On November 30th, 2020, I talked about climate change as a guest in a friend's Introduction to Sociology class at Foothill College (on Zoom). I answered his questions and then tried to address his student's questions.
What got you started?
One of my friend's first questions was about what got me started working on climate change. The first thing that hit me hard and got me thinking about climate change as a NOW problem not a SOMEDAY problem was -- back in 2004 -- hearing about how reindeer herders in Siberia were sinking into the thawing permafrost, losing their traditional pastures and migration routes. Something that seemed eternal, permafrost, was being lost, and with it a whole culture. I wrote more about this topic -- thawing permafrost's impacts on indigenous communities -- in a recent blog post: "From Beneath Us It Devours." (I include a good list of sources on the topic at the bottom of that blog post.)
But the thing that really kicked me into gear was attending a talk in November 2008 where I heard the journalist Isabel Hilton talk about the implications of the loss of the Himalayan Glacier in terms of the whole system of trade winds and ocean currents, and also geopolitical security, since China, India, and Pakistan all rely on that glacier for water. This Asia Society article about the event quotes Ms. Hilton: "I think what’s in store as the glaciers retreat, as the water diminishes, is potentially one of the first climate-change wars of the 21st century."
I remember there was silence in the room after she finished speaking. A hand went up in the back. "What can we do?" She answered: "Work on adaptation." I had no idea what she meant, but I wrote down the word "adaptation" and the next day started researching ways to focus my Master's thesis on whatever it was.
Read "Regional Cooperation at the Third Pole: The Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau and Climate Change" (2009), featuring Ms. Hilton's interviews with experts on the condition of the glacier and its importance to the region.
This Science X (Phys.org) item from August 2020, "Two-thirds of glacier ice in the Himalayas will be lost by 2100 if climate targets aren't met," is a nice summary of the current state of research and projections for the condition of the Himalayan Glacier.
What can I do?
Now, not everybody can focus their career on climate change adaptation. And while the real game-changing solutions will need to be institutional and widespread, individuals of all walks of life can play a role in the solutions. You can educate yourself on how climate change affects whatever field you end up in -- climate change is an "everything" problem, it touches on all our systems. You can be the health care professional who knows about climate change impacts like heat and smoke on the health of vulnerable populations. If you are a landscape architect you can learn about the benefits of drought-friendly native plants and innovative water management in a hotter, dryer climate. You can be a source of good information for your colleagues and loved ones.
You can learn about how to prepare for climate impacts that are happening now, adapting to climate change, and also learn about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in your community and the world, reducing the impact of climate change on future generations.
I talked about the list of recommended solutions from Project Drawdown's list of recommendations for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These recommendations come from a 2017 book edited by Paul Hawken "Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming." You can see a quick list of the top ten solutions on Wikipedia or go to the Project Drawdown website here and sort by GHG emission reduction amounts.
The top three solutions are reducing food waste, health and education (focusing on the education of girls and family planning), and shifting to plant-rich diets.
1. Reducing food waste - This can be a part of increasing food security for all. I talked about how increasing food security improves community resilience to all shocks and also has returns to children's attendance in school. If you are hungry, how can you learn?
2. Educating girls and providing family planning (curbing population growth and empowering girls and women) - I talked about how girls and women are disproportionately impacted by food preparation and water gathering needs. Improving their opportunities for education will help free them to help their communities plan for climate change and other problems. We need all hands on deck!
3. Shifting to a plant-rich diet - I recollected hearing David Suzuki talk about Meatless Mondays as a strategy that could have a significant positive impact on the planet. It sends the market a signal that we need less meat, which can have cascading positive effects, reducing GHG emissions and water usage.
Check out the Meatless Mondays movement, which is being stewarded in part by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Join its Meatless Monday Global community.
This recommendation must include a caveat that some communities cannot easily make this transition, with some living in places where plant-based food is flown in from afar, so it is relatively expensive and poor quality. In some cases, meat-based diets are critical to a community's cultural practices, such as with the indigenous marine mammal hunters who live on the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Due to sea ice loss these hunters may need to change how they provide for their communities (see this 2017 study on that question), but any change in diet should be led by community members, not outsiders telling them to switch to a plant-rich diet.
What else can I do?
Vote
I can't find the quote now, but I recall seeing on Twitter that someone asked the famous climate scientist Jim (James) Hansen what the most important thing people can do to fight climate change, and he said "vote."
