The facts of catastrophic climate change have become so alarming that growing numbers of scientists feel they can no longer hide behind inscrutable jargon, masks of neutrality, professional decorum, and robotic objectivity. When paragons of affectless detachment and Spock-speak begin dropping F-bombs at prestigious conferences, undertake civil disobedience, and call for mass resistance movements to overtake the forces of planetary destruction, there is a sea-change in the scientific world, appropriately so, something that far transcends “value-laden” research to become thunderous calls for action, anger, and uprising.
It seems the top experts know something pacifists and delusional vegans (who can only talk of the temporary reduction of meat consumption IN THE US while ignoring soaring global rates and remaining mute about the severity of climate change) don’t — the earth is fucked, time is running out, ivy league vegan outreach adds insult to injury, and it’s too late for education. The courage and integrity of the new generation of activist-scientists to speak truth to power and lay their careers on the line also puts 99.999% of academics to shame, narcissists and cowards who would rather lose species and ecosystems over a career advance any day.
The choice is mass rebellion or catastrophic collapse. Despite the false impression given by the final sentence of this article, while vocal, confrontational, and politicized climate scientists could emerge as key forces of change, the true catalysts will be mass resistance movements erupting globally. But of that, we have no guarantee and as of yet, little hope to avert impending disaster on an unimaginable scale.
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Why Earth and Atmospheric Scientists Are Swearing Up a Storm and Getting Arrested.
By Jonathan Mingle, Slate, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012
NASA scientist and climatologist James Hansen takes part in a mock funeral parade during Climate Change Campaign Action Day in 2009 in Coventry, England
Many of us have wondered at some point in almost precisely these terms: “Is Earth Fucked?” But it’s not the sort of frank query you expect an expert in geomorphology to pose to his colleagues as the title of a formal presentation at one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings.
Nestled among offerings such as “Bedrock Hillslopes to Deltas: New Insights Into Landscape Mechanics” and “Chemical Indicators of Pathways in the Water Cycle,” the question leapt off the pages of the schedule for the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. Brad Werner, a geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, is one of the more than 20,000 Earth and atmospheric scientists who descended on downtown San Francisco this week to share their research on everything from Antarctic ice-sheet behavior to hurricane path modeling to earthquake forecasting. But he’s the only one whose presentation required the use of censorious asterisks. When the chairman of Werner’s panel announced the talk’s title on Wednesday, a titter ran through the audience at the naughtiness of it all.
Why shout out the blunt question on everyone’s mind? Werner explained at the outset of the presentation that it was inspired by friends who are depressed about the future of the planet. “Not so much depressed about all the good science that’s being done all over the world—a lot of it being presented here—about what the future holds,” he clarified, “but by the seeming inability to respond appropriately to it.”
That’s probably an apt description of legions of scientists who have labored for years only to see their findings met with shrugs—or worse. Researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, for instance, published a paper in Nature Climate Change this week showing that carbon emissions have reached record levels, with a 2.6 percent projected rise in 2012. In another AGU presentation, Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration posed the question: “Will realistic fossil fuel burning scenarios prevent catastrophic climate change?” He did not seem optimistic. “We might end up burning 900 billion tons of carbon” from oil, gas, and coal, he announced. “We can have a managed path to lower emissions—or do it by misery.” A guy next to me in the audience gave a kind of hopeless snort. The head of NOAA and polar experts held a news conference at the conference entitled, “What’s going on in the Arctic?” This year broke all sorts of records: the lowest recorded sea-ice extent, the lowest recorded snow cover extent and duration, and the most extensive recorded melting event on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, among other milestones. “I’ve studied Greenland for 20 years now; I’ve devoted my career to it,” Jason Box of Ohio State University intoned somberly, “and 2012 was an astonishing year. This was the warmest summer in a period of record that’s continuous in 170 years.”
Werner’s title nodded at a question running like an anxious murmur just beneath the surface of this and other presentations at the AGU conference: What is the responsibility of scientists, many of them funded by taxpayer dollars through institutions like the National Science Foundation, to tell us just exactly how fucked we are? Should scientists be neutral arbiters who provide information but leave the fraught decision-making and cost-benefit analysis to economists and political actors? Or should they engage directly in the political process or even become advocates for policies implied by their scientific findings?
