Increasingly lethal heat waves

 

Just finished this book (first cited it here). Jeff did a great job covering the global breadth of troubling issues, including the depressing voluminous statistics accompanying them. Well worth your time.

 

I will just post below this one infuriating excerpt pertaining to desperate illegal migrants attempting to cross into the ever-hotter southwest U.S.

“El Camino del Diablo," or the Devil’s Highway, is an ancient passage in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona that runs through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a US Air Force bombing range, and the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, and more or less directly over the grave of writer and desert hell-raiser Edward Abbey.  The Devil’s Highway is a haunted place. Stories of people struggling in the desert’s merciless heat, tongues swollen from lack of water, stumbling, hallucinating, stripping off their clothes, go back centuries. Here among the saguaro cactus and ironwood trees, suffering from heat is an ancient and tragic ritual. Here, heat is not so much an engine of migration as a migration barrier, a thermal wall that blocks or kills anything that attempts to cross it, just as warm water in a river is a migration barrier for spawning salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

One person who understands all this as well as anyone is John Orlowski, a member of No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that helps migrants in their dangerous journey across the US/ Mexican border. Orlowski is in his early sixties, with a shock of white hair and a deep desert tan. He has the strong, lanky build of a lifelong mountain climber (he has scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan three times), with a nose that tilts off to the right like it was broken in a fight back in the day. While other men his age settle into retirement in a condo in Florida or the Rockies, Orlowski moved to Ajo (pop. 3,600), an old copper mining town on the Mexican border about two hours from Tucson, to help migrants get safely across the desert.

I met Orlowski one morning for breakfast at the Agave Grill, a restaurant in Ajo decorated with watercolors of saguaro cactuses and rattlesnakes. “Ajo is a heavily militarized place,” Orlowski told me. Besides the fifteen sheriffs in this sparsely populated county, there is a new US Border Patrol station just outside of town, where five hundred Border Patrol agents work. Still, the desert around here is vast, and the migrants are many. Over coffee, Orlowski explained how the border police use helicopters to patrol the most remote parts of the borderlands. If they spot a group of migrants, they use a technique called dusting, in which they lower the helicopter down to thirty or forty feet above the migrants, kicking up a huge dust storm and scattering the migrants. “When they are alone, they are much more vulnerable,” Orlowski said. It is a brutal technique. Many of the people who die have gotten separated from their families and travel companions and end up wandering alone in the desert. In the last three decades, No More Deaths estimates that more than nine thousand people have died here on the Devil’s Highway, virtually all of them from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Orlowski pointed out that there are lots of Border Patrol agents in places where it is easy to cross. And far, far fewer in places where it is hot and dangerous to cross. “Part of their strategy is to funnel migrants through the hottest, most dangerous regions of the border,” Orlowski explained.

“So, basically, the US Border Patrol has figured out a way to weaponize heat,” I said.

“Yes, that’s one way to think about it,” he replied.

After we finished breakfast, we got into his dusty pickup and headed out into the desert. In the back, he was carrying plastic jugs of water, cans of beans, and other food items that can survive for weeks in the desert. We drove through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where saguaro cacti stand like worshippers with arms raised to the heavens. The rocky peaks of Growler Mountains, harsh and mean-looking, watched over us in the distance. We eventually turned down a dirt road and drove parallel with the border. In some places, the border itself is just a 4x4 fence that you could easily walk over or under. In other places, a tall, grotesquely ugly metal barrier (Trump’s wall) had gone up. Every once in a while, I’d see a white cross, which marked the spot where human remains had been found.

After about forty-five minutes of bouncing along the dirt road, we pulled off and parked. It felt like we were a thousand miles from anything soft, cool, or kind. We loaded jugs of water into backpacks and headed out for a spot on the top of a nearby mountain where Orlowski knew migrants cross. I had prepared for the hike pretty well, I thought, with a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and pants and a long-sleeve shirt with UVF protection. Still, I felt the heat immediately and began to sweat. I saw more white crosses. As we plodded along, I worried about stepping on human remains that had been turned to near dust by the heat. A few days earlier, the body of Gurupreet Kaur, a six-year-old girl from India who was crossing the border with her mother and other family members, was discovered within a few hundred yards from where we were hiking. We found lots of evidence that people had been through here recently: a worn Nike running shoe, a shirt, a plastic bag, a phone charging cord, a few black plastic one-gallon water bottles (they are black so they don’t reflect light and the Border Patrol doesn’t see them from far away). As we headed up the mountain, I couldn’t help but notice the austere beauty of the desert: red flowers of the prickly pear cactus in bloom, and spiny ocotillos, their long, slender branches like octopus tentacles.

