And now for the weather report

Perhaps a few more weather reporters giving this kind of context could help public understanding, since studies indicate that weather reporters remain one of the primary sources of information about climate (despite many reporters having little or background in climate themselves).

Very helpfully, the American Meteorological Society has updated its statement on climate change to reflect scientific research completed since the last one in 2007. The new statement is considerably stronger in its language than its previous one. Here are a few tastes of the new statement:

"Warming of the climate system now is unequivocal [...] many of the observed changes noted above are beyond what can be explained by the natural variability of the climate. It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases [...] Since long-term measurements began in the 1950s, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing at a rate much faster than at any time in the last 800,000 years. [...] Climate is potentially predictable for much longer time scales than weather for several reasons. [...] A helpful analogy in this regard is that population averages of human mortality are predictable while life spans of individuals are not. [...] Future warming of the climate is inevitable for many years due to the greenhouse gases already added to the atmosphere and the heat that has been taken up by the oceans. [...] Global efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions have been unsuccessful so far. However, were future technologies and policies able to achieve a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions — an approach termed “mitigation” — this would greatly lessen future global warming and its impacts. [...] In the 21st century, global sea level also will continue to rise although the rise will not be uniform at all locations. [...] Atmospheric water content will increase globally, consistent with warmer temperatures, and consequently the global hydrological cycle will continue to accelerate. [...] changes in precipitation patterns are expected to differ considerably by region and by season [...] more severe droughts and floods [...] significant regional shifts in precipitation patterns [...] heavy precipitation events will continue to become more intense and frequent [...] longer dry spells between precipitation events in the subtropics and lower-middle latitudes [...] Widespread retreat of mountain glaciers is expected to eventually lead to reduced dry season flows for glacier-fed rivers. Drought is projected to increase over Africa, Europe, and much of the North American continental interior, and particularly the southwest United States. [...] more extreme warm periods and fewer cold periods are expected [...] more severe episodes of extreme heat. Critical thresholds of daily maximum temperature, above which ecosystems and crop systems (e.g., food crops such as rice, corn, and wheat) suffer increasingly severe damage, are likely to be exceeded more frequently. [...] It is unclear if the land biosphere and oceans will be able to continue taking up carbon at their current rate into the future. [...] Another unknown is the amount of methane that will be released due to high-latitude warming. There are indications that large regions of the permafrost in parts of Alaska and other northern polar areas are already thawing, with the potential to release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere beyond those being directly added by human activity. The portion of the increased CO2 release that is absorbed by the world ocean is making the ocean more acidic, with negative implications for shell- and skeleton-forming organisms and more generally for ocean ecosystems."

If you're pressed for time, or already familiar with recent climate research, then you can just skip to the conclusion. Here it is in full:

"There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research. The observed warming will be irreversible for many years into the future, and even larger temperature increases will occur as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Avoiding this future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. The ongoing warming will increase risks and stresses to human societies, economies, ecosystems, and wildlife through the 21st century and beyond, making it imperative that society respond to a changing climate. To inform decisions on adaptation and mitigation, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the global climate system and our ability to project future climate through continued and improved monitoring and research. This is especially true for smaller (seasonal and regional) scales and weather and climate extremes, and for important hydroclimatic variables such as precipitation and water availability.

Technological, economic, and policy choices in the near future will determine the extent of future impacts of climate change. Science-based decisions are seldom made in a context of absolute certainty. National and international policy discussions should include consideration of the best ways to both adapt to and mitigate climate change. Mitigation will reduce the amount of future climate change and the risk of impacts that are potentially large and dangerous. At the same time, some continued climate change is inevitable, and policy responses should include adaptation to climate change. Prudence dictates extreme care in accounting for our relationship with the only planet known to be capable of sustaining human life."

There is much to commend in this new statement. It clearly and unambiguously affirms the three basic pillars of climate science: (a) the planet is warming rapidly; (b) humans are the dominant cause; (c) the consequences are a serious threat. There is not a relevant scientific institution of national or international standing that questions any of those three claims.

At the same time, the new AMS statement acknowledges many areas of lower confidence, where research is ongoing, including: the precise sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases; the precise role of clouds and aerosol particles; the precise distribution of disruptions to the hydrological cycle; the ongoing effects of natural variation within the larger trends; the rate of ice sheet disintegration and sea level melt; the potential negative side effects of geo-engineering proposals; and perhaps most importantly the uncertainties in the human systems that cause and are impacted by climate change: how fast will we continue to modify the chemical composition of atmosphere and oceans? And how well will we respond to the risks and threats these changes will bring?