Scientists have been loath to answer such questions in unequivocal terms. Overstepping the perceived boundaries of prudence, objectivity, and statistical error bars can derail a promising career. But, in step with many of the planet’s critical systems, that may be quickly changing. Lately more and more scientists seem shaken enough by what their measurements and computer models are telling them (and not just about climate change but also about the global nitrogen cycle, extinction rates, fisheries depletion, etc.) to speak out and endorse specific actions. The most prominent example is NASA climatologist James Hansen, who was so freaked out by his own data that he began agitating several years ago for legislation to rein in carbon emissions. His combination of rigorous research and vigorous advocacy is becoming, if not quite mainstream, somewhat less exotic. A commentary in Nature last month implored scientists to risk tenure and get arrested, if necessary, to promote the political solutions their research tells them are required. Climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows recently made an impassioned call on their colleagues to do a better job of communicating the urgency of their findings and to no longer cede the making of policy prescriptions entirely to economists and politicians.
Lonnie Thompson, one of the world’s foremost experts on glaciers and ancient climates, framed the dilemma in a speech he gave to a group of behavioral scientists in 2010:
Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.
That’s the sound of serious-minded scientists fretting out loud to the rest of us that the earth is indeed fucked, unless we get our shit together. More and more are willing to risk professional opprobrium to drive that message home.
Box is a prime example. A veteran Arctic researcher, Box was arrested alongside more than 1,000 others in 2011 outside the White House while protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico for export, thus facilitating the liberation of a vast quantity of climate-warming and ice-sheet-disintegrating carbon. “Taking that stand was arguably the most important thing I’ve done,” he told me, and that includes a highly regarded body of work on Greenland ice-sheet dynamics. “I’ve taken a number of perceived political risks. The groupthink was, ‘You’re wasting your time, you’re risking your career,’ ” he said. Such actions might one day keep him from membership in the National Academies of Science, he mused aloud, but he didn’t seem too concerned. As he sees it, he can pursue rigorous science and be an engaged, concerned citizen at the same time. “I have a 14-month-old daughter,” he explained simply.
The bulk of Werner’s talk, as it turned out, was not profane or prophetic but was a fairly technical discussion of a “preliminary agent-based numerical model” of “coupled human-environmental systems.” He described a computer model he is building of the complex two-way interaction between people and the environment, including how we respond to signals such as environmental degradation, using the same techniques he employs to simulate the dynamics of natural systems such as permafrost, glaciers, and coastal landscapes. These tools, he argued, can lead to better decision-making. Echoing Anderson and Bows, he claimed it as a legitimate part of a physical scientist’s domain. “It’s really a geophysics problem,” he said. “It’s not something that we can just leave to the social scientists or the humanities.”
Active resistance by concerned groups of citizens, analogous to the anti-slavery and civil rights movements of the past, is one of the features of the planetary system that plays an important role in his model. If you think that we should take a much longer view when making decisions about the health of the “coupled human-environmental system”—that is to say, if you’re interested in averting the scenario in which the Earth is fucked—then, Werner’s model implied, resistance is the best and probably only hope. Every other element—environmental regulation, even science—is too embedded in the dominant economic system.
I asked Werner what he sees as scientists’ role in contributing to this kind of resistance, the kind of direct action taken by researchers like Hansen and Box. Werner views his own advocacy as separate from his scientific work. “To some extent, [science is] a job, and a job I really like, and I have the good fortune and privilege to have,” he told me. “In my other life, I am an activist, but there’s a line. Both sides inform the other. And I think that that is healthy. But when I’m doing geophysics, I’m a geophysicist. When I’m doing activism, I’m an activist.”
Werner agreed that more and more scientists are now engaging in advocacy than in the past. “Even if you say, ‘OK, I’m not going to advocate anything. I am simply going to make sure that I am going to produce results which are useful and available to a broad range of people,’ that’s a decision that researchers have to make.” This is not just an academic question. Anderson and Bows’ work, for instance, suggests that economic growth in the short term is simply incompatible with the (nonbinding) commitments made by most U.N. member states to keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This, of course, is not a message that is making any headway with the leaders of those countries. “The elephant in the room sits undisturbed while collective acquiescence and cognitive dissonance trample all who dare to ask difficult questions,” Anderson and Bows write. Getting relevant information into the hands of those more likely to ask those questions is, Werner said, part of his responsibility as a scientist.
Box agrees and is launching a new initiative called the Dark Snow Project, which aims to conduct the first crowdsourced scientific expedition to the Arctic, measuring how soot from North American wildfires might be accelerating Greenland’s ice melt. He and his colleagues plan to make their results publically accessible via video and other online tools, and he sees the project eventually growing into an organization that does rapid-response field science in the public interest.