After about an hour of hiking, we reached the mountaintop. Orlowski and his fellow volunteers at No More Deaths had dropped water and beans here about a week earlier. Now the supplies were gone—a sure sign that migrants had come through. We pulled six gallon jugs of water out of our backpacks. “Agua Pura,” Orlowski scribbled on the jugs with a marker. He unloaded an eight-pack of SunVista pinto beans out of his backpack and left that too. In the distance, I saw towers of the US Border Patrol’s alert beacons. A helicopter skimmed by. We could see south to Mexico, and north toward Tucson and Phoenix. I was exhausted. I was hot. I sat on a rock beside Orlowski and tried to imagine wanting to come to America so badly that I would walk for five or six days across this ghostly boneyard of heat. And the hotter it gets, the more treacherous this passage will become. Migration itself becomes a deadly gamble.

Orlowski pointed toward the Growler Mountains in the distance. “Between here and there, I’m sure there are dozens of people crossing right now, you just can’t see them,” he said. “Just like the heat, they are invisible.””

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell [pp. 92-98]

 

I'M GONNA KEEP UP MY ONGOING RANT

 

Yeah, and spare me the Perfectionism Fallacy.

 

UPDATE

It’s not just hot. Climate anomalies are emerging around the globe.
July was packed with weather anomalies, but some were so abnormal they sent a wave of consternation through the scientific community

A glimpse of a more tumultuous future seemed on full display throughout July, a month packed with weather anomalies that exceeded any definition of normal…

But some events were so abnormal that they sent a wave of consternation through the scientific community. Antarctic sea ice is at a historically low level for this time of year, according to federal data. Sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic have been “off the charts,” Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported, noting that the figures set records for this time of year “by a very large margin.” Water temperatures off the coast of South Florida rose to unfathomable levels in recent days, leading scientists to fear for the fate of the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States.

“On the one hand, we knew these things were going to happen. These have been the predictions for a long time,” said Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

And yet, she said, “this year, in particular, has seemed so extreme. … The size of the anomalies is surprising.”…

More to come...

__________

 

Hermeneutics?

 

This book had not been on my radar. Then I read a lengthy article in Harper's by the book's author, Dr. Jason Blakely. Fortunate to have run across these. Both the article and the book are outstanding.

I'd been familiar with the term "hermeneutics," but after reading the book I had to admit we'd given the topic significantly short shrift in grad school, sufficing to note its application in "interpretations" of theological writings. Our Bad.

...Indeed, a culture of scientism helps produce a culture that also rejects genuine scientific authority. The scientism studied in these pages, by falsely trading on an authority it does not wield, helps to sow a wider skepticism and cynicism about the “elite” voices of scientists as such. A disturbing increase in science denial (e.g., conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) is in a mutually supporting dialectic with the absolute scientism of a Pinker or a Dawkins. Although they have not yet realized it, figures like Pinker and Dawkins, far from defending science, undermine it by overpromising and exaggerating its authority. Ultra-Darwinists and biblical literalists are dance partners.

The only way out of this dilemma that does not involve the dual irrationalisms of rejecting science and inflating the authority of science beyond reasonable bounds involves recovering other ways of knowing the world. One of the chief resources in this regard is the humanities. The humanities insist that there is an art to interpreting human behavior that is never reducible to a strict or exact science. Although it is not scientific, this art is not subjective or arbitrary, either. Rather, it is an art practiced by many historians, literary scholars, cultural theorists, and even some rogue social scientists. Only the art of interpretation can begin to restore our culture to a clearer form of self-understanding that escapes the current delusions and disappointments of our reigning scientism. Only this will help correct the frightening tendency in our present hour to reject the rightful authority of natural science (e.g., ecology, vaccines) while at the same time submitting uncritically to the scientism of popular social theories (e.g., broken windows, Homo economicus). In the past of the humanities and interpretive disciplines lies a new future. But a key question remains: Where are the new humanists?

