge. Renewables, more energy efficiency and greater electrification will be the backbone of any future low-carbon E.U. energy mix, although natural gas will also pay a pivotal transitional role, the European Commission said yesterday. ClimateWire
California 'levels playing field' for oil. Oilsands producers will have an easier time exporting their crude to California under stringent climate change policy following a regulator's decision Friday to apply the same scrutiny to all refinery feedstock, regardless of origin. Calgary Herald
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
O Canada, O Canada
I subscribe to a daily news briefing about Climate Change. It carries articles from some of the major global media outlets. Today – 14 December 2011 – as Canada withdraws from Kyoto, here are the headlines
Disasters doom Texas oyster crop. A monstrous bloom of toxic algae looming across the Texas coast has shut down oyster season. The size of the current bloom coupled with the state's ongoing drought and lack of rain could make it one of the biggest and most destructive in history. USA Today
Scrubbing carbon dioxide from air may prove too costly. One of the seemingly ideal and direct solutions to climate change is to efficiently vacuum up greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere. But a new study finds that such a proposal is very far-fetched and tremendously expensive. ClimateWire
Most Americans link bad weather to climate change. More than half of Americans believe that weather in the United States has gotten worse over the past several years, and even more say they believe that global warming is affecting U.S. weather, a new report finds. LiveScience
Cap-and-trade gives Massachusetts economy critical boost, defying naysayers. New report on a ten-state initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions shows the program is a success after three years. Inside Climate News
Biofuel aspirations spur 'land grabs' that hurt the poor, says report. More than 40 million hectares of land has been acquired in developing countries for biofuel production in the past decade, reports a new study published by the International Land Coalition. Mongabay
Delaware wind project put on hold by N.J. company. New Jersey-based NRG Energy says it is putting on hold a project that would have created a wind farm off Delaware's coast. The company cannot find an investment partner. Associated Press
Mexican farmers despair over record drought. Dust blows across once fertile fields in north Mexico, where the worst drought in 70 years has left thousands of cattle dead and destroyed more than two million acres (almost one million hectares) of crops. Agence France-Presse
Cranes overstaying their welcome as weather grows warmer. As a result of warmer autumn temperatures, cranes are remaining in Germany longer than usual, causing damage to crops and sparking conflicts between farmers and environmentalists. Tierramérica
Warm spike in 2010 caused Greenland to rise. Unusually high temperatures last year caused a spike in the melting of Greenland's glaciers, which in turn caused large portions of the underlying bedrock to rise nearly a quarter of an inch. OurAmazingPlanet
Dirty power plant rules abandoned. The Gillard government has dumped an election promise to introduce rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants. Sydney Morning Herald
Closing brown coal plants would help meet target. Almost half of Victoria's 20 per cent emissions reduction target could be met through a federal government program paying to shut heavy-emitting power plants, think tank ClimateWorks says. Sydney Morning Herald
Recovery boosted pollution by 3.9 percent. Greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.256 billion tons of carbon dioxide were emitted in Japan in fiscal 2010, up 3.9 percent from the year before and the first surge in three years amid an economic recovery, the Environment Ministry said Tuesday. Kyodo News
Durban just the start of fight for EU climate chief. European climate chief Connie Hedegaard, who salvaged Durban talks on global warming, has a next-to-impossible task ahead of striving to shame the world's biggest polluters into real action and tackling the EU's own environmental shortcomings. Reuters
Wind, biodiesel subsidies now on the line. With subsidies for corn ethanol set to disappear at the end of the month, the rest of the renewable-energy industry is lobbying lawmakers to keep government incentives going. Des Moines Register
China and India lead condemnation of Canada's Kyoto withdrawal. The countries that Canada pegged as the barriers to a better climate-change deal are leading international criticism over the Harper government’s move to withdraw from the Kyoto accord. Toronto Globe and Mail
To view the source go to The Daily Climate
Disasters doom Texas oyster crop. A monstrous bloom of toxic algae looming across the Texas coast has shut down oyster season. The size of the current bloom coupled with the state's ongoing drought and lack of rain could make it one of the biggest and most destructive in history. USA Today
