Some Old Slogans for Continuing Debate on Climate Change

• Best pronounced with an accent from southern Scotland or the north of England: "Where there's muck, there's money." There's a history to environmental degradation for profit, and checking out old arguments can be useful to avoid accusations of bias in current arguments.

• "Posterity don't vote (and neither do most young people)."

Encourage them young folk to register to vote and get involved in boring elective politics. And remind old folks they might want to leave a livable world to their grandkids and/or avoid ending up Soylent Grey™ in their last days. On which subject, or part thereof ...

• "Let em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-Six!" — First national anthem, according to Mel Brooks's 2000-year old man. It's preferable to "Hurray for me; and piss on you all," but on a global issue a global-size "circle of concern" is a good idea. Global disasters will take Cave 76 with them.

• "Know how to answer an Epicurean": Talmudic advice meaning a theistic Jew should learn how to argue with a materialist. Similarly, atheists should learn how (when and if) to argue with theists and even Fundamentalists.You don't have to agree on fundamentals to come to some practical conclusions and work together. (Variation from 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness: ""We can pull a sledge together without being kemmerings" [§6] — we don't have to have a bonded, long-term, loving relationship with people [or even like them] to cooperate on specific projects.)

• "Rhetoric: The Art of Ethical Persuasion": That's *persuasion*, getting people to do what you want them to do (and which they should do: that "ethical" part). Winning the argument and/or getting Truth is for philosophy. So let it go with "global warming" and "severe climate change" and drop insisting on "anthropogenic" if it'll get turn the discussion n from survival strategies to the deep causes of the phenomena and/or will have you come across in another in a long line of elitist puritans trying to shame people. Earth is heating up; this is a long-term trend; it's dangerous — What can and should we do about it? Cutting down carbon emissions is one obvious thing, especially advisable since we should be doing it anyway (our descendants might want some handy hydrocarbons of their own and may be very pissed off to learn, "You freaking burned it?!" See above on Soylent Grey™.

Climate and the World Turned Upside Down (A.D. 7th Century, 1st Century and a Bit A.H.)

         One of my favorite quotations is usually attributed to Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, and it'd be appropriate for either of them, though it's probable neither said it. I'll pass it along, though: "War is God's way of teaching American geography" — and suggest a variation: «Planning for war is a pressing invitation to learn some history.»

         Unlike many in their civilian leadership — Donald J. Trump for one — U.S. war planners and others represented in the figure of speech "the Pentagon" are looking very seriously at climate change as "a national security threat," and some quick history lessons can help drive home the point that they have good reason to do so.

         The major history lesson is in a book like The Great Warming (2008), which has as its subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. But Brian Fagan's book was researched and written recently, and he relates "The Great Warming" — the Medieval Climate Anomaly of ca. 800-1300 C.E. — very specifically to global warming nowadays, and stresses its threat of extended droughts. What might be more persuasive is some historical work done a good while before our time and therefore innocent of our current political debates — and on a topic very directly relevant for one national security issue.

         So here is an excerpt from James W. Thomson and Edgar N. Johnson's An Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 (New York: Norton, 1937) — again 1937 — from Chapter 7, "The Empire of the Arabs" (I have marked but left unchanged locutions neutral in 1937 but probably discourteous today). The topic is the Muslim conquests of what Christians call the 7^th century and a bit thereafter, usually explained by both Muslims and historians from Christendom in religious terms. Thompson and Johnson have a different take.

          From these small beginnings at Medina the Arab church-state [sic] spread with prodigious rapidity. Within fifty years after Mohammed's death [in 632 C.E., 11 A.H.] it had conquered Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Within one hundred years it had spread to the frontiers of India to the east, and to the west had swept across North Africa through Spain and beyond the Pyrenees. [Usual explanation for such success (an act of God for the faithful; for secular historians) political cohesion combined with, and mutually reinforcing, religious fanaticism. …]

          The facts are quite otherwise. In the first place, it is impossible at this early date to speak of Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity against paganism characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been marked in practice by its tolerance. […]

