“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
President Johnson was concerned about the dangers of CO2 emissions, enough to address Congress about it, having been briefed by two scientists, Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle. If you’ve followed my Brief History of Climate Science, you’ll recognize their names from Episodes 3 and 4. This is what Charles Keeling’s curve of his direct measurements of global atmospheric CO2 concentration looked like back then:
It was a subtle rise, but I have no doubt Keeling and Revelle explained to the President that it was statistically significant, consistent with calculated fossil fuel usage, and linked to measured increases in global temperature that had long been theoretically predicted to result from such CO2 increases. Apparently, President Johnson was convinced.
As a result of Johnson and other presidents believing scientists — both Republicans and Democrats — we have done a lot of constructive things over the past 5 decades. We’ve conducted research and development to create more sustainable ways of harvesting the sun’s energy. These sustainable methods are now developed to the point of economical viability. We (the United States) have led the world in inadvertently causing this challenge, recognizing this challenge, and moving to develop superior technologies to address this challenge.
Now, the evidence looks like this:
“Keeling Curve,” a plot of weekly atmospheric CO2 measurements made by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at Mauna Loa, Hawaii from 1958 to present. The curve was plotted by me using Scripps weekly data from the Mauna Loa observatory, downloaded here.
We also know it’s even worse, because data from ice cores shows the CO2 increases were already well underway before Keeling started his direct measurements. And the matching temperature record looks like this:
This is the 8th episode in a series recounting the history of measurements, data, and projections related to global climate change. If you’re just joining, you can catch up on the previous episodes:
Episode 1: Beginnings (or two British scientists’ adventures with leaves and CO2 measurements)
Episode 2: First measurement of anthropogenic global warming
Though the details are not known for certain, most who have studied it believe the first inhabitants of the island, numbering not more than 150 people, arrived between 400 and 1200 AD in wooden canoes from previously settled Pacific islands that may have been as far as 2,000 miles away. They were highly skilled seagoing navigators, having over previous generations employed navigational instruments and charts, detailed observations of the sun, stars, seabird behavior, wave formations, winds, and weather, and extensive accumulated knowledge maintained in oral tradition and songs to discover nearly every island in the vast Polynesian Triangle of the Pacific. They had arrived at a faraway corner of that explored territory, to this day among the most remote inhabited locations on Earth. The first people off the boats encountered an isolated tropical paradise, forested with multiple species of up to 50-foot trees, including possibly the largest palm trees in the world, and populated by six species of indigenous land birds.
Image credit: Wikipedia. A digital recreation of the island’s ancient landscape.
Undaunted by their isolation, they set about rapidly building a complex, vibrant, and thriving agricultural civilization on the island; it would eventually reach a population of 10-15,000 people. Oral tradition, later recorded by European missionaries, held that nine separate clans, each with its own chief, were ruled over by a high chief, the eldest of the first-born descendants of Hotu Matu’a, the island’s legendary founder. Over generations, the clans paid homage to their ancestors by erecting over a hundred giant stone monuments, unique in the world, up to 32 feet tall and weighing as much as 90 tons. The precise methods by which these Stone Agers accomplished that impressive feat, testifying to their ingenuity and artistry, a deep spirituality, and a cooperative society with an apparent luxury of time and resources, is still a matter of controversy and wonder in today’s digital age.
But, by just a century after the island civilization’s peak, things had gone terribly awry.
When Dutch explorers happened upon the island on April 5 (Easter Sunday), 1722, they found a largely bald landscape, with no tree over 10 feet tall and a population of 2,000-3,000 inhabitants living in a radically diminished condition. With no wood left capable of making a seaworthy vessel, they were stranded and had lost much of their former fishing range. Twenty one tree species and all of the birds were extinct.
What happened on Easter Island during that tragic 100 years?
