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Fragilecologies Archives
15 May 2006

This idea for a “Spare Time University” may sound a bit crazy to other people, but to me it is an idea that can work. I want to develop a way to get a lot of people involved in knowing about today’s problems and proposed solutions in various aspects of life, especially those aspects related to climate, water, and weather.

Everyone knows that weather and climate influence many things that can lead either to a good harvest at the end of a growing season, or to a poor harvest. Weather and climate can affect the amount of moisture in the soil, the water needs at different times in the life cycle of a crop (from sowing the seed to harvest). Climate affects the abundance of pests that can eat crops (such as locusts), the abundance of mosquitoes, and so forth. Prolonged droughts or heavy rains can be quite disruptive and destructive of human activities and settlements. And now there is a lot of talk about the likelihood of a change in the climate that people have come to know and cope with.

A lot of people are too busy or do not have the opportunity to take formal courses in school, whether it is at the high school or the university level. They are too busy trying to put food on the table. Or they do not have the funds to go to places of higher learning. I want to bring those places to them — for free — to those who want to participate. Radios, cellphones, and newspapers: these are ways that could be used to get information to the people who toil all day to make enough money to feed their families.

“Usable” information is a top priority of a Spare Time University: new agricultural methods, new fishing techniques, different ways to till the soil or terrace a hilly landscape, and methods used elsewhere to harvest water in dry areas, and so forth. This kind of information can be brought to villagers who want to listen or read about it and learn more.

The information for each course can be relatively short and to the point. It can be highly user-friendly, without using a lot of scientific words. There is time to read or listen to the courses, however we finally decide to deliver them to the villages and remote areas, as well as to poorer neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

The reason that I think the idea of a Spare Time University is urgently needed in sub-Saharan Africa right now is that the traditional approaches to education and training appear to be painfully show and overly selective, with some of the selection criteria for acceptance into high schools and universities left over from the Colonial Era — and with a strong European bias.

Spare Time University is not an idea developed for developing countries. The truth is that it was an idea developed by the Chinese government a few decades ago. As I understand it, the notion of a Spare Time University was developed to help to close the gap between those going to universities to earn advanced degrees, and those people who labor in the fields and factories, who have neither the time nor the level of education to gain access to and succeed in a formal university setting. It was an attempt to level the playing field in society by enabling workers to participate in university courses and to be part of the development process of the country. As I said earlier, it can be carried by cellphone, radio, TV, or newspapers.

In the industrialized world, there is considerable interest in what we call a “Free University” and in informal educational programs that are designed for “K-to-Grey”; that is, designed for people from kindergarten (K) to old age (grey). Learning is truly a lifelong process. So, what do you think of this idea for sub-Saharan Africa?

Fragilecologies Archives
29 March 2006

Recently, I picked up an unlikely book (for me) to read entitled Literary Feuds (Arthur, 2002). It contains separate chapters about intellectual or personal feuds between well-known writers. One of the feuds chosen by the author to highlight was one that developed between British technologist C.P. Snow, author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution and F.R. Leavis, a British literary critic. Aside from my general interest in their personal feud, I was intrigued by a statement by Snow that compared physical scientists and literary figures.

As the author noted,

Snow had observed that one of the chief differences between the accomplishments of scientists and artists is that no scientist “need ever read an original [scientific] work of the past,” even of such giants as Earnest Rutherford, one of the greatest experimental physicists; their substance has all been infused into what is now known because science is cumulative, and embodies its past.

Literature, on the other hand, might change, but unlike science it does not progress: Shakespeare’s and Tolstoy’s works must read anew by each generation. The modern reader, or the one a hundred years from now, will not understand the “Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare.” But, he argued, the typical teenager will “know more physics than Newton” (p. 126).

Was Snow correct when he wrote that scientists need not ever read an original scientific work of the past? Personally, I think he is dead wrong. As researchers test a hypothesis and write about it, another researcher may try to reproduce the results. Yet another might challenge the original scientific findings and methods. So goes the scientific process. Eventually, researchers produce results that become generally accepted. Hence, there is no reason for students to go back to the original works of famous, as well as not-so-famous, scientists. Scientists today do indeed stand on the proverbial shoulders of their predecessors.

My argument with Snow’s statement — that students of science do not have to read the early works in their fields — is based on the following belief: I think students would benefit greatly if they could be encouraged to read the earlier works in science. I believe this because using today’s research methods and technological innovations may help new students to identify overlooked ideas and reevaluate hypothese of scientists from, say, the early decades of the 1900s, which can now be tested using contemporary knowledge. However, what most science students are taught today are summaries of previous summaries, which are, in fact, summaries of even earlier summaries of ideas identified and written by scientists decades ago. By getting young scientists to read the original materials of the older ones might help them to identify new ideas.

An example of the point I want to make centers on the work of a British scientist by the name of Gilbert Walker. Walker spent a good part of his professional life trying to identify linkages between weather conditions in one part of the world with weather events in other parts. Scientists call these linkages “teleconnections.” Walker’s work was at first designed to predict the onset and behavior of the monsoons in India, which in his day was a central part of the British empire. Later, he hired many statisticians (he called them computers!) to search for correlations among locations around the globe. Eventually, he identified a southern oscillation across the Pacific basin. The Southern Oscillation is an oscillation of sea level pressure between certain islands in the South Pacific and Darwin, Australia. When sea level pressure is high in Darwin, it tends to be low in, say, Tahiti. When it’s low in Darwin, it tends to be high in Tahiti.

