More Reasons to Love the Sounders, Soccer
Seattlest Pix 09Nov20
Friendly Folk-Pop for the Kids: Hey Marseilles at Vera This Saturday
Excavator Rampage in Stanwood
Can't Miss It: Weekend Edition Nov 20-22
That was the clear message at Benaroya Hall last night, where New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert presented a sampling of the climate change research she covers in her much-lauded book (Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change), and then joined a few colleagues on-stage for a panel discussion. Touching on a few of the main locations and research findings from her book, the punchline is a real punch in the gut, or as Kolbert summarized: "Society is not essential, it is contingent."
Hearing what Kolbert has discovered as she's tromped from Greenland to Antartica and a dizzying array of locations in between is like coming home to find your beloved sitting solemnly on the couch, waiting to utter the words "We have to talk." You've known this was coming, even if you buried it or ignored the subtle yet persistent warning signs. Your skin prickles, you futilely draw your breath and swallow hard as you feel the distance between your heart and stomach grow, one crawling up into your throat and the other dropping low into your pelvis. "Okaaaaaaay" is all you manage out loud while internally you think Oh Shit.
And Oh Shit is right. Speaking to an audience she acknowledged didn't need much convincing that global warming was real, and telling us "this won't be very reassuring," Kolbert touched on material covered in the post-script to her book: recent research results show warming signs, such as Artic Ocean ice levels shown in the above image from NOAA, are proceeding at a faster rate than the climate models had predicted. For those remaining climate skeptics (a position that is thankfully becoming increasingly publicly perilous), this takes the air out of the claim that models are just that, computer models, and things might just turn out differently. They're right on one count, but the bad news is that things might just turn out a hell of a lot worse, and feigning uncertainty as a means to avoid action is clearly foolish. That certainly wasn't the tack we took when we thought there was a slight chance that a few people might try to blow up a plane (or planes) with some liquid, she pointed out to a great deal of chuckling. So why hesitate about something so much more certain, and dangerous on such a grander scale?
Kolbert concluded her talk by indicating that there is a far higher degree of anxiety and concern about this topic within the scientific community than we are aware of in the public. She was clearly but politely calling out the media and journalists: do not sit on this any longer, stop qualifying global warming as something "regarded by many scientists as real" because it is real. She also pointed a kind finger directly at the audience when she closed with "Priviledged Americans in particular must take an active role." That's you Seattle, the place she extolled at the beginning of her talk as "a city that actually takes the future seriously." But she's far to eloquent and polite to add to that, "Now get off your passive-aggressive asses and actually do so."
The panel, moderated by New York Times science writer Tim Egan, brought K.C. Golden, policy director for Climate Solutions (and former special aide to Mayor Paul Schell), and UW Philosophy professor Stephen Gardiner (a surprising but welcome addition to the discussion) to the stage with Kolbert to discuss practical solutions to combating global warming. The discussion mostly focused on why the public and political reaction to the ever-increasingly real crisis of global warming does not match the level of anxiety within the scientific community. The problem is part scale (just too damn big for anyone to wrap their head around it), part politics (partisan sniping, China finger-pointing), and part language (distilling science vocabulary to the public, not letting scientific focus on facts and data be conveyed as dispassion). Egan mused that we do not have a "Nelson Mandela of global warming" to inspire and lead the masses. Hasn't Al Gore just applied for that job?
They were unanimous that as a country, we must own up to this: we must admit we have caused this problem, because the amount of work required to reverse what we have started is monumental. The panel didn't say this directly, but we presume they mean that without taking responsibility, we will always be in a position to find a scapegoat, a reason not to own up to the urgency and difficulty of what we must do. It is "a challenge to our moral focus" according to professor Gardiner (who was the willing target of Egan's numerous playful swipes at Gardiner's "surprising" ability to answer questions succinctly; not a typical result from a philosopher, nudge nudge). As an individual, Kolbert suggested in closing that the single biggest thing we can do is make our next car purchase (calling all Seattle SUV owners) one that halves the emissions of our previous car.
In the preface to "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" Kolbert says:
Humans aren't the first species to alter the atmosphere...But we are the first species to be in a position to understand what we are doing. Computer models of the earth's climate suggest that a critical threshold is approaching. Crossing over it will be easy, crossing back quite likely impossible.As we exited Benaroya and went in search of our car, we forlornly thought that if we could harness the urgency and the pointless fear currently engulfing this country about terrorism, it could be aimed in the direction of what feels like the single biggest threat that we currently face as human beings.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Post a comment (Comment Policy)