Take care

Happy holidays! Remember to take care of yourselves, each other and the beautiful planet we live on.#happyholidays #rescuedogs pic.twitter.com/zbU08OSuCh

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 25, 2019

“I’m very grateful to you.” - Sir David Attenborough speaking to Greta Thunberg.

Listen to Greta’s guest edited @BBCr4today programme on BBC Sounds 🎧
pic.twitter.com/rQ7DN4NyiV

— BBC Sounds (@BBCSounds) December 30, 2019

Spring 2020 Honors Lecture Series on Climate Change

"There is a tomorrow": Philosophical Reflections on the Climate Crisis

Teenage climate activist and TIME Magazine's Person of the Year  Greta Thunberg says “We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow. That is all we are saying.”

Today, though, the forecast for tomorrow is cloudy. "We’re in big trouble," says one commentator:

Over the coming 25 or 30 years, scientists say, the climate is likely to gradually warm, with more extreme weather. Coral reefs and other sensitive habitats are already starting to die. Longer term, if emissions rise unchecked, scientists fear climate effects so severe that they might destabilize governments, produce waves of refugees, precipitate the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in the Earth’s history, and melt the polar ice caps, causing the seas to rise high enough to flood most of the world’s coastal cities. The emissions that create those risks are happening now, raising deep moral questions for our generation.

But the rise of a new generation of engaged activists, led now by Thunberg, leads long-time climate crusader Al Gore to hope for a bright new dawn. “This moment does feel different. Throughout history, many great morally based movements have gained traction at the very moment when young people decided to make that movement their cause.”

In my talk I'll reflect on environmental ethics and the perils and promise of this moment.

UPDATE:

February 3

Phil Oliver

“There is a tomorrow:”  Philosophical Reflections on the Climate Crisis

January 27	Philip Phillips	Introduction / Syllabus
February 3	Law Harrington	Keynote Speaker
February 10	Kim Sadler and Cindi Smith-Walters	Are K-12 Educators Teaching about Climate Change
February 17
February 24	Alisa Hass	The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Heat Exposure in a Warmer World
March 2	Ennio Piano	Some Economics of Climate Change
March 16	Kate Pantelides	Climate Rhetoric:  Examining Genre Change in the UN Climate Report
March 23	Ryan Otter	Climate Change through the Lens of Data Science
March 30	John DiVincenzo	Climate Change:  The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, so help me Science
April 6	Daniel Sandweiss	Using Climatic and Cultural History to Understand El Nino’s Role in Ancient Peru
April 13	John Vile	A Biblical Approach to Climate Change

The Uninhabitable Earth

One of "our favorite non-fiction books of 2019":

“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” by David Wallace-Wells

You may remember David Wallace-Wells’s article “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was published in New York magazine in 2017—a piece so widely shared and hotly debated that it required its own Wikipedia article. The story rendered the abstract threat of climate change in concrete, even cinematic, terms, informing the reader without surrendering an ounce of high-level drama. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” is Wallace-Wells’s book-length expansion of the piece, and it’s just as potent, if infinitely more depressing. At its worst, it could be described as apocalypse porn. At its best, it’s perhaps the richest inventory of climate-change research yet published. Wallace-Wells makes clear, through a stream of startling factoids, that individual consumption choices can never make the difference that policy changes can. (Our smug organic-produce shopping, in others words, is virtually meaningless.) And yet the tidbit that struck me most was a fairly mundane one. Wallace-Wells writes that higher pollution levels have been strongly linked to premature births and low birth weights—and that the “simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll.” Though a grim testament to the danger of carbon emissions, the fact that something as simple as E-ZPass could help is also encouraging. There may not be a silver bullet for climate change, but, as Wallace-Wells argues, there’s still far too much potential for change for hope to be lost. —Carrie Battan
==
And,

“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell

Nearly everyone I know who’s read Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” had told me that it inspired something akin to a personal crisis. The book, Odell’s first, is equal parts philosophical self-help and environmentalist tract, and it offers a fresh mode for thinking about life under technocapitalism––and also some suggestions for what might be done. Odell is particularly interested in questioning the assumptions and incentives of the digital economy. The perversions that spring from productivity culture (to say nothing of attention as a currency and a resource) are corrosive not only on the individual level, she argues, but on a larger, social scale. She draws comparisons between the Internet and the natural world, making a case for the long-term maintenance of self, community, and place, both online and off. (“I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thoughts,” she writes.) Self-care, in this model, is not commodified self-indulgence; it’s a form of preservation enacted by reclaiming and reallocating one’s attention. Odell is an artist, and her medium, often, is context—historicization, depth, analysis. This seems fitting. In a year in which the boundaries of cruelty and indifference stretched and expanded, there was also, among a certain set, a quieting or refocussing. In my own circles, some people disappeared periodically from Twitter and Facebook. A few grew more knowledgeable about plants and birds, or listened, with great conscientiousness, to non-algorithmic public radio. Most importantly, they began to ground themselves locally and socially and to reconsider where they placed value. The personal crises, it seems, had been productive. —Anna Wiener

