Adaptation to a changing climate in Chicago

In my academic life, there is much discussion of adaptation to climate change, often in the terms of a moral imperative to protect the disadvantaged and poor and to consider assisted colonization (or assisted migration) for desirable plant and animal species which are unable to migrate to a new environment quickly enough to keep up with rapid climate change.

There is less awareness of the necessity of climate adaptation in society at large. We more often hear about global warming in a context of trying to slow it down (mitigation), with less attention paid to how we will cope with the inevitable changes already underway. Except for insurance companies, which seem to be paying close attention!

Yesterday the NYTimes reported on how Chicago is working to get ahead of the curve, taking predicted climate change into account in its urban planning. Fifty years from now, Chicago's seasons and climate may be much more like Alabama's! Having experienced frigid Chicago winters, I'm wondering what it would be like to have such long, dark nights without the cold and snow.

Some of Chicago's actions include:

• new street tree plantings are species from more southern ecosystems, eliminating the native white oak in favor of sweet gum.
• more street trees in business districts to help control run-off water and to cool the air.
• light-colored permeable pavers in parking and bike lanes to control run-off, to channel water to street plantings, and to lower the temperature.
• rubbery additives to pavement assist with expansion and contraction due to extremely hot and cold seasons.
• investing in air conditioners for public schools.

Climate Change and Disease

The American public's concern about climate change continues to decrease even as the evidence supporting the urgency and potentially harmful implications of the problem grows. Some studies have argued that this disconnect has as much to do with psychological responses and defense mechanisms as it does with serious reflection.

For instance, the issues are complex, so it is possible to focus on problems which we as individuals can distance ourselves from. Though I may feel it's too bad that some coastlines will shrink, I live a thousand feet above sea-level...

Among my own students, I've noticed a higher degree of worry about the possibility that climate change could spur the movement and introduction of diseases to humans than about other implications of climate change. But this worry is countered by evaluating those as being too indirect and lacking in examples.

A recent report will perhaps fill that gap. The New York Times has reported on a discovered link between climate change and the spread of hantavirus, a disease that can be fatal to humans.

From that article:

The spread of hantavirus among mice in the wake of the aspen die-offs should already be considered an “unintended consequence of climate change,” Dr. Lehmer said. She noted that other studies have shown an increase in human hantavirus infections in Germany during years of above-average warmth.

...

“The bottom line is that climate change is tending to introduce diseases where they haven’t been before, because it’s changing the entire dynamics of plant and animal ecosytems,” she said.

Science and Policy: Deforestation

Regular readers of this blog know that I do this more for myself than for you. Is there any handier, searchable, linkable way to keep track of the things I come across which might someday make useful handouts, references or exercises to use in my teaching?

Using the blog in this way is an idea I got from Rob Loftis, whose blog also files away his teaching ideas and notes from the AAPT conferences. I think I'll modify this one to use in my Intro to Philosophy class this fall, and I've thought about--but never actually stolen--his exercises on Twelve Angry Men.

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Last time I taught Environmental Philosophy, we spent a week talking about deforestation at the end of the course. It's a messy environmental/economic issue that offered an opportunity to review and integrate a number of the theoretical topics from earlier in the course. To provide background, I assigned this New Yorker article about illegal logging. Now, a news story that gives a swift update.

In essence, illegal logging may have decreased in the past decade (by 22% globally). That would be good news. But, then again, if no one has any idea how much timber is passing from the tropics and Siberia into China, then how can this report be accurate?

Science and Policy: Climate

Sometimes when teaching about the ethics of climate change, I hope to find a really short but authoritative newspaper article to give students. I like them to see some figures about the magnitude of climate change and to get an idea about the effects of global warming in terms that are easy to understand.

Here is a one-page news article from the AAAS, describing the contents of the latest NRC report.

The closest the committee comes to a policy recommendation is to point out the magnitude of the challenge. "Emissions reductions larger than about 80%, relative to whatever peak global emissions rate may be reached, are required to approximately stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations," it observes.

