Half baked -- a Carbon Based original

Canine sprawled on the one cool place -- the basement floor. Feline reduced to a fur puddle on the couch. Humvee-sized bear plodded by, tongue out.  Even the birds took a break.

                We humans were too stupefied to move.    The wind blasting through the trees at night felt red hot. The fan just added to the roasting.  I remembered a story about a Pittsburgh bank that gave away fans during a heat wave, only to discover that some of their elderly customers died as a result of hot air convection. 

                A few years ago, we removed the central air conditioning; we never used it. As the July 2013 heat wave intensified, we broke down and bought a portable air conditioner for the bedroom.  It barely cooled the soupy air.  

                After a few days, the strands that held my thoughts together dissolved, and my sense impressions floated into the void. The Hannah Arendt movie provided an excuse to enjoy cool air in the car on the way to the movie house.  Between cigarettes, Barbara Sukowa declared that Eichmann didn't think. I couldn't think.  She would have lectured me about the banality of heat waves.

                But I shouldn't exaggerate. Here at headquarters, the heat wave wasn't a disaster, in that nothing was destroyed, though the effective life of the roads and bridges in the vicinity was probably shortened. For most of us, the heat exacted a misery tax.

                Unlike a tax levied by a government, where the revenue intends to advance a socially valuable goal, the misery tax is a dead loss for almost everyone. People who sell air conditioners, but not the rest of us.

                Misery drives us all to think short-term. Indeed, how much of our sentient selves remain when the heat grows intolerable?  Not much.  In the grip of the heat, I couldn't consider cutting emissions, or lowering the risks of global warming.  My horizons shrunk to a single, sweaty point.  This constriction is an underappreciated toll of bad weather.

                Mitigating climate change demands that we think in the longest periods we can handle.  We need cool, dry rooms to do that. 

                If the climate change contribution to the heat wave is one percent today, the proportion will creep higher, the way a tax does if citizens don't push back.  Like a toothache, the pain will increase until we realize that we're in agony. When we have strongly corroborated reasons to believe that a tooth -- or a global problem -- will become painful in the future, then it's sensible to deal with it now, before the ache overwhelms us.

                The next local climate change tax will probably be different. It might be a flood at a neighbor's house, or a more intense season of mosquitoes, or more ticks.  Greenhouse gas emissions won't be the only cause, naturally, but it must be a contributing factor that threatens to worsen. A steady onslaught of these disruptions wears everyone down.  Misery makes it harder to think, just when searching thought is most needed.

                Now that the weather has broken a little, the dog is patrolling the yard, the cat demanding to be let outside. The birds are active again, including the heron that feeds in the drying pond.  My room is actually cool and dry. Yet I'm too busy enjoying the relief to turn my thinking towards future decades.  Even as I urge the long-term perspective on everyone, my own adherence to my recommendation is haphazard at best.  We need to use our respites from misery wisely. Take a few beats to savor the departure of pain, and then, back to paying attention to the long run.

Herd immunities -- a Carbon Based original

    Climate scientists suffer through repeated abuse by fossil fuel shills and other denialists.  But climate scientists are not the only pariahs. Denial crops up almost everywhere a country tries to base its policies on sound scientific theories.  Vaccination is an infuriating example.

    Vaccinate enough people against a contagious disease and the whole population enjoys immunity, even those who shunned the needle.  A herd thus protected contains fewer potential paths to contagion and the disease cannot spread as easily. 

    A large goal in public health is to strengthen herd immunity. A population can withstand a disease far better when the numbers of the unvaccinated are low.  Thus for decades various childhood diseases have faded into medical history.

    Until recently. 

    Anti-vaccinationists blame the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine for a supposed surge in autism.  They say that the cost of protecting against the childhood diseases is too high, that its dangers are downplayed so that pharmaceutical companies and others can flourish at the expense of their victims. The theory is that the mercury in the thimerosol-based vaccine has neurotoxicity.   Only it doesn't.  At great expense, the theory has been persistently refuted by large epidemiological studies.  Andrew Wakefield, the leading proponent of this theory, has been exposed and debunked many times, but is still a leading figure among the anti-vaxxers.

    Much as with climate change denial, the patient explanation of the facts about vaccines does little to change the minds of the zealots.   Like climate change denialists, the antivaccinationists cultivate the appearance of scientific reasoning while bypassing the content.   They refuse to accept any evidence of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. For example, elbow wagging explainers among the anti-vax crowd are at some pains to deny the existence of herd immunity.

    If thousands of people believe in astrology, it's unfortunate and laughable, but the harm is small. At least, I hope it is!  Not so with public health. Thanks to the work of celebrity anti-vaccinationists, an entirely avoidable public health emergency is at hand.  Measles, for example, has returned in Wales, in India, in Michigan, along with more cases of Down Syndrome.  

    A long-won battle is in danger of being lost because a large number of people don't believe in science.  Similar reality distortion goes on in discussions of climate change, when scientists tell people what they don't want to hear, and a surge of denial follows.

    Some herd immunities protect against disease.  Others protect against ignorance.  When ignorance is the risk, education is the vaccine.  That's the optimistic version, because ignorance can yield to knowledge at least some of the time.

    Like a disease, ignorance can kill or injure, wreaking long-lasting damage in many fields.  But the damage dwindles if ignorant people are mixed among a population of the better informed.  If enough people behave responsibly, the benighted can shun the vaccine and the public health damage won't be too great.  But this willfully ignorant group is always too large.  This is especially true of climate change.

    In matters of climate change policy, herd immunity requires widespread public knowledge of science.  If enough people pay enough attention to scientific matters, they improve their chances of making sound policy decisions. The protection is not perfect, and their scientific understanding may be flawed or full of holes.   But if they've taken steps to overcome their ignorance, then there's a better chance of enacting sound policies, and changing course when mistakes appear.

    The climate change debate, similar to the vaccination debate, hinges on the true cost of externalities -- not just the upfront economic cost of producing the energy, but the long-range ecological and risk costs as well.   The irony in the climate change debate is that the market mechanisms that could start to price in these long-range costs is exactly what the denialists abhor.  Their free market faith leads them to reject market mechanisms that might actually work.  They give capitalism a bad name.

    Of course, more than ignorance blocks acceptance of climate change action. There are the large minority of people who profit from greenhouse gas emissions, and their short-term interests trump everything. They may be well enough informed scientifically, but ideology and self-interest trump the science.  Ignorance and self-interest are overwhelming allies. 

    In climate change, a third of Americans reject any attempt to rein in free markets, which so far has been enough to stymie meaningful global action on climate.  The free market ideology, lovingly stoked for decades by a rightwing press, has resulted in toxic policy debate in which measures that are known to work can never be mentioned.

    The costs will be crushing.  Climate economist Nicholas Stern has estimate that climate change will cost about 5 percent of global GDP each year from here on out.

    So science education matters, but it's not a sufficient condition for progress.  Every high school in America could teach a sound course on climate change, and public opinion would not budge, I fear. We have a terrible example of what can happen with the teaching of evolution.  Once the deinal is mobilized, it's almost impossible to eradicate.   

    Some herds appear determined to hurt themselves.  They expose everyone to risks, whether out of ignorance or short-term self interest.  We keep coming back to the sour cosmic observation that Albert Einstein made: "Stupidity is stronger than genius because there is so much more of it."

Photo by Brian Thomas, public domain

Not following the script -- a Carbon Based original

    Comforting stories have an outsized influence on how we think and behave, especially tales about good eventually triumphing over evil.  No matter how terrible our current circumstances, the story cues us to the ending, so we can keep our hopes up.

    In one such fable, the powerful grow stronger and extract more from their victims.  The suffering of the weak grows more onerous.  But after a fight, the good people win.  In more adult scenarios, something happens to at least ease the pain. 