Again, the details are debated, but the broad strokes are fairly clear. Some combination of intensified agriculture to support the expanding population, rats, the monument construction, and possibly climate change caused the rapid and near complete deforestation of the island. Aside from the clearing of forests for fuel and agriculture, large trees may have been felled as rollers to transport the heavy monuments. Polynesian rats, stowaways on the boats that had carried the original settlers, had no real predators on the island and ate the tree seeds. Some speculate that the Little Ice Age, beginning around 1650, may have additionally stressed the large palm trees. Without protection from the trees, the fertile topsoil began to dry up and blow away. Over-hunting of the land birds by humans, or rats, or both drove them to extinction while, at the same time, access to fish protein was dramatically reduced by the loss of wood for large boats. As resource depletion continued, the systematic class system of the society gave way to loosely organized, warrior-led bands that frequently fought fiercely and took to toppling each other’s statues in anger.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. A toppled moai lies face down in the foreground of a treeless landscape.
The absence of written records on the island leaves much room to speculate about the state of mind of the people who inflicted on themselves such a seemingly predictable fate. The island is some 15 miles across at its widest point; a single person could survey the state of its entirety in a matter of a few days. Yet, someone cut down the very last of its remaining trees, thus eliminating the possibility of escape from a deteriorating environment. What were they thinking as they did that?
Were they our proverbial frog in a soup pot, unaware of their developing crisis because it appeared to occur slowly? Had each succeeding generation become accustomed to a “new normal” with fewer trees, less productive farms, and less cultural emphasis on fishing, until it seemed like no big deal to fell the last few remaining trees on the island?
Were they engaged in internal conflict, such that the folks who felled the last few trees believed if they didn’t someone else surely would?
Had the tree-felling folks successfully convinced the chiefs that the alternatives were too costly, or that the rumored decline of farmland productivity was a hoax?
Did they believe they would be supernaturally delivered from their declining state by the deified ancestors to whom their statues payed homage, such that they may have felled the very last trees as rollers to transport statues they hoped would hasten their deliverance?
Did they simply place more value on the now than on the future?
Did they fell the last trees in deep sorrow, having realized their fate but, after concerted effort, having failed to come up with any social or technological solutions to the problem of the rats and their need for fuel?
We will almost certainly never know the answers to these questions but, as we shall see, reflecting on them will be important to our own future.
It’s difficult to get inside the heads of ancient people as they faced intensifying degradation of their environment’s ability to support them. But it turns out the process can be understood, modeled, and even predicted using cold, hard math. In the graph below, Bill Basener, an Applied Mathematician, and coworkers modeled the interaction between a human population (top equation) and resources on which the humans depend (bottom equation). The human population, P, grows at a growth rate, a, but its survivability is constrained by access to resources, R (in the case of Easter Island, primarily arable farmland and trees). The resources self-replenish at growth rate, c, have a maximum carrying capacity on the island, K, and are harvested at a per-person rate, h. Solving this pair of equations using assumptions appropriate to Easter Island (see details in figure caption below) yields a population curve, represented by the solid line, which closely matches actual population values estimated from the archaeological record on the island (x’s on the graph).
Graph of the calculated population of Easter Island, adapted from Figure 1 of Basener & Ross (2005) with inset Equations from Basener, et al. (2008). P on the y-axis is the number of people on the island; t on the x-axis is the year. “x” marks in the graph are estimated actual populations according to archaeological evidence. The top equation is the equation of the line on the graph, where Pn is the number of people on the island in year n. The bottom equation is the equation for the number of resources on the island, where Rn is the maximum number of people that can be supported by the available resources in year n. The model begins in the year 400, with Pn = 50 people and Rn = 70,000 (a value consistent with the estimated starting amount of arable land on the island). a is the fractional annual population growth = 0.0044 in this model (a value consistent with other pre-WWII human populations). c = 0.001 is the fractional annual self-replenishment rate of the resources. h = 0.025 is the annual rate at which people harvest the resources. K = 70,000 is the environment’s maximum carrying capacity for resources in the absence of people.
