When you get done with everything in this announcement, you're done with the study materials for GL4003. (You still have the final exam to take.)
It's up to me now to try to make some sense out of climate change and the fate of humanity. I'm going to do so based on some of my own life experiences and academic thought. There's a strict limit to how useful this kind of thing is. Instructors shouldn't inflict their own history or ideas on students too forcefully. Too much, and it slops over into egotism. It can also be very confusing for weaker students, whose understanding of key ideas may have been shaky to begin, to endure having an instructor picking apart those ideas at a much higher level. But in the end, I feel you have a right to know what I think about all these big questions, particularly since I've been in this business a long time.
I've been working on this problem since about 1984 when I first became interested in environmental sustainability. At the time I was a corporal in Her Majesty's most excellent Royal Air Force, an engine propulsion technician-supervisor and trade trainer, and a mountain rescue "troop." (MR team members in this branch of the UK service are called "troops," for some reason long lost to history.) Always an avid outdoorsman, in the UK working-class style (which tilts to mountaineering, hill-walking, and associated activities and away from hook-and-bullet sports), I'd become interested in the natural history of the British mountains. I found what study materials I needed in the local university libraries and became a self-taught geologist and moderately expert in the ethnography of the British Isles. The UK mountains are filled with Roman camps and bronze and iron age villages and hill forts, so this too was natural curiosity. I just wanted to know why the landscape I saw around me was the way it was. My buddies on the team thought I was strange, but the British are generally tolerant of eccentricity, so they were still good to me, and still are.
My researches in natural history eventually led to my discovery of the then-relatively new idea that humans were simply not going to be able to keep growing in both population and scale of economic impact on planet earth -- that there would eventually be some kind of carrying capacity for humans. This was a problem for me because we were then deep into one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, the Reagan arms build-up, and my job was clearly to fight that war, or at least help do so. I wanted instead to join the environmental movement and work on this problem because I saw it was more important. This was the early days of modern environmentalism, which for me meant Greenpeace and the Green Party, both of which I joined. I thought that neither side had it right. Untrammeled industrial development would be the end of all humanity, not just the other side.
The Royal Air Force was remarkably good about things. They let me go two years early through a compassionate discharge (still an "honorable discharge"), and allowed me to keep my pension (which will kick in shortly). I also stayed friendly with my buddies on the MR teams. I've even had some come talk to my classes at Unity College.
But I was discharged. And I immediately went to live in a so-called sustainable commune. It didn't take too long to discover the denizens of the commune were quite nuts and incredibly blinkered to reality. Too much meditation, not enough hard thinking. But I was introduced to green building and solar power. I also worked in education for the first time there, through the commune's Youth Program. And a lot of the residents were American. I married an American girl there in 1986 (not Aimee), and a year later, tired of the commune, we found ourselves in California.
Eventually I was able to go to college in the US, and went right through to the PhD, twelve years studying ecology and ecological economics full time. I studied under Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, one of the founders of ecological economics, which is a pretty big deal in my circles. I got the job at Unity College in fall 2000, and have been here ever since. I'd rather teach here than somewhere more ritzy, Colby or CoA. I may be fooling myself, but you guys seem a bit more deserving. Most of the time.
But my life's real work hasn't changed so very much from what it was in 1984. I still do a little search and rescue. I still fix things, and teach people how to fix things, although these days they are buildings and solar panels, not aircraft. And I think and teach and write about human ecology and ecological economics. (Here's an example.)
Being a military veteran in the environmental movement, especially teaching at an environmental college, gives me a somewhat unique perspective, one that I think you deserve to hear.
Veterans are rare in the environmental movement. I've learned to be more tolerant of some conservative viewpoints than many environmentalists often are. I believe that we need the military and by extension the police services to protect us from bad countries and bad people. But I don't think that gives them license to abuse human rights. Human rights are instead what they are there to protect. I believe that some aspects of environmentalism are overblown. But that doesn't mean to say that I'm foolish enough to disbelieve what scientists are telling us about climate change and other limits to human growth.
I appreciate service. I still serve, or try to, through my work in SAR. Right now the health care workers are heroes. I deeply dislike selfishness, especially civic selfishness. There are times when we clearly are all "in this together." Imagining that it's a good idea to "open up" the economy when there are clearly still millions of people carrying this virus is a recipe for disaster, especially for old folk, and an opinion quite ignorant of the science basis for epidemiology. It will kill people.
This is important: Just because one person or a group of people consistently holds the same particular set of ideas doesn't mean to say they have the right set. Some of their ideas could be right, for sure. But some are probably wrong. And this is especially likely if the consistency of these ideas is rigidly enforced within the group and the group tries hard to make everyone adopt the same set: if you believe a, then to be part of this tribe, you have to also believe b, c, d, and e with the same foolish intensity. This is as true for left wing nut jobs as it is for right wing nut jobs. (They're all nut jobs in the end.)