British mathematician Sir Gilbert Walker was the first to connect the Southern Oscillation (or SO, a see-saw in atmospheric pressure between the western and eastern tropical Pacific) to cyclic weather and climate patterns far field. Walker became interested in the Indian monsoon during a stint overseeing India’s colonial weather observatories at the start of the 20th century. Through painstaking statistical work, Walker linked the SO to seasonal rainfall patterns in Asia, Africa, and South America. His findings were neglected, though, since no physical mechanism for the far-flung effects was apparent. Only in the 1960s did Jacob Bjerknes relate the SO to sea surface temperatures, which paved the way for understanding El Niño and other ocean-atmospheric interactions.

www.ucar.edu/communications/quarterly/spring03/winter.html

When Walker passed away, an obituary appeared in the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1959 that suggested he had essentially wasted his life pursuing correlations between weather events at different distant locations around the globe, and that the writer of the obituary believed that such correlations were spurious, misleading, or nonexistent.

However, had Walker lived another decade or so, he would have had the last word as well as the last laugh. His work on correlations has become the basis for present-day knowledge of El Niño occurrences in the tropical Pacific and several of the weather and climate anomalies that El Niño tends to spawn, not only around the Pacific basin, but around the globe as well.

This example supports my main point: it is valuable for those students new to climate and climate-related research to read the writings of the old guard. Perhaps some of these students of the atmosphere will have the potential to either identify new climate-related hypotheses or to reassess some old thoughts that can now be investigated, thanks to the development of modern research techniques. Using the analogy of TV stories in which newly developed forensic detection methods are used to solve decades-old crime cases, unsolvable then because of inappropriate detection capabilities. Well, new research methods of detection become available each decade, if not each year, and they can be used to re-test hypotheses and thoughts of researchers whose careers have preceded ours.

Arthur, A., 2002: Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels. New York: MJF Books.

Fragilecologies Archives
13 February 2006

Back in the Dark Age days of climate studies (before the early 1970s), there was considerable concern about the possibility of a global cooling of the atmosphere. The earth was moving rapidly toward the apparent next Ice Age, given the growing amount of circumstantial, as well as anecdotal, evidence at the time. The anecdotal evidence was pretty convincing to physical and biological scientists: Arctic sea ice was shifting southward into Atlantic shipping lanes; the growing season in England had become shorter by two weeks since 1940; the armadillo which had migrated as far north as the state of Kansas because of warmer decades had begun to retreat back toward the state of Texas. Due to a return to colder temperatures, fish caught on the northern coast of Iceland were appearing off the country’s southern coast, because cold water was moving toward the equator and away from the poles. In fact, Iceland in the 1970s was referred to as the thermometer for the Earth’s climate changes.

A flip in scientific concern took place in the mid-1970s away from a cooling and toward a belief in a foreseeable warming of the global climate system. The two opposing views existed side by side until the end of that decade. In fact, at the First World Climate Conference (WCC) held in late 1979 in Geneva, Switzerland by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 16 keynote speeches were presented, one of which addressed the economic costs to a society associated with a global cooling (not warming, even though warming arguments were starting to dominate). www.davidsuzuki.org

Climate-related headlines in the late 1970s were eye-catching. Several focused on a key disturbing consequence of global warming: concern about the degree of stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet is pinned to the land, and scientists have suggested that were it to fall into the ocean it would abruptly raise sea level by several meters. Such a catastrophe would swamp coastal settlements worldwide — no exceptions — bringing the coast of the world’s oceans deeper inland. It was shown to be a low probability, but one with devastating consequences worldwide. The fate of the West Antarctic ice sheet remains a major scientific issue of concern.

It seems that, as each decade since the 1970s has progressed, we witness some of the signs that scientists had been warning us about related to the gradual warming of the Earth’s atmosphere. For example, sea level continues to rise; 96 percent of the world’s glaciers are receding; warm climate ecosystems are moving upslope to higher altitudes into previously cooler climates and latitudes; exotic species and disease vectors are appearing in new locations poleward, adjusting to warmer winters and hotter summers. Droughts seem to be recurring with greater frequency and intensity in some drought-prone locations, and floods seem to be doing the same in flood-prone locations. Arctic sea ice has been disappearing at an increased rate and is now at its smallest surface area in a century.

Many of these changes are taking place earlier than expected, at rates faster than expected, and in places where they were often unexpected. We are starting to see stronger storms, some of which are called “superstorms.” In fact we are watching the development of “seasons of superstorms.”

Bleached coral. Photo by Ray Berkelmans, AIMS

While a lot of the computer model-based climate change scenarios yield foreseeable consequences of global warming out to the year 2050, 2070, or even 2100, we are already witnessing some of what scientists expect to take place in the distant future taking place now in different parts of the globe. Coral reefs are dying worldwide. Permafrost is melting. Each year seems to be ranked in the hottest ten on record. Tropical storms in the Atlantic and Pacific are increasing in frequency and intensity; and so forth. These are changes that have already been suggested verbally as well as in print for a couple of decades. They are no longer speculative changes. They are real.

