Friday, April 21, 2017

Climate Rejoinders

It was rain forests that originally drew me into geography; I had been focused on linguistics until a friend convinced me to take a course about the disappearing Amazon. Eventually, I found myself there, particularly in the very dynamic corner of the forest known as Rondônia in 1996, 2000, and 2003. The Amazon remains vast -- that "corner" is the size of Arizona -- and large swaths of continue to be vulnerable to poorly-conceived  schemes of all kinds. I was interested in the underlying processes that led to deforestation -- focusing not on the saws and fires but on the political economy that drove resource use and migration to forest regions.

The Rainforest Alliance was also focused on such questions at the time, and still is. Even if climate change were somehow "solved" tomorrow, we would still have significant environmental problems. But now we recognize that climate change is creating a milieu in which those problems are compounded. Of particular interest to me are high-elevation cloud forests, a subtype of rain forest that is even more vulnerable, and whose protection is the focus of many coffee farmers, including my friends at Selva Negra, which has RA certification. This work is essential, as both the forests and high-grown coffee itself are under threat.

Compounding the problem of climate change, of course, is that many decision-makers (from individuals to heads of state) either do not believe it is happening or pretend not to for short-term gain (as with many fossil-fuel lobbyists and their Congress Critters).

Seeing their work thwarted by poorly-informed arguments and junk science has frustrated the folks at Rainforest Alliance, and led them to create a handy list of responses to five common errors related to climate change. Their town is a bit snarky, but otherwise I find these useful.

I provide more detailed explanations for skeptics in several articles of my own elsewhere on this blog. In each case, I try to focus on the evidence and the physical principles, and to avoid simple references to authorities, which are generally not persuasive to opponents of anything. My favorite piece is Frosty Denial, which lays out the physics at a basic level. I recently added Early Warning to refute the common myth that climate scientists keep changing their minds about what is going on.

In between I did post one article that addresses the question of authority. In Not Just Nye, I include John Oliver's stunt that shows just how rare climate denial is among people who have studied the physics.

Sunday, April 09, 2017

Early Warning

Although I was not paying attention at the time, the first comprehensive paper on climate change appeared in 1981, the year I graduated from high school. In those days, I was focused on linguistics and thought of my one geography class as an extended trivia quiz. Little did I know that learning and teaching about earth systems would soon become my life's work.

That first article appeared in the August 28 issue of Science, under the title Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, by NASA scientist James Hansen and six other atmospheric physicists used the term "global warming" six times. The bulk of the article is difficult to read, as it details the evidence for warming trends in the language of, well, science.

Data from the first publication on climate change.
No responsible scientist could ignore these trends.
The last couple of pages, however, are relatively easy to understand, and they describe the range of possible implications of this warming. If these pages were to be characterized by one word, it would be variability. That is, these scientists understood from the very beginning that because the planet and its climates are not uniform, the warming of the planet would have effects that would vary across space and over time.

I mention this because people who have not been reading the literature carefully sometimes assert that scientists introduced the term climate change once contradictory "evidence" began to appear. In fact, the words variability and variation appear a combined 35 times in this short article. More importantly, the phrase climate change appears 9 times in the ten pages of the very first scientific paper on the topic.

For more on Hansen's decisions to speak publicly on this topic, I recommend What Makes a Scientist Take a Stand? on the most recent installment of the TED Radio Hour.

Lagniappe

At the end of last year, I finally worked up the courage to watch Leonardo DiCaprio's documentary about the denial of the science. I wrote about it in a post of the same name -- Before the Flood.

Several years before that, I wrote Frosty Denial, which outlines the physics in simpler terms and asks why those who deny the physics have not offered an alternative explanation. Not only is climate change evident, in retrospect it was inevitable. How could we not have a different climate, after shifting so much carbon to the atmosphere in such a short period of time?

Sunday, April 02, 2017

Brutal Honesty


These are challenging times for reporters. As front-line defenders of democracy, they face unprecedented resistance from novice government workers who neither understand nor appreciate the purpose of their work. I was struck by this when I heard the frustrated response of the White House director to reporters concerned about the human cost of expected cuts in humanitarian aid.
I encourage readers to listen to the entire three-minute report, but this is the part that I found chilling.

Excerpt at 1:52:
MCDONOUGH: People will die. If the world does not do more, people will die.
PERALTA: In a press briefing last month, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney shrugged off the crises.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MICK MULVANEY: The president said specifically, hundreds of times - you covered him - I'm going to spend less money on people overseas and more money on people back home.
Mick Mulvaney's tone is that of a bully who is exasperated by the question. I can agree with him on one thing: he is honest when he says that we should have expected this. We knew this was coming. I cannot agree with the implication, however, that brutal consequences are made somehow more acceptable by the fact that they were announced ahead of time.

The less honest part of his response, of course, is the claim that more money is being spent on "people back home." No such policies have been forthcoming. Just before this exchange, Peralta mentions a kind of aid that I used to help provide (in my very small way) when I worked for a U.S. Defense contractor. We made the Humanitarian Daily Rations that are being air-dropped in South Sudan.


Such life-savers are likely to become more scarce over time. Even the coldest-hearted and self-serving among us should be concerned about the ill will that such meanness will generate.

Saturday, April 01, 2017

Donde Voy

If I am on my computer and in need of beautiful music, I often turn to Tish. Nothing is more relaxing than her voice, flowing back and forth between English and Spanish until I cannot remember which language the last phrase was in.

But gradually, I realize that her music is always at several levels -- the beauty of the words, the beauty of the images she portrays, and eventually some wisdom and some justice. Certainly this is the case with Donde Voy (Where I Go).

Image: PRX
She sings it in Spanish -- consult the line-by-line translation if needed. I will be using this to introduce several lessons about the geography of immigration during a teach-in this week.

Tish has been part of our family listening for 20 years, and frequently part of my teaching since 2010, when we saw her in person for the first (and so far only) time in Boston of all places. My post University of Tish, Passim Campus explains why her work is so important to us as a Latin Americanists. I also mention specific songs in my posts La Llorona and Semana de los Muertos.

Finally, in searching for a nice still photo (of which there are many), I found this image of Tish with a guitar on what turned out to be a nice introduction produced for the PRX series This Week in Texas Music History. Texas music scholar Gary Hartman describes the arc of a career that has taken Tish Hinojosa from Texas to Nashville to Taos and back again.

She is worldwide now, of course, running Mundo Tish from her home in Switzerland!

Lagniappe

I wrote "finally" above, but I want to leave this very important song in a place where it might get noticed. With the political ascendency of those who think we have too much environmental regulation, it is important to consider how many chemicals are not regulated enough. A half century after Rachel Carson explained this to us in Silent Spring, we still need this reminder from Tish. No translation is needed -- this is one of the best examples of her ability to weave a story with two languages.

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