Given the uncertainties, both in the geophysical systems and especially in the human systems that drive and respond to them, the AMS statement remains agnostic about the most important debate regarding the threat of climate change: does climate change represent a level of risk that is merely disastrous or truly catastrophic?

The closest it comes to addressing this question is in the very interesting final sentence: "Prudence dictates extreme care in accounting for our relationship with the only planet known to be capable of sustaining human life." We're not talking merely about losing the polar bears, or an acceleration of species extinctions more generally, or even severe economic disruption or a rising threat of climate-related conflict. Implicitly at least, this statement acknowledges that what is at stake is the ongoing capacity of the planet to sustain human life.

UPDATE: The scriptwriter for the video above shares his thinking behind the clip.

Connect the dots

I offered a few thoughts back here on the connexions between extreme weather and climate change. This topic continues to be the subject of much investigation and the links are many and complex. Nonetheless, a few metaphors are becoming commonly accepted by scientists attempting to communicate their findings.

The first is the image of a baseball player on steroids. Adapting it for use in Commonwealth nations, let's talk about a cricketing batsman on steroids. Taking the drugs improves his muscle condition and makes it possible for him to hit balls harder. While it is not possible to say whether this or that six is the result of drug-enhancement, it is nonetheless possible to see that the player is now hitting more sixes than he was before he started taking drugs. The odds have shifted in favour of bigger shots. In the same way, we're getting weather on steroids, with greater odds of dangerous extremes.

The second commonly-used analogy, mentioned in this video, is the idea of "loading the dice". Weather is always variable, just as rolling a pair of (six-sided) dice will give you results ranging from 2 to 12, with 7 being most common. But if you take one of those dice and add a dot to each side, so that it now ranges from 2 to 7, then you'll still see a lot of variation, including the occasional low number. But 8 will now be most common, and it will be possible to roll a 13. Some of the events we've seen in the last handful of years around the globe have been the equivalent of 13s, standing as much as six standard deviations above the average (using the period 1950-80 as a baseline). Indeed, if we just look at events that are three standard deviations or more above the average, then statistically on an unchanging planet, we'd expect (on average) just 0.3% of the globe's surface to be experiencing such conditions at any one time. Yet over the last decade, the average has been about 10% of the planet's surface facing such extreme conditions. In fact, if we want to be a little more accurate, then rather than painting an extra dot on all the sides of one die, it is as though we have taken one of our pair of six-sided dice and replaced it with an eight-sided die. The point is not only has the average increased and upper extreme become more extreme, but the range of possible weather experiences has widened, leading to greater variations in temperature and precipitation. Not only are the extremes hazardous to human health and ecosystems (both natural and managed), but greater variability is now also becoming more widely accepted as harmful.

All our weather now occurs in an atmosphere increasingly shaped by human activities. There is no "natural" weather any more. We are moving into a new regime that includes higher numbers, and 13s will not be the end of it. We've only warmed about 1/5th the projected warmth of our current trajectory within my daughter's lifetime and perhaps 1/10th of the likely long-term warming.

The chances of the ball being hit out of the park keep increasing.

UPDATE: After posting this, I came across this post that examines this topic in more detail and includes the following very helpful video.

Why has the Titanic become a myth?

"People say, why are you so fascinated by this wreck? And for me it's a study of human psychology and the way people deal with crises. And they dealt with it in different ways. Some were in denial. Some were in a trance. Some just took action, didn't think, just went, just did. And others were craven cowards who thought only of their own survival. We all know that we would fall somewhere on that spectrum but until our lives are really put at risk - you know, the moment of truth - we don't know what we would do. [...]

"Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before? There was this big machine, this human system, that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now. Within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm of the world, you have different classes, you’ve got first class, second class, third class. In our world right now you’ve got developed nations, undeveloped nations. You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn. We can’t turn because of the momentum of the system, the political momentum, the business momentum. There too many people making money out of the system, the way the system works right now and those people frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren’t ready to let ‘em go. Until they do we will not be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we’re going to hit it, and when we hit it, the rich are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on. It’s going to be poor, it’s going to be the steerage that are going to be impacted. It’s the same with Titanic. I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people."

