“There is no freedom without knowledge.” - James Watson, molecular biologist

PING PONG BALLS, APPLES AND EARTH---OUR THIN SKIN OF LIFE -

From Mt. Everest to the deepest ocean canyons---the Earth would feel smooth as a ping pong ball if it were reduced to that size.

The skin of an apple is relatively thicker than Earth’s atmosphere. The diameter of an apple is about 75 times thicker than it’s skin.

Earth’s diameter is roughly 125 times the thickness of it’s atmosphere.

Therefore, when we talk about Humans destroying the Planet what we are really referring to is disturbing the delicate equilibrium of that thin surface layer of ocean, land and atmosphere in which most of life thrives. [There are living organisms thousands of feet below the surface---perhaps they will reseed life if we blow it.]

Detonating our lunatic stash of nuclear weapons would utterly destroy the environment.

Neoconservative Boy Wonder, columnist Jonah Goldberg, wants us Humans to fear an asteroid hit rather than worrying about something not quite so sudden---though climate change is something we can actually influence now.

True enough---a sufficiently large meteorite, comet or asteroid impacting Earth would make the Planet ring like a bell, blast a hole in one side and pop a wad of material out the other side. That would send the Earth spinning into another orbit and, of course, strip away the atmosphere.

Human caused climate change, however---as with so many of our environmental excesses---is caused by incremental changes in lifestyles and the resultant accumulation of great amounts of industrial and somewhat lesser amounts of individual effluvia.

PUBLIC OPINION AND SCIENCE -

The beauty of science is that scientists are totally responsible for their findings---and those findings must be based on the scientific method of using facts, evidence and logic. There is only one way to refute or alter the actual findings of science: better science using strictly the above described methodology.

Just as with evolution science, public opinion doesn’t change the findings of climate science one way or the other. In fact, climate change denial can be explained by evolution itself.

Humans evolved to react to immediate threats. Rustling noises in the grass. A saber-toothed tiger about to spring. Another Humanoid with a club. Stopping to think about things could get our ancestors killed. [Today it can get you labeled a moderate.]

We react very poorly to things that occur so slowly we can‘t notice them in a human instant. We are prone to short term thinking. But now we have to use reasoning capacity to respond to a crisis on a global scale that requires willful determination and long-term goals.

In terms of Earth‘s climate history as viewed over a period of a few hundred years, human-caused climate change is happening quite rapidly. But from the perspective of the average modern human consciousness, climate change is barely noticeable.

Public opinion is very important, however, because it affects the politics of how we use science. That’s why the public is now being bombarded with anti-climate change propaganda by the very same commercial interests who profit from polluting the environment, who got us into our resource wars, who broke our economy and instituted the private insurance death-panel-sickness-care-system.

These forces of antiscience are still around, still hiring political lobbyists, still making political contributions, still sponsoring mouthpieces to write columns in the major media, still sponsoring talking heads on radio and TV, still taking out ads and still cheerleading for more of the same. And people are still listening.

The enemies of science have one great advantage---they don’t feel constrained by the strict rules, standards and values of science. The enemies of science can pull their facts out of their bung holes and repeat them endlessly---long after they have been proven wrong. Facts and information that science would unceremoniously boot right out of the debate are lovingly nurtured by the commercial, political and cultural enemies of science and repeated to a public that reacts to emotional impact and repetition rather than the reasoned consideration that is the hallmark of science. This advantage was used to great effect by the forces of antievolution---the rules of science don’t matter when it is science itself you are seeking to destroy.

The public is smart enough to slap those cell phones up ‘side their heads; sometimes knowledgeable enough to know how the technology works; but collectively stupid enough to constantly misuse major science to fulfill minor needs.

Worse, as Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Or prolonging his lifestyle and belief system beyond their sell-by dates.

According to a recent poll (mentioned in blog comments to part three), fewer people now believe in global warming (57%) and fewer still believe that humans cause climate change (44%). That is understandable---at least in evolutionary terms---more immediate problems have manifested and climate change is the easiest of those numerous troubles to dismiss from already fearful and distracted minds.

Neoconservative columnist Jonah Goldberg gleefully touts the above poll numbers to claim that “fear mongering…from Al Gore, academia and Hollywood” has lost popularity for climate change among the public (Anchorage Daily News, 10-30-2009, “A solution we can’t afford isn’t one”).

