Collide-a-scape

This article by Roger Webster, a South African historian, is intriguing on several levels. I was drawn in by this opening:

One of the many aspects of history and archaeology that fascinates me is that, in many respects, archaeology becomes the verifier, or the destroyer, of history.

Be sure to read it all the way through to the haunting poem about drought that closes the piece.

The indispensable Jeffrey Gettleman has a heart-wrenching dispatch on Dot Earth:

We walked through a camp for displaced people, absorbing the human wreckage all around us. There were stick-skinny children with horrible, rattling coughs that sounded like an old Chevy Nova trying to start up on a cold morning. Emaciated goats snacked on piles of garbage, filling their stretched bellies with nothing more nutritious than black plastic bags. Families of ten packed into sweltering lean-tos made from sticks and cloth, many of them fleeing either war or drought, Somalia’s twin killers that have sent more than 20 percent of the country’s population on the run.

Gettleman then surveys Somalia’s desperately parched conditions and notes that

even the camels are dying, which really frightens people, because camels can plod along for days on just a sip of water. They are the last animals to keel over in the desert and disappear into the sands.

Now here’s the passage that makes this latest chronicle of Somalia’s seemingly endless tragedy horribly complicated:

True, droughts are cyclical, and various studies suggest that Africa has experienced parched epochs before. But many people here these days believe the extreme dryness may be evidence of climate change and leaders in far-from-industrialized Africa, which produces just a tiny fraction of the world’s CO2, are increasingly saying that their countries are paying a high price for greenhouse gases that are raising global temperatures worldwide.

Next, Gettleman quotes Nicholas Wasunna, an aid official in Kenya, who obviously combines these cyclical droughts with greenhouse gas-induced climate change to conclude:

This is the new norm. We’re going to be see more of these periods of intense droughts followed by intense rain,

to which, Gettelman then writes, ” is the situation predicted for East Africa this year.”

Okay, right here–this gray zone, where failed states, such as Somalia, collide with natural cycles of drought and the exacerbating factor of anticipated climate change–is where environmental security experts should step up their game and weigh in with policy prescriptions. Yes, we know that this might be a case study of “climate security,” the kind that we’ll see arising in other politically unstable countries, which the CIA will now be examining more closely for our own national security purposes.

But if we know Somalia’s misery owes largely to its decades-long failed state status, an enduring human tragedy now compounded by a four-year drought, and perhaps worsening environmental conditions from global warming, well, what’s the foreign policy/humanitarian strategy for tackling all these disparate “forcing actions” in a coherent manner?

After all, it is presumed that the carbon load already in the atmosphere is going to lead to “irreversible climate change,” no matter what happens in the U.S. Congress or in Copenhagen this year. So what’s the environmental security game plan for Somalia and other countries like it?

The tragedy of Kenya’s latest drought is captured in all its complexity by Jeffrey Gettleman. His deeply contextual story won’t lend itself to climate advocates who’d probably like nothing better than to tag it as another cautionary tale of global warming.  As Gettleman explains,

The aid community here has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan government, paralyzed by infighting and political maneuvering, seemed to shrug off the warnings.

Even in the U.S., with its stable civil society, drought triggers recrimination and conflict over shrinking natural resources. In ethnically fractured Kenya, which still has not recovered from the violence set off by a discredited 2007 political election, here’s the simmering social boil that Gettleman attributes to the drought:

It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.

Kenya presents one of the most vexing cases for environmental security proponents, whose challenge is to demonstrate causal connections between environmental stresses (such as drought and resource depletion) and sociopolitical unrest. (This 2008 Gettleman story on Kenya’s ethnic divisions underscores that challenge.) Teasing out the dominant variables responsible for Kenya’s continuing decline seems impossible. That leaves us with a a more nuanced story of interconnected environmental, cultural, and political forces. Gettleman does this better than anyone with his reporting.

Still, I have this nagging sense that drought is an obvious tipping point all through history. Yet humans time and again seem surprised and ill-prepared when the rains don’t come.  These days, there’s much public discourse on sustainability and climate change; meanwhile, drought, which deserves more respect from policymakers and political scientists, is increasingly ghetto-ized in environmental debates as a subset of global warming.

