Must We Pretend?

An article at countercurrents.org said this recently:

«A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions»
—Global Warming and Food Security: The Impact on Crop Diversity

Are we not sufficiently at the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous?

I'm starting to perceive the weather/climate distinction less as a matter of scientific certainty and more as an excuse to delay action for a long time. Here that distinction seems to be actively working against the cause of human survival by delaying what seems a truly obvious conclusion, and in doing so giving cover to inaction.

We already have a many year trend that shows things getting pretty steadily worse year over year, with not much backsliding, so it's not like we realistically have to wait 10 years to see if this surpassing 1.5°C is going to magically go away on its own. Indeed, by the time we get that much confirmation, these effects we fear will have seriously clubbed us over the head for too long.

«“The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024,” António Guterres said in his New Year message, stressing that humanity has “no time to lose.”»
—2024, Hottest Year on Record, Marks ‘Decade of Deadly Heat’

I keep seeing reports (several quoted by me here below) that we averaged above that in 2024, so I find this predication on a pipe dream highly misleading.

Even just wordings suggesting that the crossing of some discrete boundary will trigger an effect, but that not crossing it will not, is misleading. It's not like 1.49°C will leave us with no loss of diversity, but 1.51°C will hit us with all these effects.

What needs to be said more plainly is this:

Significant crop diversity is being ever more lost in real time now, and this loss is a result of global average temperatures that are dangerous and getting moreso. That they are a specific value on an instantaneous or rolling average basis gives credibility and texture to this qualitative claim, but no comfort should be drawn from almost-ness nor from theoretical clains that action could yet pull us back from a precipice that there is not similarly substantiated qualitative reason to believe we are politically poised to make.

Science reporting does this kind of thing a lot. Someone will get funding to test whether humans need air to breathe but some accident of how the experiments are set up will find that only pregnant women under 30 were available for testing so the report will be a very specific about that and news reports will end up saying "new report proves pregnant women under 30 need air to breathe", which doesn't really tell the public the thing that the study really meant to report. Climate reporting is full of similarly overly specific claims that allow the public to dismiss the significance of what's really going on. People writing scientific reports need to be conscious of the fact that the reporting will be done in that way and that public inaction will be a direct result of such narrow reporting.

In the three reports that I quote below, the Berkeley report at least takes the time to say "recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met." We need more plain wordings like this, and even this needs to have been more prominently placed.

There is a conspiracy, intentional or not, between the writers of reports and the writers of articles. The article writer wants to quote the report, but the report wants to say something that has such technical accuracy that it will be misleading when quoted by someone writing articles. Some may say it's not an active conspiracy, just a negative synergy, but the effect is the same. Each party acts as if it is being conservative and careful, but the foreseeable combination of the two parts is anything but conservative or careful.

References
(bold added here for emphasis)

«The global annual average for 2024 in our dataset is estimated as 1.62 ± 0.06 °C (2.91 ± 0.11 °F) above the average during the period 1850 to 1900, which is traditionally used a reference for the pre-industrial period. […] A goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial has been an intense focus of international attention. This goal is defined based on multi-decadal averages, and so a single year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) does not directly constitute a failure. However, recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met. The long-term average of global temperature is likely to effectively cross the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) threshold in the next 5-10 years. While the 1.5 °C goal will not be met, urgent action is still needed to limit man-made climate change.»
—Global Temperature Report for 2024 (Berkeley Earth)

«The global average surface temperature was 1.55 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis of the six datasets. This means that we have likely just experienced the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.»
— WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level

«NASA scientists further estimate Earth in 2024 was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century average (1850-1900). For more than half of 2024, average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline, and the annual average, with mathematical uncertainties, may have exceeded the level for the first time.»
— Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record

Author's Notes:

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This grew out of an essay I posted at Mastodon, and a haiku (senryu) that I later wrote as a way to distill out some key points.

Green AI

I don't believe in “Green AI.”

It's not that it's impossible to do the things people are calling Green AI. Rather, it's that I'm not willing to call those things “green.”

Some of the most technologically capable people in the world see the environmental challenge that Large Language Models (LLMs) pose and think “I should make a green data center for this new project.” Then they buy offsets—a horror I'm not going to address here—or they actually invest money to make a new and allegedly green data center.

