Earthsky Interviews
Private: Values shift ahead? What is happiness, anyway?
02-09-2007 - Human World
According to this research, technology may not be the “magic bullet” some hope it will be for solving 21st century challenges.
Rosa suggested in a “press release”:http://www.wsunews.wsu.edu/detail.asp?StoryID=6286 issued yesterday that, “We’re not likely to achieve ecological sustainability by continuing to pursue endless economic growth, ignoring our growing population and hoping for a last-minute technological fix that will solve our problems.”
Instead, Rosa said, “Achieving sustainability may require a fundamental change of values and changes in the way we have been doing things for a very long time.”
The results of this research were published in an article titled “Driving the Ecological Footprint”:http://www.esajournals.org/esaonline/?request=get-abstract&issn=1540-9295&volume=5&issue=1&page=13 published in the February issue of “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.”
Elsewhere in cyberspace, scientists are speaking to each other more and more often about the possible need for a shift in values.
There was a great discussion in mid-January among scientists worldwide who participate in the email list of the “Great Transition Initiative”:http://www.gtinitiative.org/ and/or the American Council for the U.N. University “Millennium Project”:http://www.acunu.org/ discussion list.
When scientists talk about the possible need for a values shift, they tend also to talk about happiness, which, in scientific circles, is often referred to as “well-being.” The Great Transition Initiative included an essay on well-being in its recent “paper series”:http://www.gtinitiative.org/default.asp?action=43 (look at #10 in this series). The American Association for the Advancement of Science named its annual meeting this year “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being.”:http://www.aaas.org/meetings/Annual_Meeting/
Then there’s the “Happy Planet Index,”:http://earthsky.org/blog/50335/happy-planet-index which shows that the wealthiest countries are not the happiest countries. The United States, for example, ranks 150th in the Happy Planet Index.
In the years to come, look for more scientific data – and more discussion from scientists – about what it means to be happy.
Are they saying that scientists have found out that technology won’t keep us from having global warming? Then why are there websites that talk about stopping global warming?
8000 years ago, the prairies of Canada became too hot to allow humans to live there. This followed an ice age. This was before SUV’s. Prior to that: 17,000 years ago there was ice one mile thick over what is now Rochester, NY. This was also before SUV’s.
Could some of you folks admit that climate change is beyond our understanding? Cars, heaters and power plants are not effecting our climate in any measurable way.
Socialists are trying to get you to give up your independence to foster the new world order. You, we, me. We have no measurable effect on the climate. The Universe and the Earth are larger than us.
Please, follow the money. Mankind is not capable of altruism. All of us have an agenda. Ask yourself, why would a thinking person foster any particular position. It ain’t for you. It is for them. Keep in mind, there are always those who will use any means to achieve their ends.
The Earth has been hot. The world has been cold. Carbon dioxide has been at much higher concentrations than now. There is no linear coordination between carbondioxide concentrations and earth temperature.
Look at things that matter to your life now. Ignore the bovine dung being used to manipulate you.
Benjamin,
If climate change is beyond our understanding, on what authority are you basing your claim that “cars, heaters and power plants are not affecting our climate in any measurable way”?
For the sake of discussion, could we at least pretend that climate change is real and caused by humans? After all, no one really knows. If it were real, would humans be able to make a change … to shift to a different system of values … in order to lessen the effects of climate change?
Does anyone here think that such a shift is possible?
Deborah
Global warming is real. Just because some choose to ignore the evidence doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Remember creationism. Those people chose to ignore the facts and overwhelming evidence supporting evolution but evolution is still a fact of life. Ditto global warming. The evidence is overwhelming that we have increased CO2 with our industrial activities. The problem is that we need to make an overwhelming cooperative effort to change it and get our planet back to “normal.”
Without the long term cooperation of everyone, I mean the whole world, we will continue on a downward spiral and eventually obliterate ourselves. Yes, we are capable of altruism but it will take a conscious, collective effort. I, for one, am optimistic about the future as long as we all pledge to get along with each other and work for a common goal.
The alternative is simply unacceptable.
So Keith it sounds as if you think people can make the shift toward living in a more sustainable way … because they will have to make that shift. Is that how you feel?
Do others, also, feel this is what might happen?
