རྟིན་འབྱུང Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

        With this bit of rain, perhaps the Kale of the Fall Garden will begin to show itself. Tangental to that, I had noticed that when I gave people copies of my other slim volumes of verse ("Pieces of the Moon" and "Freeversengineering") that I was apologetic, and kept persisting in explaining that the poetry in them was 20 to 30 years old. So I put together a collection of more recent scribblings "The Practice of Saying Goodbye" and now am casting about for other ways than the chronological to be apologetic. With the climate collapse coming upon us fast, one might wonder why I still bothered to try and find the meaningfully sonorific in verbal form, but I guess there is much climate grief expressed therein, and even glimpses of, if not transcendence, than at least a fierceness that still raises its fist high and says, "Life!" 

https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Saying-Goodbye-Daniel-Garrett/dp/1086145593/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Practice+of+Saying+Goodbye&qid=1566335524&s=gateway&sr=8-1

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

Sadly, because everything is interconnected, including in climate science, it would appear that tipping points may in fact act as dominos so that when one goes, more than one goes with it, meaning the little time we thought we had, might in fact turn out to be less time even than that. As Greta Thunberg said, 'we must act as if our house is on fire, because it is...'

Wildfire

Two Roads Diverging in Burning Woods: The Climate Justice Revolution vs The Vulture Capitalists

D. H. Garrett, The Asia Institute, Dreamindustrees

“Capitalist production collects the population together in great centers, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the  eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil….All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” Karl Marx 

(Image: Horst Haitzinger)

Introduction and Statement of the Problem

  We are consumed by wildfire. We are consumed by the wildfire of an economic system that depends on the uncontrolled consumption mostly of unnecessary things bought to satisfy fostered illusions, so as to enrich a very small percentage of humanity at the expense of the planet. It is a wildfire that depends on the consumption also of the life-support systems of the planet. It is a wildfire, moreover, that is about to over-run us and bring about a great collapse. Though I called this wildfire an “economic system”, it is not in fact a reality-based economic system, it is an economic system that is the greedy fantasy of the greedy, for it doesn’t even try and account for real costs, the costs to communities, to the environment, to the planet’s life support system. These are all “negative externalities” and no one pays for them except the poor, and future generations. No one pays for them until now that is, for now the damage from this carnival of covetousness is here to burn and drown and starve us us all, in the form of abrupt climate change. 

You may say that this is a simple story that nature has told many times, that it naturally emerges from the very nature of evolutionary competition: in other words an aggressive successful species dominates and eventually overwhelms its sustaining environment so that with resource depletion, population collapse occurs. The species may recover, it may not. Our present situation has some other dangerous factors in addition to resource depletion, most pressing being climate change, followed by the lethal damage we may end up inflicting upon ourselves due to some combination of nuclear and/or biological warfare, or some other form of mass-produced stupidity.

  But let us focus on climate change which in its incipient stages is already causing massive damage and considerable regime destabilization which needless to say, then heightens the possibility of those other horses of the Apocalypse chomping their way through what is left of humanity. 

  First, the level of danger posed by climate change cannot be overstated. Storms of intensity and type that have basically never been experienced by humanity in its time on the planet; storms of such violence that our infrastructure is inadequate to weather them; droughts and mega-droughts of such length and severity that our food systems collapse; killer heat waves of such length and intensity that people will try and survive indoors, but then may be forced into mass migrations as the high heat of the killer heat waves becomes the new normal average temperature; sea level rise of the multi-meter to hundred of feet level forcing the billions of humans living in the towns and cities and megacities on the oceans edges to relocate; ocean acidification proceeding to the point that the oceans approach Canfield ocean levels, ie., devoid of most of the life forms we know and in many ways depend on. 

“We have dawdled for so long ignoring the warnings of top scientists that our current and near-term fossil-based energy infrastructure will, by itself, generate enough carbon pollution to take us to dangerous levels of warming. So if we are up to avert disaster, we not only need to keep speeding up the use of new clean energy, we also have to speed up the shut down of old dirty energy sources…. Here’s one way to frame the urgency: If the world does not make substantial and sustained progress in cutting total global warming emissions by 2030, then the window will be effectively closed for averting the catastrophic warming of 2°C or higher. Having lost the war to avoid catastrophic impacts, we will instead be fighting a war to save civilization itself.” -Joe Romm

1. On Your Marx, Get Set, Stop…

  Sadly, goodness and a desire to survive do not seem to be sufficient motivating factors for solving the climate crisis. We have moreover run out of time. We are quite clearly and definitely going over the cliff to a different earth phase -a hot house state- and accompanying that plummet is the 6th great extinction, to which we, or at least a large number of us, will be both an instigator of and a party to. So given the intransigence of certain state and corporate (and indeed personal) actors, we need to look for models of bottom-up governance accelerant which will make it possible to at least give us a chance to teeter-totter at the edge of catastrophe, and perhaps, claw our way back if in fact we do topple over. Or, as is becoming increasingly likely, ensures that as many as possible survive the plunge through innovative, quickly put in place, adaptation measures. This is because -make no mistake about- as the “shit” of climate chaos increasingly hits the “fan” the tendency -already apparent- is for the rich to save the rich, and the rest be damned.