Scrubbing carbon dioxide from air may prove too costly. One of the seemingly ideal and direct solutions to climate change is to efficiently vacuum up greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere. But a new study finds that such a proposal is very far-fetched and tremendously expensive. ClimateWire
Most Americans link bad weather to climate change. More than half of Americans believe that weather in the United States has gotten worse over the past several years, and even more say they believe that global warming is affecting U.S. weather, a new report finds. LiveScience
Cap-and-trade gives Massachusetts economy critical boost, defying naysayers. New report on a ten-state initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions shows the program is a success after three years. Inside Climate News
Biofuel aspirations spur 'land grabs' that hurt the poor, says report. More than 40 million hectares of land has been acquired in developing countries for biofuel production in the past decade, reports a new study published by the International Land Coalition. Mongabay
Delaware wind project put on hold by N.J. company. New Jersey-based NRG Energy says it is putting on hold a project that would have created a wind farm off Delaware's coast. The company cannot find an investment partner. Associated Press
Mexican farmers despair over record drought. Dust blows across once fertile fields in north Mexico, where the worst drought in 70 years has left thousands of cattle dead and destroyed more than two million acres (almost one million hectares) of crops. Agence France-Presse
Cranes overstaying their welcome as weather grows warmer. As a result of warmer autumn temperatures, cranes are remaining in Germany longer than usual, causing damage to crops and sparking conflicts between farmers and environmentalists. Tierramérica
Warm spike in 2010 caused Greenland to rise. Unusually high temperatures last year caused a spike in the melting of Greenland's glaciers, which in turn caused large portions of the underlying bedrock to rise nearly a quarter of an inch. OurAmazingPlanet
Dirty power plant rules abandoned. The Gillard government has dumped an election promise to introduce rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants. Sydney Morning Herald
Closing brown coal plants would help meet target. Almost half of Victoria's 20 per cent emissions reduction target could be met through a federal government program paying to shut heavy-emitting power plants, think tank ClimateWorks says. Sydney Morning Herald
Recovery boosted pollution by 3.9 percent. Greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.256 billion tons of carbon dioxide were emitted in Japan in fiscal 2010, up 3.9 percent from the year before and the first surge in three years amid an economic recovery, the Environment Ministry said Tuesday. Kyodo News
Durban just the start of fight for EU climate chief. European climate chief Connie Hedegaard, who salvaged Durban talks on global warming, has a next-to-impossible task ahead of striving to shame the world's biggest polluters into real action and tackling the EU's own environmental shortcomings. Reuters
Wind, biodiesel subsidies now on the line. With subsidies for corn ethanol set to disappear at the end of the month, the rest of the renewable-energy industry is lobbying lawmakers to keep government incentives going. Des Moines Register
China and India lead condemnation of Canada's Kyoto withdrawal. The countries that Canada pegged as the barriers to a better climate-change deal are leading international criticism over the Harper government’s move to withdraw from the Kyoto accord. Toronto Globe and Mail
To view the source go to The Daily Climate
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Paul Vallely: Climate change - what's your excuse? Only a psychologist can explain why most of us believe global warming is man-made
I read this today and I think that everyone should read it and think!!! It is from the UK Independent Newspaper
I was putting the rubbish out the other day. Beside the green bin and the grey one I had a half-broken plastic Batman tower that been discarded in a seasonal room-tidy. As I picked it up to put it in the bin a man sped by on a bike – it had to be a bike, of course – and shouted at me: "Citizen of Planet Earth, 2011!"
I was duly stung. I like to think I do my bit for the planet, sorting into the four recycling bins and taking the batteries and fluorescent tubes to the appropriate recycling centre. But to see ourselves as others see us ....
The same thing, writ large, has been true of the wider world at the climate change summit in Durban. Outside eyes have been turned upon the ponderous attempts by world leaders to find an international agreement on how to combat climate change. Local communites, meanwhile, have been more exercised by their efforts to attract Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May to choose their city to be home to the Top Gear festival for the next three years. There's the rub. We want to save the planet but we want the thrill of fast cars and their high-octane greenhouse gas emissions.