Blakely, Jason. We Built Reality (pp. 135-136). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

I've long tended to bristle at the word "scientism." I'm now pretty much over it. Pretty much.

 

INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Nice. Very nice. And I'm not even a "religious" person (fully recovered Episcopalian, subsequent dilettante UU, Zen-leaning dude).

 

 

Goes to my recurrent focus on "Deliberation Science."

 

 

THE HERMENEUTICS OF "BLADE RUNNER?" WHAT?

 

 

Stsy with me here...

In this regard, a far better proposal for evaluating AI than the Turing test is suggested by the science fiction classic Blade Runner. This film—based on a novel by Philip K. Dick—opens with a scene depicting an interview in which a human is testing for the presence of AI. The test requires determining whether an android (known in the movie as a “replicant”) is capable of empathy. Empathy is a state that involves an awareness of how another person is experiencing a situation: what matters to him or her and what the emotional significance of a set of circumstances might be. This is closer to the criterion for human intelligence that Searle calls “semantics” and Taylor the “significance” factor. A reworked Turing test would need to be able to determine if an agent were experiencing significance or meanings. Such a test would be an interpretive or hermeneutic threshold for intelligence.

Blade Runner also serves as a powerful interpretive fable for the anxieties surrounding technological society. Taking place in a future version of Los Angeles, the plot follows a man named Deckard, whose profession is “blade running,” or hunting and destroying rogue replicants. Yet Deckard finds himself increasingly disturbed and alienated not only by his own severe loss of empathy for those around him but also by the atomized social relations of an impersonal, consumer society dominated by distant corporations. In this setting an awakening of empathy comes from a strange place: Deckard falls in love with one of the replicants he has been hired to kill.

At the center of this story is a deeper cultural fear that is the actual, repressed object of anxiety in the contemporary AI debate between doomsayers and boosters. This is a repressed fear of ourselves and what we might become if we go further down the road of the form of selfhood presented by Homo machina. That is to say, fear of robots is fear of ourselves without humanity, without empathy. Or perhaps more accurately, fear of AI is fear not of technology but of a new constellation of meanings opened up by technological society. The machine-self is one possible form of identity that humans embody in a culture of scientism.

This in turn might be linked to the distinctively modern cultures of violence—as scientifically planned by military experts and technocrats—so common in societies across the ideological spectrum. Consider in this light Joseph Stalin’s conviction that social science had revealed society could be explained “in accordance with the laws of movement of matter.” This machine view of society was the prologue to treating people like basic parts, to be replaced with other purportedly better parts. Stalinism was only one extreme version of the propensity of modern societies to conduct “scientific” mass killings. This is the kind of killing carried out remotely and planned by scientific experts. A dark dream that began in the French Revolution with the guillotine has reached an apotheosis with the invention of the concentration camp-laboratory, where violence is perfectly justified because it is perfectly rational. There is no “I” behind the system of violence in the camp-laboratory; neither is there a “you” on the receiving end. In the last analysis, there is only the impersonal mechanics of a machine grinding humanity into cinder and fire.

In Blade Runner we are offered a capitalist version of this mechanistic culture of violence and antihumanism. The humans who populate a future, dystopian Los Angeles have become radically more robotic in this way; they are no longer attuned to the experiences of their neighbors and are willing to treat them like mute objects. The streets of this Los Angeles are filled with a babble of tongues, homeless people dig through the trash, and crowds rush through the sidewalks distracted by their own individual market activity. No one speaks to one another, while neon advertisements shout platitudes about enjoying soft drinks or starting a new life on an “off-world” colony in outer space. Deckard at one point remarks that his ex-wife used to call him a “cold fish,” but the audience is relentlessly confronted with an entire society of cold fishes. What distinguishes Deckard is that he struggles mightily throughout the film to overcome his hardened willingness to assassinate others as simply part of his job, a mere market transaction. The entire plot is thus absorbed in the problem of the loss of human empathy and its replacement with a roboticized self that sees all relationships—even those of violence—as mechanical and rational. In all these ways, the city and inhabitants depicted in Blade Runner are not a portrait of the future at all but a dramatic picture of the present: the world as built by Homo machina. [Blakely, pp. 66-69].

