“This is not an act of God. This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”
Washington Governor Jay Inslee
The air quality in Seattle is "unhealthy" with a particulate count of 194. In Medford, Oregon today and yesterday it was "hazardous" at a count of 323 now and 334 yesterday.
The air is startling. Not only can you see it and smell it, it hurts to breathe it.
It is actually much worse in Salem, Oregon. There the index is 519. It is "beyond the index."
Americans generally believe in "climate science," but not fully. There are other frames. Democrats--90% of them--
generally believe what Inslee is saying. Republicans are not so sure.
There is a basis for skepticism. Climate is complicated, with feedback loops and mitigations. It isn't just a linear direction of more CO2 meaning more heat. California's Governor is on CNN as I write, saying that climate change is making dry areas drier, but also wet areas wetter, that it varied. Some scientists say warmer temperatures will increase water vapor in the air, deflecting more sunlight, so, actually, extra CO2 won't increase temperatures. Some Republican officeholders assert is all just catastrophic thinking, alarmism, to push through a socialist agenda, because, once thing are all figured in, human activity cancels itself out.
People can think that maybe it is volcanos or the variable radiation of the sun that changes climate. Or maybe it is the cycles of the earth's tilt. Climate has unquestionably changed on its own, both over the eons but also in human historical time. Six thousand years ago the monsoon patterns were different for some reason, and the Sahara desert got rainfall. What is now the driest place on earth had palm trees and rivers. Elephants need lush vegetation to survive, and their bones are testament to the fact that they thrived there. Whatever caused such a giant change was something other than humans.
There is reason for doubt. Maybe the scientists are godless and denying the actual force leading human events; maybe they are corrupted by money and where they get their grant funding; maybe they have "group-think;" maybe they are blinded by partisanship.
Distrust of science is both a left and right phenomenon. It is widely assumed among the pundit community that President Trump will announce some big hopeful news regarding a COVID vaccine as an October surprise. Even though it would have been a "warp speed" achievement of Trump, only 36% of Republicans say they would take the drug. Fifty percent of Democrats say they would take it. An idea circulating within conservative social media is that the COVID virus--or certainly the vaccine--are a plot by Bill Gates or George Soros, intended to control Americans by inserting a mind control device.
It is complicated. It is easier to blame China's coal plants and to say that nothing we do will matter much. God's will be done. The fires are an act of God. There is no one to blame.
So while we are figuring this out, do nothing.
9 comments:
Many of the climate predictions of “science“ are based on computer models of the atmosphere and oceans. Speaking as a computer scientist and without going into technical details like complexity theory and numerical analysis, it is my opinion that the computer models of the climate are not reliable enough form the basis of huge changes to our economic and technological policies.
Michael Trigoboff, we can just see the statistics on temperatures rising around the globe. Every year in this area is hotter, drier, with less snowpack.
I don't need to see a computer model for that observation.
We are sitting on a powderkeg in the extreme north, with the permafrost melting and possible release of stored up methane gasses below. And there are records in photographs of the recession of glaciers.
Fires that take out entire cities are becoming the norm. Paradise, Talent-Phoenix and others.
I am an avid hard science fiction reader. Writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter, and others much earlier have for years predicted climate chaos in their novels. We have known about this problem since maybe the 1970's or earlier.
But it was easier to pretend it was not true.
Even the best corollary data doesn’t seem to move people’s predisposed beliefs. One problem with data is that it is seen as a tool of the Elites to control the masses. So whether Michael likes or trusts IPCC data models is irrelevant to what the masses believe.