==
And,

The Best Climate Books of 2019, recommended by Sarah Dry 

Read

1

The Overstory 
by Richard Powers

Read

2

Horizon 
by Barry Lopez

Read

3

Why Trust Science? 
by Naomi Oreskes

Read

4

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future 
by Jon Gertner

Read

5

Tawny Grammar: Essays 
by Gary Snyder

Climate documentaries

One Thing You Can Do: Watch These Documentaries Over the Holidays

Also this week, a mission to expose invisible methane leaks


By Susan Shain and Hiroko Tabuchi
Dec. 18, 2019, 12:31 p.m. ET

Don’t feel like watching that holiday movie you’ve already seen 900 times? Then gather ’round to learn about a topic even more timely than Christmas cookies and the dreidel song: our warming planet.

In addition to the best-known titles, like “An Inconvenient Truth” and its sequel, “Chasing Ice,” and Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood” and “Ice on Fire,” here are five documentaries to try. Don’t worry about spoiling the holiday mood: Most of them end on an inspiring note.

“Years of Living Dangerously”

This series, featuring celebrity correspondents like Matt Damon and Olivia Munn, is a favorite of the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Not only because it discusses climate impacts and solutions, but also because it tackles two huge myths: first, that climate change is a “distant issue,” and, second, that we can only fix climate change by “destroying the economy or our personal liberties.”


“Merchants of Doubt”

If you’ve ever wondered how the climate debate became, well, a debate, then this intriguing and infuriating film is for you. Based on a book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, it draws a parallel between the tactics of Big Tobacco and Big Oil, revealing the world of politics, spin and public opinion.

“Mission Blue”

Besides highlighting the work of the oceanographer Sylvia Earle, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, this film also paints a picture of the devastating changes she has witnessed during her decades underwater. Xiye Bastida, a 17-year-old activist and organizer for Fridays For Future NYC, said it “shows the power we have as individuals to connect with nature and speak for nature.”

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“This Changes Everything”

Inspired by Naomi Klein’s 2014 book of the same name, this documentary “aims to empower,” rather than scare, viewers into action. “The film tells moving, personal stories,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the U.S. Climate Action Network, “but weaves them into a larger story about how colonialism and greed got us into this crisis, and also how people-power and disruption will get us out.”

“Racing Extinction”

Unless drastic changes are made, some biologists estimate we could lose up to 50 percent of Earth’s species within the next century. That devastating fact — a potential sixth extinction, wherein “humanity has become the asteroid” — is the basis for this fast-paced, wide-ranging film from Louie Psihoyos, who won an Oscar for “The Cove.” While some scenes are tough to watch, they’re balanced with awe-inspiring nature shots that showcase a world worth saving.

nyt

His Novels of Planetary Devastation Will Make You Want to Survive

Jeff VanderMeer, the author of “Annihilation,” brings us fresh horrors with each new book. So why does he remain an optimist?

Jeff VanderMeer was hiking the grassy, swamp-lined pathways of a wildlife refuge outside Tallahassee, Fla., a few years ago when he and a friend found themselves in the path of a charging wild boar. The area is a sea-level palimpsest of wetland and plains, all damp grass and grassy water, much of it as flat as the Serengeti — which made it possible for them to see the animal coming from across a vast, but still alarming, distance.

As the boar barreled toward them, growing slowly but irreversibly larger, VanderMeer felt his fight-or-flight reflexes stir — yet he and his companion still had plenty of time to discuss: Should they run, counting on the boar to wear itself out and lose speed over time? Would it be better to dive off the path and into the abutting reeds, or would they be pursued, forced to defend themselves against a full-grown, razor-toothed hog? Over a half-million feral pigs populate the backwoods of Florida, many the mottled-brown descendants of those brought to North America in 1539 by conquistadors, and though it wasn’t unusual to see them out scavenging peacefully during the day, articles about trappers whose legs had been sliced open by their sharp, curved tusks regularly surfaced in the local news. Eventually, VanderMeer and his friend decided to stand their ground, hoisting their packs like weapons — but then, the boar veered unexpectedly off the path, crashing through the thick stand of reeds and grasses and vanishing into the marsh.

