The Hames Report

Waste Land

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” - full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”.

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet. “I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”

This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system – is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.

But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.

Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:

 . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.

But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.

If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.

But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.

It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.

This article was written by Naomi Klein. Author of “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo”, Naomi is working on a book and a film about the revolutionary power of climate change. You call follow her on twitter @naomiaklein

Tilting at Windmills

The time for scepticism is long past. The time for informed action, though, is also quickly passing us by. As the UN climate negotiations continue in Doha "people all over the world are watching as floods wash away their lives, fires consume their houses and droughts decimate food crops. Just last week, UNEP released a report warning that melting permafrost could release massive amounts of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, bringing the planet ever closer to runaway climate change".

Here’s a letter from three powerful advocates for a safe climate to the leaders and negotiators in Doha. The authors are Bill McKibben founder of 350.org; Nnimmo Bassey of Environmental Rights Action & Coordinator of Oilwatch International; and Pablo Solon, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, former Bolivian Ambassador to the UN and former chief negotiator for climate change.

2012 saw the shocking melt of the Arctic, leading our greatest climatologist to declare a ‘planetary emergency’ and it saw weather patterns wreck harvests around the world, raising food prices by 40% and causing family emergencies in poor households throughout the world. That’s what happens with 0.8ºC of global warming.

If we are going to stop this situation from getting worse, an array of institutions have explained this year precisely what we need to do: leave most of the carbon we know about in the ground and stop looking for more. If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched.

That’s not “environmentalist math” or some radical interpretation – that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that without dramatic global action to change our path the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt – absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.

Negotiators should cease their face-saving, their endless bracketing and last minute cooking of texts and concentrate entirely on figuring out how to live within the carbon budget scientists set. We can’t emit more than 565 more gigatons of carbon before 2050, but at the current pace we’ll blow past that level in 15 years. If we want to have a chance to stick to this budget by 2020 we can’t send to the atmosphere more than 200 gigatons.

Rich countries who have poured most of the carbon into the atmosphere (especially the planet’s sole superpower) need to take the lead in emission reductions and the emerging economies have also to make commitments to reduce the exploitation of oil, coal and gas. The right to development should be understood as the obligation of states to guarantee the basic needs of the population to enjoy a fulfilled and happy life, and not as a free ticket for a consumer and extractivist society that doesn’t take into account the limits of the planet and the wellbeing of all humans.

There’s no longer time for diplomatic delays. Most of the negotiators in the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) know that these are the facts. Now is the time to act for the future of humanity and Nature.

Good intentions and logic aside, this plea is bound to fall on deaf ears. Within the very general terms of its Charter, the UN has come to believe that it (and it alone) has carriage over global issues where a unity of response is required. In practice the UN has become a default mechanism for matters like climate change because of our collective inability to challenge such assumptions, or to create alternative bodies more capable of doing the job. Possibly relevant in the years immediately following the 2nd World War, the role of the UN has become increasingly ambiguous in an era of instant communication, smart technologies and overwhelming complexity.

So what if unity (of nations) is no longer required in this context? What if diversity is actually more relevant and should be valued as such? What if the struggle for consensus actually impedes impactful investment or hinders more effective cooperation? What if there are better, more rational, alternatives we could be pursuing to build momentum faster? What if even the most basic tools needed for systemic transformation are not available to the negotiators at Doha? What if they are unaware that such tools even exist?

As regular readers of The Hames Report know, I recently called for an end to the UN's stewardship of the annual climate debate farce for purely practical reasons - see Any Advance on Doha? below.

A different institution is needed in order to initiate and engage in design thinking and constructive dialogue (i.e. transformational narrative) that can lead directly to informed action. This probably needs to be a limited-life "SWAT team" that is not politically motivated (nor bound by political expediency), that does not concern itself with easily-manipulated targets, and that is not populated with "experts" who have vested interests only in preserving the status quo.

This "SWAT team" should be a working community of possibly no more than 50 individuals - comprising systems thinkers, visionaries, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs and policy makers - people who are not trapped in the present but are capable of imagining, designing, rapidly prototyping and freely distributing a range of future alternatives - ethically compelling, socially desirable, economically feasible, systemically viable pathways, strategies and solutions for alleviation, attenuation and adaptation. In order for this to be remotely feasible three things would need to happen:

1. Somehow the UN must be persuaded to abdicate its current role - or at least step aside - not from a sense of failure but in a deeper awareness of enlightened responsibility. It should acknowledge (a) it is incapable of reaching a satisfactory outcome in these matters and (b) that nation states, geared up to compete rather than to collaborate, are possibly the least appropriate mechanism for reaching agreement on strategies for tackling climate change. Until this courageous step is taken no other body can step into the breach and the world will remain under the false illusion that a result must eventually emerge from the current process.

2. To remain relevant in this context the UN needs to demonstrate a more engaging and conscious form of leadership by stepping into a new epistemology. It can do this by openly declaring the human family to be facing a planetary emergency in which no single entity or sector has the solution - and asking for help. Following such a proclamation, the UN could then justify putting its weight behind new, even experimental, approaches - including the use of a "SWAT team" as envisaged here - and use its waning influence to persuade others, across all sectors of society, of the wisdom of such alternative approaches.

International NGOs from the Clinton Global Initiative to the World Economic Forum and the World Bank could also take it upon themselves to support such an endeavour in the spirit of radical empathy. This simple act would make it clear to people everywhere that we're in this together and that we cannot rely on governments alone to sort out the problems for which we are all responsible.

3. As a consequence of #2 above the conventional wisdom, wherein nation state governments are expected to reach a legally-binding consensus on climate change, would be downgraded. Informed action, on the other hand, would be upgraded. It is clear that a universal agreement regarding how to go about reducing carbon dioxide and methane emissions in the atmosphere will probably not be forthcoming. Indeed it is probably wishful thinking. Setting targets is even more pointless. It is evident that new forms of collaborative action are necessary. Eveything that can be done must be done.

Most of the causes for our heating planet come from energy-related pressures on traditional industrialised methods of production and distribution, combined with the ever-increasing consumption demands from a population of seven billion people. The majority of these people are now located in the world's major cities.

But cities also happen to be engines of innovation. On at least one level it makes far more sense for cities, individually and collectively, to implement real strategic solutions than for national governments to spend their time - Don Quixote-like - trying to agree on theoretical targets. Indeed there is no reason why cities should not "compete" against each other for the entrepreneurial talent and resources required to protect life-critical systems and natural amentities for their citizens. That would at least be putting their free market instincts to better use.

Nations, cities, corporations and individuals should all be able to choose the most appropriate strategies and mechanisms to deploy - given their particular circumstances. Because of international trade there will be obvious cooperative and commercial partnering opportunities. But in order for them to do this they have to be able to see a full range of viable pathways available to them and to find ways of matching these with compelling incentives to invest. Such a catalogue of possibilities does not currently exist in the public domain - not in a single accessible format at least. A SWAT team would provide that catalogue - not just in theory, but in practical, ready-to-implement, form.

One thing we do know. Business as usual can no longer be an option. Nor must inaction be given any form of legitimacy. There can be no exceptions. Time is running out, of that there can surely be no doubt? We do not need nations to reach consensus on targets. We need action to be taken by those best placed to take action - such as cities and corporations.

