Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Cooling, and the Fogey's That Don't Buy It

"You cannot find your soul with your mind,
you must use your heart.
You must know what you are feeling.
If you don't know what you are feeling, you will create unconsciously.
If you are unconscious of an aspect of yourself;
if it operates outside your field of awareness,
that aspect has power over you."

~ Gary Zukav

Apparently in the 70's scientists were predicting a global cooling cycle that would bring another ice age. Twice since I've been at UAA I've heard this, followed by an exasperated sigh and a critique of the current debate surrounding Global Warming/Climate Change. I inwardly reacted to this by feeling squirmy and angry, but not really knowing why. Ultimately, I think I worry when anyone seems to be advocating for 'staying the course' of profit-driven environmental exploitation and disregarding the new science of sustainability; the idea that we won't be able to rethink our consumer paradigm in time to share this planet brings about images of global resource wars, mass starvations/diseases, and all kinds of other nightmare images. Furthermore, a world surrounded by nightmare images is exactly the kind of environment where reason and enlightenment dwindle in the face of fear and desperation. Malthus wrote about population explosions long ago. 'An Inconvenient Truth' pointed out some of this, but even Al Gore lives 'on the grid' and consumes products from the great military industrial complex. Few other options exist, and no alternatives exist that don't come with ridicule from popular culture (only dirty hippies live in the mud, grow their own food, don't wash their hair with 'normal' shampoo, etc.).

So, here's what I wish I could say to people who don't want to look further into the details of Climate Change.
First, here's what the Climate Change believers AREN'T saying:
1. Quit manufacturing everything.
2. Give up all your conveniences.
3. We're all going to die if you keep using oil and plastics.
4. We're all going to die if we don't become vegetarians.

Granted, there are probably some environmentalists out there that do say these things, and not without reasons, but by and large, Climate Change is a mainstream concept accepted by people on Wall Street, Main Street, and by the vast majority of scientists who study it.

Here's the concept in a nutshell: every human requires resources (food, lumber, textiles, and especially transportation and stuff). Everyone (except those noble "savages" still left in the world) uses oil, plants, and trees. People 200 years ago used about a tenth to a hundreth the amount of resources as people do today. More importantly, the more everyone lives like Americans do, the more resources they use (by a whole lot - we eat more, waste more, buy more, and trash more stuff than any other culture), and literally billions of people are on a fifty year road to becoming more American-like. This last bit ignites ire in some people. Conservatives are correct that we shouldn't demonize the American way of life. They are wrong who say we shouldn't change it.

American wastefulness comes from prosperity. To make money, here are some things we do broadly: transport people places for pleasure; prepare as much food as we need to guarantee profit maximization during the dinner rush; design products that last a certain amount of time, then need to be replaced; design products that are cheapest to manufacture by not building them durable enough to be taken apart, parts replaced, etc. I don't claim that making money is bad. But, as Ani Difranco says, "what a waste of thumbs opposable, to make machines that are disposable."

Here's a good example. I live in a place that is less than zero degrees half the year and I pay money to freeze my food inside my heated house. Where is the sense in that? OK, maybe it's true that food needs a more constant temperature than 'outside' otherwise it could all spoil in a couple of fluke warm days, but still, we have the technology to be more efficient, reusable, etc. These technologies don't make anybody any money, so they aren't available at the local box store. Simple as that.

Back to Climate Change and Global Warming/Cooling. Now that we understand that people use resources and Americans super-use resources compared to poor people. We all want the world standard of living to increase, so people aren't poor any more. We could make this happen without impacting the environment, but it wouldn't be as profitable as the status quo. The more oil we burn, the more carbon we produce. Every piece of food we buy at the grocery store takes oil to transport, oil to fertilize, oil to spray with chemicals (being an oil based economy means even the chemicals we buy are made by using the energy in oil to drive chemical tranformation processes), and so on. The more papers we read (and don't recycle) the more trees we cut down - same with houses we build, and in the case of South American beef farms, the more hamburgers we eat (rainforest deforestation occurs largely to use inefficiently to raise meat animals since everyone loves cheeseburgers). The more we drive, the more caffeine we drink, the more disturbing shows we watch and articles we read, the more malnourished we become...all these things make us eat more, buy more, and want to consume more. Our culture has even gone so far as to replace fulfillment with materialism. Advertising has made billions over the last eighty years or so making sure we want want want. Climate Change is just one reason - the most compelling reason - to bend this curve and become a bit more native/hippy/counterculture-like.

