Fisking Christmas
Can you fisk a Christmas gift? How low is that? That low, huh? OK, here goes.
My brother gives people gifts he thinks they need. I'm not talking about, "you need a vacation; here's two tickets to Paris." It's more like, "you need to get more exposure to culture; here's two tickets to 'Waiting for Godot' at the theater where my downstairs neighbor works."
This year, I got a book of photographs of the Alaskan North Slope.
It is a beautiful book. Here's a picture of moose feeding on a willow patch in a certain river valley. Then I read the caption: Moose were not seen here before the 1940s. "Scientists say that one of the visible signs of climate change impacts due to global warming is that treelines, especially willow and dwarf birch, are moving north at a rapid pace ...."
Sigh. It's not really a book about Alaska after all. Apparently I'm not sufficiently alert about global warming.
But, elsewhere, "Windblown ridges with exposed vegetation, combined with dwarf willows, provide food during harsh winter months for a wide variety of wildlife." OK, so are the dwarf willows a good thing or a bad thing? Muskox herds eat them. Muskox herds are in danger, because, "During the past several years, the coastal plain experienced deeper snow and a later spring thaw than usual, a phenomenon scientists believe is the result of the impact of climate change due to global warming."
So that's bad, because they can't get the dwarf willows, right? But the dwarf willows aren't supposed to be there. But if it's global warming, why is it colder and snowier in Alaska than it used to be?
Yeah, I know, "global warming" is a misnomer -- greenhouse gas emissions piling up in the atmosphere means some parts of the world actually will get colder. Weather overall will be more erratic, more intense. But I wish the people who expect me to join this religion would take the time to make it palatable to common sense. Explain, don't hector.
And acknowledge for a change that the environment confronts us with complicated choices; we're hooked into an energy system that fuels a prosperity unrivaled in human history; that prosperity keeps poverty, disease, and starvation at bay. The seers of the 1960s predicted India and China would collapse into overpopulation chaos, and drag the world with them, but instead they have grown toward stability and even affluence, and their consumption of fossil fuel has grown dramatically at the same time. That's not a coincidence.
Yet to Peter Matthiessen, who pens a large text section of my book, the current energy system is nothing but a plot by the "hardened apostles of material progress," and a shadowy cabal of "fossil fuelers." The George W. Bush administration is "plainly more concerned with large tax cuts and subsidies for the large corporations than with the long-term interests of the nation." The plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge passed the House "in the climate of terrorist scare talk and 'patriotic' bullying after 9/11 ...."
It seems to me there's more than a slight connection between U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the grievances of bin Laden. That there might be a bit of -- dare I say it -- nuance to this sequence of events. But if there is, it slipped past Matthiessen. Al Qaida is just a hand puppet Bush uses to scare Congress. While the president was finishing up the last page of "My Pet Goat," apparently, his fossil fueler brain was thinking, "Oh, boy, now I can go befoul the Arctic!"
Nuclear power as an alternative? Nope, he's against that, too. Matthiessen's only glance at an alternative is "renewable clean energy from wind and sun," "the bright and boundless energy of sun and wind." Great! Let's run the economy of China on breezes and sunbeams.
Long before climate change became a pet cause of Al Gore, it was a matter of historical scholarship. Since I concentrated my college studies on northern Europe in the Middle Ages, I read years ago about droughts that drove the great hoarde migrations out of central Asia, the summer of rain that caused the famine of 1215 in England, and the punishing storms that re-drew the coastlines of Flanders, Holland and Friesland in the 12th century. All because of climate change.
The North Sea incursions were catastrophic on a Hollywood scale: sea surges punched through the dunes (you can see the relics of the old coast in the line of islands off the coast of Holland, Germany, and Denmark), killed perhaps 100,000 people, and turned vast agricultural disticts into reed seas. In 1231, the sea flooded up river channels into the inland lake of Holland and by 1300 it had become a bay. In 1277, thirty villages in the lower Ems basin were drowned and the Dollart formed. In floods in 1240 and 1362, sixty parishes in the dioscese of Schleswig were drowned, amounting to half the agricultural land of the realm. The island of Heligoland was 60 kilometers across in C.E. 800; by 1325 it was only 25 kilometers in diameter at the widest, half the loss having come in a single storm in January of that year. Today it is only 1.5 kilometers at the widest. The English ports of Ravenspur and Dunwich drowned about the same time.