The thing is, humans didn't—and don't—really need AI. Human society worked fine without it. And those technologists could be solving preexisting problems that are still there but now perceived as someone else's problem.

New ‘green data centers’ for AI represent both the creation and the solution of a problem that didn't exist, leaving the world with as many probiems as before but also leaving the world with fewer technologists focused on the problems human society faces because those technologists are resting on their laurels—as if solving these problems—problems that needn't have existed—helped something other than their consciences.

AI and its associated effort has a big opportunity cost, stealing from the body of people who could solve others' problems. Myriad companies around the world are diverting effort from what they normally do to explore how not to have AI leave them behind. That effort and cost isn't solving the Climate Crisis either. It is plundering our best and brightest for noncritical problems.

Meanwhile Climate Change is killing us. We have real and immediate problems that LLM-style AI can't solve.

I say it can't because, as Chomsky so aptly puts it, it's a “plagiarism” engine. If, like me, you think Chomsky is right, then it's easy to conclude that if a solution was there to plagiarize, that solution could have already saved us. LLMs are not performing new and immediately trustable computation of the kind we need for Climate, they're just blurring and regurgitating already-existing, often even already-tried, thought.

Makework and waste and distraction are the key elements here, and none of that is helping. And, yes, enormous resource use makes it worse. But my point is that the resource spent isn't just on a problem we needn't have sought to solve, which would be bad enough, but addressing that steals human resources from problems we do need to solve.

There's a denialist belief that down the road things will pay off. But human civilization may not have that long to wait. The climate crisis is now. It will not wait. We need all hands on deck solving that, not distracted by a problem that, while intriguing, isn't yet mature enough to help.

Big Tech needs to solve existing problems, not make new ones, solve those new ones, and then collapse exhausted, leaving everyone else out here in the land of Little Or No Tech to solve the existing problems that were here in the first place, but without any help.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This post began as a post on Mastodon. I did light editing to re-host the essay here. Think of that one as a rough draft.

I created the graphic in Gimp, starting from a circle with a line through it that began as an SVG image that one of the chatbots at Abacus.ai made for me one day when I was exploring how to use it. The code for that is just:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100">
  <circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" fill="none" />
  <line x1="15" y1="85" x2="85" y2="15" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" />
</svg>

Still imaginable

“Don't wear your heavy coat yet,” my mom used to warn me. “You'll need it when it's colder.” She knew I had no heavier artillery for holding the cold at bay and felt somehow it was best to have a sense of proportion.

I mention that because news reports are describing Hurricane Helene's aftermath described as “unimaginable.” It's not. It's very, very painful to imagine because all death and destruction is painful, but we can imagine this much if we try.

Of course, if you have to go through it, even a single death—a single building falling in, a single shooting, a single cancer—is, in some sense, unimaginable. Words will never capture the horror. But, collectively, when doing news reporting, we don't use the word “unimaginable” for that. And it's not because it isn't severe. It's just because, horrifying as each individual bit of death and destruction is, we still need words left over to describe bigger events, those with more people, those that will take communities a longer time to recover from, if at all.

Maybe let's dial the language back. We probably shouldn't use up these extreme words yet. Save them for later. Climate's wrath has barely even given a hint of where it's going, and it's not going to relent until we start taking meaningful action. So far we're still mired in denial and daring Climate to do its worst.

So, yes, every death matters, and I hope not to trivialize a couple hundred deaths. What Helene did was horrible. And yet… And yet, let's be clear: The possibility of billions of deaths hangs now tangibly in the balance, or should. If you don't see that as a possibility, consider that you might be engaged in Climate denial.

The problem is that Climate is bigger. It's hard for us to see, but if there were a thousand deaths, even a million, that could still be comparatively small compared to what is very likely coming. Implicitly, by using superlative terms like “unimaginable” we send the subtle cue “this is it, this is finally an example of what we've been talking about.” It is not. A thousand instances of a million people dying is closer. Or a million instances of a thousand people dying. Or ten million situations like Hurricane Helene if it helps you visualize the magnitude of the pain—if it helps you imagine it.