    An empire conquers and plunders as long as it can, finally collapsing from its own corruption and popular resistance. Not that the redress is guaranteed, since it can come far too late, or not at all. Rome falls, a belated punishment for crushing the Jewish Revolt in the early years of the Common Era and destroying Herod's temple.  On the other hand, Rome collapse was tragic if you side with the Romans.  The legend can serve any political persuasion, depending on who is editing the story.

    In a monarchy, the king or the nobles might attempt to relieve the injustices under some circumstances.  In movies, they do, at least. King Richard returns from the Crusades and kicks out the Sheriff of Nottingham.  Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, the Arabs were no doubt glad to see an invader pack up and leave.

    In a democracy, supposedly, measures exist to address wrongs more methodically, so the bad guys cannot gain too much of a lead. That's one practical advantage to democracies -- the system has a method for easing wrongs.  Mister Smith goes to Washington, shames the evil Senators and sets things right, for some.   Along the way, we tend to skip over the events that don't fit, such as the ethnic cleansing of native Americans, or the "barbarous years" recently documented by Bernard Bailyn.

    Most outlooks can find their founding myths somewhere in America's past. Political clashes sharpen during the colonial era, with a whopping release once independence arrives.   Conflict deepens over slavery, but the Civil War "solves" the problem, though not really.  Open racism renews itself in the era of racist reaction that followed, culminating in the advances of the Civil Rights era. 

    In a more recent left-leaning examples of the tale, cold war repression tightens, broken by a chaotic burst of freedom of sorts in the 1960s. In the 1980s, conservatives did their utmost to undo the gains in equality and fairness. Reagan and subsequent administrations tortured Latin America in the '80s, yet now the US has far less ability to impose its will.  Longtime US ally Rios-Montt is on trial for genocide in Guatemala.  That's a heartening outcome.

    At times, the yarns we tell ourselves seem more fictitious than others. In an oligarchy such as we have in the United States today, the wealthy have spent decades overriding the formal mechanisms to secure the people's interests.  The rich can game the rules so that they don't have to give anything up.  Too big to fail banks still control their financial regulators, halting all attempts to loosen their destructive grip.  A reactionary Supreme Court patrols for any cases that might allow some change.  Obama has shelved all plans to punish US leaders for crimes in Iraq.  The pressure keeps building.

    The pressure builds in the natural world, too.  We keep emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which raises temperatures and brings down a host of other effects on global ecosystems.  We have been experiencing worsening impacts over past years, some due to climate change, far more due to bad choices about land use and location. Wildfires are hotter and more widespread, droughts tend to get worse, and sea level rise threatens to slowly devastate coastal cities around the world.  Chances are, these conditions will get worse.

    The plot we favor demands that heroes and heroines appear to lead us to the actions we have to take.  Or that the tide of public opinion turns.  Or that a technical breakthrough comes along that solves the tangle of problems involving energy production and transmission.

    Unfortunately, none of those happy outcomes are at hand.  Despite international mitigation efforts, our emissions have gone up -- the best that can be claimed is that the rate of increase has slowed down in some countries.  The various schemes that currently exist to cut emissions aren't working. They require far more collective will than we've been able to muster.

    In the United States, the legislators (especially senators) in thrall to large emitters have stalled every meaningful effort to cut emissions, or to adapt to climate change.  The pattern is part of a larger dysfunction in US politics, and we feel the bite most keenly when we have to address major long-term problems.  

    The scientists who labor to explain what's actually happening in the climate are vilified, perhaps because they disrupt the chronicle than many people want to believe, that we have it under control, it's not so bad, etc.  The desire for a reassuring story is eroding our ability to address the issues in a realistic way.

    Psychologically, when the tale doesn't progress along the expected path, we think, oh, this story is longer than I thought.  The conclusion is further off. Or maybe we're in a different story altogether, a narrative that isn't so shapely and satisfying, a grinding, relentless tale where everyone loses.  One thing is certain. Nature ignores the script.

Frontispiece of Joseph Jacobs' Celtic Fairy Tales, via John D. Batten. Public domain

Holy land underwater -- a Carbon Based original

    For Easter, the TV schedule teemed with biblical epics (although no Life of Brian -- how odd). The procession included one of the most intelligent and thoughtful examples of the genre -- The Greatest Story Ever Told, directed by George Stevens, with Max von Sydow as Jesus, his hair dyed black. I'd seen it before, and been impressed with its virtues and willing to forgive its flaws. 

    Sure, the Hollywood piety and celestial choruses are grating. Too many of these middle eastern Jews are blond and speak with plummy British accents.  The pace stretches out much too long, especially for us nonbelievers.  Von Sydow struggles bravely to breathe some life into his Gospel-only solemnities. Everybody laughs at John Wayne's line reading as the centurion at the foot of the cross. 

    But many of the performances are superb.  Donald Pleasance portrays Satan as an ineffectual geezer who doesn't have much heart for tempting Jesus, but turns powerful and malevolent when inciting a crowd or steering Jesus to his fate.  Claude Rains does a memorably creepy rendition of Herod doddering on his throne as he orders the death of children.  Charlton Heston devours his role as John the Baptist, and was rightly proud of it.

    But what interests me most are the locations, beautifully shot by Loyal Griggs and William C. Mellor, in Southern Utah near the Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona.  The message board on the film at the Internet Movie Data Base contains several sniffs that the Utah desert is much dryer than the ancient Palestine, which is certainly true, but irrelevant. These desert vistas are otherworldly, some of them of a scale and significance that you might wonder why you haven't seen them before. 

    The reason is, many of them no longer exist. The locations vanished not because of climate change, but as a result of human decisions. Weeks before the filming of the Greatest Story in March of 1963, the gates of the Glen Canyon dam closed, trapping the river.   Many of the locations would soon vanish under Lake Powell.

    A major environmental controversy swirled around that dam. David Brower, head of the Sierra Club, battled the Bureau of Reclamation's plans to contain the Colorado River. The Club argued that the dam would destroy a unique wilderness, and set ominous precedent for plundering America's protected lands.

    In the mid-1950s, the Bureau of Reclamation agreed to forego two other dams, but only if they could proceed unopposed with dams at Flaming Gorge and Glen Canyon. The Sierra Club agreed. Congress authorized the Colorado River Storage Project in April 1956, and groundbreaking for the Glen Canyon followed quickly. 

    At first, many celebrated this outcome a major victory for the American environmentalists -- after all, they'd stopped two dams. But in a few months Brower regretted the Sierra Club's compromise.  With the dam under construction, he traveled down the Colorado River and was shocked by the beauty and grandeur of the landscape he had consigned to submersion.  Brower later wrote, "Glen Canyon died, and I was partly responsible for its needless death. ... Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure. When we began to find out it was too late."

    In the Sierra Club's magazine in 2000, he reflected, "But as surely as we made a mistake years ago, we can reverse it now. We can drain Lake Powell and let the Colorado River run through the dam that created it, bringing Glen Canyon and the wonder of its side canyons back to life. We can let the river do what it needs to do downstream in the Grand Canyon itself."

    In addition to the loss of a landscape and an ecosystem, the environmentalist objections stressed the inefficient water use the dam made of the Colorado River.  The larger the size of Lake Powell, the greater the volume of water lost to evaporation.  "Draining Lake Powell means more water for the Colorado River states and Mexico, especially Colorado and Utah. The hundreds of millions of dollars now being lost, growing to billions in the future, should be enough to give even Bill Gates pause," Brower said. " ... The sooner we begin, the sooner lost paradises will begin to recover."

    The Glen Canyon Dam still stands, but Brower's counterintuitive strictures against dams are especially relevant for the parched Southwest, where larger reservoirs result in more water loss.  The Southwest needs the water more than ever. 

    But even if we make only correct decisions, the long-range outcome will probably be the same.  We'll need to move people out of the desert.