And all that was before the internal combustion engine, the Frigidaire, the Industrial Revolution. The Earth's climate changes over time. The change can be catastrophic. Some scientists and some historians always have been aware of this, but most people aren't, because the temperatures in the last 500 years have been relatively stable. The Europeans of the Middle Ages saw the last dramatic phase of warming and cooling, but even that was a blip compared to what can happen.
We still don't know what makes it change; probably a combination of processes including everything from volcanic eruptions to deep sea currents to, possibly, interstellar dust. What we know for sure is the Earth has been much warmer in its recent past, and much cooler. There's no guarantee on the climate you see around you.
We ought to pay more attention to this. The discussion we ought to be having about climate change would take into account both human agency and other, potentially much more serious, forces.
Even if we know for sure we're having an impact on the climate, that doesn't answer the question of how that impact flows into the ongoing changes that will occur with or without us. In the 1991 science fiction novel "Fallen Angels," environmentalists have taken over earth's governments and imposed luddite laws, which end global warming, only to unleash a new ice age, which had been held in check, we learn too late, by global warming caused by human pollution. Fiction, but at least within the realm of possibility.
But instead, the debate has shrunk into a chirping contest between name-calling factions: "eco-freaks" and "tree-huggers" vs. "fossil fuelers" and "corporations."
Environmentalists often share with creationists the utterly unscientific view that the world was set spinning in one complete, harmonious form. They write as though it all would continue in perfect ecological balance if only man would leave it alone. Like creationists, they view the human race as something non-natural, though in their case it seems to be sub-, not supra-, naturam, and its impact is entirely baleful.
Start the discussion by acknowledging that the Earth's climate fluctuates, and that's just nature's way. On the Alaskan North Slope, where Matthiessen frets about how much snow falls on the dwarf willows, three-ton duck-billed dinosaurs once grazed in herds year-round on lush river-valley vegetation.
But human beings right now have a lot invested in the stability of weather patterns and coastlines, and we all ought to pay attention to what can cause catastrophic climate changes. Better to investigate and learn and adopt, rather than shut it down in advance because you don't like the people who want to hijack the issue and pour their personal manias into it.
My brother gives people gifts he thinks they need. I'm not talking about, "you need a vacation; here's two tickets to Paris." It's more like, "you need to get more exposure to culture; here's two tickets to 'Waiting for Godot' at the theater where my downstairs neighbor works."
This year, I got a book of photographs of the Alaskan North Slope.
It is a beautiful book. Here's a picture of moose feeding on a willow patch in a certain river valley. Then I read the caption: Moose were not seen here before the 1940s. "Scientists say that one of the visible signs of climate change impacts due to global warming is that treelines, especially willow and dwarf birch, are moving north at a rapid pace ...."
Sigh. It's not really a book about Alaska after all. Apparently I'm not sufficiently alert about global warming.
But, elsewhere, "Windblown ridges with exposed vegetation, combined with dwarf willows, provide food during harsh winter months for a wide variety of wildlife." OK, so are the dwarf willows a good thing or a bad thing? Muskox herds eat them. Muskox herds are in danger, because, "During the past several years, the coastal plain experienced deeper snow and a later spring thaw than usual, a phenomenon scientists believe is the result of the impact of climate change due to global warming."
So that's bad, because they can't get the dwarf willows, right? But the dwarf willows aren't supposed to be there. But if it's global warming, why is it colder and snowier in Alaska than it used to be?
Yeah, I know, "global warming" is a misnomer -- greenhouse gas emissions piling up in the atmosphere means some parts of the world actually will get colder. Weather overall will be more erratic, more intense. But I wish the people who expect me to join this religion would take the time to make it palatable to common sense. Explain, don't hector.
And acknowledge for a change that the environment confronts us with complicated choices; we're hooked into an energy system that fuels a prosperity unrivaled in human history; that prosperity keeps poverty, disease, and starvation at bay. The seers of the 1960s predicted India and China would collapse into overpopulation chaos, and drag the world with them, but instead they have grown toward stability and even affluence, and their consumption of fossil fuel has grown dramatically at the same time. That's not a coincidence.
