Collide-a-scape

Population has long been the third rail of environmental discourse. So while a lot of people are rightly incredulous at Rush Limbaugh’s ugly rant against Andy Revkin’s suggestion that people should perhaps be rewarded for having less children, I can’t say that I’m all that shocked by it. Really.

First of all, this is Limbaugh being Limbaugh. He’s addicted to being outlandish and offensive. In the same segment he suggested that Revkin help reduce population on the planet by committing suicide, Limbaugh also offered this gem on Obama and his team:

Can you think of any other administration in this country where a president or a communications specialist or anybody else would run around and start praising Mao Zedong as a role model, as a philosopher to follow?

But more to the point, millions of religious conservatives have a gag reflex to this hypothetical idea by Revkin:

Should you get credit — if we’re going to become carbon-centric — for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three.

Revkin is to be lauded for being willing to pose this “thought experiment.” As a long-time environmental journalist, he’s surely aware of the inflamed passions–from both the left and right side of the political spectrum– that often seems to overtake any discussion on population issues.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to soft pedal what Limbaugh said. It was despicable. In fact, I thought Tom Yulsman captures the disgust felt by many, myself included, with this post.

On a related note, I should say that I find myself in agreement with Joe Romm on the supposed connection between climate change and overpopulation–which he believes is a misdirection. And I think he’s right on that score. I also happen to think that George Monbiot got it mostly right with this recent piece on the issue.

That’s the name of a new twice-weekly feature that I just started writing for Nature’s great blog, Climate Feedback. My first post appeared yesterday, and you can look for them regularly on Tuesdays and Fridays in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference.

The posts will survey topical storylines and noteworthy news of the week related to the climate science/policy/politics/media nexus.

Over my cornflakes this morning I was mulling this comment by Deltoid’s Tim Lambert, which he left in response to my criticism yesterday of Joe Romm, who is on the hot seat for claiming

It is exceedingly common in regular journalism to ask people for a quote that makes a very specific point — I’ve been asked many times by reporters to do similar things.

Now, before I address Lambert’s astonishing comment, let’s remind readers what Romm first told Stanford’s Ken Caldiera, whom Romm was seeking a specific quote from, relating to Caldiera’s controversial role in the Superfreakonomics book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. As detailed by Dubner on his NYT blog, Romm explained his motivation thus in an email to Caldeira:

I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance.

Not enough has been said about that. I’m returning to it, because in his response to me, Lambert is obviously approving of such behavior, because he writes:

I think Romm was refreshingly honest.

This just blows my mind. It would be one thing if Romm said to Caldeira, I want to refute Dubner and Levitt, or I want to repudiate them.

But no, Romm says he wants to trash them. That’s plainly out of bounds. That’s not how reputable journalists operate–we don’t set out to deliberately trash people. Yet Lambert finds this “refresingly honest.” No, Tim, this is trash journalism.

Update, Oct 21: Romm still can’t bring himself to admit he erred:

Given the circumstances, I don’t think I did anything wrong.

After being caught feeding a scientist a quote, Joe Romm impugns my profession with this rationalization (emphasis added):

It is exceedingly common in regular journalism to ask people for a quote that makes a very specific point — I’ve been asked many times by reporters to do similar things.

I’ve never done this during my career as a magazine journalist. I don’t know any magazine writer that would do such a thing. Perhaps it happens in the newspaper world, but I’d be shocked if it occurs in the the way Romm suggests.

At any rate, one of Romm’s constant themes at Climate Progress is that the mainstream media is incompetent and unscrupulous when it comes to climate reporting. Well, feeding a source a quote is a serous breach of journalistic ethics. At NYU, where I’ve been an adjunct journalism professor, I couldn’t imagine telling a student this was acceptable behavior. In fact, in the five years I’ve taught classes there, I can’t recall when a student has even asked if this was acceptable behavior. I mean, it just feels wrong to do that kind of thing.

So now I’m tempted to go back and look at stories that Romm’s been quoted in, say, the last year, and ask those journalists if they ever fed Romm a quote. I suspect that Romm is trying to rationalize his own behavior with the kind of lazy practice that perhaps happened with regularity in a past era–maybe even at the Times Herald Record in the 1960s and 1970s, which is where Romm first learned all about journalism, when his parents were at the helm of that Hudson Valley paper. But I wouldn’t want to impugn his parents’ legacy or that paper’s reputation with such an accusation. Maybe I’ll just call up some old friends who worked at that fine paper in recent years and see if it was “exceedingly common” for them to feed sources quotes when they reported their stories.

Update: Romm is blaming the ruckus over his journalistic impropriety on Marc Morano, Roger Pielke, Jr., and of course, Stephen Dubner. He’s also doubling down on his defense:

Yes, I did ask him [Caldiera] to put in his own words a quote stating that the Superfreaks had misrepresented his views — because I knew very well that they had based on my previous emails with him (and my reading of his work and having heard him talk).  It is exceedingly common in regular journalism to ask people for a quote that makes a very specific point — I’ve been asked many times by reporters to do similar things.

