Don’t Kill the Messenger (Reposted)

Plutarch, Sophocles, and Shakespeare all wrote about what can happen to the bearer of bad news. Nevertheless, I will tempt this fate. Not only have I warned about the end of democracy, but now the end of civilization and the biosphere in which we live. Wait, all is NOT lost. First a brief history lesson to set the stage, a la Shakespeare.

From 95 to 56 BCE, Tigranes II was king of Armenia, and expanded its boundaries and power. In the process he established an alliance providing protection to Mithridates VI, an enemy of the superpower Rome. According to Plutarch’s Lives in the biography of Lucullus, Roman general and statesman: “The first messenger that gave notice of Lucullus’s coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes that he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man daring to bring further information, without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him, by saying that Lucullus would show himself a great commander if he ventured to wait for Tigranes at Ephesus, and did not at once fly out of Asia at the mere sight of the many thousands that were come against him.” As well, “Mithrobarzanes, one of his [Tigranes] chief favourites, first dared to tell him the truth, but had no more thanks for his freedom of speech than to be immediately sent out against Lucullus. In the engagement, Mithrobarzanes himself was slain, fighting, and all his men, except a few who ran away, were destroyed.”  Not surprisingly, Lucullus won.

I’ll let you draw your own comparisons with a former president, although his punishments were more yelling his head off and firing his truth tellers.

Enough of my foray into history, as much as I enjoy this sort of research. The message I bring you is that climate change is worse than you thought, although the solution is simpler, to borrow a phrase from John Harte, Ph.D., theoretical physics, 2 postdoctoral fellowships at CERN, Geneva and the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Lawrence Berke­ley Lab­o­ra­tory. I recently attended a lecture he gave with that title. Hs data was explicit and clear cut. The reason the situation is worse is because the commonly used models for extrapolating how much time we have, how much correction is required, and so on, are not using all the flashpoints, partly because the data has been spotty and only recently has more documentation for its veracity been available. It’s not as easy to correct computer models as we might think.

If we continue on this path, there is no question but that civilization and the biosphere in which we live will be destroyed.

I quote from Harte’s description at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a professor in the Graduate School. “Harte’s research inves­ti­gates the effects of human actions on, and the link­ages among, bio­geo­chem­i­cal processes, ecosys­tem struc­ture and func­tion, bio­di­ver­sity, and cli­mate. His work spans a range of scales from plot to land­scape to global and uti­lizes field inves­ti­ga­tions, math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ing, and the­ory devel­op­ment. He also con­ducts pol­icy stud­ies that attempt to con­nect the sci­ence to its soci­etal impli­ca­tions. Two themes, feed­back and scal­ing, weave through much of his research….The sin­gle most impor­tant con­clu­sion from Harte’s climate-ecosystem inves­ti­ga­tions is that ecosys­tem responses to cli­mate change are likely to trig­ger large feed­back effects and that most of these will enhance, not reduce, global warming.”

The problem is fossil fuels. Period. There is no argument about that, like it or not. How do we get away from them? Neither carbon tax nor cap and trade are politically realistic, and are awkward and cumbersome. Nuclear power is expensive, and there is still the issue of waste and possible terrorists or other bad actors gaining use of them for nefarious purposes. Inadequate battery storage is slowing use of wind and solar. Possible and practical solutions include: Tax breaks on the profits of sale of clean energy, efficient vehicles, homes, and appliances, increasing R and D for batteries such as compressed air and flywheel technology, repealing all subsidies for fossil fuels, and rewarding those who save energy.

What’s stopping this?

1. The amount of $ spent by fossil fuel companies, auto makers, even the US Chamber of Commerce (misguided as they are) to prevent any of these actions by a responsible government. I’m personally aware of how large this number is and how long it’s been going on because as a public interest lobbyist in the early 1970s working on the Clean Air Act, I came face to face with that money and its impact on the US Senate.
2. A widely held, mistaken myth that reducing fossil fuel use is an economic disaster.
3. Believing that if India and China aren’t on board with the U.S. (the three biggest nation-state polluters) there’s no sense in doing anything. This is NOT true! FYI: We release more than twice as much CO₂ as India.
4. The usual these days, public misunderstanding of the facts and the belief in myths and mistruths (otherwise known as lies).
5. As climate change continues, as Dr. Harte’s research has shown, the impacts will expand at a geometric rate. Consider wildfires, for example. Their ecosystem impact is immense: leading to mudslides, floods, loss of carbon sequestering trees, and loss of keystone forest species. This just names some of the most obvious.

So now I’ve given you lots of reasons to chop off my head or send me back to Washington D.C. to do battle. But before you even want to consider such options, let’s look at some conclusions, but not yet. Although I gave some hints at solutions above, I don’t want to overwhelm you all at once, so tune in in another day or two for more on the potentially simple solutions. I promise.

Tigranes, King of Armenia

Links:

https://www.worldhistory.org/Tigranes_the_Great/

http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lucullus.html

http://erg.berkeley.edu/people/harte-john/