Dear Deborah and Kent,
Without any doubt and complete confidence, the human community can make a shift to a sustainable lifestyle. However, I do think necessary movement forward toward a good enough future for our children becomes much more difficult if people are guided by inadequate ideas, outdated beliefs, preternatural theories and cascading disinformation about biological and physical reality.
As long is good, virtually irrefutable science is used as a guide and not ignored because new science initially appears both unwelcome and unbelievable, any threat can be examined, addressed and overcome.
What appears to be needed now is this: scientists and untutored people generally must become vocal and active in the face of silence, a particularly pernicious enemy of science, because silence can serve to deny reality and make it all but impossible for the human species to use its wondrous attributes to respond ably to global challenges that, even now, appear on the far horizon.
Thanks to both of you and everyone in Earth & Sky for supporting these vital dialogues about real issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Steve
Earth and Sky,
These discussions are always inviting to join when they suggest the need for changes in human behavior. Our small group is practicing changes in human behavior daily. We are practicing restorative forestry through the modern use of draft animals and nature imitating selection method for single trees on a worst first basis. This method actually improves the forest while retaining the largest, healthy trees to grow into the future. The value of carbon sequestration of this method is yet to be measured. The benefit to the forested ecology is yet to be quantified. The reduced fossil fuel dependence and consumption by the choice of a biological power system is yet to be defined. Albeit, we know this is the right thing to do in many ways. We know that it will actually make the most money from our natural resources of the long term management perspective. What is good for the ecology is also good for the economy. Eco means house and we only have one house.
The beginning of this discussion was about human happiness. This is what we enjoy as the human dignity dividend of doing this kind of labor intensive, dangerous work. It has a high human dignity dividend of knowing what you are doing is good. Good for the world as a whole, starting with one tree at a time, one practitioner, one community, region, nation, world…planet. Yes we understand it is a tiny effort in some regards, but change is not easy. Doing the same old destructive logging is easy. Selling out to capital intensive, environmentally destructive behavior is easy, it is what everyone is already doing. If we keep doing what we are doing we will keep getting what we’ve got. A declining ecosystem, which actually accurately reflects of treatment of the living world that we are a part of. This is a complex issue, but the folks that want to put their faith in denial of scientific evidence offer no guidance through example, just the same old stuff. To play the socialist card is funny. This is just warmed up leftovers from the era of the red scare…. The current policies of government seem more threatening toward personal liberty than are commonly understood. It is interesting that all of this occurs while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We suggest a change to what we call ecological capitalism. Those who address human needs without damaging the ecology should be paid the most for their efforts.
Please feel invited to visit our website and read more about what we are doing to restore the forest and communities of our world.
Warm Salute,
Jason Rutledge, Biological Woodsman, President, BOD
Healing Harvest Forest Foundation
http://healingharvestforestfoundation.org
Jason, thank you. I glanced at your website and have already sent a link to a young man I know who might be interested. Your work sounds very beautiful.
What you’re talking about here reminds me of another discussion we have going on this site … a post from the Great Transition Initiative called Who will change the world?
I think you’ll be interested in that post, and in the Great Transition Initiative, if you don’t already know about them. Be sure to read comment #11 from Orion, about other communities like yours that are working toward a different way of living in the world.
All the best,
Deborah
Hi Deborah and Jason,
The two of you, among many others, will soon become our leaders, I hope. Democratic countries belong to their people, who should in fact govern their countries. People, not money, rule in democracies. In our time things appear upside down; wealth rules and people without wealth have virtually no value.
Even the masters of the universe cannot withstand people power. Nor can the members of interlocking corporate boardrooms or the Bilderbergers contend with such force. Nor can the bought-and-paid-for politicians who provide their services with shameless self-righteousness and conviction, and turn the governments of great and splendid democracies into “business-interests-first” nations. Nor can the timorous, emasculated, nearly empty “talking heads” in the mass media. Nor can millions of worshippers of The Almighty Dollar.
From my humble vantage point, it does appear that good forward movement is being made.
Thanks, always,
Steve
Perhaps the following report is helpful.
Warning on Warming
By Bill McKibben
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis: Summary for Policymakers
Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, 18 pp., available at http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/links/ipcc.htm#4wg1
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: “World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe,” reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context— a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.
Although atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told Congress that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. “More research” was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research.
From roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun’s radiation on earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth’s climate and to track current changes. For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth’s atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world’s weather.