    I suspect that a number of decisions we make about climate change are going to follow this pattern -- environmentalists will support or oppose a project, based on their knowledge at the time, only to discover something later that makes them change their mind.  Long-range impacts are impossible to gauge, even for high-status glamour projects, such as building dams.  And once we reach that point where we know the consequences, it will probably be too late.  To add to the sting, there won't be a biblical movie being filmed to inadvertently document what we're going to lose.

    In the moment we make our decisions, we never know the ultimate outcome. At the George Stevens version of the last supper, getting exasperated with the gnomic utterances, one of the disciples says, "Speak plainly and speak no proverbs."  Good luck to anyone trying to wangle a straight answer out of Jesus, or out of the future -- we won't know the meaning until much later, when the waters are rising.

Paria, Utah, where other moviews were filmed, but not The Greatest Story Ever Told. Shot by John Fowler, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Dry thoughts at the bottom of a canyon

Recently I hiked down the trail to the White House at Canyon de Chelly and took this photograph of the cliff dweller ruins, left by the Anasazi. Some forty Navajo families live in the valley these ancient Pueblo people used to occupy.

The Anasazi emerged well before the Common Era (some say in the 12th century BCE), and lasted well into the 13th century CE. No doubt their way of life seemed utterly permanent to them, whatever they might have endured personally. Our way is the world, and nothing can change that.

If they did think that, they were wrong. All that remain are ruins in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Drought and warfare may have finished them off – I’m far too ignorant to even hazard a guess. But I stood before the ruin, took my photo, and wondered, where did they go?  They were here and now they are not.

On the drive to the park, we traveled through miles of parched land, all thinly watered by oversubscribed rivers and dwindling snowpack.  If the scientific projections hold true, the entire US southwest will find it impossible to meet its water needs.  Many people will have to move, if they can, or endure in place. 

Meanwhile, it was a long hike back up the trail. 

Left hand, meet right hand--a Carbon Based original

    The limbs need a brain to work together.

     A recent ProPublica story by Robert Lewis and Al Shaw followed the path of US government money flowing into New York's flood zones after Hurricane Sandy.  The tale illustrates one of the knottier problems in climate change adaptation -- how to design programs so that the government responds coherently, with all the parts functioning as a whole. 

    In this case, the recovery dollars come from the Small Business Administration, whose spokesperson told the ProPublica reporters that it's not their job to tell people whether to rebuild or not.  The SBA's goal is to help qualified businesses to return to business as usual quickly through disaster loans.  The longer it takes to bounce back from Hurricane Sandy, the worse they look. The SBA pays no attention to vulnerabilities to storm surges and sea level rise.

    The loan recipients are eager to make everything the way it was.  The story quotes one owner of a destroyed restaurant in Staten Island saying, "You don't walk away from one bad day."  No mention of what to do at the beginning of a bad era of mounting damage to the coastline.   The short-term perspective dominates the discussion.

    Unfortunately for the rest of us, climate change scenarios have never been part of the SBA's credit analysis for loans.  Homeowners will rarely consider long-range impacts unless regulations compel them. As a result, recovery funds are going to homes and businesses at high risk for flooding again, according to the new maps drawn up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

    Many coastal towns are already pushing back hard against these controversial new maps. Homeowners can suddenly themselves in a flood zone even though the basement has always been bone dry.  The new designation can mean that a house loses value, and its insurance will increase, if any insurer will consider underwriting a policy.  If a storm damages a house, the homeowner may be held to a higher standard, such as putting the entire building on stilts.  Nobody wants the added hassle and expense. They shudder at the science that goes into the improved mapping if the result hurts them.

    The lack of coordination also undermines building codes. FEMA's requirements are much more strict than New York City's.  Once the FEMA maps are finalized in a few years, the tougher rules might go into effect, but meanwhile Sandy reconstruction is underway now. Most property owners will evade more stringent standards, which take longer and cost more.  Indeed, the owner of the Staten Island restaurant said as much in Lewis and Shaw's story.

    Environmental groups, insurers and some housing coalitions are urging a comprehensive approach to managing and insuring areas exposed to sea level rise.   They make a number of suggestions, no less valuable for being obvious. I discussed some of them in my piece, "Trouble at the beach."

    A wildly unpopular first step would involve condemning some properties and compensating the victims.  Some sites should never have been developed -- they're just too wet.  It's in the state's long-term interest to be generous to the owners of these sites, since the cost of paying top dollar for a destroyed house still costs less than doing the same after the waters rise yet again.

    Where rebuilding takes place, more building codes must take full account of sea level rise, storm surges and stream flooding. Some houses might not need to be raised as much as others; other measures might make more sense. Adaptive but tough codes could serve as a strong guide for builders and property owners.

    A better system needs a mechanism where owners could make a case for allowing them to stay on the site and achieve a fair resolution, even if it weren't the resolution that they want. Instead of chaotic litigation in the courts, some kind of fair arbitration would be much better,

    More generally, the well-designed authority would also have a priority to halt and even reverse development at the shore. Green belts, blue belts and wetlands can hold a lot of water, and they quickly recover from flooding with little cost to the rest of the human economy. 

    None of these measures are utopian, but they do demand determined leadership.  Someone in charge has to try to overcome the snarls and gridlocked agendas. A president or an alliance of coastal governors could spread the pain around evenly and fairly, making sure all the pieces work towards the same goals.

    But leaders can't lead if nobody follows them. The coastal transformation would have a greater chance of success if informed public opinion were pushing for it.  Informed citizens would view every storm as a chance to ask, where can we pull back? What can we abandon?  How can we reduce the size of the target?  Instead of a few environmental groups saying this, maybe joined by a few intrepid insurers, everyone could be asking these questions.

    The persistent, overwhelming, exasperating obstacle rears up here.  Ideally, citizens have enough knowledge to digest scientific information and make policy judgments based on it.  But we live in a world where science has been demonized and scientists attacked for laying out theories that fail to align with prejudices.  Without a responsible media carefully explaining matters, public opinion won't acquire any momentum.  And just writing the phrase "responsible media" makes me feel like I'm pursuing a particularly implausible thought experiment.

    As matters stand now, coasts will probably endure repair bills in the tens of billions several times a decade, until we tire of making sand castles.  After a few more expensive lessons, we might smarten up, and maybe the left hand and the right hand will work together.

Photo of thumb wrestling by Jeff, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Trouble at the beach -- a Carbon Based original

    For years, coastal houses have taken a beating from waves and wind. Hurricane Sandy and winter storm Nemo are just the most recent vandals, but unnamed and less dramatic storms pound and destroy the beach no less efficiently. Water is lapping at the boardwalk.

    To intensify the punishment, federal bureaucrats at FEMA have redrawn the national flood maps, and now many coastal properties lie in flood zone one, a soggy label never attached to them before.  Insurance companies spurn premiums from these addresses, at least in the immediate aftermath of a big flood.  If a beach homeowner actually finds a policy, they balk at the exponential rise in premiums.

    In Asbury Park, New Jersey, residents blame the FEMA maps, which were released after Hurricane Sandy, for driving the middle class away from the shore.   Many people cannot afford the post-Sandy standards for rebuilding.  The new rules often call for raising beach houses two feet at a minimum.

    The New Jersey experience repeats itself up and down the coast.  Towns demand seawalls, armored boardwalks and other infrastructure to keep the beach idyll going another few years.

    For beach dwellers, the overall tone in these discussions oscillates between stubborn optimism and despair. Almost as a reflex, these people say, "Let's rebuild, we're not going to let this disaster get us down.  If we have to rebuild to higher standards, so be it.  Maybe it's even a good idea.  We can recover our money over time."  

    In candid moments, they admit they've heard of sea level rise. Uncertainty clouds all possible futures; they fear that they could raise the house, only to discover in a few years that the waves come even higher.  Mostly, though, they angrily reject the observation that these town-wrecking storms now happen every other year. 

    With mounting horror they realize that the comforting scenarios of selling the beach house at a handsome profit are beginning to sound implausible. Some of their neighbors cannot sell at any price. 

