We must change the focus on climate change

The discussions among scientific experts regarding the prospects for sea level rise provide insights into how science works in its relationship to issues of broad public interest.   In 2014, only five years ago, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the worst case warming scenario would raise sea levels by 1.7 feet to 3.2 feet by 2100.  Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica might be melting faster than once predicted.  The authors write that if emissions proceed unchecked, sea levels could plausibly rise 6.5 feet by 2100.  They came to that conclusion after coordinating the judgments of 22 experts on sea level rise and ice sheet dynamics as to how much rise there might be if global warming proceeds on a business-as-usual basis.  That is, assuming that global society fails to rein in greenhouse gas emissions as the global population increases.  

It’s tempting to consider the different conclusions of these two studies as disagreement. But we’re talking here about massive processes at different places on the planet that are not amenable to quantitative measurements. Further, we can’t be sure how much progress will be made in slowing greenhouse gas emissions.  Science must often proceed in light of such uncertainties in arriving at conclusions that can be drawn about complex systems. The 6.5 feet is an upper limit, predicted to have about a 5 percent likelihood of occurring; the lower estimate of somewhere between 1.7 feet to 3.2 feet is a near certainty. 

 Unfortunately most of the public can't imagine the consequences of either the high or low estimates.  The lead author of the new report, Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol is quoted as saying that the larger rise could spell disaster for some of the world’s largest coastal cities including New York, Miami, Shanghai, Jakarta, Osaka, and Rio de Janeiro, as well as many small Pacific island nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands. But it might be helpful to think of it this way: What would it mean if the subways and underground utility tunnels in New York were flooded, if the workings of major cities were impeded to the extent that they couldn’t function?  How would a society that depends on New York, Miami and dozens of other coastal cities continue?  

If we lived in a logical, well-functioning global society, studies of sea level rise would inform government planning on a worldwide scale; measures would be undertaken to control sea level rise, and the building of infrastructure to limit future damages would be undertaken. But that’s not happening, in large measure because there’s not a general sense of urgency. Even for those who consider themselves to be farsighted, 2100 seems a long way off. Eighty years from now, my spouse and I, our children and grandchildren will be gone.  Probably also all of our great-grandchildren, though some yet to be born could be around.  Should I have to worry about anything that far out? By then science and technology will be so advanced they’ll have figured out how to deal with the challenges.  Right? Yeah, that’s right.
The Dutch, who face immediate threats, as the opening picture shows, know that they can't afford to postpone taking action.  We should look to their example.

Thinking about forecasting the future  puts me in mind of Julian Simon, a colorful, stimulating friend with whom I associated in the 1970’s  He was a professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, and I was a Professor of Chemistry.  We were drawn together by the game of Squash.  I was a middling player, Julian was better.  For some time we pretty regularly played squash late on Friday afternoons. He almost always beat me; I was just good enough to make him work hard to win and to occasionally take a game.   He told me he liked to play with me on Fridays because it gave him a boost as he entered into observing the Sabbath. Julian's rather left-handed compliment didn't offend me; we were friends, and I sensed that he suffered from bouts of depression--perhaps I was part of his therapy. 

Julian was becoming famous at around that time for his economic writing. He argued that talk about the imminent dangers of population explosion and impending shortages of the materials needed for society’s continuance were misplaced.  He had highly public disagreements with many of his Illinois faculty colleagues, and even more visible ones with people such as Paul Ehrlich, author of a widely read book, The Population Bomb.  I served as a sounding board for some of Julian’s ideas; we frequently found ourselves sitting on the floor in the squash court arguing. I enjoyed our conversations, though I saw little evidence that my arguments had made much of a dent in the positions he spelled out in his best-known work, The Ultimate Resource.   Our relationship ended when he left The University of Illinois and moved to Maryland. He died in 1998 at age 65.  The Times obituary referred to him as the “optimistic economist”.  Julian was profiled in an article in Wired not long before he died.  Ed Regis nailed his man pretty well; Julian could wield data with an expert hand. In the face of a lot of pessimism, he insisted on optimism, even when he had to deny trends suggesting that society was on an unsustainable course. He believed that we needn’t concern ourselves with overpopulation or impending shortages of rare metals, nor should we be concerned about climate warming, which was beginning to receive increased attention.  In his largely sympathetic profile, Regis caught Julian’s irrepressible urge to challenge conventional wisdom. 