You can for instance, understand that climate change is happening and a terrible problem for humanity and still be a moderate second amendment advocate. You just have to think about it a bit harder than the others in your peer group may do, accept belief a, but reject belief b. But that doesn't mean that it would be smart if everyone gets to have their own bazooka! Imagine how hard that would be for the police. Moderation is nearly always wise.
I also realized from the commune experience that if I wanted to live sustainably and create a resilient lifestyle for my family, we would probably do better if we did it mostly ourselves and didn't try to rely on other people too much. Self-improvement is, as Adam Smith believed, the best motivator. Call this environmental libertarianism if you want. But this too can only go so far. I need to rely on government and other people and businesses from time to time too.
This spring, particularly with the lockdown and the power cuts, I feel somewhat vindicated to be a homesteader, although it has taken years of very hard work to get the farm where we want it to be. Our farm is safe, healthy, and productive. We have useful things to do, planting food and birthing lambs and stacking firewood, and that gives healthy exercise, even under lockdown. We can go outdoors as much as we want. We have water, food, heat, and shelter, and even solar electricity, all from our own resources. This is good because it saves stress on other resources, which are then available for other people. But I also see the farming and homesteading we do as an adjunct to teaching sustainability. If I think society needs to be more resilient, I should be capable of modeling that resilience. It's only fair on you, and, to boot, true to the ethic of service.
So, now you know why I do what I do and how long I've been doing it, let's talk about what I think is going to happen with climate change and renewable energy.
My ideas on this have changed dramatically since 2016 when leading climate scientist James Hansen and several eminent colleagues came out with the paper I now build much of this class around, Hansen et al 2016.
In case you need a reminder, there's a summary here.
Below is the movie in which Hansen explains the paper in lay terms. Unless you think you remember it really, really well, the movie is required. This time you may wish to take notes at key points. There will be questions on the exam.
Here is the text of the movie for those who like me, read faster than they listen.
Basically, and this is repetitious, I know, but very important, Hansen and his co-authors hypothesize that we are either close to or have passed a point of no return with regard to Greenland and Antarctic ice melt. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to collapse. This changes the calculation with regard to climate change mitigation. Because the melting can't be stopped, mitigation of greenhouse gases won't help. Instead we'll need to adapt, and perhaps very quickly, to the rising seas.
This means that the current prediction from the IPCC (page 25) for only three further feet of sea level rise this century is probably off. We may get instead several meters. We may get meter-scale sea level rise as soon as the late 2060s, or even earlier. The current doubling time for Antarctic ice loss is six years. We are currently getting about 4mm of sea level rise per year. Assume all this water ends in the ocean. Do the math with me:
2020: 4 mm/year
2026: 8 mm/year
2032: 1.6 cm/year
2038: 3.2 cm/year
2044: 6.4 cm/year
2050: 12.8 cm/year
2056: 25.6 cm/year
2062: 51.2 cm/year
2068: 1.02 m/year
And so on. This is the danger of exponential growth. The famous parable of the chess board applies.
Sea level rise due to Antarctic and Greenland melting may easily go even faster than this. Some important ice scientists expect it to do so (although not all). It certainly has melted faster in other geological periods. We still need to mitigate, because to continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere risks another climate catastrophe after this first one. But, as Hansen states, we will know within a few years if the pace of Antarctic and Greenland melting is keeping up with this scenario, decelerating, or accelerating yet faster.
These days we keep pretty good track of both Greenland and Antarctic ice:
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/4/1095
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9239
This last year was particularly worrying:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020GL087291
I've been a major advocate for rapid mitigation for a long time now. Here's an example of some of my work, in which I try to reconcile mitigation with Keynesian economics and geopolitical realism. Notice that Vladimir Putin is mentioned in my talk as a "fossil elite" trying to hold onto power as the leader of an oil state. I don't claim any particular prescience, but this was a full year before he interfered in the US election. It didn't work out well for him in the end because of the US Congress's refusal to go along with the Trump administration's efforts to reduce sanctions, and now the oil price war and the corona virus, to which Russia is highly vulnerable because Putin delayed the response, and there's no free press to tell anyone what's really happening. So the 2016 election interference was a tactical success and a strategic failure. But you can be sure that he likes the tactic and is trying it again. (This movie is also required.)
Applying Realism to Climate Policy Presented by Prof. Mick Womersley Feb. 26th 2015 from Quimby Library Unity College on Vimeo.
Mitigation means reducing the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency. A big problem with mitigation has been the way that conservative groups and corporations have lied to the public and managed to convince a lot of people that mitigation is an environmental hoax. This deliberate effort to mislead the public is one reason why, for instance, a lot of second amendment advocates feel they need to also oppose climate science. You can see the same phenomena in almost all conservative causes from same-sex marriage to abortion. It all gets lumped in together and as I said above, if the tribe is required to believe one dogma, they have to believe all. This is partly explained by the Yale "Cultural Cognition" work, but not completely.