Actually all we need from nations - in terms of "unity" - is an undertaking that by 2015 every country will enact a suite of coherent and aligned actions that make sense for them, each according to their means. Debt should be forgiven and investment capital made available by richer nations so that poorer countries can comply with this undertaking. If that pledge is broken a universally agreed law of ecocide could be enacted. Indeed prosecuting such an act of law might be a more fitting role for the UN in the future, rather than a facilitator of negotiations that go round and round in circles and end up in frustrating limbo.

 

Any Advance on Doha?

One of the signs of insanity, it is often asserted, is continuing to behave the same way, all the while expecting different outcomes.

This week diplomats from around the world are converging on Doha where the 2012 international debate on climate policy will be taking place under the auspices of the United Nations. After the failure of previous meetings of this nature one would have thought the UN might have tried something different; a little more audacious perhaps? Or, dare one say, inspired? After all you would imagine they might be getting desperate by now.

But if that is the case, it is not evident from the program. They are continuing to do the same things as before, though possibly with even greater enthusiasm.

The task, daunting but logically flawed, is pretty straightforward. In the face of potentially catastrophic global warming it is to agree a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol and to lay the groundwork for a new treaty that will take force in 2020.

Of course it would be unwise to pronounce the meeting an abject failure before it even starts, although history indicates this to be a strong likelihood after the near implosion of last year’s talks in Durban. But with the best will in the world I cannot see anything enduringly positive emerging from these talks. The likelihood is that the space for future negotiations will contract. The reasons are very obvious:

1. The Kyoto Protocol was never a satisfactory mechanism. For a start it did not include the US, and major nations including the US, Japan, Russia and Canada have already opted out of a second round. Second, in spite of fines for non-compliance, it was never legally enforceable. Third, it was based upon the imposition of aspirational targets. Setting targets without a profound knowledge of the system is always a hit and miss affair, besides which they are so easily manipulated. The fact that targets do not work was proven by a growth in emissions rather than the reverse.

2. The Doha meeting is being held against a backdrop of palpably worsening climatic conditions, extreme weather events, and progressively agitated warnings from climate activists – none of which support informed reflection. Dire warnings certainly raise awareness, but do little to inspire cooperation or initiate alternative solutions. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth trumpeted the dangers of inaction louder and with greater clarity than most scientific reports. The truth is the movie only succeeded in raising public anxiety. Now is the time for insightful collaborative action, not just more existential warnings of impending doom. Unfortunately the UN is not geared up for that.

3. The nation state grew from a worldview that was essentially combative - a belief that competition is an innate and inescapable part of what it means to be human. Thus the state defends and protects those citizens who choose to live within its borders, in return for which its citizens compete with those in other states for resources, territory, influence and wealth. To many individuals in the private sector this is the natural order. But the same worldview prevails in government as well as most non-government organisations. So the chance of almost 200 nations coming together for two weeks to reach consensus on an issue as complex as climate change is absolutely incongruous. It is not going to happen. Nations and their representatives are simply not equipped to cooperate. Nor is their ability to transcend differences sufficiently mature. It is just not in their DNA. And so it comes as no surprise to find overly simplistic groupings playing power games in Doha. Like the supposed differences between developed and non-developed nations, for example. In the end it is all semantics. The issues facing us call for unity, not rivalry.

4. The pain is not yet sufficient. As yet there is no burning platform. Gradually the relevance of extreme weather events is starting to sink into the collective conscious, particularly in those parts of the world suffering unprecedented droughts, fires, storms and flooding. But many people remain sceptical and have yet to link these incidents with long-term climatic trends. We are far too complacent. Until the accumulated strain on the planet is apparent to the casual observer - in terms of rising temperatures, sea levels, heatwaves and other weather-related occurrences - and on a daily basis, it is highly improbable that any collective action will be forthcoming.

5. Any effective communication, such that conveys compelling ideas or provokes collective action, is deliberately avoided or understated. Almost all briefing documents, reports, pledges, commitments, protocols, conventions and records of the meeting, supposedly intended to expound and inform, are invariably bogged down by a babel of weasel words – ambiguous, tortuously verbose or deliberately vague. This results in a weird kind of bureaucratic etiquette where nothing meaningful is said. Indeed the art of drafting these documents is to avoid saying anything explicitly that could cause offence to anyone at all.

6. Too many cooks have been invited to the feast. I don’t have the figures for Durban or Doha but there were well over 20,000 official negotiators in Copenhagen. How on earth can 20,000 or more people arrive at any kind of consensus? Sometimes it is difficult enough to agree with one’s partner. Do you recall the last meeting you attended with your peer team? Now imagine if the agenda had comprised just a single highly contentious topic. Can you remember how difficult it was to reach any kind of sensible agreement that each of your colleagues could live with? And was that with seven people? Twelve? In Doha there are thousands of cooks trying to bake a cake. They are armed with a multitude of ingredients. But each team is carrying a different recipe and each wants to satisfy their own individual palate. The creation will not be one to your liking. Of that I can be sure.

7. The UN uses a combined conference and workshop approach predicated on the notion of experts informing each other in the hope of narrowing options and settling on an array of desired outcomes. This instructional and essentially linear mode of communication has a long and checkered history. But in the current circumstances it is entirely inadequate since instruction does not necessarily result in new learning nor lead to behavioural change. For success to grow from these annual convocations the organisers must shift to a transformational mode of collaborative inquiry. And therein lies the rub. For the UN is hampered by being caught in a grand scheme where sheer numbers prevent effective dialogue.

8. Currently the emphasis for these meetings seems to be on resolving the problem of atmospheric carbon dioxide and soot particles by setting targets to reduce emissions. This is not just a “now” problem. It resonates back in time at least 300 years and casts a deep shadow into the future. So one might reasonably expect the problem solvers to be conscious of this expanded time-frame and to take it into account during the course of their deliberations. After all we cannot afford to put another foot wrong only to realise our mistake in 20 years time. But no. Factors of systemic cause and effect over time are considered irrelevant. So there is no exploration of which decisions led, directly and indirectly, to our present circumstances. There is no genuine comprehension of why particular choices were favoured over others. There is no grasp of the information that was available, what compelled people to make a decision, nor even the prevailing conditions in which a certain decision was thought to be the best one at the time. If our negotiators are ignorant of the past, there is even less comprehension of the future. There is no unifying narrative for a desired future that would benefit humanity as a whole. On the contrary, everything is predicated on extrapolative modelling (which has been proven to be unreliable) and on untested assumptions. There are three critical points in navigation. You must know where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to get to. This also assumes you know “why” you are headed in a certain direction. I venture to suggest the vast majority of the people attending the Doha conference this week haven’t a clue about any of these three points. They are without a compass and lacking even the capacity to know in which direction to face.

9. The UN should not be the auspicing body and mechanism for climate change action. Not that there can be any alternative while the UN occupies this space. The UN must step aside before other candidates can step forward. Nor should representatives of nation states be the prime negotiators deciding the fate of humanity. Historical legitimacy is one thing. But the UN is anything but united and power invested in tired institutions like the nation state, tethered to a habit of competing rather than collaborating, simply cannot act with the necessary speed, agility and shared empathy. The most effective global diplomacy today is that enacted on the ground by hundreds of thousands of interconnected individuals and non-government entities. Perhaps the time has come for the UN to abdicate its role in this domain or to outsource this particular function to a body more capable of getting results.