- James Cameron, Director of Titanic (1997) and Titanic 3D (2012),
National Geographic: Titanic - the final word.

Today is the centenary of the sinking of the HMS Titanic. Some people have got excited at the fact that some young people took a while to discover that the 1997 James Cameron blockbuster film* was based (at least at the macro level) on actual events. But that is not what I mean by myth. The story itself has become a shared cultural reference point, a story picture of flexible but fairly-well defined meanings. Why has the story of this particular ship been so often invoked, when so many other (often numerically greater) maritime tragedies have been quickly forgotten? As Cameron points out, the narrative of these events is very easily turned into a parable, or a myth - as the ship itself was already mythic in name and epic in scope when it was launched. We want to make sense of tragedies, and this one, for all its mysteries, seems to offer some pretty clear morals. Pride goes before a fall. We're all in the same boat. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

And watch out for icebergs.
*And its recent perfectly-timed-for-maximal-cash-in-from-free-media-publicity 3D re-release.
H/T Joe Romm for the reference and second quote.

Corporate failure: more than a few bad apples

With all the current discussion about News International and its parent company News Corp, many pixels are being devoted to a discussion of just how things went so wrong. After a string of recent revelations, the claim, maintained by News executives for years, that it was one (or then a few) bad apple(s) in an otherwise honest company now appears as either deluded, deceitful or the result of seriously deficient oversight. Since it is nearly always better to assume incompetence rather than conspiracy, at best Tuesday's parliamentary inquiry revealed a string of failed leaders - spanning media editors, senior corporate executives, police and politicians - who remained dangerously out of touch with what was going on around them. At worst, collusion, corruption and cover up on an industrial scale dwarf the significance of the original criminal data acquisition. Whatever the true nature of the rot, it goes beyond a couple of apples, whether at the top or bottom of the pile.

When confronted with misdeeds on this scale, a common reaction (which I notice in my own instincts) is to seek to put a face on the problem, a single individual who can be held ultimately responsible. We want the buck to stop somewhere. The legal pursuit of the questions of who knew what when is important and such investigations are likely to take some time. In the meantime, an impatient public desires visible signs of justice. If we cannot get convictions just yet, we will settle for resignations.

We so desperately want to be able to find someone to blame, some focus for our fury at the damage caused by a system of corruption in which media, police and politicians were too close and saw their own good in terms of a small circle than the national interest they claimed to be representing. We want to know that our violated trust is being taken seriously. Resignations serve as symbolic steps in this direction; they speak to a collective desire to start again and are a metaphor of what it looks like for an organisation to repent.

But there are deeper questions at stake. Individuals did indeed commit crimes and moral failures (either of commission or omission). Many participated in looking the other way, being willfully blind to what was going on because it was more convenient to maintain deniability (or perhaps they continue to mislead political authorities). But to leave the analysis at the level of individuals fails to take account of the dynamics that can exist at a supra-individual level. The whole can often be greater than the sum of the parts. If the only lessons we take away from this saga involve the need for greater personal integrity, we miss the opportunity to ask how the very structures might have served to sideline, subvert or dilute integrity.

There are individual failures, but also failures of structure, failures of collective imagination. They are failures of systems that are based on seeking the wrong kinds of inclusion, systems that punish those who speak up while rewarding those who conform without questioning the quality of what is shared. Whether a for-profit corporation can simulatenously claim to be serving its shareholders and the common good is an interesting question, as is whether a political system in which an MP is required to win more votes than any other candidate every five years encourages a myopic and image-driven politics.

When a corporation is accountable to its shareholders' interests and those interests are understood in narrow financial terms (as they usually are), then the only place that ethical considerations enter into it is the impulse to avoid anything unethical insofar as it hurts the bottom line. Therefore, the recent fall in News Corp shares is the real crime Rupert and his various officers have committed.

But of course that way madness lies, and the reaction of the public to this scandal is partly media-driven hysteria (the very same hysteria that News have used to successfully to drive sales) and partly genuine moral outrage that speaks to a standard other than the bottom line. There is more to living well than making a profit and there is more to a flourishing nation (or world) than a growing GDP. Therefore, there must be more to a healthy company than a rising share price. Let us resist the colonisation of our ethical thought by cost-benefit risk analysis that seeks to put a price on everything. The language of money cannot adequately translate the full complexity and richness of our moral existence and to rely on it to do so is to abdicate our responsibility for pursuing good and shunning evil.

