<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19273-bigger-than-that-the-difficulty-of-looking-at-climate-change>
Bigger Than That: (The Difficulty of) Looking at Climate Change
Monday, 07 October 2013 10:35
By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch | News Analysis
Late last week, in the lobby of a particularly unglamorous downtown
San Francisco building, a group of passionate but polite activists
met with a bureaucrat who stepped forward to hear what they had to
say about the fate of the Earth. The activists wanted to save the
world. The particular part of it that might be under their control
involved getting the San Francisco Retirement board to divest its
half a billion dollars in fossil fuel holdings, one piece of the
international divestment movement that arose a year ago.
Sometimes the fate of the Earth boils down to getting one person with
modest powers to budge.
The bureaucrat had a hundred reasons why changing course was, well,
too much of a change. This public official wanted to operate under
ordinary-times rules and the idea that climate change has thrust us
into extraordinary times (and that divesting didn't necessarily
entail financial loss or even financial risk) was apparently too much
to accept.
The mass media aren't exactly helping. Last Saturday, for instance,
the New York Times gave its story on the International Panel on
Climate Change's six-years-in-the-making report on the catastrophic
future that's already here below-the-fold front-page placement, more
or less equal to that given a story on the last episode ofBreaking
Bad. The end of the second paragraph did include this quote: "In
short, it threatens our planet, our only home." But the headline
("U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions") and the
opening paragraph assured you this was dull stuff. Imagine a front
page that reported your house was on fire right now, but that some
television show was more exciting.
Sometimes I wish media stories were organized in proportion to their
impact. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, there is not
paper enough on this planet to properly scale up a story to the right
size. If you gave it the complete front page to suggest its import,
you would then have to print the rest of the news at some sort of
nanoscale and include an electron microscope for reading ease.
Hold up your hand. It's so big it can block out the sun, though you
know that the sun is so much bigger. Now look at the news: in column
inches and airtime, a minor controversy or celebrity may loom bigger
than the planet. The problem is that, though websites and print media
may give us the news, they seldom give us the scale of the news or a
real sense of the proportional importance of one thing compared to
another. And proportion, scale, is the main news we need right now
-- maybe always.
As it happens, we're not very good at looking at the biggest things.
They may be bigger than we can see, or move more slowly than we have
the patience to watch for or remember or piece together, or they may
cause impacts that are themselves complex and dispersed and stretch
into the future. Scandals are easier. They are on a distinctly human
scale, the scale of lust, greed, and violence. We like those, we
understand them, we get mired in them, and mostly they mean little or
nothing in the long run (or often even in the short run).
A resident in a town on the northwest coast of Japan told me that the
black 70-foot-high wave of water coming at him on March 11, 2011, was
so huge that, at first, he didn't believe his eyes. It was the great
Tohoku tsunami, which killed about 20,000 people. A version of such
cognitive dissonance occurred in 1982, when NASA initially
rejected measurements of the atmosphere above Antarctica because they
indicated such a radical loss of ozone that the computer program just
threw out the data.
Some things are so big you don't see them, or you don't want to think
about them, or you almost can't think about them. Climate change is
one of those things. It's impossible to see the whole, because it's
everything. It's not just a seven-story-tall black wave about to
engulf your town, it's a complete system thrashing out of control, so
that it threatens to become too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too
wild, too destructive, too erratic for many plants and animals that
depend on reliable annual cycles. It affects the entire surface of
the Earth and every living thing, from the highest peaks to the
depths of the oceans, from one pole to the other, from the tropics to
the tundra, likely for millennia -- and it's not just coming like
that wave, it's already here.
It's not only bigger than everything else, it's bigger than
everything else put together. But it's not a sudden event like a
massacre or a flood or a fire, even though it includes floods, fires,
heat waves, and wild weather. It's an incremental shift over
decades, over centuries. It's the definition of the big picture
itself, the far-too-big picture. Which is why we have so much news
about everything else, or so it seems.
To understand climate change, you need to translate figures into
impacts, to think about places you'll never see and times after
you're gone. You need to imagine sea level rise and understand its
impact, to see the cause-and-effect relations between coal-fired
power plants, fossil-fuel emissions, and the fate of the Earth. You
need to model data in fairly sophisticated ways. You need to think
like a scientist.
Given the demands of the task and the muddle of the mainstream media,
it's remarkable that so many people get it, and that they do so
despite massive, heavily funded petroleum industry propaganda
campaigns is maybe a victory, if not enough of one.
Four months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and
injured hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media
attention, and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate
change probably fueled the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado,
that killed seven people in mid-September, but amid the copious
coverage, it was barely mentioned in the media. Similarly, in Mexico,
115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no
significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are
halving Pakistan's economic growth (no significant mention), and 166
bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no
significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced by climate change, took
the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona blazes amid record heat
waves in July. Again, climate change generally wasn't the headline
on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It's like trying to say
which cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the
contamination; you can't, but what you can say is that the overall
rise in cancer is connected.)