There it is, in stark, mathematical detail. The math is relatively simple and based on common-sense assumptions about how a population of people and resources might interact. It can’t be far off — it matches the archaeological record quite closely at key times (when it was large, and after it rapidly became small again). The simplified math doesn’t perfectly capture the ultimate fate of the Easter Island people; in fact, the population didn’t fall to zero. The archaeological record shows that people shifted to resources they hadn’t used earlier (including rats), enabling the survival of a fraction of the population, in a state of relative poverty, into the 1700’s. After that, the population was significantly affected, both negatively and positively, by contact with foreigners, and the present population of around 6,000 people relies significantly on resources from outside the island.
Still the complex native civilization on the island, built over a millennium, ended abruptly during about a 100-year period. It’s rather sobering to consider the human experiences that must have attended the rapid, downward sweep at the right side of the graph. An intensifying scarcity of fuel and food. A cooperative, seagoing civilization giving way to increasingly separate, competing bands. (Isolationism.) Proud farmers and fishers learning to survive on native grasses and rats. Fierce internal conflicts. Starvation.
One wonders if, at the height of the civilization’s powers in the 1600’s, thriving but surely confronted with mounting and ever more visible evidence of their environmental impacts, the people of Easter Island sensed the coming catastrophe.
It wasn’t the only mathematically possible outcome.
Indeed, according to some mathematically possible scenarios, the original Easter Island population would still be going strong to this day, even indefinitely. Below are four mathematically possible scenarios according to the equations above. In each, the island’s resources appear as a green line, while the human population is represented by the black line.
Four mathematically possible scenarios for Easter Island, according to the coupled population and resource equations of Basener, et al. (2008). (a) The base scenario, presented in the previous figure, that closely matches the historical record at key points. The self-replenishment rate of resources is exceeded by their harvest rate by humans (c<h) resulting in exponential disappearance of resources coincident with the exponential human population growth and ultimately leading to collapse prior to the year 1800. (b) A scenario in which the growth rate of the human population, a, is reduced to 1/4 that of (a). Inevitable collapse still occurs, but the human civilization lasts much longer, until later than the year 4400. (c) A scenario with the same population growth as (a), but in which the humans support themselves using a resource that self-replenishes at a rate faster than the harvest rate (c>h). Following an exponential growth phase, the human population and resources come into balance with one another, and the human civilization survives indefinitely. (d) A scenario that starts out identically to the slow-growing but resource intensive scenario (b). Around the year 4400, an advanced civilization finds a way to transition to a more quickly replenishing resource (c>h), ensuring its lasting survival.
The historically-representative scenario is shown in (a), where the root of the problem can easily be seen as the green curve that exponentially falls as the human population exponentially rises. Before 1800, the resources are depleted, and the human civilization is rapidly decimated.
In (b), the people manage to control their population growth rate to only 1/4 of the growth rate in (a). This might be done, for example, by instituting some version of China’s “One Child” law. Inevitable collapse still occurs, but it takes a lot longer — until after the year 4400.
In (c), the population growth is the same as in (a), but the people manage to sustain themselves using a resource that self-replenishes more quickly than it’s harvested. After an initial growth phase, the human population comes into balance with the island’s resources, and both live on indefinitely.
A key learning of scenarios (b) and (c) is that controlling population growth, which we often tend to think about when considering Earth’s limits, is not in itself sufficient to avoid eventual civilization collapse. Rather, the key to indefinite survival is finding a way to live on resources that self-replenish faster than they are consumed.
Controlling population growth can give people time to think, however. Scenario (d) starts the same way as (b), with a slow-growing population that is consuming resources much faster than they are replenished. Around the year 4400, however, a technologically advanced civilization comes to understand its predicament and finds a way to consume resources that self-replenish faster than they are harvested. (Perhaps the humans learn to practice irrigation and discover a tree species that grows very rapidly.) This transition ensures the civilization’s indefinite survival on the island.
But why are we talking about ancient islanders on a blog about modern global climate change? What do we have to learn from mathematically modeling the fate of these archaic people?
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. Our Earth appears as a pale blue dot in this photo taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 19, 2013, orbiting Saturn at a distance of 898 million miles from Earth. We, all of us, are floating together on an isolated, finite celestial island in space.
