Susanne Moser

Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This. Laurie Mazur. Earth Island Journal. July 22, 2019.

A conversation with scientist Susanne Moser about climate communication, the benefits of functional denial, and the varied flavors of hope.

Perhaps you are depressed about last year’s IPCC report, which said we have about a decade to head off catastrophic climate change. Or you are reeling from the UN’s recent warning that we may doom one million species to extinction. These days, the relentless tide of bad news can take a toll on our mental health — and on our motivation to stay in the fight. How can we find that sweet spot between denial and despair?

Susanne Moser has given it some thought.

In fact, Moser has been thinking about climate change since the mid-1980s, when — as a high school student in Germany — she read an article on the subject in one of her mother’s magazines. She came to the US to complete a doctorate on climate-related issues, and her long resume includes stints at the Union of Concerned Scientists and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as well as academic postings at Harvard and Stanford universities. Moser has always been ahead of the curve: she was writing about climate adaptation back in the early 1990s, before that was a thing. Today, in addition to advising governments, nonprofits, foundations and others on climate change adaptation and the transformational changes required to maintain the kind of conditions that allow for a functional society, much less one in which all people and nature can thrive, Moser spends a lot of time thinking about the psychological demands of this fraught moment.

In a conversation with Earth Island Journal and Island Press, Moser talks about communicating bad climate news, the benefits of “functional denial,” the varied flavors of hope, and the better world we can build in the wreckage of life as we know it.

So you’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to climate change for decades now. We always hear in the communications field that fear is not motivating, that scaring the bejesus out of people is not productive. But personally, I feel quite motivated by fear. And the science is fearful. Should we pull our punches on that?

Well, there is no doubt that fear is motivational, or else we would not be here as a species. Right? If we were not afraid of the lions coming out of the grass, we’d be eaten by them. But if you only scare people without telling them what the hell they can do with their fear and how to translate that into protective or remedial action, then you lose them. There are two reactions we have to a threat: we either deal with the threat, or we deal with the feelingabout the threat.

The first option actually reduces the threat. You reduce it, you run away from it, or you build a seawall against it. The other one is, I don’t want to look this awful issue in the face because I don't know what to do. So I'm going to stick my head in the sand.

The same is true with shame, which can sometimes move some people. Guilt can, anger can, love can, but if you don’t know how to translate them into anything, then even positive feelings won't do any good.

Well, certainly, plenty of us are scared. These days, if you're not terrified, you're not paying attention. So, how can we recognize the trouble we’re in and still get out of bed in the morning?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. Certainly, for me, one of the reasons to get out of bed is that we really haven't tried everything. Having done miserably at communication, having done miserably at policy, having done miserably at market responses to climate change gives us a ton of hope, because we could do so much better.

The other thing is we’re short-sighted human beings on many counts, and yet our species has managed to build cathedrals that took 300 years apiece. So it’s not like we can't. The future isn't written yet. It is still open in terms of how it’s going to be shaped.

Still, what we have to realize — and what's dawning on many people now — is that we have put a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere that won't just come out tomorrow. That’s why we have to make space for grief, fear, and all the rest of it in public spaces and in our private lives.

We’re dealing with a global system that’s highly interconnected. We have set so many things in motion that if you tried to control it right now, you couldn't. We have sailed a ship, and the question is, are we going to keep blowing wind into its sails and sending it off into even more troubled waters, or are we going to do what we can to smooth out the waters, and make sure the opening to the harbor is wide enough for everyone?

There is a ton of space left in terms of what we can do. We can’t just do anything we want, because of the things we have already set in motion, but we can stop making it worse, and there are so many options to deal with the challenges and to make life much less miserable for the vast majority of the world’s people.

So I think it’s a matter of priorities and values, and reckoning with what we have done. In the public sphere, it’s called political work. In the private sphere, there is deeply personal transformational work that needs to be done.

You’ve talked about something you call ‘functional denial.’ What does that look like?

The denial part is what we all have. It is incredibly hard to look the realities we have created in the eye. The functional part is that we have to keep going regardless. On a daily basis, I have to get up in the morning, I have to pay my bills, I have to do my work. I function as if the world were just the regular old world in which everything stays the same and I don't have to worry too much about anything. If you look at my daily life, it would look like that.

If you look more carefully, you might see changes or choices I've made to try to avoid adding to the problem. But by and large, I get out of bed, I drink my tea, I do my life as if nothing else was going on.

And at the same time, every single day, I face what we have created. If you ask me to stop for a minute and say, How do you feel about that? it can paralyze me. I have so much grief about it. I have such anger about it. It’s all one big morass of emotions that I have about what we, humans, had the audacity to create out of blindness, and then out of greed and whatever.

So it’s that simultaneity of being fully aware and conscious and not denying the gravity of what we’re creating, and also having to get up in the morning and provide for my family and fulfill my obligations in my work.

For me, functional denial is actually a form of hope.

Say more about that.

I've come to the conclusion we have very little hope literacy in this country, and in the world, actually. There are many different flavors of hope.

One is sometimes called grounded hope, active hope, or authentic hope. That’s where you are not at all convinced that there is a positive outcome at the end of your labors. It’s not like you're working towards winning something grand. You don’t know that you'll able to achieve that. But you do know that you cannot live with yourself if you do not do everything toward a positive outcome.

And then there's ‘radical hope,’ a term coined by a man named Jonathan Lear, an anthropologist. With radical hope, you don’t know at all whether the outcome is positive or negative. Neither the means nor the ends are clear, and you have to reinvent yourself completely to come to peace with whatever that new future is. Between grounded hope and radical hope, that’s what we’re going to need for climate change.

It sounds like radical hope is useful in times of great uncertainty.

Oh, absolutely. Lear came up with that term in the context of studying a Native American tribe that had lost everything: their land, their livelihoods, their culture, their freedom — they had to completely remake themselves in order to survive.

They had a great leader in helping them make that transformation. We don’t currently have anyone in this country or in this world that I see who understands what radical cultural transformation requires in terms of leadership.

It seems in fact that our leaders are doing precisely the opposite at this moment of uncertainty, and promising us a return to some ethereal status quo that we’re clearly not going back to, even if that were desirable.

What's interesting is that I've come to understand uncertainty as a necessary condition for hope. If you're perfectly certain that “It’s going to be fine” or “It’s going to be hell,” you don’t need hope, because you know exactly what’s going to happen.

And what people like Trump and other radical right-wingers in particular promise is a kind of certainty: “America is going to be great again, it’s going to be purely white, and we’re going to have great economy and we’re the best.” That’s all a form of certainty.

Whereas, “The future is going to look very different, and I can't tell you how, but we’re going to have to go through that together and figure it out and create it — that’s uncertainty, that requires work. It’s very unpopular.

We’re so bad at handling uncertainty. It’s very unsettling.

Well, it’s unsettling, and it’s difficult work, we’re bad at it, and that is the grounds for transformation. I have absolutely zero illusion about how hard this is going to be and that we have absolutely no guarantee we’re going to make it to the other side. So, I'll tell you that up front.

But, because we’re finally loosening from those set ways, there's actually opportunity. You cannot transform if you stay the same. It sounds trite, but if you hold on to the way it has been, you're going to stay the same. So you have to let go of the cliff, and you're going to look like a fool, you're going to make a lot of mistakes — my god, you're going to go scratching down the cliff. It’s not going to look pretty, but it’s the only way you have a chance of actually changing.

We do seem to be going off a cliff, as a society, so it’s helpful to see that as a necessary transformation.

Yeah, and this is the kind of framing that we need, and the kind of leadership that we need, to help us understand that this is a process. It’s a very archetypal process. Maybe we've never been at this much risk, as a species, but it’s not like we have never had to go through anything similar.

Maybe migration is a good example. You have to let go of your homeland, and you set off on a ship in the ocean. You don’t know whether the boat is going to hold up or whether the captain knows anything about where he's going. That’s a metaphorically perfect illustration of what we’re doing. We let go of something old in order to go through great uncertainty and come to a new place where we unfold in new ways.