Not quite a year ago, a climate-change-related hurricane drowned
people when superstorm Sandy hit a place that doesn't usually
experience major hurricane impact, let alone storm surges that
submerge amusement parks, the New York City subway system, and the
Jersey shore. In that disaster, 148 people died directly, nearly that
many indirectly, losses far greater than from any terrorist incident
in this country other than that great anomaly, 9/11. The weather has
now become man-made violence, though no one thinks of it as
terrorism, in part because there's no smoking gun or bomb -- unless
you have the eyes to see and the data to look at, in which case the
smokestacks of coal plants start to look gun-like and the hands
of energy company CEOs and well-paid-off legislators begin to morph
into those of bombers.
Even the civil war in Syria may be a climate-change war of sorts:
over the past several years, the country has been hit by its worst
drought in modern times. Climate and Security analyst Francesco
Femia says, "Around 75 percent of [Syrian] farmers suffered total
crop failure, so they moved into the cities. Farmers in the northeast
lost 80 percent of their livestock, so they had to leave and find
livelihoods elsewhere. They all moved into urban areas -- urban areas
that were already experiencing economic insecurity due to an influx
of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. But this massive displacement
mostly wasn't reported. So it wasn't factoring into various security
analyses. People assumed Syria was relatively stable compared to
Egypt."
Column Inches, Glacial Miles
We like to think about morality and sex and the lives of people we've
gotten to know in some fashion. We know how to do it. It's on a
distinctly human scale. It's disturbing in a reassuring way. We fret
about it and feel secure in doing so. Now, everything's changed, and
our imaginations need to keep pace with that change. What is human
scale anyway? These days, after all, we split atoms and tinker with
genes and can melt an ice sheet. We were designed to think about
human-scale phenomena, and now that very phrase is almost as
meaningless as old terms like "glacial," which used to mean
slow-moving and slow to change.
Nowadays glaciers are melting rapidly or disappearing entirely, and
some -- those in Greenland, for example -- have gushing rivers of ice
water eating through their base. If the whole vast Greenland ice
sheet were to melt, it could raise global sea levels by 23 feet.
We tend to think about climate change as one or two or five things:
polar ice, glaciers melting, sea-level rise, heat waves, maybe
droughts. Now, however, we need to start adding everything else into
the mix: the migration of tropical diseases, the proliferation of
insect pests, crop failures and declining crop yields leading to
widespread hunger and famine, desertification and flooded zones and
water failures leading to mass population shifts, resource wars, and
so many other things that have to do with the widest systems of life
on Earth, affecting health, the global economy, food systems, water
systems, and energy systems.
It is almost impossibly scary and painful to contemplate the radical
decline and potential death of the oceans that cover 70% of the
Earth's surface and the dramatic decrease of plankton, which do more
than any other type of organism to sequester carbon and produce
oxygen -- a giant forest in microscopic form breathing in what we
produce, breathing out what we need, keeping the whole system going.
If you want to read something really terrifying, take a look at the
rise of the Age of Jellyfish in this review of Lisa-Ann Gershwin's
book Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean. Maybe
read it even if you don't.
Only remember that like so much about climate change we used to
imagine as a grim future, that future is increasingly here and now.
In this case, in the form of millions or maybe billions of tons of
jellyfish proliferating globally and devouring plankton, fish eggs,
small fish, and bigger creatures in the sea we love, we know, we
count on, we feed on, and now even clogging the water-intake pipes of
nuclear power plants. In the form of seashells dissolving in acidic
waters from the Pacific Northwest to the Antarctic Ocean. In the form
of billions of pine-bark beetles massacring the forests of the
American West, from Arizona to Alaska, one bite at a time.
It's huge. I think about it, and I read about it, following blogs at
Weather Underground, various climate websites, the emails of
environmental groups, the tweets of people at 350.org, and bits and
pieces of news on the subject that straggle into the mainstream and
alternative media. Then I lose sight of it. I think about everything
and anything else; I get caught up in old human-scale news that fits
into my frameworks so much more easily. And then I remember, and
regain my sense of proportion, or disproportion.
The Great Wall, Brick by Brick
The changes required to address climate change are colossal, but they
are made up of increments and steps and stages that are more than
possible. Many are already underway, both as positive changes
(adaptation of renewable energy, increased energy efficiency, new
laws, policies, and principles) and as halts to destruction (for
example, all the coal-fired plants that have not been built in recent
years and the Tar Sands pipeline that, but for popular resistance,
would already be sending its sludge from Alberta to the Gulf of
Mexico). The problem is planetary in scale, but there is room to
mitigate the worst-case scenarios, and that room is full of activists
at work. Much of that work consists of small-scale changes.
As Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune put it last week,
"Here's the single most important thing you need to know about the
IPCC report: It's not too late. We still have time to do something
about climate disruption. The best estimate from the best science is
that we can limit warming from human-caused carbon pollution to less
than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit -- if we act now. Bottom line: Our house
is on fire. Rather than argue about how fast it's burning, we need to
start throwing buckets of water."