  Let us reflect for a moment on how fast things can spread and change when they truly infect the body populace. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began as an informal study group that met in Shanghai starting in 1921. The first Party Congress was held in Shanghai in July 1921. Some 57 members, including Mao Zedong, attended the meeting. By 1949 they had won the civil war and announced the start of the People’s Republic. In other words, in 28 years they went from having about 57 members, to running the most populous country on Earth. This is on the scale and speed of what we must accomplish if we are to have a chance of avoiding total climate catastrophe. We need a bottom-up Green Revolution that over the course of 10 years or so if not less, moves us from our current greenhouse gas emission trajectory to one not just of zero emissions but of negative emissions. This is the physical reality of what the earth system requires for us to maintain a supportive biosphere for humanity.  

“Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crisis have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.” George Monbiot

2. Time is of the Essence and We are Out of Essence

     Did I say ten years for radical decarbonization? A more careful incorporation of real earth system risks would say (would raise its hand politely and then shriek) five years. Why? Although the dangers of the climate change tipping points are fairly well understood, modeling of their reaction has been inadequate in terms of understanding that they are inter-connected, that when one one goes, we should not be surprised that more, or even all go in a devastating display  of cascading dominos on a global level. We know that this is the way that the earth system has reacted in paleoclimatic abrupt climate changer events. There are other reasons to think we have about half the carbon budget that we think we have. These include “global dimming” and probable under-calculation of the effects of overshoot. None of this matters of course as emissions went up last year and are expected to go up again this year, all of this precisely at the best time for radically reducing emissions. So of course the choice we have made, or rather the choice our leaders and captains of industry have made, is to try and eke out a few more years of “growth” even though it is suicidal.

“Observations of past warming periods suggest that a number of amplifying mechanisms, which are poorly represented in climate models, increase long-term warming beyond climate model projections. This suggests the carbon budget to avoid 2°C of global warming may be far smaller than estimated, leaving very little margin for error to meet the Paris targets.” Prof Hubertus Fischer of the University of Bern, from “Palaeoclimate constraints on the impact of 2 °C anthropogenic warming and beyond.”

3. Let Them Eat Pixels

     The irony in all of this, is that there is a very simple non-technological solution to the problem. Geoengineering is not required. The mass production of Negative Emission Technologies is not required. All we have to do is recognize that we are now in a war for our own survival, and recognizing that we declare a Global Climate Emergency. Ideally we get the Security Council to declare it -oh wait, Russia wants to continue enriching its oligarchs with oil and gas and be able down the road to sunbathe on the Arctic Ocean-, and 30 million or so Americans want to deny the reality of science so as to usher in “Armageddon” and be taken up in the “Second Coming.” So OK, forget the Security Council, but there is still a simple solution. Immediate carbon rationing commensurate in scale to buy us enough time to make a transition to a sustainable way of living on the planet. Yes of course, people in the wealthy carbon polluting countries would have to ride their bicycle more and give up meat on a daily basis, and there would be a temporary dip in economic growth until the green technologies take their place. But hey, we would live! The developing world would hardly feel a thing since their per-capita carbon output is so low.

     We should also locally, nationally, and internationally target the real culprits: the 100 or so companies responsible for 71% of all carbon emissions, and the 26 or so billionaires who control half the world’s wealth. There is more than enough money tin those two sources to fund a fast, decent, fair transition to a sustainable and equitable global system of energy, food, water, health, shelter, and education provisioning. See! That was easy! But ah you say, the powers that be will not give up their ill-gotten dirty gains so easily. Well yes, that is why a revolution is coming. Now it could be that long, sustained, mass non-violent protests, will be enough to force leadership to do what needs to be done. We are already seeing many of these civil disturbances taking place, particularly in Europe, but elsewhere as well. On the other hand, as the situation gets worse -climate-wise, survivability-wise- the gloves will come off and we can anticipate mass upheaval with the concomitant discord misery and death that accompanies it. Vast armies of climate-change driven refugees will try to tear down internally and externally the players that destroyed their homes. We will not be able to blame them. They literally will have nothing else left to lose. 

   You laugh of course at the idea of carbon rationing, and you laugh at the idea that wealthy companies and individuals (and countries) will share their wealth so as to avoid calamity. But enough people in the streets, soon enough, and long enough, have a way of making the people watching them from their penthouse suites, nervous. Let us hope the wildfire of non-violent climate action protest spreads quickly enough so that we still have time to act. 

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force." Michael Parenti

"Our world is richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite. Only five percent of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60 percent—and yet they are the people who produce most of the food and goods that the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were condemned 200 years ago. It is madness—and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify it.” Jason Hickels

4. The Long and the Very Short of It: Enlisting Both the Vultures of Capitalism and Our Better Angels

     So what is going to happen is this: we are most probably not going to get our shit together in time to avoid going over the abrupt climate change cliff. We just don’t seem to be able to respond to a danger moving at this speed (instantaneously in terms of geological time, but hypnotically too slow to trigger our flight or fight response). The money makers who control the world want to go on making money as long as possible. And the lumpen masses are too beguiled by the gaudy but fake jewels the rich dangle in front of them for them to stop shopping and go out into the streets and save the world. But we will react. We will react when things get so bad that we finally get it. Then we will throw everything we have at it. Negative Emission Gadgets will be mass produced like Sherman tanks from a GM factory. 
     We will do our best through geoengineering or mega-engineering to refreeze the arctic and antarctic. This will be the best way to stabilize weather extremes and prevent the inconvenience of relocating billions from our coastal cities. It will also be the cheapest alternative. A carbon price will finally be put in place. Radical reforestation and afforestation coupled with a radical re-thinking of our industrial farming practices will be attempted as a way of restoring traditional carbon sinks. Water from air technologies will become widespread both as a way of maintaining the new forests, and making it through droughts and mega-droughts. All of us, in way, will become refugees on a new planet, until we patiently and over the course of decades and centuries, repair the damage we have done and bring back as much as Earth’s verdant, impossibly beautiful and varied life, as we can. 

