James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change

James Hansen's TED talk from February:



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C-ROADS less taken...

Speaking of Hopenhagen - you want some hope?? Check out this new TED talk from (fellow Dartmouth alum!) Drew Jones of the Sustainability Institute. This is the kind of way we need to be thinking - acknowledging the danger of potential "Business as Usual" emissions scenarios, and then immediately recognizing that those are not a pre-determined future, and that we must mobilize immediately and in a big way if we're even going to get close to achieving atmospheric concentrations of 350 ppm in a meaningful timescale. Enjoy, (and learn more at the Climate Interactive Blog):

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The Invention of Air

This is a great book. It's only a couple of hundred pages and I just couldn't put it down. As M says, it's basically about all of my favorite things - systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, the American Revolution, founding fathers, scientific revolution. And the author Steve Johnson is great. I've only read one of his other books (Emergence) and it was awesome as well - really a must read. Putting my biases aside, I don't know if I'd say Invention is a must read, but if you're into that sort of thing, it's definitely a great read.

The book is about Joesph Priestly - a British "natural philosopher" (scientists of the day), around the time of the Revolution, and big buddies with Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, etc. He did a ton of experiments and is often credited with 'discovering' oxygen. He isolated it first, but was kind of off in interpreting what it was, so others rounded out the discovery and named the gas. But he also basically discovered that plants give off oxygen - through very cool experiments with sprigs of mint in jars that were able to live on, while candles in jars went out, and mice died without the plants. Piecing it together with Franklin, they opened the door for the ecosystems view of the planet (though they didn't articulate it in the way we understand it today). But that process - photosynthesis, driven by solar power - the 'engine' of nature - is central to understanding the "System" level of the framework for SSD, and what makes a sustainable society. And so it's very cool to trace it back to such a key discovery, and such a key moment.

Also very cool is how the book draws out how those types of moments don't happen in isolation. The context, the interactions, the chance that lead to big changes are all crucial. And tracing Priestly through his interactions and escapades is a great way to demonstrate that. The stories about his engagement with 'societies' in London and other places he lived are great. The main one, where he got his start and met Franklin is the Honest Whigs - where they would come together on a regular basis in some pub, have a big meal and few pints and share ideas, compare notes, report back on experiments, and drive the revolution in thought that was occuring. This was a rather effective motivator for finally getting a Green Drinks chapter going here in Gloucester.

The information networks that these types of meetings, plus the great letters of the day, and the papers, created were also critical to big evolutionary leap that took place around the time. And there are parrallels, of course to today. The chages we are faced with are unprecedented, but in many ways the principles are very similar to those in any kind of big shift in a system. The openness of information and sharing of ideas got Priestly in a lot of trouble, but also got his ideas out there for others to improve upon, and consequently improve quality of life, and take us into a new chapter in our cultural evolution. The internet and mobile devices are obviously helping to drive similar dynamics today.

Priestly also shook things up in the spiritual realm, essentially founding of Unitarianism, and providing a view of Christianity that Jefferson credits with keeping him from having to abandon it all togehter. The crossing of disciplines with ease (far more common before the rigid disciplines and specializations of the modern university changed the way we view the world) is a central theme, and again resonates with the sustainability movement, as we see growth in the interrelated areas of spiritual exploration, evolving consciouness and the like.

In making this leap, the stakes are of course a bit higher. It's not the King of England and the church establishment we're facing down, it's the potential for the collapse of civilization. The good news is we're driving the mechanisms responsible for that potential, so it's really us we're facing down, and thus very much within our power to gear up and dramatically rethink and redesign how we go about our business. We've just got to get together and do it - and luckily the upswell of awareness and engagement continues to grow. Stay going.

Methane chimneys

This story hit the Independent yesterday, and I really hope these preliminary findings are exaggerated, or not what they seem:

Exclusive: The methane time bomb

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Preliminary findings suggest that massive deposits of subsea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats

5 things for global warming

Check out this recent piece by NASA Climate scientist James Hansen - it touches on (once again) the gap between what the scientists know, and what the public and policy-makers understand.

This gap lies at the heart of why we need to move away from reductionism, where we study and address everything in isolation in separate disciplines /departments /silos / sectors / drill holes, to a whole-system approach where policy makers and scientists, engineers and biologists, economists and consumers, businessmen and school teachers, can understand eachother because they have a shared, relevant view of the whole-system. This is the first step in taking a strategic appraoch to sustainability.

But I digress, Hansen's article offers 5 things we need to do, now, to address global warming. I think there are more inspiring ways we could go about addressing the challenge - and people are starting to do that, finding synergistic solutions through sustainable urban planning, green building, sustainable product design, permaculture, and the like - but these would certainly help, and are straight forward, necessary actions, regardless if they come about through transformational change of global society or through regulation:

1) Put a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2
2) Put a price on emissions
3) Establish and enforce energy-efficiency standards (buildings & vehicles)
4) Study and report on ice-sheet stability (not sure how knowing more about the symptom helps us cure the root cause, but it's certainly important research, especially as we are forced to focus on adaptation as well as mitigation)
5) Reform of communication practices (so we can avoid the disasters of reductionism)

The full piece is brief, and available here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/hansen

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