A Planet Connected by Wild Weather
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.
The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.
I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.
And I’m not the only one.
New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35 percent of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”
Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it. There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.
But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day. If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.
The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot -- and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.
Pakistani farmers -- some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years -- will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.
Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia. In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.
In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in. In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers. In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.
And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.
In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station. In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of western children’s literature, The Wizard of Oz. “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.
This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on. But -- as with the tobacco industry before them -- the evidence has simply gotten too strong.
Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird. Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.
The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is... the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change -- and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.
So here’s a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story -- and it’s the most important story of our time -- we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.
Bill McKibben, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is the founder of 350.org, which is coordinating Saturday’s Connect the Dots day. You can find the event nearest you by checking climatedots.org.
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Bill Chameides: Water Ills Focus of New Documentary
The way to solve the energy crisis is the future not the hair shirt. Americans don't like sacrifice. XL Keystone will happen. We need to tax it and use it to empower the likes of Nathan Myhrvold and better nuclear energy.
Geothermal, tidal & wave, and solar (paired with EV's and a smart grid) are the way to go.
Remember all of the howling after Katrina in 2005 about how hurricanes would become stronger and more numerous due to Global Warming? Yeah, that hasn't happened either.
Fewer and fewer people are buying the scare-mongering as the evidence continues to accumulate that a change of a few parts per billion of CO2 is more likely a coincident rather than driving indicator of warming temps.
And since we live on a small rock flying through a dark cold vacuum, I personally would prefer a little warm vs. the alternative. Not that my actions affect the balance one way or another.
Funny you're talking about weather patterns as if they've been tame, when we just had the most billion-dollar disasters in history.
Just a suggestion... do a little fact-checking before you post this dribble.
BTW the stu pid ity of your 'dollar amount equates to severity of weather events' is revealing.
Geo-thermal, Wind, Nuclear and most of all energy efficiency.
Its criminal, the way we continue to build Office buildings and homes only giving lip service to energy saving technologies we could build into them that would make them 10X more sustainable, just so the Contractors and Builders can walk away with more cash.
-AJB
Our pocketbook is where we can make a difference. Because we can non-support what they don't support by cutting off their fuel to operate with cash flow & earnings by declaring specific moratoriums on non-spending on specific products or industries begging on the first & last week of each month.
P & L spreadsheets are powerful motivators to act with due diligence.
The core problem as I estimate it to be, is that there are no alternative technologies which I have studies can be brought to scale to replace what cheap oil does for maintaining the energy to economic growth model consuming far too many products we don't need, with far too much money we have to borrow.
If we had began a "Manhattan" style global agreement with G-20 cooperation back in the early 1970's when I was only able to get gas on odd numbered days of the week, versus the perpetual foot-dragging & worthless rhetoric now standard fare of G-8 countries since the early days of Kyoto and Bush 41's declaration that the economic lifestyle of the American people is "not negotiable" we might have been able to put a coherent dent in what is required to bring alternative technologies to scale given the epic proportions in which the entire human population depends on the economic growth model reliant on cheap oil.
So I see civilization as it is defined by the 1% as being the root of the problem, much in the same vein as noted educator, philosopher Derrick Jensen whose books: End Game I: Much like philosopher Derrick Jensen whose books, End Game I The problem is civilization, and End Game II: Resistance
I don’t hold out much hope, because from a philosophical point of view, I view “civilization” defined by a rule or be ruled hierarchy as the root of the problem. And that won’t change without a global revolution, or spiritual awakening, which is my hope.
Change, even small change, is extremely hard to come about in a civilization, particularly ours, with so many people being trapped by "individualism" living their lives on self-interest, and since what is occurring is incremental, and not in your face now problems, we are hardwired to negotiate as fight or flight, denial becomes an insidious hurdle to achieving wholesale change.
Out of necessity, a fundamental shift in human relationships to one of competing self-interests to one of harmony, balance, & cooperation.in relationships with each other may bring a spiritual awakening from one of dominator hierarchies, to one of earth community.
That’s my hope.
ONLINE ESSAYS
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich,
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html
Global oil risks in the early 21st century. (2011) by Dean Fantazzini, et al http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-27/global-oil-risks-early-21st-century
Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse (2012).by William Catton
http://www.dieoff.org/page15.htm
BOOKS
Robert U. Ayres and Benjamin Warr, (2009). The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity.
Catton,William. (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.
.Deffeyes, Kenneth S.(2005). Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak.
Heinberg, Richard & Leich, Daniel (2010). The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Centery Sustainability Crisis.
Holmgren, David. (2009).Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change
(http://www.transitionseattle.com/resources/discussion/).
Permaculture Design http://onwildearth.com/?p=506
Illich, Ivan.(1974). Energy and Equity.
Korten, David. (2007).The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
DVD Documentary's
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire
Escape from Suburbia
Blind Spot
Permaculture Design(Lecture Series)
If you take all the 'Deniers' and add them in with all the CCL (couldn't care less) then you would have to acknowledge the following and become unsettled.-
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-interview-gaia-th
The planet will settle the debate.
The absolute best book I've read in years on that is by Derrick Jensen's "End Game I: The problem is civilization", and his follow up, "End Game II: Resistance". As he would say and I agree, "If I have to do it, I will throw everything away".
When you see "a couple of degrees extra warmth" and think "OK, so it's not 75, it's 77", note that that is completely erroneous thinking. That two degrees different actually redefines the entire growing regions of our planet, and more importantly, the ice/water balance that keeps all of our coastal economic centers from being underwater.
The ice balance is returning.
The different phases of the Sun certainly do have an effect after travelling 93 million miles.
PS- No increase in ocean levels either.
The time to change direction is long past - you can't cut consumption when just about everyone considers it their divine right to have children and to consume their "fair share" of resources. I'm not just talking about within the US, but also developing nations. The beauty of it is that the most severe consequences will be endured by the very young or yet to be born...
Industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels has brought us out of the Middle Ages. Are we not better off today than 300 years ago? The price we pay is a dependency on fossil fuels and an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. This did not occur overnight and will not end overnight. Decreasing our dependency on fossil fuels is a good thing and a noble goal but let's not go off the deep end about it. In the near term our massive dependence on energy will only increase with burgeoning third world populations and increases in standards of living. Fossil fuels will be a significant part of this energy supply for decades to come. We will have to adapt to the "weather" as we strive for cleaner more economical and sustainable alternative energy sources. Stop whining about it.
One of the most effective methods to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels would be to curb demand by reducing the world's population growth. Why is no one talking about this "alternative"?
All people making above $100,000 a year will be banned from having children (again, because this sector of society consumes far more than everyone else), unless they paid 1/2 of their total annual income (including investments) into a slush fund to finance renewable energy. We should also implement the death penalty for white-collar crimes, and stop all health services to people making over $100,000. After all, if we want to cut consumption, we should start where it makes the most sense.
We have banned TV commercials from the air waves.
Since fossil fuels are both a threat to the nation's health and the future of the planet, we need to ban commericals by oil companies, just like we banned cigarette advertisements.
We pay for these commercials every time we tank up. The Oil companies also get $ 4 to 8 billion worth of subsidies. They are not providing us with cheap gasoline, so let's cut off their government subsidy and ban oil companh commercials from the air waves.