The experience inspired a scene early in “Annihilation” (2014), the first volume of VanderMeer’s breakout novel trilogy “The Southern Reach.” In the book (which was made into a film starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac), a small band of women known by only their professional designations (“the biologist,” “the surveyor,” “the psychologist”) explore Area X, a mysterious, expanding zone within which the laws of nature have taken on an alien and forbidding aspect. As the group makes for their camp, they are charged from a distance by an enormous wild hog, the team’s first encounter with the modified fauna of the area. Readying their rifles and long knives as the creature draws closer, their leader shouts orders: Don’t get close to it! Don’t let it touch you! One member of the party, an anthropologist, falls victim to a fit of nervous giggling at “the absurdity of an emergency situation that was taking so long to develop.” As in VanderMeer’s real-life encounter, the beast suddenly turns from the group and disappears into the swampland, and the novel’s narrator notes its strange posture, “its head willfully pulled to the left as if there were an invisible bridle” and its expression “somehow contorted, as if the beast was dealing with an extreme of inner torment.” (continues)
==
It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction
The micro- and macro-organisms that saved humanity from our climate crisis are now changing us — and might destroy us.

By Jeff VanderMeer

Editors’ note: This is part of the Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 50 or even 200 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The Opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

In the past two decades, the explosion of unregulated biotechnological advances saved our planet from crossing a climate crisis threshold that would have destroyed human civilization, yet our triumph is overshadowed by a new threat. We are currently in danger of being destroyed by the very organisms — micro and macro — that saved us from extinction via pollution, carbon emissions and superviruses.

Although contractors and rogue biologists did the initial work, the formal application of biotechnology to the climate crisis began in 2048 with the Tardigrade Diaspora and the microbial inventions that followed. This conscious effort to direct the power of biotechnology was enabled not only by the global creation of carbon- and plastic-devouring organisms but, also — to borrow a word from the realm of horticulture — “cultivars” that reduced the probable extinction rates among wild animals and fast-grew even slow-growers like live oaks.

But biotech would not have been enough without a corresponding deep understanding of ecosystems. This understanding occurred in large measure because we finally took indigenous knowledge systems seriously and used land reparations to let firsthand experts turn that knowledge into actual policy, without interference. This was a positive step forward, even though it required a massive realignment of social and political axes and could not stop millions of deaths due to scarcity of food and drinking water in the interim... (continues)

Living gently on the land will produce an ecological paradise, but...

The Parable of the Sick Pig and the Lonely Rooster
I still believe that living gently on the land will produce an ecological paradise. I also fear the global collapse of agriculture.

By Margaret Renkl

John and Molly Chester at Apricot Lane Farms, 40 miles north of Los Angeles.

NASHVILLE — John Chester’s lovely new documentary film, “The Biggest Little Farm,” opens with a tragedy in the making: Wildfires are moving toward the farm from three different directions. A horse whinnies in alarm as workers rush to shepherd a storybook cast of farm animals — chickens, pigs, sheep, cows — toward what they hope will be safer pastures. Sirens wail in the distance. Smoke and ash fill the air.

It’s a sobering opening for a feel-good film about a young California couple who leave their day jobs to become organic farmers. “Everyone told us this idea was crazy, that attempting to farm in harmony with nature would be reckless, if not impossible,” Mr. Chester says in a voice-over. But it wasn’t impossible: After the opening sequence, the film backtracks to tell the story of how Mr. Chester, a documentary filmmaker, and Molly Chester, a personal chef, managed to turn 200 acres of worn-out, arid land 40 miles north of Los Angeles into an agricultural paradise called Apricot Lane Farms.

As “The Biggest Little Farm” unfolds, the Chesters hire Alan York, an expert in biodynamic farming practices, to teach them traditional methods that will restore their land to true fertility, no chemicals required. Cover crops fix nitrogen in the soil and sequester rainwater, preventing runoff and holding the topsoil in place. Sheep graze among the cover crops, leaving behind fertilizer for the soil. A giant worm-composting facility produces more fertilizer for the gardens and orchards. It’s breathtaking, all the ways the Chesters have found to ensure that every animal on the farm contributes to the health of the crops, and to ensure that the crops can sustain the farm animals while still producing enough fruits and vegetables to sell at market. And all of it works in concert with the wildlife that soon returns to the newly restored ecosystem.