Yeah. That's one of my all-time favorite flicks.

Buy Jason's book. You're welcome in advance.

 

More to come...

__________

 

J6 Insurrection indictment day?

4:30 PM UPDATE

Doesn't look like there will be any J6 indictment released today. BUT—prosecutors issued a superceding indictment in the Mar-a-lago classified documents case, over the security cameras footage deletions.

THE DON RESPONDS

 

__________

 

"X" marks the Splat

 

Twitter owner Elon Musk renaming his ailing platform "X."

Whatever.

MOVING ALONG

…AI may well be a bridge to a newly prosperous era of greatly reduced human suffering. But it will take more than a company’s founding charter—especially one that has already proved flexible—to make sure that we all share in its benefits and avoid its risks. It will take a vigorous new politics.

Altman has served notice. He says that he welcomes the constraints and guidance of the state. But that’s immaterial; in a democracy, we don’t need his permission. For all its imperfections, the American system of government gives us a voice in how technology develops, if we can find it. Outside the tech industry, where a generational reallocation of resources toward AI is under way, I don’t think the general public has quite awakened to what’s happening. A global race to the AI future has begun, and it is largely proceeding without oversight or restraint. If people in America want to have some say in what that future will be like, and how quickly it arrives, we would be wise to speak up soon.

This is excellent. Jarring. A 76 minute long-read (w/an audio transcript). Highly recommended. Click the title image above.

ELON ENTERS THE AI RACE (x.AI)

 

ERRATUM

 

I recall swimming in the ocean near Miami decades ago when the water temp was 80F. That felt like bathtub water.

__________

 

Inspiring Faith-Based Rhetorical Eloquence

The presumptive 2024 GOP Presidential Nominee.

Host:

DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION?

Audience member:

MY QUESTION IS, HOW HAS YOUR FAITH GROWN SINCE YOU DECIDED IN 2015 TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT? AND WHO HAS MENTORED YOU IN YOUR FAITH JOURNEY?

Donald Trump:

SUCH A GREAT QUESTION. I'VE SEEN SO MUCH HEARTACHE AND TURMOIL. I WAS A DEVELOPER AND I DID OTHER THINGS. I HAD A WONDERFUL LIFE BEFORE ALL OF THIS. I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT A GRAND JURY WAS. I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT A SUBPOENA — WHAT IS A SUBPOENA? I HAD A WONDERFUL LIFE. I’M SO GLAD. THEY ASKED ME THE OTHER DAY, A LITTLE DIFFERENT QUESTION, “ARE YOU GLAD YOU DID IT?” I COULDN'T BE MORE GLAD. I'M SO HAPPY I DID IT BECAUSE I MADE AMERICA GREAT AND WE CAN DO IT AGAIN. RIGHT NOW WE DON’T, WE ARE NOT A GREAT COUNTRY. BUT I HAVE GOTTEN TO KNOW BECAUSE OF THIS SO MANY EVANGELICALS, I MEAN, I KNOW SO MANY PEOPLE AND THEY FEEL SO GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES AND THEIR FAMILY, AND THEY BASE IT ON RELIGION. I HAD NEVER HAD THAT KIND OF AN EXPERIENCE WHERE I GOT TO KNOW SO MANY PEOPLE. AND FRANKLIN GRAME AND PAULA WHITE, I MEAN I KNOW SO MANY PEOPLE… WHO ARE SO INCREDIBLE RELIGIOUS PEOPLE, NOT JUST EVANGELICALS, YOU KNOW, WHEN I LOOK AT THE CATHOLIC FAITH, YOU TAKE A LOOK AT THE FBI, LOOK AT WHAT THE FBI IS DOING TO CATHOLICS MADE THEM LIKE THE ENEMY. IT'S HORRIBLE. HOW COULD A CATHOLIC EVER VOTE FOR A DEMOCRAT OR A GUY LIKE BIDEN AGAIN AFTER THE EXPERIENCE? BUT, I’VE MET SOME OF THE FINEST PEOPLE THAT I WOULDN'T HAVE HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF MEETING IF I WEREN’T PRESIDENT. AND, THEY’RE RELIGIOUS PEOPLE, AND THEY’RE INCREDIBLE PEOPLE.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE ...

