climate change – Page 8 – COP 20: Lima, Peru

September 3, 2014

Whither China and Climate Change at COP 20?

My first exposure to China’s climate policy position was at COP 17 in Durban, So. Africa. There I asked a Chinese delegate if shale gas would be in the mix of transition fuels to wean China off coal in order to ameliorate the air pollution which continues to be a major contributor to a growing public health problem in eastern China. His response was that shale gas was a minor resource in China and that coal would continue to be a major player in energy production. Clearly the implication was that China was not interested in resolving the air pollution that chokes major cities as much as the continuation of the pace of economic development that was rapidly bring China into the 21st century as a developed nation. This was not what I was hoping for at a climate change conference.

What a difference three years makes! Since COP 17 and over the past year I have spent a month exploring Yunnan Province in southwestern China looking at sustainability efforts through alternative energy and climate change effects on agriculture and water availability. While you see the reason their CO2 emissions are so high (construction of high rises with no tenants, multi-lane highways to small towns, and long rail and highway overpasses to avoid farmers fields and the energy needed to build all this) even in the relatively cleaner western parts of China, there is a sense that this pace of development is not sustainable if for not other reason then the environmental degradation it is causing to some very beautiful landscapes. Moreover a lingering drought has this mostly agrarian part of China reeling from lack of rain especially for rice production. Climate change may be taking hold and the Chinese sense it.

So what has changed? While we are not sure exactly what the China’s strategy will be, it is clear they want to slow the use of coal to improve the air quality of the major cities at the very least. We saw lots of reasons to believe that alternative, non-fossil fuel energy is being used especially at the personal level. In the large cities and small villages as well solar hot water is the name of the game. In Kunming, the provincial capital, every rooftop has a solar water heater; even apartment buildings string a dozen or two water heaters together to supply all the tenants. Biogas has become a staple of rural energy life in place of burning scare wood. And government officials at the local level are encouraging these changes.

So what can we expect from the Chinese at COP 20 where they will be even a bigger player in the negotiations than they were in Durban? It is hard to know as one is never quite sure what they will come up with and how they will approach climate change mitigation now. But from talking to the people in Yunnan province including the scientists doing biomass and solar heating research it appears that the Chinese are beginning to see the value of slowing development, encouraging well established alternative energy sources at the local level, and becoming more concerned about a pending public health crisis in their megacities. Will the Chinese find a way not only to play nice with the other “kids” in Lima but also be a positive influence in solving global emissions problems? Stay tuned.

Solar water heaters for home use are ubiquitous in southwestern China including the most rural areas

September 3, 2014September 21, 2014

Impacts of the Erratic Beast

Coming from a family of Bangladeshi immigrants who want better opportunities for their children and for them to know their roots, my parents made sure my sisters and I knew our culture, language, and traditions. My parents took my sisters and I to Bangladesh at a very young age so we can fully emerge ourselves into our culture.

This past summer I visited Bangladesh for the third time. It was truly a wonderful trip like all of the other times I have visited. However, during this trip I noticed the impacts of climate change; the Erratic Beast. Bangladesh is a beautiful country with so much green scenery but it will soon be gone due to rising sea levels. There was an interesting and thought-provoking film released about the impacts of climate change specifically in Bangladesh called Bangladesh: A Climate Trap. It is a climate trap because of rising sea levels, weather patterns changing, and biological systems being affected with the rise of CO2 levels.

In Spencer R. Weart’s book, “The Discovery of Global Warming”, he address the influences which cause impacts of the Erratic Beast. In 1980, it was found that CO2 played a vital role in climate change. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrates are also influences.

With the melting of ice caps, many countries and islands will soon disappear…

Woman With Arms Outstretched — http://www.climatetrap.org/about/

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

Climate change or no climate change? That is the question.

There is a group of people who are a climate scientist’s worst enemy: Climate Change Deniers. But what happens when the climate scientists become the deniers? Merchants of Doubt tells that story. A group of scientists effectively misled the public and denied scientific truths by using their deep ties in politics. The denial of climate change is similar to the denial of tobacco smoking linked to lung cancer. Merchants of Doubt shows that people will believe what they want to believe despite any scientific evidence.

