A Fool's Wager

The Climategate saga goes on, mostly in the conspiracy-fueled imaginations of right wingers who would like to seize on the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia as an excuse to drag through the mud the scientific community's consensus around the theory that anthropogenic global warming could force shifts in climate in the next 50 to 100 years not seen in the entire 10,000 years of human civilization. What the emails do show is that scientists are capable of imagining and even conspiring to misbehave. They do not show that the science behind global warming is off in its entirety at all. There is always a range of scenarios that scientists consider, and in the last ten years the evidence, from institutions and scientists around the world including NASA's esteemed Jim Hansen, not just the above-mentioned Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has consistently shown that business-as-usual emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas emitted by burning fossil fuels that traps heat in the atmosphere, have the potential of at worst ushering in a temperature regime that would make uninhabitable large parts of the world, and at best lead to increased sea levels, flooding, droughts, increased prevalence of disease, famine, collapse and disappearance of entire nations including the South Pacific islands.

Typical of the commentary is this from Tom Karst, editor of The Packer, the trade journal of the mainstream produce industry:

"But do we really have to do something, NOW, about climate change?

What’s the rush? Let’s leave room for some skepticism.

House Agriculture Committee ranking member Frank Lucas, R-Okla., recently released a statement that American agriculture can’t afford the higher energy prices and operating costs associated with the “cap and tax” climate change bill.

I tend to agree with Lucas. Agriculture and fruit and vegetable growers should not go along to get along.

If Obama is hell-bent on making carbon based fuels prohibitively expensive, let him show the commitment to develop a new generation of nuclear power plants in the U.S."

Notice the whining, NOW? So like the 10 year-old who doesn't want to clean his room because he's playing video games at the moment and what could be more important? So the whole point of raising doubts about the science seems to be to protect the short-term profitability of whatever business. There seems to be a fool's wager going on that makes my blood boil for one because if I was Dante and designing a new Inferno I would reserve a special circle in hell for people who are willing to put my children's future on the line for the sake of their comfort and profit.

Like St. Peter, I prefer this bet: if people like me are wrong, and we invest billions to shift to renewable energy, advanced public transport, denser urban communities, organic agriculture, etc. only to discover years down the road that Mother Nature could in fact take care of herself and had inbuilt negative feedback in the form of clouds or volcanic eruptions or something, then what have we lost? It's just money. But if people like Mr. Karst are wrong and we do nothing because we prefer business as usual than having to get off our backsides and it turns out that we blew it - the ice shelves melt, the permafrost releases its load of methane stored for 50,000 years in a year or two and Earth is no longer blue from outer space - then what have we lost? It was just our planet. It's a no-brainer, folks. We need to do something now a) while we still can, and b) while its relatively affordable and doable to make the switch.

Happy Thanksgiving

Played with the kids after dinner in the living room last night. We were telling each other's fortunes, pretending to read palms.

"You're going to flunk out of high school, be really bad at everything and then work at McDonald's. Then you'll live in a dumpster and move to Nevada where you'll discover a new source of energy and be rich and live in a boat until you're 92 when you get mauled by a panther and die." Michael forecasting his sister's life was quick, certain and big on disaster.

I tried the more traditional route, numbers of kids, lifeline, career, a lot of romance for the girls and motorized toys for Michael. But I kept saying they'd all live near the ocean, preferably somewhere warm where they would invite their parents to visit every year. Then I realized the odds of them living near the ocean were just increased, as scientists are predicting a 2 meter rise in sea levels by 2100.

I'm thinking how desperate this forecast, this real life prognostication is. What happens when Bangladesh goes under is not just lost beach frontage; it's not just the extinction of human and animal life and untold misery of refugees. It's not even just genocide. We don't have a word for the extent of criminality this event implies. It dwarfs colonialism, slavery, all previous inhumanities. What could be worse than condemning entire swaths of the planet, entire nations of people and entire species of animal and plant life to death? I think even the notion of inter-generational equity, which is the result of struggling with how to deal with the implications of what is happening, falls short of the mark.