Turkey is playing a high-stakes game with Iraq, using water to advance its national security interests. Will Rogers at the Natural Security blog has nicely sized up this fascinating new wrinkle–yet another example of the emerging nexus between between international relations and environmental resources:

If Turkey is successful in getting Iraq to crack down on Kurdish rebels along its southern border, it may set a precedent for Turkey to use water as leverage over Iraq. And unlike in this instance where water’s role as a carrot may help Turkey achieve a modicum of security from Kurdish attacks on Turkish infrastructure while benefiting the drought-stricken Iraqi people, Turkey could just as easily use its water resources as a stick to get Iraq to make concession it would not otherwise make. But in a fragile state like Iraq, playing politics with water may exacerbate existing grievances and foment more turmoil and violence; something to watch for.

The dominant framing of the water/drought issue in California is quite similar to that of the emerging climate change/developing world meme.

In California, drought is simplistically blamed for the state’s water woes and economic plight of farmers. Similarly, venerable authorities claim that climate change is responsible for 300,000 annual deaths and much misery in developing countries.

Neither storyline is accurate. Critical, countervailing narratives by reputable scholars are offered but largely ignored–not because they are wrong but because they don’t fit the dominant frame.

So in this sense, I’d say that Peter Gleick is to California’s supposed water/drought/misery connection as Roger Pielke Jr. is to the supposed climate change/disaster connection. Both have marshalled evidence and made arguments that challenge the respective storylines.

No matter. The dominant, false storylines drive the debate in the media and in policy and political circles. Go figure.

Hat tip for Gleick: Noah Buhayar at Environment Capital

This could get ugly.

(Hat Tip: John Fleck.)

Would climate change have greater urgency in the public mind if we started talking more about adaptation? I realize many climate advocates fear that such a discussion is a slippery slope to non-action.

But it needn’t be. In fact, I believe that more stories and chatter about the growing humanitarian concerns of near-term climate change fallout would help make climate change less abstract to people.  That said, it seems the lines of debate are already forming somewhere between this story from Reuters:

Climate change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half a million by 2030, a report said on Friday.

And this UN dispatch from Mozambique:

A detailed study of the effects of climate change on Mozambique has confirmed what many experts feared: unless immediate action is taken, the country will be overwhelmed by the impacts of cyclones, floods, droughts and disease outbreaks.

There are obvious problems with both storylines. The former is based on a new report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, which in today’s NYT, Roger Pielke Jr. calls a “methodological embarrasment.”  At Prometheus, Pielke expands on why he believes the report will end up being counterproductive. In short, he asserts:

The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.

As for the Mozambique story, I wonder how it will be possible to distinguish between natural weather disasters and those caused by climate change. When is a cyclone or drought triggered by climate change and when is it a naturally ocurring event?

As for global warming-induced disease outbreaks, that is a totally legitimate concern. As a recent lancet editorial pointed out,

there is a massive gap in information, an astonishing lack of knowledge about how we should respond to the negative health effects of climate change.

Somehow, I doubt the new report from the Global Humanitarian Forum is what Lancet had in mind. In the absence of solid data and better assessment, it seems the simplistic disaster storyline will prevail for some time.

There’s a mind-bending exchange between climate scientists and policy experts on Dot Earth that many should find fascinating.

Or not.

Apsmith over at Daily Kos has tried to unravel how Michael Tobis got himself top billing on a recent Glenn Beck show.

Because I pop up (somewhat mysteriously–”who is Keith Kloor?”) as one of the culpable parties, I feel it’s important to correct some of his misleading inferences. I wanted to leave a comment on his post but because I’m not registered at the site, it would take 24 hours for the comment to be approved.

First, since many readers of this blog are just becoming familiar with me, well, who am I?

I’m a magazine journalist who has focused largely on environmental and archaeological topics. (A full representation of my work, including links, will soon be available on this blog.)

From 2000 to 2008 I was an editor at Audubon Magazine. It’s a small staff and I’m proud of my work there. Great people too. In addition to my editing responsibilities, I also wrote numerous stories for the magazine. During this period, as well as before I was at Audubon, I have written for various publications, ranging from Smithsonian to Science.

My favorite environmental magazine (partially because I love the Southwest) is High Country News, and I’m honored to now write for them as well.

I’m also an adjunct professor at New York University, where for the last four years  I have taught magazine writing to both undergraduates and graduates in the journalism program.

Currently, I’m spending an academic year at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as one of five Ted Scripps Fellows at the Center for Environmental Journalism. My project is on drought and prehistoric cultures in the Southwest.