I won’t give away the film’s genuine drama by revealing too many details, but it’s not a spoiler to point out that there’s a reason industrial farms typically use enormous amounts of chemicals: Attempting to farm in harmony with nature means that nature will sometimes get the upper hand, at least at first. “I guess I don’t know what Alan’s idea of a ‘perfect harmony’ is even supposed to look like,” Mr. Chester laments midway through the film. “Because every step we take to improve our land seems to just create the perfect habitat for the next pest.”

Nevertheless, we understand from the beginning that all will be well with this little patch of abundant life. From the cheerful background music in the opening credits to the animated sequences that mimic the illustrations in children’s books, this is visual storytelling designed to reassure. The message is gentle but insistent: The earth may be going to hell in a handbasket, but there are still ways to undo the damage we’ve done.

“The Biggest Little Farm” is a balm for the weary soul. I know because I’ve watched it four times already — twice last summer at the Belcourt, Nashville’s historic theater, and twice more this fall, after it became available to watch at home. Seeing that dead land come back to vibrant life gives me hope, even as news about the environment gets worse and worse and worse.

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The same week I saw “The Biggest Little Farm” for the first time, I also heard the environmental journalist Amanda Little talk about her new book, “The Fate of Food,” at Parnassus Books. Much of “The Fate of Food” concerns what Ms. Little calls a “third way” for approaching food production in “a bigger, hotter, smarter world,” as the book’s subtitle puts it.

The basic argument of this fascinating book is that industrial-scale agricultural practices aren’t environmentally sustainable, but returning wholesale to the sustainable ways of the past isn’t feasible either. There are just too many of us now, and most of us can’t afford the food grown by small-scale organic farms. Heritage farms will never be able to feed an estimated population of nearly 10 billion in 2050, never mind the increasing problems with heat, drought, flooding, crop diseases and invasive species that farmers will increasingly face in the years to come.

“The Fate of Food” explores a variety of options for responding to the disruptions in the food chain that climate change is already bringing, and will continue to bring, by using every innovative tool available to feed a growing population without exacerbating the role agriculture itself plays in warming the planet: Agriculture, along with the deforestation that accompanies it, currently accounts for roughly one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.

For months, I thought about these two approaches to farming — the nature-responsive biodynamic tactics of “The Biggest Little Farm” and some of the very high-tech approaches to food production in “The Fate of Food” — and tried to reconcile what I want to believe with what I truly fear. I want to believe that living gently on the land will always result in the paradise that is Apricot Lane Farms. I fear the global collapse of agriculture itself.

I ran into Ms. Little at the Southern Festival of Books in October and asked her if she’d seen the film. She had and said she had some thoughts. We made plans to meet for coffee a few weeks later. I felt a lot better after our conversation. For Ms. Little, it turns out, the biodynamic approach taken by the Chesters is not an anachronism that has no place in a bigger, hotter world. She calls it the “microcosm of an optimally functioning food system, an example of ecosystems functioning at their best.”

True, it’s not replicable on a scale that will feed 10 billion people affordably, and it’s not accessible — either geographically or financially — to the vast majority of people. But that’s not really the point. What the Chesters have learned is how to integrate all the different kinds of food production with one another, and with the specific environmental conditions of the farm’s location, in a way that is very nearly self-sustaining: “And all of that is crucial knowledge that we need to apply to bigger food-systems production,” Ms. Little says.

The use of crop diversity and companion planting to enrich the soil and manage pests, for example, is essential to reducing the need for chemical fertilizers and chemical insecticides, though most industrial farms still rely on a mono-cropping approach to food production. In California, however, which is already being ravaged by the heat and drought of climate change, large-scale farmers are beginning to integrate crop diversity into their operations. And there are other biodynamic practices that can be applied by much larger farms and still produce food on a scale that will feed a growing world affordably.

The value of “The Biggest Little Farm” is not merely in the way it warms our hearts with its adorable cast of animal characters (the sick mama pig, the orphaned lamb, the lonely rooster) and its idealistic farmers, determined to do the right thing under very difficult conditions. Its value is in what it teaches us about both moral responsibility and ecological possibility. “The Biggest Little Farm,” in other words, is not the film equivalent of a children’s picture book or a fairy tale. It’s a parable.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

Counting birds

Why You Should Be Counting BirdsYes, you can do something. Citizen-science initiatives like Project FeederWatch are a great way to start.

