Rubbernecking the world in decline

Following the news these days, especially after a truly tragic week, is like witnessing a fatal car accident. You are horrified to see it happening but you are helpless to look away.

Watching Meet the Press this morning, I felt a fluttering in my chest that was more than too much coffee. It was an adrenal fight-or-flight response. Should I stop reading the newspapers and watching the news in order to preserve my mental health? Or should I get more involved in political activism and defending the common good?

When I started this blog in 2005, my dream was to sail around the world. Now that seems hopelessly naïve. There are too many countries along the way that would be seriously dangerous to visit. Much of the world is in turmoil, and it will only get worse as the population continues to grow and the effects of climate change become more prevalent.

What to do? Scale back the dream, first of all. Try to lessen my personal impact and contribute to causes that promote positive change. But understand that my efforts are, to use an expression I just heard, like a fart on a garbage ship—not that significant. As I recently read, individual efforts will not slow climate change. Only legislative action, in the form of stringent emission restrictions and alternative energy promotion, will accomplish anything. And that action will need to be worldwide.

Fat chance. The countries of the world are embroiled in their people’s everyday struggles—trying to secure a decent life for their families, or are enriching the few over the needs of the many. The big picture, what is happening to the world and what the future will bring, is a distant concern.

I am helpless to look away.

"Climate change far worse than thought before"

On Sunday morning, a headline flashed by on my Google news sidebar that caught my attention: "Climate change far worse than thought before" from The Times of India. The article lists the findings of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

• Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were 40 percent higher than in 1990. The recent Copenhagen Accord said warming should be contained within two degrees, but every year of delayed action increases the chances of exceeding the two-degree warming mark. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas (GHG) warming the atmosphere.
• To keep within the two-degree limit, global GHG emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilise climate, near-zero emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived GHG should be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under one tonne carbon dioxide by 2050. This is 80-95 percent below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.
• Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.19 degree Celsius per decade. The trend has continued over the last 10 years despite a decrease in radiation from the sun.
• The studies show extreme hot temperature events have increased, extreme cold temperature events have decreased, heavy rain or snow has become heavier, while there has been increase in drought as well. They also show that the intensity of cyclones has increased in the past three decades in line with rising tropical ocean temperatures.
• Satellites show recent global average sea level rise (3.4 mm/year over the past 15 years) to be about 80 percent above IPCC predictions. This acceleration is consistent with a doubling in contribution from melting of glaciers, ice caps, and the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice sheets. New estimates of ocean heat uptake are 50 percent higher than previous calculations. Global ocean surface temperature reached the warmest ever recorded in June, July and August 2009. Ocean acidification and ocean de-oxygenation due to global warming have been identified as potentially devastating for large parts of the marine ecosystem.
• By 2100, global sea level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by the IPCC in 2007; if emissions are unmitigated the rise may well exceed one metre. The sea level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperatures have been stabilised, and several metres of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.
• A wide array of satellite and ice measurements demonstrate that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting at an increasing rate. Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990. The contribution of glaciers and ice-caps to global sea level rise has increased from 0.8 mm per year in the 1990s to 1.2 mm per year today. The adjustment of glaciers and ice caps to present climate alone is expected to raise sea level by about 18 cm. Under warming conditions they may contribute as much as around 55 cm by 2100. The net loss of ice from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated since the mid-1990s and is now contributing 0.7 mm per year to sea level rise due to both increased melting and accelerated ice flow. Antarctica is also losing ice mass at an increasing rate, mostly from the West Antarctic ice sheet due to increased ice flow. Antarctica is currently contributing to sea level rise at a rate nearly equal to Greenland.
• Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. The area of summertime sea-ice 2007-09 was about 40 percent less than the average prediction from IPCC climate models in the 2007 report.
• The studies say avoiding tropical deforestation could prevent up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
• New ice-core records confirm the importance of GHG for temperatures on earth, and show that carbon dioxide levels are higher now than they have been during the last 800,000 years.

I hope to live until about 2050. Based on the IPCC findings, the world will be a far less hospitable place by then. The recommended steps to prevent human-caused climate change, like reducing per capita GHG emissions by 80-95 percent of 2000 levels, are not feasible. Global population will continue to increase, developing nations will continue to build new power plants, and developed nations will continue to rely on fossil fuels.