There are people out there who are skipping the hope part, who believe that it’s inevitable that climate change or something else will cause the collapse of civilization, and they're getting ready for that. I'm thinking of the Dark Mountain Project, and various prepper communities on the political left and right. What do you think of that approach?

What's interesting to me is that they skipped right from one certainty, “We’re going to be fine, it’s not going to be bad,” to another certainty, “We’re all screwed.”

For example, Jem Bendell in the UK has put forward a deep adaptation agenda. On his Facebook page, on his LinkedIn group, he basically forbids a conversation about anything in-between, “We’re going to be fine” on the one hand and “We’re screwed, we’re going to die out in the next five decades.”

For Bendell, and also the Dark Mountain project, they are finding community with each other and building social capital that is absolutely crucial to get through the tough spot that we’re going through.

But the preppers — the people who just buy their generator and their guns and store food for three months — I’m worried about them. In America where there's so many guns, we’re going to shoot each other, and it’s very scary to me. It’s a very individualistic, survivalist approach, whereas the Dark Mountain project and Jem Bendell’s deep adaptation are actually doing some of the deep psychological and social work required to get to a different place.

So, community is a key ingredient of the transformational change that needs to happen if we’re going to come out on the other side of this?

There's no doubt that the harsh conditions we’re currently creating will make us dependent on each other in ways we don’t even know yet. We’re so focused on, “Can I protect myself from this; can I survive on whatever?” Even, “Where can I move?” as if there is a place to hide from this global change. But to have any chance of surviving as a species, we need to share resources, to bring the weakest and most marginalized into the center of our communities, and yeah, we’re going to get a lesson in dependence and interdependence like you haven't seen. Well, none of us have seen. I say, Stay put if you can and get to know your neighbors!

I could not agree more with that prescription, but I also can't help but notice that that doesn’t seem to be the direction we’re headed in as a society.

It’s not just the climate news but also the societal condition — the political inability to make anything happen across partisan lines — that feed into people’s despair. Fostering social capital, wherever we are —in the workplace, at the neighborhood level, in the communities — is absolutely crucial.

Hope doesn’t hinge on a rosy picture of the future. I really believe that the amount of suffering and the amount of cruelty that we’re capable of is very large. But I also believe that people do have a heart and are desperate for something other than what this currently is.

There are millions of people who don’t know how to engage with this in a constructive way and feel powerless, which is feeding their despair, but who are not on board with the viciousness and hatred and divisiveness that you can get on TV every minute of the day.

It’s really true. And the way we live now in this culture, which has caused climate change, is such a radical break from most of human history. Returning to a more cooperative way of living could be like coming home.

Yeah. It is relearning something that we once knew, at least on a species level. We keep talking about the three Fs: fight, flight, or freeze, but there is a fourth one, and that’s the one that actually helped us survive.

What's that?

The forming of bonds, or the be-friending. That’s the piece that got to us to cooperate as a species and recognize that we have greater advantage when we work together as opposed to everyone for themselves. This is biology. It is in the genetic history of our species. We are here because we cooperated. It’s part of us.

With the story of climate change, there's so much loss: loss of the familiar, of places we love, of the stable climate that gave us a huge boost as a species. Are there things to be gained as well from moving out of that certainty?

I certainly think so. The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet.

It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.

When [atmospheric concentration of carbon passed] 415 parts per million, people were saying that we had never had these kinds of atmospheric conditions during the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet. And we’re now moving to double that, and beyond.

So we’re having to deal with completely new environmental conditions, and we will be changed by that. Can we imagine that? No. Can we try to imagine that we’re not just clobbering each other over the head or blowing each other up? I can imagine something different.

When you imagine it, what is the best thing about that new world?

That we will be a nondominant species again. I'm not the first one to say that. But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet within the confines of its resources, without damaging it, and in fact making it part of our species’ purpose to recreate and nourish the conditions for the continuity of life.

In my highest aspirations for the human species, that’s what we will be: servants of life.

we're not fixing climate change

we’re not fixing climate change. fredrik deboer. July 7, 2019.

This is one of those things where I feel like everybody quietly knows it but we have this sort of tacit agreement not to say it openly in order to preserve some sort of illusion about what our society is and who we are. But, I mean, come on – we’re not fixing climate change. Nobody thinks we are, not really. Everyone’s putting on a brave face, everyone’s maintaining the pretense on behalf of the kids of whatever. But come on. Let us be adults here. We are not, as a species, going to do the things necessary to arrest or meaningfully slow the heating of the planet and thus will be exposed to all of the ruinous consequences of failing to do so.

Look, here’s what fighting climate change entails.

1. Observing slow and gradual change; apprehending the severity of a problem when there is no one clear crisis point or moment of no return.
2. Thinking long term; prioritizing conditions in the future above conditions in the present.
3. Being selfless; sacrificing our own personal needs and desires to secure the needs of others.
4. Acting strategically; working in a coordinated way towards a complex goal even when the connection between those means and goals seems remote.
5. Behaving parsimoniously; using less, consuming less, not acting as though the we are entitled to have more tomorrow than we had yesterday.

I could go on. And all of this requires cooperation across social, political, and national borders of a kind that as not existed at anything like this scale in the history of the world. Does that all sound likely to you?

I’m not telling people to give up, and I’m not telling people to despair. Of course we have to fight this thing, just like you fight to save your life even when it’s impossible. This is not in any sense denialism; it’s real, it’s coming, and the changes are utterly devastating. And though I recognize it would be easy to think this, I say this without a shred of glee, smugness, or superiority. I just feel like everyone privately knows that this is a fight we’re going to lose. Turn off every emotional part of your brain and do the pure, brutal actuarial calculus and find out what you really believe.

...

Climate change as both the death of capitalism and of the dream for a better world will do. Climate change is unique in its intellectual promiscuity, its indifference to ideology; it will both crush your enemies and your dreams as you like. There will still be humans, in the future, but they will live in a world thrown out of the exquisitely sensitive conditions that enabled us to flourish. What they will build I cannot say. I only wish I was there to see it. I am young enough to live to see the collapse, but too old to ever see what rises from the ashes.

Bates: The Real Climate Debate

The Real Climate Debate. Albert Bates. June 30, 2019.


"That lump in your throat you feel listening to someone laying down hard truth in a poetic way is actually the one piece of the human genome most likely to rescue us."


Climate came up only briefly in the first two Democratic debates. In the first, Rachel Maddow asked whether the candidates had a plan to save Miami. In the second, the moderators asked less than half of the candidates to briefly explain their position on the issue and the first of those (Kamala Harris), after her standard climate soundbite, pivoted to North Korea and Russiagate. Biden and Sanders saw it as a green energy issue—we just need more electric cars.

A more serious and determined debate has been going on outside, as a new wave of scientist-engineers surge through international conferences and refereed journals testing theories about how to recover some hope to sustain life aboard our damaged spacecraft before it passes a yet-unlocated threshold beyond which there is no recoverability.

The new tech they are pimping might be categorized generally as geoengineering, but that tends to toss both wizards and prophets into the same bag, so perhaps the tech side should be split between natural solutions and artificial ones. For carbon dioxide removal, the natural ones are afforestation/reforestation, soil rejuvenation, biochar, holistic management, chinampas, and marine permaculture. The artificial ones are BECCS (Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage), DACCS (Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage), and enhanced weathering. To delay the inexorable impact, solar radiation management is a separate category from carbon dioxide removal, and includes things like painting cities white to reflect sunlight (which would not even approach balancing the loss of sea ice at the Arctic), spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere or over large ice masses (which has to be continuously repeated, at great expense, or the bottled-up heat returns in a rapid surge), and seeding the oceans with megatons of iron sulfate to stimulate plankton and algae (another perilous treadmill—get off it if only if you want to die)

And apart from that stage, a different discussion is happening amongst what I would call the realists, although others may just call doomers. In an open letter to David Wallace-Wells published in The Ecologist, April 4, 2019, eco-scientists Rupert Read, John Foster, and Jem Bendell chastised the best-selling author of The Uninhabitable Earth for donning what they considered rose-colored glasses.