Well, of course, we live on a finite, isolated paradise. An island in space. In a project that has taken several thousand years, we have built a complex, thriving human civilization. The only intelligent civilization we know of, capable of pondering its origins and meaning and sending spacecraft to take photos of itself from 898 million miles away.
But we have to imagine our civilization is constrained by the limits of our island’s responses to our population, which has rapidly filled it up. And, as we have seen in previous episodes of this series, there are troubling signs we are nearing those limits. Can the learnings and math of Easter Island be applied to our bigger island?
Can we discover math to avoid the Easter Islanders’ fate?
Data released this week by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University show that Earth’s average temperature between January and June of this year was the 3rd hottest half-year on record.
The other 3 hottest half-years on record since 1880, when people started keeping accurate records? You’ll remember them: 2015, 2016, and 2017.
As the November elections draw closer, all of us Americans need to pay attention to the long game. We are continually barraged with hyper-partisan messaging about various issues; they may not be the basic questions we should prioritize highest. As examples, ask yourselves these questions:
In what way does our valuable argument about the rights of a fetus make any sense at all, if we are not planning for the rights of all fetuses, as soon as one-to-two generations from now, to inhabit a basically livable planet?
The point? All these issues are important. But they are only important if we are also working on the long game, that is, finding and executing a solution to climate change.
If we’re not working on the long game, the rest of those issues could, frankly, be relatively short-term problems.
My next post will be a scientific one, about how we really could lose it all. What that might look like, according to some scientific modeling. Or, if we’re alert and careful, how we might avoid it. Watch this space.
In my hometown of Hudson, WI, last month was unusually and noticeably warm. We normally open our backyard pool around Memorial Day. This year, it was open and in use a good 3 weeks earlier.
As it turns out, this type of experience was common.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently released its temperature and weather data for last month, and the contiguous United States had its warmest May since record keeping began in 1895.
Image credit: NOAA/NCEI. Mean temperature percentiles for May 2018 compared with all May’s during the 124-year period since 1895.
These are the most recent monthly temperature records that, along with recent annual temperature records (2016, 2017) have been set as part of a generally rising global temperature trend that has been observed since the Industrial Revolutions (for more information, see my detailed article).
This “news story” is a work of satire. All linked quotes, however, are 100% real.
18 May 2018
AP – Hours after a troubled teen packing a shotgun and a revolver killed 10 people and wounded 10 others at a Texas high school, rounding out 22 school shootings in the first 20 weeks of 2018, and only months after an unusually active Atlantic hurricane season featuring 17 named storms, 10 consecutive hurricanes, 6 major hurricanes, and a record-breaking $282 billion in damages, Americans widely acknowledged on Friday they had entered a new Great American Mourning Episode (GAME) observed by tradition following any such travesty on U.S. soil. Variously held for a period of weeks or months, the GAME features, by mutual agreement of all patriotic American citizens and in respectful observance of the suffering of the victims of the tragedy, a usually unspoken moratorium on any insensitive public discourse related to possible root causes of the disaster or potential methods of preventing similar travesties in the future.
These exemplary demonstrations of patriotism epitomized the vital principle of the GAME, that any misguided efforts to identify and discuss the merits of potential policy adjustments to prevent future calamities would only serve as distractions from the proper acknowledgement and consideration of the suffering of fellow Americans.
Indeed, the GAME demands, for all who love America, that terrestrial considerations of practical human action should rather be transcended by prayer, in the form of devout appeals to any of various higher deities to ease the suffering of the afflicted and grant relief from such tragedies in the future. Americans widely admit no documented evidence of any of the major deities obviously meddling significantly in natural events or the collective fortunes of large groups of people for thousands of years. Even in those ancient times, literary evidence suggests interference of deities only in the context of vigorous efforts on the part of a human population to improve its own fortunes. Nevertheless, the documented power wielded by the deities in those times was unquestionably awesome, so the Strategy of Prayer is widely considered a “Hail Mary play” that might eliminate future human tragedies without resorting to the sorts of terrestrial human actions forbidden by proper observation of the GAME.
