More on secular shifts and episodic events

In my most recent blog, I made an effort to distinguish between two categories of things which should form the basis of our discussions regarding climate change. These are:

• Episodic Events
• Secular Shifts

Episodic events are of short duration-they come and go:  tornadoes, extreme heatwaves, hurricanes of exceptional power, floods.  They grab our attention right now.

Secular shifts, on the other hand, are of long duration, consistently moving in a single direction: sea-level rise, the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global population increase.

The major message of my blog was that, although we become preoccupied with episodic events and fret over them, it is the secular shifts that threaten disaster for humanity.

It follows from this that when we look at the daily stream of articles and opinions regarding climate change and the environment, we should try to ascertain the extent to which the topic of the discussion is important for one or more secular shifts.  Here are a few examples drawn from the recent flow of environmental and climate news.

• The White House recently announced that it is considering the relaxation or elimination of existing EPA regulations regarding methane emissions from natural gas facilities. Why is this important?  Methane is often found as a chief component of natural gas; it’s a fossil fuel in its own right. When it is consumed as a fuel, carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, is produced.  But when methane sneaks out of oil wells, escapes from pipelines or is vented as a nuisance, and becomes a component of the atmosphere,  it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane emissions have increased markedly in recent decades; methane is now responsible for about a quarter of the planet’s warming. Relaxation of the regulations on methane emissions could result in substantial increases in the rate at which the planet warms, the single most important secular shift we face. 

• We humans are able to live day-to-day, individually or as communities, only within a rather narrow range of temperature.  This fact becomes more salient as the planet warms and weather patterns shift. A large percentage of the earth’s people live in tropical or temperate climate zones.  India has a population in excess of 1.3 billion and contains nearly a fifth of the world’s population.   It has seen six major droughts and drought-like situations in 10 of the last 17 years, devastating India’s farm economy.  The driving force for this unfortunate shift has been lower south-west monsoon rainfall.  Latest studies by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) show that average rainfall during the monsoon period is falling as the Indian Ocean gets warmer. For example, Chennai, a southeast Indian city of 10 million, receives most of its rainfall during the annual two-month autumn monsoon season. In recent decades, however, droughts have become more intense.  At the same time, temperatures have risen substantially during the hot months of the year. Air conditioning is a luxury; most people just have to sweat it out during the hottest periods. Water is so scarce in working-class neighborhoods of the city that the government has been forced to spend huge amounts of money to desalinate seawater, bring the water by train from hundreds of miles away, and distribute it from an army of water trucks into neighborhoods where household taps have been dry for months.  This is a city of 10 million people!  At the same time, the Indian government has documented hundreds of deaths due to extreme heat.

To add insult to injury,  despite the lower total rainfall there have been episodes of extreme downpour.

We in the US make up about 5% of the world’s population. Understandably, we tend to form judgments about global conditions from what we experience in our own country.  But what happens in India is more representative of the challenges facing most of humanity.  The more extreme climatic conditions seen in semi-tropical regions are in many cases portents of what is to come in our country.  All these episodic weather events are the products of secular changes in the planet’s climate, driven by increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases. 

• What about the heat in the U. S.?  The Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a report on the increasing number of extreme heat events all over the world, and particularly in the United States. Their projections, based on analysis of data covering decades and modeling of expected future weather patterns, shows that the U.S.faces a potentially staggering expansion of dangerous heat over the coming decades.  Dallas, TX , for example, has experienced 31 above 1000 degree days during 1971-2000.  It’s projected to experience 93 such days during 2036-2065 and 124 days during 2066-2099. The trend line suggests that in 2020 Dallas can expect to have perhaps 40 or so days of extreme heat, with all that implies for heat-related illnesses and fatalities, to say nothing of the huge demands for energy to operate air conditioning machinery. The body’s ability to survive at a temperature of 1000 depends on humidity and the availability of water to maintain hydration, but for the elderly and people in poor health, that level of heat is life-threatening.  The air conditioning and refrigeration needed to counter the heat waves consumes exceptionally large quantities of energy.  Episodic extreme heat events worldwide can be expected to increase in number and intensity as the planet continues to warm,  producing a vicious cycle of added energy consumption, thus amplifying the secular shift of global warming.   