The paragraph sounds critical. Is such restraint from recommending specific policy choices required by objectivity, professional respect for policy-makers, common sense, or good taste?

On the one hand, a report focused on science should not make recommendations that can't be justified within the space given. So a recommendation for a cap-and-trade policy, or a rejection of a tax on emissions, or an expressed preference for investing more heavily in the development of tidal power, would certainly be beyond the scope of the report. On the other hand, reports, like journal articles, are rhetorical devices and are structured so that it is clear which parts are descriptive and which prescriptive. Other NRC reports have not shied away from offering prescriptions for change in education, in medical practice, and in other policy areas. There is no good reason the NRC couldn't maintain neutrality with regard to specific alternative energy development policies and conservation policies without offering much stronger verbal support that more needs to be done. Much, much more.

Conservation Ideology and National Parks

I've been blogging about women in philosophy but have mostly been thinking about the "problem of people and parks."

A recent (July 2009) article by Emily Wakild in Environmental History speaks to a related issue: the history of park planning along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In the 1930's, Mexican and U.S. officials tried to plan an international park on the southern U.S. border which would be analogous to the U.S.-Canada Glacier Waterton International Peace Park. The planning ultimately came to naught, partly because the U.S. insisted on locating the park in a place that would be inaccessible to Mexican tourists.

What's interesting about the article is that it makes explicit the values that have supported the formation of U.S. national parks and examines the ways these values differ in another culture. The U.S. national parks favor locations of unique grandeur and untouched forests, often in remote locations. Mexican national parks, on the other hand, favored locations that offered easy access to visitors, which had cultural meaning, and which were in need of reforestation.

This strikes me as similar to the difference in the U.S. between national parks and state parks. While national parks act as symbols of American uniqueness and rugged beauty--and have been linked to economic privilege--state parks are accessible, are a way of conserving diverse lands, and embody democratic mingling of classes.

It's interesting to get this historical view on what are still current questions of land use and land preservation. Does preservation require eliminating other land uses? Does tourism aid or inhibit preservation? Are conservation goals better served by setting aside the wildest lands or by targeting resources to areas that can benefit from restoration of watersheds or forests? How does park creation further political goals and goals of democratic participation? Answering such questions often demands impossible answers, such as placing a valuation on symbolism and comparing the value of a place as national symbol to its use value.

Teaching Climate Change

I don't think my university (recently ranked 596 out of 600 colleges by Forbes, but not for this reason) offers a course that explains climate change and its social consequences.

There are a lot of barriers to offering such a course. Would it be a science course? In which scientific discipline? Just understanding the physical causes of climate change requires knowing more than just a little something about physics, chemistry, and earth science. So what department would own it? (We don't have an earth science or geography department.) Understanding the effects of climate change broadens the scope even further, to include (all) the life sciences, but especially ecology and the medical sciences. And also social science. Understanding the social causes and implications would require a yet broader course: communication, political science, economics, public policy, history, philosophy. At least those, and probably more.

Can such a course be taught only at the senior level, since it requires so much knowledge? If so, would there be any students who could fit it in their schedules among their other advanced courses? Or could it be a way to teach basic concepts from many disciplines in a way that provides the sort of meaningful context that gives sense to difficult ideas?

Even if such a course would have a market among lower-level students, how could they get credit for the course (except as an elective), given that my university is set up on a disciplinary model? And how could a team of teachers from different colleges (e.g. science and the humanities) get credit for teaching it?

Then again, how can we afford not to be teaching such courses? How can we afford not to make it possible for every student who wants to take such a course to have the opportunity?

It's so common, so easy to say that Americans don't have the education it takes to understand the urgency of climate change. But are we in higher education doing what we can? Are we providing an education that helps graduates understand pressing problems?

Here is one course, available as a podcast, which has a multidisciplinary approach to climate change.