External observers have questioned the wisdom of the GAME, saying it might delay sorely needed actions that could prevent future horrific events. Foreign analysts have often referenced the apparent incongruity of the GAME with pragmatic American reactions to other types of problems. Aidan O’Sullivan of Limerick, Ireland pointed out, “If’n a baseball cums crashin’ through yisser picture windy, Oi’m juicy sure yer open de door roi away ter see wha’ wee kid did it, even as you’re also mournin’ de loss of yisser windy.” While true, Aidan’s example misses the point of the GAME, which has to do with the sheer size and depth of tragedy that can result only from a category 5 Atlantic hurricane or a crazy loner wielding an AR-15 legally enhanced with an ARMATAC SAW-MAG 150 round dual drum magazine, a Slide Fire bump stock, a Black Rain silencer, and a Vortex Optics Crossfire II Riflescope purchased on Amazon Prime with free overnight shipping.
Immediate, pragmatic action is entirely appropriate for day-to-day setbacks like busted picture windows. A hurricane landfall on a major city or a gunman in an elevated firing position menacing a dense crowd of T-shirt and sandal clad concert-goers with 20 or more military grade firearms, however, is uniquely capable of generating a scale of mayhem – scores of dead and hundreds or thousands of human lives forever altered – that can only be properly observed by strict adherence to the GAME.
In private moments, several citizens quietly confessed some trepidation about the limits the GAME might place on Americans’ ability to engage in the collective discourse necessary to develop robust solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems. “It had been a full week since the Palmdale, CA school shooting and nearly a month since the Ocala, FL school shooting, and I’d just gotten back to starting to think about whether some type of common-sense gun legislation might help reduce the body count when some nut becomes unhinged and decides to kill a bunch of innocent people in a school or at a concert,” explained Larry Swingvoater of Green Bay, Wisconsin. “Now, another troubled teen brought his Daddy’s guns to art class, so of course I can’t think about policy while those poor people are suffering. But what I worry about is, if these mass shootings and hurricanes keep happening so close together, when WILL I think about that stuff? Anyway, I’m back to praying now – maybe that will eventually pay off.”
Others wondered aloud what the solutions from a supernatural deity might look like, should the Strategy of Prayer prove successful. Might an entity akin to the Holy Spirit provide a bullet-proof energy field around the nation’s innocent civilians, enabling Americans to maintain casual public availability of thrilling, adrenaline-pumping, battlefield style firearms without risk to young schoolchildren? Would future tragedies from climate change ultimately be averted by solutions resembling the “solar technology,” “wind technology,” or “battery technology” rumored to have been developed by human scientists and engineers? Or, might a deity prove capable of providing sustainable bioenergy derived from multitudes of burning bushes? Or, tidal energy afforded by repetitive parting of the earth’s seas?
A handful of fringe citizens, who made their controversial remarks on condition of anonymity so as not to be identified as GAME-violators, expressed the cynical opinion that the GAME poorly serves American politics and is actually the result of a “cruel and selfish conspiracy” by a few well-funded special interests with outsized influence on U.S. legislative policy. “This is not patriotism, but simply a transparent political delay tactic,” claimed Jon Faiknaim, whose name has been changed in this article at his request. “Every time a gun-toting madman or a hurricane kills a bunch of people, politicians in the pockets of the National Rifle Association and the fossil fuel industry call it ‘insensitive’ to talk about policy changes that would solve some of our most urgent public problems but harm the narrow interests of those minority stakeholders. Then, everybody forgets about the problem the moment another issue of critical national interest demands consideration. Like the linguistic etymology of the word, ‘covfefe,’ or the nature of our president’s former relationship with a porn star. Then, the next time one of these tragedies occurs, the irrational cycle repeats itself.” Fortunately, these cynical expressions of doubt were rare.
But our national leader’s statements were most inspirational as he bravely defended the sanctity of the GAME when questioned by an unruly member of the press pool about whether “we have a gun violence problem.”
This post is the 2nd of a set of articles focusing on a song on Eliot Hester’s The Beauty Lost album, which launched this past Earth Day. You can get it on iTunes or wherever you go for digital music.
