Tag Archives: climate change

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Climate denial

You’re already talking about, as we said, already experiencing more extremes, so we’re already experiencing enhanced hazards as a result of climate change. And every bit of warming, whether it’s above or below one-and-a-half degrees C, increases the risks that we face. So, anything we can to limit the amount of warming will reduce the hazards we’re creating for ourselves.

Bob Kopp, Rutgers

Clarifying words from the UN-sponsored report that came out this week, a report that makes starkly clear that the threat of climate change/global warming is real — and dire. And further confirmation that it’s the extremes that are effect of climate change, not just warmer numbers. In my simplified version of this a few weeks ago, I made the point that heat powers change and creates all kinds of extremes.

John Sauven adds a few of the details in his remarks to Democracy Now:

You can just read the headlines — you know, the wildfires out of control in Greece and Turkey, the heat domes in California and, you know, British Columbia in Canada, the wildfires out of control in Siberia, the floods in Germany and in China. You just look anywhere around the world, and you see climate catastrophe unfolding.

John Sauven, UK Director of Greenpeace

And he doesn’t mention the fires in Oregon and other west coast areas that are devastating whole towns, threatening to spread destruction and smoke across the country.

The report also is very clear — the clearest language yet — on the point that it’s what we humans do that’s making it happen so fast. Kim Cobb, one of the authors of the UN report, points out in the Democracy Now report, that they’re now saying, with full scientific consensus, that the human connection is unequivocal.

Well, this report is obviously an unprecedented new foundation for our science and our world at this critical moment. It is something that involved hundreds of authors over the last three years and really assessed the relevant scientific literature across 14,000 different articles in the published, peer-reviewed literature to make assessments as to where we are with human-caused climate change and where we’re going and what lies ahead in the choices that we have to make. So, really, a stunning, historic pillar in our field and a reminder of the futures that we have to choose in the next decades. … We’re going from “virtually certain” human-caused climate change in the last report to “unequivocal” wording for this report in terms of human influence on climate, and thinking about piling up on the absolutely factual column more and more and more aspects of the impacts of climate change. And this report, I think, makes a very strong emphasis on the rising climate and weather extremes, that have been more uncertain in previous reports. This year, the science has — over the last years, the science has matured to the point that a lot of strong wording in this report around the links between human-caused climate change and any number of different climate extremes.

Kim Cobb, Ga. Tech

It’s clear and very strongly supported by the scientific community — 14,000 articles — that this is the case. Which leaves the climate-change deniers with nothing but bluster to rely on. Denial of the need for action on this issue is just based on the selfish, greedy refusal of the industrial world to take responsibility for their huge part in this problem. Their words ring hollow in the face of the overwhelming evidence that’s been gathered in decades of research. The petroleum, coal, power and auto industries are among the worst, and they have lots of paid voices that present pseudo-science to cover their refusal to make changes that might cost their stockholders money.

And, of course, they have lots of paid lobbyists and lawyers to cajole and threaten our representatives so they are afraid to do anything about this issue. Even the half-hearted provisions in the infrastructure bill and other recent legislation doesn’t seriously take on the corporate roots of resistance to action to improve the situation.

I look at what’s happening around the world, the weather going crazy, people dying, children’s future threatened, and I seriously wonder what it will take for our leaders to do something.

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The climate

In support of my thoughts on the seriousness of the climate change/global warming situation, I’m posting a link to a recent news report from the LA Times. I hope the link works for everyone. If not, Googling “Summer of disaster: Extreme weather wreaks havoc worldwide as climate change bears down” will likely turn it up.

The report links all the recent increasing extreme weather to global warming, and it gives the scientific explanations for how those things are connected. It’s a bit more in detail than my simple notion that heat powers everything, but it bears that core notion out pretty well, I think.

A seminal paragraph:

The scenes of desperation and devastation in Zhengzhou added to a portfolio of disasters this year that have raised the specter of irreversible climate change as never before and offered glimpses of what it means to live on a warming planet where human survival grows more fraught.

LA Times July 21

There are lots of similar reports out there, though your climate denier friends and Congressmen have likely not read any of it. Sorta like the mental blinders that the folks wear who want to claim Jan. 6 Capitol rioters were just a bunch of tourists…

The link:

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-21/extreme-weather-worldwide-climate-change-disasters

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How’s the weather?

We who live in the sunny South don’t really worry a lot about the weather, unless we farm or garden.

An old Southern comic, Brother Dave Gardner, made a career out of saying, “Hot, ain’t it!” That’s probably the most common weather-related conversation and concern around here, because it does usually get pretty dang hot here in the summer! So far this year, though, we’ve had a fairly moderate summer here in Southeast Georgia. Of course, as I told my wife today, there’s still August to go. It’s been fairly consistently in the mid 70s overnight and hits 90 during the day, but none of that 97-and-hotter stuff that we often get in July. It has been a little humid, off and on, as we’ve had stretches of too much rain punctuated by stretches of not enough, as is often the case. But even the humidity–“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!” is another common weatherly observation–has not been unbearable yet.

All of which is making many of us Southerners wonder just what is going on. As well we might wonder, given the extremes of weather we’re seeing in lots of other places. I’m a bit of a weather geek, probably because I was a pilot for a few years (during my stint in the U.S. Air Force), and weather is one of the major things you learn about and worry about as a pilot. I took a class in climatology long ago during my preparation for teaching social studies, and that added an edge to my interest in what is one of the most engaging and complex aspects of life on the planet. So, I probably pay more attention to stories about weather, and the actual stuff going on in the atmosphere around me, than most folks.