10. Climate change is an integral and systemic matter. As such it is a failure of our collective values and individual behaviours as much as it is of whole systems not working as they once did. To understand the issue of global warming in all its complex variety we must know and appreciate how the whole system functions - not just the observable symptoms that are easily explained by science. We must understand the most axiomatic factors within the system. We must understand its dynamics. We must also monitor the pace, metamorphosis and impact of its emergent qualities in real time. Anything less than this profound knowledge, or focusing on just one tiny aspect of the whole system while ignoring the rest, is pure negligence. Such an ill-informed approach can only ever provide partial solutions. Sometimes it can make matters a lot worse. So we should look for evidence that a systems approach is inherently understood by the delegates in Doha. We must be able to see them using maps, causal loop diagrams, fitness landscapes and other visualisations of the complexity involved. Sadly, I see no such evidence.

Conclusions:

While success breeds success, successive failures ultimately lead to weariness and despair. The UN does not have time on its side – a decade, perhaps, or two at the most before the cost of procrastination is overshadowed by circumstances in which the majority of the human population will be struggling to deal with the effects of hostile climatic conditions.

Success would be nice. But this is only likely to accrue from radically different goals, more intelligent procedures, a determination to cut through red tape, more proficient facilitation, and where the conditions for success have been mindfully constructed as part of the process. If, on the other hand, these meetings continue on their current trajectory, and fail to reach a universally acceptable consensus for action soon, it is highly probable more individual states will choose to opt out of the farce altogether.

In Doha this week all eyes will be on the US and China. But in spite of new faces on the dance floor the music is the same slow tango. There is little evidence that the political ambition for aggressive action to combat climate change is going to change any time soon.

 

Global Warming Caused Hurricane Sandy

That's right. Global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy - and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let's say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.

Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

There is a difference between systemic and direct causation. Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation. Any application of force to something or someone that always produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

Systemic causation, because it is less obvious, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes. It may be probabilistic, occurring with a significantly high probability. It may require a feedback mechanism. In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.

Above all, it requires a name: systemic causation.

Global warming systemically caused the huge and ferocious Hurricane Sandy. And consequently, it systemically caused all the loss of life, material damage, and economic loss of Hurricane Sandy. Global warming heated the water of the Gulf and Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in greatly increased energy and water vapor in the air above the water. When that happens, extremely energetic and wet storms occur more frequently and ferociously. These systemic effects of global warming came together to produce the ferocity and magnitude of Hurricane Sandy.

The precise details of Hurricane Sandy cannot be predicted in advance, any more than when, or whether, a smoker develops lung cancer, or sex without contraception yields an unwanted pregnancy, or a drunk driver has an accident. But systemic causation is nonetheless causal.

Semantics matters. Because the word cause is commonly taken to mean direct cause, climate scientists, trying to be precise, have too often shied away from attributing causation of a particular hurricane, drought, or fire to global warming. Lacking a concept and language for systemic causation, climate scientists have made the dreadful communicative mistake of retreating to weasel words. Consider this quote from "Perception of Climate Change" by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

...we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.

The crucial words here are high degree of confidence, anomalies, consequence, likelihood, absence, and exceedingly small. Scientific weasel words! The power of the bald truth, namely causation, is lost.

This no small matter because the fate of the earth is at stake. The science is excellent. The scientists' ability to communicate is lacking. Without the words, the idea cannot even be expressed. And without an understanding of systemic causation, we cannot understand what is hitting us.

Global warming is real, and it is here. It is causing - yes, causing - death, destruction, and vast economic loss. And the causal effects are getting greater with time. We cannot merely adapt to it. The costs are incalculable. What we are facing is huge. Each day, the amount of extra energy accumulating via the heating of the earth is the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Each day!

Because the earth itself is so huge, this energy is distributed over the earth in a way that is not immediately perceptible by our bodies - only a fraction of a degree each day. But the accumulation of total heat energy over the earth is increasing at an astronomical rate, even though the temperature numbers look small locally - 0.8 degrees Celsius so far. If we hit 2.0 degrees Celsius, as we may before long, the earth - and the living things on it - will not recover. Because of ice melt, the level of the oceans will rise 45 feet, while huge storms, fires, and droughts get worse each year.

The international consensus is that by 2.0 degrees Celsius, all civilization would be threatened if not destroyed.

What would it take to reach a 2.0 degrees Celsius increase over the whole earth? Much less than you might think. Consider the amount of oil already drilled and stored by Exxon Mobil alone. If that oil were burned, the temperature of the earth would pass 2.0 degree Celsius, and those horrific disasters would come to pass.

The value of Exxon Mobil - its stock price - resides in its major asset, its stored oil. Because the weather disasters arising from burning that oil would be so great that we would have to stop burning. That's just Exxon Mobil's oil. The oil stored by all the oil companies everywhere would, if burned, destroy civilization many times over.

Another way to comprehend this, is that most of the oil stored all over the earth is worthless. The value of oil company stock, if Wall Street were rational, would drop precipitously. Moreover, there is no point in drilling for more oil. Most of what we have already stored cannot be burned. More drilling is pointless.

Are James Hansen's numbers right? We had better have the science community double-check these. And fast.

Where do we start? With language. Add systemic causation to your vocabulary. Communicate the concept. Explain to others why global warming systemically caused the enormous energy and size of Hurricane Sandy, as well as the major droughts and fires. Email your media whenever you see reporting on extreme weather that doesn't ask scientists if it was systemically caused by global warming.
 
Next, enact fee and dividend policies, originally proposed by Peter Barnes at Sky Trust and introduced in US Senate legislation as the KLEAR Act by Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins. More recently, legislation called fee and dividend has been proposed by James Hansen and introduced in the House by representatives John B. Larson and Bob Inglis.
 
Next. Do all we can to move to alternative energy worldwide as soon as possible.

This piece was written by George Lakoff who is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. George is the author of The California Democracy Act, a grassroots California ballot initiative now organizing public support at camajorityrule.com. He is also the co-author (with Elisabeth Wehling)  of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. This is a slightly abbreviated version of an article published in Alternet on 30^th October 2012.

Convergence@Speed

A few years ago I started talking about the emergence of a plausible planetary technoculture resulting from the unpredictable conjunction of a few seminal streams of human invention, and the activities related to them. I was particularly fascinated by the effects of information-based technologies on what we currently do and how we do it – especially when divorced from more serious questions related to why we do it.

But now we also need to add the speed of change as an additional defining factor. Outside of its more everyday use as metaphor there is little current appreciation of the speed of change - still less concerning the conditions the speed of change could generate through technological innovation.

There are a number of significant convergences occurring that will transform human cognition and performance. The convergence of biotechnology, nantechnology and robotics, for example, is already radically transforming healthcare, war, security and manufacturing. Similarly the merging of in-memory computing, the Cloud and device mobility is shifting our capability to access knowledge, anywhere, in real-time – impacting how we interact with each other, undertake business transactions, and move to more participative forms of democracy.

Of course there are other more estoeric intersecting epistemologies that are potentially far more interesting than focusing on computer science and informatics (the convergence of quantum science, indigenous wisdom and spirituality, for example, that could well give rise to a new human cosmology) but these are outside the scope of this article.