Goldberg is all fluff---clever, but all neocon fluff. Forget about Al Gore and Hollywood---what Jonah Goldberg intends by use of the word “academia” is to denigrate the mainstream climate scientists who actually work in the field. He aims right straight for the simple minds.

Goldberg also blames the public’s loss of faith in climate change on an inaccurate report floating around that there has been no increase in “global temperatures” since 1998.

IT’S THE SCIENCE, STUPID -

Actually, this decade is, as physicist and climatologist Joseph J. Romm points out, on track to be the hottest on record. He cites UK’s National Weather Service, the Met Office---http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/policymakers/policy/slowdown.html . In the past ten years, most annual cycles have been close to the global average temperature reached in 1998. The years from 2000 to 2008 were in the top 14 warmest years recorded.

According to the Met Office there has been a recent wave of relatively hot years. And the decade of the 2000s is going to be the hottest decade in the temperature record, warmer than the decade of the 1990s, which at the time was the hottest decade on record. 

What confuses people is that the increase is small---in tenths of degrees. However, as small and fragile as our atmosphere (and our oceans) may be, relative to the size of the Planet---we are still talking about huge masses of air and water relative to our puny lives. That the temperatures of our atmospheric and oceanic masses are being impacted by Human activity---however incrementally---reflects the extent of our influence on climate.

Those who don’t even believe that climate change is occurring at all are oblivious to the hard business reality that oil companies now want to drill in newly-opened seas. That commercial fishing interests are already seeking to get into newly ice-free Arctic waters. That shipping interests are looking at the more ice-free Northwest Passage for new trade routes. And that our Defense Department is not only concerned about security and sovereignty in the newly ice-free regions but has also written plans to cope with the social upheaval, political disruptions, and the military competition for dwindling resources and other conflicts expected to arise world-wide from conditions specifically caused by climate change.

TOO MUCH -

“God bless global warming” - an unfortunate comment by a fellow “Voices” blogger

Some people entertain the cozy notion that climate change will mean more warm, sunny days to touch up their tans. Another common misconception is that warmer climate and more CO2 will increase crop yields.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) does suggest that agricultural yields may increase moderately for North America but will vary in different areas. The IPCC says that those areas already dependent upon irrigation or already thirsty for water will see declines in agricultural production.

Warming climate areas draw moisture. While warmer air does hold more moisture, that moisture is pulled away from other areas, creating more drought conditions. Because cooling areas cause rain to fall, climate change means that wet areas will get wetter and dry areas will become drier. Not good.

Most of the Earth’s grain-producing areas tend to be on the dry side already. The Ukraine, Northern China and the prairies of Canada and the US West would become too dry. In areas of Texas and Oklahoma conditions are already approaching those experienced during the 1930s in the Great Dust Bowl era. Already we have seen more droughts in the US and Canadian West, in California, the Southeast and in Florida---important agricultural areas.

As any farmer knows it’s not just the amount of rain but when it falls that affects crop yields. My Hopi Indian friends in Northern Arizona were subsistence dry-farmers. They focused their elaborate ceremonial cycles to bring moisture in those few critical weeks during the germination and maturation cycles of their crops.

There is also such a thing as too much rain. In the US Midwest last summer, crops were destroyed by flooding. The increasing rains predicted as the result of climate change are expected to fall during severe storms rather than being evenly distributed onto croplands. This will over-saturate farm lands and erode the soils.

The Mormon farmer who rented out the old farmhouse where I once stayed in Arizona told me that, ideally, he would like it to rain just a little bit every day.

Most of the world’s food is produced within a few miles of oceans---vulnerable to a rise in sea levels. Rising seas will ruin agricultural land such as Egypt’s low-lying Nile Delta and the Mekong Delta, infiltrating areas of fresh groundwater with salt water, making the lands useless for crops. Salty ground water migrates up through the soil and turns fruitful agricultural lands into salt deserts.

TOO LITTLE

The well-documented decline of glaciers is a disaster for farmers in many areas of the Planet. Glaciers store up snow accumulation which is then melted and released during the height of Summer. Many rivers depend on glaciers as their main source of water in the Summer.

Areas such as the US West, Canada’s prairies and some areas of South America and Central Asia depend on glacial runoff to irrigate crops during the driest parts of the season. According to the World Glacier Monitoring Service http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/ the rate at which glaciers are now melting will make glacial runoff a negligible source of water within the next 20 to 40 years. India, traditionally dependent upon glacial runoff from the Himalayas will experience crop failures and mass starvation.

