The second act would be a reality check on what’s feasible, given that awareness. And that’s where I think most of the media and public have not really absorbed what would be required. How do you take a world that is 80 percent dependent on fossil fuels and go to a world 80 percent free of fossil fuels as the population grows toward nine billion and its appetite for the things that come with ample energy grows? Within half a century—or within a century even—that’s a transformation the likes of which has never happened in human history. It makes the agricultural revolution seem easy, and the reality is that this doesn’t just come by turning off the lights, driving slower, or creating green jobs (unless, as I’ve written, those jobs include scientists, teachers, and innovators). That’s Act Two, and the media have only just started to nibble at it.
CB: And Act Three?
AR: Actually putting in place the programs, initiatives, and policies that would be needed to make [the transformation] happen. And awareness. Act Three definitely depends on Act Two, and having a broader awareness of what’s necessary and a broader of awareness of why it’s necessary—not to save our climate, which is the way it’s been popularly portrayed, but as a way to limit risks of real unexpected, turbulent, and harmful changes that might be avoided with a vigorous change in direction now.
CB: Speaking of change, you broke a number of stories on the Bush administration’s interference with communications about climate science. Do you expect that, as far as access to information is concerned, your job will be a little easier under the Obama administration?
AR: I think that, if anything, now is the time for even more scrutiny and care. You could sort of look at this, oh, finally, everything will be nice and touchy-feely. But so far, Obama’s transition team has been very cagey and careful. It’s not clear how appointments are going to play out [see Dot Earth post]. Steven Chu [his Secretary of Energy] and Carol Browner [his “climate czar”] come from different universes in terms of the climate problem. Browner comes from the regulatory, top-down-style approach to carbon dioxide. Chu has a technology focus and says we need to put a price on carbon, but that nothing will happen until we have a technology revolution as well.
So there are some big dramas that will play out here. How well does [Obama] recognize the mix of long-term technology transformation and short-term policy that’s needed? Will he be satisfied with a political win like a weak cap-and-trade bill that has no meaning at all climatologically, or will he recognize that’s just a starting point? And Congress is still a huge barrier to some of things that scientists and technical experts see as necessary. These are important things for the media to stay on top of.
CB: But the other week you highlighted a new study by Max Boykoff that shows climate coverage has declined significantly this year.
AR: He and I both said that was just a snapshot. Frankly, there’s not as much meaning in that curve as there is in the other graph that I attached to the bottom of that post, which is the curve going from 1980 to 2006. That was from Boykoff’s earlier paper, which shows a huge uptick in coverage. So I think, whatever the little wiggle is right now, overall this is an arena that is not going away. But a big chunk of it is driven by energy. So as gasoline gets down to a dollar a gallon—without that added component of energy urgency—you’re going to see the climate issue fade a little bit.
CB: When you wrote about the twenty-year anniversary of your first climate cover story in Discover, you pointed out that a lot of details, particularly the lack of public engagement, haven’t changed much. Do you think that will change any time soon?
AR: That, to some extent, depends on what Mother Nature throws at us over the next few years. As some people have cynically predicted, it may take something like a mega-drought in the southwest to get the country totally engaged, and the media as well. But a mega-drought in southwest is one of the harder things to ascribe to a human influence on the climate system because, as we’ve learned historically, that’s kind of the norm for the southwest, and we’ve just been lucky to have wetter conditions over the last hundred years. But if we have a big eruption like a Pinatubo-style volcano [which would cause temporary global cooling], then this whole issue could get derailed by that. So if I had to predict, being a realist and somewhat jaded, yeah, I may have to reprise the post I’ve done at least once, riffing on the Talking Heads line, “same as it ever was.”
CB: In your Chancellor speech you mentioned that one thing isn’t the same, though. You wrote a song called, “Liberated Carbon,” but recently changed some of the words?
