Climate Change Resources for Intro to Sociology

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.

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...

Fort Point tidal gauge! 

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.

Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change (the re-post)

The following was published March 19, 2015, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Also: I followed up this piece for WWF with  posts here in March and April 2015 about some new instances of  folly -- governments constraining their own climate/environmental scientists in Florida and Wisconsin.

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The great historian Barbara Tuchman took a hard look at governmental policy missteps in her 1984 book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. As someone studying modern climate change policy, it is hard not to draw parallels to her definition of folly: The pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.

She uses these criteria to zero in on the most serious instances of government folly:

1. The policy must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not just in hindsight.
2. A feasible alternative course of action must have been available.
3. The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and persist beyond any one political lifetime (“collective government” folly is the more significant problem).

How is hiding climate change science “folly”?

Many governments are acknowledging climate change, even creating new positions to work on the problem. Governments taking slow and measured steps—perhaps too slow and measured—can be viewed as insufficient action, but it is not folly; governments ordering their scientists to study climate change and then burying the results? I call that a classic example of Tuchmanesque folly, and the U.S. federal government and three U.S. states— Nebraska, South Carolina, and North Carolina—have all done it. The press and science-friendly politicians have widely called out the counter-productivity of governments burying climate science. Incorporating the science into planning is (to some degree or another) feasible, since other governments are doing it. The subterfuge is not being done by one person, but government decision-making bodies. Governments burying their own climate science is the definition of folly.

When did the U.S. government bury climate science that it itself ordered?

The details about three states’ climate follies were recently published by the Business Insider’s science desk (read: These States Have Reportedly Tried to Hide Scary Climate Data from the Public [Oct. 30, 2014] and This Is the Climate Report South Carolina Spent Years Hiding [Dec. 29, 2014]). The author points out that “good climate reports were ultimately made public in the above three states, even if the reports are not currently being utilized to their full potential.” While that is true, North Carolina’s infamous official denial of sea level rise data will hamper planning for at least another year.

North Carolina’s House Bill 819, passed in June 2012, prevents the state from basing coastal policy on anything but historical data, ignoring any emerging climate change science through 2016. The governor failed to veto the bill, and it became law in August 2012. Almost simultaneously, in June 2012, a scientific article by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) placed North Carolina’s coast within a 600-mile “hotspot” for sea level rise. North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, had the input of the legislature and the USGS put in front of her at the same time, and she let the political current pull state policy away from where science was pointing. Meanwhile, in 2013 she was replaced by a Republican, Pat McCrory, who installed an oil developer as head of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission and believes in responding to climate change by “cleaning up the environment in a cost-effective way.” Besides this, coastal Carolinians might also worry about the lagging constraints on public safety planning caused by the May 2014 vote by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission to ignore sea level rise impacts projected too far out. Adaptation to sea level rise will—by collective government vote—only prepare for the next 30 years of impacts.

What about the U.S. federal government? Didn’t official climate science denial get voted out in 2008?

There are many ways government can delay or bury the release of inconvenient scientific findings. Many are familiar with the second Bush administration’s direct censorship of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the topic of climate change. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was also censored, leading to its senior official Rick Piltz turning whistleblower in 2005. He founded and directed the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch initiative from 2005 until his death in October 2014 (read his obituary from the NYT). In March 2013 Mr. Piltz told students during a speaking tour that:

[T]he chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a former energy lobbyist, would hand-edit reports, deleting references to the ecological impact of climate change and adding passages that exaggerated the uncertainty of climate-related findings.

In January 2009, Barack Obama promised in his inaugural speech, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place,” and two months later issued a memorandum to agency heads to improve scientific integrity. Under his administration, the direct White House interference with the EPA and USGCRP may have stopped, but Congress has found ways to delay action on EPA findings about dangerous chemicals, and in the same manner may be playing shell games to delay action on rational, climate change science-based adaptation planning.

