What the hell are we going to do?

80 percent lower than 1990 levels by 2050… that’s what science says greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to avoid the worst disruptions faced by civilization since an apparent comet strike and the great floods that ended the last “ice age” (apologies to those with brains less dense than mine, who realize just how complex are the intermingled causes of atmospheric warming happening now; I speak here as if all effects were simplified into a CO2 equivalent). 

By comparison, the much maligned Kyoto Protocol called for the industrialized world to trim emissions between 6 and 8 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.  Without the USA, even this modest “test run” of climate change reduction activity ran afoul, resulting in an 10% global increase to 2009 (36 ppm increase / ~353 ppm 1990, and probably reaching a 12% global increase by the end of the treaty in 2012).  The pending Copenhagen agreement being hailed by the US and China is a new and costlier attempt now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 3% under 1990 levels by 2020.  And then create another 77% reduction below 1990 levels within the next thirty years, as the global human population heads upwards toward 9 billion or more?  It strains credulity.  And do not forget that this severe target (80% below 1990 levels by 2050) was in response to an assumption that doubling CO2 levels marked a danger point, when it was in fact nothing more than the hypothetical case chosen in the late 19th century (Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier's 1824 theory was labeled the "greenhouse effect" when Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius coined the term during his painstaking year-long hand calculations of the rough effects of a halved and doubled level of CO2).  The real danger point at which climate appears to enter an uncontrolled spiral is now agreed to be around 350 ppm CO2 equivalent, which we passed back in the late 1980s (the atmosphere now contains about 390 ppm CO2 equivalent, increasing 2 ppm per year).

To sit back and say, “Well, then I guess there’s nothing we can do any more” is to forget that adaptation consumes far more energy, capital and labor than anyone alive today can comprehend, dwarfing to meaninglessness the current US budget debates over health care issues.  All future life bodes that we include mitigation as a strategy, even as we adapt, until the attempts prove ineffective a hundred or a thousand years from now.   In a recent book The End of the Long Summer, Author/reporter Dianne Dumanoski recognized,

"It will take conscious effort to resist taking refuge either in despair – in the conviction that 'it's too late' – or in the alternative, to bask in groundless, sunny optimism that 'we'll figure out something, because science always does.' "

The one thing to come clear out of the Copenhagen climate talks will be consensus of obligation to help the world's poor half (“half” sounds so much smaller than the 3,400,178,237 people included in the US Census Bureau’s estimated global population on 11/30/2009).  If the world’s investment in these people only results in the American dream for all (a spectacular result for those of us who make or sell things for a living), then truly we will have lost the planet.  In the United States, it seems to me that a pending climate agreement with transfer of $10 billion of wealth annually to the world’s poor to assist with mitigation and adaptation could become a vehicle to finally settle debts with African Americans and native peoples who have long sought justice.  Why not complete reparations to the descendents of the slaves freed by President Lincoln and to any Native Americans who are still left behind, in the poor half of the world’s population?  Direct wealth transfer would utilize all the vaunted strengths of the free market to help: those most in danger to relocate, those with unsustainable infrastructure to reinvest and reinvent, those with insufferable lives to better their circumstances.

We in the culture-defining US must lead toward a survivable planet by example, a duty we have essentially shirked at the highest levels (Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, Chevron, ConocoPhillips to name only those US companies in the top 10 global corporations, and not to beleaguer further the US people and its congress/President with their timidity) to date.  Blaming China is cowardly, as that country’s emissions per capita remain (for now) right at the limit of sustainability, about 4 tons CO2 equivalent per person per year.  The lack of change in America, where we continue our 20 tons per person per year “lifestyle” binge, has been inexcusable since at least 1959 (if you go by Dr. Edward Teller’s-Dr. Strangelove’s-warning in “Energy Patterns of the Future” presented to energy industry elite at the 1959 “Energy and Man” symposium in NYC).  Business as usual is by now an outright crime against humanity, as viewed by our children. 