It may have been that many scientists have been saying it. Catherine Flowers (Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice) says it in this Aug. 2020 Guardian article in response to the question "what is the most important political action individuals can take?" To the same question another famous climate scientist, Michael Mann, author of the "hockey stick" graph, responds:
We need politicians who will support climate-friendly policies. And we need to get rid of those who won’t. Voting is one critical way to do that, and if you live in the US, it’s absolutely critical that you vote on climate in the upcoming general election – from president all the way down to dogcatcher.
In the Nov. 2020 U.S. presidential election we ended up with the more climate-policy-friendly candidate, but the U.S. Senate remains elusive. If we don't have the power to move climate change legislation through the U.S. Senate, everything will stagnate for another four years, and we can't afford any delay. If you want to help do "get out the vote" work in Georgia, here are two ways to do it:
Vote Forward has a letter writing campaign with a Dec. 7 send date and they need 153,000 more letters to be written.
Move On and Resistance Labs are doing text and phone banking.
Resilience Hubs
You can participate in the "resilience hub" movement without being a climate expert. Resilience hubs bring together local government and local nongovernmental organizations to prepare a community respond to natural disasters and other shocks. The movement has spread around the world partly facilitated by the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and other organizations, like UN Habitat Urban Resilience Programme, Mercy Corps (which established resilience hubs in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria), and the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory which created a resource-rich community guide (2014).
The Hawaiian island/city/county of Oahu is creating a Resilience Hub Action Plan as part of its 2019 Resilience Strategy, stipulating: "Resilience Hubs should be defined by each neighborhood or local community for their own needs and goals, however many are focused on providing the following during a disaster: 1) Emergency shelter during a disaster; 2) A central community gathering/information site and distribution center post-disaster; 3) Renewable energy and energy storage/supply even if the grid is down; 4) Water and food stores; and, 5) Medical supplies" (p. 60).
Northampton, Massachusetts, is currently planning to create a "Community & Resilience Hub" to support its residents "who face chronic and acute stress due to natural and human-caused disasters, climate change, and social and economic challenges."
The Greater Manchester Resilience Hub is a very specific example of a resilience hub created to respond to the 2017 Manchester Arena attack. It has since created a Covid-19 services program.
For Californians, the NorCal Resilience Network has a resilience hub initiative with a leadership training program (deadline for applications for the spring 2021 training is Dec. 20, 2020).
Doughnut Economics
Right now our global economy is based on a linear growth model of economics, where we need to consume and produce more and more and more to be rated as a healthy economy. We can all benefit from questioning this old model of infinite growth, and start thinking about another way to define economic success.
Kate Raworth is a British economist who conceived of something called Doughnut Economics, based on a doughnut-shaped diagram modeling sustainable economic growth, where the outside circle is the planetary boundaries, and the hole in the center is the boundary of human well-being. The hole is where people fall when their basic needs are not being met. The idea is that we need to grow economically into the center without exceeding the boundaries of Earth's limits. Hear more about how the Doughnut can work in a real-world context in a Dec. 1, 2020, interview with Kate Raworth (40 min., a bonus episode of the "Explore the Circular Economy Show" by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation). In this interview she talks about how her model of growth fits within the concept of the circular economy (where materials are designed, created, and distributed with their full lifecycle in mind), and how she worked with leaders in Amsterdam to create a vision for the city based on Doughnut Economics (for more on that, see "Amsterdam to embrace 'doughnut' model to mend post-coronavirus economy" from April 8, 2020).
If you want to see this model brought to California, you can sign up for a meeting on Dec. 10, 2020, 5:30 PM, a virtual meet-up hosted by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab.
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| Raworth 2017, WEF, Meet the Doughnut |
Talk to your loved ones about climate change
One student asked about how to talk to her climate skeptic loved ones about climate change. This is a great question! I talked about how there are many different kinds of climate denialists, and it's worth understanding that some communities have a reasonable distrust of scientists (see the infamous Tuskegee Experiment). It's important to approach your loved ones who doubt the climate science with compassion whenever possible.
One excellent, compassionate communicator of climate science is Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and also someone who identifies as a person of faith, specifically an evangelical Christian. But most of all, she is Canadian -- you can enjoy her "oots" and "aboots" in her excellent series of short videos addressing common questions you might hear from skeptics: Global Weirding.
I also highly recommend listening to Dr. Hayhoe explain the ten things climate change and coronavirus in common (a 30-min. lecture from the 2020 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting) in her lovely Canadian lilt.
In that lecture she cites these as the most sustainable solutions to climate change: energy efficiency (citing an ACEEE 2019 report by Ungar and Nadel), clean energy, electrifying what we can while creating carbon-neutral fuels for what we can't, and drawing carbon down into the soil and biosphere.