• 
  Tropical forests globally are being lost at a rate of more than 60,000 square miles per year.  A global initiative to restore large swaths of forest,  termed the Bonn Challenge, was launched in 2011.  Countries were to make commitments to restore large areas of the world’s deforested and degraded land by 2020. Since then the goal regarding the area to be restored has been increased to about 1.3 million square miles by 2030.  That’s a lot of land, about twice the area of Alaska. Ideally, reforestation is a great pathway to mitigating the continued increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forests are capable of soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They can improve farmers’ lives in many parts of the world, improve drinking water quality, and provide increased habitat protection for wildlife.  So if the Bonn Challenge could be met, it would represent a significant effort to mitigate the secular change in greenhouse gas warming. 
  But as explained in a recent article in the journal Science, “many short term fixes fail to produce environmentally and socially beneficial long-term outcomes”. One of the most common missteps is to favor single-species tree plantations over restoring native forest ecosystems. This obviously has negative consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage, and typically works to the disadvantage of native populations.  Some nations have indeed planted a lot of trees on abandoned poor quality land or land not suited for food production, but much of the restoration involves using trees that are intended for harvesting at some point.  To maximize the benefits of restoration, trees must be left in place for longer times, encouraging diversity in the ground cover and promoting wildlife habitation.  Tearing up the Amazon rainforest to plant coffee trees or create a palm oil plantation is a step backward.  Done right, restored forests could sequester a significant amount of carbon dioxide and help limit global warming and enhance the lives of millions of people. On the other hand, a potentially great secular initiative could slip into being a disappointing episodic event. 

• I have long been an avid follower of efforts to revolutionize agricultural practices globally.  It’s such an obvious place to begin making a serious dent in the rate at which greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere.  And this, after all, is the single most important factor in determining how disastrously our anthropocentric imprints on climate change turn out. Agriculture is the world’s largest industry. About a billion people are engaged in farming.  About half the world’s habitable land is pasture and cropland.  Agriculture is essential, and potentially the single most powerful force for improving the lot of humankind generally.  It’s also one of the worst polluting industries on the planet. Of course, there isn’t just one “agriculture”.  This so-called industry varies from pitiable scratching in unproductive ground to behemoths of midwest farmland, costing as much as $400,000 and more--and that’s just for the tractor!  

The huge diversity in agriculture, based on economic factors, the conditions of the land and a host of other climate-related factors, precludes any single approach to raising agriculture’s contributions confronting climate change. It is quite evident, however, that there is room for massive reforms in conventional farming in the US and many other developed nations. Those reforms come under the general heading of regenerative farming practice.  The conventional practices that have become dominant emphasize monocultures, plowing practices that result in topsoil erosion, and heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.  The big ag corporations love it, they’ve grown rich by making the farmers dependent on them.  But there are winds of change a blowin’.  Here’s one example:

One of the precepts of regenerative agriculture is to leave the land as undisturbed as possible.  No-till practices leave the soil able to develop deep root systems with cover crops, which form deep root systems and promote sequestration of water and carbon dioxide. Their roots produce nodules that fix nitrogen which feeds the crops, and holds the soil in place in heavy rainfall, reducing runoff. To read a nice story on how this is playing out in midwest farm country, check this link.   Cover crop acreage is still small, but it’s increasing rapidly. According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture census, cover crop acreage increased 50% nationally during 2012-2017.

As the prospect of global warming looms ever larger, more attention is being paid to how we can offset our current dependence on fossil fuels by switching to renewable energy sources.  There is great enthusiasm for many promising modalities, especially solar and wind, and including also technologies for energy storage which will be essential to sustaining a balanced system with massive capacity.  But I’m not beamish about many of the rosy scenarios being drawn.  California recently set a goal of carbon-free electricity by 2045. This is an ambitious goal.  It ‘s sobering to realize that, ambitious as it is, it does not address the transportation sector, which produces two-thirds of the state’s emissions.  I recently came across this quote on the web:

“Humanity is owed a serious investigation of how we have gone so far with the decarbonization project without a serious challenge in terms of engineering reality.”  

– Michael Kelly, Prof. Electrical Engineering, Cambridge 

The issue of how to get to a carbon-free economy, especially one that might not include nuclear energy, has not been satisfactorily addressed by people who should know how far we are from that goal.  It’s true that, to the extent they can be deployed, renewable energy sources are capable of mitigating the continued increases in greenhouse gases.  But their capacity to do that is actually less than what is achievable by implementing many of the solutions described in Project Drawdown, a roadmap with which everyone should be familiar. 

A New Way to Talk About Climate Change

This blog entry is about the status of the term "climate change" in public discourse. I began with a little searching to get a sense of how the term does or doesn't show up in discussions of natural disasters.  Here are a few results:

·    In March, 2019, Nebraska experienced record flooding. The Missouri, Platte and Elkhorn rivers all crested at record heights, breaking records set as recently as 2011. I watched videos of political figures such as Senator Jim Scheer commenting on what they’d seen during visits across the state.  To a person, they were solicitous, concerned, ready to go to Washington with requests for disaster relief. No one mentioned “climate change.”