There are buckets and bucket brigades. For example, the movement to
get universities, cities, churches, and other entities
to divest their holdings of the top 200 fossil-fuel stocks could have
major consequences. If it works, it will be achieved through
dedicated groups on this campus or in that city competing in a
difficult sport: budging bureaucrats. It's already succeeded in some
key places, from the city of Seattle to the national United Church of
Christ, and hundreds of campaigns are underway across the United
States and in some other countries.
My heroes are now people who can remain engaged with climate change's
complex and daunting facts and still believe that we have some leeway
to determine what happens. They insist on looking directly at the
black wall of water, and they focus on what we can do about the peril
we face, and then they do it. They do their best to understand scale
and science, and their dedication and clarity comes from connecting
their hearts to their minds.
I hear people who are either uninformed or who are justifying
disengagement say that it's too late and what we do won't matter, but
it does matter, because a rise in the global temperature of two
degrees Celsius is going to be very, very different from, say, five
degrees Celsius for almost everything living on Earth now and for
millennia to come. And there are still many things that can be done,
both to help us adapt to the radical change on the way and to limit
the degree of change to which we'll have to adapt. Because it's
already risen .8 degrees and that's been a disaster -- many, many
disasters.
I spent time over the last several months with the stalwarts carrying
on a campaign to get San Francisco to divest from its energy stocks.
In the beginning, it seemed easy enough. City Supervisor John Avalos
introduced a nonbinding resolution to the Board of Supervisors, and
to everyone's surprise it passed unanimously in April on a voice
vote. But the board turned out only to have the power to recommend
that the San Francisco Retirement Board do the real work of divesting
its vast holdings of fossil-fuel stocks. The retirement board was a
tougher nut to crack.
Its main job, after all, is to ensure a safe and profitable pension
fund and in that sense, energy companies have, in the past, been good
investments. To continue on such a path is to be "smart about the
market." The market, in the meantime, is working hard at not
imagining the financial impact of climate change.
The failure of major food sources, including fishing stocks and
agricultural crops, and the resultant mass hunger and instability --
see Syria -- is going to impact the market. Retirees in the beautiful
Bay Area are going feel it if the global economy crashes, the region
fills with climate refugees, the spectacularly productive state
agricultural system runs dry or roasts, and the oceans rise on our
scenic coasts. It's a matter of scale. Your investments are not
independent of nature, even if fossil-fuel companies remain, for a
time, profitable while helping destroying the world as humanity has
known it.
Some reliable sources now argue that fossil-fuel stocks are not good
investments, that they're volatile for a number of reasons and due to
crash. The IPCC report makes it clear that we need to leave most of
the planet's fossil fuel reserves in the ground in the coming
decades, that the choice is either to fry the planet or freeze the
assets of the carbon companies. Activists are now doing their best to
undermine the value of the big carbon-energy corporations, and
governments clued in to the new IPCC report will likely join them in
trying to keep the oil, gas, and coal in the ground -- the fossil
fuel that is also much of the worth of these corporations on paper.
If we're lucky, we'll make them crash. So divesting can be fiscally
sound, and there is a very strong case that it can be done without
economic impact. But the crucial thing here isn't the financial
logistics of divestment; it's the necessity of grasping the scale of
things, understanding the colossal nature of the problem and the need
to address it, in part, by pressuring one small group or one
institution in one place.
To grasp this involves a feat of imagination and, I think, a leap of
faith: a kind of conviction about what matters, about living
according to principle, about understanding what is too big to be
seen with your own eyes, about correlating data on a range of scales.
A lot of people I know do it. If we are to pull back from the brink
of catastrophe, it will be because of their vision and their faith.
You might want to thank them now, and while your words are nice, so
are donations. Or you might want to join them.
That there is a widespread divestment movement right now is due to
the work of a few people who put forth the plan less than a year ago
at 350.org. The president has already mentioned it, and hundreds of
colleges are now in the midst of or considering the process of
divesting, with cities, churches, and other institutions joining the
movement. It takes a peculiar kind of genius to see the monster and
to see that it might begin to be pushed back by small actions -- by,
in fact, actions on a distinctly human scale that could still triumph
over the increasingly inhuman scale of our era.
Hold up your hand. It looks puny in relation to the sun, but the
other half of the equation of scale is seeing that something as small
as that hand, as your own powers, as your own efforts, can matter.
The cathedral is made stone by stone, and the book is written word by
word.
If there is to be an effort to respond to climate change, it will
need to make epic differences in economics, in ecologies, in the
largest and most powerful systems around us. Though the goals may be
heroic, they will be achieved mostly through an endless accumulation
of small gestures.
Those gestures are in your hands, and everyone's. Or they could be if
we learned to see the true scale of things, including how big we can
be together.
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