We'd be alarmed about a thousand traffic accidents—we'd have trouble imagining even that because we'd want that to be an upper bound. But a couple hundred people dying due to a climate-related event (a storm, a flood, a fire, a famine, etc.) is not an upper bound on how bad things can get. It's not even a rounding error. I'm not saying it's small if you're living it, but I am saying Climate is big in a way that we're not used to talking about. So that's why I'd like to hold a few words in reserve. Otherwise, we'll be reaching for phrases like “unimaginable squared“ to compensate for the wasteland of available terminology.

We'll look back and wish for events so small as Helene, if there are any of us left to look back. Even that is not clear. If there is something for which the term unimaginable is warranted, it is that. And yet even for that, we must try to imagine it, because otherwise we're not going to fear it enough. We already don't.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This essay began with a post on Mastodon. On a first pass, I did very light editing here, mostly to add fonting and a graphic, a few small wording changes. Later in the day, after publishing and before doing any broad advertising, I decided to expand this a little, so this version ended up more elaborated than the original.

I'm worried people will interpret my remark about 20 million such events literally. It might be fewer but larger events. They might not be hurricanes but floods, fires, famines.

The graphic was produced at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was “Draw an image of a meter that is a semi-circle with a range of measurement that is normal, a range that is marked in yellow as indicating concern, and a range that is marked in red as an active problem. Show the meter pointing into the yellow area.”. Using Gimp, I made some adjustments to the image it generated, removing some lettering and changing where the dial pointed to.

Humanity's Superpower

Science is a superpower.

Science is an ability to see things our eyes do not yet show us, things that if we wait to see them, we'll find it's too late to react to.

Science is a superpower.

Science lets us see long distances. It lets us see inside things. It lets us see, prepare for, and avoid coming disasters. It gives us an edge in the quest for survival.

Science is a superpower.

Science is why we can predict hurricanes and not just be surprised and blown to bits by them in the moment they happen.

Science is why were able to land humans on the moon and return them safely to Earth on the first try. We had seen past our optimism to the many ways we could fail, and planned to avoid them.

Science is the superpower that told us decades ago that the climate would be changing, that we needed to prepare. It lets us see that the polar bear plight isn't just sad for a bunch of majestic but distant animals, but a way to metaphorically visualize a world made unlivable by changing climate if we continue to ignore that amazing power, learning the lesson too late.

Science is the superpower that allowed Li Wenliang to see and understand the threat of Covide-19 long before the virus had spread.

Science is a superpower.

Science is a superpower that stands as a rock against rationalization and politics, that acts as a beacon to guide us through swirling fogs of wishful thinking and denialism.

Science helps us to recognize and manage a great many dangers without resorting to stupid human tricks. It gives us the tools to bust myths safely.

Science is a superpower.

Without Science, our first encounter with a dangerous force is likely to be our last. Science offers super-vision, the ability to see beyond what is merely available to our eyes. But only if we opt to use that power.

If we super-stupidly elect to close our eyes to Science, rendering ourselves super-blind, we're just asking to find ourselves super-dead.

---

Author's Notes:

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The public domain image used here was obtained from Wikimedia and was donated to them by Wikimedia user Mpfiz, whose contribution is gratefully acknowledged.

Healing the Democratic Party

To heal the Democratic party, Biden must admit that if he prevails, it has come at cost of obliterating the hope many of us had for absolutely essential policies he has now dissed as extreme. He should assign people to study what got lost and to school him enough to appreciate 21st century needs.

Move left, not right, in other words. That's where the healing lies.

Otherwise, if elected without such expressed admissions, his desire to have been right will lead him to overly trust the positions he previously articulated as compass north. Cognitive dissonance will cause him to actively fight moving in the direction we must go for society to survive.

He needs to admit he doesn't have broad mandate behind his platform, he just has a scared populace who'll vote for the best ham sandwich running against Trump. We didn't suddenly see his light. We just seem to get no other choice.

To lead us, he must become us, not ask we become him.

Meanwhile, Climate respects only physics, not political compromise.

Meanwhile, too many will still endure the deadly gamble that is for-profit health insurance.