A jaded campaigner at the summit, Peg Putt of the Ecosystems Climate Alliance, put it thus: "Countries want to turn up and say stuff that sounds all right when you skip across the surface of it, that plays well to an uninformed audience at home. But they're in no way going to take on vested interests or change direction to do anything real."
This is the real climate change conundrum. If the science is so convincing that humans are melting the ice, acidifying the oceans and making sea levels rise, why is everyone dragging their feet about doing something? And repeatedly so – remember the farce of the previous eco-summit at Copenhagen in 2009, when Hopenhagen slid into Hopelesshagen, disappointment and failure.
A chap named Geoffrey Beattie was bugged by the same question last year and wrote a book called Why Aren't We Saving the Planet?. Beattie is not an environmentalist; he is professor of psychology at the University of Manchester. He concludes that we all have explicit and implicit attitudes to such matters, and that the two do not always coincide. Politicians are no different here. Because we are social creatures we do not want the opprobrium that would go with ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus. That's the explicit level. But we have deeper instincts, formed over time, so that we still see gas-guzzling cars as the status symbols they have been for decades, or red meat as a treat. "People cannot change their emotional valence that quickly," he says.
What the good prof has done is set up a series of experiments that focus, not on our words, but on our gestures or even eye movements as people in a supermarket pick up items which bear a carbon footprint information label. "Our eye-tracking methodology shows that people spend between five and seven seconds choosing a product," he says. "Choices are determined by implicit values. Products have an emotional impact on us."
There are psychological barriers at work. One is a straightforward lack of adequate information. We know that every time we switch on a light, get into a car or reach to a supermarket shelf we are casting an ecological vote of some kind. But most of us are confused about the relative merits or demerits of those choices.
Another problem is that we live in skewed short-term time frames. That is clear on health. When Beattie asks his students why they smoke, the women most often say it is to keep their weight down. But there is also the youthful delusion of immortality; cancer will happen to an older self who is somehow not them.
Then there is the business of free riders. Some eco-practices, such as recycling, make us feel good about ourselves. But others make us feel bad about others. China, India and the US between them produce almost half of the world's annual carbon emissions. None of them is committed to the Kyoto protocol. So why should they be given a free ride on the efforts of the rest of us to cut carbon use?
"The free rider problem creates a lot of psychological pressure," says Beattie. One of his experiments has been to cut Al Gore's climate film An Inconvenient Truth into sections and to measure reaction to them. "The clip showing the increase in the output from Chinese power stations had the reverse effect of other clips. It induces a shift of responsibility away from ourselves."
There are other complex psychological factors. Greenness can become part of your identity. Beattie has observed that by filming people's facial expressions as they recycle. But it can induce two different ways of thinking. One is that if people do small things, such as recycling, that will lead them on to bigger things, like not flying. But with others it gives them a moral licence to do the opposite: "I deserve a reward after all that recycling so I'm flying off on a city break" or "I've bought a Bag for Life so it doesn't matter what I fill it with". Most of us are adept at finding ways to let ourselves off the hook. All of these forces have been at work in Durban, with added calculations of national interest vs the common good.
The way forward is in finding ways to change those underlying implicit values. At the personal level, Fair Trade labels pioneered a way to overcome the information problem; carbon footprinting needs to do the same. Campaigners should look to their vocabulary. Global warming sounds nice and cosy, as if we are all going to live in the Med. Planetary overheating might be a better term.
We need to curb the extremes of the optimism/pessimism spectrum. Neither "It'll all be sorted by technology" nor "We're all doomed so I'm going down the pub" are helpful.
Without changes in our individual psyches there will not be real change at the political level that will turn aspirations into action. Psychology can help us to diagnose the problem; now we must bring it to bear on the solutions.
I was putting the rubbish out the other day. Beside the green bin and the grey one I had a half-broken plastic Batman tower that been discarded in a seasonal room-tidy. As I picked it up to put it in the bin a man sped by on a bike – it had to be a bike, of course – and shouted at me: "Citizen of Planet Earth, 2011!"