Eliot Hester, composer and performer, on his song, “Cracks in the Ice (The Arctic Glaciers):”
“At the beginning, you hear waves that are crashing against some Arctic or Antarctic landform, and that’s a really calm sound and is supposed to be calm, but about midway through the song you hear this real low rumble of ice breaking and it’s less calm and more frantic. The waves and breaking ice are actually two separate tracks that continue running simultaneously, but it’s hard to hear the waves when the sounds of breaking ice start. This is supposed to symbolize that this place is still calm, but its calm is being overshadowed by this violent process.
The bird sounds you hear are actually penguins running on a totally separate track because I wanted to show that there is something living there, where their floor is constantly changing. I thought this would give us something to attach to. Penguins are normally known as likable animals, and when you put them in your mind in this really vulnerable position, I thought it would promote more change.
Interestingly, this is one of the only songs on the album to have percussion, and it’s very distinctive. I used a kick drum sample and just kept it going. I first recorded a version of this song really early in the album process, before I knew I was going to create this album. It was just a fun little loop pedal thing I did on the keyboard and I thought it sounded cool, but when I started to formulate the idea of this album I decided I would try to use this song and I really wanted to create a change from the very beginning to the middle, and then near the end it switches back to calm again. So I wanted it to go in stages — calm and then violent — and I thought if I added this harsh beat going on in back of the melody, it would make the piece kind of strive and be a little wrong and more moving. It would feel like the song was being forced to move forward just as those glaciers are being forced to change.
The keyboard sound I used is actually called ‘dark glacier.’ I don’t know why it’s called that, and I only noticed it after I finished the song.”
I think Eliot’s choice of the kick drum, relentlessly and incongruously moving the gentle melody forward, is a brilliant musical metaphor for the process by which climate change is altering the distribution of ice and liquid water on our Earth. These changes are slow but relentless. Summer is arriving, and soon all of us in the Northern Hemisphere will have lots of time to ponder this process as we enjoy an icy drink on a hot day. The moment you plop the ice in your glass, it’s destined to melt. Assuming you don’t stick your drink in the freezer, there’s no saving that ice. It sticks around for a good long while, though, giving you ample time to enjoy its delightfully cooling effect on your drink.
In scientific terms, your icy drink is a non-equilibrium state of matter. Ice is not thermodynamically stable sitting in a pool of liquid warmer than 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The moment it’s out of the freezer, the ice is in a transitional state guaranteed to end in liquid water. A couple ants that enter your slippery-sided glass might be able to save themselves from drowning, for a time, sitting on the ice. They may feel secure in their position for quite a while. The changes going on under them are slow, almost imperceptible. Sooner or later, we might imagine them arguing with one another about how secure they are. The ice seems to be shrinking, but maybe ice in their glass shrinks and grows periodically? But the ice doesn’t care what either of the ants thinks; it’s in a transitional state fixed by the laws of physics.
(Updated 01-12-2018) Publicly available Scripps ice core-merged data, downloaded and plotted by me. Green: Ice core data from Law Dome, 0 C.E. to 1957 (see references here and here). Blue circles: Average yearly data from atmospheric sampling at Mauna Loa and South Pole, 1958-2016. Red square: 2017 average measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Human experience milestones added by me. Read more in my article about this data.
As we’ve built our human civilization over a couple thousand years, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been remarkably stable, as you can see in the graph above going back to Biblical times. So has the distribution of water and ice on our Earth, with which we’ve become quite accustomed.
But that distribution of water and ice is not thermodynamically stable with higher CO2 concentrations, certainly not at our current concentration greater than 410 ppm. By absorbing reflected infrared solar radiation from our Earth and converting it to heat, higher levels of CO2 increase the temperature of our air and our oceans. This is the greenhouse effect, about which responsible scientists have a unanimous consensus, the science of which can be simply explained, and the reality of which has been verified by thermometers. We are departing from our former thermodynamic equilibrium very quickly, as you can see by the nearly vertical line at the right side of the graph. In a geological sense, this is every bit as abrupt as taking ice out of the freezer.