Meanwhile, students drown in the quicksand of student loans, and we are all poorer, but the banks.

---

Author's Notes:

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This post began as a couple of tweet threads you can find here and here.

Angry Ocean

She had forgotten the sound of the ocean, living now as she did inland from the unreliable cities, which daily faced a pounding that anyway was not the sound she yearned for.

There had been talk not so many years back of sea level rise, always expressed in millimeters, like the drip drip drip of a tub that wouldn't quite shut off. It had sounded gentle, even aggravatingly slow, like the sequel of a movie announced five years out that you're not sure you'll even live to see.

No one had said the water wouldn't just rise but come from every other angle, too—as deluges from the sky above, as floods rolling down from the mountains or as walls of water crashing in from an angry sea. The gentle, relaxing lapping of waves, and with it any sense that the ocean was ever even benevolent, had fallen away.

Why hadn't they said? OK, they said. But they didn't cry out, like you would if a tidal wave was coming fast. And this was really that—a tidal wave—just slowly, to be assembled in parts, like a jigsaw puzzle.

But unlike a jigsaw puzzle, there was no order to the pieces. Just a box full of leftovers, a chaos that was refuse of many once-orderly puzzles belonging to lots of people, and a prayer just to happen upon a couple of pieces that sort of fit.

The rain was pounding, but the weatherman didn't think it would flood too badly in the next few hours. So maybe this was a time to sleep and prepare for the onslaught anew. At least she was high up, away from the ocean.

But she missed the ocean, and she worried her memories of its once gentle nature might one day drown in a flood of too much reality.

---

Author’s Notes:

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In early June 2014, my wife and I attended a writing retreat hosted by Cary Tennis at Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy with a dozen or so other writers and soon-to-be friends. Last Saturday, almost 5 years later, some of us tuned in for a virtual reunion, and of course we did some writing as part of it.

The prompt to which this was a response, was “She had forgotten the sound of the ocean.” As today is Earth Day, it seemed a good day for me to share the piece with others.

Limited-Time Offer

Climate is cancer.
Delay is hope we've squandered.
We can't buy it back.

#ParisAccord

Originally published to Twitter in response to a tweet by David Brin.

Passing of the Salmon

“I have some bad news,” the bartender tells me, just recently, in fact. I prepare myself for the worst. She’s getting to know me quite well and probably actually knows the things that matter to me, I realize.

I don’t drink, mind you, but I’m there several times a week. I drink diet coke and ask them to take their ahi tuna salad and substitute salmon. I’m pretty regular about that. It’s not typical bar food, I suppose, but it suits me.

I like salmon. I eat it a lot. I have a couple ounces for breakfast. And it’s a common thing for me to eat when I eat out.

“I have some bad news,” she says again, making sure she has my attention, and that I’m prepared. “They’re changing the menu. There’s not going to be any more salmon.”

I am stunned. I stare at her in anguish. It’s what she expected, and she seems sad. She knew this wouldn’t sit well. But I elaborate.

“The salmon were going away anyway,” I explain. “I always expected that. They’ll be extinct. And often when I eat salmon, I think, I’m really going to miss this. I just didn’t expect it so soon, and for this reason.”

There are still salmon in the world. That’s good at least. But she’s right that I’ll be sad when I come to the restaurant. Still, maybe it’s a wake-up call. Practice. The salmon aren’t quite gone, like the rest of the ecology. Climate change mostly, though we’re fishing out the oceans anyway, and not taking very good care of anything else.

I expect mankind itself to go extinct inside of 20 years. It’s not going to be pretty. Maybe if we started saying it out loud now, it would hit us in time to do something.

I’m going to miss the salmon, when it happens for real.

And soon after that, humanity itself.

Though whatever’s left probably won’t miss us.

---

Author's Note: I attended a Cary Tennis writing workshop this last weekend. This is one of the stories I wrote. The writing prompt was:
Visualize something you really love. Use the phrase “I'm going to miss you.”

Postscript: In August 2022, this article appeared: What’s Behind Chinook and Chum Salmon Declines in Alaska?. In March 2023, another appeared: California cancels salmon fishing season as population dwindles due to drought: “It's devastating”. I feel like my 20-year timeline is on track, and not just because of these stories. It's very upsetting.