How these conjunctions evolve, and how they will overturn everything we take for granted, make for a fascinating study for one overwhelming reason: the perceived rate of technological change is exponential. In other words we will arrive in the future much faster than anticipated. This is not a new phenomenon. One only has to review the time it took to decode the human genome or comprehend the illusion of time created by the exponential growth of a toxic weed in a pond, for example[1]. But it is still so often misconstrued and leads to patterns of human behaviour that lack foresight and wise judgement.

For the most part we cannot readily conceive of change at this magnitude because our intuition about the future tends to be commonly expressed as linear extrapolations of the past or the present. Consequently we tend to ignore, misinterpret (or drastically underplay) the impact of exponential change on our lives. This has huge implications for investors, ethicists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and government policy makers, as well as technologists themselves.

Let’s spend a few moments considering what exponential change implies vis-a-vis how we currently think about progress and habitually make decisions based upon assumptions derived from more conventional understandings.

The arithmetic of logarithmic (or exponential) functions is easy enough. Essentially it is a simple formula: when relative growth of any kind (e.g. population growth, compounded interest, resource extraction, inflation or consumption) is a constant measured as a percentage over time, the doubling rate of what we are measuring (in other words the time it takes for a quantity to double in size or value) will be 72 divided by the unit of growth. So for example, if the economy grows at an average 7 per cent per annum it will double over the span of ten years. If the growth rate is an average of 10 per cent per annum then the doubling factor will be just 7 years. And so on…

In this context consider what China has achieved since 1980. The Chinese economy has been growing at an annual rate of 10 per cent for the past 30 years. That means the economy has doubled a total of 4 times over that period. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty during that time. Many new cities have been built. A modern infrastructure of highways and railways has transformed the landscape, opening up the hinterland and making it far easier to travel to the major cities. In 2010, China had 18 million households with an annual income above USD 16,000. By 2020, this number will be 167 million households. That's almost 400 million people! What is more, Chinese brands are now competing with (and out-performing) the world’s best.

Astonishing economic acceleration of this nature is unprecedented on such a scale. But there are always unintended consequences. For example, if you were motoring on the highway between Zhangjiakou and Beijing in late 2010 it would have taken you many days to reach your final destination. Massive traffic jams regularly clog this highway – occasionally stretching to more than 60 miles. On this occasion thousands of commuters were stuck on the road for days, living off water and food sold to them by vendors wandering through the semi-parked cars. Apart from ongoing construction on this highway and the carriage of illicit coal and other materials from Mongolia, it is the explosive growth in car ownership (Beijing alone is adding cars at an astonishing rate of 1,900 every day) that's the most likely cause of this urban nightmare. It has created a paradoxical situation where the number of drivers on Chinese roads now negates any benefit from travelling in cars.

Back to our exponential function. We can apply the same mathematical logic to population growth. In 1986 there were 5 billion people on the planet. The growth rate was just 1.7 per cent per annum, meaning that by 2027 we would have reached 10 billion people. By 1999 the population had reached 6 billion but the growth rate had slowed to 1.3 per cent per annum, meaning that it will take until 2052 to reach 12 billion. That still means we are growing at a rate of 80 million people a year on a planet unable to provide adequately for 7 billion. Problematically most growth is occurring in undeveloped countries that can least afford large populations and where education hardly exists – nations like Burundi, Niger and Uganda.

But the population problem also exists in economically developed countries. In Australia, the city of Melbourne has experienced 1.88 per cent population growth over the past decade. One might regard that as modest growth, but that is not the case. Indeed if growth continues at that rate Melbourne will overtake Sydney in 2028, when each city will have about 5.6 million people. No other city in Australia has ever experienced growth of this size. It has taken city planners completely by surprise (because they presumably did not do the maths) and strained the city's infrastructure and services - adding to road congestion, overcrowding on public transport, increased waiting times in hospital emergency wards, the demand for energy and water, and a host of other undesirable outcomes. All of this in a relatively affluent country where annual immigration numbers are controlled by the Commonwealth government; the total fertility rate, of 1.78 per woman, is below that normally considered to be the replacement rate for a population; and where the potential impacts of exponential population growth on the city should have been apparent and handled differently in terms of systemic urban design.

Obviously we can also apply the same mathematical logic to the extraction of fossil fuels (like oil, gas and coal) the loss of biodiversity, the rate of global warming – and, of course, the increase in computer processing power.

All of which brings us back to the matter in hand: namely the speed at which technologies are converging and the subsequent role they will play in the future. For the astonishing truth is that it is not simply the rate of change in discrete fields or disciplines to which we should remain alert, but also the rate of change in that convergence. It is this speed of change that led US inventor Raymond Kurzweill to predict that the “singularity” (the year in which artificial intelligence exceeds that of humans) will occur at some stage within the next two decades.

The examples to which I have referred should show us that exponential change demands a far more sophisticated approach to systemic design, taking into account many potential features and points of view, while also pondering deeply the social, moral and ethical dimensions of the futures we are creating. All of which is easier said than done, especially when the subject is rampant, seemingly unstoppable, technological invention.

Kurzweill maintains that by 2030 we will be interacting with technologies that are billions of times more powerful than those available today. While this is correct in terms of logarithmic change I can’t help wondering if this is what we really want.

There are three paramount dilemmas we encounter when considering such possibilities as those anticipated by Kurzweill. The first has to do with distinctions between fate (the inescapable future) and desire (the preferred future). The second concerns the inability of human minds to imagine beyond what is known through experience and to translate these imaginings into a design capability. The third raises the issue of morality. In the end all three dilemmas relate to our intentions – the territory where the most difficult choices must be made.

1. The enigma of fate and desire

Depending upon the culture in which one is literate, the potential for shaping events is taken either to be severely limited (i.e. it is the role of a higher intelligence) or theoretically infinite (i.e. mankind is creator and capable of anything). Most of us occupy a space somewhere in between these two extremes.

For me, as a Buddhist and a practising futurist, the main problem I have with the kind of positivist determinism confidently proclaimed by many scientists and technologists is the irrefutable inevitability accorded most technological expressions of the future. Currently there seems to be a huge disconnect between what convergent technologies can potentially bring to humanity, and what we want those things to be. Nor are there many opportunities to discuss or debate such issues.

The notion of a reinvented species of humanoid with super intelligence in which humans can finally discard their earthbound carcases holds no joy for me. Nor do I believe there is anything inevitable about this evolution.

2. Imagining beyond the event horizon

Envisaging how our lives could be so utterly different from how they currently manifest is problematic for most of us. Other than artists and other visionaries we tend to construct our “probable” futures from linear extrapolations of present circumstances and past memories. This is the “here and now” of our daily experience and it undoubtedly limits our ability to step into a place of infinite possibilities – an “expanded” now compressing all past, present and possible options. One of the reasons Steve Jobs was not interested in asking customers what they wanted from Apple was because they had little idea of what was actually feasible. They did not know what they wanted until they could feel and see it in their hands and play with it. In other words they could not see beyond a particular event horizon.

Apart from those rare individuals who perceive the world from an altogether higher plane of awareness, there are several accepted ways of amplifying human creativity and imagination. Using hallucinatory drugs, for example, or accessing new tools such as virtual reality, allow us to perceive possibilities that would have been previously barred from us. Few people have access to simulation facilities and the immersive experiences these provide, however, as most are still privately-owned or used purely for entertainment purposes.

