This year has been a doozy for climate change. February is on pace to break all sorts of records for the warmest ever recorded. Washington DC, for example, has temperatures similar to Honolulu the past few days. And it’s not just a blip: each year that passes has broken records from the previous year for hottest year on record.
Here in California we’re now experiencing what scientists have warned about: extreme drought followed by extreme rain. We just finished a record drought and are now on pace for record rainfall this year.
These extremes are badly stressing our infrastructure, from dams like Oroville to shuttered highway around the state. To discuss the state of infrastructure in an age of climate change, I participated today on a press briefing via Climate Nexus.
I was joined on the panel by:
- Noah Diffenbaugh, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Inst. for the Environment, expert on climate change & impacts in CA.
- Juliet Christian-Smith, Senior Climate Scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, expert on water infrastructure.
We received questions at the end from members of the press, but the discussion could be of interest to anyone. Here is the audio:
Right before the November election, the Real News Network released a 30-minute documentary called “The Doubt Machine: Inside the Koch Brothers’ War on Climate Science.” You can watch it above. It describes how Big Oil, and in particular the billionaire oil tycoons Charles and David Koch, have used their vast wealth and clout to undermine efforts to combat climate change.
The documentary is narrated by Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson and directed by investigative journalist Bruce Livesey. It includes interviews with Jane Mayer, reporter with The New Yorker magazine and author of the book Dark Money; Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University science historian and co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt, Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University; and Kert Davies of the Climate Investigations Center, among others.
You can learn more about the document and The Real News Global Climate Change Bureau at this site. If you have time, it’s well worth watching the film.
Messaging on climate change can make all the difference. Conservatives tend to shut down mentally when it comes to discussing the science, mostly out of fear that it will be used as an excuse to over-regulate the economy.
But a new study suggests a method to getting the science across. Researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany found that “phrasing pro-environmental messages in past-focused ways” worked better with self-described conservatives than messages that warned of future problems:
Their idea is that conservatives tend to take a brighter view of the past than other groups; thus, they might be receptive to arguments regarding global warming couched in more pro-past oriented ways, e.g., “Times were better when you could count on snow for Christmas in northern towns,” or “We planted bulbs in the garden on the same spring day every year.”
Yet another approach to reach this demographic, as I’ve chronicled before. Even thought support for climate action appears to be increasing, per a new poll from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, we’ll need all the help we can get from conservatives on this issue.
This might sound crazy, but Donald Trump’s presidency could actually have a temporarily positive impact on climate change. How? Nothing reduces emissions like a recession, and according to economists, Trump’s stated policies are likely to cause one.
Specifically, if Trump follows through on his promise to start a trade war with countries like China, he could end up reducing the U.S. carbon footprint significantly. Imagine higher tariffs on goods from China, U.S. cars manufactured in Mexico, and stuff from the myriad other places that export items we buy. The result will be higher prices on those goods, which will mean less consumption. Less consumption means fewer carbon emissions.
Then think of the result on those producing countries. We could see a slowdown in the economy of places like China, where growth is in large part due to sales of cheap stuff to the U.S. market. Because China itself is now a major emitter of greenhouse gases, a slowdown there will also reduce global emissions.
This isn’t just theoretical: we have experience on this issue from the Great Recession. That slowdown caused a dip in the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a UC Irvine study. The recession also made it easier for California to meet its 2020 emissions goals, as E&E News reported:
“California had a pretty soft economy for many years after its goal was set,” said Severin Borenstein, an economics professor at UC Berkeley and a member of a committee that the California Air Resources Board (ARB) set up in 2012-13 to advise it on the design of its cap-and-trade market. “Although it’s heating up now, we will easily make the 2020 goal, and that will in large part be due to the weak economy for many years.”
Now to be clear, an economic downturn is not something to root for, and it would cause all sorts of hardship and potentially more political instability. To avoid that outcome, California regulators have been meticulous and careful about making the transition to a clean economy without shocking the economy. Indeed, the state is instead focused on ways to benefit economically from clean technology, contrary to the usual conservative complaints about environmental action costing jobs and economic growth.
But Trump’s policies on trade, immigration and other economic issues may lead us to a recession regardless of what California does. And if that happens, the one silver lining for those concerned about climate change is that it will likely offer a temporary pause to the emission of heat-trapping gases. And that could buy the world more time to emerge from a post-Trump era with still a fighting chance to limit climate change.