I was duly stung. I like to think I do my bit for the planet, sorting into the four recycling bins and taking the batteries and fluorescent tubes to the appropriate recycling centre. But to see ourselves as others see us ....
The same thing, writ large, has been true of the wider world at the climate change summit in Durban. Outside eyes have been turned upon the ponderous attempts by world leaders to find an international agreement on how to combat climate change. Local communites, meanwhile, have been more exercised by their efforts to attract Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May to choose their city to be home to the Top Gear festival for the next three years. There's the rub. We want to save the planet but we want the thrill of fast cars and their high-octane greenhouse gas emissions.
A jaded campaigner at the summit, Peg Putt of the Ecosystems Climate Alliance, put it thus: "Countries want to turn up and say stuff that sounds all right when you skip across the surface of it, that plays well to an uninformed audience at home. But they're in no way going to take on vested interests or change direction to do anything real."
This is the real climate change conundrum. If the science is so convincing that humans are melting the ice, acidifying the oceans and making sea levels rise, why is everyone dragging their feet about doing something? And repeatedly so – remember the farce of the previous eco-summit at Copenhagen in 2009, when Hopenhagen slid into Hopelesshagen, disappointment and failure.
A chap named Geoffrey Beattie was bugged by the same question last year and wrote a book called Why Aren't We Saving the Planet?. Beattie is not an environmentalist; he is professor of psychology at the University of Manchester. He concludes that we all have explicit and implicit attitudes to such matters, and that the two do not always coincide. Politicians are no different here. Because we are social creatures we do not want the opprobrium that would go with ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus. That's the explicit level. But we have deeper instincts, formed over time, so that we still see gas-guzzling cars as the status symbols they have been for decades, or red meat as a treat. "People cannot change their emotional valence that quickly," he says.
What the good prof has done is set up a series of experiments that focus, not on our words, but on our gestures or even eye movements as people in a supermarket pick up items which bear a carbon footprint information label. "Our eye-tracking methodology shows that people spend between five and seven seconds choosing a product," he says. "Choices are determined by implicit values. Products have an emotional impact on us."
There are psychological barriers at work. One is a straightforward lack of adequate information. We know that every time we switch on a light, get into a car or reach to a supermarket shelf we are casting an ecological vote of some kind. But most of us are confused about the relative merits or demerits of those choices.
Another problem is that we live in skewed short-term time frames. That is clear on health. When Beattie asks his students why they smoke, the women most often say it is to keep their weight down. But there is also the youthful delusion of immortality; cancer will happen to an older self who is somehow not them.
Then there is the business of free riders. Some eco-practices, such as recycling, make us feel good about ourselves. But others make us feel bad about others. China, India and the US between them produce almost half of the world's annual carbon emissions. None of them is committed to the Kyoto protocol. So why should they be given a free ride on the efforts of the rest of us to cut carbon use?
"The free rider problem creates a lot of psychological pressure," says Beattie. One of his experiments has been to cut Al Gore's climate film An Inconvenient Truth into sections and to measure reaction to them. "The clip showing the increase in the output from Chinese power stations had the reverse effect of other clips. It induces a shift of responsibility away from ourselves."
There are other complex psychological factors. Greenness can become part of your identity. Beattie has observed that by filming people's facial expressions as they recycle. But it can induce two different ways of thinking. One is that if people do small things, such as recycling, that will lead them on to bigger things, like not flying. But with others it gives them a moral licence to do the opposite: "I deserve a reward after all that recycling so I'm flying off on a city break" or "I've bought a Bag for Life so it doesn't matter what I fill it with". Most of us are adept at finding ways to let ourselves off the hook. All of these forces have been at work in Durban, with added calculations of national interest vs the common good.
The way forward is in finding ways to change those underlying implicit values. At the personal level, Fair Trade labels pioneered a way to overcome the information problem; carbon footprinting needs to do the same. Campaigners should look to their vocabulary. Global warming sounds nice and cosy, as if we are all going to live in the Med. Planetary overheating might be a better term.
We need to curb the extremes of the optimism/pessimism spectrum. Neither "It'll all be sorted by technology" nor "We're all doomed so I'm going down the pub" are helpful.