Julian Simon’s faith in human ingenuity and adaptability is exemplary of the approach many people take to coping with climate change.  The economic system on which much of the world runs is grounded in the notion of continual expansion, a conviction that GDP tells us all we need to know about how well we’re doing.  But it’s becoming increasingly clear that GDP is a faulty index in seeking human welfare generally. On the contrary, measuring our success in terms of GDP is a road to disaster.  Julian Simon was actually right in many of his short term analyses and predictions.  He embarrassed people like Paul Ehrlich, who overestimated their own short term predictive prowess.  In this instance, the key feature in predicting the economic and social health of society is the time scale.  Julian was often right in the short term, but he is inevitably wrong in the long term.  Joseph Stiglitz has it right: we need to change our focus. 

It will not be easy to persuade most people that we should change direction, but there are glimmers of hope.  The Washington Post recently ran a story on how the Green New Deal, or some variant of it, is finding audiences across the country.  The nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, are moving ahead with ambitious plans, as are many progressive communities small and large.  But change doesn’t come easily. Just wishing for change will not get us to where we need to be. Understandably, people are wary of change that could negatively impact their social and economic prospects. It will take imaginative, open-hearted arguments to convince people that their interests will be protected. The powerful corporations and oligarchs who now hold so many levers of power will not willingly cede their control.  There will be much more to tell in this story. I hope to explore some of the themes in future blogs.  Please share the blog with your friends, and let me know your thoughts. 

Addressing climate change at the state level

During the past several days, I’ve spent time, as I often do, cruising through internet sites that are concerned mainly with environmental issues, especially climate change, and those that provide insights on the state of the body politic.  The snippets I’ve picked up make for a consistent picture.  For example, I’ve seen of late is that the moral and intellectual deficiencies of the Trump administration, including agencies headed by Trump appointees, are being countered in states across the country.  Here are several instances: 

Colorado and New Mexico have adopted new policies aimed toward capturing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas operations in the state, a counter to the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era rules targeting those emissions.  Oregon is also taking aim at the Trump administration's rollbacks. Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign a bill codifying into state law federal clean air and clean water standards that were in place before Trump took office.  New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham recently signed a landmark bill that puts the state’s energy sector on an ambitious path. The Energy Transition Act accelerates the state's current renewable electricity standard of 20 percent by 2020 to 50 percent by 2030, 80 percent by 2040, 100 percent carbon-free by 2050. Two other states, Hawaii and California, have already set forth plans for a path to zero-carbon electricity.

California is mounting probably the biggest legal battle of all with federal regulators. The state, with some of the most smog-choked cities in the country, is trying to tighten auto emissions standards, even as the EPA and Transportation Department loosen tailpipe rules on new cars and smaller pickup trucks. Trump, of course, doesn’t like this. He took numerous jabs at California during an address at a National Association of Realtors’ legislative meetings on Friday, as reported in Politico. He repeated his criticism of the state’s high-speed rail project and said that inadequate “forest management.” was to blame for the state's spate of deadly wildfires. “He blames it on global warming,” Trump said of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “I say, ‘Look, try cleaning the floor of the forest a little bit. So you don’t have four feet of leaves and broken trees that have sat there for 25 years.’" It hardly needs to be pointed out that Trump’s knowledge of best practices in forest management is on a par with his weak understanding of how global warming has ushered in major changes in rainfall and temperature patterns. 

A report released by the Louisiana state government concludes that as global warming worsens, flood-prone communities will have to shift inland. The state is losing landmass, is suffering repeated disaster-level flooding (see the picture of Baton Rouge) and will have to reconfigure its economy no matter how many levees are built, from one that focuses largely on fishing, oil and gas industries, which are vulnerable to changes that come with climate change, E&E News reports. “Louisiana is in the midst of an existential crisis,” the state government report says. “We must accept that some areas of Louisiana cannot be preserved as is and that some residents will have less land and more water, potentially impacting their livelihoods and communities.”