“The year 2020 is crucially important for another reason, one that has more to do with physics than politics. When it comes to climate, timing is everything. According to an April report (prepared by Carbon Tracker in London, the Climate Action Tracker consortium, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut), should emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable. The UN Sustainable Development Goals that were agreed in 2015 would also be at grave risk.”  https://www.nature.com/news/three-years-to-safeguard-our-climate-1.22201

“…the extent, severity, pace and closing window of opportunity to avoid potentially catastrophic outcomes has led many scientists to conclude we have entered a new era of rapid environmental change. We define this as the ‘age of environmental breakdown’ to better highlight the severity of the scale, pace and implication.” Juan Cole introducing the IPPR Report “This is a Crisis, Facing Up to the Age of Environmental Breakdown”

“I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change. … To mobilize people, this has to become an emotional issue. It has to have immediacy and salience. A distant abstract and disputed threat doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilizing public opinion.” George Marshall

5. Some Hopefully Not Final Tossed-Off Ideas for Cannibalizing What is Left Into Something Beautiful

Just as the horrors of World War II gave birth to a few ideas -like the United Nations- seeming to indicate that humanity might yet have some redeeming value, so the Times of Climate Chaos can be expected to usher in much that will be new, and some that will be valuable. In no particular order or in any semblance of levels of practicality or lack thereof, here are a few:

World People’s Bank: flipping the fact that 26 billionaires own as much as half of all humanity, we empower half of humanity with their own people-owned savings and loan. Combining their assets lifts them to powerhouse status and allows them to chart their own destiny (instead of being indebted for generations to the IMF and various lender countries…).

International Environmental Court: Because so much of climate justice involves recognizing that much of the earth system functions as a commons, the International Environmental Court will address those issues which national legal systems do not.

Global Green Alliance: Just in case there are some recalcitrant countries in terms of a rapid transition to an ecocivilizational approach to living on the planet, the Global Green Alliance will offer favorable deals to its members and not such favorable deals to the despoilers of the planet. Gradually everyone will belong! 

Blockchain Based Climate Participation/Climate Justice Mechanisms: This requires a more in depth explanation than I can give here, but suffice it to say, coupled with the Internet of Things, true ownership of the means of production can be shared more equitably than at present (in which it isn’t equitably shared at all).

Water from Air Generators will be the water supply equivalent of cell phones in obviating the need for traditional types of water infrastructure. This will free the rivers, among other things, to be rivers again.

Vertical Farming: remove the parasitical exploitation of Earth’s natural ecosystems that the current forms of human agriculture are. We will be able to make more with less, at less toil.

Recognition for the Sovereignty of the Refugee: New Refugee Eco-Civilizational Cities: With some 67 million refugees now, and climate change refugee projection figures in the 100’s of million to the several billions, it is time to recognize the sovereignty of the worlds refugees. Let’s give them a real home. Beautiful visionary eco-civilizational cities on for example the North American Great Plains would do wonders for the economy.

Smart Skins: instead of heating buildings, homes and our local environment, etc., mass production of smart -temperature adjusting skins- will save a lot of energy and give us the freedom of animals again, I mean for those who want the freedom of animals.

Geneto-architecture: let’s design our homes and structures at the genetic level and just plant them and water them and let them grow. Soil, water, and light are enough to make a good pumpkin, why not an adequate single family home?

That’s all for now!

“The stunning price drops in wind and solar power have continued. No longer are U.S. solar and wind plants merely cheaper than coal plants — they are also more affordable than new natural gas plants. And this is without subsidies or a price on carbon. Indeed, according to the financial firm Lazard Ltd, in many areas, building and running new renewables is now cheaper than just running old coal and nuclear plants.” Joe Romm, Think Progress

Question: “Will we be the first species we know that precipitated its own extinction as well as the extinction of however much of the biosphere we take with us – and watched it happen before our eyes and continued to do exactly what we know was causing it?” -Anonymous-

Answer: No!