We are unconvinced by your claim that because we engineered this mess, so we must be able to engineer an escape from it. While that may be a neat journalistic turn of phrase, it is logical nonsense. 

Climate change was not intentionally engineered by humanity. The self-reinforcing feedbacks that are further heating our world show us how the complex living system of Planet Earth is beyond direct human control. So, we have no precedent for humanity intentionally engineering global change. 

We understand you may wish to offer your readers some hope. However, your argument offers a continuing license for the hubris which has led humanity into climate-peril in the first place. 

You point out that since “a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture and perhaps even a meatless planet” are in principle possible, we have “all the tools we need” to stop tragedy in its tracks. And yet that would require us, as you also sardonically note, to rebuild the world’s infrastructure entirely in less time than it took New York City to build three new stops on a subway line.

Harsh words. After reading both Wallace-Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth and Bendell’s Deep Adaptation, I feel the critics probably went over the top. They are accusing Wallace-Wells of hanging on to unrealistic hopes while not making adequate preparations for the likelihood that those will prove groundless. I don’t think Wallace-Wells shied away from urging adequate preparations at all. And to hoist Bendell’s petard (whose ideas are not novel despite his overnight celebrity but should really be attributed to Guy McPherson), his advice is to “give up all hope of solutions without giving up on hope itself,” which is giving up on the prospect of adequate solutions, or more precisely, that humans have the genetic capability of accepting them and changing in time. I know, it’s a mind-bender. That’s why these guys get paid so much to philosophize in academia.

Readers of this blog will know that I am of the opposite persuasion. Thanks to what we have discovered about epigenetics, we have not arrived at a predetermined genetic cul-de-sac. We can, to borrow from John Lilly’s sensory-deprivation tank studies, “re-metaprogram the human biocomputer.” Thanks to what we have discovered about memes, temes, ecosystem regeneration camps, and ecovillages (now being installed in China at breathtaking speed), we are not limited by the cultural inertia of human history since Sumer. And thanks to natural climate solutions of the kind I listed above, especially biochar in all its potential applications, we are not constrained by any shortage of technical solutions, without resort to geoengineer quackery. We know precisely the acreage of forests required and the rates of planting and watering we are capable of. We know how to address the ocean feedback mechanism (exsolvation) with biochar and kelp forests. We know how to pull the fossil fuel IV out of our arm and go cold turkey without getting delirium tremens.

What we don’t know, is how to stop the quarreling and get it done. In this, I think Wallace-Wells and his critics agree. So would McKibben (Falter), Diamond (Upheaval), or Jamail (The End of Ice). Our impediments are mainly behavioral, not technical. McKibben’s approach is to take to the streets, where we can see inspiring protests by Greta Thunberg’s School Strike and Extinction Rebellion. I question, though, whether street protest really works or just makes people feel good by agitating their tribal instincts. Diamond says the problem is (putting on my best Strother Martin impersonation) “a failure to communicate,” for which he lays blame to social media and cheap airline flights. Agreed, Facebook global hegemony and the banalization of the commons is making it far worse, but it is hopeful to see Elizabeth Warren and others going after the Googazonbook social media combines and threatening to break them apart. Jamail says the upside of the fixing response is an upwelling of the human spirit. He gives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Green Deal as an example. That lump in your throat you feel listening to someone laying down hard truth in a poetic way is actually the one piece of the human genome most likely to rescue us.

In a Truthout essay published last March, Jamail wrote:

Anyone who thinks there is still time to wholly remedy the situation must answer the question: How do we remove all the heat that’s already been absorbed by the oceans? Invigorated activism, as heartening and important as it is, is not going to completely stem these tides. 

Thus, the third level of activism, adaptation, comes into focus. 

Adaptation is new territory. Here is the realm of healing, reparation (spiritual and psychological, among other ways) and collaboration. It is strangely rich with a new brand of fulfillment and unprecedented intimacy with the Earth and one another. It invites us to get to the roots of what went astray that has led us into the sixth mass extinction. Given that with even our own extinction a very real possibility, even if that worst-case scenario is to run its course, there is time left for amends, honorable completions, and the chance to reconnect in to this Earth with the utmost respect, and in the gentlest of ways.

Read, Bendell and Foster conclude their open letter to Wallace-Wells with this piece of advice:

It is not that acknowledging the hard truths which you present so starkly might still enable us to avoid climate disaster. For that it is, as in practice you so clearly demonstrate, now too late. Rather, it is the hope that through accepting the inevitability of such disaster for our present civilization, we may yet find our way to genuinely transformative change, capable of avoiding terminal catastrophe for humanity and the biosphere. 

The sooner we realize that humanity won’t have a Hollywood ending to climate change, the more chance we have to avoid ours becoming a true horror story.

In that, I think we can agree.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
― Wendell Berry

War and Empire Links July 2019

Jingoistic Military Fetishization Is As American As Bald Eagle McNuggets. Caitlin Johnstone. July 3, 2019.

The military hardware parade is taking place at the behest of President Bolton’s social media assistant Donald Trump, and critics have been vocally decrying it as alien and un-American.  

... 

All this parade is, actually, is just one of the many, many, many many times over the last two and a half years that Trump has shown America its true face, and Americans haven’t liked what they’ve seen. 

“That’s not my reflection!” the Americans scream at the mirror he holds up for them. “That’s Putin!” 

“That’s not my reflection!” they protest. “That’s North Korea!” 

“That’s not my reflection!” they say. “That’s a banana republic!” 

No, America. That’s you. It’s been you all along.

... 

This is the same country where every second house and every single McDonald’s has its flag flying over it, a cult of idolatry that’s become so ubiquitous that a football player choosing to kneel instead of stand before that stupid piece of cloth generates national outrage. The same country where simply bleating “Support the troops!” or “Freedom isn’t free!” was in and of itself seen as a be-all, end-all debate-winning argument for the rape of Iraq. The same country that spent weeks on end mourning the death of bloodthirsty psychopath John McCain on the grounds that he’s a “war hero” when they should have loaded his heartless cadaver onto a trebuchet and launched it into the nearest tire fire as part of a telethon benefit for Syria. 

All that’s considered perfectly normal by mainstream America, and liberals are getting their knickers in a knot over a few tanks 

... 

Americans are the most aggressively propagandized people in the world, and US service personnel are the most aggressively propagandized people in America. That’s the group that all this special reverence and fetishization has been attached to: a bunch of kids who’ve been manipulated into killing and dying for plutocratic investments and the mommy-shaped hole in John Bolton’s heart. That’s what this parade is meant to manufacture even more support for in a culture that is saturated past the brim in a relentless barrage of war propaganda. 

Face it, America. Trump’s tank parade isn’t in any way alien to anything you’ve ever stood for. The only way to make it more American would be to add a few monster trucks and a Kardashian. This parade is your reflection. This parade is you.

We’re Not the Good Guys. Why Is American Aggression Missing in Action? Tom Engelhardt. July 2, 2019.

“When it comes to Washington’s never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to find in such media coverage will be ‘American aggression,’” 

... 

“So here’s the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an ‘aggressor’ anywhere?”

US Foreign Policy Is A War On Disobedience. Caitlin Johnstone. July 6, 2019.

All nations are meant to submit to America’s use of military and economic force upon them, and if they don’t, that’s “aggression”. The official position of the political/media class is that the US is a normal nation with the same rights and status as any other, but the unofficial position is that this is an empire, and nations will either obey or be destroyed. 

It’s a machine with the same values as Napoleon or Hitler or Genghis Khan or any other imperialist conqueror from ages past; the only difference is that it pretends not to be the thing that it is. The US markets itself as an upholder of rules-based liberal democratic values, even though it consistently flouts international law, wages imperialist wars of aggression, imprisons journalists, crushes dissent and uses propaganda just as much as any totalitarian regime. The only difference is that it does so in a way that enables its supporters to pretend that that’s not what’s actually happening. 

Forget the “war on terror”. If US foreign policy were honest it would unite all its war propaganda sloganeering under a single banner: the War on Disobedience.

from Ilargi at Automatic Earth

Meanderings. Cognitive Dissonance. June 30, 2019.