On a related note, it’s interesting that climate change is affecting the Panama Canal, which has experienced lower water levels because of a serious drought. Carlos Vargas, the Panama Canal Authority’s executive vice president for environment, water, and energy, called the last five months “the driest dry season in the history of the canal,” the New York Times reports. The shift has resulted in some shippers having to reduce how much cargo they carry. This drought is affecting more than the canal: it is responsible for tragic losses of crops in Central American countries, where most people live close to the edge in terms of their standard of living.

Many see no other choice but migrating northward and attempting to enter the US.  They should be treated as refugees, not only from war and brutal police but from conditions brought on by climate change. The way we treat asylum seekers should be informed by an empathic understanding of their situations, not the administration's cold-hearted practices.

Undark magazine reports that since 2007 the concentration of atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, surged suddenly and unexpectedly.  Possible causes for the rising emissions range from the anthropocentric—leaky natural gas operations, landfill decomposition, livestock belching, and certain forms of agriculture,  to the natural—wetlands, rivers and lakes, wildfires, geological seeps, thawing permafrost and even the work of termites.  One possible source is tropical wetlands, which release methane as part of a natural decomposition process. That's a worrisome scenario. A warming planet causes natural methane seeps to accelerate, which in turn leads to yet more planetary warming.

I wonder if President Trump isn't showing symptoms of mental illness.  He recently went to southwest Louisiana, on an official taxpayer-funded trip, ostensibly to talk up his administration's effort to open U.S. natural gas to international markets. But--as he seems to do compulsively--instead of acting presidential, he went off-script to overtly attack his political rivals in his signature unpleasant style.  This even as the administration's trade policies threaten the growth of the natural gas export business Trump went to Louisiana to promote.  And of course, he failed to take notice of Louisiana's predicament vis a vis climate change, as described above.  Trump's behavior is of more significance than just party politics; the President of the nation, focused on his childish personal insecurities, is dismissive of the vast accumulated knowledge that climate change presents a present and long-range threat to the welfare of the country—indeed, of the planet.

It's encouraging that states are picking up the slack insofar as they're able, but there is such a lot that needs doing!  At some future time, when a politically critical level of awareness has been achieved at the national level, there’ll be frantic stabs at action, blaming, and unrest—and a good bit of human tragedy. The time is short before the pressures of climate change rather than reasoned forethought brings us to that place. When I feel frustrated about this, I’ve found it helpful to meditate at times on Lao-tzu’s philosophy. I read regularly in  A Path and a Practice­, William Martin’s very accessible rendering of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching.  Lao-tzu teaches that while each of us is on a path, we live in the now:

                                              

                                               The present moment is all we have,

                                                  so we are not constantly seeking

                                                       a faster way to do things

                                                         or a better place to be

                               

The Roman Stoic, Epictetus, opens his manual of ethical advice with the line, “Some things are in our control, others not.”  He follows with this: When something is not in your control, say to yourself, “Then it’s none of my concern.” Ah, but these Stoics leave us in an uneasy place.  How can we conclude that we have no control? It’s all too easy to let ourselves off the hook. So we keep at possibly quixotic efforts.  Until next time...write to me with your thoughts.

Bloggytown

Where is agriculture headed?

You’d have to be really out of touch not to have heard of the microbiome, the community of microorganisms that share our body space.  The microbiome is composed of a very large number of microbial species, the vast majority of which live in our digestive systems.  In recent times we’ve come to appreciate the importance of these little fellows to our well-being. We’ve learned to pay attention to them, to feed them good stuff, such as prebiotics and yogurts. We’ve come to understand that the relationship of diet to wellness lies in the interaction of the microbiome with everything we consume.

