On this page I’m collecting voices that have called for change which have struck me as particularly important or inspirational. Some may surprise you. I’m pairing the voices with images that, I think, may aid in reflecting about our relationships with our planet and with each other.
Quick links to page contents
Four NASA scientists
Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump & Ivanka Trump
Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Ripped from the headlines (…from 1953)
The President of the United States (in 1965)
Greta Thunberg, age 15, at the COP24 conference, 2018
Greta Thunberg, age 16, at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 2019
Lane Burke & Eliot Hester, singer/songwriters
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken
Science problem or social problem?
Carl Sagan and a pale blue dot
Rachel Carson on human mastery
An open letter from 11,258 scientists
A Voice for Our Earth: Four NASA scientists
“Burning all fossil fuels would produce a different, practically uninhabitable, planet. …Our calculated global warming in this case is 16◦C, with warming at the poles approximately 30◦C. Calculated warming over land areas averages approximately 20◦C. Such temperatures would eliminate grain production in almost all agricultural regions in the world.”
“…More ominously, global warming of that magnitude would make most of the planet uninhabitable by humans. The human body generates about 100 W of metabolic heat that must be carried away to maintain a core body temperature near 37◦C, which implies that sustained wet bulb temperatures above 35◦C can result in lethal hyperthermia. Today, the summer temperature varies widely over the Earth’s surface, but wet bulb temperature is more narrowly confined by the effect of humidity, with the most common value of approximately 26–27◦C and the highest approximately of 31◦C. A warming of 10–12◦C would put most of today’s world population in regions with wet a bulb temperature above 35◦C.
…We conclude that the large climate change from burning all fossil fuels would threaten the biological health and survival of humanity, making policies that rely substantially on adaptation inadequate.
…Most of the remaining fossil fuel carbon is in coal and unconventional oil and gas. Thus, it seems, humanity stands at a fork in the road. As conventional oil and gas are depleted, will we move to carbon-free energy and efficiency—or to unconventional fossil fuels and coal? If fossil fuels were made to pay their costs to society, costs of pollution and climate change, carbon-free alternatives might supplant fossil fuels over a period of decades. However, if governments force the public to bear the external costs and even subsidize fossil fuels, carbon emissions are likely to continue to grow, with deleterious consequences for young people and future generations.
It seems implausible that humanity will not alter its energy course as consequences of burning all fossil fuels become clearer. Yet strong evidence about the dangers of human-made climate change have so far had little effect. Whether governments continue to be so foolhardy as to allow or encourage development of all fossil fuels may determine the fate of humanity.”
-James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Gary Russell, and Pushker Kharecha, current and former scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a peer reviewed scientific journal article published in 2011.
A Voice for Our Earth: Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump & Ivanka Trump
“Dear President Obama & The United States Congress,
Tomorrow leaders from 192 countries will gather at The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to determine the fate of our planet.”
“As business leaders we are optimistic that President Obama is attending Copenhagen with emissions targets. Additionally, we urge you, our government, to strengthen and pass United States legislation, and lead the world by example. We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. Please don’t postpone the earth.
If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.
We recognize the key role that American innovation and leadership play in stimulating the worldwide economy. Investing in a Clean Energy Economy will drive state-of-the-art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk. We have the ability and the know-how to lead the world in clean energy technology to thrive in a global market and economy. But we must embrace the challenge today to ensure that future generations are left with a safe planet and a strong economy.
Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.”
-Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and other American business leaders, in an open letter published as a full-page ad in The New York Times, Dec. 6, 2009, ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (look for their signatures 2 lines from the bottom).
A Voice for Our Earth: Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014
“Many aspects of climate change and its associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases.
…Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions … A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial timescale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period…
Shifting biomes, re-equilibrating soil carbon, ice sheets, ocean temperatures and associated sea level rise all have their own intrinsic long timescales that will result in ongoing changes for hundreds to thousands of years after global surface temperature has been stabilized.”
