Personal and political: why cycling and recycling are insufficient

What can I do in response to climate change? As I talk to people about climate and ecology, I get asked this with great frequency, and this is not surprising. Previously, I've tried to put together a bit of a list of suggestions. Yet in replying to such a question, I often point out that "what can I do?" is a secondary question. More important than what I can do is what we can do.

Now of course there are indeed all kinds of things I can do to reduce my contributions to climate-altering emissions: buying less stuff, ditching the car, cutting flying, purchasing renewable energy, eating less meat and dairy and so on (note that recycling or changing lightbulbs, which are the usual answers people want to hear are way down this list, since they are relatively minor compared to some of the things here).

Personal footprint reductions are good, being: (a) simply the right thing to do in a world throwing away its habitable climate; (b) culture-shaping (normalising solar-installation, for instance); (c) economic communication to corporations (though this influence is plutocratic in effect, since it is one dollar one vote); (d) a talking point for persuasion (people ask questions); (e) an actual (albeit tiny) contribution to global emissions reduction; and (f) important for avoiding the all-too-easy charge of hypocrisy (this is one of the most common lazy defeater arguments people use to keep these issues at bay and it's powerful to be able to show how you're shifting your lifestyle).

But personal footprint reductions are secondary. On the timescales we have and with the structure of the problem locating particular power in massive fossil fuel interests to block progress (through corruption/regulative capture of the political authorities), it is critical that responsible action focus on cultural and political action. If we had a century in which to reduce emissions then personal lifestyle changes and a bottom-up cultural change would undoubtedly be the way to go. If we were not facing one of the richest and most powerful industries in history with a track record of shaping the political landscape to suit its agenda, then building a new and better alternative would be relatively straightforward.

Unfortunately, we don't have decades to start reducing emissions. A significant fraction of our emissions today will still be altering the climate in tens of thousands of years and we're already at the point where the observed changes (let alone those in the pipeline due to the temporal lag between emissions and warming) are becoming increasingly dangerous to human and natural systems. Two degrees warming is flirting with disaster; four degrees is a recipe for catastrophe. Our current trajectory is heading for four degrees or more. Every year we delay, the price tag of the necessary emissions reductions jumps by something like US$500 billion.

We're well past the stage where quietly changing a few lightbulbs is going to cut it.

This is one of the reasons why I am excited about the campaign to get individuals and institutions with a social conscience (churches, universities, city governments) to divest from fossil fuels. Divestment is not primarily an economic strategy, since my few dollars will always be dwarfed by the massive sums and inertia associated with business as usual. Divestment is a cultural and political strategy, changing the nature of what is normal and thinkable (i.e. culture) by putting fossil fuels into the same category as other "unthinkable" ways of making money (e.g. asbestos, tobacco, weapons, gambling, etc.), and in doing so, also changing the way that the political winds are blowing, repositioning the fossil fuel lobby to be as politically toxic (or more) than, say, the tobacco lobby. When politicians are embarrassed to be seen publicly with the fossil fuel lobby, we're winning; when they know they have to stop receiving all donations from them due to the political costs involved, then we've won.

At least round one.

Another conspiracy theory confirmed: denier bots are real

I am not generally a fan of conspiracy theories. They are often a sign of intellectual laziness, paranoia, magic thinking and the victory of ideology over facts.

But sometimes they are true.

For example, WikiLeaks has confirmed (or at least gave even more credible evidence for) a few long-suspected facts.

A second example: a few months ago it was revealed that the popular social media site Digg was being gamed by a group of conservative users, who would "bury" any stories that didn't match their political ideology. (This may well happen the other way round, of course, and it may just be that the liberals have better watchdogs. My point here is not political.)

And now corporate emails stolen and published by Anonymous from US cyber-security firm HBGary Federal confirm another conspiracy: corporations and governments employ sophisticated software operated by paid shills to manipulate hundreds (probably thousands or tens of thousands) of "sockpuppets" in an effort to sway online debate through misinformation and spin. For corporations and governments to employ propagandists pretending to be honest members of the public is nothing new. What is new in this revelation is credible confirmation of the scale and technical complexity involved in such operations. The emails reveal some of the specifications of custom-designed software enabling a single person to operate dozens of discrete online personas, each with pre-developed online history, IP address and automated posting of talking points across a large number of sites.

It has been clear for some time that sites like the Guardian face a coordinated effort to bury certain topics in misinformation. Stories that contain particular key words (such as "climate") frequently get deluged with strangely similar critical comments, often within minutes of the story going live. But to have confirmation that denier bots are real means that I'm uncertain whether to be more worried at the degree of cynical manipulation that corporate and government interests are willing to go to in pursuit of their agendas, or more relieved that the segment of the general population who actually believe and promote the claims being made by these denier bots is smaller than previously thought.

"And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

- John 8.32 (NRSV).

Weather vs climate

There is an important and often misunderstood distinction between weather and climate.

Weather is what is happening when you go outside. It is what meteorologists study and consists of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions driven by the movements of blocks of hot and cold air. It is measured hour by hour (or even minute by minute) and predicted a few days in advance, beyond which the complexities and sensitivities of the system make computational estimation almost impossible.

Climate refers to long term patterns of weather. It is what climatologists study and consists of dynamical systems driven by long term fluctuations in solar activity, oceanic currents, surface albedo and atmospheric chemistry (and, over the very long term, by geological forces and plate tectonics). It is measured in decades, centuries and millennia and predicted in decades.

Predicting the climate
Yet this raises a common question: if we can't predict next weekend's weather, how can we predict the climate in 2050? Remember that climate prediction doesn't mean a prediction of weather, on which day it might rain or be a certain temperature at a given location. It means predicting the overall pattern, which, while chaotic from week to week, fluctuates within a certain range over the long term. Climate prediction means predicting changes in that range within which weather might fluctuate.

Imagine a pot of water being brought to the boil. Although predicting exactly where and when a bubble will appear is almost impossible, it is still quite possible (given knowledge of the original temperature and volume of the water and the amount of heat energy being applied) to predict when it boil with some degree of accuracy. Or consider tossing a coin one thousand times. It is almost impossible to know whether any given toss will be heads or tails, but we can all predict that there will be about five hundred of each. Or think of sitting on a packed train. You mightn't be able to guess how the person next to you is likely to vote in an election, but with knowledge of quality polling data (if that is not an oxymoron), you can make a pretty good estimate of the likely distribution of votes on the train as a whole.

So climate and weather are closely related, but it is important to keep their distinction in mind. One way of putting it I heard recently is that climate trains the boxer, the weather throws the punches.

This distinction means that it is not possible to directly attribute any particular example of weather either to anthropogenic climate change or to natural variation. A cold day doesn't disprove the theory any more than a hot day proves it. Each are a tiny piece of evidence in a much, much larger pattern. And when an extreme weather event comes along (such as the current Russian heat wave and Asian floods), this too doesn't by itself prove anything. What does count, however, is the well-recorded pattern of increasing frequency and intensity of such events. Put simply, climate change doesn't cause extreme weather, but it increases the chances of it happening, and increases the extremity of what is possible. This is because warmer air can hold more water, bringing more intense precipitation. By the way, this includes more intense snowfall if the temperature happens to be below freezing, as was seen in the northeastern US earlier in the year. Or as NASA says, this is what global warming looks like.

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