By Margaret Renkl


NASHVILLE — Whenever people who are concerned about the environment gather, the conversation invariably turns to questions of how to live more gently on the earth. Concerned people are always asking how they can eat more responsibly, shop more responsibly, keep house more responsibly. How can they lower their carbon footprint? How can they tend their gardens in a way that supports troubled pollinators and other wildlife?

As long as the federal government is in the hands of climate-science deniers, concerned people understand that there’s no hope for a sweeping approach to the growing climate emergency. So they cling to concrete measures that everyday folks can take instead. Fortunately there are many ways to help: Every week, the Climate Fwd. newsletter from The Times includes practical tips for living more sustainably.

But what about the sublimely unconcerned people, those who are living in a way that makes absolutely no sense in light of the incontrovertible changes our climate has already undergone, never mind the peril it faces? I’m not talking about people who have been duped into believing that the climate emergency is just a manifestation of liberal hysteria. I’m talking about educated people on both sides of the political aisle who understand what’s happening but who feel exempt from personal responsibility for it. How is it possible to be informed about this calamity and yet calmly proceed as though nothing at all has changed?

Sure, some of us are by temperament more inclined to worry than others, and some have a greater capacity for imaginative extension. But increasingly, I’ve come to believe that the difference between concerned people and unconcerned people is largely a matter of personal investment. People who don’t feel, in a personal way, what’s happening to the world are better able to put it out of their minds. If you’re fleeing a wildfire — or living for days without power because of the risk of wildfires — you think about these matters with greater urgency... (continues)

Cities of the future

Is this how we must build our cities in order to survive the climate crisis and the coming sea level rise?: https://t.co/l29ftpwh5I #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #FridaysForFuture pic.twitter.com/kM33maakcD

— Dr. Alan Marshall (@DrAlanMarshall) November 6, 2019

Preserving our home should not be a partisan issue

Preserving our oceans and rivers should not be a partisan issue. Protecting the land which sustains us should not be a partisan issue. Protecting the air we breathe should not be a partisan issue...this planet is our home. https://t.co/CzfldkxjZT

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 29, 2019

Do something

“Doing nothing is exactly what the climate deniers, the Koch network, the N.R.A., the fossil fuel industry and every self-important yahoo in every gerrymandered district in this country wants us to do.” ⁦@MargaretRenkl⁩ https://t.co/vNO7SxtGLZ

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 14, 2019

We really can't afford this

	The New Yorker (@NewYorker)
10/12/19, 10:09 PM At the moment, the planet is on track to warm more than three degrees Celsius by century's end, which one recent study found would do $551 trillion in damage—more money than currently exists on the planet. nyer.cm/8owhDyf

Naomi Klein on BookTV

The clearest, sharpest, smartest voice on the climate crisis and how it “changes everything” https://t.co/uKhla5I52F

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 6, 2019

https://www.c-span.org/video/?463950-1/depth-naomi-klein

For Rachel Carson, wonder was a radical state of mind

In 1957, the world watched in wonder as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into outer space. Despite Cold War anxieties, The New York Timesadmitted that space exploration ‘represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to Earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere’. Technology, it seemed, possessed the astonishing potential to liberate humanity from terrestrial life.

But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the political theorist Hannah Arendt reflected on the Times’s strange statement, writing that ‘nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men’s bodies’. Such rhetoric betrayed an acute sense of alienation. Misplaced wonder at our own scientific and technological prowess, she worried, would isolate humanity from the realities of the world we share, not just with one another, but with all living creatures.

Arendt’s disquiet stemmed from the postwar context in which she lived: the United States economy was booming, and, for many Americans, the much-celebrated cycle of expansion and construction, of extraction and consumption, appeared infinite. Millions of Americans had bought into the glittering promise of limitless prosperity. While technologies such as plastic wrap and Velcro, microwave ovens and nonstick cookware might seem mundane today, they were unimaginably novel at the time, and pushed people further into a manmade world. While Arendt was concerned that humans would become self-absorbed and isolated, stupefied by the synthetic, and prone to totalitarian tricksters, others fretted that nature (for a large portion of the population, at least) was no longer a place to discover transcendence but had instead become merely a resource to be exploited. At mid-century, we were in the process of trading Walden Pond for Walmart... (continues)

The birds

Three Billion Canaries in the Coal Mine

What does it mean for us that birds are dying? And what can we do about it?