It occurred to me recently that the human-microbiome relationship is similar to that between plants and the soil in which they grow.  The quality of soil from the standpoint of its capacity to sustain plant life very much depends on what’s in it.  Healthy soil isn’t just dirt—it contains a complex system of interconnected soil organisms that are essential to the capacity of soil to function as a home for plants, just as our intestinal microbiome is essential to our capacity to ingest food in maintaining whole body health. Soil organisms assist with the digestion of needed nutrients for a plant, keep nutrients in place, provide structural support and water management, and many other functions.

Industrial agriculture has been premised on the notion that we humans can sustainably provide just about everything a crop plant needs. In their model, it’s not necessary to preserve an abundant, deeply rooted community of diverse organisms that support the growing of food crops.  Industrial agriculture works on the assumption that it’s OK to continually plow up the soil, virtually stripping it of life other than the annual plantings.  Thus, the soil of industrially farmed land lacks organisms that exude sticky carbon substances that hold soil particles together, imparting to healthy soil a crumbly texture.  The structure of healthy soil has pore sizes that allow it to drain when it’s wet, and store water that would otherwise run off in heavy rains. The pores also bring air to the roots. Healthy soil is a complex ecosystem, an interconnected web of organisms and their physical environment.  

By contrast, industrial agriculture has made the soil into a lifeless structure that merely holds the plants. Big agribusiness supplies all the heavy machinery needed to plow and weed the fields, and of course, major nutrients for the plants, pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds, designed to compensate for the lack of a diverse and richly varied soil, with its abundant population of insects, fungi and the like that serve to protect plants.

Most farming operations in the US today buy into the framework supplied by industrial agriculture. There is a never-ending succession of fixes to invasions of insects, infestations of infections, massive runoffs and crop losses from flooding in heavy rains, and losses in dry spells because the soil has no capacity to retain water. The so-called green revolution has succeeded only by virtue of robbing the land of riches that must be preserved if agriculture is to be sustainable. 

Back in the 1960s, Kansas farmers found that a huge aquifer lay beneath the land they were farming. The Ogallala, located beneath the Great Plains in the United States, is, or was, one of the world’s largest aquifers.  It underlies an area of approximately 174,000 sq mi in portions of eight states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. Anyone who has flown over the plains states in years past is familiar with the sight of center-pivot irrigators — the rigs that created circles of lush cropland by pumping water from the Ogallala onto the fields. Today, in many parts of the Great Plains those rigs are no longer running. They remain as mute reminders that plundering the world’s natural resources for short-term gain is ultimately a loser’s game. In many parts of the Ogallala aquifer, the water levels have fallen so far that it is no longer feasible to pump from it.  The irony is that all that water would not have been needed if the land been farmed regeneratively.

Meanwhile, in March of this year, the state of Nebraska was in a state of emergency due to heavy rainfall. A massive so-called "bomb cyclone" battered the central United States with heavy snow, howling winds and several tornadoes. Flooding forced evacuations in adjoining states as well. Conventional industrial agriculture leaves fields prone to massive runoffs following heavy rainstorms, with the result that stormwater washes fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and animal waste off the farmland (and, incidentally, off lawns and golf courses). Aside from the ruinous loss of crops, runoff carries pollutants into lakes and rivers used for drinking water supplies. When the runoff ends up in reservoirs, it promotes algal blooms which can become toxic. 

But it doesn’t need to be the way the agribusiness giants would have it.  We know that the plants and soils of a natural prairie absorb much, if not all, of the rain during a thunderstorm. Why can’t agricultural practices build on what we know works in nature?  It may seem counter-intuitive to look to pre-industrial practices, but it’s nothing of the kind, as has been demonstrated all over the world. I’ll mention here just a few examples. They all fit under the general heading of regenerative agriculture.

I recently read a fine book, Call of the Reed Warbler, by Charles Massy.  The author is Australian, with a long career in dealing with the tough challenges that Australia presents for conventional agriculture.  When Europeans came to settle, they brought with them strong opinions on how to farm successfully.   But most of Australia presented conditions they didn’t know how to deal with, particularly in the low amounts of rainfall, as well as its erratic nature, and soil types that they failed to understand.  Many attempts to farm ended in failures and abandonment of the land. But a few pioneers went against the conventional wisdom regarding water management. They found ways to conserve water and protect the soil with cover crops, proper rotations of grazing pastures and other methods.