Man, Romm really learned the wrong lessons from his parents. But here’s the latest rationalization that is worth noting, which he offers in response to a reader comment:

I have sat in interviews with leading journalists — famous ones — where they ask me the same question in slightly different form literally 8 times to try to get me to say precisely what they want me to say. I didn’t do that here at all.

You know what, I can believe part of this–the part where a journalist asks the same question in “slightly different form” numerous times–because I’ve done it, and I’m certain that many journalists have done it as well. But it’s not because we want to elicit a specific point or even a sound bite. It’s because many scientists tend to talk in jargon and honest journalists, without trying to put words in a scientist’s mouth, simply try to coax a more reader-friendly interpretation of a study or policy.

I’ve never asked a question eight consecutive times, but I have, on occasion, asked variations of the same question two or three times to a scientist. Ask any science journalist and I bet they’d own up to the same thing. Nothing nefarious there, no attempt to get the scientist to say something to advance a writer’s political or ideological agenda, just an honest attempt to get the scientist to speak in a language that my mother can understand. Anyway, nice try, Joe.

Michael Tobis is to be applauded for being open to the idea of geoengineering,  but he’s delusional if he thinks the climate activist community is also open to it. In my post yesterday, I argued that, for climate activists,

any discussion of climate adaptation is an unwelcome distraction from the debate at hand on mitigation. Why there isn’t room for both discussions to occur beats me.

Tobis says this is a RPJr-ism and

really a very half-baked way of thinking about the [climate] problem. Forcing things under that rubric is simply a distortion.

Now I have no idea what an RPJr-ism is, much less whether I’m guilty of such a thing. Perhaps Tobis or one of Roger’s fans in the climate activist community can define this term for me?

But to the matter at hand, let me direct Tobis back to the same quote from 2020Science that he references. It’s a commentary on the recent Royal Society report on geoengineering, and this is the response that 2020Science predicted (emphasis added):

I suspect that, like most climate change-related reports these days, “Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty” will have ideologues on both sides of the aisle up in arms.  It dares to consider the option of actively engineering the climate on a planetary scale to curb the impacts of global warming, and advocates further research into geoengineering.  In doing so, it will no doubt simultaneously enrage deniers of anthropogenic climate change, and those who fervently maintain that technological fixes are not the solution to the consequences of humanity’s excesses.

The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers.

More proof that environmentalists can’t chew gum and talk about climate adaptation at the same time comes in this post from David Roberts at Grist.

The cognitive dissonance from this crowd continues to amaze me. As we learned earlier this year, the carbon load already in the atmosphere is projected to lead to irreversible climate change for the next millennium:

Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450–600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise.

With all due respect to Bill McKibben’s noble cause, respectable scientists believe we should prepare for life beyond that catchy 350 number. Real environmental journalism outlets (as opposed to activist clearinghouses) find it reasonable to have this discussion.

The irony is that Roberts posts a set of global land use & ecological impact graphs to make his point that geoengineering won’t save humanity from all the upward trends in the graphs. So if every ecological and climate indicator demonstrates that the earth is becoming less livable because of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and other global land uses, then is it realistic to take geoengineering off the table just because someone like Richard Branson makes a glib and simplistic statement like this:

If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.

I suspect that what really bugs Roberts about this is the inference in the latter part of the comment that we could carry on with our carbon-intensive lives if only we could suck all that nasty CO2 out of the atmosphere. Fair enough. I can respect that.

But the truth is that no matter happens at Copenhagen and in the U.S. Congress, some type of adaptation measures will be necessary. Roberts is a very smart guy, and I know he’s capable of chewing gum and talking about climate adaptation at the same time. The fact that he doesn’t want to likely results from his belief–which is shared widely by climate activists–that any discussion of climate adapation is an unwelcome distraction from the debate at hand on mitigation. Why there isn’t room for both discussions to occur beats me.

I have an upcoming story in the Nov/Dec issue of Archaeology magazine that will perhaps generate some controversy among Southwestern archaeologists. (It’s called “Who were the Anasazi?”)  The piece explores Navajo claims to ancient Puebloan sites in Chaco Canyon and other famous prehistoric ruins in the Four Corners region. My story also discusses a wealth of new Navajo archaeological sites discovered outside Farmington, New Mexico in the last 15 years (courtesy of a big natural gas project).

As some people have already mentioned to me, the Nov/Dec print issue of Archaeology is already on newstands and arriving in subscriber mailboxes. But it won’t be online until the end of this month or on Dec 1. Thus, until I can actually link to the story, I’m going to hold off on posting about it. But I will have much to say about it then. So too, I understand, will several science journalists and archaeology bloggers be writing about it. I’m glad to hear that, because although the story focuses on the Navajo, it speaks to a number of larger issues smoldering in SW archaological circles.

