Where's the Action on Climate Change?
There’s been a minor amount of coverage in the blogosphere about the passing of Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Prize-winning scientist:
Rowland is one of the true scientific heroes of our time — both for his research and for what he did with it:
Nearly 40 years ago, Rowland and post-doctoral student Mario Molina made a shocking discovery: a single chlorine atom byproduct from aerosol hair sprays, deodorants and other popular consumer products could chew up 100,000 ozone atoms in the stratosphere. The stratospheric ozone layer, 12 to 30 miles above Earth, protects life on the planet from harsh solar radiation.
“Mario and I realized this was not just a scientific question, but a potentially grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer,” Rowland said later. “Entire biological systems, including humans, would be at danger from ultra-violet rays.”
They decided they had to advocate for a ban on consumer products that were earning billions annually. Industry representatives fought back: At one point Aerosol Age, a trade journal, speculated that Rowland was a member of the Soviet Union’s KGB, out to destroy capitalism. Even some fellow scientists grumbled that he was going overboard with a hypothesis.
…
Rowland felt it was his duty to speak out on ozone depletion and then on climate change — and his words on the subject are a clarion call for action by climate scientists, indeed, by all of us:
“Is it enough for a scientist simply to publish a paper? Isn’t it a responsibility of scientists, if you believe that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn’t it your responsibility to actually do something about it, enough so that action actually takes place?” Rowland said at a White House climate change roundtable in 1997. “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
In pondering this news and the coverage of Rowland’s views, I eventually came to the issue of a duty to respond (or rescue):
A duty to rescue is a concept in tort law that arises in a number of cases, describing a circumstance in which a party can be held liable for failing to come to the rescue of another party in peril. However, in the United States, it is rarely formalized in statutes which would bring the penalty of law down upon those who fail to rescue. This does not necessarily obviate a moral duty to rescue: though law is binding and carries government-authorized sanctions, there are also separate ethical arguments for a duty to rescue that may prevail even where law does not punish failure to rescue.
I’m not surprised that such laws are rare in the US; what could be less American than a law that took away your “right” to stand by and watch someone bleed to death on the street after being hit by a car? I mean, consider where such laws would lead us — people helping perfect strangers all over the place, a revival of a sense of community, rampant thoughts about pooling our collective actions to fight against for-sale politicians and their corporate (ahem) sponsors? Where would the horrors end? Won’t someone, at long last, think of the children?
Yes, yes, putting all that snark aside, it really does come down to the children. And this site being what it is, it also comes back, once again, to all the people in the developed world, including the overwhelming majority of adults in the US, who are militantly opposed to taking action to save our kids and their kids and so on from dealing with a world of hell and high water, or simply don’t give a damn. You know the ones — they can tell you all about the features on the new SUV or phone or whatever they want to buy or the minutiae of their NCAA basketball bracket, but they don’t have the slightest clue about any of the things we talk about on blogs like TCOE every day. In most cases, I would bet they have no clue how many miles per gallon they get in their family vehicles; their idea of environmental awareness is finding a vehicle that they can afford to gas up and helping their kids with their green-themed school projects.
This is why so many people, including me, are so eager to see something Really Big and Scary happen on the environmental front, like several pieces of Antarctic Ice Shelves the size of Portugal break off and cause tidal waves around the Southern Hemisphere. It is not because we’re misanthropic morons, as some people with an overriding interest in pushing their agenda might have you believe. It’s exactly the opposite: We have figured out that a slow and highly irregular rise in global temperatures is just about the worst thing that could happen, as it wouldn’t set off the alarms in our mental programming that evolved in radically different, to say the least, circumstances.[1] We would continue to get further and further down the wrong path until we’d locked in so much to-be-realized warming that it would quite possibly be the end of modern civilization as we know it. As the link above points out, Rowland estimated in 2008 that we’d see CO2 hit 1,000 parts per million, nearly quadrupling the pre-Industrial level.
As I’ve said before online, when one considers the lock-in effects of infrastructure and the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere, plus the latencies in the economic and political systems, the challenge we’ve set ourselves is so great that it will take a much greater response than the US managed when we joined the battle in World War II. We need not a “Pearl Harbor event”, but a “Hiroshima event”.
If Paul Gilding is right, and we need to see a change in ourselves first before we’re open to listening to the real world evidence, then it’s hard to see how we get out of this mess without truly catastrophic events unfolding within the lifetime of already born children. That possibility is so bad that it triggers my denial reflex; I simply can’t allow myself to think about it and remain engaged with energy and environmental topics.
Personally, I have no choice but to hope something Really Big and Scary happens that doesn’t kill massive numbers of people, and that it’s enough to push us to take action on climate change.[2] I detest being in that position, but looking at how dreadful humanity’s collective response to this challenge has been, and lacking anything other than unenlightened, greedy self-interest to drive our actions, it’s where logic leaves many of us.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that not only are “duty to respond” laws necessary anywhere in our world, but that in some areas, like the US, they’re quite rare.