          In the second place, it is impossible to speak of Mohammed's creating any such thing as Arab unity, nor can it be supposed that in any substantial way the nomadic Arab tribes suddenly consolidated into a unified state after his death. […] [163-64]

         The expansion of the Arabs is best understood in the light of previous movements out of the desert into the neighboring Fertile Crescent. These were constant phenomena, to be explained by the vicissitudes of climactic conditions, which always drove nomadic peoples onwards. It is now known that for a long time previous to Mohammed there had been a gradual movement of Arabs into the adjoining Byzantine and Persian empires. […] The [Arabian] peninsula itself was experiencing a periodic desiccation, which made life within it ever more unbearable and drove its inhabitants to seek relief elsewhere. It seems, accordingly, highly probably that what occurred would have happened [given the weakness of Persia and Byzantium after prolonged war (and plague)] even without Mohammed and Islam. (166).

         A couple things here. First, when you hear people talk about "Islam vs. the West," tell them that to say nothing of geography — Islam has been or remains the dominant religion in regions clearly in the western part of the Old World — there is the commonplace in European history that Islam joins the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic streams in the making of Medieval Europe. Second,  whether you accept the theory in Thompson and Johnson or not, note that in 1937 historians could find plausible that at least local long-term weather — "a periodic desiccation" — was a key factor in one of the most important political/military events in world history: the Islamic conquests and expansion leading to "The Empire of the Arabs" and, arguably, the final push taking western Europe from Late Antiquity into the early Medieval.

         Two common figures of speech for the countries on and around the Arabian Peninsula are "the Middle East" — how you'd see things if you're looking out from the British Isles toward your "Far East" — and "tinderbox": from a literal "box containing tinder, flint, a steel, and other items for kindling fires," and having as its tenor, "a potentially explosive place or situation."

         "Tinder" refers to dry slips of wood that you use for starting fires; "desiccation" means a drying out; in the Middle East and large areas in Africa, desiccation could get to desertification: taking dry areas to outright desert.

         And people will yet again move out, and there are few places to go nearby that (1) can support them and (2) do not have a lot of people already. Now add to that a large number of small-arms in the world and a fair number of people willing and able to sell not-so-small arms or teach how to make IEDs, and add to that the fairly recent and still vigorous development of Fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam, and fanatical varieties of the big three monotheisms and even in such fanaticism-resistant traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism.

         Take a tinderbox, add heat, wait for a spark. Or, change the figure of speech and let ISIS evolve into something more sophisticated, add a charismatic leader (a modern Saladin), oppose it to a Christendom relearning fanaticism, tell them all "God wills it!" (Deus vult!), and be prepared to learn geography.

         If very unlucky, you'll become and expert in geography and in the history of downright fascinating times parallel to the transition from Late Antiquity to early Medieval, known some places in Europe as "the Dark Ages."

Teaching Controversies: Global Warming

            An energetically polemical editorial in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel on "Global warming in the classroom" asserts that "Indiana" — presumably the Indiana General Assembly — erred in passing "an 'academic freedom resolution giving teachers great latitude in how they help students 'analyze and critique scientific theories,'" finding that resolution "almost an invitation to teach flat-Earth-theory mumbo jumbo and Earth-is-the center-of–the-universe nonsense" (22 June 2017).

            I taught a course in rhetoric and composition on "The Literature of the Life Sciences" where students analyzed and wrote about scientific controversies, including the "nonsense" of the theory of spontaneous generation: that under the proper conditions, life nowadays can arise and develop: e.g."if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog," as Hamlet puts it, or later when what we'd call bacteria arise in a suitable medium exposed to air.

            Spontaneous generation theory went against the Book of Genesis and its assertion that creatures were, well, created and since then reproduce "each after its kind" — but it was widely accepted until effectively exploded by elegant experiments, notably by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

            Studying that debate teaches science as a method — not a body of facts that dispel nonsense — but a method and as a human activity with social, political, philosophical, theological, and historical contexts. (Why wasn't there religious opposition to spontaneous generation theory the way there was to evolution?)

