Climate Change: On the Beach, or Going to Holland?

Climate news ranges from serious to depressing to "It's 'Game Over' For Humanity As We Know It." People pose the question: "shouldn't we just party on with the time we have left?"

In Nevil Shute's post-atomic-war On the Beach, Australian survivors of World War III wait for a cloud of radiation fallout to arrive. While waiting for certain doom, some of them attempt to lead normal lives, planting gardens that they will never see. Others in similar scenarios might turn to religion and mysticism; denial; hedonism; or contemplation of fate, possibly through the arts. Others may simply give up and surrender to despair.

Climate change does not mean certain doom for humanity. Our world will change, and we must accept its changes, but the changes do not automatically mean the end of the world. Compare being on the beach with going to Holland. This short, beautiful parable was written by the parent of a child born with a disability, analogizing it to a dream vacation in Italy. Instead of going to Italy, you learn you're going to Holland. You're angry and disappointed...until you see that Holland has tulips and windmills. It's not worse than Italy. It's just different. For the rest of your life, you will face the loss of that dream:

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Two recent reports illustrate the stark difference between choosing to live on the beach of business as usual and going to Holland.

The United Nations Environmental Programme Compendium 2009 could be summed up as Climate worse than we thought. A lot worse. Even if we enact an economy-wide cap on carbon and other countries stick with their plans to reduce carbon, we are still likely to see global temperatures rise between 1.4 and 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100, with an equilibrium of 2.4 degrees Celsius, which will likely trigger three tipping points. The mainstream media reported that temperatures will rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (but, oddly, missed the tipping point of the UNEP report).

Separately, a British conference tackled the consequences of life at 4 degrees Celsius at 2060. Computer modeling shows wildly uneven impacts all over the globe. Large parts of the inland United States would warm 10 to 12 degrees C. An average of four degrees C masks the worst increases; for example, southern and western Africa and the Arctic could each see rises of 10 degrees C. Water supplies for half the world's population would be threatened, and up to half the world's animal and plant species would die. This "plausible worst case scenario" arises from business as usual in which carbon emissions are not sharply curtailed.

Nevertheless, hope lives.

Betts said: "It's important to stress it's not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon." Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

In a business as usual scenario, the usual businesses continue to prosper until we all end up on the beach: game over, watching football, drinking, praying, despairing, or carrying on as if nothing has changed. We can, instead, choose to go to Holland. In Holland, we acknowledge the changes we have wrought in the world while mourning the loss of our old way of life. In Holland, there are no polar bears, and humans will be displaced by rising seas. However, Holland has tulips, and windmills, and -- most important -- polders, low lying tracts of land enclosed entirely by dikes. The ever-present threat of sea level rise has led not only to engineering marvels, but also the political marvel of the polder model, emphasizing cooperation despite differences in the face of a common natural enemy.

The choice is stark.

Climate change: Broken People in America

"Climate refugees": the term refers to people whose distance dulls the pain of hearing their stories, like Shahana Begum of Bangladesh.

Shahana's family, like more than half a million people in the impoverished nation, lost her shanty home and all her belongings when cyclone Sidr slammed into southern Bangladesh in November 2007, claiming more than 3,500 lives.

"I moved to Dhaka because there was nowhere else to go," said Shahana, for whom home is now a slum on the dry banks of the capital's biggest river.

The country's leading climate change scientist says it is a sign of things to come. "It used to be that we would have a big cyclone every 15 to 20 years. We are getting a big one now every two or three years," said Atiq Rahman, who was on the UN's Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nobel Prize-winning IPCC predicts 20 million Bangladeshis will be displaced by 2050 because of sea level rises and an increase of natural disasters caused by changing weather patterns.

This tragedy could never happen in America.

Bangladesh, population 160 million, is among the countries most hard hit by climate change; an estimated 20 million people -- 1 in every 8 -- will need to be relocated by 2050 because of climate. Poverty and geography cause fragility: the country sits within the Ganges River delta, and 50% of the country would disappear if sea levels rise one meter. The news seems to be always bad -- famine, floods, erosion, lather, rinse, repeat. It's easy to become numb to words on a page. So we take pictures to explain what words cannot.

Shishmaref: "We are worth saving!"

We are worth saving! begged the island village of Shishmaref, before abandoning their homeland altogether.

A villager who has lived most of his life in Shishmaref pleads: "This is our home, this is where we live, where I grew up. Over 100 years we have been at this site as Shishmaref, starting with the school and everything, but it’s been thousands of years since the Shishmaref people have been using this island as a pasture point for the ocean."