Two other great resources for helping you respond to loved ones who are climate skeptics:
Skeptical Science - it's got a "Web 1.0" look about it but it has great information, including an exhaustive list of climate change denial arguments hyperlinked to articles that will help you respond.
A free online course edX course “Making Sense of Climate Science Denial” (DENIAL101X), run out of the University of Queensland. I took it and it was extremely helpful in breaking down the phenomenon of science denial in general, and climate science denial in particular.
What is the most certain evidence of climate change?
One of the students looking for help preparing to talk to her climate change skeptic loved ones asked me what is the most certain evidence of climate change. The science of greenhouse gas leading to global warming is documented back to the 19th century, but if you are arguing with a skeptic that might be too fuzzy, since it is possible to attribute some of the warming to things other than greenhouse gas emissions. But sea level rise? That is really concrete, and for my friend's students, mostly living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's well-documented specifically on their doorstep thanks to the...
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| USGS 1999 |
See this graph in its original context, a 1999 USGS fact sheet: "El Niño Sea-Level Rise Wreaks Havoc in California’s San Francisco Bay Region."
Here is a NOAA graph of San Francisco's relative sea level that I think might combine Fort Point data with another gauge or gauges, extending from 1850 to 2020.
This is, as far as I know, the longest-running tidal gauge anywhere in the world, or at least on the west coast of the American continent, and it shows that water levels in San Francisco Bay have risen about seven inches since 1900. A tidal gauge at the Battery in New York City has shown a similar trend, with a similarly long data set.
This clear rise in sea level is caused by a combination of land ice melt and thermal expansion driven by the warming of the Earth by the blanket of greenhouse gases we've thrown over it. At a certain point the argument over the cause will be moot. Hopefully we won't still be arguing causes when SFO and OAK are under water.
Other impacts weighing on our collective minds?
We talked about various climate change impacts in our discussion, and I don't want to spend too much time on them, but here are some resources on some of the topics we touched on.
Heat
Check out Sol Hsiang's research on how heat can contribute to increased conflict in this other Scientific American piece from Jan. 1, 2014, "Feeling Hot Can Fuel Rage."
Smoke
In the San Francisco Bay Area, while sea level rise can grab the headlines, I am more worried about the health impacts of heat and wildfire smoke, since most Bay Area homes lack air conditioning. Well, as bad as it has been in the SF Bay Area, it's worse in Fresno. This Nov. 26, 2020, NYT piece "Wildfire Smoke Is Poisoning California’s Kids. Some Pay a Higher Price." discusses the disproportionate impact of smoke on children in the Central Valley.
A lot of health professionals are looking into the concerning intersection of wildfire smoke exposure and Covid-19 vulnerability, too. This Oct. 27, 2020, piece in Pulmonology Advisor tackles that question: "The Potential Effects of Wildfire Smoke on COVID-19 Risk and Severity." Bottom line: staying indoors helps avoid both risks.
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District website has resources for SF Bay Area folks concerned about wildfire smoke, including an article on wildfire smoke and Covid-19.
It truly was awful during the smoke events this past summer - every day I had to ask myself - do I have a sore throat from smoke or from Covid?
Viruses and permafrost
Check out this Scientific American piece from Nov. 20, 2020, "Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up." The known threats are anthrax and smallpox becoming reanimated after the remains of those who died of those diseases thaw. But -- we don't really know what viruses will be reanimated.
P.S. What's going on with the Venezuelan oil tanker about to spill?
A student asked about an oil tanker sitting in the water off Venezuela, apparently about to capsize. I didn't know anything about this tanker, but poking the internet the tanker in question appears to be the Nabarima, which has been moored in the Gulf of Paria, off the east coast of Venezuela and west coast of Trinidad and Tobago. It is in a state of disrepair, and is carrying about about 1.3 million barrels of crude oil that is jointly owned by the Venezuelan state oil company (PDVSA) and an Italian oil company (Eni). U.S. sanctions on Venezuela are stopping the tanker from off-loading its oil.
In mid-October 2020 it appeared to be tilting about 25 degrees. In late October efforts to correct the tilt appeared to have helped, and experts from Trinidad and Tobago visited the tanker to confirm the condition. They said it has “absolutely no tilt” and that the vessel was “totally horizontal” per Reuters reporting on Oct. 22, 2020.
The environmental group Fishermen and Friends of the Sea are still concerned that the ship is in disrepair and poses a great risk to the Caribbean.