And here's an interesting blog I just happened across which examines the psychology of climate change denial.

Footprinting and Land Use

One of my students in environmental philosophy (Greg Puleo, a mathematician-to-be) constructed an Internet footprinting quiz worth visiting. The Guilt-o-Vision addresses the problem with other quizzes' hidden and baroque architecture by simplifying land use down to the numbers for crops and livestock.

While other quizzes measure a bounty of factors and crunch them down to one opaque figure (such as this one, which says that I would need 3.2 earths if everyone were to drive, eat, heat their house, pay Terrapass, and throw out their garbage the way I do), Greg's quiz just tells you how many square kilometers of land are required to grow your food. Well, not all your food, but corn, chicken, and beef.

What's astonishing about what it shows, of course, is that if you substitute corn for meat, much less land is used. However, Greg has pointed out that the variables and how they're measured incorporate many assumptions. For instance, there is a difference between corn and other vegetables, between industrial and non-industrial production methods, and between factory-raised chickens and farm-raised chickens. Not to mention that in an efficient agriculture system, animals can be raised on pasture which is too poor for growing crops. But that's not how our animals are raised, are they? They're raised on mid-Western corn.

Locavores are Everywhere

The LOCAVORE movement has become so popular that there is even an iPhone app to support locavores in their search for farmer's markets and in-season produce.

The reasons that people support growing and buying food locally include a desire to build strong communities, accountability, support for small and sustainable farming, reduction of dependence on fossil fuels for transportation, and aesthetic enjoyment. Some people feel that it is a way of putting down roots (so to speak) and finding what is special about the unique place where they live. It is a way of reclaiming regional flavors in a mass-market mass-media world.

It fits in well with my own life-style: my parents were some sort of urban homesteaders, with a significant-sized vegetable garden in the alley of our small-town backyard. We canned tomatoes, made dill pickles, put away plums and pears. Now, I belong to a CSA and complain about coming up with creative ways to fit a half dozen red peppers into every week's meals for months on end.

YUM!

But let's take a look at this again....
Is locavory elitist?
And are we pinning too much on a symbolic back-to-the-land movement?

The transportation of food accounts for 11% of food-related greenhouse-gas emissions. So, while all that transportation does add up, it's not the fastest route to cutting greenhouse gases.

What's faster? Cutting out meat, especially red meat. 18% of all greenhouse gases are produced by livestock, and 30% of the earth's land surface is devoted to raising livestock or the grain and grass they eat. If you replaced beef with beans one day a week, it would reduce your carbon footprint more than becoming a locavore.

Environmental Decisions: No Easy Answers

As sustainability and conservation become more prevalent concerns, there is no hiding the ways that some environmental values conflict with other environmental values. While such conflicts could be used to help us refine our sense of what matters and why, ethical reflection is likely to be swamped by politics.

Serenity, a student in my environmental philosophy class, passed along this article on the environmental value of the Mojave Desert. Senator Feinstein has proposed that 570,000 acres of federal land be set aside as a national monument to prevent the most pristine lands from being developed. Who would want to develop land in the desert? Companies who would like to capture solar energy.

The argument for preservation seems to hang on Feinstein's assertion that there are other, better places for siting solar power facilities:

“While I strongly support renewable energy, it is critical that these projects move forward on public and private lands well-suited for that purpose. Unfortunately, many of the sites now being considered for leases are completely inappropriate and will lead to the wholesale destruction of some of the most pristine areas in the desert.”

Certainly, there are multiple options for energy production and conservation, and only the one shot at preservation. But it can also be difficult for environmentalists to convince others that deserts, which seem to be wastelands, have ecological and aesthetic value.