And then there's the front page headlines made by hacked emails showing the animosity of some climate scientists towards their colleagues, termed skeptics by the press. Many of them are worse than skeptics. Just like the tobacco industry did for many years, paying off so-called scientists to produce reports diminishing the health impacts of nicotine and tobacco smoke, the oil industry has for years now been attempting to "spin" the science to their advantage. And who can blame anybody for feeling a little bit of anger. Scientists are human, too. And sure there must be disagreement on many aspects of the science, the levels of magnitude of change, etc. Certainly there are many variables to consider. But there is one fact that is not variable. Like the hedgehog we must know one thing well in order to survive. Our children only get one planet.

Reflections on a Shooting Spree

"But on the whole, the life of Ivan Ilich now flowed the way he felt his life should flow -- easily, pleasantly, respectably." The Death of Ivan Ilich, Leo Tolstoy

In this portrait of a stolid Russian magistrate, Tolstoy tried to show the way we brick ourselves off from human feelings as a way of advancement, the way middle class life tends to anesthetize the pain until we are numb, all in the name of comfort. Ilich was a success, but it was at the cost of any meaningful relationships, including with his family. Of course he lived in a time and a country that was very different from ours, but was it? We pride ourselves for our meritocratic ways and our freedoms, but the aim, still, is to insulate ourselves from suffering, to escape the hoi polloi, to live in walled-off compounds of luxury and security, to insure ourselves and our families against calamity, to innoculate ourselves from disease and catastrophe, and to vote into power leaders strong enough to protect us from the enemy hordes, the other that wants to take it away, that rages at the gate. In short, we want our cake and eat it too. We want to be strong, free, comfortable, and yet we want to live in solidarity with the promise of Emma Lazarus. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. We want to be rich and we want to be popular. Somehow we straddle the fence, offering the world the two-faced specter of our political shufflings, here George, there Barack, not sure ourselves what country we live in. Is it red, blue, something in between? It takes faith, sometimes a lunatic faith to keep faith with the old red, white and blue, and there is pain, the pain that is expressed in the lunatic, murderous shooting rampage of an Army doctor that reminds me of a character in a tragic Russian novel.

Striking the Balance

As easy as breathing, the in and out rhythm, there and back again, over and over. Or swinging: parents push on the playground and then the children learn that by pumping their legs they can get as high as they can, higher and higher. Until finally the older ones they're ejecting, jumping at the highest point of the arc to see who can get the farthest, flying off into space until gravity brings them down with a dull thud in the wood chips.

We're entering the dark side of the year, the diastole half of the beat of life, when the short days and long nights give rise to reflective taking of bearings and anxiety about the end game. The forest looks naked but somehow more mysterious, the grey hardwoods like clouds mingling in a valley with the deep green pines, all suffused with mists. I'm always hungrier, my dinners suffering a lack of portion control that I justify as seasonally driven. I crave meats and thick, rich sauces. This is the animal part of the brain, remembering shortfall, famine, scarcity and cold. As we evolved we began to hoard other prizes, and now, when hardship means having an old car and losing face in the parking lot, we wonder how to strike the right balance. George Bush promised we fulfilled duty when we shopped, and we all know the malls fill up this time of year. But call it residual guilt, there is a gnawing sense that we must be called to do more. Produce or perish. Those who believe in eternity want to produce a higher self through prayer or good deeds, those who don't still believe that work is the lot of all humanity. My tenant, Chris, has been out of work since July. He was a fork lift driver with MacLanes, the warehouse chain that handles all the Walmart traffic in northern New England. I saw him yesterday when he came over and he'd grown a belly and said he was hoping to be taken back on for some seasonal shifts.

"It must be tough," I said. God knows I've been there before.

"Oh, yeah. I'm looking forward to having a purpose," he said.

Unemployment, like the winter, has a rise and fall. If only we knew how to strike the right balance, as easy as breathing, or children swinging.