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By 1995, the central Herculean tasks of both research and synthesis were largely complete. The report the IPCC issued that year was able to assert that “the balance of evidence suggests” that human activity was increasing the planet’s temperature and that it would be a serious problem. This was perhaps the most significant warning our species, as a whole, has yet been given. The report declared (in the pinched language of international science) that humans had grown so large in numbers and especially in appetite for energy that they were now damaging the most basic of the earth’s systems—the balance between incoming and outgoing solar energy. Although huge amounts of impressive scientific research have continued over the twelve years since then, their findings have essentially been complementary to the 1995 report—a constant strengthening of the simple basic truth that humans were burning too much fossil fuel.
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The 1995 consensus was convincing enough for Europe and Japan: the report’s scientific findings were the basis for the Kyoto negotiations and the treaty they produced; those same findings also led most of the developed world to produce ambitious plans for reductions in carbon emissions. But the consensus didn’t extend to Washington, and hence everyone else’s efforts were deeply compromised by the American unwillingness to increase the price of energy. Our emissions continued to soar, and the plans of many of the Kyoto countries in Western Europe to reduce emissions sputtered. (At the same time, most tragically of all, China and India had just begun their rapid industrial takeoffs using precisely the technologies we then knew were wreaking havoc; they did not seek or find much aid from the Western countries that could have encouraged them to take a more benign path.) In 2001 the IPCC issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR), but it coincided with the start of the Bush administration, which refused even to consider a serious policy for climate. The IPCC’s new Fourth Assessment of this February (known as AR4) arrives at a more congenial moment, as the new Democratic Congress takes up a wide variety of legislation designed, finally, to curb emissions.
The finding of the new report that attracted the most attention in the press was that scientists were now more confident than ever that the warming we’ve seen so far (about one degree Fahrenheit in the average global temperature) was caused by human beings. Instead of being merely “likely,” the conclusion was now “very likely,” which in the IPCC’s lexicon means better than a 90 percent chance. But it’s been years since any reputable scientist specializing in climate research doubted that conclusion. More important findings were ignored in accounts of the report and in some cases were obscured by the document’s very poor prose, which is much more opaque than its predecessors. Those findings include:
The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is now increasing at a faster rate even than before.
Temperature increases would be considerably higher than they have been so far were it not for the blanket of soot and other pollution that is temporarily helping to cool the planet.
Alternative explanations for some of the warming (for example, sunspot activity and the “urban heat island effect,” the raising of temperatures in cities caused by high building densities and the use of heat-retaining materials such as concrete and asphalt) are now known to be relatively negligible.
Almost everything frozen on earth is melting. Heavy rainfalls are becoming more common since the air is warmer and therefore holds more water than cold air, and “cold days, cold nights and frost have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves have become more frequent.”
These facts serve as the prelude to the most important part of the new document, its predictions for what is to come. Here too the news essentially confirms the previous report, and indeed most of the predictions about climate change dating back to the start of research: if we don’t take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of— at the best estimate—roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that’s enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a “totally different planet,” one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.
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The process by which the IPCC conducts its deliberations—scientists and national government representatives quibbling at enormous length over wording and interpretation—is Byzantine at best, and makes the group’s achievements all the more impressive. But it sacrifices up-to-the-minute assessment of data in favor of lowest-common-denominator conclusions that are essentially beyond argument. That’s a reasonable method, but one result is that the “shocking” conclusions of the new report in fact lag behind the most recent findings of climate science by several years.
That’s most obvious here in the discussion of the rise in sea level. Researchers know that sea levels will rise fairly quickly this century, in part because of the melting of mountain glaciers and in part because warm water takes up more space than cold. The new assessment refines the calculations of the rise in sea level and puts the best estimate at a foot or two, which is actually slightly less than the last assessment in 2001. Though it doesn’t sound like much, a couple of feet is actually a large amount— enough to inundate many low-lying areas and drown much of the earth’s coastal marshes and wetlands. Still, it might be more or less manageable.
During the last eighteen months, however, new research has indicated that a far more rapid rise in sea level may be possible, because the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic appear to have begun moving more quickly toward the sea. Some of this research appeared in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and James Hansen has written in these pages about this new information[*]; it is responsible for much of the recent increase in the level of alarm. But it is not included in the IPCC report, except as a caveat: “larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.”