            Similarly, why did educated Europeans and others from ancient Greece on deny the evidence of their senses and come to believe the Earth wasn't flat, if lumpy, but a sphere? And how can we know that they knew? (Hint: Check the "ball and scepter" motif with kings: they don't hold a plate to signal power on our planet.)

            And, of course, it took a long time for the theory of a sun-centered universe to be accepted, and long time after that before the universe expanded to the universe or multiverse of today. (And I've got $100 for the favorite charity of the writers of "Classroom" if any one of them can write out from memory the main evidence for why common sense is wrong and the sun does not revolve around the Earth.)

            A tough job for teachers is getting kids interested, and those kids should at least be curious why their elders are so exercised over whether and how the Earth is warming and what, if anything we can and should do about it if it is.

            There's a great teaching opportunity there, not preaching some truth or other. It's just that teaching controversies requires broadly-educated teachers perhaps team teaching, and literate people reading essays of analysis, not giving multiple-choice tests.

The Great Warming (Again)

            Yo, liberals! One last time: Stop playing on guilt and insisting on Truth and that global warming is caused by people. 

            It's enough if we accept that Earth is going through a warming period, that the period looks to last a long time, and that the last time around — the "Great Warming" of the Middle Ages — that trend was peachy-keen for the Vikings and northern Europe but very bad for people in hot, dry places. 

            A standard book on the Medieval warming has the subtitle "Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations" — and the "fall" part got nasty. 

            If current warming has its root cause in subtle variations in energy production by the sun or in the Earth's orbit or inclination (etc.), there's nothing we can do about root causes. What we can do is slow the warming by reducing greenhouse gasses in Earth's atmosphere or at least slow down the increase in those gasses. 

            The obvious way to slow down the release of greenhouse gasses is to burn less carbon, which we should do anyway on the conservative principle that we owe future generations oil and coal and other carbon-stuff they might want to use. 

            And we really need to slow down climate change because there are a lot more humans than there were in the Middle Ages, we still like to live in areas subject to flooding, our civilization is much more complex, interdependent, and vulnerable, and we're armed with far more dangerous weapons. 

=========================

REFERENCE: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations Paperback – March 3, 2009, by Brian Fagan

Doing What We Ought to Do Anyway: Meat and Water (8 July 2014)

   In a moment of candor, an official of the Alumni Association or U of I Foundation or other money-raising activity of the Univsersity of Illinois told me that soliciting people like me — nonrich people — barely repaid the effort. We were solicited, persistently, so we'd give something and the "Development" people could record that gift and add it to their statistics and appeal to serious potential donors with "Hey" (or the equivalent in rich-people's speech), "89.37% of alums have contributed, so don't you want to do your part?!" Also, getting us to contribute small amounts early on in life kept or got us "invested" in the Big U, which would be of use to the solicitors if they hit us up later on, when we might have made some money.

      Something like that is going on in California where our Governor, Jerry Brown, is asking — with increasing intensity — ordinary folk to conserve water. 

      We in California do need water discipline. In a surprise best-seller, Brian Fagan looks at The Great Warming of about 900-1500 C.E., with the arresting subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Viking and more generally Nordic and European people did rather well the last time Earth warmed up; peoples in water-sensitive areas — including what is now the US Southwest —  often did not come through well, if at all.

      Which is why out here arguments on the causes of climate change and the details of proper responses can seem weirdly pedantic and perversely political.

      Right now, immediately, without debate, we ought to be taking the more obvious actions on all levels, including individuals: doing things we should be doing anyway.
      Given that future generations might want petroleum and maybe some coal for what are significantly called "petrochemicals," we should be leaving a fair amount in the ground and not, for God's sake, burning it.

      Given that beef is good and good for you — the film operation I work on is looking for money from ranchers ... — but Americans should reduce beef and pork consumption on health grounds, we would do well to go over to more chicken and fish to reduce methane release, a greenhouse gas.
     And for the last part — personal conservation of water — a story.