A Change of Climate

I sit on a wooden bench, held by wrought iron curves in a hallway of sandstones. An antique building, lovingly refurbished in layers of creeping modernity, the mortar that probably once held these stones long since bolstered, replaced, or just newly imitated by concrete. And yet in the old style. A curvature of bricks overhead, forming an arch down the hallway. The terrace at my feet is well-worn criss-crossed stone.

It is cool in here, outside the reach of the piercing midday sun, but I can see the sky at the end of this tunnel of a hall—and through a rectangular stone opening. The blue of that distant sky beckons, beyond tall trees that seem designed to emphasize the sky’s elusive height. Wisps of cumulus clouds dart about, seeming to float higher than they belong, and yet with the occasional light cirrus streak well above that. The sky is big here, and even the tallest trees struggle to reach it. Crooked pine-like trees, unlike the pines at home, with only a few broad branches high up, not the triangles of New England pines, but more like large green dandelions or fuzzy umbrellas. Ivy works its way up part of their shafts, adding to the exotic look, but giving up the climb long before the top.

The valley stretches for miles, with row upon row of contented buildings, with their red tile roofs and distinctive walls of muted orange and sun-drunk beige. Nothing is in particularly neat lines, yet there is still a relaxed order to it all, a comfortableness perhaps borne of tradition, a peace with the pace of existence, a well-worn efficiency that I imagine to come of understanding what is necessary or beautiful to life, and what can be rightly ignored. Even where there is wear on things here, it seems less product of neglect and more just a well-earned badge of honor.

There is a timeless quality to it all, like a place that has existed in essentially this form since long before me, and that will go on this way long after. The residents are adapted to life here. They know its rhythms. They are in harmony with how things are.

I’ll miss all of that.

Not when I leave, I mean, because I could return.

But because the harmony is a property not only of the people with the earth, but the earth with the people.

And Climate Change will take all of that away, never to return.

I’m glad I saw this place before it became a desert, unable to grow olives and grapes. I’m glad I saw this place when its people were prosperous and proud.

Science is an odd thing, and hard for some to trust. But science sees things that others do not. Things in the distance, and yet not always that far distant, because we can be so very nearsighted when we wish to be.

The earth has a cancer, and cancer starts innocently, unpresumingly. If you wait until it’s obvious, it’s too late. There are those among us who would wait to fix the Climate until it’s obvious. And that will be too late.

So I’m glad I saw this place before the effect of that indifference takes hold. It was a great achievement, that easy civilization.

I will miss it. I think we all will.

Assuming any of us are even left to do so.

---

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Originally published June 11, 2014 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): extinction, cancer, death, life, desert, drought, climate change, climate, memory, beauty, beautiful view, scene, view, le santucce, tuscany, italy

The photo, titled "Tuscany Italy Countryside" by Linnaea Mallette was obtained from publicdomainpictures.net, which asserts that it is in the public domain.

Background & Context: I wrote this last week while at a writing retreat hosted by Cary Tennis at Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy last week. It was a beautiful place to sit and think, but devastating Climate effects will not discriminate as to venue. They'll happen everywhere and to all of us.

That Creeping Feeling

Some horror films, especially those with half a dozen sequels, are very melodramatic in style, presenting one or more people walking into a situation where the audience knows danger to lurk but the characters have no inkling of that danger, or haven’t admitted it. Scene by excruciating scene, the plot unfolds, the author having arranged matters so that the helpless characters cannot see ordinary safety unraveling all about.

Climate change is like that. It unfolds slowly, patiently, its plot never moving in a straight line, making sure that there’s every reason for most of the characters to to feel comfortable. As with a good melodrama, a few characters are aware of the problem and they struggle to warn the others, but always to no avail as a gruesome ending becomes increasingly inevitable.

The sick plot twist here is that we are the authors and we are the ones arranging for our own complacency, even in the face of the clues our fellow characters have discovered. It feels sometimes like the people who know what’s really going on are locked in a sound-proof plexiglass room, able to see out clearly, watching it unfold, but powerless to stop it or even to just get a message out.

