About Social Media Today
There’s an undeniable fact that overhangs peak oil, climate chaos, and probably a few hundred other issues one could name. Far worse than being merely an “inconvenient truth” or a “nasty reality”, it’s the issue that stands between humanity and the action needed to deal with those problems. And this is it: We live in reality, but we respond to our perceptions of it.
Underwhelmed? You shouldn’t be. This mapping of reality onto our perceptions acts as a multiplier, often with a value less than one, that makes us over- or under-react to circumstances. It is the “conversion rate” or filter between the outside world and our minds, and it determines how much urgency we feel about everything from the most trivial of personal decisions or problems to worldwide catastrophes happening right before our eyes. And that urgency dictates the nature of and effort we put into our responses, including whom we vote for and which public policies we support.
Do I really have to provide an itemized taxonomy of our misjudgments, how we underestimated risks in the past and paid a price for that faulty perception (thalidomide), or how some of us overestimated a threat and caused needless grief (Y2k doomers who “knew” we couldn’t possibly fix that very real problem), or how we foolishly took steps that either weren’t needed or would have been pointless (backyard fallout shelters in the US in the 1950’s)? I didn’t think so.
This dichotomy of the universe into reality and our perceptions of it is conspicuously relevant to peak oil and climate chaos, for an absurdly simple reason: A large portion of people around the world, especially here in the US, either don’t know the facts or refuse to believe them for reasons of ideology or financial gain. As a result, there is nowhere near an appropriate level of pressure on politicians to take action, and there isn’t even enough urgency among the mainstreamers to change their own consumption patterns. The universe is infinitely indifferent to how busy our lives are or whether we philosophically oppose government action to limit CO2 emissions or accelerate our transition away from oil or even whether we’ve advanced science enough to understand what’s going on any more than the dinosaurs did 65 million years ago when they experienced one hell of a push on nature’s reset button.
While I’ve been thinking about writing something along these lines for a while, the impetus to make me do it today came from a few things that popped up in my news feeds this morning:
NASA data shows ‘dramatically thinned’ Arctic ice [•]:
Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thick older ice shrinking by the equivalent of Alaska’s land area, a study using data from a NASA satellite showed.
Using information from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Satellite (ICESat), scientists from the US space agency and the University of Washington in Seattle estimated both the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover.
ICESat allows scientists to measure changes in the thickness and volume of Arctic ice, whereas previously scientists relied only on measurements of area to determine how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice.
Scientists found that Arctic sea ice thinned some seven inches (17.8 centimeters) a year, or 2.2 feet (67 centimeters) over four winters, according to the study by NASA and the University of Washington, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans.
They also found that thicker, older ice, which has survived one or more summers, shrank by 42 percent.
“Between 2004 and 2008, multi-year ice cover shrank 595,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers) — nearly the size of Alaska’s land area,” a report of the study’s findings said.
And don’t forget another subtle feedback, pancake ice [•].
Polar blog: ‘There’s something afoot in the Arctic’ - CNN.com [•]:
Never before has the channel between Ellesmere Island and Greenland been this ice-free in mid-summer; it’s usually blocked with ice until August. Over the past week we’ve placed GPS trackers and time-lapse cameras on and around the Petermann Glacier, in anticipation of it losing a piece of ice around 100 square kilometers in size. Massive cracks are spearing across the “tongue” of this enormous floating ice shelf (16km wide and 80km long) heralding one of the biggest glacier calvings ever recorded in the northern hemisphere.
…
This week, world leaders are meeting up in Italy for the G8. It’s a real — and possibly the last — opportunity for them to take a stand on climate change in the run up to this December’s climate meeting in Copenhagen, by making cuts of 40 percent in greenhouse gas emissions for developed countries.
Forget minus 50 in 2050 - COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 [•]:
According to a draft document seen ahead of talks at the 17-nation Major Economies Forum tomorrow, major nations have failed to agree to set a goal halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
China and India have upset the applecart, opposing any mentioning of the target, a source familiar with negotiations told Reuters.