As for the big question—is Earth fucked?—Werner announced in his talk that he has done some preliminary runs of his model. At this point I could sense the audience lean forward collectively on their seats. First he simulated the global economy proceeding into the future without the drag of environmental management decisions. “What happens is not too surprising,” he told us evenly. “Basically the economy fast chews up the environmental resources, depletes those reservoirs, resulting in a significant amount of environmental damage.”
Then he factored in some environmental management, presumably of our standard, EPA cost-benefit-analysis-driven variety, and found that “it delays the environmental damage but it doesn’t prevent it.”
That’s not too surprising either. But it also implies we’re eventually, definitely fucked. Still, there’s a choose-your-own-adventure element to the story that has yet to play out. Resistance, Werner argued, is the wild card that can force dominant systems such as our current resource-chewing juggernaut onto a more sustainable path. Werner hasn’t completed that part of his model, so we’ll have to wait to find out what happens. But during the Q-and-A session, he conceded that “even though individual resistance movements might not be fast enough reacting to some of these problems, if a global environmental movement develops that is strong enough, that has the potential to have a bigger impact in a timely manner.”
In other words, according to at least one expert, maybe the Earth is not quite fucked yet after all. But the ultimate outcome may depend on how much, and how many, scientists choose to wade into the fray.
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thanks as usual for spreading the news… reposting
// “danger to civilization” //
The cultural assumption that humanity is civilized promotes a blinding and subsequently fatal narcissism. There can be no “civilization” while the individuals who supposedly comprise it fail to demonstrate civilized behaviour.
EL
point well taken
The Earth isn’t dying, it’s being raped and murdered, but the rapists and murderers have names and addresses.
yes and no, the ecosystems are dying; the oceans are turning into acid, rainforests into stumps, and deserts into grasslands. This is a kind of death. The earth will survive us (unless we detonate a gazillion nuclear bombs in its core), but ecosystems are collapsing everywhere right now. I once read a piece that said the earth could become so degraded someday, it will look like the moon or mars in its barren rocky bleakness. As books and documentaries on the theme of the “world without us” show, the earth in time will reclaim everything and regenerate and heal, but right now in some sense ecosystems are dying. The earth will live, but as a lush blue force of life, or as barren rock and caked mud fields? That’s not life, thats not evolutionary abundance… but in time (the earth is middle age at 4.6 billion years, giving evolution plenty of time to revive) yes, the beauty and fecundity of earth can be restored, but the sooner we leave this planet (or, unlikely, live harmoniously and sustainably with it), the soon it will once again flourish and teem with life.
“…as a lush blue force of life” what a beautiful and true way of describing our perfect Earth <3
Your current articles are timed perfectly with the class I’m currently in, Environmental psychology. My professor just posed a question on what to do with people who bury their heads in the sand regarding climate change. I had plenty of suggestions!
Most of my classmates are just so damned proud of themselves for rinsing out those cans and plastic containers for recycle and occasionally educating others to do the same. Meanwhile, they are meat eaters who don’t have a clue!! Is there a significance to the date 2048 in terms of serious resource scarcity? I heard this date mentioned in a video somewhere… 35 years is not that far off!
it’s one estimate and they vary, usually dates of crisis events get bumped up as scientists realize breakdown events like melting ice sheets are happening much faster than even pessimistic estimates; there are a lot of variable in an estimate like you cite, with assumptions and unknown variables, so i would try to get some other estimates, perhaps Michael T. Klare is the best writer on resource wars; see his various books on Amazon or the like and he has interviews and papers online. The apathy of people in the face of species extinction, the animal holocaust, and climate change is mindblowing, including among the victory vegans who think the world is in a state of progress. There was a vegan commenting on my intro to this blog post on reedit i saw last night, where a vegan said i didnt know anything about vegans because they are well aware of the environmental impact of meat consumption. Well, yeah, pretty basic, comes with the territory, but that does not mean you find vegans talking about the specifics of climate change or voicing warranted pessimism about the overall state of the planet, which was my pint. As I have long maintained, they almost never tall about climate change or the severity of the ecological crisis as a whole, because its a downer and they are too busy back slapping about all their victories, as the rhinos and elephants are being wiped out and the planet is preparing to shirk us off like a flea. Vegan organizations especially will avoid this topic as it would affect their donations and volunteer numbers and moral, just keep taking the Soma good vegans — I never listen to vegan when I want to know about the ecological crisis, i go straight to the scientists who are deluded enough to think that you save an animal for every tofu burger you eat and every salad cools off the earth! This guy, like almost everyone else, cannot take my point that while meat consumption may be down in the US (right now and over recent years), it is rapidly rising in China, india, Indonesia, and elsewhere globally, and so what is the victory party about when we are badly losing the war against meat consumption, the animal holocaust, species extinction, and systemic social and ecological crisis. Vegans are cultists, I systematically avoid them and their nauseating potlucks (of course I remain a 20 year + vegan), and it has come to the point I am embarassed to call myself a vegan, the word is ruined, as Francione co-opted and ruined (depoliticized) the word abolitionism. So many vegans brag about their atheism (I was never religious myself), but scratch a vegan atheist and you find a religious fundamentalist who has a deep psychological need for a “leader” like Francione in many cases, and his infallible “truth,” and more generally have a need for simplistic answers to complex issue and intractable problems.