Silly season is upon us. And I, for one, welcome my alien overlords. I speak, of course, of the national presidential election cycle already in progress. Every four years, in a sort of grotesque circadian rhythm, the so-called Presidential cicadas…err…candidates, pop up out of nowhere, noisy, pesky and ultimately irritating unless you happen to be mesmerized. Unfortunately, the life span of this particular species of political pest is not 14, or even 30 days, but more like 600. 

For several decades now, I have referred to this political and social phenomenon as the silly season. And for good reason I might add. At no other point in our day to day lives, except possibly Christmas, are we piled so high with such ridiculousness as when the latest pack of jabbering jackals come calling for our vote. To describe the process as political pandering would be too kind, and incorrect to boot. Essentially we are told what we want to hear and promised the moon and stars, something which speaks far more about us than it does them. 

Regardless of what ‘voting’ might have once represented in the hearts and minds of Americans (mostly conditioned reflex and leftover belief from more than a decade of primary school propaganda) today it is little more than an exercise in national self-deception. 

Of particular interest to me was how, out of 24 Democrats running for president and of the 21 invited to the Democrat debates, only one, Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran and military officer, had the stones to actually question the morality of the American Empire’s war mongering global rampage. 

For this singular act of political bravery, she was promptly branded un-American. As if to say being a good and proud American means supporting bombing the shit out of second and third world countries. And why not? After all, we’re doing it for the children…right? A question naturally follows…which children are we speaking of, ours or theirs. Of course, you and I already know the answer to that. 

Obviously, the military industrial complex will make sure Gabbard is quickly squashed like a fat bug under a tank’s tread. War is a racket and most definitely big business. Besides, you don’t fool with Mother Nature nor Father War. Always remember the golden rule. One may question, even complain, about the effects of the sociopathic socioeconomic system and its supporting status quo. But one must never question the basis or validity of the system itself or the sociopaths. What passes for ‘capitalism’ these days is actually socialism for the rich and in-your-face fascism for the poor and middle class.

...

I do not expect a roaring collapse, just more diseased crumble buttressed by an ever-increasing police state. The haves will not let go of their unequal share and the have-nots will no longer be ignored. The dirty little secret is there’s only one major political party in America, deliberately divided into two similar factions separated only by a few hot button issues. Divide and control is the theme of the coming decade. Expect strife and discord to accelerate into the November, 2020 Presidential election. God only knows what comes after that, regardless of who wins or loses. 

There is no magic bullet, no knight in shining armor, no one size fits all ‘fix’ to be rolled out at the last minute to save the day. Just an inexorable grinding of our bones to make their bread. Plan accordingly. Or not, as the case may be. Based upon my life experience, the vast majority of people will not seek even a smidgen of independence from the dependency promoted by the state to facilitate the capture of mind and body. Instead they will hunker down, cover their heads and hope the storm passes overhead. It will not…it will get worse before it gets even a little bit better. 

I leave you with the following short verse, which I stumbled across some time back. In four short sentences it neatly sums up the present state of affairs, what’s just around the corner and how we will eventually pull ourselves out of this mess. For those who might not fully understand, we are only now just entering hard times, pushed relentlessly forward by ever weaker men and women.

Hard times create strong men

Strong men create good times

Good times create weak men

Weak men create hard times

Opposing War Is The Best Approach To Revolution. Caitlin Johnstone. July 11, 2019.

One of the most common labels people use to describe what I do is some variation of “anti-war journalist” or “anti-imperialist blogger”, and I’m always a tiny bit surprised when I see it. Not because I disagree with it; opposition to US-centralized warmongering probably constitutes a majority of my content, so it’s a reasonable description. I’ve just never explicitly had opposing war in mind when doing what I do. It’s been the main byproduct of my journey here, but it’s never been my objective.

I got started on this gig making Facebook posts in Bernie Sanders groups after noticing that the US mass media were actively sabotaging his 2016 primary race. My goal at the time was the same as it is now: to help jailbreak Americans, and thus the rest of the world, from the nearly invisible power structures which are oppressing us all and driving us toward extinction. When I first started writing about the 2016 presidential campaign I didn’t focus nearly as much on US foreign policy as I do now.

The shift toward emphasis on US-led warmongering wasn’t something I planned, it was just the natural consequence of my staring, day after day, at the puzzle of how to free humanity from its chains. I didn’t understand the mechanics of empire all that well when I started out, so I meticulously studied the behavior of government and media structures and watched for opportunities to expose glitches in the narrative matrix so I could highlight them for my readers. As I got better at noticing these glitches, I found that the opportunities to go “Look! See? They’re lying to you!” most often presented themselves around the issues of war and imperialism.

This is because it turns out that endless war is an absolutely essential component of the globe-spanning alliance between oligarchs and government agencies which is sometimes referred to as the “deep state”. Exerting more and more control over world affairs is how the largest power structures on earth continue to expand their power, and this is impossible to do without using the carrot of US military/economic alliance and the stick of US military/economic punishment. US economic control isn’t hegemonic enough on its own to overcome the influence of growing economic powers like China, so the threat of military violence is absolutely essential for maintaining the power alliance. It’s the glue that holds the entire empire together.

US Foreign Policy Is A War On Disobedience

"So now you’ve got this weird dynamic where the US is constantly working to make sure that no other countries surpass it and gain the ability to treat America the way America treats other countries."https://t.co/AVJoxuLOSq
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 6, 2019

So endless war is a 100 percent indispensable element in preserving existing power structures. The US-centralized empire cannot exist without it. The trouble for the empire, however, is that it can’t just come out and tell the public “Yeah we need to destroy everyone who opposes our resource control agendas and dominance in key geostrategic regions, so we’ll be forcibly eliminating this noncompliant government on Thursday.” The public would never go for it, because that’s a plainly sociopathic values system which we are taught since school age that our society evolved beyond many generations ago. People would lose trust in all government institutions, and revolution would quickly foment as a result.

For this reason, propaganda is necessary. Because America is where the empire has centralized most of its military firepower and billionaires, Americans are the most propagandized people on earth. There are thousands of people whose whole entire job is to convince Americans that it is good and desirable to keep trillions of dollars in military hardware moving around the planet and killing complete strangers who pose no threat to any American.

The challenge for the propagandists is that this is plainly bat shit crazy. It’s an assignment that is both absolutely necessary and extremely difficult. When the entire world order depends on convincing millions of people that something transparently insane and ridiculous is perfectly sane and rational, you’re naturally going to have difficulty smoothing over all the plot holes in the narratives you’re selling. That’s why you’re always seeing glaring discrepancies in the narratives used to promote US foreign policy agendas. In retrospect I’ve pretty much built my career on highlighting these discrepancies.

The primary role US-led warmongering plays in maintaining existing power structures, which I first started to notice during the 2016 Democratic primaries, is on even clearer display during the 2020 Democratic primaries. You see candidates like Bernie Sanders being frowned upon by hardline centrists for promoting domestic policies which would hurt the profit margins of the oligarchs, but overall he’s being treated as a legitimate candidate and receiving reluctant coverage on mainstream media networks. Then you look at the treatment of a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard, who is campaigning on a major overhaul of US foreign policy, and she’s treated as a raving lunatic and a traitor.

“Challenging domestic policy status quo in Washington can be controversial and subject you to some attacks. But those who dissent from DC’s foreign policy addiction to imperialism, militarism and support for repression are those who are always most smeared and maligned,” Glenn Greenwald tweeted a while back.

You can get away with promoting things like universal healthcare or student debt forgiveness with only moderate pushback from the establishment, but wanting to scale back the forever war will quickly see you branded a Russian asset or an antisemite and canceled. The empire won’t even tolerate you interfering with their narratives, let alone getting elected. Your voice will be targeted with an aggressive smear campaign until they make sure that hardly anyone is listening to what you have to say.