AR: Well, folk music is a plastic and evolutionary process. Originally, it said, “Satan came along and said, ‘Hey, try lighting this.’ He opened the ground and showed us coal and oil.” And, you know, I thought a lot about that. I probably approached the song initially in the voice of your traditional, Bob Dylan rabble-rouser. And now I look back, and I think, you know, it’s not Satan; it’s normal. It’s just us.
Very good interview. Mr Revkin is playing a very important part in this worldwide discussion, and his DOT EARTH blog serves a vital function now, both for professionals in science and journalism, and for lay readers like me. Bravo!
Posted by Danny BLoom on Tue 16 Dec 2008 at 10:31 PM
Cheers to Andy! I was caught by the way he framed Global Warming in three parts. To add to Andy's description of the first and second ensemble, it seems that artists and other social thinkers will be involved somewhere between Act I & II: http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exhibition_programs/SEA/index.html.
Although,
Posted by Audrey K. Tran on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 02:32 PM
here's the proper link:
http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exhibition_programs/SEA/index.html
Posted by Audrey K. Tran on Fri 2 Jan 2009 at 12:40 AM
According to the citation that came along with his recent Chancellor award, Andy, "by staying ahead of this story by continuing to explore and examine its developments and implications" performs an important public service.
Perhaps we might gently rephrase this to:
Andy, after "eventually stumbling upon what the U.N. Brundtland Commission laid out for everyone in the world in 1987" starts to absorb this fifteen years later, in 2002.
(The 1987 "Our Common Future" report laid out in elaborate detail that the expanding human population was the root cause of the ecological crisis.)
Andy continues to perform his unique public service for us now as he "stays ahead" of the story:
The movers and shakers of the journalistic world seem to be trying, at last, to integrate climate change into their consciousness. This was one reason Andy was given their John Chancellor award. They start calling climate change "the issue" of our times, and here's Andy, ahead of the story as always, telling them they haven't got it yet, bringing them and us the news that the big story global warming is a substory of is what has been staring anyone who wanted to look at this in the face for decades.
John Chancellor, according to a speech on that video you have linked to here came from the "lusty school of Chicago" journalism. These Chicago school people thought being a journalist meant you had to: "print the news and raise hell".
But things have changed. Chancellor made his name reporting as the Arkansas National Guard was called out to prevent African American children from entering Central High school in Little Rock. Although that was a polarizing issue if there ever was one, i.e. there were those who insisted that blacks deserved to be treated as second class former slaves with no right to be schooled beside whites, Chancellor took a side. What they said at the ceremony that Chancellor did was this:
"Through his reporting, John Chancellor dispelled lies and ignorance for the first time in the new age of TV".
Now that we are in the new Internet age, Andy is cited to receive an award in memory of Chancellor's work, because "you respect different sides of this polarizing issue", i.e. climate, supposedly by "sticking to the facts".
We don't dispel lies and ignorance now, with powerful statements on TV or the Internet such as this example of Chancellor's work which was played at the award ceremony:
"Whats the Israeli Army doing here in Beirut? The answer is we are now dealing with an Imperial Israel which is solving its problems in someone else's country, world opinion be damned".
Now, we respect ignorance and lies. Andy's got "deniers" who show up daily on his blog, who he seems to cater to as somehow one pole in a debate that has as he said at the award ceremony, "catastrophists" on the other side.
Perhaps truth is an average now. You stack up the morons who show up saying the accumulated evidence of the last thirty years of intensive study means the great danger to the world is that it is cooling, compare to "catastrophists", like those types at Goddard poring over the data archived from the gravity satellites as they measure the accelerating loss of ice mass on Greenland, throw in a pinch of people who make no logical sense at all, and out comes your report.
Instead of John Chancellor's ringing tones declaring "and so it ends, born in cynicism and now dying in cynicism, the great, fake, Russian Empire..." we get Andy saying what could have been said in 1988, up there, at the end of your post, i.e. "humans are influencing climate even though there are still big questions about specifics".