    Homeowners do not suffer alone. Insurers are in a bind, too.  Customers dispute the underwriters' assessment of the odds. Many clients will search online for a less responsible insurer who will underwrite the risk without even a glance  at climate change and potential coastal flooding.  That insurance company might even make money for a couple of years.  When the next damaging storm comes, they will collapse.  This isn't sustainable.

    One usually mute participant in this drama is the inland taxpayer. In the 1980s, an earlier taxpayer outcry largely halted the practice of replenishing beaches for wealthy seaside communities.   That kind of resentment will flare again when they rebel against paying for shoring up houses and improving infrastructure for someone else, which will soon -- once again -- suffer destruction by water. 

    Many of our fellow citizens have committed themselves to coastal living. For the sake of economic growth, beach towns artificially build up values in areas where floods will destroy the property.    Nor are they alone -- everyone who pays taxes that go to recovery funds after a storm has also made the investment. 

    We're now faced with a steep bill for blindly subsidizing these coastal risks for all these years. Finding the right solution will require a stretch from all of us -- homeowners, financial institutions, taxpayers and governments.

    Sooner or later the move away from the shore will gather momentum.  The worst way is all at once, through the "magic of the market," when a big storm scares away the financing to rebuild or improve infrastructure. Families will burn through savings, and then leave their waterlogged wrecks in ruined towns.

    The more orderly path is arduous, and requires that governments vigorously take the lead. For example, the most effective step costs dearly at first, but solves the problem one building at a time.  Governments buy vulnerable beach properties and condemn them. 

    Theoretically, a motivated government can compensate owners somewhat fairly, even if the upfront bill looks frightening.  But the prospects for a justly administered program in the United States look dim.  The wealthy have the clout to make sure that governments, whether state or federal, buy them out at top dollar. Working class homeowners will be stuck with stingier deals, or no offer at all.

    A managed retreat demands enough solidarity to spread the pain around fairly.  A possible role model has already emerged in parts of Australia, where many town councils block coastal development and condemn damaged buildings. Developers push back, although many grudgingly acknowledge that their long-term interest demands working closely with towns to avoid building in areas exposed to sea-level rise and catastrophic flooding. Of course, developers in Australia lack the overwhelming political muscle of their US counterparts.

    Governments must take other active steps, too.  They must upgrade coastal building codes, as New Jersey is doing now. They must devise sustainable ways to protect the buildings that remain after the buyouts.  They can also penalize banks and insurers for encouraging development in risky areas.  They must do their best to prevent short-sighted opportunism from delaying the retreat.

    This kind of active government involves more social engineering than any of the stakeholders usually like.  What's more, governments and others will probably make many mistakes in the orderly retreat from the shore.  But that doesn't change the goal -- to stay dry and safe by shepherding  people out of danger.

    As is usual with anything connected with climate change, the sooner we act wisely, the better. The price tag goes up the longer we dither.

Aerial views during an Army search and rescue mission show damage from Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast, Oct. 30, 2012. US Air Force photo

Staged photos and real facts--a Carbon Based original

    What counts as evidence?  The question occurred to me while reading Errol Morris's Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.  Morris explores images from the Roger Fenton's photos of the Valley of the Shadow of Death during the Crimean War, to torture photos from Abu Ghraib, to an ambrotype found in the hand of a dead Union soldier at Gettysburg.

    He suggests that photographs, like other "evidence," are often ambiguous, sometimes maddeningly so. In a chapter called "Photography and Reality (Captioning, Propaganda, and Fraud)," he dwells on a controversial image from the 1930s that has a an analogy to the subject of climate change today. 

    FDR created the Farm Security Administration in 1937 to alleviate rural poverty. The FSA's photo department employed many titans of photography, among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, to document the farmers' plight. Conservatives hated the FSA to begin with, and the photography department was the object of particular scorn. 

    On one assignment, Rothstein took several photos of a cow skull on dry soil in South Dakota, and the FSA released it to the media. The Washington Post's caption read, "From Pennington, South Dakota, comes this photo of a bleached skull on a sun-baked grasslass plain giving solemn warning that here is a land the desert threatens." (The FSA's own caption was less didactic, by the way.)  Please note, I wasn't able to find the exact image of the skull that appeared n the Post-- shown here is another image from the same take.

    The New Deal's enemies thundered that the photo had been staged, a staging that was evidence of the fraud behind the effort to bring relief to poor farmers.  And indeed, Rothstein had moved the cow skull ten feet from where he found it.  Accordingly, they declared, that exceeded the bounds of documentary integrity. 

    Morris says, "What makes these accusations of photo fakery utterly perverse is the claim that they unfairly portrayed a drought.... But the Dakotas were experiencing a severe drought."  The Dust Bowl was real, and a large part of the country was in a state of ecological and agricultural collapse. But the conservatives reacted as if one piece of photographic stagecraft -- arranging props for the camera -- negated the reality.  The Fargo paper and the conservatives in general reacted so viscerally because of their seething political suspicions of government reforms and measures that might crimp business activity. 

    The same suspicion, stoked by fossil fuel propaganda, distorts climate controversies today.

    Another tacit assumption seems to have been present, too, one that might be called crackpot empiricism, or the positivist delusion. This is the belief that empirical observations alone are the foundation of all rational inquiry. Theory and observation are totally separate, and theories must rest on a base of observations.  In keeping with this foundationalist outlook, the conservatives of the 1930s and the denialists also seem to believe that if one piece of evidence, one observation, doesn't hold up for any reason, then their enemy's entire edifice collapses. 

    Much of 20th century philosophy involved a detailed critique of this delusion.  Morris alludes to this critique in a subsequent chapter of Believing is Seeing, citing a 1958 book by Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, which countered the positivist delusion by insisting that observations are theory-laden. Or, as Morris points out, "Our beliefs do not determine what is true or false. They do not determine objective reality. But they can determine what we 'see.'" Indeed, one of the themes of Believing is Seeing is a tussle with the positivist delusion -- observation is not as simple as it looks, and we bring our theoretical point of view to everything we observe.

    In practice, incompatible observations can put a strain on theories, but most theories can accommodate a surprising amount of divergence before they begin to get into trouble.  They are baggy and loose in this sense.

    The early fear was that this looseness opened the door too wide to relativism and unreason. The work of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos among many others energetically investigated how to choose rationally among competing theories.  The upshot is that the theory-laden nature of facts does not plunge us into a state of relativistic undecidability, where there are no facts, only competing points of view.  Instead of something with a foundation, knowledge is a network where successful theories and observations must strongly cohere. 

    Decades of philosophical arguments have sharpened the sense that although observations are theory laden, some theories are still better from others.  Reality begins to emerge when many observations in one field as well as in other sciences provide strong corroboration for the same theory.  Empirical observations of the climate, for example, steadily agree with the theories of atmospheric chemistry, physics, and a long list of other disciplines. It all points to climate change as a real issue with a human cause. Observations are not solitary, but part of a much larger group. When many squadrons of facts tend to corroborate a theory, that's signficant.

    So the question of whose science to believe can be readily answered.  For believers in anthropogenic climate change, a long list of major scientific bodies, national and international, regularly affirm the consensus view of climate change.  They marshal a large army of facts to support their case.

    On the denialist side, a squad of often discredited quacks maintains the opposite. Their numbers are small and their arguments are regularly refuted, but their struggle continues on life support from hundreds of millions of fossil fuel dollars. They see themselves as the teenagers in Red Dawn, singlehandedly fighting off a Soviet invasion of Colorado.

    As citizens, we're often called upon to make decisions based on scientific data that we don't personally understand. We wind up having to accept some things on the authority of people who know more.  And which evidence will you believe?  In the climate change controversies, which science you accept seems to depend on politics. But on the denialist side, you have to ignore a whole lot more evidence to mainain your point of view.

    Whether or not the cow's skull was moved, there was a drought in 1937.

