This is a thoughtful interview by Nick Breeze of Adrian Tait on the psychology of acknowledging the reality and implications of climate change.
What’s particularly interesting about this interview is that they are mostly talking about evolved denial of reality, yet because of their own inherited denial, they are not aware that denial is their main topic.
If you are not interested in or disagree with Varki’s denial theory, the interviews are still worth watching.
Fact 1: Trump denies the reality of human caused climate change and will probably reduce the US climate science budget.
Fact 2: Climate scientists have had zero success at influencing human behavior to reduce CO2 emissions.
Fact 3: Of all the groups in society, climate scientists should be setting a low carbon lifestyle example, but they don’t. See fact 2.
Fact 4: Firing all the climate scientists will definitely reduce CO2 emissions.
Climate scientists have been adding bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to their models as a means for addressing climate change that allows us to do something in the future rather than today, and that may not require us to change our lifestyles.
BECCS is crazy wrong on many levels.
There is no evidence that BECCS can scale up, nor that we can afford the astronomical construction cost, or higher operating cost from the reduced power plant efficiency required to capture the carbon, or the energy to transport and process the biomass, or that we have somewhere safe to store gigantic quantities of CO2, or that any of this can be implemented on a time scale that matters, or that enough net energy will be left at the end of the process to run a hamster wheel let alone an advanced civilization.
On top of all that, humans are already using far more than their reasonable share of the planet’s primary net productivity. From which of the few wild species left are we going to take the biomass to run BECCS?
BECCS will cause us to waste precious time and money before some engineer assigned to implement it stands up and says it won’t work and should never have been considered in the first place.
Despite being crazy beyond belief it is promoted by intelligent people with PhD’s and good intentions.
And it’s our best option on the table to avoid disaster.
Wow! Where are the adults?
There must be something REALLY big and powerful, like evolved denial, in play to explain our collective crazy insanity.
Most scientists consider 2 degrees of warming to be dangerous. Common sense says 1 degree is unsafe because the recent extreme weather and loss of Arctic ice and glaciers have been caused by 1 degree of actual warming.
A new paper in the journal of Science Advances says 7 degrees is likely this century because the climate becomes more sensitive to greenhouse gases as the temperature warms.
Independent newspaper overview.
To be clear on the implications, 7 degrees will kill your children.
Much time and effort has been wasted establishing climate change agreements that will not work because the relationship between wealth, consumption, and CO2 has not been acknowledged or addressed.
We have not to date met any of our (ineffective) commitments because we do not understand the nature of our predicament. We cannot reduce climate change with a different type of economic growth. We must stop growing and contract.
Assuming feedback loops have not already taken over (meaning there is nothing we can do to avoid runaway climate change), here are the only 2 policies that would positively impact climate change and every other overshoot threat we face:
1) Increase the interest rate until the economy begins to contract on a sustained basis. An economic crash may or may not be avoidable but we have no choice.
2) Establish a one child policy with a penalty tax of say 25% of total income for every extra child. No exceptions. Countries with cultures that value males more than females should provide a subsidy to families with a daughter to keep the male/female ratio at about 50/50.
Wise countries will implement one additional optional policy:
3) Tax excess wealth and use the funds to pay down public debt.
As the economy and population contracts there will be a natural tendency for the wealth gap to widen which usually leads to social unrest, despots, and war. Wise countries will anticipate this and implement policies to prevent the wealth gap from widening. Collected taxes should be used to pay down public debt because this will help to stabilize our debt backed currency as the economy shrinks.
These policies will cause pain but doing anything else (or nothing) will cause a lot more pain.
Non-deniers are in many ways worse than deniers because while accepting the fact of climate change they deny what it would take to actually do something about it. Many people are saying the climate will be screwed by Trump. The fact is no leader anywhere in the world is implementing the policies needed to improve the situation, namely population reduction and contracting the economy. At least Trump and his like don’t pretend to give a fuck.
Here is an excellent new post by xraymike79 in which he provides a big picture summary of the facts that should be at the top of our election priority list and yet we do not acknowledge or discuss them.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2016/11/02/some-fun-facts-for-a-dystopic-future/
Denial is amazing.
History has proven considerably worse than the Club of Rome’s projections. The original report made only passing reference to some of the most critical environmental problems of today. In response to this, the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified a set of nine ecological processes regulating land/ocean/atmosphere and their accompanying boundaries within which humans must stay to avoid biospheric collapse. In 2015, researchers found that four of these planetary boundaries had already been breached: biodiversity loss, damage to phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, climate change and land use. None of these critical boundaries were picked up by the original Limits to Growth report. We have destroyed the stability of the Holocene Epoch and continue to wreak havoc with every passing day. In other words, there are many other environmental crises too numerous to list that are coming to a head, and catastrophic sea level rise is just the icing on the burned cake. The last time Earth had such a disruptive species, cyanobacteria altered the atmosphere and killed off all the anaerobic life forms including itself. Ironically, oxygen was the byproduct of the cyanobacteria that proved lethal to those ancient lifeforms and paved the way for the rise of photosynthetic organisms. The cyanobacteria had a 500 million year run, but modern man has only been around for 0.01% of that time. Our large brain has made it possible for us to destroy ourselves in record time.