CNN 2023 Town Hall

2017 Boy Scouts Jamboree

Trump at the CIA

Trust me, I've got lots more...

__________

 

Is Denial an "ism?" Scientifically speaking?

 

I finished David Lipsky's thoroughly engaging book. Lordy, mercy...
 

 

Just submitted a review on Amazon.

How can a book be at once so recurrently hilarious and infuriating?

Read it and find out.

You're welcome in advance.

The author, beyond his formidable analytical acumen and indefatigable attention to the voluminous relevant historical detail on the topic, is a Sensei of Snark. Across the nearly 16 Kindle hours of this book, I have encountered and exceeded my Lifetime Permissible Dose of deft, ROTFL allusive analogies and metaphors. I kept interrupting my wife: "Baby, you gotta hear THIS..."

The Bang for the Buck here is fabulous. The subject could hardly be more important. Do yourselves a serious favor. Get David's book and place it at the front your must-read queue.

OK, so, is there a "science of Denial?"
 

Just started this one.

 

Recall an earlier post on "denial?"

Psychologists have been studying a very basic cognitive function that appears to be of increasing importance – how do we choose what to believe as true or false? We live in a world awash in information, and access to essentially the world’s store of knowledge is now a trivial matter for many people, especially in developed parts of the world. The most important cognitive skill in the 21st century may arguably be not factual knowledge but truth discrimination. I would argue this is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught in school, and is more important than teaching students facts.

Knowing facts is still important, because you cannot think in a vacuum. Our internal model of the world is build on bricks of fact, but before we take a brick and place it in our wall of knowledge, we have to decide if it is probably true or not. I have come to think about this in terms of three categories of skills – domain knowledge (with scientific claims this is scientific literacy), critical thinking, and media savvy…

One of my requisite daily web-surfing stops.

 

Also apropos of the topic—"The Big Myth," "Science denial: attributes and antidotes." And, how 'bout Amanda Ripley's "Conflict Entrepreneurs?"

 

The Wiki takes a crack at "Denialism."

 

"Why Trust Science?"

 

Finally for now, is there a "science" of "Science Communication?"

 

ERRATUM

SPEAKING OF DENIAL

Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”

In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted…

Click the title image. Read all of it.

UPDATE

My new Harper's

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins. As protests broke out both for and against various public health measures intended to combat the spread of the virus, this polarization went beyond policy decisions concerning mandates and lockdowns to questions of medical fact and expert authority. It was as if the authorities had set off the fire alarm in a nation-size movie theater: one half of the audience vacated their seats in muted panic while the rest defiantly continued to eat their popcorn.

The pandemic laid bare the extent to which Americans occupy a split reality. From within the credentialed classes, the demos appears increasingly and disturbingly resistant to rational argument and evidence, with rowdy populist movements undermining at every turn the response to an unprecedented public health emergency. But from within these populist camps, it seems that many Americans have been blindly following—or worse, knowingly supporting—an undemocratic regime intent on imposing its values under cover of scientific neutrality. In this view, the pandemic was just the latest excuse for this regime to advance its technocratic agenda; often, resisting that agenda meant rejecting technical expertise entirely.

The result is that American democracy and scientific authority are suffering parallel crises of credibility, each standing accused by the other. This twofold crisis has many causes, among them political polarization and the spread of misinformation on social media, as well as long-standing antirationalist religious traditions and anti-intellectual strains in American business and culture. None of these factors should be minimized when attempting to understand America’s widespread antiscientific sentiment. But they need to be supplemented by another, far less widely acknowledged, fount of skepticism—one that requires contending with what the populist view gets right: scientific expertise has encroached on domains in which its methods are unsuited to addressing, let alone resolving, the issue at hand...

Unable to reach any kind of democratic consensus, Americans largely faked their way through the early stages of the pandemic. Some fraudulently claimed conspiratorial knowledge in order to challenge scientific expertise. Others disguised their preference for the preservation of bare life or for economic growth as the consequence of inarguable scientific findings, and denounced all dissenters as irrational and immoral.

