Climate Links: May 2019

** updated May 22, 2019; * May 20

** In the Hands of Angry Gods. Ed Simon, The Baffler. May 22, 2019.

The case for hell on earth

And we abolish the idea of hell at the very moment when it could be the most pertinent to us. An ironic reality in an era where the world becomes seemingly more hellish, when humanity has developed the ability to enact a type of burning punishment upon the earth itself. Journalist David Wallace-Wells in his terrifying new book about climate change The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming writes that “it is much, much worse, than you think.” Wallace-Wells goes onto describe how anthropogenic warming will result in a twenty-first century that sees coastal cities destroyed and refugees forced to migrate for survival, that will see famines across formerly verdant farm lands and the development of new epidemics that will kill millions, which will see wars fought over fresh water and wildfires scorching the wilderness. Climate change implies not just ecological collapse, but societal, political, and moral collapse as well. The science has been clear for over a generation, our reliance on fossil fuels has been hastening an industrial apocalypse of our own invention. Wallace-Wells is critical of what he describes as the “eerily banal language of climatology,” where the purposefully sober, logical, and rational arguments of empirical science have unintentionally helped to obscure the full extent of what some studying climate change now refer to as our coming “century of hell.” 

* George Clooney releases PSA against climate change “dumbf**kery”. Melissa Locker, Fast Company. May 8, 2019.

Clooney noted that science has given “unprecedented knowledge of the natural world from subatomic particles to the majesty of space.” Tragically, though, that knowledge is threatened by “an epidemic of dumbf**ing idiots” saying “dumbf**king things.” 

Unfortunately, according to Clooney, “dumbf***ery is highly contagious, affecting the minds of even the most stable geniuses,” leading people to deny climate change, not vaccinate their kids, and not believe in dinosaurs. Now, that “rampant dumbf***ery” threatens “our health, our security and now our planet.”

* Because 'The House Is on Fire,' Naomi Klein Takes Centrism-Obsessed Media to Task for Failed Climate Coverage. Eoin Higgins, CommonDreams. May 1, 2019.

"You can't leave it all to the markets."


* Humanity Is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide. Eric Levitz, NY Mag. May 6, 2019.
[MW: most headlines captured just the sentiments of the first 9/10ths of this headline, but its the final word of the headline that's crucial.]


* Traditional Economics Has Absolutely Screwed Us. Mitchell Anderson, TheTyee.ca. May 9, 2019.

UN’s biodiversity crisis report screams for new ways of natural accounting.

"Conventional capitalism is failing because it considers the services provided by nature such as oxygen and food production as free and limitless. Only an economist could fail to see how a collapsing biosphere might be bad for business."

* A War Reporter Covers "The End of Ice" -- and it will change the way you think about climate catastrophe. Elise Swain, The Intercept. May 4 2019.

“A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things,” Jamail explains. “I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.” 

“The End of Ice” readers won’t find calls for technology-based solutions, politicians, mitigating emissions, or the Green New Deal to save us. 

“This global capitalist experiment, this experiment of industrialization and burning fossil fuels rampantly is an utter, abject failure,” Jamail told The Intercept.

415.26 parts per million: CO2 levels hit historic high. Patrick Galey, AFP. May 13, 2019.

Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. 

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm). 

It was also the first time on record that the observatory measured a daily baseline above 415 ppm. 

The last time Earth's atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.

Climate Stasis: German Failure on the Road to a Renewable Future. By Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz and Gerald Traufetter, Spiegel Online. May 13, 2019.

In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the country was turning away from nuclear energy in favor of a renewable future. Since then, however, progress has been limited. Berlin has wasted billions of euros and resistance is mounting.

Gray whales starving, washing up dead in startling numbers along SF coast. Peter Fimrite, SanFran Chronicle. May 11, 2019.


Why rapid extinction of plant, animal species matters. Daryl Choo, Today Online. May 12, 2019.

Human activities are putting a million species worldwide at risk of extinction, threatening ecosystems that people around the world depend on for survival, a United Nations (UN) assessment has found. 

The 1,500-page report, compiled by more than a hundred international experts, is the most comprehensive assessment on biodiversity and ecosystems yet.

The problem is capitalism. George Monbiot. April 30, 2019.

It is a weapon pointed at the living world. We urgently need to develop a new system.  

For most of my adult life, I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective, but the noun. 

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th. It is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess. 

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, which drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system. 

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. 

The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. 

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week, a paper in the journal New Political Economy by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st there has been a re-coupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion. 

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone, from which materials are taken without full payment, and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases, until capitalism affects everything from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. 

Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate. 

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, that he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, that he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction, but from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations. 

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism. 

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God. 

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice, based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth. 