Compounding physical and biological changes that are accompanying global warming (all observers admit that the climate has warmed in the 1900s by about 0.7 deg C) are demographic changes, such as in population growth and migration, land transformation and land use patterns, heightened exploitation of a wide range of natural resources, and increases in water and food shortages in many parts of the globe. In addition, there is a movement of populations worldwide toward coastal areas, areas that are increasingly going to be at risk to tropical storms, storm surges and sea level rise.

Scientists have repeatedly argued that for a degree warming in the mid-latitudes there would be a corresponding warming in the polar regions of 3 to 4 degrees. In other words the earliest visible signs of the impacts of global warming will likely appear first in the higher latitudes. And, they are! For example, a recent talk at St. Olaf University highlighted some results of a survey of changes in the Arctic and the Antarctic:

Sea ice extent in the Arctic has decreased by nearly 30% since the middle of the last century and the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by about a half degree Centigrade over a corresponding period, a greater change than anywhere else on the planet. This warming has led to the disintegration of several Peninsula ice shelves that had previously acted as a buttress, slowing the discharge of interior ice to the sea.

These reasons, only a few of the reasons that have led me to believe that the future has arrived earlier than expected, earlier than expected even by climate experts.

Fragilecologies Archives
21 December 2004

There’s a new club in town: the Kyoto Club. It was formed in mid-December 2004 in Argentina at a conference of governments meeting to discuss ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. The Club’s membership is made up of countries whose governments have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, a legal international accord to cope with the adverse causes and consequences of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. Policy makers have been working on this Protocol since 1997 and toward it since the early 1990s. To get going, the Club needed a quorum, a minimum number of members. It got that when Russia ‘s President Putin decided to sign on in the fall of 2004. The Protocol goes into force 90 days after ratification by Russia (16 February 2005, to be exact).

Two major greenhouse gas emitters, the USA and Australia, have not signed on to the Kyoto Protocol. In other words, the US government (the Congress as well as the President) has chosen not to join this particular club that now boasts a membership of 129 countries. Australia has followed the lead of the United States, forming a sort of ìcoalition of the willing,î that is, willing to say no to the Kyoto Protocol and process.

Each of these governments presents its arguments for its unwillingness to tie itself to mandatory steps to reduce CO2 emissions. They challenge the credibility of the global scientific community working on trying to understand the human influences on the global atmosphere. The US is responsible for about 25% of global CO2 emissions. It favors voluntary actions by industry to reduce CO2 emissions. The following headline which, I believe, captures a key expectation of the present-day Bush Administration, appeared in an official US Government press release at the 10th Conference of Parties (COP10) in Buenos Aires in mid-December 2004: Better Technologies Key to Addressing Climate Change.

Carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is called a trace gas, because its amount in the atmosphere is very small, especially when compared to other atmospheric gases. Scientists have learned over the past two centuries that CO2 in the atmosphere is a “greenhouse gas,” that is, it acts like a blanket that traps outgoing longwave radiation and heats up the Earth’s lower atmosphere. Although it is not the only greenhouse gas, it is pervasive. The other greenhouse gases (GHGs) include methane [various natural and human-related sources], nitrous oxides [used in fertilizers], and various CFCs and their equally harmful substitutes).

The funny thing about membership-based clubs is that they have entrance requirements which exclude some potential members while embracing others. Those requirements could be as simple as asking to join the club as a member and as complicated as having to meet many restrictive requirements. For the latter type of membership, potential members have to ìdo somethingî or at the least give the appearance of doing something that works toward achieving the club’s mission. For international agreements, a prospective member must agree to the signing onto, and agreeing at least in theory to abide by, the regulations and guidelines.

It is necessary to keep in mind that not all those governments that ratified the Kyoto Protocol did so because they believed the scientific reports that blame human activities for recent warming trends. Some have likely signed on to be a part of the Kyoto process with the purpose of acting as a ìfifth columnî (that is, to act as potential obstructionists if deliberations threaten their national interests). They will try to slow down progress toward mandatory regulations that call for large cuts in a nation’s CO2 emissions.

The In’s and Out’s of COP10

It seems that we are entering a new stage in the global warming problematique. I believe that the formation of the Kyoto Club has created overnight (at COP 10 in Argentina in mid December 2004) a ìglass wall,î a barrier of sorts, between members of the Club who profess that their countries will abide by the rules and regulations, mission and goals of the Protocol and those who have chosen to pay no attention to it. The difference between these two groups is the following: While Kyoto Club members may not reach their stated goals to reduce CO2 emissions, they have pledged at least to try. To the public at large, these countries are trying to deal with a potentially dangerous environmental problem of global proportions.

USA defaults on climate policy leadership to Ö the Kyoto Club

The campaign button to the right was handed out at the COP10 meeting. It is a fabricated image. President Bush did not really write or hold up such a message for all to see. The interesting thing about the button, whether one agrees with its message or not, is that the US Government has been singled out as THE obstructionist to global attempts to deal with the global warming issue.

The US (along with Australia) has been against placing any mandatory limits on their emissions of GHGs. Opposition to limits has been its guiding theme in how the US has treated the Kyoto Protocol process, as well as to the scientific findings that are driving (actually, accelerating) the Kyoto process. Those findings have come not only from modeling efforts but from observations of changes everywhere as well, such as glaciers melting just about everywhere on the globe. However, there are direct and indirect, obvious and not-so-obvious, consequences for not joining the Kyoto Club.