Perhaps we need to think more seriously about investing in the capability for the expansion of human imagination as a pre-requisit for more sophisticated social designs. Obviously an increased capacity for imaginative cognition may ultimately be provided by the technology itself. But by then it will be too late to influence the design of the technology and many ethical concerns will possibly have been overlooked.

3. The Moral Dimension

The moral issues, including many ethical questions that require resolution and will have a considerable bearing upon the various choices that may need to be made, have incredible consequences and are too important not to be considerd as part of the original impulse for design of any socio-technological ecosystem.

Meanwhile the inexorable tide of technological innovation that sweeps everyting before it gives us little time for any considered thought on these matters. For example, some clusters of transformative technologies could improve the human condition by prolonging life, enabling the human-machine interface, and eliminating disease. One might consider these critical to humanity’s future did they not exacerbate the population problem. It is ironic that most of what we regard as being good for humanity (medicine, peace, sanitation and law and order for example) actually worsen the population problem, while an alternative strategy for resolving the problem, (by promoting conflict and disease and encouraging murder for example) is morally obscene.

 

 

---

[1] If a toxic weed doubles every day and covers the entire surface of the pond in 30 days, then it wil only cover half of the pond’s surface on day 29. This, of course, is part of the reason we see so little action to combat climate change. Looking at it today doesn't seem to be so bad. Unfortunately we do not see past the 29th day to tomorrow!

The Next Dust Bowl

Which impact of anthropogenic global warming will harm the most people in the coming decades? I believe that the answer is extended or permanent drought over large parts of currently habitable or arable land — a drastic change in climate that will threaten food security and may be irreversible over centuries.

A basic prediction of climate science is that many parts of the world will experience longer and deeper droughts, thanks to the synergistic effects of drying, warming and the melting of snow and ice.

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. Added to natural climatic variation, such as the El Niño–La Niña cycle, these factors will intensify seasonal or decade-long droughts. Although the models don’t all agree on the specifics, the overall drying trends are clear.

I used to call the confluence of these processes ‘desertification’ on my blog, ClimateProgress.org, until some readers pointed out that many deserts are high in biodiversity, which isn’t where we’re heading. ‘Dust-bowlification’ is perhaps a more accurate and vivid term, particularly for Americans — many of whom still believe that climate change will only affect far-away places in far-distant times.

Prolonged drought will strike around the globe, but it is surprising to many that it would hit the US heartland so strongly and so soon.

The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies. Yet few policy-makers and journalists seem to be aware of dust-bowlification and its potentially devastating impact on food security. That’s partly understandable, because much of the key research cited in this article post-dates the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step in prompting action.

I first heard of the risks in a 2005 talk by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona in Tucson. He pointed to emerging evidence that temperature and annual precipitation were heading in opposite directions over many regions and raised the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought”.

The idea wasn’t new. As far back as 1990, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

Events are starting to bear out these worrying predictions. Snowpack reduction, early snowmelt and a decrease in dry-season river flow in the American West, forecast more than two decades ago, have now been measured. In much of the northern Rockies, the peak of the annual stream runoff is up to three or four weeks earlier than it was half a century ago. Heat and drought — coupled with the greater impact of destructive species, such as bark beetles, aided by warming — have increased forest die-off and the risk of wildfire.

The palaeoclimate record dating back to the medieval period reveals droughts lasting many decades. But the extreme droughts that the United States faces this century will be far hotter than the worst of those: recent decades have been warmer than the driest decade of the worst drought in the past 1,200 years.

And much warmer conditions are projected. According to a 2009 report of the US Global Change Research Program, warming over mid-latitude land masses, such as the continental United States, is predicted to be higher than the forecast average global warming: much of the inland United States faces a rise of between 5 °C and 6 °C on the current emissions path (that is, ‘business as usual’) by the century’s end, with a substantial fraction of that warming occurring by mid-century.

A 2007 analysis of 19 climate projections estimated that levels of aridity comparable to those in the Dust Bowl could stretch from Kansas to California by mid-century. To make matters worse, the regions at risk of reduced water supply, such as Nevada, have seen a massive population boom in the past decade. Overuse of water in these areas has long been rife, depleting groundwater stores.

Of course, the United States is not alone in facing such problems. Since 1950, the global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% of global land area per decade. Recent studies have projected ‘extreme drought’ conditions by mid-century over some of the most populated areas on Earth—southern Europe, south-east Asia, Brazil, the US Southwest, and large parts of Australia and Africa. These dust-bowl conditions are projected to worsen for many decades and be “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stopped.”

The concept of drought has not been ignored by the IPCC and other scientific groups; there is even a United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. But the cumulative risks don’t seem to have been fully recognized by the public and by policy-makers. And key questions remain to be answered, ideally in a dedicated report by an organization such as the US National Academy of Sciences or the IPCC.

Most pressingly, what will happen to global food security if dust-bowl conditions become the norm for both food-importing and food-exporting countries? Extreme, widespread droughts will be happening at the same time as sea level rise and salt-water intrusion threaten some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges. Meanwhile, ocean acidification, warming and overfishing may severely deplete the food available from the sea.

What are the implications of dust-bowlification for energy generation? After agriculture, energy generation is responsible for the majority of freshwater withdrawals, and two key strategies for generating additional potable water — wastewater purification and desalinisation — are both energy intensive. Future energy systems will need to be low on greenhouse-gas emissions and on water use. In particular, thermal power plants, including nuclear, may need to switch from evaporative or ‘wet cooling’  systems to dry cooling techniques, which, unfortunately, tend to be less efficient.

From an ecological perspective, what will be the effects of dust-bowlification on the global carbon cycle? In the past six years, the Amazon has seen two droughts of the sort expected once in 100 years, each of which may have released as much carbon dioxide from vegetation die-off as the United States emits from fossil-fuel combustion in a year. More frequent wildfires also threaten to increase carbon emissions. And as habitats are made untenable, what will be the effect on biodiversity?

At the same time, drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US South-west and the drying seen at the global level, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable. Some models forecast an increase in precipitation for East Africa, whereas others correctly predicted in 2010 that warming of the Indian Ocean would lead to drought in the region, such as this year’s devastating drought in Somalia. The models need higher resolution and a better understanding of precipitation, sea surface temperature and the effects of vegetation.

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations and steadily growing areas of non-arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

These predictions are not worst-case scenarios: they assume business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions. We can hope that the models are too pessimistic, but some changes, such as the expansion of the subtropics, already seem to be occurring faster than models have projected. We clearly need to pursue the most aggressive greenhouse-gas mitigation policies promptly, and put dust-bowlification atop the world agenda. The time to act is now.

This piece was written by Joe Romm and first published in the journal Nature on 27th October 2011. It is reprinted here with the author's permission. Joe is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 "people who are reinventing America." Time named him a "Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger." Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

 

 

Food Security on the Menu

A world with 7 billion people, threats from a changing climate and unsustainable resource use are intensifying pressure on humanity and world governments to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed. This global issue brings both responsibility and opportunity for Australia.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates 75 million to 130 million people were pushed into malnutrition and poverty when food prices spiked in 2008, and another 40 million joined them after this year's price spikes. There are many regions where large gaps exist between actual and potential production, and an estimated 12 million hectares of agricultural land is degraded each year.