Trump has made no secret of his rejection of climate science. Instead, he counter-punches by saying the real threat is global warming caused by a nuclear bomb (video above), as Politico reports:
The seemingly far-fetched threat of nuclear-induced climate change has been on Trump’s mind since at least June, when he warned of “nuclear warming” during a visit to The Chicago Tribune. His concern: The environmental impact of a potential nuclear blast gets far less attention than the greenhouse gas emissions that are already raising sea levels and temperatures worldwide.
What’s his solution? Trump’s underlying policy goal here is actually dismissing calls for federal action to cut U.S. emissions by raising the profile at a presidential level of both national security and nuclear containment. It’s a counter-argument as well to both Obama and Clinton, who have described climate change as a threat on par with terrorism.
It’s an odd way to deflect on the science and attempt instead to muddle the issue. But who knows — in this election year, it may actually work well enough to confuse people. And of course the other challenge for climate advocates is that climate change doesn’t rank high on the list of voter concerns.
It certainly doesn’t help when a major party nominee tosses out strange, deflecting rhetoric like this, but it’s a line of argument that advocates should be ready to refute.
Climate science denial may finally be waning on the right, but there’s still a long way to go. The Guardian assesses the roots of this denial, dispelling the myth that anti-vaccination ideology is a mirror on the left of climate science rejection on the right:
A 2013 paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues investigated the links between ideology and science denial. The study similarly found no evidence of symmetrical science denial between liberals and conservatives on different issues. The authors concluded that conspiratorial thinking and free market support – both prevalent on the political right – were most strongly related to science denial:
Free-market worldviews are an important predictor of the rejection of scientific findings that have potential regulatory implications, such as climate science, but not necessarily of other scientific issues. Conspiracist ideation, by contrast, is associated with the rejection of all scientific propositions tested.
Notably, left-wing anti-vaccination beliefs are more motivated by distrust of the pharmaceutical industry rather than broad-based rejection of science (although I imagine there’s some overlap).
Meanwhile, the pervasive phenomenon of smart, stubborn science-deniers continues:
This rising distrust of science is particularly high among higher-educated conservatives, in what’s been coined the “smart idiot” effect. Essentially, on complicated scientific subjects like climate change, more highly-educated ideologically-biased individuals possess more tools to fool themselves into denying the science and rejecting the conclusions of experts.
The article does note that “smart idiot” demographic change will take its toll:
However, there is good news. For one, climate denial is largely limited to a small and dwindling group of old, white, male conservatives; hence, it’s not a tenable long-term position for the Republican Party. Like opposition to gay marriage, science denial is a position that will increasingly alienate young voters in particular, who will bear the brunt of the consequences of climate inaction.
It’s a shame it has to come to that, rather than having the overwhelming evidence and weight of scientific consensus change attitudes. But perhaps in that respect, attitudes about climate change science are no different than our country’s polarized attitudes about a host of political issues.
In a long and fascinating piece on President Obama’s views on foreign policy, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg relays the president’s thinking on a range of global issues, gleaned from multiple and extended interviews.
While the Middle East is much of the focus of the article, the president reveals his real concerns for the safety of the United States:
“Isis is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told me in one of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Obama explained that climate change worries him in particular because “it is a political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention. It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the agenda.”
And it’s also dominating his thinking about the transition to the next president:
In a conversation at the end of January, I asked the president to describe for me the threats he worries about most as he prepares, in the coming months, to hand off power to his successor.
“As I survey the next 20 years, climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has on all the other problems that we face,” he said. “If you start seeing more severe drought; more significant famine; more displacement from the Indian subcontinent and coastal regions in Africa and Asia; the continuing problems of scarcity, refugees, poverty, disease—this makes every other problem we’ve got worse. That’s above and beyond just the existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback loop.”
It’s reassuring that the president personally is so focused on climate change. To my mind, there is no greater issue facing humanity. Of course, for any single individual, there may be more important concerns: the Syrian refugee, the low-income person with health troubles, the migrant worker.
But climate change supersedes all these issues on a global scale, with the following potential consequences:
- Economic — the cost of relocating major American cities from inundated coasts or drought-stricken regions will be enormous. Probably not fatal to the U.S. economy, but likely to be deeply crippling.