In 1970 as a teacher at Lincoln High School in Portland, I was the advisor to the Earth Group. High school age youth were aware of our effects on the environment. All you had do was walk to the Willamette River and see and smell the pollution, litter was all along the roadside, eagle's eggs were too leathery to protect their chicks due DDT, Medford, Roseburg, Klamath Falls and other mill towns all had wigwam lumber scrap burners, agriculture field burning took on a massive scale burning the grass fields between Portland and Salem annually, whales were in decline, nuclear energy and hydrogen bomb testing scared people, drinking water sources were becoming contaminated and a hole was opening in the ozone layer. Everyone saw the effects of human caused environmental degradation and population growth. Legislation, laws and regulations where passed unanimously. Big tobacco was under attack from health experts and doctors as a leading cause of lung cancer and heart attacks. The polluting and extraction corporations felt they had their backs to the wall. With tobacco and Big Oil, PR agencies stepped into the fray. A slew of contradictory information was released to muddy the waters. To counter the PR campaigns environmental interest groups countered with their own "opinions" showing up to public hearings turning them into circuses.
The mission of industry and polluting corporations turned increasingly to a two front war. Discredit the science and buy their own legislators. Newly configured congress and state houses started chipping away at the regulations, rules and laws protecting the environment. What started out as a straightforward environmental approach morphed through conservative media into the attack on the nanny state. That brings me to Trump and why he is so loved by these industries and corporations. He has their back through executive order suspending as many of these laws, regulation, rules and guidelines protecting clean water, clean air, the environment, land use and mining and mineral extraction as he can. The list is too long and my be a topic for another blog post by Peter Sage. As Peter likes to say "net, net, net" the environment suffered and the corporate coffers are overflowing. I just hope, unlike King Midas, they'll find a way to eat, drink and breath money if it still has any value.
Diane N M:
You can see weather data. What you can’t see is what’s causing it. How much of it is due to CO2? How much is complex chaotic behavior of the incredibly complex atmosphere and oceans? I don’t know. Neither do you. The difference seems to be that I know that I don’t know.
What caused the 1930s dust bowl? Or the melting that formed Glacier Bay a century before industrial CO2 emissions? The cooling trend that started in the 1970s? The drought that wiped out the Anasazi?
Maybe we need to drop mass quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere. There are ideas like ocean fertilization that might work. Would you support anything like that? Or a quick transition to the new safer nuclear reactors like the NuScale design? I could see approaches like that.
But the wind and solar approach seems like impractical virtue signaling to me. You still need backup power for dark, windless times.
We are about 10,000 years into an interglacial period. They average about 10,000 years. Are we saving ourselves from the glaciers by emitting CO2?
My main point is that we don’t know a lot. What’s the right decision under this much uncertainty? What tradeoffs should we make? How do we sell them to a large enough majority to make coherent action possible?
I like Bjork Lomborg’s approach:
https://www.lomborg.com/
Even in an Ice Age there will be room for a couple hundred million humans. It is earth's way of pushing reset. It's ok. The earth will do what the earth will do. In an Ice Age Indonesia and the Amazon will still be warm enough that humans will survive. It happened time and time again.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Michael T. Seriously, your abject denial of the integrity of computer models is a straw man. The economy will adjust to any stupid thing we humans throw at it. Its like a life form in that it strives to survive, economists be damned. And scientists. And computer models. Economies always adjust to human needs and actions, not vice versa.
.
I'm always amazed how Republicans don't seem to understand how economies actually work. They talk tough and act like they are the smart capitalists in the room but they don't seem to get it. In fact, most consequences are unintended. Most economic growth is made by cleverly adjusting to the ambiguity, not from predicting it.
My god aren’t these fires enough? More fires next year. Used to be snow drifts in Cave Junction according to my son in law who grew up there. Rains during the summer were commonplace. Inertia, greed, repetitive habitual comfort. The grand kids will be the ones to suffer and will have to adapt. Lots of dead, lots of suffering, lots of extinction. It’s here from now on until like the planet Mars...the atmosphere is gone?
We will not reverse our path to extinction, that is obvious. Hell, Americans can’t even agree on a mask.
Rly said: Seriously, your abject denial of the integrity of computer models is a straw man.
I know something about how those models work and how they are validated. Do you?
Post a Comment