The fact that we’re so strictly forbidden from pursuing this line of attack is a clear sign that warmongering is the weakest point in the empire’s armor. It’s the most essential component of the oppression machine, and its narratives are the weakest and most plot hole-riddled. If you’re interested in taking down the oligarchic machine which keeps ordinary people poor, sick and stupid, then attacking war propaganda is the most useful expenditure of energy.

American leftists and progressives have not been great at this; even those who identify as “anti-imperialist” tend to mostly stay focused on domestic issues. This is perfectly understandable, since Americans are the victims of the empire’s soul-crushing neoliberal exploitation and it is therefore the thing that is staring them in the face most often.

But the drivers of empire do not fear a push for domestic policy reform nearly as much as they fear a push for foreign policy reform. They know that the plebs can be kept poor and stupid enough to pose no threat to the oligarchs controlling all the money (and therefore all the power) by simply manipulating the system and herding everyone into controlled political opposition groups who will end up telling them “Ohh, sorry, we couldn’t get the congressional votes. Those damn Republicans!” A large public demand to end warmongering would be a much tougher challenge to manipulate around.

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”

"Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism." #war #peace #TulsiGabbardhttps://t.co/dLbW6O2bRV
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 29, 2019

It’s actually the same agenda anyway; the plutocratic class, which is incentivized to keep everyone else poor in a system wherein money equals power and power is relative, is the driving force behind both neoliberal exploitation and the forever war, and if you can end either of these things you will end the whole empire. It just happens that when you look at the whole picture, warmongering turns out to be the far easier and far more efficacious line of attack.

There are plenty of moral arguments against imperialism, but you don’t even need to enter into morality to see that it’s smart to make opposing war your foremost priority. The kingdom of the bastards who are grinding us all down and trying to make us poorer, sicker and stupider so we can’t muster the chutzpah to toss them out on their asses is fed by an umbilical cord of endless war, and we have the power to cut that cord by opposing war and attacking war propaganda together.

Change that, and we change everything. Ordinary humans can finally begin to make the world their own, guided not by sociopathic oligarchs but by an enlightened self-interest which realizes that the only way we can continue to survive is if we learn to collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem for the common good. This is all I’ve ever been pushing toward here. Deep down, it’s all any of us want

Feature Reference Article #17: Arctic

The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems. Robert Hunziker, CounterPunch. Apr. 19, 2019.

Sometime in the near future it is highly probable that the Arctic will no longer have sea ice, meaning zero ice for the first time in eons, aka: the Blue Ocean Event. 

Surely, the world is not prepared for the consequences of such an historic event, which likely turns the world topsy-turvy, negatively impacting agriculture with gonzo weather patterns, thus forcing people to either starve or fight. But, the problem may be even bigger than shortages of food, as shall be discussed. 

Still and all, it’s somewhat consoling to know that the Blue Ocean Event is quite controversial within the scientific community. There are climate scientists that believe Arctic ice will be there beyond this century. One can only hope they are right because an ice-free Arctic will indubitably create havoc for life on the planet. 

However, disturbingly, the prospects for enduring sea ice don’t look good. 

Here’s why: Dr. Peter Wadhams (professor emeritus, University of Cambridge) who’s the leading authority on Arctic sea ice (A Farewell to Ice, Oxford University Press) was recently interviewed re the current status of Arctic sea ice, as of 2019, and recorded on TUC radio (live broadcasts on KALW/San Francisco and independent internet radio). 

Here are snippets from that interview: Over the past 40 years the loss of Arctic sea ice has rapidly progressed, e.g., from 1976-87 Arctic sea ice thickness decreased by 15%… during the 1990s, thickness decreased by 43% … and today 75% of the sea ice is gone… resulting in an impairment of sea ice albedo, which reflects solar radiation back into outer space by 80-90% with sea ice, but conversely, without sea ice, it absorbs 80-90% of solar radiation into the dark background of iceless water where crucial untold dangers lurk. 

Accordingly, the Arctic has experienced “the biggest transition of albedo on the planet.” (Wadhams) The consequences are unimaginably challenging, kinda like trying to calculate, beforehand, what happens when fallen into an ontological rabbit hole, or in other words, expect the unexpected! 

Not only that but, the Arctic is already a hothouse in the hemisphere. For example, permafrost samples in the Yukon near Dempster Highway registered temps, as of April 2019, nearly 2°C higher than at any point in time over the past 10,000 years. (Source: CBC News, Arctic is Warmest It’s Been in 10,000 Years, Study Suggests,” April 12, 2019) 

As far as that goes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) suggests an upper limit, or guardrail, of 2°C post-industrial temperature. If exceeded, primary ecosystems that support life are at risk of breaking down. 

In fact, aside from the Arctic, pivotal ecosystems are already starting to break down around the world, especially in the rainforests of Puerto Rico and Mexico (experiencing high temperature variations of 2C) where, shockingly, arthropods are disappearing, nearly en masse; as well as documentation of over 100 separate locations of Flying Insect Armageddon in Europe (likely caused by toxic chemicals) registering mass losses of 75% over a few decades, which characterizes an extinction event! 

As for the Arctic sea ice scenario, one critical question is not discussed in public: What happens next? 

What happens when all of the sea ice is gone? 

According to the tenacious climate scientist Paul Beckwith, the “refrigerator effect” is lost in the Blue Ocean Event, meaning the “water temperature is not pegged close to the freezing point when there is no ice left to melt.” (Source: Paul Beckwith, climate system scientist, University of Ottawa) 

Thereafter, by default, the only major source of ice remaining in the Northern Hemisphere will be Greenland. Thenceforth, the “Center of Cold” in the Northern Hemisphere will shift to Greenland, no longer the Arctic, likely shifting from the North Pole to approximately 73° North Latitude or the center of Greenland (Beckwith) … Then what? 

Unfortunately, that creates a whole new category of risks as weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere depend upon jet streams (20K to 39K feet above sea level) that rely upon the “Center of Cold” over the North Pole interceding with warm air currents from the tropics to generate jet stream gusto. If the “Center of Cold” shifts, who knows for sure what’ll happen to the crucial jet streams? 

The short answer may be the jet streams will go bonkers more so than ever before. Of course, to a lesser degree, this is already happening right now and causing extreme weather events like massive flooding in the Midwest: Hello, Kansas. 

As of 2019, all-time record-setting heavy weather hit the U.S. with humongous amounts of snow throughout the northern Midwest as a result of slow-moving wobbly jet streams that loop and bring Arctic weather directly south. Believe it or not, the resultant massive flooding (also record-setting) may be a minor event in the context of a newly released chilling study about the impact of Arctic sea ice loss, as follows: 

The study of ancient ice cores by a team from the British Antarctic Survey, University of Cambridge and University of Birmingham found “major reductions in sea ice in the Arctic” cranked up (temperature amplification as a result of no Arctic sea ice) Greenland regional temperatures “by 16° C in less than a decade.” (Source: Louise C. Sime, et al, Impact of Abrupt Sea Ice Loss on Greenland Water Isotopes During the Last Glacial Period, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 5, 2019) 

According to the study: “This work confirms the significance of sea ice for past abrupt warming events…  This is important because changes in sea ice have profound consequences on both global and local scales, including impacts on global climate and local ecosystems,” Ibid. 

Significantly, if the “Impact of Abrupt Sea Ice Loss on Greenland” scenario were to recur, it would create havoc, and panic within a decade. Could it happen? Well, it happened in the past without the assistance of human-influenced GHG emissions. Therefore, the answer seems to be: Yes, it could happen again. End of Story! 

But, on second thought: The 16° C increase in temps in less than a decade is difficult to fathom, even though the paleoclimate record shows it did happen. After rereading the British Antarctic Study again, and again, it goes without saying that a temperature increase of “16° C within a decade” would destroy most life. One can only hope that the British Antarctic Survey team made a big fat mistake, or there are extenuating circumstances of some kind or other. 

But, make no mistake about this: Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions today are rip snorting faster than almost any paleoclimate time scale, likely setting a new 62-year record for CO2 emissions in 2019. Precariously, that feeds directly into increased planetary heat and loss of more Arctic sea ice. The end results cannot be good, an understatement. 