     I had Legg-Perthes disease as a child:  bone death in the ball and, in my case, socket of the hip. I recovered completely by sophomore year in high school, but I still found it of karmic appropriateness that I got through adolescence and young adulthood with no broken bones beyond one finger and a couple of toes. Anyway, I had never worn a cast until one time well into adulthood I slipped on black ice while jogging and got myself a carpal navicular fracture and wore a cast for three months. The cast removed, I went into high-rehab mode squeezing balls — and was back at my internist's office very quickly thinking I'd sprained every ligament and tendon in my hand.

      My doctor checked me out and said my hand was fine but that I should start with the big ball (a tennis ball) and work my way to the little ball of Silly Putty. He reminded me that I hadn't used that hand in three months and that the pain was normal and, indeed — "If you weren't feeling pain I'd have you at the hospital for neurological tests. ... Didn't the orthopedist explain that to you?" I told him the orthopedist had said, "There may be some discomfort," and my GP replied, "Ah! Doctor talk. You layfolk would say, 'There will be pain.'"
     And we got to talking of other things, one of which is relevant here. I told the doctor that I was happy to be showering again regularly, though I'd gotten proficient at sponge baths and had received no complaints on body odor. He said that spong-bathing was good — it turned out to be a crucial skill for when I broke my foot and that took a year to heal — he said it was good I'd learned about alternatives to showers since, "Americans bathe too much."

     My doctor was convinced that we showered and bathed more than was good for our skin and that this would become an increasing issue as I aged and — strongly relevantly here — as the US population aged.

      It won't make up for much of the water wasted on golf courses or sloppily used in agriculture, but Californians to start with can start adjusting to long-term drought with learning to take more sponge baths; and rich Californians (et al.) can cut back on demands for private swimming pools.


      We should be cutting back there already, and if we ordinary folk start conserving, the Governor can go to the heavy-users of water and say, "Hey," or the proper agri-biz form, "89.37% of your human-individual fellow citizens have cut back even on showers; so it's time to do your part." And we ordinary folk will have "investments" in water conservation — and maybe laying off the lamb and beef and pork — to support conservation by important people.

Fracking Pros and Cons (For Me, and Maybe You) [28 Oct. 2014]

"Where you stand depends on where you sit." — Rufus E. Miles

I'm beyond ambivalent on hydraulic fracturing — fracking — so let's say I'm "multivalent" and strongly conflicted.

