Stepping Back from the Brink - George Monbiot

We know where we’re going. For many years, scientists have warned that we are crashing through the Earth’s ecological limits. We know we are in the midst of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Yet we seem constitutionally incapable of acting on this knowledge.

The United States has elected a man who promised to unleash a gigantic ecological tantrum, and has, unfortunately, delivered. The UK government has produced 150 pages of greenwash it calls the 25 Year Environment Plan: the same gutless twaddle governments have been publishing for the past 25 years. As always, it was described in some quarters as “a good start”. No policy, anywhere, is commensurate with the scale of the challenge we face.

So what stops us from responding? For years, I’ve suspected that the cause runs even deeper than the power of big business and the official obsession with economic growth, potent as these forces are. Now, thanks to the most profound and far-reaching book I have ever read, I feel I’m beginning to understand what it might be.

Read the piece by Guardian columnist, George Monbiot - “Stepping Back from the Brink.”

How to Help My Daughter Face Climate Change With an Open Heart

When the wildfires were still raging in California, my 12-year-old daughter and I rode Amtrak north from Oakland to Sacramento. Nearing Berkeley, we caught our first glimpse of the gray-brown wall of smoke issuing in from Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Mendocino, Butte, and Solano counties. After riding 10 or so miles further on, the illusion of the wall suddenly dissipated, and we found ourselves speeding along in a fog of fine ash, our train blanketed in its opaque haze.

Gazing into the smoke, my daughter seated beside me, I considered the stark difference our awareness of global warming created between my childhood and hers. And I felt a deep anxiety stir in my belly.

What happens to a child’s psyche, I asked myself, as she gradually absorbs the knowledge that our planet is warming at a terrifying rate and to an unimaginably dangerous degree, then quietly observes the adults in her life, particularly those most responsible for caring for and protecting her, doing the very things that are causing the emergency? What happens as she observes the mundane spectrum of everyday life in the United States amid climate chaos: as dad pulls the car up to the pump, as mom comes home from the airport after a business trip, as the family sits down to another meat and factory farm-based dinner, iPhones at the ready and the thermostat cranked to 70?

Read the Yes! Magazine story by Chris Moore-Backman - “How to Help My Daughter Face Climate Change With an Open Heart.”

The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science

Science strives for coherence.

For example, the findings from climate science form a highly coherent body of knowledge that is supported by many independent lines of evidence: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human economic activities are causing the global climate to warm and unless GHG emissions are drastically reduced in the near future, the risks from climate change will continue to grow and major adverse consequences will become unavoidable.

People who oppose this scientific body of knowledge because the implications of cutting GHG emissions—such as regulation or increased taxation—threaten their worldview or livelihood cannot provide an alternative view that is coherent by the standards of conventional scientific thinking.

Instead, we suggest that people who reject the fact that the Earth’s climate is changing due to greenhouse gas emissions (or any other body of well-established scientific knowledge) oppose whatever inconvenient finding they are confronting in piece-meal fashion, rather than systematically, and without considering the implications of this rejection to the rest of the relevant scientific theory and findings.

Hence, claims that the globe “is cooling” can coexist with claims that the “observed warming is natural” and that “the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us.”

Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that “something must be wrong” with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation.

This high-level coherence accompanied by contradictory subordinate propositions is a known attribute of conspiracist ideation, and conspiracism may be implicated when people reject well-established scientific propositions.

Read the Synthese paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, and Elisabeth Lloyd - “The ‘Alice inWonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism.”

QandA tackles climate change implactions and complications

The implications and complications of climate change are clear to some, but remain a mystery to many.

Aware of this, the Australian Academy of Sciences recently released the new The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers.

This is an extensively revised update of a similar publication in 2010. Its stated purpose is to “provide an understanding based on our present scientific knowledge, of some key questions about climate change”.

The Climate Council discusses this updated version of publication in its story: “The Australian Academy of Science published a helpful Q&A on climate change”

Second call for climate change abstracts

Those with something to say about climate change should submit an abstract to The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) for its 2012 annual conference.

The conference, which has the theme of “Climate Adaptation in Action: sharing knowledge to adapt”, will bring together researchers, practitioners and decision makers to share knowledge and research approaches.

This knowledge and subsequent approaches will inform policy and practice in planning for climate change with the goal of ensuring Australia is adapting well to climate change.

This is the second call for abstracts and submissions close on February 17, 2012 and any abstract should be no more than 300 words.
To register for the June 26-28 conference at Melbourne’s Sebel Hotel or to submit an abstract visit the NCCARF website.