Amidst the repeated failure of not just scattered individuals but of our most trusted social institutions - of corporations and parliaments, banks and police, sensationalist newspapers and a reading public that buys them - it may be worth considering again the apostle Paul's exhortation to his readers in Rome, who were at the heart of a vast empire with powerful cultural incentives to fit in: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds (Romans 12.2 NRSV). This is addressed not simply to the individual believers, but to the church as a whole. It is an invitation to a way of corporate existence based on the good news of God's mercies (verse 1). The church, of course, is not immune from moral failure. Yet the good news here is an invitation to discover anew a source of belonging that does not require us to narrow our moral vision lest we stick out, but which gives us permission to find fresh ways of thinking and seeing amidst a culture that has lost its way. The church has no monopoly on wisdom, has not cornered the market in corporate governance or collective integrity. Yet in its practices of humility, confession, forgiveness and love of neighbour to the glory of God, in its memory of Jesus accepting the outcast and breaking bread with the traitor, in its grasp of the promise of a Spirit who leads into both honesty and new begingings, it has something that is genuinely different and worth rediscovering and sharing by each generation.

A mortal danger overtaking humanity

"There is a mortal danger - there is a danger which is overtaking humanity. And we will not solve it unless we all pull together, unless we all agree to do something. Now that is a fantastically difficult thing to achieve. It has never happened in the history of humanity that all humanity has agreed."

- David Attenborough, Beyond the Brink, final quote.

What is he talking about? David Attenborough regularly polls as the most trusted public figure in the UK (along with the Queen). Do you think he is overstating things here?

Are you voting for death?

"[D]riving is like voting. Presidents do not fall on the basis of one single vote. Your vote becomes politically potent when aggregated across the whole of the electorate. Voting is a private contribution to a public mass action that carries the power to topple presidents. Driving to the shops does not make you a killer. The chance that you will kill anyone is miniscule. But the risk does exist and someone somewhere will kill a pedestrian while to the shops today. These small personal actions carry with them a tiny probably of causing harm, which when aggregated across the whole population have major public health implications. We will see later on how the motor industry and the car lobby attempt to personalize road danger. It is better for them that road death is seen as an errant act of a deviant driver or a 'jaywalking' child than the expected outcome of an unsafe system that kills 3,000 people every day, most of them pedestrians and cyclists."

- Ian Roberts with Phil Edwards, The Energy Glut:
Climate Change and the Politics of Fatness (London: Zed Books, 2010), 42.

We are generally quite poor at thinking in terms of large scale societal trends. More cars on the road means more pedestrian deaths and consequently, fewer pedestrians and so more cars on the road as more people join the transportation arms race. (This in turn drives up BMI across society, but that is a point for another day, though it is one of the beefs of this book.)

The deadliness of mechanised transport is a systemic risk we have accepted (and largely become blind to) as a society because we love our cars so much. This too is another illustration of red vs green behaviour.

It doesn't have to be this way.
When looking for an appropriate image to accompany this post, I realised that I don't have many photos of cars. I don't find cars visually attractive and generally frame my photography to exclude them (that said, anyone reading this blog for any length of time will also realise that I generally crop people from my images as well. That is not from misanthropy as much as a recognition that I'm not very good at portraits). In the end, this image of the decomposing remains of a vehicle in a Scottish field seemed the most fitting.

A shared understanding

Each of these reputable scientific institutions is staking its reputation on the claim that human carbon pollution is dangerously altering our climate. Credibility is their most valuable asset to risk.

The list of reputable scientific institutions staking their reputation on the denial of that claim can be counted on the fingers of one head.

Arguments from authority are a legitimate secondary form of argument, and are quite relevant for non-specialists such as myself (and, I assume, most of my readers).
This question is discussed in more detail by Kate at ClimateSight: "Is there a consensus in climate science?"

Credit crisis: a visual aid

An animation in two parts.


I found this to be quite a helpful summary of some of the structural causes for the present economic downturn. Notice the assumptions at play: that money can always be multiplied through the opening of new markets, that someone else can carry the risk, that my pursuit of wealth is good for the whole system. All false.