Climate-Centrism

I became more and more pissed off as I read Brian Merchant's By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean (Vice, August 13, 2015).

It’s not just that the ocean is absorbing more heat than at any point over the last 10,000 years, and that its levels are rising. It’s also becoming more acidic. Its very chemical composition is changing. Ecosystems will be reordered, currents altered. To the billions who live closest to it, it will be more hostile. Coastal flooding will threaten cities, Arctic passageways will open new trade routes, and fishermen who depend on the seas will scramble to keep up with the shifting aquatic biomes.

“In a worst case scenario, i.e. one in which we pursue business-as-usual through the end of the century,” the climatologist Michael Mann tells me, “the oceans will look something out of a post-apocalyptic Hollywood flick. We are talking about the depletion of fish populations by overfishing, the massive die-off of much other sea life due to water pollution and ocean acidification, the destruction of coral reefs by the twin impacts of ocean acidification and bleaching by increasingly warm ocean waters.”

So why is Brian Merchant quoting climatologist Michael Mann about the future ocean? Later he quotes climate modeler Gavin Schmidt (of realclimate.org). Neither of these guys makes a living studying the effects of warming and acidification on marine ecosystems, though both seemed happy to pose as "experts" on what the ocean may look like 85 years from now. 

If you want to learn about the oceans, past, present or future, why don't you fucking interview somebody who studies the oceans and marine life? Where are the quotes from Jeremy Jackson? Where are the quotes from Callum Roberts? Where are the quotes from Lisa-ann Gershwin? Where are the quotes from Daniel Pauly and his British Columbia colleagues? Where are the quotes from Woods Hole? And so on.

If this had been an isolated incident, I would dismiss it as bad journalism, but there is a pattern. I see this climate-centered bias all the time in lots of different guises. So I decided to give it a name. I called it climate-centrism.

climate-centrism — a kind of tunnel vision in which only climate change and its causes is discussed. More precisely, it is a form of the "streetlight effect" I mentioned in the third Flatland essay (quoted below).

It also seems to me that cognitive scientists, not to mention economists, policy-makers, and climate activists, etc., are a lot like the drunk who lost his keys.

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks the drunk if he is sure he lost them there, and the drunk replies, no, he lost them in the park.

The policeman asks why he is searching under the streetlight, and the drunk replies, "because that's where the light is."

David H. Freedman, the author of Wrong — Why Experts Keep Failing Us — and How to Know When Not to Trust Them, calls this the streetlight effect.  And in considering Flatland, that truly important psychological effect is one of its defining characteristics.

Humans focus solely on climate change and carbon emissions because that's where the light is.

And then the obvious question becomes what about where the light isn't? What about the stuff that lies (literally in this metaphor) in the shadow, which was Jung's term for the unconscious?

I want to talk about humans and time. But I do not want to talk about the predicted future effects of carbon emissions in a BAU scenario. Instead, I want to talk about the present and the past, which I discussed in the second Flatland essay. Look at this graph from a recent mass extinction update.

Vertebrate extinctions since 1500. See the paper to understand the difference between A and B.

Now watch this silly but unfortunately typical video. Pay particular attention to the last minute or so.

The youtube note reads "climate change has become so dire that some authors and scientists are preparing for the next mass extinction event. But would that really be a bad thing for life on earth?"

The pertinent question is: did climate change cause any of the vertebrate extinctions in the graph above?

The answer is NO. 

Has any vertebrate species gone extinct because of climate change in the last 100 years? 

To my knowledge, the answer is NO.

And yet, in the video above Thom Hartmann assures us that a future mass extinction is coming if we continue to burn fossil fuels. It is here that we see how climate-centrism gets elaborated. And If you think it's unfair of me to highlight an idiot like Hartmann, I can assure you that anything Jim Hansen or Mathis Wackernagel say reflects exactly the same bias (see below).

By focusing solely on the climate problem, the implication becomes that we can avoid a mass extinction and an ecological catastrophe in the oceans if we stop burning fossil fuels. Moreover, by framing carbon emissions as a political problem, the implication becomes that we can avoid a mass extinction by halting the evil practices of a few rotten apples (i.e., capitalist elites, fossil fuel companies).

But humans have been disrupting the biosphere and co-opting it for their own purposes for many thousands of years. We are in the midst of a mass extinction which began long ago. And that extinction is human-caused, and was human-caused long before rapid climate change came along in the anthropocene.

Suppose climate change did not exist. In this thought experiment, the world is exactly the way it is today except there is no additional climate forcing from greenhouse gas emissions. We're still emitting those gases, but the physics has been changed such that there is no stronger greenhouse effect.

What happens in such a world? In that hypothetical world, we're still in the midst of a mass extinction. The oceans are still going to pot. Humans are still disrupting and destroying the biosphere, and co-opting the Earth's primary productivity and buried resources for themselves. The only difference between this hypothetical world and the real world is the timing of events. Without climate change and ocean acidification, human destructive impulses take longer to play out. On the geological time-scale, in the distant future, the difference in timing wouldn't even be visible in the record of the rocks.

This idea is not new with me. Others have made similar observations (e.g., see here and here).

In short, humans are still trashing the place, even if climate change did not exist.

Recently, we "celebrated" Earth Overshoot Day (August 13 in 2015).

Global Footprint Network tracks humanity's demand on the planet (Ecological Footprint) against nature's ability to provide for this demand (biocapacity). Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity's annual demand on nature exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.

Earth Overshoot Day has moved from early October in 2000 to August 13th this year...

And here's the climate-centrism.

"Humanity's carbon footprint alone more than doubled between 1961 and 1973, which is when the world went into ecological overshoot.

It remains the fastest growing component of the widening gap between the Ecological Footprint and the planet's biocapacity," said Mathis Wackernagel, president of Global Footprint Network and the co-creator of the Ecological Footprint resource accounting metric."

The global agreement to phase out fossil fuels that is being discussed around the world ahead of the Climate Summit in Paris would significantly help curb the Ecological Footprint's consistent growth and eventually shrink the Footprint."

So we're only a little in overshoot (early October as opposed August 13th) if we quit burning fossil fuels. Certainly all those extinct vertebrates we saw above will be glad to know that!

I have a lot more to say about this subject, but I'm going to stop here today. I simply wanted to make people aware of what I call climate-centrism.

Comments

[Ken Barrows]

In putting in my two cents in the blogosphere, I have responded to those who say climate change is a hoax. I point out that we should reduce carbon emissions because of ocean acidification alone. The reply: crickets.