Up to a third of all food harvested is lost or wasted as it is processed, distributed or consumed in our homes. Climate change is expected to exacerbate the problem: increasing temperatures, altered rainfall patterns and more severe weather will lead to dire social, economic and ecological consequences. Vietnam's fertile, low-lying Mekong Delta is already experiencing ingress of seawater.

The global challenge is to increase agricultural productivity and decrease our environmental footprint while adapting to changing climate patterns. We must increase global food production by 2050 by between 30 and 80 per cent while halving our greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

This is the task facing the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. The commission, chaired by Britain's chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, is calling for urgent action by governments, international institutions, investors, agricultural producers, consumers, food companies and researchers. It wants food security on the agenda at the next round of international climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, in recognition of its inextricable link with climate change. The commission's blueprint urges seven key steps:

• Integrate food security and sustainable agriculture into global and national policies.
• Significantly raise the level of investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems.
• Sustainably intensify agricultural production while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other negative environmental effects.
• Target populations and sectors globally that are the most vulnerable to climate and food insecurity.
• Reshape food access and consumption patterns to ensure basic needs are met and foster sustainable eating habits worldwide.
• Reduce loss and waste in food systems.
• Create comprehensive, shared information systems that encompass human and ecological dimensions.

I believe Australia will play a unique role in this transformation. Despite our highly variable and challenging climate, many sectors of Australian agriculture have achieved an extraordinary annual productivity increase of 2 per cent or more for the past 30 years. We feed 60 million people each year and we are one of only 15 countries that export more food than we import. The rapid growth of mega-cities in our region will mean growing markets for the food we produce.

Future climate change brings new challenges to lifting agricultural production, but Australia is well placed.

We hold the world record for the lowest proportion of rainfall ending up in river systems, with a staggering 89 per cent evaporating. Our temperate areas have the world's highest year-to-year variability of run-off. By 2030, climate change is likely to cut average river flows by 10 to 25 per cent in some areas of southern Australia. A key driver for achieving rapid adoption of new technologies and practices is partnership between researchers and farmers. Australian agricultural research has a long history of innovation and collaboration with farming industries and communities that can be harnessed to deal with the challenges of food security and climate change.

Across Western Australia grain growers have lifted production through better practices, such as conservation agriculture, despite lower rainfall. In Vietnam, where saltwater is intruding, some farmers have turned rice paddies into shrimp ponds. Our irrigators can now use precision satellite data, soil moisture and evaporation rates to determine precise irrigation times sent via SMS to their phones. Every one of these efforts can be scaled globally.

Real changes are necessary across the global food system if we are to achieve true food security for all. It will mean a shared commitment across society and around the globe.

This article was written by Dr Megan Clark who is CSIRO chief executive and a commissioner for the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. The article first appeared in the Melbourne Age on 23rd November 2011 and is reproduced here with the author's permission.

 

Middle East Protests & Oil Addiction

Gasoline prices have been rising this winter in the US even though we are well outside the summer driving season with its traditionally highest price level. Among the reasons for today's higher gasoline and crude oil prices is the high demand for heating oil during this extra cold winter, as heating oil in some northern parts of the world is a life-and-death commodity. This can put some pressure on gasoline supplies as refineries might attempt to maximize heating oil output, although refining requires producing a constant balance of light, medium and heavy products, at fairly high utilization of capacity.

Crude oil prices have been moving toward the $100 per barrel mark. The actual price for crude and petroleum products is much higher in some nations due to subsidies (direct and hidden), keeping prices artificially low. But the official price of oil seems on the way to break the $147 / bbl record from July 2008.

Whether the emerging economic powerhouses China and India are the main reason for higher oil prices is academic, when the whole world is affected by developments in price and supply anywhere. The stability of countries such as Egypt and other Arab states has been proven illusory. When the right geopolitical event in the Persian Gulf (perhaps connected to the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni trends now in play) interrupts oil supplies by as much as 10% or more of global demand, the effect on the oil market may well be as if Hubbert's peak oil bell curve became a cliff that we have already jumped off.

A revolution in Saudi Arabia has been my favorite example for years, in terms of illustrating what can spark a return to the 1970s' skyrocketing oil prices, panic buying and hoarding. As grocery shelves will be emptied in a few days when a major oil supply crunch hits, as the late Matt Simmons reminded us, what difference does it make how many billions of barrels of crude are really off Brazil's coast?

Now, when people didn't expect it but should have, we see that Arab peoples have indeed been chafing under dictatorship for decades. Arabs, as in most places, have been biding their time for liberation. Whether certain regions can soon attain it is another matter, when many have far outstripped their besieged ecosystems' carrying capacities. In Middle Eastern countries the water and soil situations are generally poor and getting worse. Food shortage and food riots can flow from ecological deterioration, especially as new weather patterns (or non-patterns) have been increasingly disruptive for agriculture.

This is one argument for activists in Arab lands to remember there is no liberation or equality on a dead planet. Although the Egyptian uprising or revolution is hundreds of miles removed from the Persian Gulf, where 18% of the world's total trade in crude its shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, a common spirit of rebellion has spread in the region. It can take a sharp anti-American or anti-corporate turn and thus affect oil exports to the U.S.

In Saudi Arabia where the monarchy is extremely repressive, demonstrators have dared come out of the woodwork after Tunisians sent their dictator packing. International emphasis on military security in the region has been on huge ships and the Persian Gulf itself, but numerous facilities on land in Arab countries and nearby nations are vulnerable to attack and closure. Also, the Suez Canal sees one million barrels of oil pass through each day from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

The number of separate but linked oil facilities, extent of damage, or days of closure do not have to conform to some arithmetic model for there to be a massive reaction in the world oil market. The perception of supply shortage, with real instances affecting deliveries, is what drives oil prices on the world market, much as the stock market sometimes has a herd mentality. So far we are talking about what most observers would consider a temporary oil supply disruption resulting in a price spike. However, if the disruption and spike are strong enough, severe effects can shut down much of the global economy and simultaneously stop much local activity.

Petrocollapse - the exacerbated and lasting failure of the world oil market to meet demand, and the paralysis and collapse of most of the economy's infrastructure relying on petroleum - does not need to follow a formula or specific pattern of oil industry breakdown or a certain depletion schedule of oil reserves. We will only be sure when petrocollapse hits. Because peak oil has been attained, we can say that the petrocollapse process has begun and just needs a catalyst to tip the whole economy and trigger famine on a scale as large as some future climate disaster.

I don't believe the "Transition Town" or less-known "Stair-case slow collapse/catabolic" viewpoints take into account adequately the extreme vulnerability of and to the oil market. The Transition Town and Stair-case adherents' views, hopes, dreams and assumptions may actually refer to social change from civilization collapse, when they may think they are referring to the post-peak oil downslope, or vice versa. But this may make no difference as events may accelerate, and collapse and die-off throw theory and wishes out the window.

In my oil analysis career at Lundberg Survey, we accurately predicted the Second Oil Shock based on our finding that in March 1979 there would be a 9% shortfall of gasoline for U.S. demand. It was a time of billions fewer humans and rising oil production (extraction). The world also seemed poised to follow through with stringent conservation and development of alternative fuels. After Jimmy Carter's failure to catch fire with those strategies, energy efficiency actually reversed direction with the SUV phenomenon. But any slight per capita gains, had they been consistently in the right direction for conservation, are offset anyway by growth, while efficiencies paradoxically end up adding to more consumption.