It’s happening slowly and (mostly, at least) in remote places a lot of us don’t get a chance to see. But it’s happening, and any Pacific Islander or coastal Miami property owner will tell you the results are arriving at our shores. See more:
The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measured at the Mauna Loa observatory averaged 410.31 ppm for the month of April, 2018, marking the first monthly average above 410 ppm for over 800,000 years. The atmospheric CO2 concentration has now increased 30% since CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa started in 1958, and over 40% since before the Industrial Revolution.
(Updated 05-07-2018) “Keeling Curve,” a plot of weekly atmospheric CO2 measurements made by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at Mauna Loa, Hawaii from 1958 to present. The curve was plotted by me using Scripps weekly data from the Mauna Loa observatory, downloaded here. Blue: Data from 1958 through 2017. Red: 2018 data. For fun and context, I added some significant human events to the Earth’s recent CO2 timeline.
The build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels traps ever greater amounts of heat from the sun, driving global climate change.
“We keep burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide keeps building up in the air. It’s essentially as simple as that.”
-Ralph Keeling, geochemist and Director of the Scripps CO2 Program
This post is the first of a set of articles focusing on a song on Eliot Hester’s The Beauty Lost album, which launched this past Earth Day. You can get it on iTunes or wherever you go for digital music.
Eliot Hester, composer and performer, on his song, “Waves (The Beaches of Kiribati):”
“The sound you hear in the background is actually waves on a beach in Kiribati. I watched a video of that beach. You could see visibly the effect on the area, houses about to be immersed and stuff. The visuals looked rather rough and dire, but if you closed your eyes it sounded very peaceful. It was an odd juxtaposition. That’s what I think is really interesting about this song. Most people think that it’s very peaceful and relaxing, but if you see what’s going on, it seems more urgent. Interestingly, in this song I was trying to evoke the relaxation. The way I structured the album, I wanted to make the early songs relaxing, but build urgency in the later pieces.”
About Kiribati and climate change:
Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas) is a Pacific nation comprising 33 atolls and islands and a population of about 110,000. When it gained its independence from the U.K. in 1979, it became the world’s only nation with residents in all four hemispheres. The atolls and islands of Kiribati have had permanent residents since they were settled by sea-going Micronesian explorers in canoes between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago.
The lands of Kiribati rise only 3-6 feet above a sea level that has been relatively stable for the last few thousand years, but less stable recently. The residents are now engaged in an ongoing battle with a rising sea that their president has already conceded they are destined to lose.
High tides flood and salinate farmland. Families erect sandbag walls in an effort to protect their homes.
Today on Earth Day, Eliot Hester, a new age instrumentalist, has released his new The Beauty Lost album. Eliot conceived The Beauty Lost to bring attention and contemplation to beauty in the process or in danger of being lost from our Earth due to climate change. Each original composition incorporates, interwoven with contemplative melodies produced by a unique blend of instrumentation (cello, bassoon, clarinet, guitar, keyboards) natural sounds of an environment in peril.
Celebrate and contemplate this Earth Day by listening to Eliot’s album!You can get it on iTunes, or wherever you go for your digital music. You can feel great about your purchase this Earth Day, as Eliot is donating 20% of the proceeds from sales related to The Beauty Lost to 350.org, a non-profit organization that supports and promotes scientific research and political action to stop anthropogenic climate change. See Eliot’s website for more information.
From time to time, I’ll post on this blog a science article related to each of the beauties and losses Eliot so harmoniously captures. Watch this space.
With his haunting and meditative music, Eliot reminds us that climate change is not simply a matter of dry science, political debate, economic calculation, and technology deployment. It is all those things, of course. But it’s also a deeply emotional and profoundly moral issue, one that fundamentally challenges our love for one another, our nurturing of children born and unborn, and our stewardship of our Earth, the provider of all the beauty that cradles us.
It’s something that will require all our brains to fix, but we feel it viscerally, in our hearts and in our guts.
