The elevator speech (climate crisis)

From my Dot Earth posting:

A stalled-elevator speech is too improbable, but opportunities for a one-minute speech happen every day so that you can get in practice for a 40-story ride with someone influential:
—–

"Wouldn’t mind the bad weather so much except [time this for elevator liftoff] for that sinking feeling that the climate is shifting fast.

We’ve already had 50 years of more and more wildfires, and on every continent. Same thing for major floods. Probably windstorm damage as well. That’s climate change, not just bad weather moving around.

And it looks as if permanent drought is going to make the poor Mediterranean into a dust bowl. Same thing for Perth, Cape Town, and southern California. The tropics are expanding, just as the earliest climate models said they would.

Just imagine what will happen when all the students and young professionals finally realize that it’s their future that is being trashed.

And some of the changes, in retrospect, have been a sudden step up, the way worldwide drought stepped up during the big 1982 El Niño. Unusual dryness went from 15% of all land to 25% and stayed there. It has gone to 35% but come back down to 25. Maybe not, next time.

We’ve had three of those really big El Ninos now: 1972, 1982, 1997. At that rate, we’re about due for another.

And the real danger with a big one is fire. Judging by how dried-out the Amazon was at the end of the last mega-Nino, a longer one could kill off the rain forest, real fast. Our CO2 excess would pop up by 40% and our problems even more.

All that from just one event. And without all those leaves, the routine carbon emissions do 50% more damage each year. Nasty trend, real nasty even if we don’t get a uncontrollable runaway.

One thing clear from the climate models is that we don’t have a lot of time, with the next ten years being crucial. You don’t solve such a big problem quickly with new light bulbs.

We’ve got to act as we would on the eve of a great war, turning on a dime as we did in 1941. And the politicians who can pull this off are going to be heros, just like those guys that pulled off the American Revolution in 1776."

—-
Too bad I didn’t invent this speech in time to slip it into my book, out in April: Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (University of Chicago Press, a mere $22.50).

William H. Calvin is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
http://Global-Fever.org

•  I'll probably get killed for saying this, but...

  I think the global warming frame has outlived its usefulness.  

  We need to take the battle away from whether consensus exists on climate change (of course it does) and center it on whichever arguments achieve the desired effect.  The stakes are too high to get caught in a pissing match.

  We can argue this on multiple fronts.  Energy independence might bring more conservatives on board.  Let them think they are sticking it to the Muslim world by luying less gas.  I don't care why they do it.

  At the end of the day, the elevator speech is this:

  "What bad can come from reducing pollution?  Whether you think there is a debate on how dangerous the current situation is or not - what if you are wrong?"

  It is that simple.  We ought not get bogged down trying to make them agree.  Just get them to act.

  by snout on Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 07:02:39 AM PDT

  •  I (somewhat) agree

    I'm not for abandoning a focus on climate change as motivation for doing something, since it's necessary to look at climate change to arrive at correct solutions. To use your example, focusing only on reducing dependence on foreign oil suggests using locally available energy resources as a substitue, and one of those is coal. That's not a real solution either.

    However I do agree that discussing many of the problems that cause or result from climate change is at the same time discussing problems that need solution whether climate change is real or not. Dependence on foreign oil, problems with the condition of forests and wildfire, water shortages, and a lot of environmental issues will be made worse by global warming, but they'd be problems that desperately need remedy without global warming.

    I think a viable political strategy would focus as much on those problems independent of climate, while at the same time recognizing the need to deal with climate change as part of the solution to those problems.

    by badger on Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 10:17:25 AM PDT

•  My argument:

  If we can spend a trillion dollars on Iraq based on there being "even just a 1% chance that Saddam has WMD" (Cheney's favorite excuse), then why can't we spend a trillion dollars shifting to an independent, non-hydrocarbon based energy economy even if there's only a 1% chance that Global Warming is real and human-caused?

  by sxwarren on Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 07:36:06 AM PDT

•  Dr. Calvin ---

  I'm impressed to be reading a diary by you on dKos, and I hope you'll keep posting (and also interact in the comments sections). I've spent some time at your website, and read some of your older books online there (highly recommended). It was also the first place I heard of Dr. Lakoff - well before anyone here became familiar with him and his books. I even bought a copy of your A Brief History of the Mind and loved it.