Tobacco Smoking and Global Warming have a lot more in common than you would think; they are both intertwined with the global economy and both the smoke from tobacco and the manufacturing of tobacco are detrimental to the environment. Global warming is intertwined with global politics and the global market. Energy usage, a main environmental issue, is what keeps the economy going.

Scientists concluded evidence that tobacco smoking can cause lung cancer, which sent the tobacco industry into a panic. In fear they would lose profits from the new evidence released about the negative health effects of tobacco smoking, they hired a group of scientists to disprove these facts. The tobacco industry used science to manipulate consumers. This manipulation of science only delays the progress of climate change mitigation.

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

Change and Complexity

This drawing illustrates two things.

1. Change is hard. People are often stuck in their own beliefs. It usually takes a generation or two of people dying out to change society’s beliefs. Just ask Ignaz Semmelweis, one of the first people to observe the germ theory. The scientific community thought his claims of hand washing to reduce mortality in hospitals were baseless and insulting. (Ironically, he was beaten by guards in a mental hospital and died at the age of 47 of blood poisoning when the staff treated his wounds without sterilizing their tools or hands.) The scientific laws and theories that we take for granted as accepted facts today were not always so widely accepted. There is always a struggle to gain acceptance of a truth that seems strange and complicated.

2. The science of climate change is extremely complex. Complex ideas are hard to grasp. They cannot be built up or taken down with just one accusation. They must be discussed and explained so that the public understands what “global warming” actually involves. In a study conducted by Bord and colleagues at Penn State, the correct understanding of the causes of climate change was what determined how the participants acted and voted on climate change.

The discovery of global warming was as complicated as content. It wasn’t straight forward at all; there were many false starts and persistent uncertainties. At first, scientists thought that there was too little CO2 to act as a greenhouse for the earth. Once that was disproven, no one thought there was enough CO2 in our atmosphere to make any difference in the climate. Then, no one imagined the industrial and population boom would be quite so big and quite so fast.Once global warming was even considered a possible threat, it was already the 1960s.

Getting the public on board with the warning of climate change was another task altogether. Scientists needed to convince the government, citizens, and industries that their findings on global warming were valid and urgent. This is not in most scientists’ comfort zones. Climate change is a complex issue, and it is difficult to transfer the scientific jargon into public knowledge. And today, scientists and citizens alike are arguing for action on climate change. The history of climate change is still being written today. Let’s make sure it has a happy ending.

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

How to End an Awkward Dinner Conversation? – Talk about Climate Change

Everyone has experienced the endless question fandango. What school do you go to? Do you like it? What are you studying? What are you going to do with that? What’s next? Well, one day I hit a breaking point, so when one of my mother’s friend finished asking me those five questions. I went on an extended rant about the projected gloomy future of our planet. I discussed: the Arctic ice sheets completely melting by 2080, the rising sea levels that will engulf the Pacific Islands, the decreasing Amazon rainforest, the increase in frequency/intensity of hurricane and etc. Afterwards, I glanced over at my mother’s friend and she had a horrified look on her face. She made an excuse about “dying to see the renovation on the garage”. Mission Accomplished.

However, after reading Bill McKibben’s book, eaarth , I realize now what I did was wrong. Climate Change is apocalyptic enough, and the last thing I should be doing is crushing people’s moral regarding climate change. Climate change needs people’s interest, not dread. McKibben informs the reader about the anthropogenic alteration to Earth’s atmosphere, biodiversity, oceans and landscape. These changes will result in a new planet and there have been consequences that have already negatively impacted thousands of people.

Rather than my end of the world scenario with no hope, McKibben paints positivity on to his pages. He offers encouragement, hope and solutions. For example, he acknowledges the switch to local farming and the individual level changes. Like other climatologists, McKibben calls for political and global level changes to green house gas emissions. His website demonstrates the power of protesting and encourages people around the world to get involved. I gained a vast amount of positivity from reading earth and I hope to take McKibben’s approach towards climate change.

http://350.org/

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

Do you want to live on a new planet?

Living on a different planet sounds exciting, right? I think of a space ship finally landing on its far traveled destination and discovering completely a new environment. This picture above is an artist’s depictions of Kepler-186f, a newly found Earth-size planet orbiting inside a red dwarf star’s habitable zone. It’s rocky, it might have water, it might even have life, but could we, evolved through Earth’s distinct conditions, ever thrive there? It’s likely not.