References

1. “Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization” Kevin MacKay, Kindle 2018.https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-25/the-ecological-crisis-is-a-political-crisis/
2. Hubertus Fischer, Katrin J. Meissner, Alan C. Mix, Nerilie J. Abram, Jacqueline Austermann, Victor Brovkin, Emilie Capron, Daniele Colombaroli, Anne-Laure Daniau, Kelsey A. Dyez, Thomas Felis, Sarah A. Finkelstein, Samuel L. Jaccard, Erin L. McClymont, Alessio Rovere, Johannes Sutter, Eric W. Wolff, Stéphane Affolter, Pepijn Bakker, Juan Antonio Ballesteros-Cánovas, Carlo Barbante, Thibaut Caley, Anders E. Carlson, Olga Churakova, Giuseppe Cortese, Brian F. Cumming, Basil A. S. Davis, Anne de Vernal, Julien Emile-Geay, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Paul Gierz, Julia Gottschalk, Max D. Holloway, Fortunat Joos, Michal Kucera, Marie-France Loutre, Daniel J. Lunt, Katarzyna Marcisz, Jennifer R. Marlon, Philippe Martinez, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Christoph Nehrbass-Ahles, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Christoph C. Raible, Bjørg Risebrobakken, María F. Sánchez Goñi, Jennifer Saleem Arrigo, Michael Sarnthein, Jesper Sjolte, Thomas F. Stocker, Patricio A. Velasquez Alvárez, Willy Tinner, Paul J. Valdes, Hendrik Vogel, Heinz Wanner, Qing Yan, Zicheng Yu, Martin Ziegler, Liping Zhou. 
3. Palaeoclimate constraints on the impact of 2 °C anthropogenic warming and beyond. Nature Geoscience, 2018; 11 (7): 474 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-018-0146-0https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0146-0
4. “Don’t Even Think About It, Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change” George Marshal, Bloomsbury USA (August 18, 2015)
5. “Levelized Cost of Energy and Leveled Cost of Storage 2018, Lazard, https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/
6. “Cascading regime shifts within and across scales” Juan C. Rocha1,2,*, Garry Peterson1, Örjan Bodin1, Simon Levin 1,2,3,4 Science  21 Dec 2018: Vol. 362, Issue 6421, pp. 1379-1383 DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7850 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6421/1379

6) “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

PNAS August 14, 2018 115 (33) 8252-8259; published ahead of print August 6, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

7) “Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely” Adrian E. Raftery, Alec Zimmer, Dargan M. W. Frierson, Richard Startz & Peiran Liu Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 637–641 (2017)

8) “Well below 2 °C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes” Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan PNAS published ahead of print September 14, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618481114

9) “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” Occasional Papers IFLAS Occasional Paper 2 www.iflas.info July 27th 2018 https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/deepadaptation.pdf

10) “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis” Christian Parenti, Dissent 2013 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-radical-approach-to-the-climate-crisis

11) “Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges” Yann Robiou du Pont & Malte Meinshausen,  Nature Communications, volume 9, Article number: 4810 (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07223-9

12) “What Lies Beneath: The scientific understatement of climate risks”, Research Gate, September 2017, David Spratt, Ian Dunlop https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324528571_What_Lies_Beneath_The_scientific_understatement_of_climate_risks

13) “Scientists Say Ocasio-Cortez’s Dire Climate Warning is Spot On” Joe Romm, Think Progress, Jan 31, 2019 https://thinkprogress.org/scientists-defend-ocasio-cortez-12-year-ipcc-science-climate-warning-9daee90fae7b/

14) “Heterogeneous retreat and ice melt of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica” P. Milillo1,*, E. Rignot1,2, P. Rizzoli3,†, B. Scheuchl2,†, J. Mouginot2,4,†, J. Bueso-Bello3,† and P. Prats-Iraola3,† Science Advances  30 Jan 2019: Vol. 5, no. 1, eaau3433 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau3433

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3433

15) “Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492” Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 207, 1 March 2019, Pages 13-36

Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslina, Simon L.Lewis, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261

16) “How China’s Big Overseas Initiative Threatens Global Climate Progress” Isabel Hilton January 3, 2019 Yale Environment 360 https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-chinas-big-overseas-initiative-threatens-climate-progress

17) “The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment” Editors: Philippus Wester, Arabinda Mishra, Aditi Mukherji, Arun Bhakta Shrestha, Springer Link, Open Access Book, 2019 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-92288-1

18) “Three years to safeguard our climate” Christiana Figueres, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Gail Whiteman, Johan Rockström, Anthony Hobley, & Stefan Rahmstorf, Nature, 28 June 2017

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

(This is a draft of a short story I am working on for a book of short stories I am writing called, "The Book of Books I Will Never Write."  I am sharing it now in this indistinct form because of what is happening now in our world...)

Refugia

by D. H. Garrett

It had been built in the perfect place to solve a desperate need. And as large as it was -room for 30 million and more- it still rose above the horizon most gracefully. It had the revealing blessedness of a Mont Saint Michelle, but on a vastly grander scale, it had the magic of the Emerald City, but without the fakery of a little manipulative man behind a curtain. But the real miracle of the place, beside the compassion of its being, was it lightness. In terms of its weight upon the earth, it weighed nothing, its ecological footprint was zero.  And all around it, on the seeming endlessness of the Northern Great Plains, buffalo were again roaming, and the prairie grass was as tall as prairie grass had ever been.

It had all started with a dream, a vision. An old Lakota Sioux wiseman had seen it in his inner sight, and told a few. And there it would have stopped except for the fact that one of the few was his nephew and his nephew was the senior Senator from South Dakota. And old Senator Blackhorse had thought about it, recognized it for what it might be, and got to work talking with the right people to make it happen. 

It had been a rare moment of clear-sighted purpose for the nation as a whole. Abrupt climate change was ravaging the planet with floods and droughts and famine. The number of refugees had grown into the hundreds of millions, and no one wanted them, even though none of this was their fault. And they weren’t content of course to die in place. And so their movements reared up on a vast scale, swirling across borders, battering down walls, braving bullets, tearing down governments from within and without. And all they wanted, was what everyone wanted, a home, and chance to work and dream and raise their children in peace.