Without changes in our individual psyches there will not be real change at the political level that will turn aspirations into action. Psychology can help us to diagnose the problem; now we must bring it to bear on the solutions.
Durban
Are the Durban Climate Change talks a success or a failure??
It is far too early to tell but sadly I guess history will regard all our efforts as failures when the generations of tomorrow have to live with the restraints caused by the excesses of today.
We are too selfish and too self centred and tomorrow's world looks very grim - and that is so sad.
Maybe human civilisation as we know it does not deserve to survive!
It is far too early to tell but sadly I guess history will regard all our efforts as failures when the generations of tomorrow have to live with the restraints caused by the excesses of today.
We are too selfish and too self centred and tomorrow's world looks very grim - and that is so sad.
Maybe human civilisation as we know it does not deserve to survive!
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Fear is not the answer
I have never been one to want to reinvent the wheel, as the saying goes and so I include the following article from the Guardian Newspaper which I think is excellent .......
The chances are, if you are reading this, that you might also have seen either The Age of Stupid or An Inconvenient Truth. To those who fight to get climate change to the top of the agenda, these two movies are essential campaigning tools. Now I don't dispute their power and Messrs Gore and Postlethwaite are to be credited for sticking their heads above the parapet, but I have a problem with them: they left me feeling numb and overwhelmed. Gore stacks up the evidence of the momentum towards dangerous tipping points so effectively that by the time he gets on to "solutions" very near the end of his hundred minute presentation, you feel you are about to be demolished by a juggernaut.
I had a similar reaction when I first saw The Age of Stupid. At the end of a packed screening earlier in the year, one of my Operation Noah colleagues stood up and bluntly asked the audience: "So having seen that, who wants to get involved in campaigning?" There was a chilled and muted response. It may be me, but a very large amount of the film left me thinking that all the images of flooding, drought and destruction which Postlethwaite uncovers in his film archives are inevitable. From his futuristic vantage point of 2055, he shows a world that, in a mere 40 to 50 years, has gone to the dogs. And in a world where denial is still very much a factor, it's amazing how quickly people switch from denying the scientific evidence for human-induced global warming, to embracing the view that it's all too late and we're all doomed. Of course, that "flip" still allows you to go on behaving as before. "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
Which raises all sorts of questions that lobbyists and campaigners have been grappling with for years now on all this: what is the best way to engage the human imagination on the issue of our time? Guilt and fear are very limited in their appeal and, more often than not, only induce a greater desire to turn away and carry on as before. What's encouraging is to come across so many schoolchildren who are getting more and more familiar with the notion of stewardship. It's a term that has both appeal to religious and secular mindsets: namely that because of our lofty status in terms of biological and intellectual complexity compared to other species, this carries with it a responsibility to cherish our surroundings. Man's intelligence, as we have seen from history, can be put to a variety of creative and destructive uses: compare lunar landings and the discovery of penicillin with war and genocide. Ahead of December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen, we are now facing an epic collective decision as a species: business as usual and sleepwalking towards all sorts of potential horrors, or reverting back an understanding that sees ourselves not as usurpers of nature as a commodity, but as protective guardians of a wondrous world that is threatened – uniquely, by its own most intelligent life form. Fossil fuels which took millions and million of years to be formed by slow natural processes are being released into the biosphere at a dizzying rate with destabilising consequences which are there for all to see.
I believe virtue and example are contagious. Look at what happened recently with the launch of the 10:10 campaign, which the Guardian is backing. No sooner had Ed Miliband signed up to cut his own carbon emissions by 10%, than we were being told the whole Tory front bench were getting ready to endorse the pledge. Within 24 hours, the entire cabinet had also jumped on board and Liberal Democrats announced they were looking at moves to make this a resolution which would bind the whole party. Cynical politicking? Maybe in part, but this is all about momentum and taking the notion of stewardship beyond the perceived domain of the elite middle classes into society as a whole.
We are gnawing away at the very womb that sustains us. Reversing that trend needs as big an army of stewards as we can possibly muster.