I hear you. I imagine that before Earth became that degraded, the degraders would have seen the demise of their own species, absent as you say, some weapon-related incident. Try as I might to think positively, I see little likelihood of a positive turnaround effected by humanity. That the planet would recover is a comforting (in the face of fatalism) thought, and realistic, again absent some weapon-related incident. I find hope in what potential I’ve read into Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, such as the living entity that the planetary ecosphere could be seen as responding in a similar way to how organisms that live in it respond to infection. At the risk of sounding simplistic, (and to those that level such I charge I would say that there are cultures that predate western cultures that do have a suchlike view), certain planetary symptoms could be seen to mirror human biological responses to viral infection, high temperature, sweating, shaking. Perhaps I reach too far in my search for comfort.
Yes it is hard to voice these real worries in public when I speak rather than the more upbeat alliance politics approach. I do fear we are fucked, and my hope has shifted galaxies away from 19th century Marxist metaphysical models of revolution I entertained in my undergrad years to hoping we can save enough fragments of biodiversity and ecosystems for it all to regenerate as soon and as well as possible. That will happen best if we are gone, and totally gone, as in airborne-ebola virus gone (haha, would we then resurrect as zombies in the apocalypse as you see in 1000 movies?). The tactical consequences of this position vs. total liberation are disturbing enough in their logical force that I cannot even air them in my head, let alone have the bad judgment to voice them in public, but there is a utilitarian argument for human demise for the greater good of biodiversity and the earth and there are inexorable logical conclusions that suggest different tactics than solidarity, sisterhood, and power to the people! Haha, maybe I’ll write it down in science fiction form, under the pseudonym of Gary Francione or David Jentsch, to great champions of nonviolence
Again, I hear you , and have friends who’ve opted for a personal strategy some time ago that includes, among other things, not breeding.
Got myself fixed a year ago, wasn’t pleasant but glad I did and every environmentalist, animal activist, and vegan should do the same (“oh, but then the inferior people will breed!” they always say with more than a bit of elitist and eugenics overtones, or they think their kids will grow up to be vegan warriors, but could just as well I suppose (i dont know for sure, I only raise stray cats) buy a BUrger King franchise
Haha. there’s definitely material for that Sci-Fi book. This or that, all power to your pen.
Thank you for the resources.
I shouldn’t have been so sarcastic about my classmates since I was just as ignorant several years ago. I remember your comments about vegans, pot lucks, and the fact that you’d rather have a conversation with your hunter neighbor than most vegans. I completely understand now. 
“Vegans” keep their heads in the sand because they’re happier that way. All those numbers that PETA and others put out about saving x amount of animals if you go vegan never made sense to me. Especially with the knowledge that the rest of the world is after the so-called freedoms and glory we have in Western society. Hell, they built a Burger King on post in Wildflecken, Germany in 1986. (My senior year in high school!) My husband calls me “Debbie Downer” now. I don’t care. I’m still trying to find a sane balance and it’s difficult. Life just ain’t as fucking rosy as it used to be!! On a different note, I suppose one of the upsides to having children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), is that there will be no pro-creation going on for them. My daughter is the only verbal and potty trained one but she definitely has her issues. I can’t say with certainty that she will be able to do a spectacular job of taking care of herself so believe me, she will be ‘fixed.’ Never mind the fact that she has a 100% chance of having a child with autism. Changing the subject yet again, 
I love the fact that researchers are now recognizing that they need to be shouting their data in the streets since handing it over to government officials and other organizations is not working in our favor. As long as we have governments that continue to keep their hands in the pockets of the oil, gas, coal, AG, and Pharma corporations, we are FUCKED! 