Case in point: according to a Center for Public Integrity 2014 report, the EPA has been prepared since 2008 to assert that arsenic is 17 times more potent as a carcinogen than it now reports. However, its arsenic report was delayed procedurally at the Office of Management and Budget for two years. Then, in 2011, Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, with arsenic-laden pesticide companies among his campaign donors, ordered the EPA to have its findings reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences within a House Appropriations Committee report. In 2015 the review is still ongoing, and nothing has changed in federal regulations regarding arsenic in drinking water.

Eventually the “safe” levels of arsenic may be adjusted and avoidable cases of cancer duly avoided. But evidence is mounting that there is no way to be adequately conservative in our emissions of greenhouse gases or adequately liberal in preparing for climate change hazards. According to a Princeton study published in 2013, even if we halted all greenhouse gas emissions today climate change would proceed unabated for centuries—not decades, as previously thought— because of the ocean’s decreasing ability to absorb heat. And this is not accounting for intersecting hazards and feedback loops causing exponential worsening of conditions, difficult to project with today’s climate models.

The EPA’s arsenic case is awful, but the burial of scientific findings about climate change is potentially catastrophic.

Are there any cases of the U.S. government actually adapting to climate change, despite political pressure to delay?

The U.S. Navy has been at the forefront of actually adapting to climate change since before Obama’s restoration of “science to its rightful place.” A Feb. 12, 2015, article by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone describes how the military has long seen the security threat represented by climate change and taken measures—as long ago as 2003, when the report “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” (by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, downloadable here) was published by the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, then President George W. Bush’s defense secretary. The home of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, Norfolk, VA, is within the sea level rise “hotspot” called out by the USGS in 2012 (running from Cape Hatteras, NC to north of Boston, MA). So the Navy has been busy planning for climate change, despite occasional Obama-era interference from Congressional climate denialists. The Navy started with replacing critical piers that were becoming submerged in the late 1990’s. Goodell asks the officer in charge of mid-Atlantic Navy facilities, Capt. J. Pat Rios, about the rationale for replacing them:

“We didn’t raise the piers because of climate change” […]. He doesn’t quite wink, but almost.

“Then why did you raise them?” I ask.

“Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building them, it didn’t cost much more to build them higher.”

Thus, the Navy’s climate change adaption planners find their ways to work around a government bent on folly.


Photo: Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. © U.S. Government

Red-Letter Day for California Adaptation Planning: SB 379 is Law (and Some Other Good Legislation, Too)

Yesterday (Oct. 8, 2015) California's Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 379, requiring cities and counties to include planning for climate change impacts in their general plans starting in 2017.

• Fact sheet about SB 379
• Text of SB 379

SB 379 was proposed by Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson of the 19th Senate District (including all of Santa Barbara County and western Ventura County).

The title of the bill reads like a strange little haiku:

SB-379
Land use: general plan: 
safety element.

Last night I attended a sea level rise planning discussion (part of the Here. Now. Us. project) in Marin County, a county where you could say the default political persuasion was left of "Hippie," and found myself sitting next to not one but TWO climate change denialists. These people spent every minute of airtime they were allowed expressing concern that people are concerned about climate change (because of its illegitimate science, it is too expensive, we are already doing enough to respond to flooding, etc.). So I think this bill takes a bold stride forward. It explicitly uses the words "climate change" and "climate adaptation" -- phrases that provoked loud scoffs from the vocal duo I met last night. Let me offer the strangely titled-with-a-haiku SB 379 my own haiku in thanks:

With a clear task list
you ask us for foresight so
our children are safer.

The Governor also signed two other bills by the same senator yesterday, both concerning oil spill protections: SB 295 Pipeline safety: inspections  and SB 414 Oil spill response.

These other two good bills were also signed over the last two days, upping the ante on the state's GHG reduction goals and inaugurating representation of vulnerable populations on the board that oversees the state's main GHG reduction measures:

• SB 350 (De León and Leno) Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015 (Also see the Governor's Oct. 7, 2015, press release about it)
• AB 1288 (Atkins and Pavley) Air resources (to ensure the California Air Resources Board "is more representative of the state's diversity and those most impacted by pollution" according to Governor Brown's Oct. 8, 2015, press release about it)

So now in the article of California's Health and Safety Code that deals with the make-up of the Air Resources Board, Section 39510 (e) reads:

"The Senate Committee on Rules and the Speaker of the Assembly shall each appoint one member to the state board who shall be a person who works directly with communities in the state that are most significantly burdened by, and vulnerable to, high levels of pollution, including, but not limited to, communities with diverse racial and ethnic populations and communities with low-income populations."