According to NASA, Global Climate Change – Vita Signs of the Planet: “Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient or paleoclimate evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten (10) times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.” 

Meanwhile, according to the aforementioned interview with Dr. Peter Wadhams: Currently, the Arctic is heating up about 4xs faster than the rest of the planet… the temp difference between the Arctic and the tropics is dropping precipitously … thus, driving the jet streams less… creating meandering jet streams… in turn, producing extreme weather events throughout the Northern Hemisphere, especially in mid-latitudes where most of the world’s food is grown. 

Not only is future food production seriously at risk, but as well, massive quantities of buried seabed methane (much more powerful in its initial years at influencing global warming than CO2) in the Arctic could release suddenly because of loss of albedo, no longer reflecting solar radiation out into space, rather absorbing it down to massive quantities of CH4 (methane) under seabed permafrost, which is: “The greatest single threat we face… It would be a catastrophe because the temperature would suddenly rise… It wouldn’t rise smoothly” (Wadhams). 

But, really, honestly, come on now, something’s gotta (hopefully) be wrong with the aforementioned British Antarctic Survey’s scientific data. Could it be a misplaced decimal point? 

Astonishingly, it is factual data. In the simplest of terms, Greenland’s 16° C temperature increase in less than a decade is mind-blowing, especially in consideration of the survey team’s statement that it: “Confirms the significance of sea ice for past abrupt warming events.” 

Hmm! Déjà vu, the Arctic sea ice scenario today seems curiously similar to the British Antarctic Study. Prospectively, that’s really horrible news!

Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release. Merritt R. Turetsky et al, Nature. Apr. 30, 2019.

The sudden collapse of thawing soils in the Arctic might double the warming from greenhouse gases released from tundra

The Dangerous Methane Mystery. Robert Hunziker, CounterPunch. June 20, 2019.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (“ESAS”) is the epicenter of a methane-rich zone that could turn the world upside down. 

Still, the ESAS is not on the radar of mainstream science, and not included in calculations by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and generally not well understood. It is one of the biggest mysteries of the world’s climate puzzle, and it is highly controversial, which creates an enhanced level of uncertainty and casts shadows of doubt. 

The ESAS is the most extensive continental shelf in the world, inclusive of the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea, and the Russian portion of the Chukchi Sea, all-in equivalent to the combined landmasses of Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan. 

The region hosts massive quantities of methane (“CH4”) in frozen subsea permafrost in extremely shallow waters, enough CH4 to transform the “global warming” cycle into a “life-ending” cycle. As absurd as it sounds, it is not inconceivable. 

Ongoing research to unravel the ESAS mystery is found in very few studies, almost none, except by Natalia Shakhova (International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska/Fairbanks) a leading authority 

... 

Shakhova’s research is highlighted in a recent article in Arctic News: “When Will We Die?” d/d June 10, 2019, which states: “Imagine a burst of methane erupting from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean that would add an amount of methane to the atmosphere equal to twice the methane that is already there.” 

Horror of horrors, the resulting equation is disturbing, to say the least, to wit: Twice the amount of CH4 that is already in the atmosphere equals a CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) of 560 ppm, assuming CH4 is 150xs the potency of CO2 in its initial years. And, adding that new number to current CH4/CO2e of 280 ppm to current CO2 levels of 415.7 ppm, according to readings at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, equals total atmospheric CO2 of 1256 ppm.

... 

In other words, if ESAS springs a big fat leak, the Big Burp, which would only be <5% of the existing frozen methane deposit; it is possible that atmospheric CO2e would zoom up go as high as 1256 ppm. 

What happens next?

A recent third-party study, also referenced in the aforementioned Arctic News article d/d June 10th, concluded that at 1200 ppm atmospheric CO2 global heating cranks up by 8°C, or 14.4°F, within a decade. (Source: Arctic News d/d June 10, 2019). Truth be known, that scenario is not problematic, it’s catastrophic and too far along to be classified as a problem. After all, problems can be fixed; catastrophes are fatal. 

According to Shakhova’s research, as referenced in Geosciences/ 2019: “Releases could potentially increase by 3–5 orders of magnitude, considering the sheer amount of CH4 preserved within the shallow ESAS seabed deposits and the documented thawing rates of subsea permafrost reported recently”

... 

Nobody knows 100% for certain how the climate crisis will turn out, but there is pretty solid evidence that the issue, meaning several ecosystems which are starting to collapse in unison, is accelerating, by a lot. So, there is not much time left to do something constructive, assuming it’s not already too late. Speaking of which, a small faction of climate scientists has already “tossed in the towel.” 

After all, it’s not that hard to understand their point of view as many ecosystems have already hit tipping points, which means no turning back, no fixes possible, but still, (and, here’s the great hope) nobody really knows 100% for sure how all of this will play out. 

Nevertheless, in a perfect world that really/truly “follows the science” a Worldwide All-In Coordinated Marshall Plan to do “whatever it takes” would already be in a full-blastoff mode. 

But… It’s not!

Climate Change Economics Stupidity / Madness / Insanity

subtitle: the stupidity / madness / insanity of the likes of Nordhaus and Tol makes me Insanely Mad!

The mythical economic data on climate change (1): Nordhaus’s 1994 survey of “experts”. Steve Keen. June 30, 2019.

As part of my critique of mainstream economics work on climate change, I'm going through each of the 14 data points that Nordhaus used to fit his damage function to "data" in the manual to his DICE program {Nordhaus, 2013 #5673}. These came from a survey paper by Tol in 2009: "The Economic Effects of Climate Change" {Tol, 2009 #5683}. Nordhaus later revised his function, given errors he belatedly spotted in Tol's table {Nordhaus, 2017 #5584}, but there were many errors he didn't see that I'll cover first before turning to his 2017 paper. The paper in question here is: 

Nordhaus, W. (1994). "Expert Opinion on Climate Change." American Scientist 82(1): pp. 45–51. 

For context, Figure 1 shows Tol's table, highlighting the numbers he gave for this paper (which are erroneous), while Figure 2 shows all the numbers Nordhaus used, with this pair—a 3 Kelvin (K) increase in temperature, and a 4.8% fall in GDP)—highlighted. 

...

 

Aside from the not surprising finding of great dissension, the opinions of experts revealed major differences among disciplines, particularly between mainstream economists and natural scientists…" (45. Emphasis added) 

This is emphasised in the descriptive text for the figure that highlights the whole paper:

Figure 1. Will greenhouse warming lead to fruitless plains or fruited paradise? Experts on global change are deeply divided on this question. At one extreme, the author's survey shows, are mainstream economists who view the prospect of greenhouse warming with little concern, confident that human societies will adapt handily to such changes. At the other extreme, natural scientists worry about major and irreversible impacts unpredictable extreme events, such as shifting ocean currents or migrating monsoons. Which picture more closely depicts the future reality cannot now be predicted. (pp. 46-47. Emphasis added)

... 

What this shows is that mainstream economists are generally climate change trivializers— not that they know anything meaningful about the magnitude of disruption to the globe's ecological and economic systems that will result from climate change.  The 30-times difference in expectations of serious disruption from climate change between scientists and economists  should have been the takeaway from this survey, not the average of the expectations of damage.

Bjorn Lomborg, The Gullible Environmentalist. Steve Keen. June 10, 2019.

Writing in the New York Post last week, Bjorn Lomberg argued against calling climate change "catastrophic", and quoted a United Nations report which alleged that global warming will have only a trivial effect on global GDP over the next half century. As he put it, the total impact of global warming by 2070 will be no worse than a single recession, 

...

The definitive overview of these studies (there were 20 studies as of 2014, when the report was published) is provided by the leading co-author of the chapter Lomborg cites, Richard Tol (Tol 2009; Tol 2018). All of them are studies by economists, and as is well-known, economists are fond of making what they call "simplifying assumptions". 

Of all the assumptions behind these studies, my favourite—if that is the right word—is what Tol describes as "the statistical approach", which "assumes that the observed variation of economic activity with climate over space holds over time as well" (Tol 2009, p. 32). 