The two countries first want to see developed nations commit to making deep cuts in their emissions by 2020. They also want rich nations to come up with plans to provide developing nations with short-term finance to help them adapt to climate changes like more floods, heat waves, storms and rising sea levels, the source told Reuters.
A draft G8 statement seen by Reuters today, states that the rise on global temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). If the statement passes, it would mark a breakthrough by EU states in convincing the United States, Japan, Canada and Russia that the limit is a necessary threshold beyond which climate change will have incalculable consequences.
There it is: Too many decision makers are too concerned with short term or personal issues to take appropriate action. Instead of saying, “We’re all in this together, and the situation is urgent. We will find a way to deal with climate chaos, no matter what.”, the “developed” and “developing” countries are staging a food fight. And it just keeps getting worse–check the Energy and Environment Clock [•].[1]
The Cognitive Gaps in the title of this post should be pretty obvious to regular visitors to this site. The first and most obvious is the one between what the mainstream accepts as true and what climate scientists know. This Mainstream Gap is a product of people being “too busy to pay attention”, plus the fact that some are so ideologically opposed to the obvious solutions, or have such large financial incentives to defend business-as-usual practices that they simply wrap themselves in denial and shout down the scientists. Whatever the cause, the universe doesn’t care. Non-renewable fossil fuels come out of the ground, CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere, and all the natural systems and their emergent properties we depend on for our very lives respond.
Related: See the RealClimate review of Chris Mooney’s newest book, Unscientific America [•]. I will review it as soon as I receive my copy.
The other is the Science Gap, the one between reality and what even the climate scientists know. We’ve seen a growing stream of “it’s worse than we thought” reports regarding climate chaos in the last year or so. Arctic melting, ocean acidification, reduced oceanic buffering of CO2, threats to species, sea level rise, and so on. It’s tempting for the non-climate scientists (like me) to scream, “How could they get it this wrong???” That would be a horrible misreading of the situation, of course. The core problem is not that the climate scientists weren’t smart or diligent enough, it’s simply the mundane issue of timing. We humans poured many billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere before we figured out it was a serious problem. Once we did make that connection we had a tremendous amount of science to perform before we could understand just how our planet’s systems would respond to the enormous jolt from that CO2. Even with all the attention the climate is getting now, the scientific process can only be pushed so fast before we start leaping to wildly inaccurate and costly conclusions.
It didn’t have to be this way, of course. We could have evolved on a planet with a geologic history that produced little or no fossil fuels, allowing science to advance, even if at a slower rate, far enough to understand our planet before we poisoned it. Or perhaps things would be different if the continents were not in a formation that put so much land close enough to the North Pole to form permaforst but far enough from it to let it melt in response to just a couple of degrees of warming and trigger a huge, amplifying feedback. Or perhaps a different philosophical approach would have modified our behavior enough to keep more of the carbon in the ground, no matter how vast the reserves, until we better understood. You can play your own what-if games with counterfactuals; the unblinking reality is that we’re surrounded by the set of circumstances we inherited from random chance plus our own past actions, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise.
So this is our challenge: Close not just one of those gaps, but both. We have to understand better what our past and current actions are doing to the planet, and then we have to make sure that enough people beyond the science community and concerned laypersons, like us, also understand it at least well enough to pressure their representatives to take action. And we have to do it quickly enough so that we can act in our own best interest and avoid the worst impacts of peak oil and climate chaos.
[1] Could this possibly be my ulterior motive for bringing back the clock and creating new versions (in development as I type this)–to help people visualize what humanity is doing on the energy and environmental fronts, in real time, and therefore (hopefully) feel some urgency? Whether you think I’m that subtle or not, please help promote this experiment by sending a link to the current clock [•] (which you’ll notice is free of advertising) to some friends and relatives.
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