Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Dude, i think you need to go see some good music:-)
  

    
Meanwhile, the prospects for cap-and-trade appear to be declining in
the U.S.:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30984.html
  

    
Emily, jstrahl and others: Thanks for the great discussion and great
links to further info on this topic. I was frustrated during the
conference by the lack of meaningful coverage in the mainstream media.
This is helping me catch up after a long period of dismayed
disengagement. I think you are correct, Emily, in focusing on the
actual political realities in the U.S. I fear that until more climatic
disasters, the public and Congress will continue in a wait-and-see
mode. That's just human nature, apparently. How far Mother Nature is
willing to go on this remains to be seen. Whatever the Danes'
organizational shortcomings, it appears they are setting a high
standard environmentally, one that we'd be wise to emulate.  Anyway,
thanks and Happy New Year to all.
  

    
I'm going to work through some of the comments and questions above in
the next few posts.

jmcarlin:  I was very interested to read Thomas Friedman's essay on
Copenhagen and Denmark. I wonder if the other delegates there paid any
attention to that example or what you heard about it there, if
anything.

Danish politician and past climate & energy minister Connie Hedegaard
(widely anticipated to become the future European Commissioner for the
Climate) was the president of the conference.  Presumably some of her
credibility came from the simple truths of how Denmark has so
successfully taken a low-carbon path.

Some outlets (and activists) reported that it was a major blowup when
Hedegaard resigned a couple days before the scheduled end of the
meeting, and handed the conference chair to Danish Prime Minister Lars
Løkke Rasmussen.  From what I learned, this was simply a
prodcedural/diplomatic nicety, so that the country's highest elected
official would be in charge during the period of the high-level
meetings with other heads of state. 
  

    
>Also, do you feel like NGOs made a significant
impact on the process or were they merely in the way?

From the pov I understand best, that of a Western democracy, activists
probably are most influential in the weeks and months running up to
the meeting, when they have the best chance of influencing the
politicians who set the positions that the country will bring to the
COP.

My impression was that once the meeting started, the NGOs were mostly
effective in diversifying the content, so to speak, by holding side
events exploring different issues. They seemed to put the bulk of their
time into spurring press coverage of this or that opinion,
development, or demand.  They helped to get a lot of attention on the
position of the small island nations, for instance.  

I know that the huge, numerous worldwide marches on the Saturday
mid-way through the conference were noted by many speakers, as proof
that the people of the world want action.  

It's arguable that the world climate action movement didn't have much
impact, given how bad the proceeds of Copenhagen turned out to be.

I for one would not argue that, though. Trying to turn the analytical
mindset on the past year or two of climate politics, I see that there's
a really remarkable up-swelling of popular awareness and activism --
and unity -- around global warming. That's a success, in civil society
terms.

Copenhagen turned out not to be the culmination of all that effort
that the organizers were hoping for.  So now they have the challenge of
keeping their movements intact, engaged and optimistic.

Think about how long and brutal the US Civil Rights Movement turned
out to be, before the national laws changed.  And how much longer
before the values it espoused have became the social norm here, rather
than the exception.

For the climate movement, though, the awful truth may be that all this
needed to be happening 5-10 years ago in order to make any real
difference to the climate.
  

    
Paula: In the end, did you think the press overreacted to street
stuff?

Again in terms of Western democracies (because that's what I know, and
we're talking about international politics here), I think that the
press always overreacts and misreports street stuff.  It's the old "if
it bleeds it leads" mentality.

I once heard a commentator describe news coverage of activist events
as "nature documentary:"  Behold the wild agitator, in his natural city
street environment.  Look, his crazy behavior is provoking the police
man to attack him!  How little we understand what makes this wily
creature act the way he does.

That still works for me nearly 20 years later.
  

    
jstrahl: Thus, the so-called "political reality" amounts to
acquiescence to suicide.

Acquiescence to fundamentally changing the conditions of life on Earth
for the much worse, yep. 

I get a little edgy around absolute terminology like "suicide" in this
context, which says a lot about why I find journalism a lot more
satisfying than I did activism.
  

    
Jacques:  Given the disinterest of a good portion of the American
public about climate change (and the outright denialism of another
portion)...

The former is frustrating.  Is there just some facet of "the American
character" that our polity can't get as interested in this as the
British, or the Danes, or the Germans or the Japanese?

The latter was bought and paid for by the oil and auto industries, and
they got good value for their money.
  

    
Regarding that Politico article, by the way, "Senate Democrats to
W.H.: Drop cap-and-trade," I'd love to know how it came to be assigned.
 

About the only thing worth taking away is the part where some senators
may lose their nerve as mid-term elections approach. The rest is
inside-the-Beltway maneuvering for position.
  

    
Emily: for nations which are facing flooding to the point of
elimination, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, or huge devastation, like
Bangladesh, i don't think "suicide" is an overstatement. 
  