That’s the title of a fantastic piece by Chris Turner in the October issue of The Walrus, a Canadian magazine. He turns the typical environmental tale of crisis on its head, suggesting that,

We need a new kind of story, a new template for our ecological philosophy — one that acknowledges what we have lost and the emerging limits of what can be saved, but does not lament. To borrow the terminology of the linguist George Lakoff, we must first change the frame.

To do that, the author argues, we have to acknowledge that we are living in the Anthropocene epoch.

Turner’s story is one of the best examples of long-form environmental journalism that I’ve seen in years. An array of topics are crosscut: discussions of climate change, ocean acidification, the imminent death of the Great Barrier Reef, geo-engineering, sustainable communities, the history of scuba-diving, and a compelling, new ecological concept called resilience science.

That new branch of ecological science seeks to bridge both nature’s and society’s needs. It recognizes that complexity is inherent and change a constant. As Turner describes it,

Resilience embraces change as the natural state of being on earth. It values adaptation over stasis, diffuse systems over centralized ones, loosely interconnected webs over strict hierarchies. If the Anthropocene is the ecological base condition of twenty-first-century life and sustainability is the goal, or bottom line, of a human society within that chaotic ecology, then resilience might be best understood as the operating system..that encourages sustainability in this rapidly changing epoch.

Until last year, I was an editor for nearly a decade at Audubon magazine, America’s premier environmental magazine.  During that time, a common theme–almost a guiding philosophy–was to produce stories that at least gave people hope for a better future, instead of hammering a relentless narrative of degradation and destruction. I credit David Seideman, the editor-in-chief, for that piece of editorial guidance. He grew up with Audubon Magazine as a child, is an unabashed environmentalist but also a history buff. And he knew enough about that depressing environmental narrative (which had its place in the 1960s and 1970s) to realize that Audubon readers had grown weary of it by the 2000s.

True, plenty of stories in environmental magazines, including Audubon, still celebrate the innate wonders and beauty of nature. But the dark flipside always seems to be imminent or irreparable loss, usually because of some human action.  What Seideman did–and is still doing with a great team at Audubon–is is to focus the magazine more on how to fix longstanding environmental problems. (Trust me, this was no easy feat during George W. Bush’s two terms.) A shining example of this is the latest issue, which includes a special feature on green design.

But if I were creating an environmental magazine from scratch today, I would cede the “lament” and “inspirational” narratives to my colleagues and use the twin concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene as my foundation. Combined, these two concepts offer more than a rhetorical frame–they suggest the makings of a new paradigm, one that provides the “operating system” to grapple with the world’s increasing complexity and fragility.

If the science of resilience has arrived to guide us, then the stories showing us how should follow.

H/T: Resilience Science

Do leading Democrats and enviros want a climate change bill so bad that they are being snookered by Republicans? Absolutely, argues Roger Pielke, Jr:

The take over of climate policy by the Republican agenda is the most over-looked aspect of this entire debate. Perhaps those covering the horse race can’t see the forest for the trees.

He’s referring specifically to the public land and offshore gas drilling concessions that Dems are eager to offer up. Roger then wonders

what will happen if drilling in ANWR were to become an explicit part of the climate bill negotiations? Are left-leaning Democrats willing to give that away in silence as well?

That aint gonna happen, Roger. ANWR is an environmental totem, too important symbolically to surrender. During the previous eight years, the Bush Administation played a smart game of bait & switch, suckering mainstream enviros into expending all their political capitol on saving ANWR while vast tracts of Western public lands in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah got carved up by gas drillers. Yeah, enviros put up a token fight, but they would have laid down their lives for ANWR, and the Bush team knew it.

Paul Roberts, in his 2004 book The End of Oil (which I reviewed here), noted a similar dynamic with respect to ANWR and fuel efficiency legislation:

Political strategists have long known that the Arctic Wilderness carried a far higher emotional impact among voters than does for fuel efficiency: even environmentally minded Americans would much rather save polar bears than conserve gallons of gasoline, and this is true even among the membership of big national environmental groups. Political strategists also know that many moderate members of Congress–the so called swing block–feel they can vote “green” on perhaps one big issue a year without offending their more conservative constituents and colleagues.

In sum, I’d be shocked if big Enviros handed over ANWR in exchange for a climate bill. They won’t go that far. Their memberships wouldn’t allow it.

UPDATE:  I should have noted that Roger realizes this as well, because he also wrote near the end of his post:

If Republicans want to blow up the bill, they probably just have to press loudly for this  [ANWR] provision.

That’s the title of today’s column by John Fleck over at the Albuquerque Journal. What I really like about this piece is that the focus is on ecosystem services, which to me, seems firmer ground to build this concept on, rather than the climate security link.

Via Fleck, we learn that a federal laboratory is actively working on the interplay between ecological and national security issues, so there’s something happening beyond the think tanks and U.N conferences otherwise engaged with the environmental security issue. Here’s the money quote from Fleck’s column:

Failing ecosystems and the decline of ecosystem services at regional and global scales pose a long-term threat to U.S. national security as great as the more conventional threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and war.