“Ocean acidification will continue for centuries if CO2 emissions continue, it will strongly affect marine ecosystems (high confidence), and the impact will be exacerbated by rising temperature extremes…
Global mean sea level rise will continue for many centuries beyond 2100 (virtually certain). The few available analyses that go beyond 2100 indicate sea level rise to be less than 1 m above the pre-industrial level by 2300 for [greenhouse gas] concentrations that peak and decline and remain below 500 ppm CO2-eq[uivalent]… For a radiative forcing that corresponds to a CO2-eq[uivalent] concentration in 2100 that is above 700 ppm but below 1500 ppm, … the projected rise is 1 m to more than 3 m by 2300 (medium confidence)… There is low confidence in the available models’ ability to project solid ice discharge from the Antarctic ice sheet. Hence, these models likely underestimate the Antarctica ice sheet contribution, resulting in an underestimation of projected sea level rise beyond 2100.
Sustained mass loss by ice sheets would cause larger sea level rise, and part of the mass loss might be irreversible. There is high confidence that sustained global mean warming greater than a threshold would lead to the near-complete loss of the Greenland ice sheet over a millennium or more, causing a sea level rise of up to 7 m. Current estimates indicate that the threshold is greater than about 1°C (low confidence) but less than about 4°C (medium confidence) of global warming with respect to pre-industrial temperatures. Abrupt and irreversible ice loss from a potential instability of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet in response to climate forcing is possible, but current evidence and understanding is insufficient to make a quantitative assessment.
Within the 21st century, magnitudes and rates of climate change associated with medium to high emission scenarios … pose a high risk of abrupt and irreversible regional-scale change in the composition, structure and function of marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, including wetlands (medium confidence), as well as warm water coral reefs (high confidence). Examples that could substantially amplify climate change are the boreal-tundra Arctic system (medium confidence) and the Amazon forest (low confidence). …A reduction in permafrost extent is virtually certain with continued rise in global temperatures.”
-Rajendra K. Pachauri (Chair), Myles R. Allen (United Kingdom), Vicente R. Barros (Argentina), John Broome (United Kingdom), Wolfgang Cramer (Germany/France), Renate Christ (Austria/WMO), John A. Church (Australia), Leon Clarke (USA), Qin Dahe (China), Purnamita Dasgupta (India), Navroz K. Dubash (India), Ottmar Edenhofer (Germany), Ismail Elgizouli (Sudan), Christopher B. Field (USA), Piers Forster (United Kingdom), Pierre Friedlingstein (United Kingdom/Belgium), Jan Fuglestvedt (Norway), Luis Gomez-Echeverri (Colombia), Stephane Hallegatte (France/World Bank), Gabriele Hegerl (United Kingdom/Germany), Mark Howden (Australia), Kejun Jiang (China), Blanca Jimenez Cisneros (Mexico/UNESCO), Vladimir Kattsov (Russian Federation), Hoesung Lee (Republic of Korea), Katharine J. Mach (USA), Jochem Marotzke (Germany), Michael D. Mastrandrea (USA), Leo Meyer (The Netherlands), Jan Minx (Germany), Yacob Mulugetta (Ethiopia), Karen O’Brien (Norway), Michael Oppenheimer (USA), Joy J. Pereira (Malaysia), Ramón Pichs-Madruga (Cuba), Gian-Kasper Plattner (Switzerland), Hans-Otto Pörtner (Germany), Scott B. Power (Australia), Benjamin Preston (USA), N.H. Ravindranath (India), Andy Reisinger (New Zealand), Keywan Riahi (Austria), Matilde Rusticucci (Argentina), Robert Scholes (South Africa), Kristin Seyboth (USA), Youba Sokona (Mali), Robert Stavins (USA), Thomas F. Stocker (Switzerland), Petra Tschakert (USA), Detlef van Vuuren (The Netherlands), Jean-Pascal van Ypersele (Belgium), Core Writing Team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report, 2014.
A Voice for Our Earth: Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible.
… Climate change is one of the greatest dangers we face, and it’s one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children.”
-Professor Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA (1942-2018), English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, who elucidated both for experts and the lay public new discoveries about the origins and nature of the universe, even while battling Lou Gehrig’s disease since the age of 21, by all accounts among humanity’s greatest minds, commenting on July 2, 2017
A Voice for Our Earth: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Every week since April, 2012, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has delivered a speech on the Senate floor, imploring the U.S. Senate and federal government to take substantive action on global climate change. His speeches have often referenced readily observable effects of climate change in his home state of Rhode Island and elsewhere in the world. They have often referenced detailed data from peer-reviewed scientific studies. They have often been delivered to an empty Senate chamber. They have added up to over 500 hours of remarks on climate change in the U.S. Senate.