Many have seen the pandemic as a forerunner to a much darker and more devastating global crisis. The next catastrophe—very possibly ecological in nature—may be far more destructive. Averting such a crisis will require listening with careful humility to scientists and scientific authority. Science’s role as adviser and counselor, keeping the demos in contact with reality, is irreplaceable.

At the same time, American society long ago allowed major institutions to be governed by scientism. If the wonks and data evangelists do not have their power curbed, the country could descend into a battle over whose values trump whose. Such a turn would signal not only the end of democracy in America, but also the imposition of an alien notion of life on those who no longer recognize themselves in the government that presides over them.

Prioritizing democratic dialogue and shifting away from top-down policymaking will not be easy. In a society as large and as varied as ours, there will always be the temptation to outsource contentious decisions to supposedly neutral authorities. But if we want to stand a chance of weathering the next crisis better than we have this one, we’ll need to learn to trust ourselves.

Jason Blakely is an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University and the author of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power.

A long-read. Worth every second. Like I didn't already have enough to ponder. Bristling at the word "scientism," but, OK. I'd spent most of the day burrowed deep into Jared Del Rosso's Denial before reading the Harper's essay.

COULDN'T RESIST

Bought his book. I'm never gonna get caught up.

AMAZON BLURB: Over the last fifty years, pseudoscience has crept into nearly every facet of our lives. Popular sciences of everything from dating and economics, to voting and artificial intelligence, radically changed the world today. The abuse of popular scientific authority has catastrophic consequences, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis; the failure to predict the rise of Donald Trump; increased tensions between poor communities and the police; and the sidelining of nonscientific forms of knowledge and wisdom. In We Built Reality, Jason Blakely explains how recent social science theories have not simply described political realities but also helped create them. But he also offers readers a way out of the culture of scientism: hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation. Hermeneutics urges sensitivity to the historical and cultural contexts of human behavior. It gives ordinary people a way to appreciate the insights of the humanities in guiding decisions. As Blakely contends, we need insights from the humanities to see how social science theories never simply neutrally describe reality, they also help build it.

Well, we'll see.

ADMIN ERRATUM

BobbyG is spending the @BobbyGvegas week in Twitter Jail for cracking back on @RepMTG for her endless repetitious fact-free allegations against the President. I tweeted "Provide us with some REAL EVIDENCE, or stifle it."

Elon's snark-bereft AI moderation algorithm determined it to be the egregious ToS violation of "advocating self-harm."

So, I wasn't yet quite ready to launch this (below), but it's serving as an interim work-around. Twitter handle @ArgumentScience.

OFF TOPIC

Horrific. Katrina. Riveting piece, overall. Mediocre acting in many places, but visually arresting and true to The Book.

 

My wife was at the time Director of QA for the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge LA. She spent the entire fall of 2005 post-hurricane down there with her peeps working 16-20 hours a day pumping NOLA "dry," doing blue tarps roofings, and putting people into FEMA trailer homes. She got home (Vegas) right before Christmas. We then did Mardis Gras in Bation Ruoge the following Feb.

 

More to come...

__________

The Anthropocene Exigency.

It's not going to abate absent sustained globally cooperative human countermeasures.

 

See my 2021 post "anthropocene adversities advance." And my 2019 posts "covering climate now—or just last month?"

 

TWO NEW READS

 

THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST

…You probably think of heat on a temperature scale, either Fahrenheit or Celsius. You think of it as a gradual, linear thing, a quality of the air around you that moves up and down in increments, or that can be controlled by a thermostat. Seventy degrees is a little hotter than 68 degrees, which is a little hotter than 65 degrees. The change of seasons also plays into this incremental perception of heat—winter gradually warms into spring, spring into summer. Yes, there are some days that are noticeably hotter or colder than others, but we crank up the air-conditioning or throw on a sweater. We trust it will pass and things will return to normal. Temperature is a merry-go-round that we are used to riding.

This sense of incrementalism also holds true with the climate crisis. The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get.