- National security — the climate stressors on various nations, as we saw in the Middle East with drought-fueled rising food prices that sparked the Arab Spring, could lead to instability, wars, and more refugees. We’re already getting a taste of what that may look like in Europe and the Middle East right now.
- Species survival — as the planet blows past 2 degrees centigrade warming by the end of this century, with steeper temperature increases to come in the next, there’s a strong risk of global crop failure and further massive species die-off, leading to the risk of extinction for humans.
Of course, there are other planetary risks, like nuclear war and viruses/plagues. But those threats are likely to leave pockets of the planet (or percentages of people) unharmed, allowing life on Earth as we know it to continue.
In the long run, I believe life on Earth will survive, whether we’re here or not. In fact, a mass die-off now will probably provide a great opportunity for some other species, currently around us somewhere, to flourish and diversify, much as mammals did after the die-off of many dinosaur-era species.
But I’d rather have that future come much later, and keep the present arrangement for as long as we can. And at the very least, at least we have a president who shares these concerns, even as his political power — and boldness to tackle the issue when we had a better opportunity — has faded.
Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker finally weighed in on climate change last week in Nevada, and their big plan for California to cope with it? More dams:
Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co. who ran against U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2010, said it “may well be true” that climate change has worsened effects of the drought. Like many Republicans, however, she blamed environmentalists and their Democratic allies for blocking the construction of dams in the state.
“California has had droughts for millennia,” Fiorina told The Bee. “And so knowing that, you would think that you would prepare for droughts by building reservoirs and water conveyance systems so that you could save the rainwater during years when there’s a lot of rain.”
I suppose it’s a typical Republican line of thought: we shouldn’t ask anyone to moderate their consumption at all — just boost supply. They take the same tack on energy — drive all you want, we’ll drill more!
But the problem is that a growing population, coupled with projections for more and severe droughts, makes expanding water storage unrealistic as a long-term solution. Not to mention that building dams is extremely expensive, while the more fiscally conservative path would be to encourage cheap conservation measures. And this doesn’t even account for the environmental destruction associated with building more dams.
Bottom line: not only do these candidates not take the science of climate change seriously, their proposed solutions are impractical, expensive, and destructive.
The Village of Kivalina, Alaska, from the air.
Presenting climate deniers with facts doesn’t seem to persuade. Offering free-market solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t work either. And pointing to the economic opportunities from clean technologies seems to be a losing battle, too.
So maybe the best hope is to spotlight the human toll of climate change. The Village of Kivalina in Alaska is ground zero for climate change:
Kivalina City Council member Colleen Swan says the people of the village rely for food mostly on what the environment, especially the ocean, provides for them. “It’s been our way to make a living for hundreds of years,” she says. “During the winter months the ice is part of our landscape, because we go out there and we set up camps and hunt, and it’s all seasonal. We were able to see the changes years ago.”
In May, June and July, the men of the village go out on the ice hunting bearded seals. They cut up the seals, dry them and store them for the winter. “That provides the winter supply,” Swan says. “That’s what keeps us warm in the Arctic.”
About 15 years ago, the villagers noticed the season started two weeks early and the ice began to thin sooner than before. “We didn’t notice at first the gradual change until it became two weeks early consistently from year to year,” Swan says. Now, she says, the hunters must remain vigilant, keeping a close eye on the ice, the seals and the sea. If they don’t, they could miss the hunting season. “The hardest one to swallow was the fact that our ice wasn’t safe any more for us to set up whaling camps,” Swan says.
Unfortunately it will be people in “edge” communities like Kivalina, where they eke out a living from the land and sea, who will face the brunt of climate change impacts. In that respect, Pope Francis was right to call climate change a moral issue.
I’ll be on Warren Olney’s show tonight at 7pm on KCRW Radio (89.9 FM in Los Angeles), discussing the Pope’s apparent bashing of cap-and-trade as a means to address climate change. Joining the roundtable discussion will be David Baker from the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote an article describing the Pope’s comments, and Scott Edwards of Food & Water Watch, who doesn’t like cap-and-trade and was pleased with the Pope’s position.
Meanwhile, here’s what the Pope wrote to stir this particular issue up:
171. The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.
Hope you can listen in or stream. I’ll post a link later.
UPDATE: you can listen to the show here.