Yet to Peter Matthiessen, who pens a large text section of my book, the current energy system is nothing but a plot by the "hardened apostles of material progress," and a shadowy cabal of "fossil fuelers." The George W. Bush administration is "plainly more concerned with large tax cuts and subsidies for the large corporations than with the long-term interests of the nation." The plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge passed the House "in the climate of terrorist scare talk and 'patriotic' bullying after 9/11 ...."
It seems to me there's more than a slight connection between U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the grievances of bin Laden. That there might be a bit of -- dare I say it -- nuance to this sequence of events. But if there is, it slipped past Matthiessen. Al Qaida is just a hand puppet Bush uses to scare Congress. While the president was finishing up the last page of "My Pet Goat," apparently, his fossil fueler brain was thinking, "Oh, boy, now I can go befoul the Arctic!"
Nuclear power as an alternative? Nope, he's against that, too. Matthiessen's only glance at an alternative is "renewable clean energy from wind and sun," "the bright and boundless energy of sun and wind." Great! Let's run the economy of China on breezes and sunbeams.
Long before climate change became a pet cause of Al Gore, it was a matter of historical scholarship. Since I concentrated my college studies on northern Europe in the Middle Ages, I read years ago about droughts that drove the great hoarde migrations out of central Asia, the summer of rain that caused the famine of 1215 in England, and the punishing storms that re-drew the coastlines of Flanders, Holland and Friesland in the 12th century. All because of climate change.
The North Sea incursions were catastrophic on a Hollywood scale: sea surges punched through the dunes (you can see the relics of the old coast in the line of islands off the coast of Holland, Germany, and Denmark), killed perhaps 100,000 people, and turned vast agricultural disticts into reed seas. In 1231, the sea flooded up river channels into the inland lake of Holland and by 1300 it had become a bay. In 1277, thirty villages in the lower Ems basin were drowned and the Dollart formed. In floods in 1240 and 1362, sixty parishes in the dioscese of Schleswig were drowned, amounting to half the agricultural land of the realm. The island of Heligoland was 60 kilometers across in C.E. 800; by 1325 it was only 25 kilometers in diameter at the widest, half the loss having come in a single storm in January of that year. Today it is only 1.5 kilometers at the widest. The English ports of Ravenspur and Dunwich drowned about the same time.
And all that was before the internal combustion engine, the Frigidaire, the Industrial Revolution. The Earth's climate changes over time. The change can be catastrophic. Some scientists and some historians always have been aware of this, but most people aren't, because the temperatures in the last 500 years have been relatively stable. The Europeans of the Middle Ages saw the last dramatic phase of warming and cooling, but even that was a blip compared to what can happen.
We still don't know what makes it change; probably a combination of processes including everything from volcanic eruptions to deep sea currents to, possibly, interstellar dust. What we know for sure is the Earth has been much warmer in its recent past, and much cooler. There's no guarantee on the climate you see around you.
We ought to pay more attention to this. The discussion we ought to be having about climate change would take into account both human agency and other, potentially much more serious, forces.
Even if we know for sure we're having an impact on the climate, that doesn't answer the question of how that impact flows into the ongoing changes that will occur with or without us. In the 1991 science fiction novel "Fallen Angels," environmentalists have taken over earth's governments and imposed luddite laws, which end global warming, only to unleash a new ice age, which had been held in check, we learn too late, by global warming caused by human pollution. Fiction, but at least within the realm of possibility.
But instead, the debate has shrunk into a chirping contest between name-calling factions: "eco-freaks" and "tree-huggers" vs. "fossil fuelers" and "corporations."
Environmentalists often share with creationists the utterly unscientific view that the world was set spinning in one complete, harmonious form. They write as though it all would continue in perfect ecological balance if only man would leave it alone. Like creationists, they view the human race as something non-natural, though in their case it seems to be sub-, not supra-, naturam, and its impact is entirely baleful.
Start the discussion by acknowledging that the Earth's climate fluctuates, and that's just nature's way. On the Alaskan North Slope, where Matthiessen frets about how much snow falls on the dwarf willows, three-ton duck-billed dinosaurs once grazed in herds year-round on lush river-valley vegetation.
But human beings right now have a lot invested in the stability of weather patterns and coastlines, and we all ought to pay attention to what can cause catastrophic climate changes. Better to investigate and learn and adopt, rather than shut it down in advance because you don't like the people who want to hijack the issue and pour their personal manias into it.
Labels: climate change, environmentalism