  However, as a fellow WA State resident, I live on the east side of the Cascades, and live through months without rain and  with the threat of fire every summer. Having researched the topic of wildfire a little, I think you're off-track somewhat.

  First. climate change is already here and what's going to happen to forests globally is already taking place, so reducing CO2 now isn't going to prevent fires (there are obviously other important reasons to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but this probably isn't one any longer).

  Besides futility, framing forest and wildfire problems in terms of global warming detracts from efforts to restore forests and reintroduce fire into forest ecosystems, which is necessary for their sustainability in many places. That turns out to be necessary to reduce CO2 emissions from wildfires as well.

  For example, in your book (which I haven't seen), there's a good probability you've cited the 2006 paper by people from Scripps and other places - none of whom have significant expertise in wildfire or even forest ecosystems - which purports to show a relationship between climate and fire. Besides being a very poorly done paper, if you read the early paragraphs carefully, they frame the issue in terms of restoration versus climate change, which is exactly the wrong point of view in my opinion.

  So without making this book length (or at least diary length), I'm disappointed to see you frame climate change in terms of fire in this way. Unforunately, I don't think it's a supportable point of view, and even if it were, it's a point of view being used to distract from the real, necessary solutions to the problem.

  by badger on Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 10:10:23 AM PDT

  •  I can't follow the logic of this comment.

    Yes, there have already been fires that can be attributed to rising temps, and yes, fires have been overly contained and do contribute to natural forest growth, but to say that fire is not a concern related to global warming doesn't follow from those observations. The rest seems to be personal opinion, like to frame the issue in terms of restoration cersus climate change is the wrong point of view. Habitat restoration is a vital ingredient in slowing global warming, along with a global mobilization to drastically reduce fossil fuel combustion and change how we live on earth. How is that wrong?

    The problem I see is how to approach and motivate the masses who are fearful of "others" and blindly obedient to fear-mongering authorities, and this diary tries to address that problem.

    Where I work and in my family are many followers of the "hoax" hoax. In the typical situation you can argue and get angry and that results in the topic becoming off limits while the same blind obedience to denial persists. It takes refined social skill to maneuver through the thickets of naysayers in a time of unprecedented urgency. My analogy is that we are all on a train that is headed over a cliff. There are a few of us looking out the window of empirical observation and can see it coming, but most of us are partying and paying themselves in the club car or fear-mongering against fantasized evils and fighting each other to the death, either to amass riches and power or to attain religious trancendence of death, to achieve life eternal in a heavenly paradise. So denying global warming is a small matter by comparison.

    But just where do you start trying to explain all this to the guys at work who say it's just a big hoax and don't want to look at facts? I don't know how to do that.

    Here are my Top ten ways to slow or reverse global warming.

    by howardfromUSA on Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 10:36:51 AM PDT

    •  The explanation

      probably requires a diary or more, and that isn't something I have time to do at the moment, although I plan to get around to it eventually.

      Here's the money quote from the article I referenced:

      If increased wildfire risks are driven primarily by land-use history, then ecological restoration and fuels management are potential solutions. However, if increased risks are largely due to changes in climate during recent decades, then restoration and fuels treatments may be relatively ineffective in reversing current wildfire trends

      It's saying exactly the opposite of what you recognize (and what I agree with) in your first paragraph. The attitude has become "global warming causes fires", which is tenuous at best (global warming might make fires more probable, but climate is only one factor affecting wildfire occurrance and not a 'cause' - although even that isn't completely correct depending on the weather).

      It's more correct, IMO, to say that fires cause global warming - are a significant contributor of greenhouse gases - and that suggests a different set of solutions, among which is ecosystem restoration. Reducing atmospheric CO2 doesn't improve forest health of make forests less prone to destructive fires.

      As to convincing skeptics, I don't know that I have an answer to that, but I don't think faulty science is likely to be the answer, or that strategies which minimize, ignore, or even perpetuate other environmental problems (and yes, there are other problems besides climate change) are a good choice.

      by badger on Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 01:03:32 PM PDT