The Club’s members have taken over the global leadership position on climate and global change issues. How then will this impact US participation in future deliberations on global warming? Will the US be able to influence the process as a powerless onlooker—an outsider, as opposed to as an active Club member?

There is a new dimension of the global warming issue on the horizon that is a direct result of the US decision not to sign on to Kyoto. The dimension that I am concerned about as an American citizen is as follows: with the creation of the Kyoto Club, there will be a subtle, creeping but steady, shift of blame for the occurrence, as well as damage, of weather and climate-related disasters. Instead of blaming global warming on industrialized nations in general for the adverse impacts of global warming (GHG emissions), people will increasingly blame the US for specific environmental changes and disasters as they occur around the globe.

The ëblame game’ begins

The process of blame has in fact already begun. For example, at COP10 Argentinean reporters blamed the melting of South American glaciers on the US, because of its uncontrolled emissions of GHGs. It is not that other countries are not implicated in the global warming of the atmosphere; after all, it’s the combined amount of CO2 and other GHGs that are responsible for the warming. However, in the eye of the public, it will be increasingly apparent that the Kyoto Club membership—129 of them at present—as a whole (and despite the lack of commitment by some members) is trying to do something about it. For its part, the US has not yet chosen to treat the problem as an urgent and serious issue of planetary survival.

Those who care even slightly about the fate of the planet and about the well-being of present and future generations should worry about the mounting criticism of the US as being THE major obstacle to resolving the global warming problem. The US will be blamed for just about every bad climate- or weather-related problem that takes place on the planet, e.g., this flood or that drought was caused by America’s greenhouse gas emissions. US scientists have already suggested that global warming worsened the severity of recent drought in the US. Tuvalu and other Pacific Island nations are planning to sue the industrialized countries for global warming-related sea level rise that would eventually submerge their territory. For example, a report on the Internet (8 October 04) at www.disasterrelief.org was based on the political activities captured in the following headline: Tiny Pacific Islands to Sue Over Global Warming.

The Inuit in the Arctic region are also planning to sue the US government for destroying their culture as a result of CO2 emission-related environmental changes within the northern latitudes. Their concern is for the well being of humans, ecosystems and wildlife, as suggested in this BBC webline: “Beaches turning to mud and changes in wildlife are among the signs of a warming climate recorded by an Inuit community in Canada.” It is therefore foreseeable that the blame for the impacts of environmental changes in climate sensitive regions, ecosystems or activities is very likely going to be directed toward the biggest single greenhouse gas emitting nation, the United States .

Many scientific studies based on a variety of research methods including climate model projections suggest that there will be an increase in the frequency as well as intensity of extreme events (droughts, floods, tropical storms, disease outbreaks), as the atmosphere warms. It is conceivable that, eventually, several of those damage claims are likely to morph into legal cases with the USA as the defendant.

The ugly scenario that I see emerging is that the intensified blame of the United States for global warming will enable other major greenhouse gas emitters (polluters) to avoid being scrutinized for their emissions levels. The public opinion spotlight will fall increasingly on the United States as being responsible for the global warming problem. From an international cooperation perspective, many countries see the US government as acting irresponsibly, kind of like the free child described in the 1960s in transactional analysis terms: “I want what I want when I want it.”

The US President has gone out of his way to made it a point not to lead Americans and people in other countries on this issue. The US Congress has followed the lead of President Bush. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that many Americans, companies, and city governments want to take effective concrete steps toward arresting, and then rolling back, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions by, say, the State of California can have a greater impact than those actions taken by many national governments with smaller economies.

Certain phrases come to mind: “Pay now or pay later” and “a stitch in time saves nine.” The US pubic will eventually have to bear the costs of abstaining from involvement in the Kyoto process and from the likely impacts of global warming in at least the following two ways:

(1) US goods could become blocked from international trade activities, if the manufacturing processes required to produce those goods surpass the GHG emission restrictions that are sure to be established by the members of the Kyoto Club;

(2) Cleaning up after disasters will likely be much more costly than the costs that would be incurred by trying to prevent or mitigate their impacts.

There is also a third-—hidden—cost that Americans have already begun to pay: the shame of having turned our political and ethical back on the rest of the globe, as other governments wrestle with a global warming of the planet’s atmosphere to temperature levels that have not been witnessed for thousands if not tens of thousands of years.

In a way, it is like going to a casino to gamble: in order to play you have to pay. The US has chosen at this point in time not to relinquish any control over its greenhouse gas emissions to the Kyoto club. As a result, it will have considerably less influence on the decisions made by the club, decisions that may be come binding for many countries around the globe.

Fragilecologies Archives
1 February 2006

In July 2004, several government agencies were involved in playing out a hypothetical future focused in Louisiana and a strong Category 3 hurricane named Hurricane Pam. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) website has a press release that was issued after the completion of this exercise. It praised this effort to get a handle on required responses to a potentially devastating tropical storm making landfall in the highly vulnerable state of Louisiana, especially New Orleans . This “perfect storm scenario” was played as a game, at a time when no such hurricane was threatening the central part of the Gulf Coast.