That is how the idea of Refugia was born. Out of pain and chaos and an old Indian’s idea of how it might end. The Senator called together the most innovative architects and city planners and engineers and ecologists and biologists and artists and dreamers and computer scientists and anthropologists and psychologists and they designed into existence a city that practically grew itself, that created its own energy and water and food; a city with room for 10’s of millions to lead good, healthy, well-educated and inspired lives of meaning and purpose and comradeship. A city so green and sustainable, that the airs and waters around it visibly healed from its presence.  

And they filled the city with those most in need: Palestinians and Afghans, Central Americans and Africans, people of every color and belief from all over everywhere, for climate change had left nowhere safe.  The skeptics felt it wouldn’t work, that fights would break out, that the city would soon burn to the ground from all of the sectarian fighting, (much as the world seemed to be doing). But a miracle had happened, and they all got along most splendidly (well of course there were squabbles, but little squabbles) for the Refugians, as they came to call themselves, found they had so much more in common, than what could ever keep them apart. And with their needs met, and their dreams fed in their beautiful new home, it was as if heaven had taken root in this one place on earth, in this one great living, organic city that was of the earth and with the earth, and nourished the earth, equally to what it got in nourishment from the earth, which wasn’t much -self sufficient as it was- except of course for  the place that had been provided for it.

And it all looked like it would work, with more Refugia’s planned, now that it was clear to all that the poisons had to be cleared from the air and the waters and the land, and that the earth could be largely re-wilded with humanity no longer needing to be a virulent parasite wanting to devour it all for itself, but rather that human technologies could meld seamlessly with the natural rhythms of the world and mankind could rest within them, prosperous but not destructively greedy, nourished and growing, but not at the expense of the planet itself.  Refugia betokened a Golden Age far beyond the dreams of even of the greatest dreamers. 

But then there were the others. They were well-armed, and hateful. They were Nativists and Racists, believers in strange interpretations of strange religions which somehow gave them the right to do whatever they wanted in the name of their God. And Refugia was their scourge, their anathema. Refugia, economic success that it was, put a lie to their smug sense of supremacy; Refugia’s visionary light of humanity’s possibilities for peace and greatness when all lived together accepting and equal, was exactly what drove them mad. They couldn’t stomach the idea that this compassionate trans-national cosmopolitanism not just worked, but that it excelled, and was felt by many to be unutterably beautiful. And so the hater’s plotted and schemed to tear it down, from within and without. They sowed lies and they sabotaged, and the more Refugia caught them in their subterfuges, the more incensed they grew.

The Refugians sought council among themselves to try and find ways of dealing with, defusing, defending against all of the hate. They offered their enemies Refugias of their own, offered to show them how it was done, said they could live their own lives with their own kind (whatever that was) at peace. But their overtures were rejected. “We don’t need your help,” they were told, “We were the ones who invented all of this while you lazy people were picking through your garbage dumps.”

Now this is where I should tell you how ended. But I cannot. I do not know for sure. I did not survive to the end of the troubles that, because of climate change and hate and inequality, came to devour the United States and much of the world. I know that as I lay dying, in a state of strange calm, various possibilities ran through my brain. Perhaps the Refugians found a hard way to defend themselves, though few defenses are impregnable, and powerful weapons tend to migrate to both sides of a conflict. Perhaps the most persuasively eloquent of the Refugians were able to calmly convince enough of those gathered against them to treat them as human and negotiate some common sense, if not amicable, solution. But those amongst the haters still open to talk I suspect were few. I smiled at the thought that Refugian scientists had developed a love bomb, an invisible gas that if released amongst the torch-bearing, rifle-bearing vigilantes, would trigger waves of love and remorse and forgiveness within them. But of course one never knows if such a chemical recourse would last.

And so I passed away before I know the end to this little story. In leaving my body, I had a brief sojourn in a Native American place, where I saw the old Lakota Sioux wiseman who had the original vision. I asked him if Refugia would survive. He smiled and gestured to the brilliant thick field of stars above and said, Refugia is always here.”

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

And yet another cry as we head toward something that looks very much like an abyss...A paper presented at a conference in Shanghai on "The Geopolitics of Climate Change"....and all along of course there really isn't anything political about this process....

Heroic Measures

D. H. Garrett

“Climate change is here. It is dangerous. And it is about to get much worse," 

Johan Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Abstract: The weakening of the polar vortex and the resulting climate extremes around the world are indicative of a phase transition for the earth’s climate. Because the level of emergency-level decarbonization is not likely to occur in time (due to the weakness of global governance, national governance, and a dominant economic system which is essentially fraudulent because it does not take into account negative externalities, including climate change costs and pollution), it is prudent to assume that we have initiated a sequence of rapid climate change. Because this transition is non-linear, once we go over this cliff (if we have not in fact essentially already done so) the energy required to climb back up to the relatively stable climate of the Holocene, will probably be several orders of magnitude greater than would have been required had we acted in time.

This paper examines three basic issues: 

First: what is the nature of the transition climate, with a focus on tipping points and their results, and what is the nature of the new climate phase attractor we are being drawn to.