Note the placement of the trash can in the center of the "before" and "after" pictures. Erosion occurs along the entire island chain, but exacerbated at Sarichef Island in part because of the hydrographic impacts of hard armoring of a sandy shoreface and permafrost degradation, accelerated by human infrastructure. The island now plans to relocate to the Alaska mainland. Yes, you read that right: Shishmaref is a part of the United States, not Bangladesh.

Isle de Jean Charles: Deliberately abandoned by the Army Corps
At the opposite end of America, Louisiana loses land: 30 square miles every year. A long-planned Army Corps of Engineers project, Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection Project (also known as the Great Wall of Louisiana), would protect parts of Louisiana from storm surges and climate change. However, it was designed to abandon the Native American people of Isle de Jean Charles. In 2006, a levee district director explained that it was simply a question of money:

"The problem is, based on the cost-benefit ratio, it would cost too much to include that sliver of land. For the cost, you could buy the island and all the residents tenfold."

In effect, the government had to ask itself: is it worth $100 million or more to protect a shrinking spit of an island, its only road, its modest homes, some of them little more than shacks, and its 250 residents, whose families have lived here for generations? Its conclusion: no.

By fall 2009, the same tribe announced plans to abandon its island home, instead using 12 million dollars in federal aid to move 230 people 10 miles inland. The Great Wall of Louisiana may not even work, and there may come a time to abandon places larger than Isle de Jean Charles. The Army Corps of Engineers' chief recently acknowledged as much when asked whether New Orleans should be abandoned entirely? Without answering that question, he told a reporter: "Protect the city, no. Reduce the risk, yes."

Kivalina: Climate cover-up succeeds
This photo shows the impact of sea level rise on Kivalina, Alaska far better than any words can:

Kivalina's residents decided to fight back. They hired prominent lawyers to sue 24 large polluters. More important, the suit also accused eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking (as detailed in Jim Hoggan's recent, thoroughly researched Climate Cover-Up). On October 16, a federal district court judge dismissed (24 pg pdf) Kivalina's complaint (for legalnerds, the ruling was on political question and standing grounds). The plaintiffs plan to appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

Newtok: Broken people
Newtok, Alaska is a village being squeezed between two rising rivers. It's lost an average of 72 feet a year to the water between the 1950s and 2005. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) compares the villagers to American Indians losing their ancestral homes:

"But what we're talking about here is the existence of a people. When they are separated from their land, they lose their language. They lose their culture. They lose their identify. And what do we have for it? Broken people."

"We saw that, to certainly an extent, with the American Indian when we took them away from the land and gave them reservations and said, 'Here, here's how we're going to make it even,' " she said.

America's broken and abandoned people are not limited to these four villages. In Alaska alone, 31 villages are imminently threatened by erosion, with 178 more communities -- including its largest city, Anchorage -- vulnerable to erosion. Even if they're all relocated, they're not legally "climate refugees" because they're not moving from one country to another. Climate refugees have been described as the third rail of climate policy. Under the Geneva Convention, a "refugee" is a person who flees from one country to another, such as the millions who have fled drought between Kenya and Somalia. The United States has no long-term relocation policy for people whose homelands become unlivable due to climate change. Instead, affected villages have been clamoring for federal and state money on an ad hoc basis.

The broken people of villages such as Shishmarek and Isle de Jean Charles have more in common with Shahana Begum and other Bangladesh people than they do with the average middle-class American: native people, practicing a subsistence lifestyle in a fertile land, being harmed by forces far away. To this middle-class American observer, they're the 21st century equivalent of Native Americans being forced off their homelands, through no fault of their own, and herded on to reservations.

The Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee begins hearings tomorrow on the Kerry-Boxer bill, Most of the debate this week will be on its dollars-and-cents costs and benefits. Will Senators Murkowski and Begich of Alaska, and Landrieu and Vitter of Louisiana, demand justice for their people, or will they vote for their shares of oil contributions? Rising seas will not respect their votes.

Our treatment of poverty-stricken villages sets a precedent for how we will treat others affected by sea level rise. Will the residents of Dade County, Florida plead "We are worth saving!" or will they simply allow themselves to be meekly herded off their land? Will the Army Corps of Engineers ultimately decide that the costs of storm surge barriers and seawalls around this city are too high?
Or will we treat people with money different from people at the margins of American society?