That is indeed another step in the right direction. Part of my 2009 Master's thesis was devoted to the "lessons learned" from the failed Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC) mandated by AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. That committee's participation in the initial roll-out of AB 32 resulted (as of 2009) in a lot of anger on both the EJAC and the ARB. A lot of the roll-out process was already determined by the time the EJAC was formed, setting the committee up for failure. Having actual front-line community representation on the ARB should improve trust, and hopefully the health outcomes of our state's most vulnerable populations.

Other legislation of note signed this week:

• AB 1482 (Gordon) Climate adaptation, requiring the state to update the state's adaptation plan every three years (which was already being done by Executive Order, but now it's a law)
• AB 1496 (Thurmond) Methane emissions, supporting monitoring and reduction of emissions of this extremely dangerous greenhouse gas.
• SB 246 (Wieckowski) Climate change adaptation, setting up a "Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program" at the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, which has been the lead agency on climate planning under this governor, and tagging it with responsibility for updating the state's Adaptation Planning Guide (published in 2012).

Also noteworthy in state adaptation news-- today the California Natural Resources Agency released the 199-page draft document "Safeguarding California: Implementation Action Plans" for which it is holding public comment sessions in Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Mon. Oct. 12: Bay Area Listening Session on Climate Adaptation

6-8 PM, MetroCenter Auditorium, 101 Eighth Street, Oakland (right above the Lake Merritt BART Station). 

Mon. Oct. 26: Sacramento Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans

10 AM- 12 PM, Rosenfeld Hearing Room, California Energy Commission, 1516 9th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814

Tues. Oct. 27: Los Angeles Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans

1:30 - 3:30 PM, Carmel Room, Junipero Serra Building, 320 W. 4th Street,, Los Angeles, CA 90013

Some Good News from the Southern Ocean, the Arctic, and Republican Pollsters

Since most news about climate change falls in the two categories of "confirming our worst fears" and "creating new, more depressing fears" I thought I'd share a few tidbits of recent good news.

• Southern Ocean Showing 'Remarkable' Revival in Carbon Absorption Ability (Sept. 10, 2015, The Guardian) about a new report of results from a 30-year study, The Reinvigoration of the Southern Ocean Carbon Sink by Landschützer et al. (Sept. 11, 2015, Science)

The downside mentioned by one of the study's lead scientists, Nicolas Gruber - "One has to recognise that despite this remarkable increase in the Southern Ocean carbon sink, emissions have gone up even more."

• Survey of Republican Voters Shows a Majority Believe in Climate Change (Sept. 28, 2015, NYT)

The downside of this good news is that it describes the attitudes of potential voters, not Republican elected officials or candidates for the top office of the country. Potential voters are not the same as political party influencers, unfortunately. The more extreme voices are appearing to win the day in terms of how the elected/ would-be elected leadership is positioning itself on climate change.

• Shell Exits Arctic as Oil Slump Forces Industry to Retrench (Sept. 28, 2015, NYT)

I don't see any downside here!

This Sept. 28, 2015, BBC article has some helpful maps illustrating the location of the Shell test drilling site with respect to the ice extent and international boundaries.

The Arctic will never be safe from the threat of oil drilling as long as we use oil in our energy stream, but for "the foreseeable future" it is safe from Royal Dutch Shell.

Meanwhile, the Russian oil production project by Gazprom Neft is still active in the Pechora Sea, drilling at the Prirazlomnoye Arctic field, apparently unaffected thus far by sanctions, unlike the Rosneft/Exxon joint drilling project in the Kara Sea.