            * Fracking has contributed to what is, as I write, a relative glut of oil, driving down the price. And that is generally good in economic terms, but not so much, to start with, for me, personally.
                        In my young 20's, I had three summer jobs that required a significant commute to work, and I vowed to never, if possible, ever do that again. It turned out to be possible, and even in California I don't have to spend much on gas, capping off my Prius once every couple of weeks or so, and getting change back from the $20 I pre-pay; so lower gas prices are nice, but not, for me, as a consumer, a big deal. On the other hand, in terms of my minute participation in the economy as a would-be producer — specifically of films — rather than a consumer, a continued boom in North Dakota (and higher prices of gold [it's complicated]) would be a whole lot more important.
                        Low oil prices, though are, again, fairly minor and mostly good for Americans, but they are major issues, and not good, in places like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. My grandparents fled the Russian Empire, and I have no great love for Mother Russia, and I don't care much one way or another about Iran and Venezuela. Still, American foreign policy will be helped with Russians and Iranians who are fat, comfortable, calm, at worst mildly corrupt, and up for some cooperation where interests coincide. Similarly with that awakening (and geographically pretty close) giant, Venezuela. Anyway, Iranians and Russians who feel threatened and insecure are likely to get seriously belligerent toward us, and will be a problem. We don't want any of those three to have money to throw around on military adventures, but we do want them in a mood to deal. Especially Iran and Russia: we must deal with them on nuclear arms issues and on an Islamic fanaticism (at least of the Sunni variety) that has long bothered Russians and in current forms scares even Iranian theocrats.
            * Fracking has helped keep down the price of natural gas, and electricity, and back when I lived in Ohio, that was important: One winter month my gas bill for a two-bedroom, well-insulated house, with most of the rooms closed off, and with me depending a lot on space heaters and layers of clothing — was $320. But in "south-central-coastal California," where I now live, I keep my furnace turned off almost the entire year and keep money on account for my gas bill — which includes gas for cooking — by mailing off a check for $100 every eight months or so. Like most of my neighbors, I don't have air-conditioning and the sort of power bills that come with A/C, so I'm not much affected by changes in the cost of electricity that come with changes in the cost of natural gas (plus, of course, I'm an old fart, and I turn off lights and any electrical devices I'm not using). So the price of natural gas means little to me personally but will be very important to my friends and family and fellow citizens "Back East" if we have another hard winter.
            * By making North America more energy independent, fracking reduces the importance of oil as a component of US calculations in foreign policy in the Middle East, and it may indirectly and over the long haul reduce the influence of natural gas in the relations between the European Union and Russia — both of which are Good Things. Probably. In any event, the thought of being able to tell the Wahhabist elite of Saudi Arabia (a wholly-ruled possession of The House of Saud) to go screw a Ferrari fleet, is unquestionably attractive.
             * For all the positive economic possibilities, however, hydrocarbons from fracking —especially cheap hydrocarbons — are an environmental problem.
                        The cheaper oil and natural gas get, the fewer the incentives to leave them in the ground for future generations — even if we get room-temperature fusion power, people will probably want petrochemicals — and to burn them now. The more we burn them now and over the near future, the more greenhouse gases and the more the human contribution to climate change. The last time around for global warming, the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was peachy-keen if you lived in Scandinavia and were setting out for Iceland or Greenland. If you lived in areas that were already hot and dry however, long-term warming could be very, very bad. At least there seem to be correlations going back to ancient Sumer and pharaonic Egypt between (a) long hot spells and (b) political nastiness at best, and the disappearance of civilizations at worst.
                        For you folks who live in areas with Great Lakes and mighty rivers, where the water falls out of the sky, drought is probably not an immediate concern. In California and the US southwest, where stealing water is a long-standing inter- and intrastate sport, water is a crucial concern.
                        Insofar as fracking contributes indirectly to global warming, it's a problem. Insofar as fracking can pollute or poison water supplies, it's an immediate threat.
                        In some ways in California, fear over water is good news. We've been fracking for oil out here for a generation without problems serious enough to come to public attention; however, the public, and, far more important, California's AgriBiz Hegemons of the Universe are concerned enough about water that the General Assembly has started regulating fracking very carefully. But California is a heavily Democratic state nowadays, and tolerant of regulation (although pretty much uniquely, we don't charge extraction fee for oil: Standard Oil of California may be long gone as a corporation, but their influence lives on; but I digress). California will probably regulate fracking to ensure the safety of the strawberry crop (etc.), but if you live in an area that's still subject to decent rainfalls and indecent deniers of science — and worshippers at the carboniferous altar of Coal, Gas, Oil, and Deregulation — you may be drinking your water from bottles fairly soon and learning that a daily shower is not a necessity.  
            * A more remote concern is that fracking — or disposing of fracking wastes — may cause earthquakes. In California earthquakes are to be feared, but it would be good to have a number of small earthquakes if that puts off for another couple of lifetimes The Big One. And as a California convert who lived in the Midwest when during oil shortages a lot of Texans had bumper stickers on gas-guzzlers reading, "DRIVE FAST; FREEZE A YANKEE!", the thought of some quakes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is not totally unpleasant. Also, the only earthquake I've ever experienced that got me (and the neighbors) out of the house and asking "What the fuck?!" was in Oxford, Ohio. That was maybe fifteen years ago — I'd have to check when I first bought earthquake insurance — but quakes far away from the edge of tectonic plates have happened and will happen again (Can you properly mispronounce, "New Madrid"?). And triggering Midwestern quakes is a legitimate fear.

Well, etc.: including concerns about transporting oil by rail or pipeline, discouraging development of cleaner energy sources not based in carbon, and fracking operations on oil-drilling platforms that aren't in my backyard exactly but are easily visible from our slowly-recovering city beach. So I will courageously and unambiguously assert firmly, Well, yeah, we in the US should proceed with fracking, but slowly, carefully, cautiously, and in moderation. And to encourage caution, keep an close eye on the weather, and let's have some significant taxes on carbon emissions and, more generally, fossil fuels.