Slouching Toward Copenhagen

A post that I wrote shortly before the Copenhagen climate conference. My pessimism was, I believe, largely borne out by events.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

the spin machine twirls and curls: Email fracas shows perils of trying to spin science

Yeats predicts: "The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...." Meanwhile, the spinners succeed and the mainstream media are misdirected in the stolen email story.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

and people cease listening to inconvenient truths of science and reason as fewer Americans continue to believe in global warming; the Australian opposition party dumps its leader over climate legislation; and a new survey shows that world concerns about global warming have dwindled.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Senate chairs split over climate bill; "Hanging in the balance is one of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priorities, as well as the president’s credibility among potential signatories to an international climate pact." Meanwhile, UN environmental chief calls upon United States and China to raise their offers.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The United States Senate puts off climate bill until spring because, according to Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the climate bill is "really big, really, really hard, and is going to make a lot of people mad." In India, climate loan sharks flourish as droughts and failed crops worsen the cycle of poverty. The country of Tuvalu is drowning and its people migrating to New Zealand.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

A survey delving into the past 30 years in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that temperature changes match up with a significant increase in the likelihood of civil war. Both the 1994 Rwandan civil war and the 2000s Darfur conflict are generally seen to be wars for scarce resources. The Pentagon begins to war game the implications of climate change including famine, rising sea levels, and natural resource competition.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

When it comes to the stability of one of the world's most volatile regions, it's the fate of the Himalayan glaciers that should be keeping us awake at night. Although India and Pakistan have entered into a treaty regarding use of waters flowing from Himalayan glaciers, the treaty's success depends on the maintenance of a status quo that will be disrupted as the world warms. The Himalayan glaciers supply water to a billion people in India, Pakistan, and western China; a billion people with nuclear weapons; a billion people with nuclear weapons who do not have a history of getting along. Scientists originally predicted that they would largely melt by 2035, but their melt has accelerated. Meanwhile, California's water woes are just the beginning for the United States as water becomes the new oil.

The best lack all conviction,

Climate science is not and never will be settled, the RealClimate editors say, while acknowledging that naysayers such as Wall Street Journal editors will seize upon smidgens of uncertainty. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) wants to consider other options besides the cap and trade bill approved by the House, and leftists attempt to resurrect the idea of a carbon tax.

while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Hacked Emails give Inhofe fuel for climate change debate. Four Republicans (Representatives Sensenbrenner and Issa and Senators Barasso and Vitter) have demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency cease all work on greenhouse gases. Sarah Palin uses Facebook to demand that President Obama investigate the "snake oil science" of climate instead of going to Copenhagen. Representatives Joe Barton and Greg Walden call for hearings on NASA scientists.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Pope tells Copenhagen participants to respect God's creation and promote development while respecting human dignity and the common good.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

Copenhagen's green credentials obscure unpleasant facts, such as Denmark's continued reliance on coal-fired plants, Danish society's highly consumerist society, and its beef habit (in 2002, the average Dane consumed a whopping 321 pounds of meat -- nearly a pound a day. For Americans, the figure was 275 pounds).

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

Australia faces collapse caused by desertification. Wildfires in February 2009 (late summer) killed hundreds, and November 2009 (spring) broke so many records "that for a lot of places, even average conditions for the rest of the month will be easily enough to break existing records," says a climatologist. A new dust bowl has emerged in California's Fresno County.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Climate drama climax looks elusive: "Too little time and too little agreement, however, especially between rich and poor countries, mean the 192-nation Copenhagen conference is likely to produce, at best, a framework — a basis for continuing talks and signing internationally binding final agreements next year." Carbon pledges made to date will stoke potentially catastrophic 3.5 degrees Celsius warming by century's end, warns the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and energy specialists Ecofys. The pledges on the table will not halt emissions growth before 2040, let alone by 2015 as indicated by the IPCC. Negotiators at Copenhagen face deep sets of fault lines, including rich vs poor nations, developed vs developing countries, Poland and Estonia vs the rest of the EU, island nations vs time, OPEC vs clean technology, and urgency vs inertia.

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

The earth is the hottest it's been in 2,000 years, the National Academy of Sciences reported in 2006. More recently, a paper authored by Northern Arizona University professors found the warmest temperatures in 2,000 years at a time when the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions overpowering natural climate patterns.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Is a revelation at hand for an inherently cautious group? Will bickering nations unite against a common enemy? Or will things fall apart as the Earth cannot hold its people?