Still further north from the Gazprom Neft project, the "Goliat" platform, owned by the Italian energy group Eni and Norwegian company Statoil, is in place at the border of the Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea. According to the BBC article cited above, it "could soon start producing oil ... within weeks." So, the Arctic Oil Rush is underway, just without one of the world's biggest oil multinationals.

Wisconsin joins the follies

Wisconsin, really?

Yes, Wisconsin, reports Tim McDonnel in Another State Agency Just Banned the Words "Climate Change," on Apr. 8, 2015, for Mother Jones.

And this time it isn't just one political leader unilaterally deciding to deny those tasked with preparing for changes to the land use of the words "climate change," it's a collective decision, specifically two political leaders on a committee of three. The decision to decree that public employees refrain from "engaging in global warming or climate change work while on [Board of Commissioners of Public Lands] time" was proposed by Wisconsin's new State Treasurer Adamczyk, who ran on a platform of promising to eliminate the State Treasurer's office, and supported by the new State Attorney Schimel, who, as a candidate, said he would have defended the state's ban of interracial marriage in the 1950's, and would have defended the state's ban on same-sex marriage more recently. The third committee member, Secretary of State La Follette, voted against it.

Government Follies, Florida Edition

Hey, I have a new piece up on the WWF ClimatePrep blog!

Wherein I get to talk about my favorite historian the brilliant Barbara Tuchman and her definition of government folly:

Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change (March 19, 2015)

As the piece was being prepared for publication I was wondering if the topic wasn't a little dated, since the momentum is only growing for governments to come to the climate change adaptation table, but then this happened:

Former Florida DEP employees say they were told not to use terms "climate change" or "global warming" (March 9, 2015)

In Florida, of all places. When people want to know in a 3 second sound-bite what I've learned from all my research and work in the adaptation field, I often joke: "don't buy land in Florida."

And now Governor Scott has gone one more step further down the folly-tastic path:

Crazy on you: Scott administration orders employee to get medical evaluation for considering "climate change." Wow. (March 19, 2015)

Wow, indeed.

Read his official reprimand if you want to look at the inner workings of an employee being silenced on the topic of climate change. Now, true, this isn't about burying an inconvenient scientific report about climate change hazards; it's about an administrator feeling like she is being put in a precarious position by an employee's efforts to advocate against the Keystone XL pipeline, citing climate change as a reason to oppose it. However, the employee being asked to get a mental health screening before returning to work strikes me as beyond the pale.

As of this past week, the Florida chapter of the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is taking up Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee Bart Bibler's case. The Florida PEER director Jerry Phillips says "Bart Bibler has no idea whether he will ever be allowed to return to work."

This kerfuffle in Florida doesn't meet Tuchman's definition of government folly (it's not collective folly: it's folly  resulting from the actions of an individual, the governor), but let's see how the Florida legislature responds—or doesn't.

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Update: WWF's ClimatePrep blog apparently went defunct in 2018 and may not be revived.  I'm updating this blog's links to ClimatePrep to snapshots on Archive.org (where available). Some articles look OK there, some not so OK. For a readable version with images intact, see my ClimatePrep articles as reconstructed on this blog:

• Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog
June 08, 2017

• Story Maps: A Rising Star of Climate Change Communication
April 10, 2017

• The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud
February 17, 2017

• The Internet of Water - October 31, 2016

• Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo
August 30, 2016

• California: The Rebeavering
May 22, 2015

• Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change
March 19, 2015

• In the Heat of the Moment
December 02, 2014

• California’s Adaptation Clarion Call
September 02, 2014

• Farmland in Flux
July 8, 2014

• Honest Conversations: Climate Change and Uncertainty
December 12, 2013

Breathtaking Shortsightedness in the U.S. Congress

U.S. House of Representatives Votes to Repeal Climate Science (a April 7, 2011, blog post by Dan Lashof, Director of NRDC's Climate Center in Washington, D.C.)

The impacts are evident, communities are already having to retreat from coastal erosion and sea level rise, and the House of Representatives is denying the whole scientific body of evidence. Some days you feel more hopeful than others.