Like a lot of us, Amy and I filed our taxes today, a day before the due date. (Whew!) We owed this year. It’s all good; I don’t actually mind paying my fair share of taxes for the good services our government provides. Our kids attend a great school staffed with fantastic teachers. We had to call 911 once for our daughter when she was a little baby (she’s fine), and our town’s publicly funded ambulance was right there. I’ve had the opportunity of doing some work inside the wastewater treatment plant for a major metropolitan area; if you haven’t seen inside one of those, you’d be amazed at the operation your taxes pay for, you know, to take care of our business. Most summers we drive across the country on great highways. Our freedom is protected by the best military the world has ever known, and under civilian leadership.
All this stuff is expensive.
My taxes next year, I presume, will help pay for an enhanced wall on our Southern border. I wouldn’t personally elect to pay for that. I tend to believe professional border guards whom I have heard say there are more efficient ways to buy border security improvements. I also don’t think it’s all that high on our priority list of problems — the already dwindling number of illegal immigrants crossing the border with our peaceful trading partner to the South.
But I still don’t very much mind paying for that wall. I understand it’s important to lots of other Americans and they voted, fair and square, for our current President partly based on that promise. Sometimes in a democracy we end up buying what other people want more than we do.
I’ll tell you what I do not wish to buy with my taxes.
I do not wish to pay for my government to employ Maria Caffrey, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, to spend the greater part of 6 years researching and writing an 86-page report about projected climate change impacts on coastal parks of the National Park Service, only to sit on the final draft for over a year after it was submitted right before the 2016 presidential election.
“It would create flooding across a massive area.” -Climate scientist Maria Caffrey commenting on the projected effect on the National Mall of a category 3 hurricane on top of rising sea levels that might occur due to anthropogenic climate change, according to her analysis
Image credit: Rae Ellen Bichell / Mountain West News Burea. A marked up draft of Caffrey’s report, obtained by a journalist through a public records request, showing how the National Park Service is in the progress of systematically editing it to remove all mentions of the human role in climate change.
“Anthropogenic” and “human activities” have been removed, suggesting climate change is just a fact of life, not the direct result of human choices (in direct contradiction of the overwhelming scientific consensus based on a wealth of well studied evidence). Perhaps most insidiously, the phrase, “will have a significant impact on how we protect and manage our public lands” has been edited to read, “will impact how we manage our public lands.” Whoa, that’s way different! The scientist wrote that the impacts would be significant! And that we might need to protect and manage our public lands. As in, we might have choices to do more protecting and less managing! But after some well-placed bureaucratic strike-outs, presto, it’s just some impacts we’ll need to manage. Nothing significant. No worries.
“I want an investigation into how that document got around to the press before we even had a chance to look at it.” -Ryan Zinke, U.S. Secretary of the Interior and an old friend of the fossil fuel industry, responding to questions from lawmakers about the report his employees appear to have had a chance to look at, based on the edits above
“I was legally required to release these records.” -Maria Caffrey, potentially ending Zinke’s investigation by explaining that she works for a public university, which is required to supply the press, or anyone, with its records on request. Your taxes at work – yeah!
This is what I do not wish to pay for. Why should any of us want to? Why pay a scientist to study something for 6 years, then bury and seek to alter the resulting report? Why indeed, when the conclusions look pretty darn important? My family and I walked across the National Mall over Spring break. It’s beautiful, many people have worked hard to build it, and in its monuments are a record of our most important memories and greatest hardships, sacrifices, and triumphs as a nation. If the scientists we’ve already paid have concluded in the future it might be destroyed, and that’s preventable, well then we should know it! My money bought that answer!
I do not wish to pay for cover-ups, lies, and half-truths.
I do not wish to pay for my government to corruptly and falsely play favorites with the fossil fuel industry; I already pay them at the pump.
“Potentially it’s hopeful. We could choose to try and go down that lower emissions path and be able to divert ourselves away from much higher sea levels.” -Maria Caffrey, climate scientist
That’s a message of hope, but only if we’re in possession of the truth we paid for.