Which brings me to the real subject here:

hat is going on?

While we’re sitting down here enjoying a fairly mild summer, the folks out in Oregon where I once lived are experiencing heat waves, drought and vicious, terrifying forest fires fueled by the drought and heat. All the northwest is suffering record heat, billions of organisms in the ocean along the northwest coast are dying, and forest fires are raging out of control.

The largest of the Oregon fires is said to be creating its own weather, the heat causing cloud formation and wind. Its smoke is traveling across the continent, polluting the air in New York City. Hundreds of fires are going on from California to near the Arctic Circle, and the firefighting infrastructure is overwhelmed. The consequences of all this seems guaranteed to be dire, thought we don’t yet have an idea of the extent of it.

At the same time, floods are ravaging populations in Asia and other areas of the world, as well as in the U.S. The warming water all around the world (most alarmingly to me right here in the Gulf of Mexico) are giving rise to surges of nasty bacteria that eat humans. (Maybe related, maybe not, but yet another alarming development surfacing as we begin to learn to cope with the COVID pandemic, is a number of strains of resistant fungi in hospital and nursing home environments.)

How can all these diverse and seemingly contradictory phenomena be explained? One of the basic things that I learned about weather is that all the various weather phenomena are powered by heat. It creates the airflow that moves everything around and carries water up into the atmosphere to fall down again as precipitation, and it interacts with the earth’s rotation to create the destructive storms that seem to also be on the increase in recent years. Heat is literally the engine powering everything that happens in the atmosphere.

And, of course, all the data shows that the earth and its atmosphere are heating up. So as there is more heat, even an amount of heat that creates a few degrees of increase in average temperature, all the extremes are pushed further and further. This is the simple, easily understood fact at the basis of the climate science behind global warming as a threat to the stability of our climate. There’s a lot more to the science than that, I’m pretty sure, but that much of it I can understand without being an expert.

That is why even the cold-weather storms and record cold temperatures don’t prove that global warming isn’t happening. They are the result of the extremes of up and down increasing. It’s a simple formula: more heat produces more extreme weather.

Maybe, as the climate-change deniers would say, we don’t have enough data or understanding of the complexities to know what the root causes of this heating up are, and certainly there are a lot of forces interacting there, including the likelihood that we’re still coming out of the last ice age. But we do understand that some things that we are doing are making the situation worse. We need to stop doing those things as expeditiously as possible. Maybe we can’t change the course of this overall process, but, if we can slow it, maybe we’ll have time to prepare to deal with the worst consequences of it.

As a father and grandfather, I reel at the prospects of a degraded natural environment for my progeny, indeed for the human race as a whole. As the natural world suffers, so do we. Our quality of life, the quality of our health and well-being, the quality of our relationships, even the quality of our spiritual lives is directly and materially affected by the conditions of the rest of the world.

We must begin to make choices that reflect these realities. We neglect and deny them at our own peril.

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Lean in…

“So, what if instead of continuing to avoid this hurt and grief and despair, or only blaming them—the corporations, politicians, agrobusinesses, loggers, or corrupt bureaucrats—for it, we could try to lean into, and accept such feelings. We could acknowledge them for what they are rather than dismissing them as wrong, as a personal weakness or somebody else’s fault.”

—Per Espen Stoknes

in:  In Order to Respond Adequately, First We May Need to Mourn

from:  Over Grow the System

In continuing efforts to “respond adequately” to any of the insanity going on in our world today, it seems this advice is profound, and in keeping with the Buddhist approach which I try to maintain.

Rather than descend into denial and escapism or the trap of blaming “them”, we must do our best to lean in – as Leah Song of Rising Appalachia sings – facing the truth of what is happening, the truth of our own pain and grief over it, and then… and then… rise up in new clarity and resolve and begin to work through the changes that we can see are needed for things to be better.

Changes in our own lives, in our own approach to the world, in how we communicate about it all. In what we believe is possible for us to do. Respond adequately.

The blaming trap, casting all this horrifying, depressing tragedy as an “Us v. Them” thing is really just a way of avoiding the hard truths of it, and worse, makes the situation worse by hardening the positions of those we castigate, label, vilify and hate. Not that there’s not ample evidence that much of the problem stems from actions that are clearly deliberate efforts to accrue personal benefit to some in callous disregard of the likely – dare we say unavoidable? – consequences.

But there’s where the Buddhist perspective comes in. The dharma teachings are full of the notion that everyone – the most vile, depraved, evil among us – has Buddha-nature and that everyone’s actions in this world are the result of causes and conditions that we may not be able to discern, but nevertheless are deeply buried in the motivations and responses of everyone. Understanding that there are things in ‘those people’s’ lives – think of how they may have been abused and neglected in childhood as a simple example – that are responsible for the actions that we see as greedy selfishness or mean-ness or evil can help one to respond to those people with compassion rather than anger and hatred.

Not that these things in any way excuse or justify actions that are harmful to others, but simply that seeing that as an underlying truth can help one respond with love and compassion.

And that kind of response is the only thing that has even the remotest possibility of touching the hardened hearts of those who are destroying our world.