On Tuesday, March 13, 2018, Senator Whitehouse delivered his 200th such weekly address. It being the 200th, it was attended by 16 fellow Senators, all of them Democrats or Independents.
One might think, after some 500 hours talking on the Senate floor, sometimes to nobody but C-Span, Senator Whitehouse would be exhausted. Perhaps he is. In any case, exhaustion doesn’t show in his 200th speech, which I think is passionate, accurate, and superb. The full text of his speech, as prepared for delivery on the Senate floor, follows. It doesn’t take too long to read, and it basically sums up our problem. Links in his comments to related content on this website have been added by me.
“By any measure, Mr./Madam President, Americans are dissatisfied. Opinion surveys tell us that only 35 percent of Americans believe that the country is headed in the right direction.
Why this alarming dissatisfaction? We don’t have to guess: popular opinion tells us quite plainly. In a survey taken after the 2016 election, 85 percent of voters agreed that the wealthy and big corporations are the ones really running the country. That includes 80 percent of voters who supported Trump.
It’s not just opinion: academic studies have looked at Congress and confirmed that the views of the general public have statistically near zero influence here; that we listen to big, corporate special interests, and their various front groups.
Even the Supreme Court is not immune. In a 2014 poll, more respondents believed, by 9 to 1, that our Supreme Court favors corporations over individuals, rather than vice versa. Among self-identified conservative Republicans, it was still a 4-to-1 margin.
So hold that thought: the wealthy, and powerful corporations, control Congress, and people know it.
As I give my 200th “Time To Wake Up” speech, the most obvious fact standing plainly before me is not the measured sea level rise at Naval Station Newport, is not the 400 ppm carbon dioxide barrier we have broken through in the atmosphere, is not the new flooding maps coastal communities like Rhode Island must face, nor is it the West aflame.
It is not even the uniform consensus about climate change across universities, national laboratories, scientific societies, and even across our military and intelligence services, who warn us that climate change is fueling economic and social disruption around the world.
The fact that stands out for me, here at number 200, is the persistent failure of Congress to even take up the issue of climate change. One party won’t even talk about it! One party is gagging America’s scientists and civil servants, and striking even the term “climate change” off government websites.
In the real world, in actual reality, we are long past any question as to the reality of climate change. The fact of that forces us to confront the question: what stymies Congress from legislating, or even having hearings, about climate change? What impels certain executive agencies to forbid even the words?
Before the Citizens United decision was delivered up by the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court—a decision, by the way, that deserves to rot on the trash heap of judicial history—we were actually doing quite a lot in the Senate about climate change.
There were bipartisan hearings. There were bipartisan bills. There were bipartisan negotiations. Senator McCain campaigned for president under the Republican banner on a strong climate platform.
What happened?
Here’s what I saw happen: the fossil fuel industry went over and importuned the Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision; the five Republican-appointed corporatists on the Court delivered the Citizens United decision; and the fossil fuel industry was ready and set at the mark when that decision came down.
Since the moment of that Citizens United decision, not one Republican in this body has joined one serious piece of legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Our heartbeat of bipartisan activity was killed dead by the political weaponry unleashed for big special interests by those five judges.
The fossil fuel industry then made a clever play: they determined to control one party on this question; they determined to silence or punish or remove any dissent in one political party. This created for the fossil fuel industry two advantages.
First, they got to use that party as their tool to stop climate legislation. And they have. Remember the movie ‘Men in Black’? Today’s Republican Party bears the same relation to the fossil fuel industry, as to this issue, that the unfortunate farmer in ‘Men in Black’ bore to the alien who killed him and occupied his skin for the rest of the movie: complete occupation, with nothing left but the skin.
The second advantage for the fossil fuel industry is that they could camouflage their own special-interest special pleading as partisanship, and not just the muscle and greed of one very big industry wanting to have its way.
That is why we are where we are. That is why talking to Republicans about climate change is like talking to prisoners about escape. They may want out, but they can’t have their fossil-fuel wardens find out.
Climate change is a prime example of how our institutions are failing in plain view of the public. Small wonder the public holds Congress in low esteem, and thinks we don’t listen to them. Frankly, it’s amazing that there is any shred of esteem remaining, given our behavior.