Denialism has been the bane of my life since the 1990s. My PhD thesis was essentially an attempt to to find a way around conservative denialism through understanding religious advocacy for the climate. Despite the college's mission, I've had climate deniers in every single one of my Unity College classes since Fall 2000. Most of them have gone away thinking differently, but there has often been enormous friction as I challenge their mistaken ideas.
In the movie I make clear that the problem with climate change mitigation is that it is opposed by "fossil elites," my term for the owners of fossil fuel capital, who will resist to the end the devaluation of that capital, even though they have children and grandchildren. Some of these fossil elites are de-facto owners of nation-states (or at least kleptocracies). They use their money to fund denial propaganda. Ordinary Americans that embrace denialism, especially if they are themselves vulnerable to climate impacts, are to them what Stalin called "useful idiots."
That's one problem. The other is that mitigation as proposed by some left wing thinkers and even some climate scientists might cause a recession. A recession might weaken the democracies vis-a-vis the dictators and fossil elites, and lead to a setback for mitigation. This is why the Green New Deal is a superior approach. It uses Keynesian thinking to avoid the trap of recessionary mitigation. This is what I advocated in the movie above, before the GND came out. Again, I don't claim prescience. It's an obvious solution. And it turns out others were working on this idea long before me.
That still leaves denialism. Unless we defeat it, we won't get mitigation in time. Fossil elites have bought themselves time on the throne by funding denialism, including casting doubt on renewable energy's effectiveness and cost-efficiency, even though renewable energy prices are lower than fossil energy. As I said, I have beat myself to death for many years now tackling denialism in the classroom and in public. At times it has driven me close to despair.
But these new data from Greenland and Antarctica may mean I no longer have to do so. If Hansen is right, mitigation can't help us stop sea level rise in any case, and we will soon have very convincing proof that the rise is accelerating (by 2025 or at least 2030). By the time we have this proof, denialism will be yet weaker because the average age of climate deniers is quite old. (It's already weakening over time.)
This, to be honest, and despite the bad news that caused it, has been something of a relief. We won't get mitigation in time to head off this first great climate disaster, and that is bad. But this disaster, along with the aging out of denialists, will be the end of denialism, and we should get some sane mitigation policy shortly thereafter.
Hansen shows that a regional cooling in the north Atlantic, or even a general global cooling, will accompany such vast ice melt, by adding cool water to the parts of the oceans where thermohaline circulation starts, hindering poleward movement of atmospheric heat, and by the melting ice just cooling the oceans, period. That should help human agriculture, previously in grave danger from warming. The bad news is that this increased temperature gradient will lead to superstorms. But you can't have everything. I think humanity and liberal democracy will survive sea level rise and superstorms. I doubt it would survive the collapse of global agriculture. Here's the relevant graphic from the paper. The accompanying explanation is section 3.4 on page 3766 and 3767.
So I'm optimistic for a partial resolution soon. It's not a great basis for optimism, to be sure. We'll lose Florida, or much of it, and quite a lot of some major east coast cities. Adapting to the loss will be very hard and will cause great disruption, something we've had practice in recently. But we will enter a new political reality in which it will become almost impossible to deny human-caused climate change.
The bad news is, this is just the beginning of the Great Human Ecological Crisis of the 21st Century. Scientists believe that there are other ecological limits or boundaries to human economic growth looming in the background.
This is usually covered in your Environmental Issues and Insights core class. Here's a quick reminder:
Introducing 'The Doughnut' of social and planetary boundaries for development
In this video there are nine planetary boundaries, but of course, others may surface. A few years ago it was proposed that "novel entities" are a similar human ecological issue. Novel entities are chemicals or diseases introduced into human habitat, often by economic growth, as human development expands into wild habitats to find disease or finds new chemicals both of which we have had little exposure to.
Examples include PCBs, Agent Orange, Ebola, and now the novel corona virus. Just as Ebola found a way to get from African wildlife into the human population, so has Covid 19. And I should think we are not done yet with pandemics and poisons. And don't forget the superstorms.
So this is, as Churchill said of appeasement,
"...only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time."
Apologies. I'm fond of Churchill's rhetoric. It can be bracing in a crisis. At least my parents and grandparents thought so at the time. But, in other more prosaic words, you are all going to have interesting lives. I hope it works out well for you. But keep smiling and remember, a couple generations ago there were lots of people still alive, like my own grandparents, who had survived the Great War, the Great Depression, World War 2, and much of the Cold War. You won't have it nearly that bad. (My grandfather, a British Army private in both WW1 and WW2, taught me how to garden. I think of him every time I plant something.)
Another thing to remember: The planet has melted down before. It knows how to do it and survive. It's the humans we have to worry about. And especially democracy. That's what is really threatened by all these ecological problems and especially the fossil elites. I'll be dead by the time this is all worked out, and your generation will be in charge. If you manage to save democracy, you'll have done well. I'll be rooting for you.
Just listen to the scientists (or be one), and don't buy a house on the coast.