Second: as the climate turns so extreme and chaotic that it becomes clear even to reluctant leaders that we are in severe trouble what can be anticipated in terms of national and international responses, with a focus on climate refugee issues and geoengineering schemes.

Third: what types of radical adaptations in terms of infrastructure, governance systems, and human and biodiversity sustainability will have the greatest likelihood of success

Introduction: I do not want to think that the human story is over. We have after all only been in existence for a relatively short few hundred thousand to a few million years or so depending on how expansive you want to consider the family tree. At any rate it is much too short to consider an accomplishment to be proud of relative to much longer lived species. 

But we are facing a major challenge due to climate change (and of course the lethality of our weapons technologies) which it is not an exaggeration to say has existential potential. Climate change has over earth’s history proven to be more a factor in the demise of species than say asteroids.

And indeed exoplanetary specialists who have identified and hypothesized a huge plethora of habitable planets with seemingly no one there are concluding that, what I call the Planetary Germination Rate -in which a species “blooms” from its home planet before it either kills itself in meaningless internecine warfare or poisons itself from climate change- that that rate is exceedingly low.

And indeed as a species we seem to have reached that dangerous fluxion point. Looked at one way, the prospects look grim. Looked at another way though there is great reason for hope. We have all the technologies we need either ready to deploy or in various stages of development to create a golden age of humanity on earth in which every child has a world class education and world class health care and lives in respected variegated societies that are at peace with one another.

And indeed, this vision of a near-future harmonious equitable eco-civilization is one which we must constantly bear in mind as we move through the coming times of trouble, and times of great trouble they will be.

In terms of climate change we are blowing through the 1.5 degree safe guardrail as if it didn’t exist. What this means is that a variety of known and probably unknown positive feedbacks are activated or are being activated and we have begun or are beginning a process of runaway climate change as the earth begins to transition to a different climate phase, a hothouse state.

There are basically two types of runaway climate change. In one, the type Hansen first modeled when he was trying to understand the atmospheric history of Venus, the planet basically becomes so hot that the oceans are out-gassed to space. Now the good new is that with a little effort we should be able to avoid that. That said recent papers suggest the threshold for that happening may be fairly low at the 9 to 11 degrees C range.

The bad news though is that the types of positive feedbacks, or tipping points, that would indicate we have gone over the cliff, are all indicating activation to various degrees. Most notable is the melting arctic, the quicker than previously expected degradation of Greenland’s ice sheet and those of the Antarctic, the increase in permafrost melting, the death of our coral reefs and ongoing die-offs of forests both from clearing and fires. Even the MOC has weakened markedly and much earlier than modeled. 

(Courtesy EDF)

Hell and High Water

It is important to recognize that each of these tipping points, can itself best be modeled as a complex system, the nature of whose phase change may vary, but can be simplistically best thought of as non-linear in nature. In other words there is a difference between a slope and a cliff. Moreover, all of these tipping points, are multiply nested in other systems and complexly interconnected to other tipping points and so when one goes, the effect on the others is profound. In other words, the dominoes are close enough to each other that we should not be surprised if a cascade effect occurs. All of this though can be modeled as part of a larger earth system phase change, out of the Anthropcene (which perhaps had better be recognized for what it is, brief) and into a probable hot house state.  In other words, the glaciation-interglaciation periodicity that the earth has exhibited for so long is reverting in some way thermally to an earlier state, perhaps analogous to the PETM or the late Eocene.

What does this mean in terms of weather, and yes, survivability for us -possessed of considerable hubris- humanoids?  And what is the timeline for this “snowballing” avalanche of troubles?  

Let me first consider the timing. Will it begin tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in 10 years, in 20 years? We must recognize first of all that it is happening now. The climate change attribution studies which have been performed on extreme weather events so far, point at such high levels of probability toward climate change causality that looking the other way is folly. It is true that for some reason, given the way IPCC reports etc., are written and the high-level of necessary conservatism that goes into scientific predictions on the basis of complex -but not complex enough- modeling, that we usually think in terms of a mid-century or end of the century prospectus for when the dire will really become DIRE. I cannot say that we should switch now from screaming “HELP,” to screaming “HELP! BLOODY MURDER!" while also panicking, waving our arms and trying to run headlong out of the burning building. It is one of the two. Because as we can see various level of activation occurring at all of the identified Tipping Points, they are probably showing us a picture not of gradual subsidence, but of fairly rapid collapse. The only thing that keeps us from clearly seeing this is our subjective sense of temporal speeds which in turn are determined biologically, neurophysiologically and to some extent culturally as a species.

Next let us consider the weather: presently it is periodically somewhat normal-like interspersed with increasing periods of chaos. This won’t last long (the seeming normality that is). Although phase changes are often graphed as being relatively smooth and quick, from A to B, from ice to water, or what have you, in fact in many systems, the phase change itself looked at at a high enough level of temporal resolution can be quite interesting, with elements seemingly switching back and forth between phases and spikes of unique, out of the ordinary behavior, as partially localized energy releases occur and strands of stability break resulting in odd configurations. This is certainly what we can expect in terms of the weather, but not just the weather. In other words we can expect drought and mega-drought, punctuated by “rain bombs” and other types of massive precipitation events. As the polar vortex grows weaker and weaker it can be expected, as a semi-intact higher density mass of air, to slip slide around, sort of like the way a top begins to wobble more and more as it loses velocity, or if you watch an ice cube on a hot plate, spitter and spotter and dance about as it melts.  The effects of of this climate chaos on food security, water security and biodiversity are well-known, though the gravity and the speed are probably not sufficiently appreciated, as least as measured by adaptive responses.  Although regional modeling of these effects is improving, it is difficult for even the best modeling to capture the highly irregular and inherently chaotically unpredictable nature of the phase-change inter-regnum period. That said, I think we’ve seen enough already to say we’re screwed.