Right now we’re more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of warming from preindustrial temperatures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change. The reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-killing drought. But to nonscientists—which is to say, most humans on the planet—3.6 degrees of warming does not sound dangerous at all. Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day? Then there are folks who argue that extreme cold kills people and causes all kinds of weather-related problems too so maybe a hotter world isn’t such a bad thing after all.2 Even the phrase “global warming” sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather.

The difficulty of understanding the consequences of heat is amplified by conventional notions of what it means to be hot. In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new. Websites publish “hot lists” of the latest books, movies, TV shows, and actors. Facebook started in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm as a hot-or-not website called FaceMash, which ranked the attractiveness of Harvard women. Heat is an expression of passion—you feel hot for the guy at the bar or engage him in a heated debate. A person who is quick to anger is hot-blooded. Near the house where I live in Austin is a gym called Heat Bootcamp. Here, sweat is purifying, a sign of inner strength (a throwback to medieval times, perhaps, when heat was linked to masculinity through what philosopher Thomas Aquinas called “the elemental heat of the semen”). In Miami, one of the hottest cities in the US, where heat is a lethal threat to outdoor workers and where the city regularly floods due to rising seas caused by the melting ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, the basketball team is named, without irony, the Miami Heat.

Goodell, Jeff (2023-07-10). The Heat Will Kill You First (loc 196-222). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO

IN 1956, Time magazine and the New York Times had addressed science and the possibilities. That spring, Roger Revelle gave Time his first climate change interview—in an issue that documented the unnerving Soviet policy of smiles and an America that no longer had enough animal-act enthusiasm to support two circuses. (Since then, the remaining outfit has also folded its tent. Trained bears and top hats we’ve decided belong to our entertainment past.)

“In fifty years or so,” Time reported, summarizing Revelle’s research into the carbon exhalations of our machines, “this process may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.”

They had known even then about the tightness of terrestrial margins. You’d need only a one- or two-degree rise to start the ice melting, the climate changing. “When all the data have been studied,” Time explained, scientists “may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”

Five months later—cement sky, pavement leaves—the New York Times had speculated about “striking changes in climate.” A human-caused warmth that could “convert the polar regions into tropical deserts and jungles, with tigers roaming about and gaudy parrots squawking in the trees.”

A spicy thing to visualize, as light and weather thinned toward Christmas: the former frozen regions being lorded over by a mouthy bird.

And now it was here. Time magazine’s half-century waiting period elapsed. And a great international apparatus had sprung up to capture and examine the data. The IPCC, of course. Two hundred science organizations on record; from the Academy of Athens to the Zimbabwean Academy of Science. Climate change was human-caused, and real.

With three great repositories of the world’s temperature. One in Manhattan—Jim Hansen’s NASA office, six stories up from the Seinfeld coffee shop. Another amidst the Washington gridlock and founding-father statuary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. The third in Britain: the Jack Bauer-sounding Climatic Research Unit, at the University of East Anglia.

The Unit had amassed four million separate temperature readings, from four thousand sites on the planet, reaching back 150 years.

This was weather’s week-by-week episode guide—the sun-and-rain version of Ulysses. No characters, no Dublin, just sky. It had become the largest story in science.

It was 2009. To scientists, with their research accepted and agreed to, the climate fight now looked “winnable.” They weren’t following the politics. They had their eyes on their opponents, who they believed were done.

Relief can be misleading. Especially when it is anticipatory. That just-before moment then becomes the most hazardous. When you envision the glass of water so thoroughly you wonder if you’ve already drunk it. When you feel yourself breaking the tape so clearly you cease to run. When actually finishing the race begins to seem like a formality.

In his memoir of these years, climate scientist Michael Mann quotes an observation by General Douglas MacArthur: “It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”

Mann’s pasting this in tells the whole story: by 2009, the climate scientists believed they’d entered the wind-up phase, their long conflict behind them. Also, that Mann believed they had lost their killer instinct. The desire—sometimes salutary—to hear an enemy skeleton crunch beneath the boot. “By early 2009,” Mann writes in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, “a troubling complacency had emerged among the scientists.”

Lipsky, David. The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial (pp. 407-409). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

David Lipsky is killin' me. What a writer! And, the Snark... geez.