Since 1979, aggregate energy demand has not been tamed in the least, and growth of the global oil infrastructure has dangerously proliferated. Peak oil extraction happened worldwide around 2006, according to the International Energy Agency, although "peak" is not a single year due to the advent of nonconventional crudes and biofuels over time. Peak oil is the main reason we are living in very different "oil times" since 1979: growth of crude supply has turned a corner, starting downward. Compared to past years, even conventional crude (light, sweet, easily extracted) - besides unconventional and expensive, extra-polluting oil replacements - is far more expensive to exploit, with lower net energy obtained for newer fields.

Petrocollapse will not be limited to the U.S., as we shall see when dominoes fall. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The popular faith in renewable and other alternative fuels to "save us" from dwindling oil reserves or from a loss of Middle Eastern or OPEC oil ought to be shattered prior to the rude and crude awakening from a significant supply crunch. The alternatives are not ready on a large scale, and generally only provide electricity rather than liquid fuels or petrochemicals or other materials. We will only wake up en masse when chaos starts to rapidly unfold - as if it hasn't already.

One is constantly cautioned to never conclude on a sour note. So I will point to the silver lining of collapse as a liberator far more fundamental than regime change. This is because basic relationships in society will be radically altered by extreme lifestyle change brought about by the loss of petroleum and by having to painfully face the recent separation from natural cycles that modern technological societies have achieved.

The U.S. is still thought to be the richest country in the world, but increasingly this fact requires the caveat of a greater and greater gap between the rich and poor. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world. In contrast, Tunisia is far better off, ranked the 62nd most unequal country. Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal. And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country! And inequality in the U.S. has soared in the last couple of years.

The New York Times published on 31 January that in Egypt "long-simmering resentments have burst into open class warfare." As poor as the Arab peoples are who are rioting and replacing regimes, and as important as this is for Arabs and all people under oppression, it is even more urgent for US citizens to focus on questioning their own circumstances vis-a-vis petroleum dependence.

Fossil fuels do not make us safer or healthier. Besides getting soft from sitting in our cars, before the TV and under the influence of many pharmaceutical drugs made from fossil fuels, US citizens seem to still want to believe all is more or less well. As to energy, many still believe "they will think of something." But some of us would rather "Imagine" and create now a radically more liberating and equitable world and way of living, as John Lennon did with his song of that name.

This article was written by Jan Lundberg and was first published in Alternet on 1st January 2011. It is reprinted here with Jan's permission. Jan is founder of Culture Change and was an oil industry analyst at Lundberg Survey before joining the grassroots environmental movement in 1988.

Climate Cranks: Time to Fight Back

I didn't realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means "clear and bright" in Italian.

I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government's chief science adviser. The interview changed my life. King, who had done as much as anyone except Al Gore to awaken the world to the dangers of climate change, helped me understand that the climate problem had undergone a profound, largely unexpected paradigm shift that carried the gravest of implications for little Chiara and all the world's children. No longer was climate change a preventable future threat; it was now a punishing current reality, one that was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it got better.

My interview with King led me to write HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth  which has just been published. My hope was to find a way for my daughter and her peers around the world to cope with all that lies in store for them. After four years of investigation that took me across the United States and around the world, I'm heartened to report that there are many practical steps we all can take—as individuals, as communities, as countries—to protect our societies and our young people from the changes in our climate that are unavoidable over the coming decades.

Still, I am saddened and angry that we find ourselves in this position in the first place. After all, humanity's failure to take action in time against global warming was a conscious decision, a result of countless official debates where the case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was exhaustively considered and deliberately rejected. Much of the blame for this unfortunate outcome belongs to people I have come to refer to as climate cranks—the corporate lobbyists and right-wing ideologues who for twenty years have done all in their power to keep this country, especially the government, from seriously addressing the problem.

In my journalism I have frequently pointed out the nefarious role the climate cranks have played in our national politics, but I confess I have often wondered how much good this did. I revere the profession of journalism and have long believed that it is best kept separate from activism; each of these callings has its own role to play in the endless struggle to make a better world. But I am not only a journalist. I am also a father. And as a father who during all of my now 5-year-old daughter's life has been watching governments, especially my own, do next to nothing about the climate catastrophe hurtling toward us, I have come to feel obligated to reach beyond the tools of journalism, vital as they are. Like my colleagues Bill McKibben and Mike Tidwell, two journalists and fathers who have also come to embrace climate activism, I now feel compelled to take more direct action. If Chiara and her peers around the world are to have a decent chance of inheriting a livable planet, the status quo cannot stand. We need transformative change, above all in Washington, and we need it quickly.

Which is why I will go to Washington the week of February 15 to confront the climate cranks—in Congress, in the media and in the corporate sector—and try to stop them from further sabotaging our response to the climate crisis. My partners in this effort will include the group Kids vs Global Warming, whose iMatter march aims to put a million kids in the streets on Mother's Day to demand that our leaders address climate change as if our children's future matters; Grist, America's leading environmental news website; The Nation; and other organizations still to be determined.

On the ground in Washington I will be joined by local young people—activist members of Generation Hot. Our plan is to confront the climate cranks face to face, on camera, and call them to account for the dangers they have set in motion. We will highlight the ludicrousness of their antiscientific views, which alone should discredit them from further influence over US climate policies. And we will show how our nation could still change course—for example, if the federal government were to use its vast purchasing power to kick-start a green energy revolution that would create jobs and prosperity across the land. We welcome your help and constructive suggestions for how to achieve these goals and invite you to join us.

But now let me turn to the question of why such direct action has become necessary. From the time global warming emerged on the public agenda in the late 1980s, it was regarded as a grave but distant future threat and, crucially, one that could be neutralized if humanity acted quickly enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I shared these assumptions until my October 2005 interview with David King shattered them. The science adviser told me that in fact global warming had already triggered outright climate change, and had done so a hundred years sooner than even the most concerned scientists had expected. One early manifestation, according to three British scientists writing in Nature, was the record heat wave that brutalized Europe in the summer of 2003. King cited government statistics indicating that the heat had killed 31,000 people, making it "the deadliest disaster in modern European history." Yet this turned out to be an underestimate. An epidemiological study conducted in 2008 for the European Union—reported here for the first time—concluded that the 2003 heat wave had caused at least 71,449 excess deaths, a toll considerably higher than the United States suffered during the Vietnam War.

As a new father, most alarming to me was King's next point: this newly triggered climate change is bound to intensify for the rest of my daughter's life. The inertia of the climate system—that is, the laws of physics and chemistry—guarantee that average global temperatures will keep rising for decades to come, no matter how fervently humanity might embrace solar energy, electric vehicles and other options for reducing emissions. And as temperatures rise, this global warming will unleash still more climate change: deeper droughts, stronger storms, wilder wildfires and so on, as well as faster sea level rise.

"No, no, it's not too late," King hurried to reply when I asked if this paradigm shift means all is lost. But the early arrival of climate change does transform the nature of the problem, as paradigm shifts tend to do. To wit, humanity now faces a double imperative. The traditional goal of climate policy—to reduce global warming—has now become more urgent than ever, for if global temperature rise isn't halted soon, it could gain too much momentum ever to reverse. Yet at the same time, humanity has no choice but "to adapt to the impacts that are in the pipeline" over the coming decades, said King. In short, we have to live through global warming even as we try to reverse it.