The characteristics of hypothetical Hurricane Pam were described in the press release in the following way, entitled “Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes”:

Hurricane Pam sustained winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain in parts of southeast Louisiana and a storm surge that topped levees in the New Orleans area. More than one million residents evacuated, and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000–600,000 buildings. Emergency officials from 50 parish, state, federal, and volunteer organizations faced this scenario during a five-day exercise held this week [July 2004] at State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.

According to the release, the conclusions that were reached by those participating in the scenario, the importance of which we have no reason to challenge:

The exercise used realistic weather and damage information developed by the National Weather Service, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the LSU Hurricane Center, and other state and federal agencies to help officials develop a joint response plan for a catastropic hurricane in Louisiana.

The regional director then noted, “we made great progress in our preparedness efforts.” No reason to doubt his statement. They probably did… on paper.

The FEMA press release also provided a partial list of the Plan of Action identified for a “perfect storm scenario.” The following key essential activities were highlighted: debris removal, the need for landfills, the need for shelters, the search-and-rescue of stranded residents, plans for support of hospitals around the state that would bear the burden of refugees from the flooded coastal areas, and the impacts and needs of schools in the affected zone, including consideration of using the displaced teachers and retired teachers, among others, to fulfill “essential” school positions.

After having studied early warning systems for some years, I have come to believe that all (that is, every) early warning systems get into trouble when they are tested by Nature. And the test for this perfect “storm scenario” (the Hurricane Pam exercise) came 13 months later, in late August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, especially along the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines, and headed inland as a strong Category 3 hurricane.

Many of the responses identified by exercise participants to the forecasts, impacts and reconstruction in the disaster zone were great ideas. When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, however, the potential responses identified in the exercise were, for the most part, either poorly pursued or not pursued at all.

What history tells us of the development of a perfect storm scenario more than a year in advance of a major hurricane (like the one designed for use in the scenario) is that a thoughtful, well-identified, multiagency developed scenario of a disaster management plan in no way guarantees that a thoughtful, effective, and efficient response to the disaster would automatically follow.

Concerns from various quarters have often been expressed about the vulnerability to extreme flooding of New Orleans and its population, especially the poor. Hurricane Pam was a realistic “perfect scenario” of an extreme event that was foreseeable; people in the region have borne the brunt of hurricanes and several near-misses before, even in recent times.

Many people have stories to tell about Katrina. Many have proposed designs for future reconstruction of the disaster zone. But who is listening? How do you get a target audience to listen to your story or scenario? In this case, it seems that even with all the relevant players involved (decision makers, local to federal) the Hurricane Pam exercise apparently failed to serve a purpose in real life. It serves as yet another example of disaster lessons identified but lessons that were apparently not learned (that is, applied) by those with the authority to apply them.

One can only wonder why a level of urgency was not felt among the relevant disaster management agencies at the time, given an excellent National Weather Service forecast about 60 hours in advance of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

In economics as well as in disaster studies, people often refer to risk takers and those who tend to shy away from taking risks (risk averse). However, no one talks about “risk makers.” These are people whose decisions put others at risk, while they themselves are not in harm’s way as a result of the impacts of their decisions. With regard to Hurricane Katrina, the FEMA director was already a risk maker. However, the people who had to face those heightened risks (such as those in the lower Ninth Ward) ended up having to live for the rest of their lives with the negative impacts of bad decisions made by others.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A Louisiana congressman says e-mails written by the government’s emergency response chief as Hurricane Katrina raged show a lack of concern for the unfolding tragedy and a failure in leadership. (4 November 2005)

Risk makers, for their part, go back to their offices, downplay their responsibilities for disaster consequences, and go back to the proverbial drawing board to develop new plans that will once again most likely put still others at risk in the future. They often remain physically as well as politically unharmed.

The Hurricane Pam exercise, the perfect “storm scenario,” apparently tempted Fate and did so at the expense of Gulf Coast residents. Fate won.

Fragilecologies Archives
30 January 2007

What a mess our political system is in! People think that political systems last forever but they don’t. Look at the many civilizations that have developed throughout time and have collapsed, having seemed invincible at the height of their ascendancy. I am worried that our democracy of sorts is in trouble, even on the decline. People seem to have lost interest, as well as faith, in their responsibility to vote after having weighed a range of issues. Many votes appear to be driven by one issue or another: abortion, taxes, religious fervor and environment, as well as on America’s perceived as well as real responsibilities as a self-proclaimed superpower.

So what am I getting at here? I am a liberal person on social and environmental programs. I am tolerant of all religious perspectives and cultural differences. In the past 15 years, I have witnessed the rise to power of Bill Clinton as President, someone I would call a realist in Political Science terms. His two terms in office were followed by George W. Bush’s two terms.

When Clinton defeated George Bush senior in the 1992 election, the country, politically speaking, made a left turn away from the policies of the Reagan-Bush era. With the contested election win by G.W. Bush the junior in 2000, the country voted to make a right turn. What has happened since the 2000 election and events early in the Bush the Second’s administration has been a downturn.

The public does not know what it wants. The Bush administration has fostered a polarization (a chasm, really) of the electorate by talking in terms of patriots, god-fearing, righteousness: if you are not in support of Bush policies, you are labeled as unpatriotic. If you speak out against the war in Iraq, about weapons of mass destruction, about leaving the Iraqis to resolve their differences without US involvement, about corruption in Congress and the executive branch, and so forth, you are labeled as unpatriotic. If you support stem cell research or are in favor of abortion or birth control anywhere in the world — not just for Americans — you are godless.