In Tol's words, what this means is that these economists performed "some sort of regressions of variations of an economic quantity over space on climate variations over space" (Tol 2018, p. 1), and found a weak, nonlinear relationship between GDP today and temperature today. They then used these results as a proxy for the impact of the increase in temperature from global warming on GDP.

...

Nonetheless, that's what they used this data to do. Nordhaus, for example, asserted that global GDP would fall by 1% if global temperature rose by 3°C (Nordhaus 2006, p. 3517, Table 2)—and this became one of the data points in the IPCC graph of temperature versus damage to GDP (see Figure 2). But all he was entitled to assert was that if one location (say, Chicago) has a 3°C higher average temperature than another (say, Copenhagen), then it is likely to have a 1% lower GDP. 

The absurdity of using relationships between temperature and GDP by location to predict what will happen to GDP from global warming is more obvious in an earlier IPCC report, written by a related group of economists to those who wrote the 2014 report. Chapter 6 of the IPCC report Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change, entitled "The Social Costs of Climate Change: Greenhouse Damage and the Benefits of Control", states that: 

Most models assume a nonlinear (convex) damage temperature relationship, resulting in damages of 6% or higher for 10°C warming. (Pearce, Cline et al. 1995, p. 183) 

It could be quite valid to say that statistically, a location whose average temperature today is 10°C higher than some other location is likely to have a GDP that is 6% lower. 

But to say that a 10°C rise in global temperature will only reduce global GDP by 6%? That is madness. A 10°C rise would ultimately melt all of Earth's glaciers, inundate the world's coastal cities, and drastically alter the climate of the planet. The last time the planet was that much warmer was over 50 million years before humans evolved: the planet would be unrecognizable. You simply can't extrapolate from conditions in our current world to one that is 10°C hotter. A model that estimates a mere 6% fall in GDP as a result of that increase in temperature is an absurd model.

...

So should you have faith in the IPCC's prediction that climate change will reduce GDP by less than 2% over the next fifty years? Only if you can trust the "simplifying assumptions" made by the economists who wrote that part of the IPCC report. 

The actual climate scientists who write other parts of the IPCC report certainly don't trust the economists. They can't say so in the IPCC report itself, because of the consensus rules that determine what the IPCC can and can't publish. But they are certainly saying so in their own academic papers. A recent paper by 16 climate scientists advised strongly against the methods that economists use to decide whether we should take action against climate change:

Current rates of change of important features of the Earth System already match or exceed those of abrupt geophysical events in the past (SI Appendix). With these trends likely to continue for the next several decades at least, the contemporary way of guiding development founded on theories, tools, and beliefs of gradual or incremental change, with a focus on economy efficiency, will likely not be adequate to cope with this trajectory. (Steffen, Rockström et al. 2018, p. 8257. Emphasis added)

Rather than being blasé about the impact of a 10°C increase in global temperatures, these scientists are worried that even a 2°C increase will trigger feedback effects in the climate that we will be powerless to reverse:

Our analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions, a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed. Where such a threshold might be is uncertain, but it could be only decades ahead at a temperature rise of ~2.0 °C above preindustrial, and thus, it could be within the range of the Paris Accord temperature targets. (Steffen, Rockström et al. 2018, p. 8257. Emphasis added)

They therefore argue that we should do everything possible to avoid a 2°C increase in global temperatures:

Precisely where a potential planetary threshold might be is uncertain. We suggest 2 °C because of the risk that a 2 °C warming could activate important tipping elements, raising the temperature further to activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth System to even higher temperatures (Tipping Cascades). (Steffen, Rockström et al. 2018, p. 8254)

With global temperature already 1°C above pre-industrial levels, we're already half-way to the threshold that climate scientists warn could lead to catastrophic change to the biosphere, and therefore dramatic damage to the economy as well. So don't trust what a tiny cabal of mainstream economists tell you about climate change. Don't be gullible like Bjorn Lomborg. We only have decades left to avoid a catastrophe that, as usual, economists cannot see coming.

An extraordinary Twitter Exchange with Richard Tol. Keen. June 21, 2019.

I had an extraordinary Twitter Exchange with Richard Tol over the last few days. I've written this post to preserve that exchange in case, at a future date, Tol decides to delete his tweets. They provide a superb window into the thinking that lies behind mainstream economic modelling of climate change, and why this has led to humanity dangerously delaying taking action against climate change.

By the way, do please read the Wikipedia entry I linked to above, firstly because it gives a pretty realistic picture of Tol's position on climate change—which aligns him with the "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg—and secondly because it is under dispute because it was substantially edited by Tol himself! That's an enormous faux pas which, characteristically, Tol is incapable of appreciating. Here's the Talk page on his entry:

Figure 1: The discussion of Tol's Wikipedia page in which he acknowledges that he wrote much of it himself



For those who don't know, Tol is one of the leading economists working on climate change. He is the author of the FUND "Integrated Assessment Model" (IAM) which is one of the key models used by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to assess the economic impacts of climate change.

Tol has also been an author of the economic impact sections of the IPCC Reports, especially the 1995 report {Bruce, 1996 #5707} in which the following observation was made:

Most estimates are for equilibrium climate change associated with a doubling of the preindustrial C02 equivalent concentration of all greenhouse gases. Best-guess central estimates of global damage, including nonmarket impacts, are in the order of 1.5=2.0% of world GNP for 2xCO, concentrations and equilibrium climate change. This means that if a doubling of C02 occurred now, it would impose this much damage on the world economy now… 

Most models assume a nonlinear (convex) damage temperature relationship, resulting in damages of 6% or higher for 10°C warming. {Pearce, 1995 #5716, p. 183}

Figure 2: The authors of the 1995 assessment, including Tol

What? A 10°C increase in the average global temperature would reduce global GDP by a mere 6%? How on Earth did they come up with that figure? Even those who claim that the Sun is actually causing the rise in temperature, or that the temperature is actually falling, should see red with this claim. Humanity has never existed in, let alone experienced, a planet with that temperature. How on Earth would such a drastic change in temperature make such a tiny difference to GDP?

As the italicized section of the previous quote makes clear ("if a doubling of C02 occurred now, it would impose this much damage on the world economy now"), this is not the result of applying a high discount rate to future enormous damages: this is the actual estimate they made of how much lower GDP would be in a world with a 10°C higher average temperature (relative to pre-industrial levels), relative to one in which the global temperature was no different to pre-Industrial levels.

The reason, as I realised about two weeks ago when I read Tol's article "The economic effects of climate change", is that they are using data on GDP and temperature today across the globe (and primarily, across the USA) as a proxy for what will happen when global temperatures rise:

Mendelsohn assumes that the observed variation of economic activity with climate over space holds over time as well; and uses climate models to estimate the future effect of climate change… Like Mendelsohn, Nordhaus and Maddison rely exclusively on observations, assuming that "climate" is reflected in incomes and expenditures—and that the spatial pattern holds over time. {Tol, 2009 #5683, p. 32}

These regressions show a weak quadratic relationship between temperature and GDP today, which is why the "damage functions" in Nordhaus's DICE model is a simple quadratic with a tiny coefficient. Nordhaus assumes that the decrease in GDP that will result from a change in temperature relative to pre-industrial levels is the change in temperature squared, multiplied by 0.00227 (or 0.227%):

The parameter used in the model was an equation with a parameter of 0.227 percent loss in global income per degrees Celsius squared with no linear term. This leads to a damage of 2.0 percent of income at 3°C, and 7.9 percent of global income at a global temperature rise of 6°C. {Nordhaus, 2018 #5691, p. 345}.

I was simply gobsmacked when I realised that this was the basis of the benign predictions of the impact of climate change on the economy that the IPCC parrots. I had thought that the cause would be something disputable, like different levels of discounting, or complicated, like the impact of the assumptions of the underlying Ramsey growth model (a foundation that all IAMs share with the RBC and DSGE models that #Irony did such an excellent job of warning about the Great Recession before it happened). But instead it was this mind-numbingly stupid assumption.