President Obama, much as I love him, feels constrained to make a whirlwind visit and speech then leave the true negotiations to others at Copenhagen, a bully pulpit function in the absence of real legislative US action.  Every city should host a vigil or a protest to bring attention to the momentous nature of the discussion and decisions that will be made there.  If you want to be a part of the action on the 11th or 12th of December (Bill McKibben of www.350.org is calling for coordinated action on either the 11th or 12th): vigils outside congressional offices, letters to the editor, op-eds, or local direct action.  Visit or join your www.1sky.org local group for more.

Led by China, CO2 gases rose in 2008 - Climate Change- msnbc.com

Led by China, CO2 gases rose in 2008 - Climate Change- msnbc.com

Spiralling feedback effects strengthening climate change are not something we will grow out of. In fact, if the world's economy is not on a substantially different footing by the time a general recovery takes hold, then I dare say life as we know it, in the long run, is doomed. Sorry to go all "2012" on ya....

Given unmodified capitalism's current strength and long lead, reversing course in time to save ourselves seems highly dubious. It is not likely, and certainly not desirable, that humanity should live through a second big economic collapse prior to the tipping point after which human efforts toward greenhouse gas emissions reduction lose effectiveness and nature wails on. Pity it seems we cannot become immediately and globally more radical in reimagining future energy, transport and commerce without their legacy wastes. Future generations will naught but thank us if, somehow, we do.

This is it.

Great movie commemorating a great loss; it really helped to humanize Michael Jackson.  It made me a little jealous of him.  He got to check out before the climate really changed and we are left holding no option but to adapt or die.  Expressive, expansive, belated tip of the hat to you, MJ.

But I didn’t mean to write about a movie.  I meant to write down the dissertation idea that finally fit.  This is it:  How National Environmental Policy Act environmental review would change if Carbon Dioxide (CO2) were named a criteria pollutant.

It crystallized out of unrelated Friday conversations at work.  One was with my supervisor Janeen Spates, debating whether activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere cause physical change to the environment. 

Harris County and HUD have always assumed that using federal grant money to support public services such as ambulance rides or bus ride vouchers for ill patients produced no physical changes to the environment and were thus exempt from NEPA environmental review under 24 CFR Part 58.  On the other hand, constructing new apartment buildings or a new park with play equipment for the kids would produce physical changes to the environment, triggering full environmental assessment under the same federal regulations.

However, the plastic “Donald Duck” play seats that Diana and I used to love to swing on at Marquette Park on Lake Michigan in the 1960s have already cracked up and either joined all that trash in the landfills or is by now well on its way floating serenely toward the great Pacific Ocean garbage flow.  A permanent physical change to the environment?  Certainly, even though no physical evidence of the play equipment remains on the beach less than fifty years after installation.  But the CO2 that left the tailpipe of our car as we happily wheeled down Lakeside Drive to cavort on that same beach is still with us.  So is the CO2 expended in constructing the “Donald Duck” swing equipment, in manufacturing the plastic seats themselves, in transporting them from wherever they were made to the beach where they were used by countless happy kids, each of which transferred over a pound of Carbon (2.5 miles * conservatively .9 lbs of carbon dioxide/2ish kids per car) to the atmosphere on the way there, and after wiping off their sandy feet, again on the way back.  About half that carbon dioxide was absorbed by the world’s waters, acidifying them, and the other half is still up in the air, for a century or more, helping raise the mean temperature of earth during the entire time.

So if the Carbon emissions produce more permanent change, and arguably more adverse change, to the environment than the plastic and metal remnants of the disused 1960s play equipment of my youth, why is CO2 still generally discounted in the federal environmental review process?

That part of the NEPA environmental review process that I work with almost daily is HUD’s interpretation of the statute codified in federal regulations at 24 CFR 58.  Another Friday conversation was with one of my two planners, Jared Briggs, who fresh from recent training relayed the sense that HUD is moving away from narrowly defining its community development mission as safely housing people with less toward a broader view of real community building.  In lifting its view from only those traditionally underserved to the whole community, a move that has been underway at least since the welfare reforms of the Clinton era, opportunity exists for adopting a more generally holistic view that is consistent with the postmodern American city and country. 