Congress remains a democratic body on the surface, with all the procedural veneer and trappings of democracy: we hold votes, and there are caucuses and hearings and voting. But on the issues that most concern the biggest special interests, Congress no longer provides America a functioning democracy.
Underneath the illusory democratic surface run subterranean rivers of dark money. Massive infrastructures have been erected to hide that dark-money flow from the sunlight of public scrutiny, to carve out subterranean caverns through which the dark money flows.
If you want to understand why we do nothing on climate, you have to look down into those subterranean chambers, understand the dark money, and not be fooled by the surface spectacle.
It’s not just the dark money spending that’s the problem.
When you let unlimited money loose in politics, particularly once you let unlimited dark money loose in politics, you empower something even more sinister than massive anonymous political expenditures; you empower the threat of massive anonymous political expenditures—the sinister, whispered threat. Once you let a special interest spend unlimited dark money, you necessarily let it threaten or promise to spend that money.
Those sinister threats and promises will be harder to detect even than well-obscured dark-money expenditures. You may not know who’s behind a big dark-money expenditure, but you’ll at least see the smear ads. You may not know what’s up, but you’ll know something’s up.
But a threat? Two people, a back room, and a silent handshake are enough. Give a thug a big enough club, and he doesn’t even have to use it to get his way.
This is the great, insidious evil of Citizens United. And this, I believe, is why we are where we are.
The Senate was legendarily corrupt in the Gilded Age. One writer described senators not as representing states, but ‘principalities and powers in business. One Senator represents the Union Pacific Railway system; another the New York Central; still another the insurance interests of New York and New Jersey.’ We cannot pretend it is impossible for the United States Senate to be corrupted; our history refutes that happy thought.
So we need to keep our guard up, as Americans, against corrupting forces; and this unlimited, dark flow of money into our politics is a corrupting force.
Congress’s embarrassing and culpable failure to act on climate change is one face of a coin. Turn it over, and the obverse of that coin is corruption, exactly as the Founding Fathers knew it—the public good ignored, for special interests wielding power; in this case, the power of money. Climate failure; dark money. Dark money; climate failure. Two sides of the same evil coin.
And if that’s not cheerful enough, wait, there’s more! There’s the phony science operation that gives rhetorical cover to the dark-money political muscle operation.
This phony science operation is a big effort, with dozens of well-funded front groups participating, supported by bogus think tanks, well described as the ‘think tank as disguised political weapon.’
Today’s phony science operation grew out of the early phony science operation run by the tobacco industry, which was set up to create doubt among the public that cigarettes were bad for you.
How’d that work out?
Well, I’ll tell you how. That effort was so false and so evil that it was determined in court to be fraud; a massive, corporate-led fraud.
After the tobacco fraud apparatus was exposed, it didn’t disappear; it morphed into an even more complex apparatus to create false doubt about climate science. The goal, exactly like the tobacco companies’ fraud, is to create something that looks enough like science to confuse the public, but which has the perverse purpose to defeat and neutralize real science: a science denial apparatus.
This fossil-fuel-funded science denial apparatus has big advantages over real science.
First, the science denial apparatus has unlimited money behind it. The IMF has put the subsidy of the fossil fuel industry at $700 billion per year in the U.S. alone. To defend a $700 billion annual subsidy, you can spend enormous amounts of money; so money is no object.
Second, the science denial apparatus doesn’t waste time with peer review, the touchstone of real science. Slap a lab coat on a hack and send him to the talk shows. The science denial apparatus is public relations dressed up as science, so it behaves like public relations and goes straight to its market, an inexpert public, to work its mischief.
Third, they have the advantage of Madison Avenue tacticians to shape their phony message into appealing soundbites for the public. Read a scientific journal lately?
Fourth, the science denial apparatus doesn’t need to stop lying when it’s caught. As long as they are getting their propaganda out, the truth doesn’t matter. This is not a contest for truth, it’s a contest for public opinion; so debunked, zombie arguments rise from the earth and walk again.
And finally, they don’t have to win the argument, they just have to create the illusion, the false illusion, that there is a legitimate argument.
Then the political muscle those five Justices gave this industry can go to work.
I would like to suggest, 200 speeches in, that it’s time we stopped listening to the industry that comes to us bearing one of the most flagrant conflicts of interest in history. It’s time we stopped listening to their fraudulent science denial operation. It’s time we put the light of day on their creepy dark-money operation, and stopped listening to its threats and promises.