As I said above, odd inter-phase change behavior can be expected not just from the weather, but also from political systems under stress. As Antonio Gamsci said, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our urgent task -socio-politically-economically- is to birth the new eco-civilizational age as quickly as feasible, so as to save as much of humanity and of the earth as possible. The greatest challenge facing this task may in fact be that of preventing the “morbid symptoms” from being so destructive that that we are left little but ashes and hate from which to build the new.  

But let us return to the modeling of systems a little less complex than that of human beings whose belief systems are colliding with realty. Modeling of the hot-house planet once the phase change has been completed is a little easier as we have paleo-climatic analogues, and because a new phase that is in a state of thermal equilibrium will have been reached. Ironically, interestingly enough, if we do manage to stall some of the tipping points with the application of measures specific to them, or through local, or regional or global geoengineering attempts, or through success at decarbonization attempts, we may actually be prolonging the inter-phase chaotic period. Moreover, if in fact we have, as appears to be the probable case, initiated an earth system phase change, even if our efforts to decarbonize are massively successful, it is by no means certain that we will be able to flip things back into a perfect replica of the Holocene. Some things once broken are very hard to fix, and thermodynamically speaking, and certainly bio-dynamically speaking, not all phase changes are reversible. We are probably, having destroyed the natural garden of the earth, going to have to learn to be humble, patient, chief apprentice gardeners of the earth for centuries at least, to recreate a planet that is evocative of and approaching to the natural paradises that all cultures mistake for heaven, and which more importantly, the human physical frame to considerable depth, finds itself most happy when abiding in.

In other words, the arguable science of these phase changes aside, the fundamental human question is, how will us humans respond to all of the problems? The main impediment to solving the problem of climate change up to now, can arguably be located inside our heads.  Although we have this human gift of being able to model in our various languages, to various degrees of accuracy, events that can reasonably be assumed will occur, the center of gravity of our response to the climate change challenge has in fact been at a more instinctual level, and in that sense, we have barely reacted at all, but instead have increased the speed of our “economic” activities and mostly ignored the little voices of reason telling us to slow down and do things in a different way based on a different set of more humanistic, values.  So given that rather tragic record, what -politically, economically, and scientifically- can we expect to be a likely set of responses? Actually, though this is in some way the crux of what might be of use in this paper, I want to say and in fact have to say, that the answer to that question is over-constrained. There exist a range of possibilities. It is, in other words, up to us. 

Civilizational collapse is certainly possible. It has happened to other civilizations in the past. Species and ecosystem collapse certainly must be left on the (collapsing) table. Intermediate states between total collapse and total smooth sailing through also seem quite probable given that we are clever monkeys and don’t want to die. Some regions and states may find the resources and technologies to “batten down the hatches” sufficiently to survive intact, while other poorer societies, or countries weakened by other issues, might find the added climate stress more than enough to cause their collapse also. The massive waves of refugees in turn might easily cause other proximate societies to collapse. At a minimum, the rather small number of refugees we are seeing so far, seems to be enough to increase rabid nationalism, forcing some wealthier countries to close their doors. And heck, it is such a small earth these days that we are all “proximate” to each other. Neo-isolationism does not arise in isolation. There are also examples of course of peoples in times of trouble coming together to work with common purpose toward a common goal, survival. When things get bad enough, the kind of WWII level response that should have been undertaken some time back, might well, probably will, be what takes place. When the need for concerted international effort becomes obvious enough, I think we will make our best efforts, even though, at that late date, and it is already a very late date, there will be quite a lot of “shit to hit the fan.” Though I personally think the human software modification approach (live simply, focus on human happiness) is the simplest and most energy efficient way to solving the problem, in fact there already are, (and will be quite a bit more) a number of clever technological “deus ex machina” solutions to provide us with the prosthetics that our greed now requires of us. And finally, though it seems right now the most unlikely scenario, we may respond so quickly and in such volume to this threat that, the impact as we go over the climate change cliff, is made much more mild. That and I want to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Heroic Measures in Freefall and at Impact

We do not know if the earth has a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order as part of some advanced directive it has crafted in its wisdom. In past extinction events (this is the 5^th) nature has taken its course. Since contemporary neo-liberal capitalism essentially regards the earth (with the exception of the wealthy of course) as a lifeless system whose value is only measured by the extent to which profits can be extracted from it -no matter the costs- one does not expect to find a DNR tucked away amongst the hills and crannies of disappearing wildernesses.  Instead, we can expect that the super-predator (homo sapiens sapiens) currently driving the rapid climate phase change which we are undergoing, will adopt so-called “Heroic Measures” to save its own skin. Most of the heroic measures –geoengineering schemes- being bandied about are in fact quite risky, having side-effects, both anticipated and no doubt unknown, which would cause us to say no, had we any other choice (we did of course have another choice, but made the wrong one…).