·     People in California who lost their homes in raging fires over the past couple of years were often pictured as plucky, tough people, ready to rebuild. The attitude, certainly the implicit hope, is that the fires were an anomaly. “Fires happen”. Some said the government should have cleared out the underbrush.

·     The billions of dollars in damage along the gulf coast caused by hurricane Michael a year ago will be substantially covered through disaster relief from the Federal government. How much of that funding will be devoted to replacing structures and infrastructure that will suffer a similar fate when the next hurricane strikes? 

The idea of “climate change” as a secular shift in Earth’s climate, is not ensconced in the intellectual, moral or cultural spirit of our time.  Why is this so?  Why isn’t the nation preoccupied with the dire threats that scientific study tells us are posed by “climate change”? One part of the answer lies in federal government policies, which amount to something worse than lack of attention. The administration supports initiatives that would directly contribute to climate change; for example, leasing federal lands to fossil fuel extractors, and permitting drilling in areas where an earlier administration had closed it off.


In the early 1930s, when the Great Depression had tightened its grip and the economy was falling apart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a range of bold federal policies aimed at restoring confidence in banks and putting people back to work. He had to fight political enemies and economic conservatives every inch of the way, but in time people’s outlooks and expectations changed from despair to hope. It was the age of the New Deal. The arguments against the federal government addressing “climate change” are not unlike like those that were advanced by big business interests against FDR’s New Deal. They include the dictum that the government should not be involved in addressing such matters; the markets will make adjustments to changing conditions of whatever sort. Today, resistance to government-centered, comprehensive and socially just health care, or to reform of the criminal justice system, reflects the same thought patterns.  But how do markets actually work in addressing broad social needs? Businesses are for the most part profit-oriented and short-term in outlook.  There’s not much room for a broadly-based social welfare orientation. Though the private sector can be, and often must be, participating partners in government-funded and operated programs, it should not be counted upon to formulate and execute broad social programs.


On the other hand, the private sector can’t help but be involved in addressing a challenge that penetrates as deeply as climate change into the nation’s economic and social life. Unfortunately, a large swath of the corporate world doesn’t wish to accept that it has particular roles to play.  At a minimum, corporations should behave as good citizens (Corporations are now “citizens”, aren’t they?), conserving energy and adopting climate-friendly policies and practices.  Businesses involved with transportation or the technologies of energy generation must be involved; climate change impinges directly on their bottom lines. Then there are companies whose operations directly affect climate change by dint of the products being produced or the manner in which their operations are being carried out. Three big ones are fossil fuel production and consumption, mining, and land use and food production. The last of these promises great benefits from mitigating climate change, but industrial agriculture has shown little interest in abandoning its many destructive products and practices.   


Despite all the talking and writing about climate change, there is not enough public concern, enough impetus for action.  Which brings me back to the concept of the American zeitgeist, the intellectual, moral, or cultural spirit of our time.  I agree with George Lakoff that we must reconsider the ways in which climate change issues are framed.   We can start with the realization that support for needed change is limited by the public conceptions of “climate change” itself.  In January of this year, Yale University issued a report entitled Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018, as part of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.  The report is a veritable blizzard of data relating to changes in beliefs and attitudes over the past several years regarding climate change. Here is a small sampling of the results:

·       Seven in ten Americans think that global warming is happening, up about 10% since March 2015.

·       Americans are increasingly certain that global warming is happening—51% are “extremely” or “very” sure, an overall increase of 14% since March 2015.

·       About 70% of Americans admit being at least “somewhat worried” about global warming. Of those, about 30% are “very” worried.

·       About seven in ten Americans say the issue of global warming is either “extremely”, “very” or “somewhat” important to them personally, while about three in ten say that it’s either “not too” or “not at all” important to them personally.

·       Fewer than half of Americans perceive a social norm in which their family and friends expect them to take action on global warming.

·       Only one in five Americans is aware that more than 90% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.

What can we do with this information?  The Center made an effort in 2014 to identify which messages on climate change were effective. Although the work was carried out several years ago, many of the results remain of interest.  One that stuck out for me is related to the last bullet point: when many of the subject groups were told that a high percentage of all climate scientists are in agreement that humans are contributing to climate change, the polarization between higher educated liberals and conservatives was reduced by nearly 50%.

These indications of how climate is perceived show that we’re far from having an informed public.  The fact is, people don’t really know what “climate change” is. Some ideas from philosophy and language theory have helped me understand why this is so.  Start with the fact that “climate change” is not a physical thing, like a tree or chair.  Rather, it’s a social construct, a term employed to reference a complex set of processes, occurring at many places and on different time scales, and jointly shared on the basis of shared assumptions.  Familiar examples of social constructs are “money”, “war”, or “human trafficking”.  Because such constructs are many-faceted, people don’t all have the same idea of what each one is. A man who served on desk duty in the Pentagon during World War II would have a different idea of “war” than a marine who’d gone ashore at Iwo Jima.