Would that it were just a sci-fi or horror movie, or even a simple nightmare from which one could awaken.

* * * * *

Cancer is a subtle enemy. It presents itself in such small ways, almost imperceptibly. We may see signs, but hope we don’t. It creeps. Worst of all, it accelerates.

We want to control its rate, to force it to be linear, measured, paced. But try as we might, we cannot hold it still. It resists commands.

We seek to impose onto it, by force of will, by clutching at every definition and argument we can lay our fingers upon, that it must move, change, or grow only when we say.

We command of it a cartoon physics that says it will not bite us until we look, and then we steadfastly refuse to look.

As with all things Death, we are skilled at ways of looking away from it, hoping that if we don’t meet its direct gaze, it won’t come for us today. We hope it will simply walk past, taking no notice, our apparent indifference having saved us.

Climate change is like that, too.

* * * * *

Author's Notes:

These are just my subjective impressions. Please comment accordingly.
(We'll do objectivity another day.)

Originally published November 8, 2010 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): acceleration, accelerates, creeping, creepy, death, denial, pace, cartoon physics, cancer, novel, mystery, escape, melodrama, warning, warn, cassandra, paradigm, sense, feeling, emotional, emotion, visualization, analogy, metaphor, global warming, climate change, politics

The Big C

Climate Change. There are a great many things I could say about Climate Change, but today I want to make a pretty simple point about the likely health effects of Climate Change: They won't be good.

It's also common in discussions of Climate Change to talk about the effects on large systems, like cities or business sectors, or on large groups of people, sometimes even the entire population of entire countries. Such talk, I worry, can make your eyes glaze over, like trying to talk about whether the war cost one or three trillion dollars. Who can even know the difference? And yet, the difference most certainly matters.

So I'm not going to focus on large systems or groups. Most assuredly, they'll come up incidentally, but really I'm just going to talk about myself, what I fear will be the impact on me personally. But really you should know I'm not just talking about me, or meaning to say my situation is more important. I'm just using my situation because I know it best. There will be many like me. If you like, as you read along, substitute the name of someone near and dear to you, and substitute their situation. If you find a way to put a personal face to Climate Change, I'll have achieved my goal today.

Cancer is another aspect of it for me. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer last year. I was fortunate to be covered by decent health care. Just lucky. There was a gap some years back where I could not afford health insurance and, had the cancer happened then, it might have ended differently. Fortunately, I was beyond that rough economic time and evaded what might have otherwise been a death sentence. Others have been less fortunate, which upsets me greatly. We should have universal health care.

I didn't write about my cancer at the time it was happening. Well, I did, but only indirectly. I wrote a post about roller coasters the night before I went into surgery as a metaphorical way of expressing how out of control I felt. Everything was on autopilot, and I was plenty scared. But at the time I didn't want to acknowledge the situation publicly. In fact, this article is my first time writing about it in a web-accessible location.

Frankly, I'd really rather have such matters remain private. It's a curious thing about politics. I've been a strong advocate of privacy rights for all of my adult life. My personal web page begins with an essay talking about the separation between my public and private persona, and how I don't like volunteering personal information to the public eye. There are too many ways to abuse it. There are a lot of things about me that are not the world's business and that ought not be fodder for people at search engines to browse or for marketeers to slice and dice for sale.

Citizen participation in a democracy sometimes requires otherwise, however. It's no one's business what my religious beliefs are, what I think of abortion or being gay, or how my family chooses to deal with end-of-life issues. Yet modern American politics is typified by invasive meddling in areas such as these, and so I find myself joining those who feel the urge to stand up and be counted on such important matters, even at the sometimes risk of having what should be our private lives out on display. I don't like it at all. But I see no way around it.

To speak of my medical position is scary because it's possible the information can be used against me. Of course, my medical situation comes as no surprise to insurance companies which can force me to disclose my medical history as a condition of coverage. At least, thanks to recent legislation, they can no longer exclude me for having a pre-existing condition. But they can still raise my rates, or those of an employer who has me in their “pool.” So an employer at some point in the future may quietly let me go or another may fail to hire me, never saying the reason. Who can know? What I do know is that insurance companies pay people to figure out clever ways to get around government restrictions and back to business as usual.