In Bush’s tenure in office so far (he still has two years to go), the country has gone from one with no foreign debt to one with enormous debt burdens placed on our children and grandchildren. We got into a war as a direct result of the intentional lies of our government, for reasons it has yet to disclose and that the public has yet to understand. The Iraq War has generated more hatred of the US worldwide than ever before. Even our long-standing allies, such as they are, have questioned the direction that Bush’s America has chosen to go. What kind of leader would say publicly (even if he or she entertained the thought) that he would stay the course in Iraq even if it is only his wife and his dog who support him? The blindness of the President is matched only in bravado by the arrogance of his Vice President Cheney (a ìDon’t worry. Be happyî oblivious-to-reality Vice President).

I am told that there is a Chinese proverb, “it takes three generations for a family to be successful but only one to destroy that success.” It seems that such a proverb applies to America of the past fifteen years. Whatever goodwill we have had fostering democracy, freedom, immigration, humanity, we have lost much of it. That the torture tactics that were officially supported (until exposed and challenged as un-American, an attorney general who was involved in approving and later defending torture tactics in the name of freedom — is that like destroying a village in order to save it?), an intransigent Secretary of Defense who listened to no one, an army that was sent into combat ill-equipped and misused, a president that can only present his speeches to selected audiences mostly on military bases and so forth, all point to a country on the decline.

Typical protest against the Bush administration. From www.realitybasednation.com

And then there is the domestic side of the downslide of America where the national debt has deepened sharply, the outsourcing (exporting) of American jobs, the few-dollar tax returns with no mention of borrowing to keep the country’s economy and two-front wars afloat (don’t forget Afghanistan), the invasion of privacy and loss of human rights in a country that challenges other countries about their civil rights records.

We have lost the right to judge the misguided deeds of others without allowing ourselves to be judged. As a country, we no longer have any moral authority, having squandered it through government-sponsored torture of political and other prisoners. We have lost as well our clout, with regard to issues of war and on issues related to a cleaner environment such as global warming, whether local or global.

The Bush administration has been a disaster. Even members of his own party now question his judgment and his ability to lead the country on anything, especially two wars. It may be that it will end up that his wife and his dog, as he once quipped, will truly be his only supporters.

Fragilecologies Archives
27 January 2006

The idea behind the title of this editorial is the following: Many of the scenarios people have discussed about the consequences of future human interactions with various types of ecosystems, from deserts to mountain slopes, have already, in reality, been played out. The scenarios should no longer be viewed as speculation about possible consequences, because the future — that is, the end result — of activities involving changes to the natural environment have already been initiated by human activities somewhere on the globe for the first time. The impacts of those changes have most likely already been demonstrated. Why? Because the result of similar activities (modification of the natural environment) has already been pursued, tried, and tested in other parts of the globe in earlier times, and they have already yielded their results, which have turned out to be either good or bad for the environment, or for society, or for both.

As an example, cutting down trees in large numbers on mountainsides will likely yield similar results as far as the natural environment is concerned, when the same clearcutting approaches are attempted anew in a similar topographical setting in a different part of the globe: soil erosion, rapid rainfall runoff, lower soil moisture recharge, silting up of stream flow, sediment loading of dams and reservoirs, and faster snowmelt in the spring. The same is true if one were to remove mangrove forests in order to develop shrimp ponds or to irrigate desert soils without proper drainage facilities.

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A pristine forest scene	A pristine forest after clearcutting

While some people may have made these changes to the environment in proper ways, others have not. The point is that we do not necessarily need new scientific assessments of potential environmental impacts, for some of these processes of human-induced environmental changes have already shown their impacts on the environment and on society. it is a fact that often the call for new environmental impact assessments is no more than a delaying tactic by those who favor the changes to the environment, often for personal or corporate gain.

Mangrove forests	Shrimp ponds displacing mangroves

The future impacts of new activities that involve modification of the natural environment already exists somewhere on the globe, if only we choose to look for them.

Fragilecologies Archvies
20 January 2006

Over the years, various governments have proposed programs and technologies designed to weather-proof or climate-proof their countries or vulnerable regions within them. The objectives of such programs could be interpreted in either of two ways:

(1) To insulate human activities from the influence of weather and climate conditions, most likely extremes in precipitation (rain or snow) and in temperature;

(2) To reduce the exposure of a weather- and climate-sensitive activities to climate-related hazards.

The first objective is quite idealistic and can be misleading to the public, because such a goal may be unattainable. To date, no society rich or poor, industrial or agricultural, has been able to fully insulate its people and human activities from climate- and weather-related anomalies. Yet, a phrase such as ìclimate proofingî suggests that there are programs in place that can now, or if not now in the near future, achieve such an objective.

The second objective is much more realistic, in that it suggests that climate-proofing is a process and not just an end state and that, while the objective may be unattainable, effective operational steps towards achieving an increasingly protected society is an attainable goal. This objective is most likely the one that governments have in mind when they propose such “proofing” activities either for society as a whole, or for specific climate-sensitive social and economic sectors, or for known vulnerable regions. Both objectives are designed to minimize, if not eliminate, the chance for surprises and to mitigate, if not prevent, the unwanted consequences of anomalous weather or climate.