Unreconstructed Krauthammer

I shouldn't be surprised by the unaccountability of right-wing blowhards for the positions they took on a host of issues during the Bush years. But given the demise of the Republican Party leadership as signified by the rise within the GOP of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk as serious spokesmen and not just media puppeteers, it behooves sober-minded individuals to pay close attention to the rants of fascistas of the airwaves such as Charles Krauthammer. I read his interview in Der Spiegel today on-line and was struck by the clear-minded, yet lunatic espousal of two relics of Bush era dogma, namely the requirement for unilateral exertion of imperial power in order to bring peace to the world, and the scientific uncertainty surrounding and therefore as-yet unclear need to do anything about global warming. Along with these was the underlying, rabid need to belittle any Obama administration leverage on reforming the country. Krauthammer cannot bear to concede the transformative effects of an Obama presidency so far and insists it's all about celebrity hype. Yes, he does foresee some sort of health care reform going forward, but that's the work of an "average" president. The big Maginot line, apparently, in the Republican psyche, is now the global warming crisis, where Obama's efforts to bring US carbon emissions down to acceptable levels must be doomed to failure. I hate to tell him, the writing is on the wall there as well. Cap and trade, baby, bring it on. There is an unfortunate bunch of chatter about geo-engineering from uninformed sources, and the right-wing continues to love the Dr. Strangelove allure of nuclear power, but the simple fact remains that the hard work of avoiding catastrophic climate change involves switching the global industrial economy onto the twin tracks of energy efficiency and renewables.

Global Protest Puts Science at the Fore -- Sheep Don't Care

This Saturday, activists staged protests and actions in over 4,000 cities around the world designed to highlight the need to bring carbon emissions way below present levels in the atmosphere in order to safeguard a habitable planet beyond the end of this century. The movement behind the protests is spearheaded by New England environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, but the science that inspired McKibben is the mainstream view that carbon levels beyond 350 parts per million in the atmosphere will push global average warming beyond the two degree rise from pre-industrial levels that is considered safe for civilization. At the moment our levels stand at about 383 parts per million. Leaders meeting in Copenhagen late this year are expected to hammer out a treaty aimed at reducing present carbon levels, but many fear that politics as usual, even with the United States on board for the first time in the history of climate negotiations, will cloud long-term thinking. Hence the need for giving leaders a shove in the language of international street theater. The results were inspiring. See www.350.org for a slide show of the day.

Here in New Hampshire, a warm Indian summer following the heavy rain Saturday brought out out the Asian lady bugs from their burrows to hover on the tree trunks of our young apple trees. Nature tries to find a balance with the insects leading the way. On my drive to work I still love to see the strings of Canada geese forming vees in the sky westward and southward. A family of skunks, attracted by a neighbor's bird feeder, has attempted to set up winter residence, and our sheep, in protective mode, have been hit, one of the young ewes right in the face. Sunday I spent a good few hours shearing the thistle burrs out of their fleeces. I put them on the winter pasture and thought I'd mowed down the thistles, but enough of them, their royal purple blooms long gone, were still standing like petrified sentinels in the deeper grass around the old paddock, and of course that's straight where the sheep went, getting thoroughly covered on their faces and flanks with the brown little velcro life bombs that get so embedded they ruin the fleece if left to overwinter.

Eve Turns Eight

"Mothers for miles around worried about Zuckerman's swing. They feared some child would fall off. But no child ever did. Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will."

Charlote's Web

by E.B. White

The middle child, Eve holds the magnetic center - the Higgs Boson particle of the family - imparting mass and gravitational attraction. She does it unwittingly, as if by naming her we let in some archetypal grain to her nature; she seems to have a deeper understanding of things, not as quick to come to a conclusion, measuring and sifting for the level beyond the appearance of things. Although what do I know about an eight year old girl's mind? Maybe I'm just romanticizing. What does anyone know? But there is an impetus now to protect our girls, a recognition that the forces out there are toxifying their childhoods beyond recognition.

She wanted her ears pierced, at the threshold of some kind of discovery about herself. She held a teddy bear at the Piercing Pagoda at the Concord Mall lent to her by the girl behind the counter just opening on a late Sunday morning. The girl was heavy set, blond, and she marked her ears and swabbed the earlobes with an antiseptic wipe, stepping back and asking me for my opinion. Did the markings look level. Don't want to get this wrong. I looked and squinted and nodded affirmatively. Eve looked serious, as if about to set off on a journey into herself, into her own destiny apart from her brother and sister and I. Then at the party she played on the trampoline with her friends Molly and Cody, swinging the styrofoam tubes at each other like swords.