Houston can be a tough crowd for an ecocentrist.  Yet even Dr. Stephen Klineberg’s evenhanded Rice University Houston Area Survey finds increasingly that the population considers the threat of global warming as “very serious,” passing the majority mark in 2008.  The Houston Area Survey found consistently that between the 1980s and the 2000s people agreed (ranging between 61% to 72%) with the statement, “Protecting the environment is so important that continuing improvements must be made, regardless of cost.”  If they’re saying that in the (petroleum) energy capital of the world, how much more acutely must the rest of the world feel this?

After last night’s sleep, I thought that if we gave long-lived greenhouse gasses their shrift in environmental review, our assessment of what produces beneficial and adverse environmental effects would change quite radically.   My wife Donna, upon hearing it, told me to write it down this morning before I forget, which is her quite meaningful stamp of approval.  Ha-ha, forget a real dissertation hook into the climate change adaptation planning that I have been working toward at TSU since 2004 and also lets me engage Dr. Ibitayo on my committee?  I wrote it down.

The Massacre at Fort Hood

(تَكْبِير) “Allahu Akbar” in deed. If in place of Allah you substitute the profane belief that “might makes right”; that the direction of violence can ever project a force for justice. Not even the most coldly ironic human can make sense of the massacre that took place in the military heart of Texas on Thursday afternoon. Yet I believe that such was bound to happen eventually. The fundamental illogic of training in the martial arts, of knowing to kill in order to deny the land to those you dislike, and to dominate and dehumanize others so that their way does not impede your way, this day is cruelly exposed like a giant raw nerve at the heart of a beast.

Can anyone condemn the soldier who turned on his mates who can also abide what those slain and unslain were either commencing or finalizing at the Soldier Readiness Center of Fort Hood, the “largest active duty armored post in the United States”? (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,572305,00.html).

If the string of domination by violence noted in the Bible beginning with Cain and his brother and continuing to Saul’s thousands and David’s tens of thousands had continued unbroken to this day, how many of us would be yet alive? सत्याग्रह Satyagraha, my gentle readers.

This is a test from a mobile location. Just wanted to see if an SMS worked. ;). -Paul

Nothing against Christians, or more generally monotheists, but after 9-11 occurred and the U.S. did not avoid launching war with Iraq, I finally called a spade a spade and went atheist (or as I like to euphemize it, "interfaith" for American ears...sounds less antagonizing). Hope that doesn't offend my gentle reader's sensabilities too badly. I finally tried to write an apology for my switch from a Christian to an atheist faith in my blog. In case anyone is still wondering where the old Paul went: (http://paulsuckow.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-god-exists.html).

In these decades I am far more concerned about the approaching effects of climate change on real life as we knew it around the time of our birth than I could ever become exercised about the conceptual soul's eternal verities. If you are a betting (wo)man, you should understand that we are fast approaching an overrun of a 50/50 point in the odds that human life will become extinct along with much, maybe half, of every lifeform humans have ever known. In toxicology and public health, a lethal dose of anything for 50% of subjects (LD50) is commonly shunned entirely. It's already not certain that we can avoid the vortex of natural reinforcement that will lead to a radically different planet from the one on which forests and crops and mammals and ocean life have evolved, and especially during the long ice ages thrived.

Not since the end of the Younger Dryas millennium have human civilizations endured a decadal rise approaching 8 degrees Celsius. And that was catastrophic for all civilization at the time, to the point that science is still largely written to say that "our" civilization began after the survivors of what I'll call the original "Noah" flood (around 6450 years +-25 before present) came down from the mountains into the Tigres-Euphrates valleys to establish male-dominated city-states like Ur. All literature except perhaps the largely unexplored oral traditions of Himalayan spoken Sanskrit lost the thread of human civilization to that point. We theorize that that sub-glacial outburst flooding from ancient Lake Agassiz was only the most recent and all things considered a somewhat minor global pulse of what has arrived during the progressive meltdown of the ice age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz). It seems reasonable to consider the Semitic Noah/Nuh(a) story, Gilgamesh epic and similar accounts in other literatures to perhaps conflate local events as in Sumeria around 2900 BC with the much earlier collective memory of ice age losses. The current Wiki article about this currently gives no help (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah), leaving us with Science Channel reporting.