Like many science-minded people, I'm hoping for some kind of fix or breakthrough, but I'm afraid it's a false hope. I think we're facing an inevitable decline in the quality of life for all of earth's inhabitants, at least for those who survive extinction.

Here's a lyric from World Party's song, "Private Revolution", that puts our situation into some perspective:

But the world spins on regardless,
Which is lucky for you and me,
'Cause of all the places in a year's ride from here,
This is the only place to be.

2009: The Year of Stupid

Everybody who voted for him thought that when President Obama took office in January, the country would get busy fixing all the problems left over from the Bush administration, like ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, improving the depressed economy, reforming health care, and doing something to slow global warming. We optimistically thought that Congress would want to cooperate to achieve these goals. We were wrong. Apparently, the Republicans were pretty satisfied with the status quo and willing to do everything in their power to obstruct progress. To people like me, this was the equivalent of asking your dinner mate to pass the mustard while the runaway train you're on is hurtling toward destruction. Stupid.

And as the year wore on, it just got stupider: "birthers," "deathers," "tea baggers," Sarah Palin and her book tour. It was bad enough that the Republicans in Congress had become the party of "No!", but it was intolerable to see fellow citizens latching on to every stupid idea that came out of the mouths of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their ilk. Former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on political talk shows to cement his image as Darth Vader, and Karl Rove refused to shut up despite his persistent irrelevance. At least former President Bush was largely absent from the public sphere, the one thing we could have hoped for that came true.

Stupidity wasn't limited only to politics. Every day the news brought us more: the hoopla over Michael Jackson's death, Carrie Prejean's ignorant sensitivity, Jon and Kate's ugly divorce, the Balloon Boy hoax, the clueless White House party crashers, and Tiger Woods's excessive horndogging. The many celebrities who died this year were lucky they weren't around to see how stupid it could get.

There was an expression in the '70s: "The IQ of the universe is a constant. The population is increasing." Let's hope it's not true.

Happy New Year!

Gore 2008: Save the Planet!

Last night Nan and I saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary film about global warming. It was an eye-opener. I had been lukewarm to the idea of global warming for some time, especially since reading Michael Crichton's book, State of Fear, in which he presents scientific evidence in a fictional context to show that global warming is part of a natural cycle perhaps somewhat enhanced by human activity.

Al Gore blows the top off that idea in the first few minutes with his graphs showing the cycles of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last fifty years. The growth is exponential. Then he goes on to show the potential future consequences of having this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not a world we would want to live in: flooded coastlines, summer temperatures consistently over one hundred degrees, even more devastating hurricanes and cyclones, accelerated desertification, political unrest, and natural disasters claiming millions of lives.

The critics are saying that everyone should see this movie, and I agree. If you have an open mind, it will change the way you think about the earth and our future on it. The problem of global warming makes the war on terror seem inconsequential by comparison. Personally, I think Al Gore should run for president in 2008 on the platform of instituting the steps necessary to minimize the impacts of global warming. Anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth would have his vote.

Here is the text of a hand-out I picked up in the movie theater lobby:

Ten Things To Do

Want to do something to help stop global warming? Here are 10 simple things you can do and how much carbon dioxide you'll save doing them.

Change a light
Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

Drive less
Walk, bike, carpool or take mass transit more often. You'll save one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile you don't drive!

Recycle more
You can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste.

Check your tires
Keeping your tires inflated properly can improve gas mileage by more than 3%. Every gallon of gasoline saved keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere!

Use less hot water
It takes a lot of energy to heat water. Use less hot water by installing a low flow showerhead (350 pounds of CO2 saved per year) and washing your clothes in cold or warm water (500 pounds saved per year).

Avoid products with a lot of packaging
You can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.

Adjust your thermostat
Moving your thermostat down just 2 degrees in winter and up 2 degrees in summer could save about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

Plant a tree
A single tree will absorb one ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

Be a part of the solution
Learn more and get active at ClimateCrisis.net.

Spread the word! Encourage your friends to see An Inconvenient Truth