When Cassandra is an optimist -- a Carbon Based original

    According to the myth, Cassandra was a royal beauty of Troy.  To woo her, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. But she spurned his divine advances, and he cursed her so that everyone would sneer at her predictions and dismiss her as a wafting lunatic. Bad luck for Troy, when she warned of its imminent destruction. Enemies hidden in a wooden horse -- sheer fantasy.

    Modern day Cassandras don't even need the appearance of insanity to be discredited. Their market-besotted critics hurl charges of playing to the media, or simply hating America. Apollo's curse is still working perfectly.

    Cassandra bubbled up in my memory when our corporate masters gathered in Davos recently at the World Economic Forum. Among speakers was Nicholas Stern, the lead author of the 2006 Stern Review of the Economic Effects of Climate Change, a 700-pager on global warming's impact on the world economy. Stern's words at Davos drew some attention because he declared that recent events are worse than the scenarios in his earlier published view.

    In 2006, Stern labeled climate change the largest market failure of all time. According to Stern's first estimate, climate change will cost 5% of global gross domestic product (GDP) every year, if no action is taken. The Review proposed that we invest one percent (later raised to two percent) of global GDP per annum to avoid the worst effects of climate change.  The Stern team concluded that benefits of decisive, early action on climate change surpass the cost of cutting carbon emissions, and far outweigh the costs of inaction.

    In an echo of Apollo's curse, conservatives deemed Stern a Cassandra. After all, his Review accepted the IPCC assessment reports, and a large portion of the commentariat doubted the veracity of this international climate body.  Stern's an eco-fundamentalist, said some.  Bjorn Lomborg, the go-to guy for climate confusion and delay, played his customary tune, exaggerating the expense of cutting emissions and downplaying the impacts of business as usual.  He tut-tutted at Stern for "fear mongering" and described the Stern team's work as "sensationalized."   Surely the market will allow us to innovate our way out of the problem.

    The denialists' fellow travelers among economists also attacked the 2006 Review.  Many pilloried Stern for his supposedly flawed methodology, such as a discount rate that's lower than the financial world would like.  A low discount rate means that present generations are not favored over future generations.  Other scholars disliked Stern's doubts about cost-benefit analysis as a guide to climate action.

    Now, even after all that bluster, Stern has actually reinforced his dire prophetic credentials. In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos (as covered by the Guardian), Stern said: "Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then."

    Had he foreseen the situation would evolve, he says, "I think I would have been a bit more blunt. I would have been much more strong about the risks of a four- or five-degree rise. This is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one? These risks for many people are existential."

    Stern isn't the only Cassandra.  Many scientists involved in drafting official climate science publications, such as the IPCC doorstops (next one due out next year) or the Stern Review struggle with the Cassandra accusation.  Even as they write their reports, they take care not to overstate the probabilities lest they alienate their audience, and cringe when people cry "doomsayer!" As a result, they eventually wind up saying something akin to Stern -- the dangers are worse than we thought even a short time ago.

    It's hard to explain the dire facts about climate change to people who object strenuously to anything other than the best-case scenario.  If you believe in only smooth sailing and upbeat projections into the future, climate change threatens your vision of reality.

    Stern as well as the climate consensus actually follows the mainstream scientific view of assessing dangers, in which we revise probabilities in the light of more recent experience. After all, a doctor examines a patient who comes in for an annual check-up by noting what's changed.  If the man has recently gained a lot of weight, has much higher blood pressure than previously and recently started smoking, any sane doctor knows that plenty has changed.   The same sort of steady revision is ongoing in climate research.

    Why doubt Cassandra? Her perfectly sane warnings were true --the Trojan horse really did signal their doom.  But as long as the Koch Brothers have Apollo on their payroll, Cassandra cannot convince her audience.

Evelyn de Morgan's 1898 painting, "Cassandra"

Escaped crocodiles -- a Carbon Based original

    Every now and then, a news story shines a bright light on risks and shows the unpredictability of the various systems we occupy.

    Even a professional worrier might have failed to predict what happened in the town of Modimolle in Limpopo province in South Africa, near the border with Botswana. The town is home to the Rakwena Crocodile Farm. 

    For the past week, rains have soaked the ground, and flooding has been widespread.  Rising water forced the farm to open their cages to avoid a storm surge crushing the animals. Once floating free, some 15,000 crocs slithered into the depths of the swollen Limpopo River, no doubt ecstatically.

    "Before there were only a few crocodiles in the Limpopo River. Now there are plenty," said one of the farm's proprietors. "We go catch them when farmers phone us."  One turned up in a rugby field 75 miles away.  Some nearby citizens climbed on their roofs to escape the flood and spotted crocodiles circling their houses, much in the style of countless New Yorker cartoons.

    A later report says that many have been recaptured thanks to an effort from the police and the army, but more than half are still on the loose, like a mass reptilian version of The Fugitive. Their eyes glow in dark, according to one paper, so it's often easier to catch them at night. So far, no injuries or fatalities have come up in my news feeds.   I'm sure everyone in Limpopo province and elsewhere downstream is checking twice before dumping the garbage or walking down to the soggy end of their yard.

    My wife said to me, "I guess the crocodiles are really black swans." It's a safe bet that very few people -- maybe nobody -- considered the perils of a crocodile farm in a flood plain.  Perhaps floods are rare in Limpopo Province, and maybe the farm has always been high enough -- until this week. 

    The farm's website says, "The Curio shop stocks a wide variety of crocodile leather belts, hats, purses, and rifle slings.  Light lunches can be booked and tasty crocodile meat dishes are available."  No word about treading carefully if you notice that all the cages are empty.

    Charles Perrow in 1984 invented the idea of a "normal accident," also known as a system accident, which occurs when many small failures, accidents and mistakes suddenly coalesce in a big disaster.  Perrow says that normal accidents come about when interactive complexity encounters tight coupling.    Normal accidents are tough to predict because a situation with many moving parts -- like a nuclear power plant, for example --- prevents people from keeping track of all possible interactions. 


    I don't know how complicated the Rakwena Crocodile Farm's organization is, whether they have operating manuals, departments that don't communicate well with each other, and snarls of bureaucratic barriers that veil what's actually going on.  Something tells me that a crocodile farm is not as involved as a nuclear power plant, and that its systems are not as tightly coupled.  But a flood is a crisis for both.

    First of all, a flood disrupts the power to an entire area and makes roads impassable. The emergency services are impaired at the exact moment you need them most.

    Many nuclear plants are on vulnerable sites because they use nearby rivers as a coolant.  But rising water can knock out operating electricity to the plant, and endanger the backup generators that keep critical cooling equipment running for the reactors and the pools of spent fuel.  Floodwaters can breach retaining walls. This is what happened at the Fukushima-Daichi plant in Japan, resulting in major escapes of radioactive material and damage to the reactors.  

    If thousands of crocodiles reside on your property, you must have ready access to fresh water, or a very long garden hose.  A flood could mean a major escape of powerful swimming predators. Not as bad as airborne particles of cesium-137, but still not anything you want to encounter on your morning constitutional.  

    We keep discovering that we inhabit fragile structures.   Climate disruption adds new layers of complexity, and stresses everything in ways we haven't experienced before.  Our arrangements often turn out to be much less flexible and resilient than anyone predicted.  (I hasten to add that climate change isn't the culprit behind the crocodile escape.)  The precise cause is less important than a danger growing in plain sight, with no one able to take effective preventive steps. 

    Or maybe we are underestimating the reptilian ingenuity of crocodilus nilotikus. Somewhere, caged reptiles brood, watching with slitted yellow eyes and dream of freedom, much like the main character in John Crowe Ransom's poem, "Crocodile," which ends:

    Full length he lies and goes as water goes,
    He weeps for joy and welters in the flood,
    Floating he lies extended nearly a rood,
    And quite invisible but for the end of his nose.