I guess that's why I read every day in the news that voters are ready to vote the Republicans back in. I guess voters think the protections we have now are too strong, and they'd rather go back to a time when the insurance companies weren't screaming in pain from the thumbscrews to which we consumers have put them.

Commerce is also a key component in my story. Adam Smith's much-touted “unseen hand” of capitalism has seen fit to decide that we should not make things locally any more, you see. We buy them from elsewhere. Who knows where? We assume the fuel will continue to flow, and flow cheaply, to get things from here to there. We assume there won't be floods intervening. We assume there won't be disease that causes us to restrict travel. We assume a great many things. And because of those assumptions, we're comfortable believing that commerce will just continue to function reliably no matter what.

And as long as it does, I'm probably fine. Or as fine as one gets having had a recent cancer. There are no guarantees. A highly competent surgeon removed my thyroid and with it the cancer. So I'm ahead of the game in that regard. I can't complain. I probably had more problems fighting the provider of my short term disability coverage than the cancer itself. At least with the cancer I had skilled professionals acting as my advocate. With the insurance company, it was the other way around. But I persevered in spite of administrative obstacles, and subsequent tests have so far shown me all clear. Odds are that I'll die of something else, not thyroid cancer. Of course, I still have to manage life without a thyroid, but that's mostly a routine matter in modern society. I just take some pills every day, which I can always get from the local pharmacy. Always. No matter what.

And that brings me back to Climate Change. It threatens us all in so many ways. The water level might rise. There might be more and stronger storms. The food supply is certainly in danger. If that falters, there could be famines, even wars. Any of those things could affect me, but I don't dwell on them a lot, at least not in the obvious way. But all of these problems have something in common, and that's where my mind often goes: Even in mild form, they can disrupt the normal flow of society.

Carrying capacity of the planet figures in here, too. It's defined by Wikipedia as “the population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment.” I've had many debates with people about what that number is. I agree with those who think we're already there. I've heard others suggest that carrying capacity is not a number but a function of technology—that as technology improves, so will carrying capacity. I don't agree. Hanging our hopes on technology is dangerous because if technology ever fails us, we will suddenly and “unexpectedly” find ourselves with far less ability to sustain ourselves than we thought we had. It's not written in stone that technology will get ever better and more accessible.

Ask someone who's been through a hurricane or a flood and has had to back up and start over. The march of increasing technology is more variable than we sometimes allow for. The temptation may be to dismiss such things as “local effects,” but there can be global disruptions. Peak oil and the looming shortage of rare earth elements will have profound effects on the sustainability of present technology. And Climate Change is affecting food supplies in the ocean and even on land, as Russian droughts have caused a global wheat shortage. We've also built a society that relies on global assembly of goods; things are not made in one place any more. If transportation becomes suddenly expensive or inaccessible, that's a problem that can be highly disruptive.

When the stock market crashed, we found suddenly that we had been overleveraged. People who thought they were making enough money or spending it in the right places came to realize that they had based these thoughts on assumptions that the world would always be precisely as it was, only always better. Suddenly they realized how fragile this assumption was and how little prepared they were for deviation. Climate Change is going to be a rude awakening that we have spent our technology enabling spectacles rather than increasing basic robustness. I think we'll find that this is what carrying capacity is really about—not how are we living in normal times, but how capable are we of surviving exceptional times, of dodging the global extinction events that have taken down the dominant species of past eras. Do we have good plans for emergencies? I look at events like the Katrina hurricane and shudder.

Calamity, you see, has this very personal aspect in my mind. If the complex engine of our society's continues on track, if commerce continues without interruption, I'll probably continue to have access to the pills that compensate for my missing thyroid. My most personal fear isn't all those big things—the sea level rise, the storms, the fires, the pests, the diseases, the famines, the wars. If those problems happen, we all have to fight them. I won't be alone.