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system, but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves, that meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

One million species at risk of extinction, ... + One. Ian Welsh. May 6, 2019.

So you’ve probably seen all the articles about the UN report which finds that one million species are at risk of extinction, out of the 8.7 million species we believe exist. 

That’s more than 10%. 

The key thing that tends not to be emphasized in this is that ecosystems are chains, or complex webs of interactions. The death of insects, for example (remember when driving caused bug splat? I can’t remember the last time I saw that), will revebrate through the entire web, starting with birds. 

These interactions are complicated and we do not understand them well at all. 

There is a non trivial risk that the algae which are the major oxygen producers in the Oceans will die, for example. They produce 70 to 80% of our oxygen. 

If that happens, humanity will go extinct, along with a lot more than 1 million other species. 

Our actions are insanity. Absolute insanity. We are destroying the web of life which makes our own existence possible. 

We have no escape. We cannot even make biospheres (enclosed environments) work. Without that we cannot try to keep even a small population alive in the collapse (not that that would be anything but a catastrophe anyway.) 

But that we can’t make even a simple enclosed environment which can support human life work is the point. We are playing with systems we don’t understand. We are committing mass genocide of other life forms. 

And there is a better than even chance that it will be a million, or millions, +1. 

We do not exist separate from the web of beings who make life on Earth possible.

Say Goodbye To Permafrost (And Civilization?) Ian Welsh. May 13, 2019.

So, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have ever been since homo sapiens has existed. 

Meanwhile, on Russia’s arctic coast, which is permafrost, the temperature is 29C, 84F. 

That means the permafrost is melting. 

Since we continue to pump greenhouse gasses out, since every scenario includes more significant warning, I will state again: we are not going to avoid permafrost melting. 

Permafrost holds vast amounts of methane. Methane is, short term, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. 

This will likely then lead to methane releases from arctic seas. It will lead to faster melting of glaciers and polar and antarctic ice. As oceans warm, they will expand further, leading to sea level rises.
Increased temperatures will lead to even more extreme weather events such as category 6 hurricanes. 

We will see changes in weather patterns and so on. 

But the key point is that we are about to hit, and there is no actual possibility of avoiding, the accelerator, almost certainly leading to exponential uncontrolled increases in climate change. 

We are, for all practical purposes, past the point of no return. We will lose our coastal cities, for example, the only question is when. The glaciers and snowcap in most of the world will go away, leading to many rivers drying up. 

Etc, etc… 

Climate change is not a question, it is a certainty, and the question is not will it be bad, but “how bad?” 

The answer is almost certainly, “very, very bad.”

Deceptive sustainability: Cognitive bias in people's judgment of the benefits of CO2 emission cuts.
Mattias Holmgren et al, Journal of Environmental Psychology. 2019.

Abstract

People's beliefs in the actions necessary to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are important to public policy acceptability. The current paper addressed beliefs concerning how periods of small emission cuts contribute to the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, by asking participants to rate the atmospheric CO2 concentration for various time periods and emission rates. The participants thought that a time period with higher emission rates combined with a period of lower emission rates generates less atmospheric CO2 in total, compared to the period with high emission rates alone – demonstrating a negative footprint illusion (Study 1). The participants appeared to base their CO2 estimates on the average, rather than on the accumulated sum, of the two periods' emissions – i.e. an averaging bias (Study 2). Moreover, the effect was robust to the wordings of the problem presented to the participants (Study 3). Together, these studies suggest that the averaging bias makes people exaggerate the benefits of small emission cuts. The averaging bias could make people willing to accept policies that reduce emission rates although insufficiently to alleviate global warming.

Introduction 

Anthropogenic climate change (Figueres et al., 2017, Hansen et al., 2005, IPCC, 2014, Oreskes, 2004) has already raised sea levels (Solomon, 2007), increased global mean temperature (Houghton, 1996) and caused extreme weather events (Meehl et al., 2000), and the consequences risk being even more dramatic in the future. To mitigate global warming and climate change by reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is thus one of the most important steps to a sustainable future. However, unless corporate and political opinions reinforce necessary national and international regulations of GHG emissions (Zhao, 2017), this will hardly be possible. Because public opinion influences the direction of corporate and political opinion, people's ability to understand and accept the forces behind global warming is essential to take into consideration. 

