Scared Scientists: some remarkable photography

[GliderGuider]

This is brilliantly haunting photography of some brilliant, haunted people. Seven Australian scientists, all working in aspects of environmental science, share their deepest fears.

A quick chat to the experts and it’s immediately apparent that climate change is not only real: it’s serious. Very serious.

But this isn’t what scares scientists.
They're afraid humanity will continue to bury its head in the sand; instead of facing its greatest challenge head on.

Scientists don't want to be right, they want to be wrong. Research shows this is our last decade to slow climate change before it's too late. The science community believe if people are willing, we can transform the current trajectory from one of fear to one of hope. But the science can only take us so far. If we want a safe and sustainable world, we need to take the facts seriously - and do what needs to be done to change them.

Tim Flannery



TIM FLANNERY
Mammologist, Palaeontologist
University of New South Wales,
Monash University, La Trobe University

FEAR: DISRUPTION OF GLOBAL CIVILISATION

Climate Science underestimated the pace of climate change, it was too conservative. We're now having far more rapid change than originally projected. Change that if not slowed, will undoubtedly affect my children and my grandchildren.

There is genuine potential for a change in climate to disrupt our global civilisation. If that happens, we know human nature has a dark side, people will fight over an ever diminishing resource pool, and that is a future we want to avoid.

This decade is critical, it is our last chance to prevent our children from that type of world. We have to make significant progress and get the global emissions trajectory turning downwards. That is the urgent task at hand.

[Viva_Daddy]

1. The GOP is still in DENIAL so THEY HAVE TO GO!

[GliderGuider]

2. Necessary but not sufficient, unfortunately.

The drive to consume more resources and energy, to keep growing at all costs, has its roots in each of us regardless of our wealth (or lack of it), party affiliation or political outlook.

Try a thought experiment: choose between a job that will let you feed and educate your kids, or a drastic reduction in income, social services and physical infrastructure in order to "save the world" - maybe, at some unspecified time in the future. If you choose the former, you are part of one problem, if you choose the latter you're part of a different problem. There is little middle ground left - human beings have already appropriated it.

We are trapped by the structure of the global system we have built around ourselves, with the very best of intentions. Every one of those scientists' deepest fears is going to come true.

[phantom power]

5. We climbed this hill.

We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we're at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it's a mirage, maybe it's a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can't see because the clouds are blocking the view.

So we head off to find out -- but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can't move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We're trapped on a local maximum.

But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it's only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.

But you can't get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.

--Dr. Lianna Lutterodt, "Faith and the Fitness Landscape," In Conversation, 2091

From Echopraxia, by Peter Watts

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

7. Yes, it's called looking down the road far enough

so you don't run into the wall.

[AlbertCat]

6. Necessary but not sufficient, unfortunately.

Indeed.


Cut down on the making babies thing. That's the root of the problem.

[GliderGuider]

8. Cut down on the making babies thing...

And stop trying to make people wealthier. (I=PAT, right?) No, it ain't gonna happen.

I sense a problem here...

[The2ndWheel]

9. It's a series of reinforcing things

I don't know if there's a single root problem. Look at the roots of a plant or tree. They go in all sorts of directions, taking in as much energy as possible.

The population issue is more like the trunk of the tree than the root. Or, the population could be the branches, something else is the trunk that fortifies the growth of the population, and something even deeper than whatever the trunk is are the roots that fuel the trunk.

Population itself just seems to be too easy of answer.

[AlbertCat]

29. Population itself just seems to be too easy of answer.

It's true.

It might be a force for civilization.... a bigger and bigger population.

Steven Pinker talks about ever widening circles of altruism as evolution goes forward. From the self, to children, to the emendate family, to the extended family, to a group of families, to tribes, to other tribes, to cities, to countries, to other races, to species, to other species....and so one. One mechanism might be the bumping together of a spreading population, and the sharing (as well as the ever present competition) that must come with it.

[Dont call me Shirley]

16. Also a big issue, a few people thinking they deserve as many resources as they can hoard.

And the "I get to have mine, so you don't get to have any" folks

[JDPriestly]

15. We are not trapped.

Alternative energies require cooperative efforts among people, but they promise not just a healthier environment but better lives for more people and across-the-board economic betterment.

Solar energy should be the primary source of energy in the Southwest. We should need very little oil and gas and utterly no coal or nuclear energy to supplement it. That would mean pretty much unlimited electricity. We developed so many complex technologies. We can certainly develop better batteries, better energy storage. One thing we can do is to rebuild our grid to store and carry electrical energy better.

We need laws that require utilities to buy excess electricity produced from solar panels. That requires rebuilding the grids.

I tell this story over and over, but I will tell it again. I worked for a small oil company in London in the early 1970s. I was really just a glorified secretary, but my boss liked me (his English wasn't that great and I could write his thoughts out in coherent form) and our office was small so he sent me to the alternative energy forum of the first International Energy Conference. I remember that Sheik Yamani as well as the Baron de Rothschild were there. I ate lunch with a bunch of men who were executives at big oil companies.