Massy also refers to the work of pioneers in other places, especially Africa, where desertification has left so much land unproductive.  Allan Savory is one of the great pioneers in regenerative agriculture.  A native of Zimbabwe, he has concentrated his efforts in the restoration of land that has been desertified over time through human activities. His aim is to convert such lands to productive grassland through managing the land in concert with the grazing of livestock. His work is controversial in some circles, in part, I think because many would like to see less use of animals in human diets.  But for many of the people of Africa whose livelihood and diet have for generations depended on grazing animals, Savory’s methods, referred to as holistic management, have resulted in greening of huge tracts of formerly unproductive land.  Holistic management is far less of a threat to global warming than the industrial model of producing meat. The lush grasslands soak up CO₂, thus helping to draw down the levels of the most important contributor to global warming. I recommend that you watch Savory’s TED presentation.  As TED's founder, Chris Anderson commented, it’s astonishing.

I’m a vegetarian, and I’ve long believed that an important step we could take to ward off global warming would be to shift the human diet from animal-based to plant-based.  I'm convinced that a plant-based diet is superior from a health perspective, but Savory has shown that warding off global warming does not require that we entirely abandon eating meats.  We must, however, cease industrial meat production, which comes at a high cost to our health and the quality of the environment. As recounted in The Guardian in 2017, in America food animal production has caused massive pollution of water.  Vast areas in the Gulf of Mexico, have turned into dead zones because of pollution flowing into the Mississippi River and thence into the gulf.  Industrial pig farming is a particularly egregious form of CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).  CAFOs store swine waste in giant vats referred to as lagoons, which often contain pathogens—salmonella, antibiotics and antimicrobials that have been fed to the animals—as well as nutrient pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus. If the water from these lagoons leaches out into the soil and trickles down into the water table beneath, the surrounding communities suffer. Conditions have grown worse as climate change has brought on powerful storms that cause flooding of lagoons, and hurricanes that can wipe out the lagoons. There is really no satisfactory solution to the environmental deterioration caused by these industrial-scale operations that the corporations would be willing to invest in. Smithfield Foods, a huge corporation that operates pig farms in North Carolina has been cited numerous times for creating living conditions unbearable for anyone living anywhere near one of their operations.  The injurious effects on affected communities are a form of environmental injustice—most of the people affected have no relationship with the corporations.  But “big ag” is very big business indeed; it has tremendous pull with state and federal legislators. The Center for American Progress recently floated a novel idea to counter the effects of a rapidly consolidating agriculture industry: an independent task force at USDA charged with maintaining competitive markets and protecting farmers from the harms of consolidation. In a related vein, a bill from Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Mark Pocan would temporarily ban future ag mergers while Congress rewrites antitrust laws to strengthen enforcement against anti-competitive deals.

Farmer Gabe Brown provides another example of how regenerative agriculture can rewrite the rules for ecologically and economically successful farming. Brown and his family have employed regenerative agricultural practices on several thousand acres in North Dakota to produce healthy and highly productive soil without the need for fertilization, pesticides or herbicides. Their soil soaks up tremendous amounts of CO₂, holds it long-term, and absorbs large quantities of rainfall without runoff. To learn more about how Gabe does it, and the background science, check out this video. Gabe is a really entertaining guy!  I was impressed with the sense of wholeness in the efforts around the globe to restore soils to their legacy conditions.  Gabe rotates animals on his holdings in a similar way to Allen Savory.  Half a world apart and with vastly different cultural underpinnings these two and many others are treading on common ground—healthy soil.

After learning about the work of these pioneers, I’m left feeling that I need to investigate further.  I don’t see how the use of grazing animals on farmland can, or even should be, scaled to the production of food across large areas such as America’s plains states. It seems clear that benefits accrue from the grazing.  There should be ways to simulate the beneficial effects of grazing animals on large tracts of croplands. In any case, it's certainly past time for industrial agriculture to adopt new practices if we’re to save the planet from environmental degradation and global warming while providing food for a rising global population.