How about Pope Francis, who called climate change ‘one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.’
How about the scientists whom we pay, hundreds of them across the government, whose salaries our appropriators are funding right now; and who under President Trump released this report, saying there is ‘no convincing alternative explanation’ for ‘global, long-term, and unambiguous warming’ and ‘record-breaking, climate-related weather extremes’ — it’s our human activity.
How about our intelligence services, whose National Threat Assessment, issued under President Trump, signed by our former colleague Dan Coats, has a chapter titled ‘Environment and Climate Change.’ Here are the identified consequences: ‘humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks and power outages,’ and, most dangerously, the prospect of ‘tipping points in climate-linked earth systems’ that create ‘abrupt climate change.’
How about listening to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump and the Trump Organization in 2009, when they took out this full-page ad in the New York Times saying the science of climate change was ‘irrefutable,’ and its consequences would be ‘catastrophic and irreversible.’ Where’d that guy go . . . ?
How about our own home state universities? Every one of us can go home to Ole Miss or Ohio State, to the University of Alaska or LSU, to Utah State or West Virginia University or Texas A&M. We can each go home to our home state’s state university, and they don’t just accept climate change, they teach it. They teach it.
Or, if you can listen quietly, you can listen to the oceans.
The oceans are speaking to us, if we will just listen. They speak to us through thermometers, and they say, ‘We’re warming.’ And they speak to us through tide gauges, and they say, ‘We’re rising, along your shores.’ They speak to us through the howl of hurricanes powered up by their warmer sea surfaces. They speak to us through the quiet flight of fish species from their traditional grounds as the seawater warms beyond their tolerance.
If we know how to listen, through simple pH tests, the oceans will tell us that they are acidifying, and beginning to kill their own corals and oysters and pteropods. Or we could go out and check, and see the corals and the oysters and the pteropods corrode and die before our eyes. It’s happening.
The fishermen who plow the oceans’ surface can speak for the oceans: as one Rhode Islander said to me, ‘Sheldon, it’s getting weird out there.’
‘This is not my grandfather’s ocean,’ said another. He’d grown up trawling with his granddad on those waters.
It’s not just oceans: I went out on Lake Erie with seasoned professional fishermen who told me everything they’d learned in a lifetime on the lake was useless, because the lake was changing on them so unknowably fast.
We choose here in Congress to whom we’re going to listen, and it’s time we started to listen to the honest voices and the true voices. If you don’t like environmentalists or scientists, listen to your ski industry, listen to your fishermen and lumbermen, listen to your gardeners and birders and hunters. Listen to those who speak for the earth and for the oceans.
It is an evil mess that we are in, and if there is any justice in this world, there will one day be a terrible price to pay if we keep listening to evil voices.
The climate change problems we are causing by failing to act are a sin, as Pope Francis has flatly declared. But that’s not the only sin.
To jam Congress up, fossil fuel interests are corrupting American democracy; and to corrupt American democracy is a second and a grave sin.
The science denial apparatus—to mount a fraudulent challenge to the very enterprise of science, that is a third grave sin.
And perhaps the worst of all is that the world is watching. It is watching us as the fossil fuel industry, its creepy billionaires, its front groups, its bogus think tanks, all gang up and debauch our democracy.
From John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan, we have held America up as a city on a hill, with the eyes of the world upon us. From Daniel Webster to Bill Clinton, we have spoken of the power of our American example as greater in the world than any example of our power. Lady Liberty in New York Harbor holds her lamp up to the world, representing our American beacon of truth, justice and democracy.”
“I have a distinct memory, traveling with John McCain to Manila, and waking up early to go visit the American military cemetery. The sun coming up over the rows of white gravestones standing over our dead. The massive, gleaming marble arcade of names, carved on walls stretching high over my head, of Americans whose bodies were never recovered—over 17,000 in all, remembered in that cemetery.
After their sacrifice, can we not do better than to sell our democracy to the fossil fuel industry? What do you suppose a monument to that would look like, I wonder?
America deserves better; and the world is watching us; we, this city on a hill.
I yield the floor.”
-Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), on the U.S. Senate floor, March 13, 2018
A Voice for Our Earth: Ripped from the headlines (…from 1953)
This article, which appeared in the August, 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, references the work of Dr. Gilbert Plass, a Canadian physicist who had just begun using some of the world’s first high-speed computers to perform accurate calculations of infrared absorption of sun radiation in all layers of our Earth’s atmosphere. The many calculations required could not have been accomplished by hand. The layer-by-layer atmospheric radiation model Dr. Plass constructed provided the first decisive proof that carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere could be expected to increase our Earth’s surface temperature. (This had been suspected since the 1800’s, but reasonable scientists disagreed and the dispute could not be settled without more accurate data or computations.)
I have tried to find out what computers Dr. Plass used, but I can’t find that information published anywhere. The IBM 701, pictured below, was the first mass produced computer and was introduced just a few months before the above article.
Dr. Plass’ predictions in the above article, later refined in a series of scientific papers he published in 1956, have proven remarkably accurate. If you want to learn more about how Dr. Plass’ work fits into our knowledge of climate change, check out Episode 3 of my Brief History of Climate Change Evidence. To see just how well Dr. Plass’ predictions held up, check out Episode 7, where we look at modern temperature measurements and grade his work.
Spoiler alert: It’s been 65 years since the above article; lots of accurate measurements have been made by scientists all over the world, and the article was pretty much right on.
A Voice for Our Earth: The President of the United States (in 1965)
“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 of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, in a Special Message to the U.S. Congress, February 8, 1965.
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:
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:
And our 2018 President says global climate change is a hoax, and has pulled us from the Paris climate agreement, in which we should be playing a leading role. And, somehow, roughly half of our Congress and half of us agree. Even though the effects are readily observable and figuring significantly in many of our lives.
The President in 1965, on this issue, was speaking from a position of knowledge, responsibility, and strength.
The President in 2018, on this issue, is speaking from a position of willful ignorance, amorality, and provincial weakness.
We must find ourselves again. Our children, and their children, depend on it.
A Voice four Our Earth: Greta Thunberg, age 15, at the COP24 conference, 2018
“My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden.
I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now.
Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn’t matter what we do.
But I’ve learned you are never too small to make a difference.
And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.
You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.
Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.
Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act.
You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.
We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.
We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again.
We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.
We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.
Thank you.”
-Greta Thunberg, 15-year-old Swedish climate activist who has inspired teens around the world with her Climate Strike campaign. Full text of her speech at the UN COP24 summit in Katowice, Poland, which ended Saturday with an agreement struck — barely — between some 200 negotiating countries. The deal keeps the process under the Paris agreement alive, but with a set of rules that most scientists and diplomats agree is not nearly sufficient to meet the Paris agreement’s goals of keeping the global temperature from climbing above 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Among substantial difficulties during the negotiations was the refusal of the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to “welcome” the UN sponsored IPCC Special Report released in October (“welcome” being diplomatic speak for “acknowledge the truth of the basic conclusions of”).
A Voice for Our Earth: Greta Thunberg, age 16, at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 2019
“Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.
And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas being released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.
At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge that we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.
But Homo sapiens have not yet failed.
Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognize the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.
We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases.
And either we do that or we don’t.
You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5 °C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t.
Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.
Now we all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the future living conditions for humankind. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.
That is up to you and me.
Some say that we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?
Here in Davos – just like everywhere else – everyone is talking about money. It seems that money and growth are our only main concerns.
And since the climate crisis is a crisis that has never once been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences on our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget, and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. And that needs to change today.
No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of future and present economics.
We are now at a time in history where everyone with any insight of the climate crisis that threatens our civilization – and the entire biosphere – must speak out in clear language, no matter how uncomfortable and unprofitable that may be.
We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint is, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.
Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”
-Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who has inspired teens around the world with her Climate Strike campaign. Full text of her speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2019.
A Voice for Our Earth: Lane Burke & Eliot Hester, singer/songwriters
I hate you
and love you
all at the same time
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to
but we tend to leave you behind
These hands were made for loving but all we do is fight
I wish we could combat the monsters inside
and love was made for people but people are filled with greed
we take what we want and expect it to be free
Now our hearts are empty, now our hearts are bare
but we still take what we want and expect it to be there
It’s just plain and simple, we lost everything
and now we can’t hear the song that human nature sings
It goes
Oh
save me
help me
Caged in this life we try to hide behind TV’s
it’s all about me
perpetuate the planet ’till it’s gone, and then we’ll have it
won’t we?
it’s all about me
These hands were made for loving but all we do is fight
I wish we could combat the monsters inside
and love was made for people but people are filled with greed
we take what we want and expect it to be free
Now the world is empty, now the world is bare
but we still take what we want and expect it to be there
It’s just plain and simple, we lost everything
and now we can’t hear the song that human nature sings
It goes
Oh
save me
help me
oh
oh
save me
help me
save me
help me
-Lane Burke and Eliot Hester. “Human Nature.” Novel, Vol. 1, The 5th Records, 2019.