In short, the new report is a remarkably conservative document. That it is still frightening in its predictions simply indicates the huge magnitude of the changes we’re now causing, changes far larger than most people fully understand. Even using its conservative projections, the panel states unequivocally that typhoons and hurricanes will likely become more intense, that sea ice will shrink and perhaps disappear in the summertime Arctic, that snow cover will contract. Later this year, a second working group will outline the effects of these changes on humans, translating inches of sea-level rise into numbers of refugees, showing the effects of increases in temperature and humidity on malaria-carrying mosquitoes as well as the impact of heat waves on crop losses. The language will still be bloodless, but the findings obviously won’t.
The IPCC has always avoided taking political positions—it doesn’t recommend specific policies—and it continues this tradition with its new report. In its discussions of the momentum of climate change, however, it does introduce one particularly disturbing statistic. Because of the time lag between carbon emissions and their effect on air temperature, even if we halted the increase in coal, oil, and gas burning right now, temperatures would continue to rise about two tenths of a degree Celsius per decade. But, the report writes, “if all radiative forcing agents [i.e., greenhouse gases] are held constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming trend would occur in the next two decades at a rate of about 0.1ºC per decade.”
Translated into English, this means, to put it simply, that if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now. In the words of the experts at realclimate.org, where the most useful analyses of the new assessment can be found, climate change is a problem with a very high “procrastination penalty”: a penalty that just grows and grows with each passing year of inaction.
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This is why the most important news about climate at the moment may come not from the IPCC but from Washington. After twenty years of inactivity— a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing—the first few weeks of the new Congress have witnessed a flurry of activity. A series of bills have been introduced by people ranging from California Representative Henry Waxman and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Arizona’s John McCain that would call for more or less aggressive carbon reduction targets. Some of the bills would set in place a “cap-and-trade” system that would set overall limits on emissions of carbon dioxide but would allow companies to freely buy and sell credits permitting them to emit certain amounts of it; this would produce a market for carbon-cutting measures.
The IPCC report doesn’t call for particular reduction figures. It does, however, make clear that reduction in emissions must be quick and deep. There is no more optimistic alternative. Even if we do everything right, we’re still going to see serious increases in temperature, and all of the physical changes (to one extent or another) predicted in the report. However, there’s reason to hope that if the US acts extremely aggressively and quickly we might be able to avoid an increase of two degrees Celsius, the rough threshold at which runaway polar melting might be stopped. This means that any useful legislation will have to feature both a very rapid start to reductions and a long and uncompromising mandate to continue them. Sanders’s bill, also endorsed by California’s Barbara Boxer, who heads the relevant committee, comes closest to that standard. It calls for an eventual 80 percent cut in emissions by 2050. McCain’s bill, cosponsored by one of his challengers for the presidency, Barack Obama, is somewhat weaker in its eventual targets. But the bargaining has barely begun, and in any event quick initial implementation of any cuts will be almost as important as the final numbers.
No one expects President Bush to sign such a bill. In fact, it was widely considered a minor miracle that he uttered the words “climate change” in this year’s State of the Union address. (His limp proposal, centering on alternative fuels for some vehicles, was equally widely considered a dud.) What’s happening now has much to do with positioning for the next presidential election, and the legislation that will eventually be passed and signed in 2009. What the IPCC report makes clear by implication is that that legislation will be our last meaningful chance: anything less than an all-out assault on carbon in our economy will be rendered meaningless by the increasing momentum of global warming. And of course by now our economy is only part of the problem. Though we use more energy per capita than any other country, the Chinese may pass us in total carbon emissions by decade’s end. Even if we start to get our own house in order, we’ll need to figure out how, with desperate speed, to lead an equally sweeping international response.
The only really encouraging development is the groundswell of public concern that has built over the last year, beginning with the reaction to Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s movie. In January, a few of us launched an initiative called stepitup07 .org. It calls for Americans to organize rallies in their own communities on April 14 asking for congressional action. In the first few weeks the Web site was open, more than six hundred groups in forty-six states registered to hold demonstrations—this will clearly be the largest organized response to global warming yet in this country. The groups range from environmental outfits to evangelical churches to college sororities, united only by the visceral sense (fueled in part by this winter’s bizarre weather) that the planet has been knocked out of whack. The IPCC assessment offers a modest account of just how far out of whack it is—and just how hard we’re going to have to work to have even a chance at limiting the damage.
Notes
[*] See “The Threat to the Planet,” The New York Review, July 13, 2006