The chances are, if you are reading this, that you might also have seen either The Age of Stupid or An Inconvenient Truth. To those who fight to get climate change to the top of the agenda, these two movies are essential campaigning tools. Now I don't dispute their power and Messrs Gore and Postlethwaite are to be credited for sticking their heads above the parapet, but I have a problem with them: they left me feeling numb and overwhelmed. Gore stacks up the evidence of the momentum towards dangerous tipping points so effectively that by the time he gets on to "solutions" very near the end of his hundred minute presentation, you feel you are about to be demolished by a juggernaut.
I had a similar reaction when I first saw The Age of Stupid. At the end of a packed screening earlier in the year, one of my Operation Noah colleagues stood up and bluntly asked the audience: "So having seen that, who wants to get involved in campaigning?" There was a chilled and muted response. It may be me, but a very large amount of the film left me thinking that all the images of flooding, drought and destruction which Postlethwaite uncovers in his film archives are inevitable. From his futuristic vantage point of 2055, he shows a world that, in a mere 40 to 50 years, has gone to the dogs. And in a world where denial is still very much a factor, it's amazing how quickly people switch from denying the scientific evidence for human-induced global warming, to embracing the view that it's all too late and we're all doomed. Of course, that "flip" still allows you to go on behaving as before. "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
Which raises all sorts of questions that lobbyists and campaigners have been grappling with for years now on all this: what is the best way to engage the human imagination on the issue of our time? Guilt and fear are very limited in their appeal and, more often than not, only induce a greater desire to turn away and carry on as before. What's encouraging is to come across so many schoolchildren who are getting more and more familiar with the notion of stewardship. It's a term that has both appeal to religious and secular mindsets: namely that because of our lofty status in terms of biological and intellectual complexity compared to other species, this carries with it a responsibility to cherish our surroundings. Man's intelligence, as we have seen from history, can be put to a variety of creative and destructive uses: compare lunar landings and the discovery of penicillin with war and genocide. Ahead of December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen, we are now facing an epic collective decision as a species: business as usual and sleepwalking towards all sorts of potential horrors, or reverting back an understanding that sees ourselves not as usurpers of nature as a commodity, but as protective guardians of a wondrous world that is threatened – uniquely, by its own most intelligent life form. Fossil fuels which took millions and million of years to be formed by slow natural processes are being released into the biosphere at a dizzying rate with destabilising consequences which are there for all to see.
I believe virtue and example are contagious. Look at what happened recently with the launch of the 10:10 campaign, which the Guardian is backing. No sooner had Ed Miliband signed up to cut his own carbon emissions by 10%, than we were being told the whole Tory front bench were getting ready to endorse the pledge. Within 24 hours, the entire cabinet had also jumped on board and Liberal Democrats announced they were looking at moves to make this a resolution which would bind the whole party. Cynical politicking? Maybe in part, but this is all about momentum and taking the notion of stewardship beyond the perceived domain of the elite middle classes into society as a whole.
We are gnawing away at the very womb that sustains us. Reversing that trend needs as big an army of stewards as we can possibly muster.
Sunday, 6 September 2009
More from Paul Elrich
Dear Friends,
There is growing consensus among environmental scientists that the scholarly community has adequately detailed how to deal with the major issues of the human predicament caused by our success as a species – climate disruption, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, toxification of the planet, the deterioration of the epidemiological environment, the potential impacts of nuclear war, racism, sexism, economic inequity, and on and on. I and my colleagues believe humanity must take rapid steps to ameliorate them. But, in essence, nothing serious is being done – as exemplified by the “much talk and no action” on climate change. The central problem is clearly not a need for more natural science (although in many areas it would be very helpful) but rather a need for better understanding of human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct humanity toward a sustainable society before it is to late.
That’s why a group of natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities decided to inaugurate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB — pronounced “mob”). It was so named to emphasize that it is human behavior, toward one another and toward the planet that sustains all of us, that requires rapid modification. The idea is that the MAHB might become a basic mechanism to expose society to the full range of population-environment-resource-ethics-equity-power
There is growing consensus among environmental scientists that the scholarly community has adequately detailed how to deal with the major issues of the human predicament caused by our success as a species – climate disruption, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, toxification of the planet, the deterioration of the epidemiological environment, the potential impacts of nuclear war, racism, sexism, economic inequity, and on and on. I and my colleagues believe humanity must take rapid steps to ameliorate them. But, in essence, nothing serious is being done – as exemplified by the “much talk and no action” on climate change. The central problem is clearly not a need for more natural science (although in many areas it would be very helpful) but rather a need for better understanding of human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct humanity toward a sustainable society before it is to late.
