I will admit upfront that there are many aspects of our current energy and climate situation that I find frustrating. I’m sure I’m not alone in that among people who comment here or merely read this site. But I feel compelled to point out one particular detail that sends me in full head-spinning mode, what I call “the vision thing”. You might be tempted to assume that I’m talking about “vision” in a metaphorical sense, as in some Senator not having a vision of where good public policy can take the US, or the CEO of some huge corporation being far too myopic. And if you made that assumption, you would be wrong, because in this instance I’m talking about vision in the most literal and mundane way, our ability (or requirement) to see things.
Specifically, we’ve all read accounts similar to this wholly fabricated one[1]:
Senator Smith has just returned from a trip to Greenland [or Glacier National Park or Alaska or Siberia or ...] where he saw first hand the effects of global warming. “The amount of melting that’s taking place is simply stunning. You can’t truly appreciate the magnitude of the changes to the glaciers [or ice bergs or permafrost] until you see it in person. We have to find a way to rise to this challenge, forge international agreements to limit humanity’s CO2 emissions, and prevent this situatin from becoming much worse.”
Whenever I see or hear such a report, it takes all the willpower I have to keep from shouting at my monitor or TV screen or newspaper, “And why the hell did you have to travel thousands of miles to be convinced there’s a serious problem???”
Clearly, some non-trivial portion of these trips are purely for show to demonstrate the traveler’s environmental awareness and/or are taken simply because the person is in a position to do so on someone else’s dime. But I’m convinced that not all of them can be explained away so cynically, and at least some share of these trips really are “fact finding trips” that end of having a big impact on our hardy adventurer.
Which brings me back to my question: Why? Why, in the year 2010 with all that implies about the routinely available multimedia technology, would someone have to haul his DNA thousands of miles on an airplane to stand on a glacier and see a river of melt water roaring into a moulin before that person is able to say, “Holy shit — this really is a problem”? What Senator (or member of the House or mayor of a moderate to large city or CEO) can’t have a staff member pull together a devastating amount of visuals and reports on climate change? Why can’t he or she simply watch the Extreme Ice documentary, which should be enough to scare just about anyone spitless? Why can’t a member of the US federal government call our friends at NASA or NOAA or NSIDC and get a personal briefing?
If you’re wondering what set me off on this tangent, it was a graph in an excellent post Joe Romm made yesterday on CP, Arctic sea ice area and volume drop near record lows. While I strongly recommend you read the whole post, one graph leaped out at me:
Ignore the pretty colored boxes at the top for a moment and focus on the line graphs. In particular, notice the black line, which says that from 2007, the current year for minimum sea ice extent, and 2008, when the sea ice began to “recover”, as the deniers would have you believe, the overall volume of sea ice declined by 2,000 cubic km (16,000 to 14,000), or about 12%. That’s over 6.5 times the most recent estimates I’ve seen of the yearly volume of ice loss from Greenland (roughly 300 cubic km per year), and is equivalent in weight to about 5.4 million Empire State Buildings.[2]
Why isn’t this graph, based on the best available science, far more compelling than what a Senator or CEO can see by flying to some spot in the far north and standing on glacier for 20 minutes and observing one tiny speck of the landscape? And if we really are this tied to a “only seeing is believing” brain wiring, how can we arrange to get a few thousand of the world’s most powerful people to make this trip before it’s far too late?
[1] For a non-fabricated one, see Change of heart from climate sceptics:
Michael Hanlon the formerly ultra-sceptic science editor of Britain’s two-million-copies-a-day Daily Mail has also changed his mind after a recent trip to see a glacier in Greenland.
[2] The ESB weighs 365,000 tons, and each cubic km of ice is roughly one billion tons.
I’m sure there is some psychological reason for this – it would seem to dovetail with how we (as a species) don’t deal with medium to long term threats that require change well at all (and just ignore them till they are in our face).
Sasparilla:
Yeah, it does seem to be part of the same mechanism. From an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes sense — don’t go fleeing from every sound that might be a tiger, or you expend a lot of energy and foraging time unnecessarily. Wait until you’re sure (i.e. you see the threat in person) and you “know” it’s immediate before you take action.
This ratio, between the length of time it takes us to outgrow/overcome our evolutionary baggage and the time it takes us to load the atmosphere with CO2, could be the single most important number in human history.
Good point on seeing it with your own eyes, Lou. Without the good graphic details available on sites with good historical photographic records, I would not know what I was looking at if I went to Greenland, the Artic, or even Rochester in the winter. The only way I would know that anything is wrong, in any of those locations, would be if the ice was not there to any extent. I wonder how many personal reference points others actually have, and if they think they have them, how out of date their memories would be.
I could be sarcastic and say that when the Artic is gone, it will save us a lot of fighting over CO2 records since we will no longer be able to use ice core samples to impute CO2 levels, but actually it is tragic. When all of the 3 million year old ice is gone, there will be no way to go back and replicate the scientific experiments, and the skeptics will be very right when they say, “you can’t prove global warming.” Perhaps we can drop them into the ocean blue where the ice used to be. It should be a great contrast with where they will (at least metaphorically) go in the after-life, and, for all I care, where they can go right now, metaphorically or not.
OT–but I think Lou will be interested in this post on EV batteries.
“EV Batteries Plummet in Price: Down to $400 a kwH”
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ev-batteries-dropping-rapidly-in-price/
(Honestly not sure how it happened b/c I thought batteries cost ~$800/kwh just the other day…) Assuming it is real, it is seriously good news!
dd: Thanks for posting that. I somehow missed it.
It’s great news. A small EV gets about 5 mile per kWh, so a 100 mile/charge range requires a 20 kWh pack. (The article mentions that the Leaf has a 24 kWh pack.) Driving down that cost/kWh figure even further does two very interesting things: It lowers the minimum price for an EV, drawing in more customers who will then be driving on electrons instead of ancient microbes, and it opens the possibility for car companies to offer buyers a range of battery packs — 100 mile, 150 mile, and 200 mile ranges, for example.
I plan to replace my Scion xA with an EV in the summer of 2012. I will then charge it with 100% green electrons, flip the bird at the gas station every time I pass it, and give my neighbors infinite “I’m greener than thou” grief. My wife is already dreading the sad spectacle this could turn into…