Collide-a-scape

Via Matthew Nisbet, I read this NPR transcript from a show discussing the recent Pew poll that had climate advocates wringing their hands in disbelief. The NPR conversation between Pew’s Andrew Kohut and Yale researcher Anthony Lieserowitz is a worthwhile read for anyone who seriously wants to engage with those poll results.

The bottom line: concern about climate change has lessened– at this juncture– because of the economy, the weather (perhaps that cool summer), and Marc Morano, probably in that order of significance. (Nobody points to Morano, specifically, but if you read the transcript, you’ll see that part of the blame for that waning public concern is attributed to the “well amplified message” of the “climate-change-dismissive community,” which makes me wonder if I underestimated the power of that when I wrote this.)

Anyway, I’m just giving the main thrust I gleaned from the NPR transcript.  Read it for yourself. I bet you’ll find it illuminating.

This Jon Stewart interview with Superfreaks co-author Steven Levitt will surely make Joe Romm et al reach for their Rolaids. Stewart doesn’t merely play it down the middle–he defends Levitt.

Roger Pielke Jr. highlights the one quote that will no doubt earn Stewart daggers from environmentalists.

But for me, what Stewart said in reference to the book’s controversy was more in tune with my own perspective on this and all other environmental issues:

Why does it have to be so dogmatic?

Guess what? Your dog is part of a carbon emissions, greenhouse gas factory. I can only imagine the horror my crunchy green, dog-loving friends in Boulder, Colorado, will feel when they read this post at High Country News.

For the record, no pets in my household, thanks to wicked allergies on both sides of the family.

My Tuesday post at Nature’s Climate Feedback is up.

Be very scared, argues Robin Cook, in this essay in the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign policy. Somebody, he says, needs to write a gripping, mega-selling novel to

shake up the complacent public about the high risk of an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don’t mean the much-publicized swine flu. While the world media has obsessed, and rightfully so, about this fast-spreading illness, I’m worried about the next crisis, something much deadlier and much more catastrophic, indeed the kind of crisis most people wrongly believe could not happen in this day and age. If I were the author, this urgently needed novel would have to be called Plague.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m generally not a fan of scare tactics. But if Cook has his history of the 14th century Black Death correct–and I think he does–then yeah, maybe the right kind of novel or movie might be necessary to jar us out of our complacency. And if not, well, anyone know where Cook’s well-stocked ski cottage is?

The NYT has a nice round-up of perspectives on this recent Pew poll, which finds:

There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising.

I tend to think this poll is more a snapshot in time. We’re still in a major economic downturn, as Pew research director Andrew Kohut alluded to in this AP story:

The priority that people give to pollution and environmental concerns and a whole host of other issues is down because of the economy and because of the focus on other things. When the focus is on other things, people forget and see these issues as less grave.

Then again, this is a fascinating picture from a war zone. It suggests that some people who have good reason to be distracted from enviromental issues are still focusing on global warming as a major concern.

Noting this positive profile of Andy Revkin on NPR, a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s suggests there’s an upside to Limbaugh’s recent drive-by:

Rush’s listeners were reading Revkin prior to his attack, but this NPR-listener is going to check out his blog. Well done Rush: You just gave Revkin a few thousand more readers.

I noticed that Joe Romm found the NPR profile useful too, with this recent headline at Climate Progress:

No wonder polling shows more people don’t know the scientific evidence that humans are warming the Earth has grown stronger. Revkin stunner on NPR: “I’ve made missteps. I’ve made probably more mistakes this year in my print stories than I had before.”

Clever conflation there.

My Friday post for Nature’s Climate Feedback is up.

Is the Copenhagen climate treaty doomed? In the November/December issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Bruce Bueno De Mesquite, a political scientist from New York University uses computer modeling in game theory to predict that,

Despite the hoopla, the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen is destined to fail. Here’s what will happen instead: Over the next several decades, world leaders will embrace tougher emissions standards than those proposed-and mostly ignored-in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. But real support for tougher regulations will fall. By midcentury, the mandatory emissions standards in place will be well below those set at Kyoto, a far cry from the targets for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases set to be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen. And by the time 2100 rolls around, the political will for tougher regulations will have dried up almost completely. The reasons are many, but come down to this: Today’s emerging powerhouses like Brazil, India, and China simply won’t stand for serious curbs on their emissions, and the pro-regulation crowd in the United States and Europe won’t be strong enough to force their hands.

You scoff?  Don’t bet against the good professor, who has done work for the U.S. State Department, multinational corporations, and even environmental NGO’s.  De Bueono boasts:

According to a declassified CIA assessment, the predictions for which I’ve been responsible over the years have a 90 percent accuracy rate.

It’s soooo interesting when science and ethics collide. Especially when Nature is involved. Thanks to environmental historians like William Cronon and Stephen Pyne, and ecologists such as Emily Russell, we know that humans have been manipulating nature for a long, long time. It’s not as if we suddenly learned how to live in a fetid swamp like South Florida or the scorching desert of Phoenix, Arizona. Even the Amazon, that mythical icon of untrammeled nature for anthropologists and environmentalists alike, has recently been revealed as an entirely manufactured landscape in prehistory, one that supported a highly engineered and urban metropolis.

The field of environmental ethics, like environmentalism, and until recently, ecology, has not really engaged with this world-wide anthropogenic landscape history. The reason for this is an enduring (and false) dualism that humans and nature are separate: humans live in a world of their own making and nature, if left alone, exists in an exalted, pristine state. This mindset is rather ironic now, in light of the whole climate debate, which flows from the fact that humans have radically manipulated the earth’s governing climate–and by extension, the whole of nature, from the rain forest to ice caps.

So now that we’ve got this debate on geoengineering underway, I find it curious that Ben Hale, an environmental ethicist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder (and someone who I respect highly), tells us why we should forgo manipulating the climate to undo the damage we’ve done:

The problem is that we ought not to exert such control over our climate, even if we can do so with extreme precision.  Doing so introduces incredibly complex moral problems that we can hardly begin to fathom.

The first problem with that statement is that we already exert sway over the climate. Why is it not reasonable to consider exerting a different kind of sway with “extreme precision” if that helps us improve the climate? As Michael Tobis wrote recently,

But what of geoengineering solutions? I am not in the least averse to using whatever tools we can bring to bear to manage the situation on the way to some sort of sustainability…

In fairness, Tobis also says there are “different classes” of geoengineering solutions that need to be distinguished. Fine. I’m down with that. At least he’s open to them.

Leaving aside the many questions that remain about the scientific merits of geoengineering, what of Hale’s moral argument against it? What is this Pandora’s Box of “incredibly complex moral problems that we can hardly begin to fathom”? Is it that we shouldn’t be fiddling with nature on such a grand scale? Well, as I’ve pointed out above, we humans have already done so all throughout our history. Why should this be any different?

Now, just to be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of geoengineering. All I’m trying to get at is why it should be precluded, since we already manipulate everything everything else on this earth, from species to ecosystems. Yes, there are scientific reservations that need to be addressed. And there are major political and economic obstacles as well. But I don’t understand the moral misgivings that Ben has expressed. Perhaps he can lay them out more precisely.

Update: Ben Hale obliges here.