STARVATION

A Daily News letter-writer calls oil “mother’s milk.“

“Save the polar bears and starve the children,” the letter says.

Starvation is already occurring---“Worldwide starvation worse now than ever,” says an article in the 9-20-09 Anchorage Daily News. The causes are “complex” and include “climate change,” with “drought” cited as the “single most common cause of food shortages on the planet.” The article also cites political neglect and complacency due to past grain surpluses which are now no more.

In the past ten years, the world has tended to eat more grains than it has produced---grain reserves are now close to record lows. Many countries have already banned or limited food exports just in order to feed their own populations.

As oil prices increase, more agricultural lands will be devoted to producing biofuels, further reducing edible crop yields. Obviously, the poor people among us will, as usual, suffer most because only the rich will be able to buy ever-dwindling food supplies.

Fisheries are also under siege by climate change (see OCEAN ACIDIFICATION in part three of this series). It is anticipated that the combination of over-fishing and climate change will put an end to most fisheries by the latter part of this Century.

Children are already dying in Bangladesh because our “mother’s milk” is poisoning the Planet. A cyclone in May of this year took 300 lives in Bangladesh, caused 375,000 people to lose their homes and wiped out 4,000 kilometers of roads.

Atiq Rahman, a member of the IPCC, noted that large cyclones used to occur every 15 to 20 years. “We are getting a big one now every two or three years,“ he said.

Tigers now swim across rivers from their flooded habitats and dwindling food supplies to kill and eat humans in Bangladesh.

By the year 2050, predicts the IPCC, 20 million people will be displaced from their homes in Bangladesh due to rising sea levels and increased storms caused by changes in the weather.

Those refugees will wind up in the slums of Dhaka, says “Ram” Rahman, who urges the wealthier nations to accept refugees of climate change.

The city of Dahka is already strained with 12 million residents---and is expected to have 20 million people by 2020 due to an influx of climate refugees, according to estimates by the World Bank.

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s liveability poll, Dhaka is already ranked as the 138th worst city in the world to live in---only Harare, Zimbabwe is graded lower.

Rabab Fatima, of the International Organization for Migration in Dhaka, blames the rapid urbanization of that city mainly on the “direct consequences of environmental degradation.”

Dealing with climate refugees is just one of the problems already facing some nations. It is a subject that should be addressed at the upcoming Copenhagen summit when a new climate treaty is written to take the place of the expiring Kyoto Protocol.

POLLUTED, DILUTED OR BLOATED -

We have literally fouled our own nest. We have poisoned the air and the waters and the land. All our bodies---even the bodies of people in the most remote parts of the Planet---contain traces of nasty chemicals, hormones, medicines, pesticides (biocides) and radioactive fallout from nuclear tests.

And why are so many women suffering from breast cancer? Just as the body fat of marine mammals concentrates pollutants, so too do fatty human female breast tissues become final repositories for traces of our industrial poisons.

Our farm products no longer contain as much of nutrients as they once did---the result of artificially increasing yields and depleting the soil. Our beef today has a different and less healthful ratio of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids---the result of artificially increasing yields of meat by feedlot practices that literally make our beef cattle obese just before the slaughter. It is well known that feeding corn and other grains exclusively to cattle will sicken and kill them if continued too long. Our agricultural production is tending downward in any case.

POLAR BEARS OR HUMANS?

There is no real choice. The environmental reality is that Humans are not separate from polar bears. We are both mammalian life forms dependent upon oceans and ocean ice remaining stable. Indeed, the modern Human system and it’s agricultural plants and livestock were most recently developed during a waning phase of ice age conditions.

We have already moved the climate system. Ice buffers the temperature of the ocean---which is immoveable like a boulder, but once it gets rolling it’s hard to stop. As stated above, the poorest regions of Earth are now suffering the early effects.

These first and most obvious victims of climate change didn’t produce the condition---the wealthy and industrial nations pour out the most greenhouse gases. But soon enough those who created the problem will also be suffering just as directly---in low-lying areas like Florida and New York City.

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CLIMATE CYCLES BUT THIS ONE MEANS DISASTER FOR THE SYSTEM -

There has always been climate change. But the relative suddenness of this current change is already impacting our very fragile modern economy which is based on a rather narrow and unnatural way of living and some very specialized industrial agricultural methods with relatively small variations of specific crops highly vulnerable to disease and climate change.

