Wednesday, August 02, 2006
maybe the heat wave is caused by the burning of flags.
Baby, it's hot outside ...
Joshua Holland (2:44PM) link
It's 101 degrees here in our nation's capitol. Neither I, nor my loyal but hirsute canine companion, the talented Red Dog, are digging it.
It's the same heatwave that killed 164 people in California recently. That's nothing; a similar blast in Europe killed 11,000 in France alone in the summer of 2003.
Earlier this summer, we had the deluge. Rain swamped roads, knocked out power, stranded people on their roofs and caused 200,000 Pennsylvanians to flee their homes (joining tens of thousands who remain refugees a year after Katrina). The Boston Globe called it "The worst flooding in the eastern United States for decades."
It was "triggered by days of torrential downpours." In the Dakotas, farmers (and everyone else) would give their left nut (or left boob) for just one of those days. They've seen a return of the dustbowl:
Fields of wheat, durum, and barley in the Dakotas this dry summer will never end up as pasta, bread, or beer. What is left of the stifled crops has been salvaged to feed livestock struggling on pastures where hot winds blow clouds of dirt from dried-out ponds.
Some ranchers have been forced to sell their entire herds, and others are either moving their cattle to greener pastures or buying more already-costly feed.
Farm ponds and other small bodies of water have dried out from the heat, leaving the residual alkali dust to be whipped up by the wind. The blowing, dirt-and-salt mixture is a phenomenon that hasn't been seen in south central North Dakota since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s…
Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center, told the Globe that more than 60 percent of the country is in a drought, extending from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana, and Wisconsin.
And while George W. Bush trusts a Sci-fi writer who says it's not due to man-made causes, George Monbiot writes, "the consensus among climatologists is that temperatures will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade; by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase we have suffered so far."
Conservatives argue that we can't prove that the increase in extreme weather over the past few years is a product of greenhouse gasses, even if it's consistent with the scientific models, and as far as I understand it they're right. What they don't say is that definitive proof will come far too late to do anything about it. It's a gamble with the whole planet at stake.
Ultimately, it's not the science that makes me gloomy, but the politics. In his excellent book, Collapse, anthropologist Jared Diamond looked at around a dozen societies that changed their environment in ways that threatened their very existence. Some fell apart and disappeared, others overcame their issues and continue to thrive today. Diamond identified five or six factors that made the difference (I don't remember exactly how many), but the one that stood out for me was political leadership; some societies had leaders who were sufficiently aware of their surroundings and bold enough to change the status quo, and they came up with survival strategies. Others whistled by the graveyard, and their people now lie in the proverbial dustbin of history.
So I think about the folks "leading" us, five or so miles from where I sit. They're debating the estate taxe and the minimum wage. They take time talking about amending the Constitution to criminalize flag-burning. And they've declared a rhetorical "war" on a problem that pales in comparison with the potential disaster of catastrophic climate change. We know which type of leaders we have -- we're faced with a narrowly-delineated political culture with sharp limitations on what's possible to even discuss.
The difference between the problems faced by the societies Diamond studied and the issue of climate change is that those other societies' problems were localized. Iceland's soil erosion didn't impact Papua New Guinea. But our rump political culture has the potential to impact all of humanity. We're five percent of the population and we're responsible for over five times that amount of the world's greenhouse gasses.
Sorry to be depressing. But sooner or later, we're going to have to face up to these issues. We can only hope it'll be soon enough.
Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.
Joshua Holland (2:44PM) link
It's 101 degrees here in our nation's capitol. Neither I, nor my loyal but hirsute canine companion, the talented Red Dog, are digging it.
It's the same heatwave that killed 164 people in California recently. That's nothing; a similar blast in Europe killed 11,000 in France alone in the summer of 2003.
Earlier this summer, we had the deluge. Rain swamped roads, knocked out power, stranded people on their roofs and caused 200,000 Pennsylvanians to flee their homes (joining tens of thousands who remain refugees a year after Katrina). The Boston Globe called it "The worst flooding in the eastern United States for decades."
It was "triggered by days of torrential downpours." In the Dakotas, farmers (and everyone else) would give their left nut (or left boob) for just one of those days. They've seen a return of the dustbowl:
Fields of wheat, durum, and barley in the Dakotas this dry summer will never end up as pasta, bread, or beer. What is left of the stifled crops has been salvaged to feed livestock struggling on pastures where hot winds blow clouds of dirt from dried-out ponds.
Some ranchers have been forced to sell their entire herds, and others are either moving their cattle to greener pastures or buying more already-costly feed.
Farm ponds and other small bodies of water have dried out from the heat, leaving the residual alkali dust to be whipped up by the wind. The blowing, dirt-and-salt mixture is a phenomenon that hasn't been seen in south central North Dakota since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s…
Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center, told the Globe that more than 60 percent of the country is in a drought, extending from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana, and Wisconsin.
And while George W. Bush trusts a Sci-fi writer who says it's not due to man-made causes, George Monbiot writes, "the consensus among climatologists is that temperatures will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade; by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase we have suffered so far."
Conservatives argue that we can't prove that the increase in extreme weather over the past few years is a product of greenhouse gasses, even if it's consistent with the scientific models, and as far as I understand it they're right. What they don't say is that definitive proof will come far too late to do anything about it. It's a gamble with the whole planet at stake.
Ultimately, it's not the science that makes me gloomy, but the politics. In his excellent book, Collapse, anthropologist Jared Diamond looked at around a dozen societies that changed their environment in ways that threatened their very existence. Some fell apart and disappeared, others overcame their issues and continue to thrive today. Diamond identified five or six factors that made the difference (I don't remember exactly how many), but the one that stood out for me was political leadership; some societies had leaders who were sufficiently aware of their surroundings and bold enough to change the status quo, and they came up with survival strategies. Others whistled by the graveyard, and their people now lie in the proverbial dustbin of history.
So I think about the folks "leading" us, five or so miles from where I sit. They're debating the estate taxe and the minimum wage. They take time talking about amending the Constitution to criminalize flag-burning. And they've declared a rhetorical "war" on a problem that pales in comparison with the potential disaster of catastrophic climate change. We know which type of leaders we have -- we're faced with a narrowly-delineated political culture with sharp limitations on what's possible to even discuss.
The difference between the problems faced by the societies Diamond studied and the issue of climate change is that those other societies' problems were localized. Iceland's soil erosion didn't impact Papua New Guinea. But our rump political culture has the potential to impact all of humanity. We're five percent of the population and we're responsible for over five times that amount of the world's greenhouse gasses.
Sorry to be depressing. But sooner or later, we're going to have to face up to these issues. We can only hope it'll be soon enough.
Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.