That’s why a group of natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities decided to inaugurate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB — pronounced “mob”). It was so named to emphasize that it is human behavior, toward one another and toward the planet that sustains all of us, that requires rapid modification. The idea is that the MAHB might become a basic mechanism to expose society to the full range of population-environment-resource-ethics-equity-power
humanity's collision with the natural world
Paul Ehrlich, citing 'humanity's collision with the natural world,' launches a new forum to direct human activity toward a more sustainable future.
5 September 2009
By Douglas Fischer
Daily Climate Editor
Frustrated by society's inability to tackle pressing environmental dilemmas, Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich on Friday announced a new endeavor aimed at rapidly turning human behavior toward a more sustainable future.
In essence, nothing serious is being done – as exemplified by the 'much talk and no action' on climate change.
- Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Called the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior, or MAHB (pronounced "mob"), the venture seeks to link a broad array of seemingly unrelated human activities that endanger humanity's future - from racism to climate change, loss of biological diversity, water shortages, declining food security, economic justice and pollution.
The hope, Ehrlich said, is that by making these larger connections, more effective solutions can be found.
"Basically, absolutely nothing is happening," he said. "We don't need more scientific evidence that we're screwing ourselves. We need to get beyond the cultural discussions we're having now."
The problem, Ehrlich said, is clearly not a need for more natural science. Rather, it is the need for a better understanding of "human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct humanity toward a sustainable society before it is too late."
Organizers envision the MAHB as a global conference, involving scholars, politicians and a diverse spectrum of stakeholders – from media and industry to religious communities and foundations. Organizers also hope to encourage a "global discussion" about human goals and to explore ways to steer cultural change toward creation of a more sustainable society.
Ehrlich said he would partially model the MAHB after the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where hundreds of scientists from nearly every nation and representing diverse disciplines sort the scientific validity of claims and attempt to find equitable solutions.
Another model is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, developed by environmental and social scientists to assess the condition of Earth's life-support systems, he said.
But the IPCC derives its power and authority from its governmental mandate, noted Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.
Governments signing on to the United Nations' climate framework have asked the scientific community to provide a clear consensus on the science and then endorse those findings via policy, said Huq, lead author of the adaptation and mitigation chapter in the IPCC's most recent assessment.
It's not clear - yet - who the MAHB is meant to inform.
For the IPCC, "the governments are the ones who have asked for the information, and they are the ones who endorse the information," Huq said. "If scientists just produce a report, and ... there isn't really anyone in a position to take it up, nothing happens to it."
"We are just preaching."
Still, Huq agreed with the premise, adding that the endeavor is something "we certainly need."
But for now, the MAHB is just 10 big thinkers, among them Stanford climatologist Steve Schneider, Science editor and Stanford president emeritus Donald Kennedy, Washington State University sociologist Eugene Rosa and University of Oslo philosopher Nina Witoszek.
Ehrlich, president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, is considered a pioneer in the study of popoulation science. He was one of the first scholars to alert the public to the problems of overpopulation and to raise issues of population, resources and the environment as matters of public policy.
Ehrlich has floated earlier visions of this venture before, losing funding at Stanford for what he described as a "short try-out." He's thinking bigger this time: He hopes to officially kick-off the MAHB in 2011 with a "world mega conference" akin to the 1992 United Nations "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro.
That 1992 summit remains the UN's largest environmental gathering, with 172 governments, 108 heads of states, 2,400 representatives of non-governmental organizations and another 17,000 attendees at a parallel global forum. It led to the adoption of a wide-ranging blueprint for action on sustainable development worldwide. The Kyoto Protocol and the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December are two products.