A synopsis of historical sea level rise:
Greater catastrophies in the deeper past may be linked with Sanskrit rememberances of advanced, global and presumably sustained ice-age civilization(s), long thought to have been purely mythical. Sea level rise of about 25 meters appears to have resulted from an initial antarctic icecap rapid disintigration called Meltwater Pulse 1A about 14,300 or 14,200 years ago. The geological record of that pulse is widely agreed upon, though most scientists smooth out the timeframe to inlude a 500-year runup to the rapid portion of the disintegration. A similarly vertical jump in the raw data seems to correspond with another period of rapid collapse, perhaps in the Northern hemisphere because some muddying in the data should possibly be expected from the assumed isostatic shifts that create uncertainty in the record (volcanism and massive technonic shifts in water/ice pressure overburdening the plates may have begun by then). The greatest ice sheet collapses of the meltdown diluted the oceans sufficiently with fresh water, truly massive amounts compared to current icemelt potential. The world ocean conveyor system seems to have been struck dead. Some insight into this can be found in observations of today's arctic deep water chimneys that have been shutting off one by one in the last part of the century, apparently weakening the Gulf Stream just enough to mask overheating of Europe and the northeastern U.S. seaboard from global warming.

Regions we call temperate today suddenly returned to cold, dry ice-age conditions for 1,300 years +-70, a period known as the Younger Dryas. Finally about 11,550 years ago a horrendous decade with an 8-degree C. global temperature climbout broke the spell. Interestingly, some of this may correspond to Plato's transcription of the ancient Egyptian account of the destruction visited upon the central territory of "Atlantis" around 11,600 years ago. For the next three thousand years ice and water-borne debris tore and formed the northern landscapes we know as post-glacial. The raw data appears to gain in volatility throughout this period of steady sea-level rise until a peak event around 8400 years ago calmed things down for a few hundred years, only to enter another millenial period of volatility with perhaps ten meters amplitude dampening slightly until what I would consider the last big flood event around 6450+-25 years ago.

Six mellinnia since we have seen a small upward sea level rise within the range of natural variability (roughly +-2 m). This year we are experiencing a similar measure of sea level rise to that typically experienced over the last century, but now up to about 1.8 mm of sea level rise from around 1.5 mm over the last century. This amount may rise non-linearily with any instability in grounded ice sheets as they continue to spead up and spread out due to continued mass loss (edge melt and loss of buttressing floating ice pack).

Almost no cultural transmission, save the Sanskritt of Himalayan survivors, crossed the entire meltdown period and into our own civilization. The Judeo-Chrisitan tradition always thought the Earth's creation to date back roughly 6,000 years, long known to be insufficient from scientific and even historical records (http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_date.htm NOTE: this religious tolerance web site is a reliable source of interfaith principals and helpful to understanding my current worldview).

Even today, our great global civilization(s) could be but a dull reflection of the those great ancients which developed during the stability of the long ice age up through the last glacial maximum (LGM). The world ocean had very gradually lowered to 400 feet (120 m) below recent sea levels by the LGM. Perhaps we should spend more time looking for answers to questions of sustainability underwater than in the pages of more recent and simply ignorant holy books.

consumer

con·sum·er
Pronunciation: \kən-ˈsü-mər\
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Date: 15th century
: one that consumes: as a: one that utilizes economic goods b: an organism requiring complex organic compounds for food which it obtains by preying on other organisms or by eating particles of organic matter — compare producer 3
— con·sum·er·ship \-ˌship\ noun