We may not have to travel light-years away to find a new planet- ours is transforming right before our eyes. Bill McKibben describes this new planet we are creating, Eaarth, in his book of the same name. This new world is plagued by drought, fires, and storms. The planet, as before, is primarily covered in water, but this time, the pH is slipping down, the temperature is creeping up, and the coastline is rising to cover the many cities of humans. Everything’s changing. The rise in global temperature means that the mountain pine beetle can survive through the winter and kill trees in the western United States. These huge tree kills increase mudslides and erosion and decrease forest carbon uptake. The snow and ice in Greenland and the Arctic are melting, swallowing up small island nations like the Maldives in the process. Other places become deserts. Depending on the nation’s affluence, people must either spend more money on desalination plants or spend more time traveling to gather water. Crops are frozen, parched, and diseased, increasing food costs and human starvation.

This new planet no longer seems exciting; it is menacing. The current seven billion humans that depend on a hospitable planet to are actually very temperamental. How do we survive this new planet? McKibben wants us to think small. We must shrink our economy, limit growth, and give our tired planet some space. New planets have new limitations and restrictions, these are some of ours. Now we have to learn how to adapt to living on this mad experiment we have created.

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

The Discovery of the Truth: Revised and Expanded Edition

by Elizabeth Plascencia

Courtesy of Balog: Columbia Glacier, Alaska from 2006 to 2012

To divulge the whole story of global warming – what a task. Where to even begin? How would we explain the state of our existence on planet Earth to a foreigner? Human activities in the Anthropocene? The Industrial Revolution? Population growth? Fossil Fuels? I am unsure of the beginning and I sure don’t want to know the ending.

Weart carefully tells the story of global warming through meticulously weaving in and out of science and history in The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition. Additionally, to my surprise, Weart actually stated a handful of aggressive verbs, which is often unlikely for climate change activists who try to “speak the party talk”. I was pleasantly surprised. Often climate change speakers are lost in their sea of words when attempting to maintain their position in the middle and not appear too radical. In order to achieve some sort of movement I really respected when Weart presents to model ourselves differently in the name of change. Real change. Not just something that we talk about and agree on at a conference.

Discovering the truth about our state of being is so much more than just the idea. It is taking action and creating momentum in order to catapult change.

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

ON CLEARANCE (90% off): Doubt

by Elizabeth Plascencia

What does it mean to doubt? Is it the dictionary definition of “a feeling of uncertainty or lack of conviction” or rather this mindset that has been spoon-fed to us about climate change? How does one so easily doubt the change that is evident right before our very eyes? Easy. It has to do with something in your pocket or on your desk right now – your wallet.

Our wallets expand and contract every so often, rarely, or never. Unfortunately, it is now evident that human beings are fragile enough to be swayed by meaningless dollars signs and devour the doubt in exchange for the green. The climate change skeptics who claim that the science behind the matter is “unsettled” or “to be determined” are particularly of this nature.

I found the book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway of special interest due to the language of presentation. Not only did the authors blatantly spell out the truth but did so in a way that brutally clarified the raw material at the core of this so-called “dispute” over climate change. I soon realized that the raw material was in essence composed of industry and power through the familiar green noted above. Basically, this book enraged me and I had to put it down twice.

It is sickening to me, 19-year old me, to be aware of these outstanding faults in our society and feel slightly powerless. Because what I observe around me is not the tobacco industry crashing but rather the latter – I return home every summer to the strewn cigarette butts that ornament my hometown beach in Santa Monica, California.

Congruently, the quote that stood out most to me was the following:

“How could the industry possibly defend itself when the vast majority of independent experts agreed that tobacco was harmful, and their own documents showed that they knew this? The answer was to continue to market doubt, and to do so by recruiting ever more prominent scientists to help” (p.24)

As symbolic as the cigarette butts are to the tobacco consumer, we must stop the market for doubt right in its tracks. No sale today. No sale tomorrow. The market for doubt has crashed.

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

Who wants to believe that Lord Voldemort has returned?

• Cigarette smoke causes lung cancer.
• Massive sulfur emissions, primarily released from power plants, are causing acid rain.
• The CFCs we put in aerosol cans, air-conditioners, and refrigerators are depleting the ozone layer.
• Humans are causing global warming.
• Voldemort is back.