    
Emily, it's pretty clear that Politico likes to put a rightward spin
on most of its articles, including this one. But I've seen the same
story, more or less, in other publications the last couple of days.
Such as:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6969108.ece

  

    
Read the Times article attentively, and you can perceive that next to
no new reporting was done to create it.  It's a rehash of the Politico
story with some extra background on climate politics thrown in.

It's not news that Landrieu and the other senators mentioned in these
two stories are against the climate portions of the proposed
legislation.  So I wonder why this story has been put into circulation
at this particular moment, post-Copenhagen and before Congress is back
in session. 
  

    
This is such bunk, Obama's plan is now being made to look like
"radical environmentalism" (not quoting anyone specific) by senators
who are even more pro-corporate than the Obama administration. 

And the consequences of even a 2C rise are far worse than previously
thought.
http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/54721
Nature: Sea Level Rise May Exceed Worst Expectations, Rebecca Lutzy,
12/17/09. A new study by scientists from Princeton and Harvard which
was released in Nature (link included) suggests even a 2°C temperature
rise could cause a 6-9 meters  (some 18 to 27 ft) increase in sea
levels. 
Emissions cuts presented so far would actually amount to a  3C rise,
and an article i posted previously would argue an even greater rise.
  

    <scribbled by stevebj Mon 28 Dec 09 03:39>
  

    
>>> And the consequences of even a 2C rise are far worse than
previously thought.

>>> Nature: Sea Level Rise May Exceed Worst Expectations, Rebecca
Lutzy, 12/17/09. <<<

Note the headline, <jstrahl>: *May* Exceed Worst Expectations. And
note, too, the use of the word "suggests" in the first line of the
article. The study's data point in a grim direction, surely, but
there's still an important difference separating a suggestion from a
fact. 
  

    
>Obama's plan is now being made to look like
"radical environmentalism" (not quoting anyone specific) by senators
who are even more pro-corporate than the Obama administration. 

Yes, when you can't get a whole lot less radical in a capitalist
economy than by establishing a market - a kind of market that's already
running in Europe, and by the coalition of states in the Northeast
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative here in the US. 

It seems like someone or a group of someones is trying to get traction
on that meme in the public mind before Congress returns to session.
  

    
By "it seems like," I mean, "It's possible that..."
  

    
I don't think that in this case it's just a possibility:-) It's quite
obvious where these senators are coming from. 
<stevebj>: scientists like to couch their pronouncements in terms like
"may", which is always taken advantage of by AGW deniers (who populate
media outlets such as your old paper, the Wall Street Journal) who
like to parse every single word and jump on the slightest ambiguity. If
you read the article, you'd see that their conclusions are more
definitive than what you imply. And the last several years have seen
the worst predictions prove to be if anything UNDER-estimates of how
bad things are getting and how fast. More comes in by the day. Good
sites to keep up with the changes are 
http://www.heatisonline.org/main.cfm  
and 
http://www.desmogblog.com    
(to clarify, what i say about the WSJ has nothing to do with you,
Steve, i don't think you've worked for it for quite a while, right?)
  

    
I never worked for the WSJ. I'm a contributor to The Economist.

Scientists don't "like" to couch their pronouncements in hedge words
such as "may" and "suggest," it's a responsibility. Because no study is
definitive and every scientist who publishes in peer-review journals
knows that. 

Which isn't to say things aren't dire as far as climate change is
concerned. But taking one study or even a small handful of studies and
using them as stand-alone factual statements rather than as increments
in a long process of data collection and knowledge gathering is
improper use of scientific inquiry. If one published study was all that
was needed to establish the truth, anyone who took LSD would have
fried chromosomes.  
  

    
<stevebj> slipped in, making a point I also make in my first comment
below.

"scientists like to couch their pronouncements in terms like 'may'"

I wouldn't say that the "like to," but that they feel they must,
because they're dealing with hypotheses. This was an issue when I first
wrote about global warming in 2001
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2001_Summer/ai_76896207/).
I was hearing that while climate scientists felt in their guts that
human activity was driving climate change that could be catastrophic,
as scientists they had to be clear that evidence was not conclusive,
that they had not proved the case. It wasn't long before many
scientists were issuing stronger statements and speaking with some
urgency.

I'm interested in the impact of the so-called "climategate," the
emails stolen from the University of East Anglia. Wikipedia says
"Climate scientists issued rebuttals and described the incident as a
smear campaign, accusing the climate change sceptics of selectively
quoting words and phrases out of context in an attempt to sabotage the
Copenhagen global climate summit." If that's the case, was the sabotage
successful?
  

    
I don't think that "Climategate" or other denier cant has any impact
whatsoever on the UN climate treaty process.  As far as I can tell, no
other country's political system is humoring deniers to the extent that
the USA's does -- not even Canada or Australia. 