Global Warming and Realistic Expectations of Science

In my philosophy of science class last week I taught Wendy Parker's article on pluralism in climate science. (W.S. Parker. 2006. Understanding Pluralism in Climate Modeling. Foundations of Science 11:49-368) One of the topics that my class is spending a good deal of time on is the unity of science, methodological pluralism, and the more thorough forms of pluralism (metaphysical pluralism?) argued for by Nancy Cartwright, Phillip Kitcher, and John Dupré. This article fit well into that schedule because it examines a case in which the best contemporary science provides incompatible models which are nevertheless viewed as complementing each other, rather than competing with each other.

I expected that the class discussion which might develop out of this case would evaluate whether it is the levels of uncertainty involved in climate science which supports the current pluralism. In principle, at least, more certainty about climate processes and better datasets would be more likely to bring some of these models into actual competition with each other (even though such certainty is out of our reach for the foreseeable future).

But the discussion which actually developed came out of shock that our climate models are uncertain to this degree, that our data about past climate is not more complete, and an examination of whether, failing absolute certainty, the climate change skeptics have a correct assessment. I do not think that the students leaning this way started with any sympathy for the deniers. So, is this a case of a little knowledge being a bad thing?

In truth, I find this reaction to be an extension of the disillusioning about science which is a regular part of the philosophy of science class. The science students are comfortable with the revelations that there is not "a" scientific method, that science is not certain, and that when we want to explain why science is rational and progressive, the structure of its social institutions is one place to look for that explanation. My engineering students are less receptive.

I discovered that it's not wise to talk to smart, engaged, advanced undergraduates about the uncertainty in climate science because, unless they've taken an ecology class (which only 40 students a year at my institution enroll in), they may be completely unaware of the evidence in support of global warming. And if they're not aware of the evidence, they're certainly not able to evaluate it.

I don't think that only scientists can engage in issues surrounding global warming. But my students have taught me, again, how important science education is.

Here's my course blog, where an environmental science student reacts to the class discussion.

Is it getting hot in here?

Today is the National Global Warming Teach-In!

RIT is living up to its newly developed self-image as a leader in educating for a green economy. In just the last month, we revved up our program from 0 to this.

I'm participating in two ways:
1. in my philosophy of science class, we're discussing Wendy Parker's article "Understanding Pluralism in Climate Modeling" (Foundations of Science 2006, vol. 11, pp. 349-368).
2. a panel discussion with colleagues from the social sciences. Our comments will be directed by questions from our dean on the ways in which the liberal arts contributes to conceptualizing and addressing global warming.

Clean Air, Clean Water, Good Music

Here's a blog that discusses music and environmental concerns:
http://rockandecology.blogspot.com/. Check out the comparison of thrash metal bands' environmental awareness!

A post on Grist by Bill McKibben about environmental music.

A list of environmental songs

The Singing Climatologist

Captain Sea Level

Thanks to Richard Wallace, Ursinus College Environmental Studies program, for these links! A student in my Intro to Ethics course passes along this humorous video by Tim Minchin:

Take a breath of fresh air

What's a walk in the woods worth? And to whom?
Is it just "nature lovers" that unwind in the great out-of-doors?

A study in Psychological Science finds that people perform a memory task better after walking through an arboretum than after a walk in a streetscape. Even viewing scenic images is a better treatment for mental fatigue than pictures of buildings. Science does occasionally prove the obvious--in this case, that strolling in the forest really is relaxing.

How much fuel is that?

Judging fuel efficiency using MPG apparently leads most of us to misjudge the benefits of increasing fuel efficiency for the least efficient cars.

Miles per gallon tells us how many miles we can drive on one gallon of gas. But who has a sense of their gas usage?

What we do have a clear sense for--what we most clearly experience--is how many miles we drive. So the measurement that best matches how we intuitively measure our fuel use is how many gallons it takes to drive a certain number of miles (gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon).

The economists who conducted these experiments found that the MPG measurement is misleading because people don't realize that trading in a car that gets 18 mpg for one that gets 28 mpg is a bigger jump in fuel efficiency (twice as big!) than trading in one that gets 34 mpg for one that gets 50 mpg. The implication for policy is that increasing the fuel efficiency of behemoth gas guzzlers is more effective than incrementally tweaking hybrids.