What do the phrases have in common? No one wants to hear them. No one wants to hear that their activities are harming themselves or the planet. No one wants to hear that the dark lord of the wizarding world is coming to create a pure blood society.

If you believe these facts (save Voldemort’s return), then you feel guilty until you change what you are doing. If you hear even one little whisper that the fact might not really be a fact at all, then you can cling to that whisper and carry on with your life, guilt-free and change-free.

The Freds (Fred Singer and Fred Seitz) knew about this flaw humans have. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tracked their careers and they’ve been working in the industry of doubt for a while. They started when smoking cigarettes was still advertised as “healthy” and tried their best to keep it that way. The truth eventually won out, but the Freds did slow down the progress.

Undeterred that their previous claims on cigarettes had been proven false, they worked their way through the years to cast doubt on disarmament, acid rain, the ozone hole, secondhand smoke, and then global warming. As long as some scientist could deny that these harms were occurring, politicians and mass media could still claim “debate.”

So why did these two physicists make these claims on issues that were outside of their expertise again and again even after they were proven wrong each time? “Our product/ byproduct harms people” is not a great slogan. This means decrease in revenue and increased government restrictions; this change means money. A lot more money than it takes to fund the Freds and their friends to take your side.

So these Freds, they worked on writing their own reports, slandering other scientists, and talking to politicians. Most recently, they worked to keep the “climate change debate” alive and well. F. Seitz is now dead but F. Singer still writes the occasional opinion piece dismissing global warming. Their business has become something much larger; people in power now realize just how valuable doubt is in slowing, even halting, a response to climate change. More than 97% of scientists believe that humans have caused climate change and our earth is warming. Yet, in 2010, WorldPublicOpinion.org surveyed Americans of voting age and found that almost half (45%) of them think most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring.

Corporations are using media outlets to trick us into believing that climate change is something that the scientific community is unsure about. They present the facts like there are two equal sides, when there aren’t. Presenting two opinions makes sense when debating politics, but it doesn’t transfer well to science. In the scientific world, uncertainty about an issue requires more research, not a debate.

John Oliver has a better way of representing this debate in the media; have a televised debate with 3 climate change skeptics and 97 climate scientists who say humans are the cause of climate change.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg”]

So what I’m proposing is change in how the media feeds us, and how we swallow their message. We need to demand the unpleasant truth. It’s not fun. We don’t want to cut emissions and spend money and pass new regulations. We don’t want to acknowledge that Voldemort is back because it’s so much nicer to pretend he isn’t.

But no matter how much we pretend, the climate has changed and it’s getting worse. We put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now we have to collectively toughen up and deal with climate change head on.

September 2, 2014September 21, 2014

Climate Change and Rhetoric

The power of words is indescribable. They are: how we communicate with each other, how we express our feelings and how we share our thoughts. How these words are used is up to the beholder, for words can completely alter how one perceives a topic. A topic that demonstrates the effect of the right words by the right people is climate change.

In Merchants of Doubt, authors, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, convey the events that lead to the cloud of uncertainty surrounding global warming. Surprisingly, it all started with three well-respected physicists who were able to orchestrate doubt through the media and politics. Their approach was described as the “Tobacco Strategy”, which was utilizing the “lack of certainty” to it’s advantage to avoid the truth. For example, tobacco companies were able to argue that tobacco was not proven to be detrimental to one’s health because data was “uncertain”. The three scientists applied the power of the word, “uncertainty”, to acid rain, the ozone hole and the cause of climate change.

However, only three scientists would not be able to spread the whole anti-climate change movement, so they hired scientists to add credibility and started the George Marshall Institute. The right words were now coming from the right people, which is when rhetoric is most successful. If a civil war solider, not Abraham Lincoln, gave the Gettysburg Address it would not have even close to the same effect. In addition to the credible sources, they were able to use the media to their advantage and spread their ideas. Below is a talk by a scientist from the George Marshall Institute that exhibits climate change rhetoric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5wqAaLf4Rk

After reading this book, it is slightly terrifying to think about the power of words and it’s effect on our ideas unconsciously. It makes me wonder how the media’s crafty words have infiltrated my thoughts, ideas and actions. Hopefully, after reading this book I can be more aware of my thought process.