By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — During the nearly quarter-century that my family has lived in this house, the changes in our neighborhood have become increasingly apparent: fewer trees and wildflowers, fewer bees and butterflies and grasshoppers, fewer tree frogs and songbirds. The vast majority of Tennessee is still rural, and for years I told myself that such changes were merely circumstantial, specific to a city undergoing rapid gentrification and explosive growth. I wasn’t trying to save the world by putting up nest boxes for the birds or letting the wildflowers in my yard bloom out before mowing. I was hoping only to provide a small way station for migrating wildlife, trusting they would be fine once they cleared the affluence zone that is the New Nashville.

I was wrong. A new study in the journal Science reports that nearly 3 billion North American birds have disappeared since 1970. That’s 29 percent of all birds on this continent. The data are both incontrovertible and shocking. “We were stunned by the result,” Cornell University’s Kenneth V. Rosenberg, the study’s lead author, told The Times.

This is not a report that projects future losses on the basis of current trends. It is not an update on the state of rare birds already in trouble. This study enumerates actual losses of familiar species — ordinary backyard birds like sparrows and swifts, swallows and blue jays. The anecdotal evidence from my own yard, it turns out, is everywhere.

You may have heard of the proverbial canary in the coal mine — caged birds whose sensitivity to lethal gasses served as an early-warning system to coal miners; if the canary died, they knew it was time to flee. This is what ornithologists John W. Fitzpatrick and Peter P. Marra meant when they wrote, in an opinion piece for The Times, that “Birds are indicator species, serving as acutely sensitive barometers of environmental health, and their mass declines signal that the earth’s biological systems are in trouble.”
(continues)

As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace.--Pythagoras

— TPM Philosophy Quote (@tpmquote) September 29, 2019

What If We Stopped Pretending?

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.
By Jonathan Franzen

“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.

I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. The consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we’ll pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe a little more, but also maybe a little less). The I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. The rise might, in fact, be far higher...(continues)
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Readers respond:

Can We Stop Climate Change?

Jonathan Franzen argues that it is delusional to think we can still save the planet from climate change, because rising temperatures will inevitably cause global catastrophe (“What If We Stopped Pretending?,” September 8th, newyorker.com/franzen). He says that we should resign ourselves to the destruction to come. This argument promotes complacency and hopelessness, and it gives an easy out to people who might otherwise advocate for the political action we need. I trust the climate scientists and activists who believe we have the resources to create a hopeful future. Franzen does not offer reality—he offers defeat.

Judy Schneier
Brooklyn, N.Y.

If environmentalists resent Franzen’s piece, it is only because it presents the state of human inaction on climate in a well-reasoned, clear-sighted, and complex way. We cannot prevent cataclysmic temperatures and extreme weather. Wouldn’t we all feel better if we acknowledged that fact and acted accordingly?

Linda J. Drake
Denver, Colo.

The most exemplary of the new books on climate change—David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” and Bill McKibben’s “Falter”—struggle for an honesty that does not counsel despair. Franzen’s argument, which suggests that attempts to mobilize are at odds with conservation and even with moral clarity, is an unhelpful distortion of the truth. We have the money and the technology to save ourselves. The tragedy, if it comes to that, will be that we don’t do so, even though we can.

Tom Athanasiou
Albany, Calif.

I quibble with Franzen’s assertion that one of our best defenses against global chaos is to maintain functioning democracies and civil society. Franzen must see how poorly democracies have fared in the past few decades—just ask Francis Fukuyama or George Soros. If we want to confront the coming climate apocalypse, we must, as Franzen says, “institute draconian conservation measures.” Left to our own devices, most of us will keep destroying the planet, one Amazon Prime order at a time, and we’ll keep voting for whichever Drumpf or Bolsonaro lets us do it. Democracy may well be the worst answer to the question of climate change.

Emily Otto Kaplan
St. Louis, Mo.

My only complaint about Franzen’s piece is that it should have been published in 1970, when we still had a chance.

Walter Haugen
Fougax-et-Barrineuf, France

Franzen’s essay is a welcome discussion of reality. At our current rate of progress, we cannot stop global warming. But Franzen says he is not a scientist, and it shows. In the last few decades, science has enabled us to manipulate molecules of DNA as easily as a carpenter builds a table. Technologically speaking, developing safe and controllable methods to combat rising temperatures is a much easier task. Franzen deserves credit for advancing the discussion, but he should recognize that what we need is a large government-funded research program—one that gives science the chance to stop global warming.

Robert Eisenberg
Chicago, Ill.

Yes, the climate reality is desperate. But caving like this? Pathetic. I could never explain to my classroom of fourth graders this kind of moral surrender.

Siri Bardarson
Freeland, Wash.This article appears in the print edition of the September 30, 2019, issue.