All of this makes my daughter an involuntary member of what I call Generation Hot. In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot, roughly 2 billion young people in total. I choose that date because it was the day humanity was put on notice that human activities were unwittingly raising temperatures on this planet. The warning was in NASA scientist James Hansen's testimony to the Senate, boosted by the decision of the New York Times to publish the story on the front page, thus making "global warming" a common phrase in newsrooms, government offices and households the world over. But Hansen's and countless subsequent warnings have gone unheeded, largely because of stiff resistance from the carbon lobby, to borrow author Jeremy Leggett's term—the energy and auto companies that profit from carbon dioxide emissions, the politicians and propagandists these companies sponsor and the right-wing ideologues who share their antigovernment sympathies.

My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot are fated to pay the price for this foot-dragging. One of the most unpleasant facts about climate change is that, once triggered, it cannot be turned off anytime soon. Even if humanity somehow stopped emitting carbon dioxide overnight, King told me, "temperatures will keep rising and all the impacts will keep changing for about twenty-five years." Since it is likely to take us at least a quarter-century to leave fossil fuels behind, the reality is that we're locked in to at least fifty more years of rising temperatures and the harsher climate impacts they bring. Thus the young people of Generation Hot are condemned to spend the rest of their lives coping with a climate that will be hotter and more volatile than ever before in our civilization's history.

You want specifics? By the time she is my age, Chiara may well not have enough water to drink here in California, because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack will have melted. Children in today's Washington, DC, are likely to witness in the course of their lifetimes sea level rise combine with stronger storm surges to regularly ring the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials with moats and submerge half of the National Mall. By 2050 the record heat that made the summer of 2010 so wicked will become the new normal in New York City and much of the East Coast. Overseas, the impacts will be punishing as well, especially for the poor. In Bangladesh, sea level rise is already making the soil and water in southern coastal regions too salty to produce decent yields of rice, the staple crop for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the inexorability of sea level rise ensures that many such low-lying areas worldwide will have to be evacuated, unleashing vast streams of climate change refugees. Military experts warn that this will pose not only humanitarian challenges but recurring threats to peace if the refugees attempt to cross national borders.

Precisely how much blame the carbon lobby and climate cranks deserve for the fate of Generation Hot cannot yet be scientifically determined. In theory, it's possible that global warming would have prematurely given rise to outright climate change even if the United States and other countries had scaled back their emissions beginning in the late 1980s. After all, it is the historic accumulation of greenhouse gases, not the annual emissions, that drives global warming. Scientists are still debating exactly when global warming sparked climate change, as well as the related question of how much responsibility global warming bears for any particular climate impact. (In their Nature study of the 2003 heat wave, for example, the three British scientists estimated that global warming was responsible for about 75 percent of the excessive heat Europe experienced that summer.)

But these are scientific nuances. As a practical matter, there is no denying that the large amount of greenhouse gases emitted since June 23, 1988—about 40 percent of humanity's total emissions since the Industrial Revolution—made global warming worse. That, in turn, increased the likelihood of unleashing climate change. Viewed in this context, the obstructionism of the carbon lobby and climate cranks played a decisive role.

Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the climate cranks blocked our government from taking serious action against emissions. By doing so, they also stalled international action (since other countries were understandably reluctant to reduce their emissions when the world's biggest polluter was unwilling to do so). Thus limits on global warming were avoided at the very time they would have mattered most. "Had some individual countries, especially the US, begun to act in the early to mid-1990s, we might have [avoided dangerous climate change]," Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton who ranks among the world's most eminent climate scientists, told me. "But we didn't, and now the impacts are here."

"This was a crime," Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Germany's former chief government adviser on climate told me. But the wrong people are being punished. My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot have been given a life sentence for a crime they didn't commit. Meanwhile, the perpetrators are reaping record profits, enjoying prominent media coverage (and not only on Fox) and even gaining control of the House of Representatives, where they plan to launch an inquisition against climate scientists who don't share their loony ideas.

It is outrageous that these climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. The plain truth is that they have no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, and that should discredit them from exercising any influence over our climate policy, much less holding it hostage to their ideological and economic agendas. But someone has to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes.

Don't rely on our media to rise to the occasion. The protocol of mainstream news coverage leads Washington journalists to refer to these people as climate skeptics. They're not skeptics. They're cranks. True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.

One crank recently took me to task for supposedly having no respect for science. In my reply, I assured him I respected science as much as anyone who lives in the modern world, where we take for granted air travel, Wi-Fi Internet, modern medicine and a host of other blessings. Then I asked, "If you respect science so much, how do you explain the fact that virtually every major scientific body on earth disagrees with you about climate science? Are they all in on the conspiracy?" He never replied, but of course that is the logical implication of his camp's insistence that they do too have science on their side. The scientists who say otherwise are all part of a conspiracy to—well, take your pick: to keep the research dollars flowing, to expand government control of the economy, to dismantle modern society and return us to hunter-gatherer primitivism. As I said, these are the ravings of cranks.

You can hear much the same from Congressional Republicans, starting with Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the vice chair of the House Science Committee, who will be leading the charge to debunk mainstream climate science. "I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything human beings do," Sensenbrenner has opined, repeating a talking point favored by many climate cranks but definitively refuted by many peer-reviewed scientific studies. For his part, the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is so scientifically illiterate that he apparently thinks the environmental complaint about carbon dioxide is that it's a carcinogen. Uh, no, Mr. Speaker, that's actually the rap against those cigarettes you like smoking (and whose manufacturers you've defended all these years).

Newly emboldened by the midterm elections, the Republicans are gearing up to put environmentalists and climate scientists on the defensive and block progress against global warming for the rest of Obama's presidency. It's time to turn the tables on them. The first step is to connect the cranks to the terrible consequences they have set in motion, and thereby discredit them from further influence over the nation's climate policies.

How? Our initiative, Confront the Climate Cranks, will do just that: confront the cranks on camera and accompanied by some of the children they have put in danger. We will video all of our confrontations and then quickly make them available to the public—by posting them on YouTube and sharing them with mainstream and alternative media and the social networks of our partner organizations. (In the run-up to these confrontations, we will invite the participation of the members or readers of The Nation, Grist, Kids vs Global Warming and the other partnering organizations, polling them on which cranks to target, what questions to ask and so on. Thus we hope to build momentum before arriving in Washington, as well as generate continuing attention and activism after the confrontations.)

By no means is our initiative alone sufficient to turn the tide in the climate fight, but we believe it can make a valuable contribution, especially if others lend a hand. By naming and shaming the climate cranks, we hope to shift the political terrain of the climate fight. By highlighting the specific climate impacts that have already begun and will intensify in the coming years, we aim to shift the debate away from abstract ideology toward the actual consequences the cranks have wrought for Generation Hot. And by conveying our message through children and parents, we can reach the ordinary Americans whose support is essential to overcoming the power of money and insider status in Washington. We hope you'll join us.

This blog was written by Mark Hertsgaard, the environment correspondent for The Nation. Mark is the author of six books, including "Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future." This article is adapted from Mark's latest book HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, published in January by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You can get involved in Mark's work by visiting the Generation Hot Facebook page)