As more carbon ends up in the atmosphere, less taken out by less and less trees (which doesn't even get into the ocean-change argument), the more solar energy remains in the complex dynamical system we call the biosphere - that which supports all life in the universe as far as we currently know. Energy can be stable and produce predictable weather, but increasing the levels of energy in our biosphere will do several things (a super-majority of scientists agree): make weather patterns more unstable and unpredictable; more heat will melt polar ice caps (oops, I mean are already melting polar ice caps).

Now, the chain of events goes like this: ice caps melt, oceans rise. Oceans rise, and more water is available for absorbing heat energy, and global cooling happens. So global warming becomes global cooling.

Based on sound scientific data, here's how people should think of (or frame if you will) Climate Change: humanity has had a relatively stable period for many thousands of years but the more we super-consume (which by the way only makes us sick, obese, and otherwise cantankerous), the more likely we are to bring the carbon levels to a tipping point. All we have to do to screw ourselves is reach that point once.

Here's the rub: the Earth will survive either way. We really only hold our own survival in our hands. We can become efficient, smart, and less wasteful, or we can become oil for the next species nature endows with reason and technology to use us. We're using up all the dinosaurs (roughly where oil comes from), so it's only fair that we return the favor.

Alternately, consider this: the biosphere is a closed system which, during the time of the dinosaurs contained much higher levels of CO2. All that CO2 turned into Hydrocarbons and atmospheric oxygen, giving us the rich air we breath. By burning all the dinosaurs, the carbon all goes back into the air, and since the biosphere is a closed system, we get to breath the same kind of air that dinosaurs breathed.

But I get it, you don't want to give up what we have, and since solar panels, electric cars, and spending time growing our own food, repairing and reusing our own waste, or worst of all, not buying stuff from box stores, would totally take away our luxuries, you don't like the self-criticism posed by Climate Change scientists.

So warming, cooling, boiling, brewing...whatever. We've created a monumental system based on resource extraction and utilization. Practically everyone in the world is starting to get this at some level or another. I'm sorry those scientists in the seventies told you something that seems like a contradiction. It isn't a contradiction in actuality, and I don't give a crap about the seventies. I care about my great-great-grandchildren, and homegrown produce tastes way better anyway. In the meantime we all get the privilege of feeling like hypocrites, acting like Americans, and striving to be better while applauding ourselves (somewhat hypocritically) for our efforts. All we have to lose is waste, and what we have to gain is the lifestyle of thousands of generations of homo sapien sapiens, which I'm sure we can improve on even if we're living right. Maybe we can keep electric cars and espresso stands.


Ani Difranco: Your Next Bold Move

coming of age during the plague
of reagan and bush
watching capitalism gun down democracy
it had this funny effect on me
i guess

i am cancer
i am HIV
and i'm down at the blue jesus
blue cross hospital
just lookin' up from my pillow
feeling blessed

and the mighty multinationals
have monopolized the oxygen
so it's as easy as breathing
for us all to participate

yes they're buying and selling
off shares of air
and you know it's all around you
but it's hard to point and say "there"
so you just sit on your hands
and quietly contemplate

your next bold move
the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable
and sell them to seagulls flying in circles
around one big right wing

yes, the left wing was broken long ago
by the slingshot of cointelpro
and now it's so hard to have faith in
anything

especially your next bold move
or the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself

you want to track each trickle
back to its source
and then scream up the faucet
'til your face is hoarse
cuz you're surrounded by a world's worth
of things you just can't excuse

but you've got the hard cough of a chain smoker
and you're at the arctic circle playing strip poker
and it's getting colder and colder
everytime you lose

so go ahead
make your next bold move
tell us
what's the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself