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A Note on Climate Change [Again]
By now, probably everyone has heard the story about how a frog will die in boiling water. The story goes like this: if you place a frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly, slowly increase the temperature to the boiling point, the frog will adjust to the rising temperature and will not jump out of the water to save itself. The frog dies.
Now, I really don't know if this story is true or not. It could be an urban legend. But is has a certain "truthiness" to it. It sounds like it should be true, even though it might not be.
At any rate, as I look out my window, I can still see the effects of Typhoon Morakot, which recently made landfall in Fujian Province, hundreds of miles away. That was one big, big typhoon!! We've been under the typhoon's influence for more than three days now. It forced me to cancel plans to attend the annual Guan-yin celebration on Putuoshan Island. I have a hard time even imagining what it was like on the coast, where I used to live.
Nonetheless, extreme weather is about the only obvious, immediate effects of climate change that we can directly observe. Virtually everything else is just a matter of a little bit of adjustment.
So, how are governments adjusting to this? Well, we are, indeed, making some slight progress on curbing carbon dioxide emissions, but maybe a more drastic approach might be helpful:
... [C]limate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
....
Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
From this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?hpw
Maybe we need to see climate change as a threat to national interests to get us to wake up.
Meanwhile, this still goes on in the world:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090809/ap_on_re_af/af_malawi_mighty_tasty_mice
Malawi, with a population of 12 million, is among the poorest countries in the world, with rampant disease and hunger, aggravated by periodic droughts and crop failure.
I'm not sure if we're going at it like frogs in water or flocks of dodos. Maybe we'll come to our senses and actually survive. But I don't know.
I wonder about humanity sometimes. I really do.
Now, I really don't know if this story is true or not. It could be an urban legend. But is has a certain "truthiness" to it. It sounds like it should be true, even though it might not be.
At any rate, as I look out my window, I can still see the effects of Typhoon Morakot, which recently made landfall in Fujian Province, hundreds of miles away. That was one big, big typhoon!! We've been under the typhoon's influence for more than three days now. It forced me to cancel plans to attend the annual Guan-yin celebration on Putuoshan Island. I have a hard time even imagining what it was like on the coast, where I used to live.
Nonetheless, extreme weather is about the only obvious, immediate effects of climate change that we can directly observe. Virtually everything else is just a matter of a little bit of adjustment.
So, how are governments adjusting to this? Well, we are, indeed, making some slight progress on curbing carbon dioxide emissions, but maybe a more drastic approach might be helpful:
... [C]limate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
....
Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
From this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?hpw
Maybe we need to see climate change as a threat to national interests to get us to wake up.
Meanwhile, this still goes on in the world:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090809/ap_on_re_af/af_malawi_mighty_tasty_mice
Malawi, with a population of 12 million, is among the poorest countries in the world, with rampant disease and hunger, aggravated by periodic droughts and crop failure.
I'm not sure if we're going at it like frogs in water or flocks of dodos. Maybe we'll come to our senses and actually survive. But I don't know.
I wonder about humanity sometimes. I really do.
0
Comments
Palzang
Palzang
Have you seen the doc The 11th Hour? It makes a good case for climate change being a threat not just to national security but global security. I avoided watching it for a very long time until I couldn't rationalize my way out of it any longer. I did the same with Al Gore's doc. Anything to avoid a perceived unpleasant experience. But as with Al Gore's doc (the name of which escapes me at the moment for some reason), The 11th Hour wasn't nearly as painful to watch as I thought it was going to be. It was fascinating, amazingly well done, and extremely informative. If you haven't seen it you'll probably find it as good as I did.
Actually, no, I haven't seen it, but it sounds interesting. Do you know if it can be downloaded?
I have a slug of doc's that I've collected over the years. This is the most recent one that I've seen, and it's quite good:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00djvq9
These two about water pollution are also fairly new, and very frightening:
http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/
http://www.flowthefilm.com/
For more of a political analysis, I've followed Michael Klare for some time. This is his latest book [I have the 2008 version—which is quite good]:
http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Powers-Shrinking-Planet-Geopolitics/dp/0805089217/
I remember an old line by Tom Robbins, which I'm sure I will mangle slightly: “The last half of the twentieth century blues. A time when Western Civilization is declining. Entirely too fast for comfort, but too slow to be very interesting.” Unfortunately, we are now in the twenty-first century ... and things are becoming very interesting indeed ...
It's not like we don't have hope. We do.
But we're going to be cutting things pretty darn close.
