Signs From Earth

Climate Catastrophe? A Rational Action Approach

 

Two years ago an Oregon science teacher produced a video called "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See." Greg Craven's schoolroom lecture on how to think about global warming and decide whether action against it is needed became an internet hit with over seven million viewings.

Craven has now turned the movie into a book (isn't it usually the other way around?) called "What's The Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to The Climate Change Debate." 

Craven uses tools of risk assessment to help us decide how to think about and approach this issue. The focus is not on what to think about global warming, but how. The graphic above is adapted from his book, and summarizes the core argument: He sees this as a choice between action and no action against something that is true or false. 

If you see global warming as false, we do nothing against it, and nothing happens, then we can "Party!" On the other hand if you see it as false, we do nothing, and all the scientific projections come to pass, then "Global Catastrophe" is our future. 

As Craven points out, taking action against global warming comes with significant costs, but is less expensive than "Global Catastrophe." This is all about making choices and living with consequences.

Greg Craven's Website: What is The Worst That Could Happen?

Report: Ecological Impacts of Climate Change

The U.S National Academy of Sciences has released a new 28-page illustrated booklet "Ecological Impacts of Climate Change." Available free as a downloadable PDF, the booklet shows in a visual way the accumulating impacts of climate change across the United States. 

As temperatures keep rising we see a variety of changes: growing seasons and ocean currents shift, animals modify their migratory and breeding behavior, plants such as grape varieties grow in new areas and abandon old, and habitats such as the Arctic ice shrink and change the ecology of the north. All regions of the country are being affected.

The booklet is based on a 2008 report by the National Academies with the same title, "Ecological Impacts of Climate Change." (Lest we get confused.)  This extended assessment is also available free as a PDF download from the National Academies Press website once you have registered.

 

The new Ecological Change booklet is a companion to "Understanding and Responding to Climate Change," which was updated in 2008 to include new information from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report.

Powerpoint slides for the new Ecological Change booklet are also available to download and use if you are so inclined. This to help educate or inform a local civic group, museum visitors, the kids at your neighborhood school, or even your peers at work. Climate impacts for each area of the U.S. are different and presentations are tailored for your region: Pacific Coast, Alaska and the Arctic, Western Mountains, Southwestern Deserts, Central U.S., Southeast, and Northeast.

Both booklets are part of an ongoing National Academy of Sciences study of climate choices ahead for the United States. A two-day summit was held the end of March, and webcasts of the sessions are available. The summit agenda is available here.

The changes we are seeing all around are going to be with us for a very long time, so we might as well understand and help others understand what is in store for our animal and plant neighbors, and ourselves. These materials from the National Academy of Sciences are a good place to start learning.

Related: Island Press this spring released a book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming, by Anthony Barnosky. A professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley, Barnosky focuses on the changes we see in the natural world as temperatures rise rapidly, and he connects this with the end of the last ice age when mass extinctions occurred. 

Washington Post review by Barbara King: "A Hot Topic: In "Heatstroke," an ecologist argues that we need to rethink conservation in an age of global warming."

.."Barnosky likes ecosystems just as much as the next scientist, but in "Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming," he argues brilliantly that conservation biology can no longer focus on saving them. The reason is simple: Thanks to global warming, the ecosystem we work to save today will have a different climate tomorrow. This means that many species will face extinction (or at least serious loss of genetic diversity), even if the land around them is protected from the logger's chainsaw and the developer's backhoe..."

The Whole Earth is Now Online

The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.

Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. 

Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.

Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.

Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.

Whole Earth led me to Berry's influential book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, and to Jackson's New Roots for Agriculture.

I discovered the work of Donella Meadows here, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the authors of the 1970's book The Limits to Growth.

Meadows' essay Places to Intervene in a System is significant, along with her sequel essay Dancing With Systems.

"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."

The Catalog's influence was documented in a 2007 book by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.

--DD

Links:

People of the Screen

You are reading these words on one. Kevin Kelly explores implications, especially the impact of screens on printed words and pictures.

NY Times Magazine: ..."We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality...."

And Seth Godin on the declining influence of the Times in the era of the screen: Watching the Times struggle (and what you can learn)