It is in other words, a hopeful time.

In that light I will present a brief overview of adaptive/mitigative approaches organized in terms of global, mezo, and micro-level applications. In some senses, though global level geoengineering responses might best effect root causes and have the greatest global efficacy, they also tend to be the most expensive and riskiest.  I will not address here renewable energy and efficiency measures except in passing, because, important as they are, those issues are well-covered elsewhere (one must add of course that their speed of deployment needs to be about an order of magnitude faster than it is at present).

Amongst global solar radiation reduction technologies, the most promising candidate is probably thought to be stratospheric aerosol injection. Global dimming. The “hazy-way” out of global frying. Unfortunately models appear to show it more effective for higher latitudes and encouraging of drought in the global south. As in any engineering problem there are probably work-arounds that can be found. 

Radical reforestation and aforrestation is another strong global candidate. While the problem of ramp-up speed can probably be solved, maintaining massive new forests under extreme climate conditions is no easy task, given that well-established forests are already dying off under the same conditions. That said, again, these problems are probably solvable.

Large scale seaweed farming on up to 9% of the ocean’s surface has also elicited considerable excitement as a way of sequestering Carbon, directly contributing to ocean de-acidification, and providing both a food and a fuel source. Speed of scale up, and maintenance issues also of course need to be solved.

At the mezzo-scale level there are numerous ideas about approaching the tipping points themselves to, at least, delay the switches from being thrown. The slow down of the MOC (Meridional Overturning Current) might be addressed by dumping massive amounts of salt into Greenland fresh meltwater to make it heavy enough to continue sinking thus maintaining the thermal conveyor belt function of the MOC. Or for that matter, the sources of the meltwater itself that are the problem for the MOC (not to mention sea level rise) could be addressed, and geoengineering technologies could be focused on the poles, Greenland, and the Himalayan glaciers, with the full understanding that there are huge advantages to maintaining some semblance of climate stability (not to mention not losing our coastal cities or putting Northern Europe in a deep freeze for a while) by preserving as much of the Earth’s cryosphere as possible.

At the micro-scale there are also a large number of possibilities. Their greatest advantage is in terms of regional adaptability, and the fact that if they don't work they have less of a global impact.

Water from air technologies have the potential for widespread application, given robust projections of major water shortages combined with increased desertification and the beginning of mega-drought regimes in some regions. Widespread deployment would help to maintain green carbon sinks in dry times, while at the same time essentially function as a way of taking water vapor (a major contributor to global warming) out of the air and use it as an agent of carbon bio-fixation.

Given the food security problem, because of chaotic and violent weather patterns and other issues, it is probable that we will need a new agricultural revolution if nothing else as a backup (and maybe later primary food supply). Vertical farming (at everything from the skyscraper to the household level) is a promising candidate.

In fact, if we are not able to address root causes quickly enough, and if global and mezzo-level geoengineering schemes prove to problematic, we will have to rethink all of our human infrastructure, because “Stationarity is Dead.” In other words the envelope of what was considered the range of possible climate, is over, and everything that we have built to date, is probably not going to withstand the multiple punches of a hot and angry Planet Earth.

We may in fact all get hot and bothered and resort to tried and true historical methods of dealing with our collective unhappiness. For example, there is that one excellent and expedient way to -at one fell stroke so to speak- alleviate both a great amount of excess consumption-driven climate change and the massive levels of global inequality: yes, I speak of (*sarcasm alert*) the guillotine.  This particular remedy will probably not be willingly acquiesced to by the global elites. That said, any fair system of global climate governance should include a hefty wealth tax on trans-national hiding of -if not ill-gotten- than at least carbon-heavy gains.

In conclusion, at least for now, we may in fact be reduced to living in air-conditioned malls, and having to put on our smart temperature-controlled undergarments, just to venture out to play on a planet that has shifted unrecognizably under our feet and made us into aliens no longer quite welcome upon her, buffeted about and mistreated in fact by Her, much as we mis-treated Her for lo these many years.

 

References

1. “Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely” Adrian E. Raftery, Alec Zimmer, Dargan M. W. Frierson, Richard Startz & Peiran Liu, Nature Climate Change, volume 7, pages 637–641 (2017) doi:10.1038/nclimate3352

2. “Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, Theme issue ‘The Paris Agreement: understanding the physical and social challenges for a warming world of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’ compiled and edited by Dann Mitchell, Myles R Allen, Jim W Hall, Benito Mueller, Lavanya Rajamani and Corinne Le Quéré; 13 May 2018; volume 376, issue 2119

3) “Net retreat of Antarctic glacier grounding lines”, Hannes Konrad, Andrew Shepherd, Lin Gilbert, Anna E. Hogg, Malcolm McMillan, Alan Muir & Thomas Slater, Nature Geoscience, volume 11, pages 258–262 (2018) doi: 10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z

4) “Albedo Enhancement by stratospheric suffer injections: More research needed” Alan Robock,  AGU Publications, Earth’s Future

5) “Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation” Stefan Rahmstorf, Jason E. Box, Georg Feulner, Michael E. Mann, Alexander Robinson, Scott Rutherford & Erik J. Schaffernicht, Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 475– 480 (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2554