Beautiful song, worth a listen. Insightful lyrics, worth some thought. Check it out on iTunes.
A Voice for Our Earth: U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken
“Exercising my ‘reasoned judgement,’ … I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”
-U.S. District Court of Oregon Judge Ann Aiken, November, 2016, in a 54-page opinion and order denying the U.S. federal government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit, filed against the federal government by 21 kids currently ranging in age from 11 to 22, asserting that the federal government has “known for more than fifty years that the carbon dioxide … produced by burning fossil fuels was destabilizing the climate system in a way that would ‘significantly endanger plaintiffs, with the damage persisting for millenia’,” and demanding that the government desist from subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions
The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was recently highlighted on 60 Minutes:
- Watch the 60 Minutes report here.
- Read here about the 36,000 pages of documentary evidence gathered by the plaintiffs for the case, much of it the government’s own documents spanning 50 years and 10 presidencies.
- Visit the plantiffs’ web page here.
Since 2016, the Trump Administration has appealed Judge Aiken’s decision three times to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and twice to the Supreme Court. All 5 appeals failed.
The next oral arguments in Juliana v. United States are scheduled for June in Portland, Oregon.
A Voice for Our Earth: Science problem or social problem?
“But will we choose a different road? Your guess is as good as any scientist’s. Human decisions remain the main source of uncertainty in climate change, not the physical response of the climate itself. The confidence level of the physical predictions for many years has exceeded the certainty we need for other big choices, such as when we decide economic policies or court cases. But predicting the human component of reducing carbon emissions depends on politics and social psychology, which constantly surprise the best experts.
We’ve already blown through a lot of irreversible changes without taking effective action. Carbon dioxide that we emit stays in the atmosphere permanently, in terms meaningful to human time horizons. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has gone from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to about 400 parts per million [in 2016], and it increases at 2 parts per million per year. We’re seeing many damaging impacts, with melting glaciers and permafrost, disappearing sea ice, increasing droughts, heat waves and fires, stronger storms, accelerated sea level rise, altered growing seasons and habitat ranges, and so on. Impacts lag emissions, so more severe changes are already inevitable.
But on the hopeful side, every major carbon-emitting nation made commitments to reduce emission at a Paris summit in December 2015, the first time that had happened. It wasn’t enough, but for the first time the whole world pulled in the same direction.
Carbon reduction depends on peace between nations. And changing climate could be a great impetus to war. The physical sciences have found many feedback loops by which warming begets more warming, but the social science connection of carbon and conflict could be the most powerful of all.”
–Charles Wohlforth, lifetime Alaska resident and LA Times Award winning science and environment writer, and Dr. Amanda Hendrix, 20-year planetary scientist, in their 2016 book projecting possible futures for humanity
Carl Sagan and a pale blue dot
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Rachel Carson on human mastery
“The human race is challenged more than ever to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”
-Rachel Carson
An open letter from 11,258 scientists
9 Nov 2019
On Monday, the United States formally submitted to the UN its plans to exit the Paris climate agreement. This was an expected formality; according to UN rules, Monday was the earliest day the plan could be submitted pursuant to President Trump’s June 1, 2017 announcement of our intention to leave the agreement shared by 187 other nations to make their best efforts to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius or, better yet, 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial temperatures.
U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, explained on Monday that the Paris agreement threatens to impose an “unfair economic burden” on the United States, a nation which has enjoyed the economic benefits of being the #1 cumulative carbon dioxide emitter over approximately the past 170 years since the Industrial Revolution.
This statement appeared to expand on President Trump’s declaration of his reaction to his own government’s detailed 2018 climate assessment report, “I don’t believe it.”
Neither Secretary Pompeo nor President Trump has provided any significant evidence, measurements, expert reports, computations, graphs, tables, or numerals to back up their opinions based upon which they are busy making globally consequential decisions on behalf of all Americans.