I don't think any press corps is giving deniers as much attention as
the US press corps.

In the US, uncertainty about the human origins of global warming was
cultivated to keep us out of the Kyoto accord, as well as to stall
domestic action to curb emissions/put a price on carbon.  I know it
sounds like Mulder-esque paranoia if it's not information that you've
encountered before, but this has been pretty well-documented in the
mainstream. 
  

    
Emily, when the White House announced that Obama would go to
Copenhagen at the end of the conference instead of at the beginning,
there was much speculation that this meant there must be some sort of
major deal in the works for Obama to take part in announcing, otherwise
why would he make the shift? It turned out that there certainly was no
major deal, and Obama had to go through considerable exertion to
emerge with anything at all. So do you have any sense why he shifted
the time of his visit?
  

    
Steve, if you look at sites like The Heat is On (Ross Gelbspan) and
Desmog Blog, you'd see what's involved here is much more than one study
involved here. I've been involved for 21 years.  But whatever.
  

    
OK, I'm going to do something I've avoided doing for, I don't know,
fifteen or so years, which is to respond to Jeff STrahl, who has never
wanted to be confused by facts once he has made up his mind. Mostly
what I'd like is for you, Jeff, to consider staying just a little in
the background here, not making your argument, and all the arguments
about your argument, central to this discussion. There are other people
in the world and not all of us want to hear you make the same point
over and over again, all the while implying that anyone who disagrees
with you is either a nut job or has his head up his ass. (A
Republican/Fox News/Rush tactic, I'd like to point out.)I think that
this distracts from a fascinating and unusual discussion: a firsthand
account from a reliable observer of an important if inconclusive
attempt to do something about the problem that you are so intent on
exposing. I would really appreciate it if you would not turn this forum
into a trollfest.

That said, and at risk of encouraging you, I'd also like to point out
that no one can possibly deny that the climate is changing, at least in
the relatively short term. And there are certainly widespread human
activities that could cause the climate to change in the ways that it
sems to be changing. Even so, no one can possibly say with one hundred
percent certainty that this change is being triggered by human
activity. The fact that human activity could explain a warming climate
and the fact that the climate is warming make for a strong correlation,
but of course there is always room for doubt. That's why scientists
(some of whom undoubtedly exploit the subjunctive mood, using "may" as
mere rhetoric) have jobs. Doubt is a good thing, Jeff. It makes for
curiosity, thoughtfulness, humility, restraint, and, some might say,
civilization itself. 

So maybe we're mistaken. It's happened before. Consider the certainty,
promulgated by brilliant and well meaning scientists, that dogs and
cats were the carriers of the Plague, which caused Londoners to kill
the very animals that could ahve controlled the population of the real
culprits, the rodents. Or that cholera was carried on the air, which
caused Londoners two centuries later (not picking on the UK here, not
on purpose) to flush more waste into the Thames, thus increasing the
spread of cholera. These mistakes can lead to folly, and we have to
acknowledge this. 

Every time you talk about something like "acquiescing to suicide,"
you're revealing your own hubris--and perhaps your own ideology, which
may be a deep suspicion of modernity, and a sense that technological
culture has led us far astray from anything like a life that works. I
could be wrong about that, but I happen to hold this belief to some
extent, and it is hard not to see climate change as Nature's way of
confirming that we've taken the wrong path. But we could be very wrong
about that. Global warming could be a random fluctuation (which
wouldn't make action less urgent, but might make it less contentious),
or, for all we know, it could lead to a better life on earth after the
cataclysm is over. We all have to figure out what we should do in an
uncertain field, and reports like Emily's--not to mention the
interesting, if often disappointing ideas that people with actual power
come up with--can only help us to do that. 

So settle down, man. We're not all ideological dupes, and you're not
the last honest man. Let this discussion unfold. Don't hijack it.
Please.
  

    
We do tend to play politics and dance around the question whether
there's critical action we must take now to prevent catastrophe at some
undetermined point in the future. Taking action now, in this case,
means taking steps that have interesting and difficult political and
economic consequences. It's not surprising that there are "deniers" who
prefer to believe that no action on our part will prevent catastrophe.
Some believe that there will be no catastrophe, others that there will
be catastrophic effects that we can't prevent, and that we'll just
have to adapt. It's going to be tough to get the myriad interests and
positions aligned for effective mitigation. I think the Copenhagen
failure reflects this reality.

I think the deniers made compelling use of the "climategate" buzz,
especially in emphasizing the fact that climate data is not openly
available (actual reasons here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/kim-cobbs-view/#more-254
7),
and implying that climate scientists are hiding data that will
disprove the case for anthropogenic climate change. Scientists no doubt
understand that this is a rhetorical trick, but I'm surprised it had
no impact among the politicians at Copenhagen.