So you would think that these stark facts laid out before us would be causing panic in the global markets and seats of power around the world because, clearly, no one is safe from this unfolding apocalypse. In what many call the ‘most powerful nation on Earth’, surely a leader must be on the verge of taking the helm of this sinking ship. In any rational world, they would be compelled to battle this planetary emergency with the war-time urgency it demands. In the election year of 2016 there are only two prospects in our corporatocracy, one of whom is so frightening that hundreds of the world’s scientists felt compelled to issue a warning against his possible election. The other candidate seems much more palatable on the surface, but her record and recent emails illustrate just how tortured her positions are on environmental issues. Anyone who has studied the numerous practices that make modern civilization truly unsustainable, the depths of corruption and waste in its global socio-economic system, and how predatory one has to be in order to survive and “succeed’ in it realizes in the end that it wouldn’t matter much who fills that figurehead position. Toeing the line of the dominant culture is a prerequisite for the job. That’s one reason why nations are building walls in response to climate change refugees and putting faith in unproven and unrealistic techno-fixes to save themselves while at the same time drilling for new oil, financing new coal plants, allowing climate goals for corporations to add up to only a quarter of the amount needed to limit warming to 2°C, and giving the shipping industry a pass on curbing its emissions(if shipping was a country it would be the world’s 8th biggest carbon polluter).
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2016/06/video-forest-service-survey-finds.html
VALLEJO, California, 22 June 2016 (USFS) – The U.S. Forest Service today announced that it has identified an additional 26 million trees dead in California since October 2015. These trees are located in six counties across 760,000 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada region of the state, and are in addition to the 40 million trees that died statewide from 2010 to October 2015, bringing the total to at least 66 million dead trees. Four consecutive years of severe drought in California, a dramatic rise in bark beetle infestation and warmer temperatures are leading to historic levels of tree die-off.
“Tree dies-offs of this magnitude are unprecedented and increase the risk of catastrophic wildfires that puts property and lives at risk,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “While the fire risk is currently the most extreme in California because of the tree mortality, forests across the country are at risk of wildfire and urgently need restoration requiring a massive effort to remove this tinder and improve their health.
Between 2010 and late 2015, Forest Service aerial detection surveys found that 40 million trees died across California – with nearly three quarters of that total succumbing to drought and insect mortality from September 2014 to October 2015 alone. The survey identified approximately 26 million additional dead trees since the last inventory in October, 2015.
Forest Service scientists expect to see continued elevated levels of tree mortality during 2016 in dense forest stands, stands impacted by root diseases or other stress agents and in areas with higher levels of bark beetle activity. Additional surveys across the state will be conducted throughout the summer and fall.
With the increasing size and costs of suppressing wildfires due to climate change and other factors, the very efforts that would protect watersheds and restore forests to make them more resilient to fire in the future are being squeezed out of the budget. Last year fire management alone consumed 56 percent of the Forest Service’s budget.
A new book titled Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley is available to read online for free here.
The book is an excellent primer on energy and does a nice job of summarizing the challenges we face as fossil energy depletes.
Heinberg’s style is to present an intelligent fact-based view of the challenges while simultaneously offering positive things we could choose to do to make the future less bad. He avoids predicting pain or collapse although having followed him for years I think this is likely a politically correct veneer. He also tends to ignore the effect of de-growth on our debt-based economy and the resulting small amount of wealth we will have available for investment.
I like the fact that the book uses a wide lens and discusses things often ignored like high temperature industrial processes that cannot run on renewable energy (concrete, metal, and silicon chip production, for example) and discusses the use of fossil energy as feedstocks (fertilizer needed to feed 7 billion, for example). I also like that it discusses honestly the need to reduce our population.
If you’d like a calm intelligent summary of our predicament with lots of space to draw your own conclusions this book a great place to start.
As an aside, I remember David Fridley from an excellent talk he gave in 2007 on the Myths of Biofuels. It’s still relevant and worth watching here.
I was very sad to learn that David J.C. MacKay passed away on April 14, 2016.
When I first learned of peak oil 8 years ago I went deep into renewable energy technologies looking for a solution. One of the people that influenced me the most was David J.C. MacKay with his book “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”. David was a breath of fresh air with his unbiased scientific analysis of data rather than the fact-free blather that is commonly used to support some favored position.
His book is available to download for free here.
David convinced me that it is impossible to maintain our current lifestyles with renewable energy. We must dramatically reduce our total consumption and we would be wise to do it proactively before nature forces us.
Here are a couple excellent talks by David….
Here is the last interview with David a few days before he died. I find it interesting that on his death bed the thing that fascinated him most was our denial of reality. It’s sad he did not read Varki before he died.
And lastly a nice obituary by Mark Lynas.
Thank you David. You had a great mind and worked hard to make the future better.
un-Denial 