The fertile soils of Western Canada became a dustbowl in the Great Depression. Saskatchewan Archives Bd., Regina, R-B15082-3 (1930s).

For example, the history of successful agriculture in the Canadian prairies has been punctuated by drought episodes. The prairie provinces suffered as much as the U.S. Midwest during the Dust Bowl days in the 1930s (so of course they received no attention in U.S. history books). In the 1970s, following the recurrence of severe drought in the Canadian prairies, the government launched a program to ìdrought-proofî the prairies. Drought-proofing measures included changes in land-use practices such as leaving stubble and crop residue in the ground after harvest. This was done to retain snow and to protect the topsoil from being eroded by wind action. Expectations for successfully drought-proofing this region, however, were soon undermined by nature, as droughts and crop losses continued to reappear in the region. Today, Canadians in the region are more specific in their activities by, for example, calling for the drought-proofing of farm water supplies.

Despite the confusion that surrounds the concept of drought-proofing, it is still being proposed by U.N. agencies as well as by various national governments. Two recent examples come to mind, Australia and India. During the 2002 drought in New South Wales, the government pursued a drought-proofing strategy, calling on farmers to review the way that they manage their property (land and water resources) for drought. Drought-proofing in this situation means mitigating the potentially adverse impacts of very dry conditions by devising ways to keep moisture in the soil by resorting to no-till practices and by upgrading irrigation facilities (see, for example, www.abc.net.au/nws/stories/s604472.htm).

The U.N. development program has partnered with Britain, Australia, and development agencies in creating drought-proofing activities in India on an experimental basis (e.g., Orissa and Rajastan). Its plan is to encourage the use of technologies for the purpose of rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharging in order to make water supplies in rural areas more reliable and available and they are present, especially when there are conditions of meteorological drought (www.undp.org.in/news/press/press207.htm). But not everyone has bought into the notion of climate-proofing. For example, Indian policy analyst Devinder Sharma has argued that drought-proofing measures should not be imported from other countries but should be home-grown). In September 2002 he suggested the following:

It comes as a rude shock. The American agriculture that we studied in the universities and appreciated has crumbled with one year of severe drought. It is well known that Indian agriculture falters because of its complete dependence on monsoons. But with the kind of industrialisation that took place in the United States, and with the amount of investments made, we were told that US agriculture is not dependent upon rains. Now, though, the drought-proofing that we heard so much about appears to be a big farce.
(www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/uslessons.htm)

The U.S. government has also attempted weatherproofing. In late 1999, the U.S. weather research program launched a national computing system for forecasting purposes. But within a matter of days, a forecast of light snow for the Washington D.C. area proved wrong, when a major winter storm developed, depositing 12 inches of snow in the metropolitan area. More recently in March 2001, a storm of major proportions — referred to by some forecasters as a potential “storm of the century “– had been forecast for the lower half of the northeastern U.S. It was forecast to be a “Nor’easter,” the magnitude of which had not been seen since the 1950s.

A Nor’easter (www.theweathernetwork.com)

The forecast prompted people in the region to prepare for several days of having to cope with snow-related disruptions. Stores were emptied of shovels, salts, mechanical snow-removing devices, and the like. Although a major storm did develop, its track unexpectedly shifted more than 100 miles to the north. Most of the snow-related disruptions failed to occur in the D.C. area. Once the storm system had passed by his state, the Governor of New Jersey threatened to sue the National Weather Service for the adverse costly impacts of what he viewed as a grossly “erroneous” forecast.

While labeling a program as climate-proofing or weather-proofing represents the hopes of the climate and weather forecast communities, it is a poor way to capture the attention of the public. First of al,l the notion can be interpreted to mean that such a goal is attainable, with the availability of new forecasting tools and techniques in the new understanding of the workings of the climate system. Second, it raises false hopes which are onlysquashed by the next surprising climate or weather anomaly.

A forecast is just a forecast. It does not come with a guarantee. Instead, it comes with an invisible “buyer beware” label.

Fragilecologies Archives
20 December 2005

The debate about the causes behind the global warming of the Earth’s atmosphere still continues three decades, more or less, after it began. One point on which all scientists now agree is that the global climate has warmed since 1900 by about 0.7 degree C.

In the past thirty years, the balance among the various positions in the debate, however, has shifted significantly in favor of those who believe that the climate is warming up because of human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) and the cutting down of tropical rainforests in different parts of the globe and those who believe that the warming is part of a natural cycle independent of human influence.

It is pretty safe to say that, among scientists, the yeasayers (those who believe that human activities are affecting global climate) well outnumber the naysayers (otherwise known as skeptics who do not believe in a human-induced warming). There is a third category, the undecided, and of those there are some who lean toward the views of the yeasayers and others who favor the naysayers position.

I think that in many cultures there is probably a story about a boy who cried wolf. It goes like this: a shepherd herding sheep spent many lonely days and nights tending his family’s sheep. So, to get attention, he would cry “Wolf!” so that others would come running to help him protect the sheep. At first the villagers were happy that no wolf appeared. But the boy continued each night to cry wolf and soon the villagers no longer believed his calls for help. One night a wolf did come to attack the sheep and the boy cried wolf yet again. This time, no one came to help him, and his sheep were killed.