A statue of a crocodile at the Neptune Fountain in 1951, on Marx-Engels Platz in Berlin

Smaller targets -- a Carbon Based original

    Mark Twain once said (in Pudd'nhead Wilson), "Put all your eggs in one basket and -- WATCH THAT BASKET." Unfortunately for us, we've put a great many eggs in one basket -- properties near the water. 

    Almost half the United States population lives within 50 miles of the sea  or in flood plains, and these growing settlements are regulated haphazardly, if at all. Perverse incentives for coastal and flood-plain property development abound, such as pro-growth policies, insurance availability and lavish reconstruction funds. 

    We would face growing disaster losses even if climate change didn't exist, and the demographic migration to the water just makes climate change impacts exponentially worse.

    Marcia McNutt, who recently announced her resignation as director of the US Geological Survey, told a scientific gathering one instance of what "worse" means. She reported that Superstorm Sandy had scoured away many dunes, leaving towns and cities dangerously bereft of natural defenses against future storms. " Sandy was a threshold for the northeast and we have already crossed it," McNutt told the National Council for Science and the Environment conference in Washington. "For the next storm, not even a super storm, even a run-of-the-mill nor'easter, the amount of breaches and the amount of coastal flooding will be widespread," she said.

    McNutt vocally doubted the possibilities for rebuilding coastal defenses, given the obsession with austerity that grips Washington.  Nobody is willing to invest in public works these days, whether restoring natural defenses such as dunes, or hardening the shoreline through sea walls and other manufactured barriers.

    But even if the funds for such a building program existed, would beefing up shore defenses make sense?  This is not the only response.  

    Charles Perrow points the way in his 2007 book, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial and Terrorist Disasters (published by Princeton).  He doesn't dispute the need to protect our assets from all kinds of threats and to cope with the aftermath of storms, quakes and terror attacks. We must do both. But he stresses a seldom-used alternative -- reducing the size of the target. 

    The target has been growing for a long time. The major reason Hurricane Sandy caused so much damage resulted from decades of unregulated (or barely regulated) development, from allowing unchecked building to continue in known vulnerable areas.  Today's toxic combination of home rule and easily influenced officials makes it hard for governments to resist the commercial forces behind development.  We are stuck in an endless loop of inundation and rebuilding.

    One of Perrow's themes is that proper governance can break this loop, reduce the size of the target and dramatically improve resilience.  We could ease into sane policies through a variety of small steps, such as zoning changes for vulnerable spots. 

    Some of these steps are commercial, such as more astutely designed insurance.  State or local governments could declare that once a property is flooded, it's no longer insurable without significant modifications, such as being rebuilt on stilts.  Some insurers might squawk, but on the whole property insurers are very aware of the risk and would accept some consistently enforced regulations to help change behavior.

    With nudges from local governments, banks could be persuaded to tighten the loan requirements for vulnerable properties, mandating construction to a higher and more flood-proof standard. They could even encourage such innovations as floating houses that are designed to raise and lower with the water level.

    Governments can also pursue buyouts for owners whose property is damaged. Many homeowners have sunk considerable funds into their vulnerable houses, and the chance of being made even partly whole may persuade some to allow their property to be condemned.  Most of them bought these parcels years before any talk of climate change and sea level rise were in the air.  Make them generous buy-outs. Part of good governance is to start thinking now about who should pay for coastal retreat, and how.

    Of course, it would be hard to imagine a more unpopular policy. Everybody loves to live near the water.  I would, too.  At every turn, coastal dwellers will fight a retreat from the coast.    But inland taxpayers should have a say in how to use recovery funds -- and many of us are dubious about paying for a rebuild of the same weak house on the same wet site.

    To shrink the target, governments must resist developers.  Maybe the federal government needs to step in, if only to represent taxpayers who object to money being spent foolishly.

    If we remove massive property concentrations from the coast, then coastal erosion is not much more than an inconvenience, certainly not a billion-dollar disaster.   From higher ground, we could take a much more relaxed approach to huge storms and floods.

    The alternative is the anguish of watching the basket with all our eggs sink under the waves.

South-facing Long Beach on Oak Island, NC, September 17, 1999 -- Hurricane Floyd brought a devastating 15 feet of storm surge that damaged or destroyed hundreds of houses along this community's ocean front, and flattened its frontal sand dunes. Here, elevation worked to save the house but pilings and framing from a local municiple pier ripped through the first floor and some of pilings of Mark (R) and Angela (L) Godfrey's beach home. Photo by DAVE GATLEY/ FEMA News Photo

Learning curves, negative and positive--a Carbon Based original

    Under most circumstances, the more we practice at a task or a project, the greater our skill. In a positive learning curve, the costs of acting go down as the rewards increase.  But in some instances, practice makes our performance worse.  Economists and psychologists describe a negative learning curve as one where the more we persist with an activity, the greater the costs we face.  Practice makes us worse off.

    A 2011 article by the vigorously anti-nuclear Joe Romm in Think Progress asked, "Does nuclear power have a negative learning curve?"According to the piece, even the most successful nuclear operations suffer from a sharp growth in construction and operating expenses, even after adjusting for inflation.  Unlike wind and solar, where the cost per kilowatt hour has been steadily dropping, nuclear's has climbed.  A 2007 Moody's study finds nuclear costs mounting from $4000 before 2007 to $5000 to $6,000 today. One case Romm cites in Florida is even more expensive.

    Lest you think that this is just a problem for the balkanized, inefficient, poorly regulated US, Romm links to a paper that finds the same pattern in France's nuclear industry. Arnulf Grubler of the International Institute for Applied Systems in Austria analyzed public records for Energy Policy and wrote “The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing”.

     The cost escalation has happened even though French reactor designs are standardized to a degree that impossible in the US, and even though costs go down per unit as the size of the reactor increases.   France has other advantages, too, such as a powerful, well-run state utility. But this hasn't saved it from the negative learning curve.  Grubler speculates that the French cost rise stems from the inherent complexity of nuclear technology, which demands "a formidable ability to manage complexity in both construction and operation."  It's an ability nobody has, not even Electricite de France. 

    Romm's stinging conclusion: "New nukes have gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter." 

    So much for nuclear power (though I wonder whether the same objections would apply to thorium-based nuclear reactors).  But I'm struck by the notion of negative learning, defined as an activity that grows more costly the longer it's pursued.

    In the broader climate change landscape, the business as usual scenario -- the path we're on now -- exemplifies negative learning.  Sticking with our carbon-intensive ways entails worsening costs in the form of natural disasters, sea level rise and other impacts.  Most casual onlookers or organizations tend to regard climate impacts as random.  But they are externalities that follow predictably from burning fossil fuels.  The more greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere, the higher the costs go.

    One reason we remains stuck in this negative learning curve is ideological.  A substantial minority of American citizens have political objections to the kind of actions required to cut emissions drastically.

    Occasionally public opinions leans toward actually taking action against climate change, usually after a natural disaster.  That's when fossil fuel propagandists hurl themselves into the fray.  Hundreds of megaphones start blaring , stupefying the debate with a cacophony of marginal scientists, pro-capitalist think tanks, and industry flacks. A coalition of petroleum, steel, autos and utilities use their legislative clout to stop anyone from thinking about the origin of the growing costs, or noticing that they're not random. 

    This kind of political bind bedevils the whole world, not just the United States. The dispiriting fizzle of the latest round of international climate talks in Doha revealed yet again that the US inaction has global allies.  The motives of poorer countries are different from the wealthy nations, and stem largely from the urgent need to use energy to advance their development.  They have much catching up to do, and to reach the goal, they believe, they need a full energy portfolio, including fossil fuels.

    The irony is that with climate change, a positive learning curve awaits us when we cut emissions.  Because of the physical nature of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, early carbon mitigation can have huge benefits.  We have the power to avoid decades of growing costs.