Rowland is one of the true scientific heroes of our time — both for his research and for what he did with it:
Nearly 40 years ago, Rowland and post-doctoral student Mario Molina made a shocking discovery: a single chlorine atom byproduct from aerosol hair sprays, deodorants and other popular consumer products could chew up 100,000 ozone atoms in the stratosphere. The stratospheric ozone layer, 12 to 30 miles above Earth, protects life on the planet from harsh solar radiation.
“Mario and I realized this was not just a scientific question, but a potentially grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer,” Rowland said later. “Entire biological systems, including humans, would be at danger from ultra-violet rays.”
They decided they had to advocate for a ban on consumer products that were earning billions annually. Industry representatives fought back: At one point Aerosol Age, a trade journal, speculated that Rowland was a member of the Soviet Union’s KGB, out to destroy capitalism. Even some fellow scientists grumbled that he was going overboard with a hypothesis.
…
Rowland felt it was his duty to speak out on ozone depletion and then on climate change — and his words on the subject are a clarion call for action by climate scientists, indeed, by all of us:
“Is it enough for a scientist simply to publish a paper? Isn’t it a responsibility of scientists, if you believe that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn’t it your responsibility to actually do something about it, enough so that action actually takes place?” Rowland said at a White House climate change roundtable in 1997. “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
In pondering this news and the coverage of Rowland’s views, I eventually came to the issue of a duty to respond (or rescue):
A duty to rescue is a concept in tort law that arises in a number of cases, describing a circumstance in which a party can be held liable for failing to come to the rescue of another party in peril. However, in the United States, it is rarely formalized in statutes which would bring the penalty of law down upon those who fail to rescue. This does not necessarily obviate a moral duty to rescue: though law is binding and carries government-authorized sanctions, there are also separate ethical arguments for a duty to rescue that may prevail even where law does not punish failure to rescue.
I’m not surprised that such laws are rare in the US; what could be less American than a law that took away your “right” to stand by and watch someone bleed to death on the street after being hit by a car? I mean, consider where such laws would lead us — people helping perfect strangers all over the place, a revival of a sense of community, rampant thoughts about pooling our collective actions to fight against for-sale politicians and their corporate (ahem) sponsors? Where would the horrors end? Won’t someone, at long last, think of the children?
Yes, yes, putting all that snark aside, it really does come down to the children. And this site being what it is, it also comes back, once again, to all the people in the developed world, including the overwhelming majority of adults in the US, who are militantly opposed to taking action to save our kids and their kids and so on from dealing with a world of hell and high water, or simply don’t give a damn. You know the ones — they can tell you all about the features on the new SUV or phone or whatever they want to buy or the minutiae of their NCAA basketball bracket, but they don’t have the slightest clue about any of the things we talk about on blogs like TCOE every day. In most cases, I would bet they have no clue how many miles per gallon they get in their family vehicles; their idea of environmental awareness is finding a vehicle that they can afford to gas up and helping their kids with their green-themed school projects.
This is why so many people, including me, are so eager to see something Really Big and Scary happen on the environmental front, like several pieces of Antarctic Ice Shelves the size of Portugal break off and cause tidal waves around the Southern Hemisphere. It is not because we’re misanthropic morons, as some people with an overriding interest in pushing their agenda might have you believe. It’s exactly the opposite: We have figured out that a slow and highly irregular rise in global temperatures is just about the worst thing that could happen, as it wouldn’t set off the alarms in our mental programming that evolved in radically different, to say the least, circumstances.[1] We would continue to get further and further down the wrong path until we’d locked in so much to-be-realized warming that it would quite possibly be the end of modern civilization as we know it. As the link above points out, Rowland estimated in 2008 that we’d see CO2 hit 1,000 parts per million, nearly quadrupling the pre-Industrial level.
As I’ve said before online, when one considers the lock-in effects of infrastructure and the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere, plus the latencies in the economic and political systems, the challenge we’ve set ourselves is so great that it will take a much greater response than the US managed when we joined the battle in World War II. We need not a “Pearl Harbor event”, but a “Hiroshima event”.
If Paul Gilding is right, and we need to see a change in ourselves first before we’re open to listening to the real world evidence, then it’s hard to see how we get out of this mess without truly catastrophic events unfolding within the lifetime of already born children. That possibility is so bad that it triggers my denial reflex; I simply can’t allow myself to think about it and remain engaged with energy and environmental topics.
Personally, I have no choice but to hope something Really Big and Scary happens that doesn’t kill massive numbers of people, and that it’s enough to push us to take action on climate change.[2] I detest being in that position, but looking at how dreadful humanity’s collective response to this challenge has been, and lacking anything other than unenlightened, greedy self-interest to drive our actions, it’s where logic leaves many of us.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that not only are “duty to respond” laws necessary anywhere in our world, but that in some areas, like the US, they’re quite rare.
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