People tend to mentally account for climate change as an object, instead of a process characterized by temporal totality and inertia (Chen, 2011). A consequence of this mental construal is that the stock-flow relationship of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere (the “inflow” via anthropogenic CO2emissions, and the “outflow” via natural CO2 absorption; Newell, Kary, Moore, & Gonzalez, 2016, p. 138) becomes difficult to grasp (e.g., Chen, 2011). For example, people tend to mistakenly believe that it is possible to stabilize atmospheric CO2 by keeping the anthropogenic emissions at current rates (Sterman & Booth Sweeney, 2007). The fundamental limitation of people's mental model of global warming is one of the underlying reasons for the erroneous beliefs individuals have about the relationship between the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, the inflow via anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and the outflow via natural CO2 absorption. The belief that the CO2 concentration can stabilize by keeping CO2 emissions at current rates fails to take the process of accumulation into consideration. Maintenance of current emission rates in fact result in a continuous accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, as long as the emission rates are higher than absorption rates. This insufficient understanding of climate change may be one reason for people's reluctance to take costly and immediate actions to respond to climate change, as people's understanding and perception of climate change, its mechanisms and consequences appears to be one factor that drives climate action and behavioral responses to this phenomenon (Gifford, 2011). 

People's views of climate change and global warming are affected by biases and are easily influenced by extraneous information (Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011). For example, people are more likely to believe in global warming on hot days (Zaval, Keenan, Johnson, & Weber, 2014); they respond differently to the threats of climate change depending on perceived distance to the problem (Ejelöv, Hansla, Bergquist, & Nilsson, 2018); and people tend to think that “environmentally friendly” objects can compensate for more harmful ones (a negative footprint illusion; Holmgren et al., 2018a, Holmgren et al., 2018b). This paper extends research on the negative footprint illusion by exploring it in the context of people's beliefs regarding benefits of small emission cuts. 

People tend to think that ‘climate friendly’ behaviors can compensate for less friendly behaviors (Kaklamanou et al., 2015, Sörqvist and Langeborg, 2019). For example, a common idea is that “I recycle - therefore I can take my car to work”. One possible explanation of these beliefs is that people try to find a balance between good and bad deeds (Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin, 2009). In other words, people tend to use moral licensing (e.g., Mazar & Zhong, 2010), in which they believe that they can license themselves to act immorally after establishing moral credentials. This manifests in relationships between higher fuel efficiency and increased driving distance (Matiaske, Menges, & Spiess, 2012). Similarly, decreased water use due to a water saving campaign, is related to increased electricity usage (Tiefenbeck, Staake, Roth, & Sachs, 2013); and electric car owners generally feel less obliged to act environmental friendly compared to conventional car owners (Klöckner, Nayum, & Mehmetoglu, 2013).

The idea that ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘climate friendly’ behaviors can compensate for less friendly behaviors is sometimes applied to ‘friendly’ and ‘harmful’ objects as well. For example, people tend to think that a hamburger combined with an organic apple has a smaller carbon footprint than the hamburger alone (Gorissen & Weijters, 2016), and even experts intuitively think that a set of conventional and “green” buildings are less harmful to the environment compared to the conventional buildings alone (Holmgren, Andersson, & Sörqvist, 2018a). In general terms, when ‘environmentally friendly’ items are added to a category of ‘regular’ items, people tend to think that the environmental impact of the category decreases (Holmgren et al., 2018a). This effect is called the negative footprint illusion and is associated with people failing to take into consideration the simple fact that A + B must necessarily be larger than, or equal to, A. The illusion seems to arise because people base their estimates on the average of the items in the set rather than on their sum, i.e. an average bias (Holmgren et al., 2018a). Because people tend to think that “environmentally friendly” objects can compensate for more harmful ones, the estimated environmental impact become the average of the environmental impact of the objects rather than on their aggregated sum (Fig. 1). It should also be mentioned that the illusion has been shown to arise in both between-participants (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016, Holmgren et al., 2018a, Kim and Schuldt, 2018) and within-participants experimental designs (Holmgren, Kabanshi, Marsh, & Sörqvist, 2018b).

....

11. Conclusions 

Heuristics and systematic biases of the human mind lead to misconceptions about climate change and global warming. We need to develop more effective educational approaches to overcome the barrier of human cognition in order to avoid wicked outcomes in solving environmental problems. Campaigns and consumer information based solely on scientific rationales seem quite ineffective (Stoknes, 2015). For one thing, policy makers, planners and climate-change researchers need to package the message of global warming in more effective ways. As shown here, insights developed within the subject area of environmental psychology have much to offer in this context. What might seem to be logical policy interventions may in fact be quite deceptive interferences for achieving sustainability. Hence, strengthened legislations about information concerning emission cuts and ‘environmentally friendly’ choices could be a necessary tool to overcome the influence that the averaging bias seems to have in people's thinking about the benefits of emission cuts.

Terrawatch: snowball Earth – when glaciers reached the tropics. Kate Ravilious, Guardian. Apr. 30, 2019.

Rock deposits show there have been many times when the planet has been covered in ice