    A recent report in Nature suggested that an international price on carbon at $20 per ton today gives the world an almost 60% chance of holding global temperature increases under 2°C. This temperature level would blunt the costliest impacts of global warming, including: rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme weather.

    Unfortunately for slow learners or non-learners, the cost of action closely tracks the level of greenhouse gas concentrations.  By 2020, when the parts per million are higher, we will need a price of $100 per ton of carbon to achieve the same result.  If we wait until 2030, no price on carbon, no matter how expensive, will be able to hold the line on temperature. 

    Under these circumstances, the moral and economic case for action now is strong. Rather than linger in a negative learning curve, we should actually try to benefit from our experience.  But we live in a cynical, paralyzed, ungovernable time, when our elites cannot act on behalf of our species in any coherent way. 

Some learning curves from an 1899 issue of Popular Science Monthly

Gobbling our way to utopia--a Carbon Based original

     Back in 1567, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted a satirical allegory called the Land of Cockaigne, also known as Schlaraffenland.  The painting depicts a clerk, a farmer, and a soldier sprawled on the ground, stupefied with gluttony. Above their heads, a table bends under the weight of a half-gobbled feast.  The tools of their trades lie unused beside them.

    Nearby, a knight lies slackjawed in a lean-to roofed with pies, apparently waiting for one of them to slide into his mouth.   In the background a man has found his way to Cockaigne by eating a tunnel through a cloud-like giant pudding.  For the orally inclined, that's a favorite path to bliss.

    An egg with a spoon in it jogs from one sleeping figure to another.  Behind the tree, a cooked pheasant lays itself upon a silver platter, and a roasted pig runs about with a carving knife strapped to its flanks. In this enchanted land of consequence-free feasting, food eagerly searches for eaters.

    We live in a climate Schlaraffenland today, peopled by hearty eaters who don't want to believe the truth about our relentless appetite for energy.   Many understand the potential for decades of horrible impacts from atmospheric greenhouse gas., and they want a different, better future. But they want it without interrupting the flow of tasty pies.

    I often entertain two fantasies about how to save ourselves, one technical, one political.

    In the technotopian vision, some genius creates a form of energy superior to fossil fuels, an improvement as dramatic as kerosene's advance over whale oil in the 1860s.  The transition to the new energy regime happens in a matter of a few years, and the might of the fossil fuel industry wilts before the new energy's economic advantage.  The electricity generation business steadily abandons coal and natural gas.  Electric cars replace the petroleum fleet.   Upgraded dwellings draw on the electrical grid only occasionally. An abundance of clean energy ends pollution and cuts greenhouse gas emissions to zero.

    Some visionaries even propose using the abundance of energy in this scenario to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, so we can eliminate the decades of impacts that already burden the climate system.

    We need such solutions today, or a decade ago, but in fact they are some distance in the future, if they are even possible. Our grid is built to deal with uninterrupted base load power generation, and most utilities must struggle to exploit fluctuating sources like wind and solar.   What's more, energy consumers lack the education and willingness (and spare time) to make decisions about energy consumption based on real-time monitoring.   Even more fundamentally, no renewable options currently have the energy density that makes petroleum so well-suited for transportation.

    Energy economist Vaclav Smil warns us that energy transitions usually take 50 years, at least. It's a slow process with plenty of missteps. As for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, it would require an enormous amount of energy.

    The political fantasy of avoiding climate impacts sometimes feels even more unreal than the technical one.  Our dream is to devise governing structures that are equal to our climate challenge.  The fossil fuel industry uses its vast lobbying might to promote green energy, instead of blocking it. Sound leadership nurtures a large variety of renewable energy options until the best ones emerge. As a society, we avoid splitting into a small factions of puritanical scolds versus everyone else.

    Local governments steer development away from coastlines and floodplains, and invest heavily in infrastructure improvements, so that roads and bridges can withstand stormier and wetter conditions. We bury our power lines, so that blackouts and other outages are much reduced, and we're better able to weather natural disasters.

    Far-seeing leaders reshape our usage of land, energy and other species in a comprehensive way, and diligently plug loopholes and exceptions. We also cultivate the ability to alter course when needed, so that unforeseen consequences do not trip us.  

    I hear you groaning out there. To take the necessary steps would be almost impossible for a sound democracy that functions well; attempting the same task with our current hobbled, corrupt, dolt-ridden Congress is ludicrous.

    The problem wouldn't disappear even if we could magically replace today's crop of intransigent politicians with a more reality-based crowd. As economist Martin Weitzman notes, in a democracy, the most enlightened elected officials face an impossible task.  As a society, we must aggressively tax carbon to create strong incentives for renewable energy.    This results in much pain spread among a large number of constituents. These aggrieved citizens can easily unite to defeat the very long-term-oriented climate action party.

    Had we started climate action decades ago, the compromises that were politically possible then might have gradually steered our overall energy trajectory to a safer path.  Unfortunately, we have delayed well past the point that such compromises will begin to address the emergency. Given today's climate conditions, such politically doable measures won't be nearly enough to hold global temperatures below the 2 degree threshold urged by the IPCC.

    Fantasies are so seductive because they promise a happy ending without strain. 

You'll find Bruegel's 1567 painting in the Alte Pinakotek in Munich

On a beach

Happy New Year from Carbon Based, on a beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island...

The day the dam broke--a Carbon Based original

    On December 26 in a local church, a neighbor read several stories by James Thurber.  One of these was "The Day the Dam Broke," which recounts a stretch of two hours in 1913 when sudden rumors of a failed dam in Columbus, Ohio, provoked a mass panic.  Thurber says, "The fact that we were all as safe as kittens under a cook stove did not, however, assuage in the least the fine despair and the grotesque desperation which seized upon the residents of the East Side when the cry spread like a grass fire that the dam had given way." 

    To comic effect, Thurber dwells on the terror that erupts instantly and the citizens' shamefaced return to their lives when no waters appear.  (Actually, a similar theme crops up in a number of Thurber stories, such as, "The Night the Bed Fell Down.")

    Residents fled east to avoid the rushing waters of the Scioto River. There were none. Authorities worsened the alarm.  Soldiers patrolling the streets announced that the dam had NOT failed.  Everyone heard as, "The dam has NOW failed.

    But were the citizens of Columbus so irrational to flee? Dams do break, and it's usually disastrous when they do.  In fact, in a real dam break, everyone downstream must act quickly to reach higher ground.  Thurber observes that everybody ran because the starting the cars of that era required a crank, and presumably that took too much time with an inundation gushing at one's heels.  

    The irrational part lay in not bothering to check for water, even after some minutes.  But coastal dwellers today, if they heard a tsunami warning, would remember the horrifying YouTube videos of the Aceh tidal wave coming ashore in 2010.  They would flee in an instant. I know I would.

    Nothing in Thurber's story considers the dam's soundness and its state of repair, or the quality of its management.  But presumably, after the panic of 1913, the leaders of Columbus probably checked the dam and made inquiries into what they could do to prepare for an actual dam break.  But that's a much less amusing story.

    This is how everyone wants climate change to turn out -- a hasty alarm that we slink away from when its foolishness is revealed. But of course, that doesn't fit the climate change pattern.  Evidence from direct observations, the paleoclimate record, and climate models all corroborate anthropogenic global warming.   This means intensified water cycles, more weather-related disasters, and a variety of other effects.

    What's more pertinent is speed. Climate change as a whole does not suddenly appear full blown. It builds slowly and on any given day doesn't impinge on people's minds or their lives. A catastrophe right in front of us grabs all our attention, but sorting out the climate signal it contains is not so obvious, nor is it the most pressing task when the waters are rising. 

    The analogy between Thurber's story and climate change would be even better if there were a well-funded movement in Columbus whose goal was to stop any effort to maintain the dam. Actually, something similar has happened to infrastructure in the United States, as state and local governments have allowed bridges, roads, dams, water treatment plants, and so on to fall into disrepair.  Decades of skimped maintenance has resulted in degraded service and outright failures.  The American Society of Civil Engineers gives US infrastructure a "D," and estimates a five-year investment of $2.2 trillion will be necessary to bring everything into good repair.