This is from an article in today's Washington Post about carbon capture in U.S. coal plants:
The stimulus bill devoted $2.4 billion to pilot projects. On Monday the Obama administration awarded $20 million of that to a program that uses supersonic shockwaves to compress carbon for storage, on top of $408 million in stimulus money awarded to two other cabon pilot projects. It has pledged $1 billion more to a model plant called FutureGen. If the Waxman-Markey climate bill becomes law, a new Carbon Storage Research Corp. would pump another $1.1 billion a year into researching this nascent technology, and first movers would get billions of dollars more in bonus emission allowances that could be sold.
Coal companies and environmentalists alike are counting on a breakthrough in carbon capture and storage technology to siphon off harmful emissions from the world's coal plants. Coal plants in the United States account for a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions. In the past five years China has brought online coal-fired electricity equal in size to total U.S. installed capacity -- and new plants are coming online in the developing world all the time. Without a breakthrough on coal plants, it may be impossible to meet emission limits climatologists say are needed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081002709.html?hpid=topnews
The bold face is not in the original.
Who knows? We might just get some sort of a technological breakthrough. I would never discount human ingenuity.
But I don't think that there's much doubt that we're entering into an entirely new stage of evolution. I call it the Age of Limits. Hopefully, we won't end up killing each other over the last barrel of oil on a boiling planet ...
I'll shut up now. I promise.
Thanks so much for those links. What's even better is that I'm house sitting for my sister and brother-in-law for the next 10 days and they have high speed internet access. At home I have dial-up which precludes me from even watching short videos unless I want to wait an hour for it to download. But here I can explore your links without any frustration. Yayy!
There are 65 docs on the BBC site alone. I know what I'm doing tonight!
I get most of my docs from the usenet, and I really don't know if you can download or watch from the BBC site. Maybe you can.
But you can watch a lot of them here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/
And I really liked this one [even though it's off the climate change topic]:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/
I'm packing for Putuoshan now. Happy house-sitting!
Just hazarding a guess, of course, but I'd say that the only people who aren't scared senseless are the ones who don't know anything about it.
Ignorance being ... well, you know ...
And, yes, it is very difficult to do much of anything about it, directly. I figure that the best thing for me to do is to do what I can ... and what I can't do, I don't sweat. That might not be the best attitude in the world, but, hey, for right now it's about the only thing I can come up with.
I haven't been to the Frontline site in ages. Thanks for reminding me.
Where's Putuoshan?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Putuo
Palzang
And, again, thanks to jj5 for answering a question that I should have anticipated, but clearly didn't. However, the wiki article is pretty scant in it's history. Putuo was mentioned in historical documents way back in the Qin Dynasty, and became a Daoist center until the rise of [Tien Tai] Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty [around 900 CE]. During the Song Dynasty, it became a center of Chan Buddhism, although it was never as important as Hangzhou.
http://www.amazon.com/Kuan-yin-Ch%C3%83%C2%BCn-fang-Y%C3%83%C2%BC/dp/023112029X/
There's a nice set of pictures here:
http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/China/Zhejiang/Putuoshan/blog-38182.html
Palzang, I've lived in Asia for going on twelve years now, six in Korea, and going on six in China. I live in Jinhua, which is south of Hangzhou, which is, in turn, south of Shanghai. I much prefer Hangzhou.
And, Brigid, I hope you had/have a chance to watch this one [which is, at least, on topic]:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/
And, finally, for those who are interested in trivia, “Putuo” and “Potala” both derive from the same word, “Potokala,” the mythical home of Avalokiteshvara/Guan-yin.
Although, I have to admit, that only have the pinyin spelling of “Potokala.” There might be a different spelling in standard English. Hey, anybody want to do any research on that?
Palzang
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m9xjc
Thank you very much.
It would have taken me forever to find that out on my own.
Palzang-o-mat
“James Lovelock is a celebrated scientist and writer.
He founded the Gaia theory - the idea that the planet acts like a single organism.
He has long spoken of Mans "unsustainable exploitation" of the planet and the grave consequences that will follow.
Now ninety years old, he describes his latest book as a final warning on the fate of the planet.
Stephen Sackur asks him if humanity is likely to heed that warning. ”
Link to Lovelock's interview:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/8206892.stm
A bit of a warning: this is not for the squeamish.
I just finished watching the doc "Garbage Warrior" about Michael Reynolds. Fantastic! Just amazing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m9xjc
I do sympathise with the feeling of an unwinable battle - I sometimes feel the same when I look at my grandchildren and realise that I shall not have achieved my ambition to leave the world better than I found it. It must be even harden in Oz with your scary drought and fires.
What I do is, quite simply, whatever I can, at home and locally. More widely, I make a nuisance of myself to my (excellent) M.P. and local polluters. Do what you can. Think globally and act locally. And bring up your children to understand they are caretakers of the earth, teach them to cultivate the garden and to love the ground on which they stand.
Thanks STP