For several years now the naysayers (skeptics) have been saying that the yeasayers were “crying wolf’” about a human-induced global warming of the atmosphere. The truth of the matter is that the naysayer is the one who is crying wolf. Some key policy makers or influential advisers use the increasingly weakened arguments of the naysayers in order to avoid having to take serious action to combat global warming. Yet, each major study adds another missing piece to the climate change puzzle in support of the yeasayers’ argument that humans are influencing the climate. The naysayers try to find an article to refute the apparent progress in scientific understanding of global warming of the 20th, and now 21st, century.

Each of the most recent years seems to take its place on the list of the ten hottest years on record, most of which have occurred within the past 20 years. Hmmm; is it rocket science to conclude that something must be going on here with regard to forcing the global climate system to change?

Now we learn, thanks to satellites, that the coverage of Arctic ice is dropping and is at its lowest level in recent times. Great, say the naysayers; some governments can use the ice-free Arctic for a shortened navigation route between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Great, eh? Not so, if you listen to the arguments about the potentially devastating impacts on climate in the Northern Hemisphere. Apparently, for evidence of global warming the northernmost latitudes represent the proverbial canary in the mine [in the old days canaries were brought into the mines as an early warning of gas buildup].

People fear change in general and some suggest that the North American breadbasket — the US Midwest and the Canadian Prairie Provinces — will become drier with a warmer atmosphere (which is causing the Arctic sea ice to melt!).

The point of the comments above is an attempt to re-right a wrong. It is not those who say that humans are a contributing factor in global warming that are the proverbial boy crying wolf. It is the skeptics who are crying wolf, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary of their position. Isn’t there enough evidence already in space, on the ground, in the ocean, in ecosystems and in society to support a governmental comprehensive “precautionary” approach to dealing with global warming of the atmosphere that has become a worldwide concern?

It’s time to leapfrog the obstacles placed by naysayers in the way of political action on global warming, so that future generations can say that our generation of Americans preferred being safe as opposed to being sorry.

Fragilecologies Archives
19 December 2005

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
And all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men
Could not put Humpty together again!
— Children’s nursery rhyme, Anon.

It is now obvious to most observers that the global climate has warmed up by almost a degree Centigrade since 1900. Glaciers around the globe are melting. Sea level is rising. Warm-temperature ecosystems are moving upslope of mountainsides to higher elevations as the lower atmosphere becomes increasingly warm. And now we are told that the percentage of Arctic sea ice reduction may have reached a “tipping point,” or a point at which there is more heat being absorbed by the dark-colored ocean waters than is reflected back by the lighter-colored sea ice.

Researchers expect the climate to continue on a warming trend throughout the 21st century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of a couple thousand scientists from around the globe, suggests that global temperatures can continue to increase by 2.5 to 5.8 degrees C by the end of this century. Some of this increase is the result of burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere and the release of other greenhouse gases (GHGs) as a result of land-use activities, the use of certain chemical fertilizers in agriculture, cement production, and the cutting down of tropical rainforests in Brazil and elsewhere. These are the human contributions to GHGs. There are also natural changes that occur as a result of warming, whether or not that warming is caused by people or by natural occurrences: the melting of Arctic sea ice, and the thawing of permafrost in the northern latitudes.

Once GHGs are in the air, they have a long residence time in the atmosphere — on the order of a century of more. So, we have already committed the atmosphere to additional warming, even if there were to be a drastic reduction today in the use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and in tropical deforestation (forests absorb carbon dioxide; scientists say that they are a “sink” for carbon dioxide).

The point I want to raise is this: if by some major scientific breakthrough, we were able to reduce GHGs back to the 1900 level (or, for that matter, any other level of the 1900s), and global temperatures were reduced back to earlier levels, would regional and local climates return to be the same as they were at those lower levels? In other words, by controlling GHG emissions (either human-induced or naturally occurring), would we be able to return to the climate of 1900 — or, for that matter, to any other climate regime of the past that we might like? I have identified an analogy that suggests that the answer to that question is “no.”

The analogy I have in mind is a personal one. Many Americans today are very concerned about their body weight. Medical reports remind the public about their habits of overeating and about how overweight Americans are in general. I decided to see if I had the willpower to lose weight by returning to my weight when I was 26 years old (four decades ago). I managed to lose 17 pounds in a year. The loss of weight apparently came from different places on my body, such as my face and waist. People have since told me how my face looks thinner, making me look somewhat older. They suggested to me that I put those 17 pounds back. That got me to wondering: if I were now to add them back to my body, would they return to the same places where they were lost?

My gut feeling is that the 17 pounds would not necessarily go back to the places from where they originally came. By analogy, can one assume then that the regional climates, exhibited during a time of lower GHG concentration, will be restored as they had previously existed? The analogy to me suggests that the answer would be “no.” It forces me to question whether societies have put themselves on a proverbial “slippery slope” of climate change with unknown consequences and over which they have no control. In other words, I assume that there is no going back to a favored climate regime as the result of a policy to alter greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Idyllic climates of the past may be a thing of the past.

Whether we like it or not, we are playing Russian roulette with global and regional climates. We have catalyzed changes in the climate system to such an extent that attempts to reverse those adverse changes and return to favored past climates will likely fail.