It is unclear whether the MAHB will achieve such a level of success or is destined to the same obscurity as earlier efforts. For now it is little more than a website with a mission statement and a blog.
But finding a way to make climate science more relevant to policy makers has become an increasingly pressing question in academia, and Ehrlich is pressing forward.
"A global consensus on the most crucial behavioral issues is unlikely to emerge promptly from the MAHB – or any other international forum," he said. But "if the scientific diagnosis of humanity's collision with the natural world is accurate ... what alternative is there to trying?"
5 September 2009
By Douglas Fischer
Daily Climate Editor
Frustrated by society's inability to tackle pressing environmental dilemmas, Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich on Friday announced a new endeavor aimed at rapidly turning human behavior toward a more sustainable future.
In essence, nothing serious is being done – as exemplified by the 'much talk and no action' on climate change.
- Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Called the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior, or MAHB (pronounced "mob"), the venture seeks to link a broad array of seemingly unrelated human activities that endanger humanity's future - from racism to climate change, loss of biological diversity, water shortages, declining food security, economic justice and pollution.
The hope, Ehrlich said, is that by making these larger connections, more effective solutions can be found.
"Basically, absolutely nothing is happening," he said. "We don't need more scientific evidence that we're screwing ourselves. We need to get beyond the cultural discussions we're having now."
The problem, Ehrlich said, is clearly not a need for more natural science. Rather, it is the need for a better understanding of "human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct humanity toward a sustainable society before it is too late."
Organizers envision the MAHB as a global conference, involving scholars, politicians and a diverse spectrum of stakeholders – from media and industry to religious communities and foundations. Organizers also hope to encourage a "global discussion" about human goals and to explore ways to steer cultural change toward creation of a more sustainable society.
Ehrlich said he would partially model the MAHB after the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where hundreds of scientists from nearly every nation and representing diverse disciplines sort the scientific validity of claims and attempt to find equitable solutions.
Another model is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, developed by environmental and social scientists to assess the condition of Earth's life-support systems, he said.
But the IPCC derives its power and authority from its governmental mandate, noted Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.
Governments signing on to the United Nations' climate framework have asked the scientific community to provide a clear consensus on the science and then endorse those findings via policy, said Huq, lead author of the adaptation and mitigation chapter in the IPCC's most recent assessment.
It's not clear - yet - who the MAHB is meant to inform.
For the IPCC, "the governments are the ones who have asked for the information, and they are the ones who endorse the information," Huq said. "If scientists just produce a report, and ... there isn't really anyone in a position to take it up, nothing happens to it."
"We are just preaching."
Still, Huq agreed with the premise, adding that the endeavor is something "we certainly need."
But for now, the MAHB is just 10 big thinkers, among them Stanford climatologist Steve Schneider, Science editor and Stanford president emeritus Donald Kennedy, Washington State University sociologist Eugene Rosa and University of Oslo philosopher Nina Witoszek.
Ehrlich, president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, is considered a pioneer in the study of popoulation science. He was one of the first scholars to alert the public to the problems of overpopulation and to raise issues of population, resources and the environment as matters of public policy.
Ehrlich has floated earlier visions of this venture before, losing funding at Stanford for what he described as a "short try-out." He's thinking bigger this time: He hopes to officially kick-off the MAHB in 2011 with a "world mega conference" akin to the 1992 United Nations "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro.
That 1992 summit remains the UN's largest environmental gathering, with 172 governments, 108 heads of states, 2,400 representatives of non-governmental organizations and another 17,000 attendees at a parallel global forum. It led to the adoption of a wide-ranging blueprint for action on sustainable development worldwide. The Kyoto Protocol and the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December are two products.
It is unclear whether the MAHB will achieve such a level of success or is destined to the same obscurity as earlier efforts. For now it is little more than a website with a mission statement and a blog.
But finding a way to make climate science more relevant to policy makers has become an increasingly pressing question in academia, and Ehrlich is pressing forward.
"A global consensus on the most crucial behavioral issues is unlikely to emerge promptly from the MAHB – or any other international forum," he said. But "if the scientific diagnosis of humanity's collision with the natural world is accurate ... what alternative is there to trying?"
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