Potatoes were developed in South America with hundreds of varieties. Now, as one farmer said of the single variety of potato he and so many other farmers grow in vast quantities for French fries---“If one potato gets a disease they all get the disease.”

In other words, most of the crops we grow today have no diversity. Diversity is how the natural selection process of evolution is able to keep up with natural pests, predators, diseases and changes in climate. If one variety doesn’t survive another one will. This is how climate change has driven evolution in the past.

Our economic system has even less diversity---it depends on people consuming their brains out. Ironically---with all the fear about the costs of global warming mitigation---it is the precious economy itself that will be devastated.

Like a bunch of wild-eyed pistol wavers we Americans never seriously considered the costs of destructive warfare before we charged into the Middle East. We never bothered to consider the consequences of these destabilizing wars---anyone who wanted to think about it first was labeled a “traitor“ and we plunged ahead, urged on by the shameless stoking of primitive fears.

Now, right on cue from our corporate masters, everyone is suddenly a “skeptic” about the costs and consequences of dealing with health care and mitigating climate change. Americans are not skeptics---they are saps.

HOMO HABILUS

Our smaller-brained ancestors survived without significant change for four million years. Analysis of dust carried on the wind from Africa and deposited on the sea floor reveals that, when brains stayed the same size, Africa’s climate was stable.

Homo habilus, the Tool Maker, subsequently arose following violent swings of climate 2,000,000 years ago that featured freshwater lakes the size of Lake Victoria coming and going. Climate became wet-dry-wet within periods of just 1000 years---along with a slow, general, drying trend. Jungles became deserts and volcanoes erupted. Surviving under these conditions is thought to have accelerated brain growth in our ancestors.

Modern Humans resist change but our ancestors evolved by adapting to many conditions. We are creatures of climate change. But we can’t evolve our way out of this mess---it‘s happening too fast and, unfortunately, the systems and constructs of modern civilization have become extremely specialized and extremely vulnerable. Ideologically frozen, our unregulated “free market” capitalistic, economic system of cancer-like growth has so far been unable to evolve to deal with it’s own bubble-machine limitations---never mind climate change.

The systems of modern civilization were not only developed during a rather narrow period of post ice age climate that now seems to be accelerating into something else but have only very recently become dependent upon petroleum and other fossil fuels. Instead of climate change measured in thousands of years we are now seeing change within a hundred years---with the terrible possibility of climate feedback loops causing ever-increasing degrees of warming.

Most cycles of Nature and Human behaviors such as economies go up and down in waves. Because cyclical things don’t always just come crashing down all at once---but come back for a time---the public is easily fooled in the short term that impending disasters such as climate change, economic recession, etc. are essentially over.

Given our Human inability to think in the long term, the climate may superficially appear to “stabilize“---at least within the short reference period of a year or two. Also, as with climate “cycles,” we will probably see an economic cycle returning to some “prosperity.”

But the amplitude of each cycle will go higher and fall lower---and proceed at an increasingly accelerated pace. Not only is this current climate cycle coming on with great speed, but the effects to our modern civilization will come faster than in the past simply because our dependence upon high-speed technology means that any failures will also come on at high-speeds. Our narrow modern lives are even more fragile than our narrow slice of environment.

Among the expected effects of world-wide climate change is social unrest. In other words, starvation, senseless violence, roaming gangs, hoarding, stealing food, escalating resource wars and the rich barricaded behind guarded gates. We will become just like those poor countries we watch on TV---angry, poverty-stricken and oppressed peoples living under brutal, militaristic governments.

Climate change or not, one thing is for sure---Americans are not going to be able to live quite the lifestyles they have enjoyed for the past few insensible decades. True, those who skim the wealth from our “free market” economy may live high off the hog for a while. And you can bet that some of our returning soldiers and mercenary contractors will find employment as security guards for these rich corporatists to keep the expected hungry and angry crowds from breaking in and stealing back what has been taken from them during the vast transfer of wealth to the already rich during the past few decades. “Security” forces will be needed to “keep order” on the streets of America when resources become more and more tight in these global warming days.

You think things are tough now? There once were many as thirty branches of pre-Human species besides Neanderthals---they have all died out except for us. That’s how evolution works---messy.

Rudy Wittshirk

part five will deal with corporatist efforts to promote near-useless climate solutions just to make more profits; the feeble will of oil-soaked politicians; and what some people are doing.

part six will look to the so-called “sustainable future“ and the old, indigenous way of looking at life and the Planet.