We signed off on an equivalent to this as delegates to the Changing Atmosphere conference of 1988. Look it up. Why is it necessary to constantly emphasize and reemphasize that there are still things to be discovered? After this planet is dead there will still be things to discover. It is completely and utterly obvious.
I'm trying to imagine a Chancellor report "black children are starting to enter white schools here in the South even though there are still questions some pinheads who say they have minds still have as to whether blacks are human like the rest of us".
The main thing that must be emphasized now is that "there are still big questions about the specifics", at this exact instant, this is after melting and ice shelf disintegration has been observed on both polar caps, the sea ice looks to be disappearing in the Artic summer many decades before anyone thought it was possible, CO2 is accumulating at a rate faster than anyone modelling thought possible even a few years ago, it has dawned that ocean acidification means the CO2 uptake by the oceans is definitely not a benign assist the biosphere was granting us, Crutzen has issued his call that it is time to legitimize geoengineering research, Hansen is making an urgent personal appeal to Obama talking about the events of only the last few years "startling" "the relevant experts" who now believe all international negotiation and all national targets for a level of CO2 and GHG at stabilization were and are, as Hansen says, "a recipe for global disaster".
But why worry, even though this is a time when many in the general population are waking up to the issue for the first time, or reawakening after a long sleep. Our kids, and the kids of our kids, will still have lives. We are certain about this. It says so in the New York Times. Perhaps the newly awakened are even wondering where the John Chancellors of today are who will report, dispelling the liars and ignorance peddlers Andy daily caters to on his blog. The best science reporter of the day keeps on throwing in our face that "there are still big questions about specifics".
The ice in the north may or may not be melting due to climate change, maybe its being swept out by wind and ocean currents after thinning perhaps due to climate change, possibly caused by humans, sometimes its almost certain, we must all know that there are all these scientists busy studying every last detail, and they are not in full agreement just yet. Reports keep coming in, those pesky reports on methane bubbles accumulating under lake ice, bubbling up through the Arctic ocean, emanating from permafrost even as its surface refreezes, catching fire when you thrust a torch into a lump of permafrost sitting in the snow. And there is that theory of paleoclimate about a big blast of methane setting off the transition from a snowball Earth to warmer than it is now. Pay no attention folks, this is an incremental issue, and by god, it is going to stay an incremental issue.
The North West Passage opens up in the 21st century, repeatedly, and only in the 21st century, this is something European explorers have searched for since the discovery of North America, and the scientists, according to Andy, can't agree that climate has changed. What is this, are they saying climate is not responsible for all that ice being up there in the first place? Are they saying the North West Passage was open, and entire ships could have sailed through it, with not a cube of ice showing anywhere out to the horizon, and the inhabitants of the area did not notice? Who are these scientists?
Andy is a specialist in writing about what is known, is not known, and can never be known, especially that last one, as he writes there will always be ice in the Arctic, yes there always will be it says that right in the NY Times, or that climate will always be an "incremental" issue he states categorically as he "cuts to the chase" in his acceptance speech in that video up there. We will never read, ever, something as non-incremental as that it has suddenly dawned on the world's scientific community that the planet is now widely considered to be undergoing an irreversible runaway warming and we must now debate various geoengineering methods and decide if we will declare war on any country jumping the gun trying to stop this in the wrong way.
I suppose people who grant that a new discovery like this is possible are "catastrophists", who are as far off base as deniers, because what, there is no basis for their view? Some "catastrophists" remember the way the Ozone hole appeared and blew all conception that scientists had that they understood what was happening in the stratosphere out the window causing hysteria and sudden international action. All the projections of all the modellers, all the observations confirming that the models were correct, all the reassurance emanating from the labs that said this problem was not an emergency that had to be taken on decisively and immediately suddenly disappeared, replaced with this problem is an emergency that has to be taken on decisively, immediately.
Posted by David Lewis on Sat 17 Jan 2009 at 02:10 AM