This would be a great problem for a critical thinking course!

Skepticism about Climate Change

Yesterday I posted a quote from a book review by Freeman Dyson. Dyson thinks that climate change skeptics have been misunderstood and are too quickly dismissed:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Now, I think Dyson is right to consider whether the hype about global warming distracts from other important environmental and social issues. In fact, environmental problems are not all of a piece: a solution to one problem can exacerbate others.

Still there's a problem here with Dyson's assessment. He says "Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists." But is this true?

I have yet to meet someone who is both skeptical of the climate science that supports anthropogenic global warming and is a passionate environmentalist. The position that Dyson describes--a person who thinks that the climate change hype is overblown--is not necessarily skeptical. This person just has their values ordered so that addressing climate change is not the primary value. The skeptics that I've met take one of these positions:

1.) They are ignorant of and threatened by science, sometimes as an extension of a general anti-intellectualism or anti-secularism.

2.) They think that there is a more subtle political motivation for the climate change hypothesis. For instance, that liberals are really anti-corporate, anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, etc. and this scientific hypothesis is an excuse to get political support for their views or their candidates. Often the skeptics in this camp don't doubt the climate change evidence but do doubt that the cause is anthropogenic. The argument goes that if it's not anthropogenic then we need not change any of our practices.

Climate change: Ethics, politics, economics

Next year I'm teaching an "Introduction to Ethics" course with an emphasis on sustainability issues.

One inevitable pitfall will be the temptation to be distracted from the discourse of ethics by the details of policy. My students, most of whom prefer technical problems to theoretical questions, will be tempted by this distraction. And since I'm usually so concerned to show that theory matters to practice, I will be too. But it's a lower-level course, not a place for settling what policy should be for specific cases.

Another pitfall will be overcoming both apathy and skepticism. In just about every class or lecture where the question of global warming comes up, there is one (and usually only one) skeptic. I hope that I can pull the ever-present skeptic into a debate on the ethics of the issue instead of the facts. I personally believe the facts are settled, but there is no time in a philosophy course to teach all the science--both basic and complex--that is needed to place trust in the consensus of climate scientists. (For example, one student this year insisted that since Mars is warmer than the earth, and Mars has no humans on it, climate change on earth can't possibly be caused by humans.)

Freeman Dyson has a piece in the New York Review of Books discussing an economic evaluation of climate change policies in the book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. The author, William Nordhaus, holds that the more ambitious plans, such as Al Gore's call for a drastic reduction in emissions, will not be cost-effective in the long run. That is, they will cost more to implement than the economy will benefit from climate stabilization. (This evaluation seems to ignore the ethical question of whether the costs of failure to act are disproportionately paid by the vulnerable.) On the other hand, doing nothing could be disastrous. Nordhaus says that any policy proposal which tries to avoid raising the price of carbon (and doesn't that translate into allowing gas prices to rise?) is simply not serious.

Dyson also takes on the question of the global warming skeptics, as I'm sure I'll have to do. The main argument in their favor is the problem of induction that attacks any scientific generalization, plus the philosopher of science's skeptical metainduction: any scientific inference could be wrong, and in the history of science many have been wrong. So maybe the climate scientists, with all their evidence for anthropogenic causes of global warming and the even greater consensus that, human-caused or not, the current warming trend will be fueled by positive feedback mechanisms, are just wrong. Maybe. But the idea of inductive risk does hold that skepticism in check: if we're wrong, we'll be in really bad shape.

Dyson's concern is that the global warming issue distracts from other environmental issues. He writes:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Numeracy and Democracy

My dad is a statistician/methodologist in psychology, and sent me images of this amazing art installation in Seattle:
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?icl=7. It aims to provide a sense of proportion over our waste, and I think it's profound.

Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

© Chris Jordan

Detail at actual size:

© Chris Jordan

In several classes this week, I've been speaking with students about political awareness and apathy. I am especially moved by the significance of democracy and our privilege, given the events in Zimbabwe this week over the elections. Yet at the same time, a University Senate sponsored rally against racism drew a pathetic few demonstrators with no clear message, and no clear aim.

Art can be a great way to raise consciousness. Although it tends to preach to the converted, it provides motivation and vision in a way that grassroots politics and activisim no longer seems to.

Val Plumwood

Val Plumwood, an influential philosopher, ecofeminist, and activist died on February 28. Author of many articles and book chapters and four books, her latest was Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2001).

She will be remembered for her contributions to a distinctively feminist, anti-patriarchical and anti-hierarchical philosophy of environmental encounter. She argued that Western forms of reason--scientific, economic, and instrumental--are the root cause of an ecological destruction that will eventually end our species. Her philosophical views can be experienced through her personal retelling of her near-fatal encounter with a crocodile. This riveting story illustrates an understanding of humans as potential prey, and the attack caused her to review how she thought of humans' place in nature:

This concept of human identity [as separate from nature] positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we can not imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end.

Wonderful wonderful wonderful

It's pure awesome to see things we love but which exist in odd corners of our lives come together and meet each other!

An article in yesterday's New York Times describes The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, an art exhibit by Margaret and Christine Wertheim featuring all these wonderful elements:

textile art: In this case, crochet. The exhibit features sea creatures, such as kelp, anemones, corals, and sponges, crocheted out of the most magnificent yarns. The crochet coral reef covers 35,000 square feet! In the Wertheim's essay for the Chicago Cultural Center, they write:

Every person who takes up this craft creates new species of crochet organisms and we have come to see the project as a collective experiment in textile-based evolution. Just as all living creatures result from variations in an underlying DNA code, so the species in these handi-crafted reefs arise from deviations in a single simple algorithm.

feminism: Crochet and knitting, though not exclusive to women, are undoubtedly a feminine realm. (Though there are exceptions!) In 1997 Margaret Wertheim published a feminism-inflected book on women and science, titled Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars.

mathematical theory: The crocheted forms grew from a mathematical model:

Hyperbolic crochet was itself the outgrowth of an unexpected branch of geometry. For two thousand years mathematicians attempted to prove that the only possible geometries were the flat, or Euclidean, plane, and the sphere. Great minds expended themselves on the effort, only to discover in the nineteenth century that a third option was logically necessitated....Mathematicians’ skepticism about hyperbolic space had been based in part on their inability to imagine how it would look, for they had no way to model it physically. Most were thus astounded when, in 1997, Dr. Daina Taimina, a Latvian émigré at Cornell University, presented a hyperbolic structure made with crochet.

science: The crocheted coral reef forms imitate real creatures dwelling on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, whose bodies exhibit hyperbolic forms.

environmentalism: The project highlights the rate at which coral reefs are being devastated by global warming and agricultural run-off.

More photos here!

The Global Environment Outlook-4

Khadimir alerted me to the UN's "The Global Environment Outlook-4," a 5-year report about the sorry state that the whole world is in. The BBC headline:

Continuing destruction of the natural world is affecting the health, wealth and well-being of people around the globe, according to a major UN report.

In the report, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon writes

This assault on the global environment risks undermining the many advances human society has made in recent decades.

Bad news all around.

Since David Sobel’s book Beyond Ecophobia, there has been some debate about whether reporting of environmental news in such dire terms is serving to fuel political change. Or if, by creating an association between fear and the environment, apocalyptic reports will push people to tune out.

Sobel recommends that education introduce students to nature with an eye to play, empathy, and exploration. Only once people (children) have cultivated an attachment to natural landscapes should the environment as problem be introduced.

There is some reason to this. But political change to address environmental problems cannot wait for us to reform education and then for biophilic children to grow into environmentally-aware adults. Tell-it-like-it-is reports are necessary for motivating global political change NOW.