In case that isn't obvious to you, here's a little illustration using the opposite phenomenon—global cooling. The assumption that these "climate economists" made works both ways: if today's temperature:GDP relationships can be used to predict the impact of global warming, they can also be used to predict what would happen with global cooling. That actually helps to put a handle on how monstrously stupid this assumption is, because while temperatures that many degrees above current levels haven't been experienced for millions of years, temperatures 4 degrees below pre-industrial levels were experienced by our ancestors as little as 20,000 years ago.

Figure 3: Representation of estimated global temperatures from 500 million years ago till now



This visualisation by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences shows the extent of glaciers at the Ice Age peak 21,000 years ago—when the average global temperature was 9°C, versus the 14.4°C average today, and the 13.7°C pre-Industrial level.

Figure 4: The Earth during the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago. Click here to see a time-lapse visualisation



So all of Canada, most of Europe, and a fair slab of the USA would be under glacial ice, if temperatures fell 5.4°C—or 4.7°C relative to pre-Industrial levels. How much does Nordhaus's damage function reckon that GDP would fall, relative to a world that remained at today's temperature?

There would be a 6.4% fall in GDP.

Let's unpack that a bit. I'm sure Tol would dive in with a caveat here, that such a change would take centuries, and we'd have plenty of time to adapt—he made precisely the same case in reverse in our exchange over global warming. Sure, fine. But the concept underlying these "damage functions" is that they tell you what GDP would be in two different worlds: one where humans didn't have to cope with temperature change at all, and GDP grew with today's human wealth unaffected, and one where we do have to adapt to temperature change.

So let's imagine two Earths, identical in all respects today and with identical technology in the future as well (because these Neoclassical models assume technology improves at an exogenously given rate, and is unaltered by climate change).

In the former world, all of today's factories, houses, cities and indeed nation states can just continue. Resources are devoted to creating new capital via investment, but zero resources have to be devoted to moving technology from one place to another, or to replacing infrastructure.

In the latter world, with glaciers taking over such trifling human settlements as New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and Toronto, those cities would have to abandoned, along with all the factories that produce output there today, and either moved or rebuild closer to the Equator. The descendants of today's roughly 150 million residents (37 million Canadians and about 100 million Americans) would have to move south too—maybe to Mexico, which I'm sure would be happy to accommodate them (pardon me, but I simply can't maintain an academic straight face as I dissect this nonsense).

Figure 5: Zooming in to focus on North America



Imagine the scale of destruction of existing infrastructure that has taken two centuries to construct. Try to imagine the resources that would need to be devoted to shifting existing resources, or, more commonly, replacing resources that could not be shifted, and had to be abandoned to the advancing ice.

Imagine, just to make it a fair contest, that we had 500 years to do it—in line with the length of time that Tol thinks it would take for sea levels to rise 6 metres under global warming.

Do you really think that, after 500 years, the economy of the global cooling Earth would be just 6.4% smaller than the constant temperature Earth?

Of course not. So much of the Global Cooling Earth's resources would need to be devoted to rebuilding, moving, resettling, etc., that there's no way it would suffer just a 6.4% fall in GDP relative to its climate-change-free twin. A huge proportion of its resources would have to be devoted to replacing the infrastructure destroyed by the glaciers. It would be lucky to have any resources left to expand output.

These niceties are completely ignored by Tol, Nordhaus et al. with their crazy assumption that climate:GDP correlations today can be used to predict what will happen as global climate changes over time.

So though Tol, Nordhaus and friends have produced numerous seemingly scientific mathematical models of climate change and economics, they ignore the fact that such huge changes in climate will destroy much of the existing resources of the global economy, and require a huge proportion of our productive capacity to be devoted, not to expanding output, but to replacing capacity destroyed by climate change.

They are not scientists in any sense of the word, but fantasists who simply believe that the magic ingredient they describe as "the incredible adaptability of human economies" {Nordhaus, 1994 #5699, p. 48} will overcome any problems. All their models tell us is that they have faith—and a faith that bears no relation to the actual way in which capitalist economies function, nor to the threats that global warming will pose to the ecosphere as well as the economy.

As I note in the exchange with Tol, they are not climate change deniers, but climate change trivializers. Had they not poked their noses into this issue, human societies could well have started managing their impact upon the biosphere shortly after the Limits to Growth {Meadows, 1972 #4784} study was published in 1972. Instead, thanks to them unjustifiably undermining the credibility of that report, we have lost half a century of adaptation. Their attempts to eulogise capitalism may end up leading to its destruction.

So much for the prelude. Below are links to Tol's tweets, as well as images of the exchanges in case Tol later deletes his tweets when it proves expedient to do so. After all, if he's willing to edit his own Wikipedia page, it wouldn't be surprising if he removed potentially incriminating tweets as well.

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140513746571464705?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140523232782671873?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140536347293310977?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140584301307793409?s=20

Key Tweet: see next section https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140591420144869381?s=20


https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140618253384998914?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140620174363627520?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140621628012924929?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140623105322377216?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140625044688838656?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140627214632988676?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140628124679454720?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140632103463333892?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140632795968081920?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140633320755257344?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140633723853004802?s=20





https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140640237724590080?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140684964087947264?s=20

Follow on from key tweet

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140591420144869381?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140669525081415680?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140591756964192256?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140928458853421057?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141285166951936000?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140618253384998914?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140620174363627520?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140621628012924929?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1140623105322377216?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141050873809899521?s=20







https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141585185575702528?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141591925432213506?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141596267522547717?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141601347210502144?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141629791172476928?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141753535513714688?s=20

https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141776842967388161?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141683256640921600?s=20



https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1141688413436948480?s=20









Bruce, J. P., H. Lee, et al. (1996). Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Meadows, D. H., J. Randers, et al. (1972). The limits to growth. New York, Signet.

Nordhaus, W. (1994). "Expert Opinion on Climate Change." American Scientist 82(1): 45–51.

Nordhaus, W. (2018). "Projections and Uncertainties about Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 10(3): 333–360.

Pearce, D. W., W. R. Cline, et al. (1995). The Social Costs of Climate Change: Greenhouse Damage and the Benefits of Control. Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: 183-224.

Tol, R. S. J. (2009). "The Economic Effects of Climate Change." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 23(2): 29–51.

TolTweetsTrivializingClimateChange201906.pdf

from comments

Justin Wood:

The cavernous ignorance in saying a current 10K temp difference between Alaska and Maryland means 10K global surface temp increase is all totally fine is truly staggering. You fail first-year climate science students for this sort of nonsense.

The increase in energy retained by the Earth-atmosphere system at a 10K rise is gargantuan. As someone points out in that thread, the superstorms, flooding, droughts, disease vectors, and who knows what other catastrophes we'd unleash would wipe out much of the species. And that's not even accounting for the max wet-bulb temperature humans can physically survive in (hint: much of the planet would be unsurvivable).

Words fail.

James Hutchinson:

10 C increase in global average temperature, we will just move indoors!?! This is the level of thinking from a respected economist, what a moron.  How did he get his piece of paper from an actual university?  How does he even tie his own shoelaces without trying to use magic?   I'm not sure economics can be saved at this point. 

Prof Steve Keen:
It can't, in my opinion. These intelligent morons have it in an intellectual strangehold, and they literally won't let go even if the environment starts going to Hell. I think the only option is to shut economics programs down and use the staff as 1st year mathematics tutors, which most of them could be capable of. But get rid of the bloody discipline. They're supposed to analyze capitalism, and instead they'll be the death of it.

Wouter Verlinden:

haha, that Toll guy is really bizar. 

"it is possible to imagine a scenario in which climate change does cause violent conflict"... "There are three reasons to assume that this is unlikely"..." Second, drought is only a real problem for the poor"...."Poor and exhausted people are unlikely to take up arms, and if they do, they are probably not very effective. "

It's really there. In writing. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20110719103630/http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/fnu-files/publication/tol/RM8133.pdf

Ok, only poor people will die. That's not really important. And if they start fighting, they will be so hungry, they can't put up a decent fight.

Alrighty then.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