    We have time to prepare for slow-moving risks.  The cry of denialists notwithstanding, it's worth spending money today to avoid a catastrophe tomorrow.  Of course, we've already lost decades in the battle against climate change, thanks to fossil fuel industry's propaganda onslaught.  But there is still plenty we could do, and we will need to spend decades at it.

    Not long after our neighbor finished his Thurber reading, a sleeting snowstorm began, and was still underway a day later.  But everyone returned to their homes in an orderly way.

Thurber's own illustration for "The Day the Dam Broke"

The sense of an ending--a Carbon Based original

    It's December 22, the snow is falling, and I'm basking in relief that Mayan apocalypse fizzled.   A 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar ended yesterday -- December 21, 2012.  Some New Age thinkers claimed that this date heralded a major spiritual transformation, the beginning of a new era, or the end of the earth in a collision with a planet or a black hole.

    Historians of Mayan culture scoffed at these internet-stoked rumors and theories, doubting that any authentic sources supported such a gaudy Hollywood interpretation. Astronomers were derisive about talk of black holes or planetary collisions. 

    These party poopers didn't stop hundreds of credulous souls from flocking to Merida in the Yucatan, near the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, and to Tikal in Guatemala. The photos look festive.

    There were casualties. In Sergeyev Posad, a village near Moscow, police blamed a retiree's suicidal leap from her apartment window on her Mayan-based fears. And Chinese authorities arrested around 1,000 members of the Church of the Almighty God for spreading tales about the supposed end times.

    Not for the first time, a calendar served as a screen for some people to project their fears of mortality.  The projection plays into our hardwired narrative bias -- we love stories with a beginning, middle and end.  The Mayan curtain rings down with a bang, and the story's ridiculous falsity didn't make it any less satisfying.

    By coincidence, last night I went to the documentary Chasing Ice, director Jeff Orlowski's chronicle of one photographer's attempt to grapple with a single aspect of a real catastrophe.  It's also one that doesn't lend itself readily to a simple narrative.

    The project began in 2005: The National Geographic sent photographer James Balog to document the impacts of climate change in Iceland.  Dubious about climate change before this trip, he saw enough to change his mind and to give him a mission:  He founded the Extreme Ice Survey to systematically photograph the disappearance of a number of Arctic glaciers using an array of time-lapse cameras.  His goal was to provide visual evidence to the world of the reality of climate change. 

    He surely succeeds. We witness two large calving events, in which a large chunk of the glacier face breaks off and floats away.   In Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland, we see moulins with melt water coursing away, and time-lapse sequences showing vast ice fields dwindling and slipping away.

    Another satisfaction to Orlowski's documentary lies in the courage and persistence of Balog and his crew.  They wrangle their cameras into the best position for their shots, or deal with technical failures in the harsh polar landscape.   They even have to redesign and replace the timing mechanism for many dozens of cameras, which costs them months of work.

    Balog rightly describes the images the Survey has collected as beautiful and horrifying. Of course, the visual evidence probably resonates most with those who already believe in climate change. It's unclear whether it will convince any denialists.  A YouTube video showed one self-described Fox News viewer declaring that she now believed in global warming as she left a showing of Chasing Ice, shaken by what she saw. But it's unclear whether the change of heart has lasted, and whether many others will follow her.  Certainly the most recently polling data shows that a sizeable minority of Americans continue to believe that climate change is a fraud, or at worst an overhyped issue.

    Climate change believers who aren't scientists probably exceed the numbers of those who believed in the Mayan apocalypse. Even so, along with evolution and reproductive health, climatology has been plunged into the cauldron where conservatives boil the science they hate.

    We suffer from cultural insanity when a New Age trifle like the Mayan apocalypse can command hours of airtime, while the screaming emergency created by greenhouse gas emissions scarcely rates a fraction of the sustained focus that it needs. As Balog points out, as a result of our own greenhouse gas emissions, we are approaching the end of a relatively benign and hospitable period for human habitation.  The stormy, wet, unstable future we are creating will contain threats whose contours are just coming into view.

    With his narrow focus, Balog attempts to counter the tide of denial and the unshapely vastness of climate change as a whole.  A dying glacier has a definite end point, and our love of story is mobilized when watching its death throes.  Struggling with climate change will be the work of centuries, and it will probably take forms we don't anticipate. It won't be a story with a satisfying arc, or even an ending.

A Mayan zodiac circle, shot by theilr, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Where are the climate change investments? A Carbon Based Original

    Markets can fall prey to inefficiencies or fail altogether. The annals of investment are replete with tales of visionary investors who find ways to exploit these failures.      Climate change, in addition to being a global emergency, is also a market failure.  In the words of climate economist Nicholas Stern in 2007, "Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, and it interacts with other market imperfections."

    So where are the investors who are profiting from exploiting this failure?  In fact, their numbers are small, and so far their performance has not attracted other asset managers. 

    One disadvantages is that investors in climate change do not have need politicians committed to the right policies.  As Stern put it, "The first is the pricing of carbon, implemented through tax, trading or regulation. The second is policy to support innovation and the deployment of low-carbon technologies. And the third is action to remove barriers to energy efficiency, and to inform, educate and persuade individuals about what they can do to respond to climate change."

    Investments in the right actions face a political headwind. Instead of a concerted three-pronged push, would-be climate investors face virulent obstruction from conservative politicians.   These politicians and their fossil fuel backers work indefatigably to thwart all measures to price carbon. They do their utmost to thwart any large-scale post-carbon investing -- witness the near-criminalization of renewable energy at the hands of congressional Republicans.  They spout fossil fuel propaganda unabated even though governments and businesses pursue hundreds of small improvements in energy efficiency, and a majority of Americans believe climate change is real.

    Hostility from politicians and lobbyists is not the only obstacle. Psychology and cognitive habits place another barrier in the way of investing profitably in climate change action.

    Most people rarely notice long-term, lumbering problems for a number of cognitive and psychological reasons.  Their time horizon is too short. The climate signal emerges too slowly from the noise to command investors' attention.

    Traders, for example, operate in the briefest of short runs, and for them, climate change has hardly any existence at all. They buy securities, hold them for just a moment. 

    Investors work with a time horizon of three months to a year.  But even this somewhat longer field of view is the blink of the climate's eye. 

    Some asset managers defy this tendency, focusing on climate and renewable energy as investments, but most other investors quickly lose interest. 

    The time horizon problem even bedevils insurance, the one industry that cares the most about climate change right now.  Insurers have an immediate and obvious stake in reducing climate risk, since clients' disaster losses determine how profitable they are. 

    A growing number of property and casualty firms are focused on climate change. They are cutting their own emissions, taking climate into consideration in their portfolios, spelling out and communicating the risks of climate change, and even trying to influence policy. 

    Does this mean we should put our money in climate-savvy insurers?  Sometimes the industry does well, but the nature of the risk business prevents them from reaping extravagant payoffs. 

    The time horizon of insurers is one year -- policies are renewed every twelve months, usually in January.  Their judgment of their portfolios' risks only needs to be correct enough for a year. 

    Skill at assessing risk is only one part of the insurance business. The other half is investing. Insurers invest the premiums they take in, resulting in some of the largest asset pools in the world.  Their bias is conservative and short-term, since they might face large losses that could force them to unwind their portfolio in a hurry. In short, an insurer that has an acute understanding of climate risks has a better chance for staying in business, but it won't perform like a boom stock.

    Between the difficulty of thinking long term and fierce political opposition, sound climate investing has languished. That's alarming because all of us have a stake in stopping greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the harshness of its impacts. It should be profitable to do so.

Dunes at Gran Canaria, shot by Marc Ryckaert (MJJR), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license