 

 

 

"Because the climate doesn’t care about politics, or experts, or warnings, and isn’t even aware there are people. We have our days and lists and hours, our schedules and emergencies; but the climate keeps its own time."  [David Lipsky, pp. 471-72]

________

 

NPR WHILE IN THE CAR TODAY FETCHING MY GRANDSON CALVIN

apropos, see my recent post "Baltimore Code Red."

 

 NY TIMES' DAVID WALLACE-WELLS:

 

Floods, Heat, Smoke: The Weather Will Never Be Normal Again

Global warming is accelerating, with temperatures not just rising but rising faster than ever. Every day, it seems, we get better at normalizing extreme weather. But it is simultaneously proving harder to compartmentalize — even in places such as New York City that once looked to residents like concrete fortresses against nature.

A month ago, when orange skies blanketed New York, it was a sign to many that this particular climate horror could no longer be conceptually quarantined as a local phenomenon of the American West, where tens of millions had already acclimated to living in the path of fire and every year breathing in some amount of its toxic smoke. That was normal for them, we New Yorkers thought, even though San Francisco had turned a sunless dark amber for the first time only in 2020. It wasn’t normal for us, we told ourselves. Then, when the air quality index dropped from 405 back into the 100s again, in the weeks after, the joggers hit the pavement at their routine times, glad the sky was merely unhealthily smoggy...

Yeah...

 

Other relevant random stuff of mine: "Global warming: the ultimate health issue?" "Climate science speaks: Act now."

 

RETROSPECTIVE. FROM AN APRIL 2021 POST OF MINE:

THE MORAL CASE FOR GLOBAL WARMING MITIGATION

 

I read this a number of months back. Good read. Sound argument.

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time.

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.

Drawing on over a decade of research,The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.

An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. [Amazon blurb]

Well worth your time.

BILL MCKIBBEN

…There’s a rally planned for mid-September in New York City, when the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called a Climate Ambition Summit, to make a case that Biden, who may address the General Assembly, should meet Guterres’s demands to end fossil-fuel expansion, particularly because this country still leads the world in oil and gas production. But this moment feels as if it calls for something larger—comparable to the Earth Day demonstrations of a half century ago, which brought ten per cent of the American population into the streets. It’s eruptions on that scale that change the political reality. And those eruptions are usually rooted not just in fear and anger but also in love and resolve.

The massive Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, which was caused by a rig six miles off the California coast, was one of the sparks for the first Earth Day, in April, 1970. People were raging over the sight of dead seabirds soaked in oil, but they were also fighting for things that they loved: the ocean, the beach, the chance to sit peacefully on the sand. The incredible warming of these current weeks should strike fear, but it should also remind us how valuable a breeze is, how remarkable a deep-blue winter day, or how precious the cool that comes when night falls. The crazily raging river a quarter mile from my door scares me, but it also makes me think how stunning it is in its usual form. This planet remains stirringly beautiful, and that beauty must be one of the things that moves us to act. And so must the beauty that people can produce: we can take the deadly power of the sun and, with a panel, convert it into the electrons that help cool our homes in a heat wave. If all of that sounds overblown, scientists say that this past week broke records for the hottest days in about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, which takes us back to the bare edge of the human story. We’re at a hinge point in that story if ever there was one.

Yeah. Below, a long-time rant of mine.

 

And, yeah, I realize that solar voltage / amperage / wattage capture is but one component. Storage, conversion, practical & equitable distribution (incl. integration w/currrent electrical grids, etc).—None of those are free or effortless to scale up. But deniers can spare me the endless "yes, but" Perfectionism Fallacy line dance.

Moreover, the "consumption unsustainability" / "degrowth" argument is a separate issue (and a gnarly one in its own right). Conflation is not Our Friend.

PERSONAL ERRATUM

 

We went to Deep Creek Lake in far western Maryland on July 1st for a big family vacation. This is what we hit just west of Cumberland MD on I-68.

 

That was Cheryl and I, in a rental SUV, with our now-3 yr old great-grandson Kai in the car seat in the back. More excitement than I needed.

 

SUNDAY JULY 16TH UPDATE

 

 

DAVID LIPSKY INTERVIEW

__________