In other news…
On Tuesday, a group of 11,258 scientists from 153 countries jointly published in the journal, BioScience, an open letter not-so-subtly entitled, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” I recommend reading the entire letter, which is just 4 pages long and straightforwardly written.
“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is.’ On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” -Opening paragraph of the letter
The writers recount a 40-year history of explicit warnings from various groupings of scientists that have occurred since scientists from 50 nations assembled in Geneva at the 1979 First World Climate Conference (see U.S. National Academy of Sciences report published that year).
“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament … The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected … It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity … Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks … that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans … These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”
Unlike Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Trump, the scientific authors of this open letter present an abundance of data supporting their arguments. Arguing that simple global surface temperature alone is an inadequate measure of humanity’s progress on the climate (a reasonable argument, since inertia in Earth’s climate system will ensure that the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere will continue to warp Earth’s geologic state for decades and longer), the authors present a suite of 15 graphical “vital signs” measuring various aspects of human activity that affect the climate (Figure 1, reproduced below).
Similarly, they present 14 graphical panels documenting measured impacts on, or responses of, Earth’s climate system (Figure 2).
Finally, the authors propose 6 “critical and interrelated steps” that humanity must take to avoid the worst consequences of climate change:
Energy – Rapidly reduce CO2 emissions by leaving remaining fossil fuels in the ground and moving to renewable energy sources and improved energy conservation practices as quickly as can safely be done.
Short-lived pollutants – Vigorously reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants like methane, black carbon (soot), and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which the authors tie directly (with evidence) to the saving of millions of lives over the upcoming few decades.
Nature – Rapidly reduce ongoing losses in Earth’s biodiversity, including forests, sea grasses, and microorganisms that store large amounts of carbon. Take on reforestation efforts at large scales, which could accomplish a third of emission reductions needed to meet the 2030 Paris agreement targets.
Food – Eating more plants and less meat, particularly ruminant livestock meat (beef), would result in substantial emission reductions while simultaneously freeing up cropland currently used for feeding and grazing livestock to instead grow food for people and plant carbon-sequestering trees.
Economy
“We need a carbon-free economy that explicitly addresses human dependence on the biosphere and policies that guide economic decisions accordingly. Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality.”
Population – Strengthen policies like provision of and easy access to family-planning services, improving gender equality, and making primary and secondary education of girls ubiquitous — policies that have proven to lead to stabilization of population while simultaneously improving human rights.
“We are encouraged by a recent surge of concern … Schoolchildren are striking. Ecocide lawsuits are proceeding in the courts. Grassroots citizen movements are demanding change, and many countries, states and provinces, cities, and businesses are responding … The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual. We believe that the prospects will be greatest if decision-makers and all of humanity promptly respond to this warning and declaration of a climate emergency and act to sustain life on planet Earth, our only home.”
I wonder, how shrill will the warnings of scientists need to become, how strongly worded their opening paragraphs, how unambiguous the titles of their studies, how many scientific signatories will their papers require, how voluminous the data and inventive the graphical methods will they they need to employ, just how complete will their consensus need to become? How many schoolchildren will feel compelled to strike from school and how many tears will they need to shed before parliaments and international governing bodies in their efforts to call attention to the science?
How much of all that?
Before we will stop tolerating government representatives who stand in front of bouquets of microphones trolling scientists and making vapid statements about “unfair economic burdens” and “the reality of the global energy mix” while themselves living conspicuously unburdened economic lives and transparently being on the take from the similarly economically unburdened purveyors of the “current energy mix?” Before we will stop entertaining the crackpot ramblings of this or that radio personality or pseudo-scientist on Fox News questioning mainstream climate science, as if he represents an actual dispute among real scientists when real scientists author papers with hundreds or thousands or over 11,000 signatories and while the land-based ice on Greenland is quite obviously melting in great torrents and California burns? Before we will listen instead to the scientists and our own schoolchildren, who are striking because they realize they will own the consequences of the decisions we make right now and the real-world effects of climate change are so glaring as to be easily apprehended by any fourth grader?
How much evidence will be required? Before we will vote out the idiots and the profiteers, and vote in the pragmatists, the scientifically literate, the inspirational and justice-minded leaders ready to set to work on the difficult choices that need to be made and the hard but rewarding work that needs to be done?
How much, before we start to put things right?