Now, as to some of the sinister connections inferred by apsmith:

It’s true that Roger Pielke Jr. is a political scientist at the the University of Colorado, where I’m a Fellow. But until two weeks ago I had never met Roger or had any exchanges with him. I did, however, attend a AAAS panel four or five years ago, where Roger gave a climate change-related presentation.

My criticism of alarmist, over-the-top rhetoric by environmentalists made its first appearance in this blog several weeks ago, when I started taking potshots at Joe Romm. (See here and here.) Soon after that, Michael Tobis uttered his unfortunate comments during an exchange with Roger Pielke, Jr, on his blog, which I noted here.

What’s been interesting to me is that the majority of blog comments I’ve received in the wake of all this controversy have related to Roger Pielke Jr. Nearly all of them have come from environmentalists who have cast aspersions on Roger’s motives and characater.

Roger has a well-established record of engaging his critics on blogs, so it’s no surprise that Roger has tried to answer the many criticisms leveled at him on this blog. I give him a lot of credit for doing so.

Because I’m deeply interested in the relationship between drought and how it has affected prehistoric societies, I’m also interested in climate change. As it happens, archaeologist Brian Fagan has recently published a nice book called The Great Warming, examining the role of drought in the collapse of ancient civilizations. I recommend it for anyone interested in the topic.

I mention this because any future societal impacts resulting form anthropogenic climate change are currently uncertain. We can speculate on all sorts of worst-case scenarios, and that’s legitimate. I happen to believe that if we continue on our present course of greenhouse gas buildup, we increase the likelihood of experiencing extreme weather events. That will undoubtedly lead to great human tragedies and increased geopolitical instability.

There should be a vigorous debate on all this. But I object to the over-heated and hypberbolic rehetoric that has dominated the discouse (from both sides of the political spectrum) these last two weeks.

This absurd post by Joseph Romm, in which he accuses The New York Times of “media malpractice” due to supposed errant climate change coverage in several recent stories, reveals a doctrinaire mindset on the relationship between global warming and natural disasters that is becoming all too common in environmentalists.

Romm is ticked off because, among other things, this front-page Times piece on California’s drought didn’t mention human-induced climate change as a “likely” factor and that another Times piece on Australia’s catastrophic fires (”Australia Police Confirm Arson Role in Wildfires”) was improperly headlined.  Regarding the latter, let’s remember that straight news coverage of major disasters tend to highlight the newsiest developments of the moment. To Romm, though, the Times headline was a missed opportunity:

Apparently, the editors believe that blaming individual bad guys is the best way to frame the story, not blaming us all for all our contribution to human-caused global warming.

So let me get this straight: Australia’s tragic fires shouldn’t be pinned on arson, or bad fire managment, or recent settlement patterns, or least of all, parched conditions resulting from cyclical drought, but rather all of humanity?

Romm is particularly histrionic over the Caifornia drought story (”Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California”) that appeared on Monday. The Times reporter, Jesse McKinley, writes that:

The country’s biggest agricultural engine, California’s sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.

To Romm, there is nothing “unlucky” about this drought. As he rightly points out, California is experiencing a record drop in snowpack and rainfall. But it is also true that California has a long history of severe, periodic droughts, some of which McKinley informs readers of later in his piece. Romm never acknowledges this larger perspective in his post. Instead, he claims there is “abundant science” that shows the currently reduced snowpack and rainfall to be “precisely what we would expect from human-caused climate change…”

Not exactly. There is good science and legitimate concern that climate change will exacerbate Western droughts this century–but no smoking gun for this particular drought.

That’s not to say McKinley’s story couldn’t have been leavened with a forward-looking graph on climate change and projected linkages to future California droughts.

Somehow, though, I doubt this would have satisfied Romm, who lately sees climate change behind every wildfire, drought and heat wave.

In his latest rant, Romm seems to argue that any story on extreme weather should amount to a story on climate change:

In the past, I think the media and scientists felt they had to bend over backwards not to attribute any single weather event 100 percent to human-caused global warming — but today there is no excuse whatsoever for a senior reporter at a major newspaper not reporting that what is occurring now is precisely what climate science has been predicting would happen.

Better yet, Romm advises, why even bother with mainstream newspaper reporters, when

if you want to find the best journalism now on climate — the most science-based, the most fact-based, the most integrated and comprehensive, the most relevant to your lives and the lives of your children and the people you care about and indeed all of humanity — you must go to the web, specifically the blogosphere.

I’m down with that. I just wouldn’t advise anyone to seek out Joe Romm as your fact-based, truth-seeking guide.