Nebraska has seen flooding before. It’s thus not obvious that a farming family in Nebraska experiencing flooding in 2018 would associate that event with a long-term trend of global scale when they know little of the underlying scientific consensus. How should ranchers in the southwest, where prolonged dry conditions are a natural part of life, view an especially dry spell? Records of the past based on ancient tree-rings indicate that at times the Southwest has experienced protracted droughts that lasted about 50 years, longer than the 1950s and 2000s droughts that caused economic losses to agriculture and ranching.  So it’s reasonable to ask whether we should look at recent weather patterns as symptomatic of climate change.  They may be, but historical records reveal that such episodes have occurred in the past.  As humans have multiplied and spread themselves over the planet, they’ve taken to living in places susceptible to episodic natural events: droughts, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, extreme heat. Sheer population increases guarantee that episodic occurrences in the future will result in a larger loss of life and greater damage to the built environment.  They’ll be talked and written about in relation to climate change, but will the public arrive at better understandings of how the planet is changing long-term?  

The legendary philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, wrote: “What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.” That idea has been expressed in many different ways: we see what we know.  When the farmer and his family experience flooding in Nebraska, they know it from family history as something seen before. Our challenge is to convey climate change in a way that people are encouraged to see episodic events as part of larger sweeping changes of global scale that will eventually override the shorter-term variations to produce irreversible secular change. 

Secular changes are long-term and unidirectional. Climate scientists are quite sure that some changes in climate experienced in recent times are appearing for the first time in what we might call “modern” human history, extending back say 100,000 to 200,000 years. For example, the oceans are warming; they haven’t been this warm since the last interglacial warm period, about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. That’s a secular change. Correspondingly ocean levels are higher than they have been since that long-ago period.  

Another secular change, a stark product of unprecedented warming, is shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap.  It is predicted that by mid-century it will disappear altogether during the summer months.  This is not an episodic event.  All the evidence suggests that the Arctic ice cap has been present year-round for the past 2.6 million years, long before there were any humans around to notice. Loss of Arctic ice has already produced noticeable year-by-year weather changes across the continents. More consequential changes are predicted to appear when the ice disappears altogether.

According to data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the average global temperature on Earth increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit) since 1880.  The Arctic, however, has warmed 4 or 5 times that much, producing the shrinkage of Arctic ice we’ve just noted. In recent decades the relatively warmer Arctic air has also warmed the permafrost, a permanently frozen layer below the Earth’s surface. Permafrost consists of soil, gravel, and sand, bound together by ice. It covers much of the northernmost land.

Some of it extends quite deeply and has been there for centuries. The world’s permafrost is estimated to hold 1,500 billion tons of carbon, much of it as methane.  That’s about double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. The more extended warming of the permafrost at deeper layers is a secular change, expected to cause releases of gases that will accelerate global warming.

The changes described in these examples are secular; long-term, consistent shifts with long-lasting effects. I believe that the best place to begin in communicating the reality of climate change is to talk about these big-picture, long-term, changes. For example, one could start with what scientists tell us about the oceans:  

·       Ocean levels are rising.  That secular change will lead to the disappearances of low-lying atolls in the south Pacific that have been inhabited for thousands of years, and by the end of the century will effectively inundate many coastal regions with large populations.

·       The ocean is warming. That secular change is producing episodic changes, such as more powerful hurricanes, and bleaching of coral reefs, which are vital to the ocean’s support of marine life.

·       The ocean is becoming more acidic because it’s absorbing the increasing amounts of atmospheric CO₂.  That secular shift is affecting living systems, such as marine creatures with shells.  

The key is to stress that the most salient naturally occurring events, the ones that grab our attention, are episodic—they come and go.  They’re dramatic when they show up, and we can expect that they’ll likely happen again.  The secular changes come on gradually. They don’t announce themselves as abrupt or traumatic, but they’re the causative agents for more powerful and frequent episodic events. The secular changes are the quiet, big ones already mentioned, and these:

·       increases in greenhouse gases that will cause continuing warming of the planet.

·        continuing acidification and warming in the oceans described above.

·        declines in freshwater resources.

·        loss of arable land.

·        declines in species diversity that will affect food production and the quality of the planet’s ecosystems.

These shifts and related declines in the natural world threaten our survival on Earth.  Some are so far along that there will be no escaping their effects, but we can work to mitigate the changes and plan on how to deal with them. To save humanity from the worst of what is to come, we have to focus intently on what scientists are telling us, and start acting.