It may seem silly, but I just worry the drug companies won't make my pills any more. Or they'll make them, but the free market won't find enough value in getting them to my town, especially in an emergency. I'm dependent on what feels like a Rube Goldberg mechanism to get them from wherever they come from into my hands. If that breaks down—if the stores close, or can't get stock—I worry no one will notice. It's such a small thing that I fear it will be overlooked. I'd love to stock an emergency supply, but my doctor has to prescribe only what I need, and the insurance companies work to prevent my buying pills ahead of when I need them. Talk about death panels. They try to placate me by noting the pills don't have a long shelf life. Or they mention I can buy a 90-day supply instead of a 30-day supply. But, 30-day or 90-day, they still make me burn that supply down to almost zero before I can get more.

So I obsess about what may seem to others as a comparatively mild risk of Climate Change—about the mere interruption of business as usual. It's not the biggest effect one could imagine. But it's how I personalize it. Your circumstances being different, you'll probably personalize it differently. That's okay. Just please do try, once in a while, to think of Climate Change not just as a global phenomenon, but as something more local, tangible, and personal. After all, Climate Change won't just affect the future of our species and perhaps of all life on Earth, but it will also, as part of that, affect you and me personally.

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Originally published September 14, 2010 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. I have reproduced the article here, but to read the original discussion, you'll need to click through to the snapshot created by the Wayback Machine.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, climate change, cancer, citizen participation, convergence, carrying capacity, calamity, catastrophe, personal, personalize, supply chain, leverage, over-leveraged, stock market, crash, medication, drugs, supplies, hurricane, drought, war, disruption, society, capitalism, planning, population, overpopulation, zpg, health insurance, health care, health, bad for your health

George

When I was around the age of five, my parents gave me a little stuffed bear, who I named George.

He was no ordinary bear, of course. He had eyes that seemed very deep and knowing, and for a while he had a felt red mouth, though that fell away at some point.

Inside, he had a music box. There was a metallic key extending from his chest—the kind that's probably unsafe and illegal in the modern world where doubtless they must be made of fireproof, non-toxic, biodegradable, nerf-like sponge foam. But this old-fashioned key just jutted out harshly with a piece of metal like a penny that attached to the pole allowing you something flat to hold while you twisted it to wind him up. Thus armed, he would play a bit of the song Around the World in Eighty Days, which I came to like quite a lot.

One day the music box broke, though. I must have been in first or second grade and wasn't sure what to do. Twisting it didn't manage to catch something it needed to catch, and when you let go after twisting it would just play all the notes really fast in a kind of single quick metallic zing sound that took only a second or two to complete. It was quite disappointing.

So I did what kids do. I threw George against the wall. To my surprise, that fixed him, and the music box played again. I was thrilled.

Sometime not too long after, though, he broke again. But fortunately, I was now a skilled bear repairman. Or so I thought. Sadly, no matter how many times I threw George against the wall, and I tried it quite a lot before giving up, it just didn't seem to help and mostly seemed to be scratching up the wall with that bit of metal that stuck out.

Later in life, I'd had more school and learned that there were “best practices” for fixing broken things, and that bashing them against the wall mindlessly was not among them.

And yet, sometimes I look at the way certain people approach the world and think it sad that they never had a George to teach them this lesson. Failing to understand science and causality, they resort to mysticism and a belief that if something once worked, even by accident, it will somehow find a way to work again, even without knowing why it ever worked or whether that reason is still in play.

Periodically I hear people referring to Climate Change as a natural process, as if that implies it will fix itself. They say the climate has corrected itself before, and so they seem comfortable that it will happen again. They don't say how or why or even when this will happen, so I must infer they are expecting it to happen by magic—and just in time to avoid any inconvenience to mankind.

Maybe it's just my personal experience that leads me to say this, but ... I'm just not so sure we can rely on either repeated good luck or outright magic.

It's time for some serious science.

Footnote

I still have George. He's threadbare here and there, but still loved. My parents tried to get me to throw him away when they thought me too old for him, but I refused. I'm glad I still have him. His music box still doesn't work on its own, but if you help him by holding the key just right and refusing to let the key unwind faster than it should, you can still get him to play his tinny tune. It still makes me smile.

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Originally published May 16, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, climate change, global warming, science, mysticism, engineering, best practices, mindlessly, koan, lesson, childhood memories, lessons learned, bear, teddy bear, george, teddy bear named george, hypothesis, test, growth, experience, trust