(Among them, I think was Maggie Thatcher's husband. This man came up to me and introduced himself and told me that his wife was quite outstanding. I had been instructed to say nothing about my job. I dropped my coffee all over myself. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life.)

In other words, I wasn't the plainest woman around and I was very young. My boss may have sent me just as a joke on the old boys' club. (He had daughters.) But then, I think he was trying to encourage me to have confidence.

Anyway, MIT presented on solar energy. This was the early 1970s, and they said they were supplying a house in the area around MIT with nearly all its energy needs from solar power. They supplemented with gas only on days with very bad weather.

After the presentation, the MIT team answered questions and took comments. A man a few rows behind me stood up and said that he represented the nuclear industry of Canada and that they were not interested in solar energy because it did not provide them with a product they could sell.

The energy industry wants us addicted to their products. They do not want us to have energy self-sufficiency. This is capitalism gone awry. The energy companies have acted like drug pushers.

The thing about addiction is that life improves if you kick your addiction. As a society, we have allowed ourselves to become addicted to oil, gas and coal. If we free ourselves from our addiction we will become more prosperous and happy.

Why should the average American family pay so much for energy, so much for lights, electricity, heat, air conditioning and gas when we have alternatives that in the long run will be cheaper even if the initial costs of switching to them are high. Can't we build a better life for ourselves in this way.

The oil, gas and coal we are extracting and mining now is far more expensive than it was when my great-great-grandparents mined a little coal on a property somewhere in the Middle West. Oil was almost oozing out of the ground way back when it was found in Pennsylvania. Now we spend fortunes building platforms in the ocean, and we are ruining our environment, destroying land we will one day need and contaminating that essential resource for our lives -- water, in order to satisfy our addiction to fossil fuels and keep our blood money flowing into the coffers of the self-satisfied, oblivious fools like the Koch Brothers.

We can do better. There are better products to sell than the poisons we now use to heat, fuel and energize our lives.

[NickB79]

20. Energy is but a small subset of the many ways we've screwed the planet and ourselves

http://io9.com/this-chart-shows-how-humans-dominate-the-planet-by-w-1537709081

An instant swap to renewables will not alter the path we've put ourselves on at this point.

It's like trying to hit the brakes on a car going 90 mph when it's only a few feet from that brick wall you coming.

[Enthusiast]

21. Thank you, JDPriestly.

Switching to alternative energy would be the single greatest improvement we could make at this time. Of course we also need to rein in the consumer culture mentality.

[GliderGuider]

22. You say that like you think "reining in the consumer culture mentality" is possible.

I've spent the last decade researching this problem from every scientific point of view imaginable. My conclusion is that it's not possible, so long as there are still consumables to be consumed.

[Enthusiast]

23. I only hope.

[GliderGuider]

24. Sorry, didn't mean to be quite so harsh.

Burt we're collectively in a car going a hundred miles an hour, we're ten feet from the wall, and nobody even knows where the accelerator and brake pedals are. I hope faith will be enough, because prayer is about all we have left.

[Enthusiast]

25. No problem. Here's why. I live in the rural Appalachian part of Ohio. Think WVA.

My area has finally reopened some old coal mines. This area has been economically depressed for decades.

The people here are simply thrilled to be employed again. If you tell these guys they can no longer mine that coal they would fight you to the death on the spot. Now they can buy that big truck they have wanted since they were children. They cannot be reasoned with.

I also live on the edge of shale formation they are fracking. You can hardly find anyone here that would go against fracking even if it causes earthquakes and poisons ground water.

So I know all about the hill we have to climb. And I understand there is no substitute for cubic dollars.

Like you, I am near despair. But I still hope. Maybe we will have a short term but massive heat wave in the middle of this coming Winter. You know, something big enough to wake people up.

[GliderGuider]

28. +1 - Thanks, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

[Control-Z]

3. K&R&B(ookmarked)

These scientists are frightened but have hope for stabilization. It is time to promote the solutions and hope, I think.

[GliderGuider]

4. The scientists may simply be voicing their top-level fears

It's just not done for an environmental scientist to say "We're fucked" in public. But I would bet good money that after a beer or two in private, many of these scientists would say just that.

They may express hope for stabilization, but I no longer share their tepid optimism.

IMO the system of global civilization is not under the control of any of its internal components (i.e. nations, institutions and individuals). The system as a whole needs constantly increasing inputs of net energy and raw materials in order to maintain its integrity, and will resist or circumvent any attempt to restrict its access to them. The system understands that the cost (to its components) of maintaining those inputs is much less important than the treat of its own dissolution. The positive feedback loops on which the system depends for integrity will continue to operate until they can't.

So it goes.

[ErikJ]

13. maybe theyre afraid if they told the truth, it would spark total anarchy

No hope for future would probably cause massive disruption.

[freedom fighter jh]

14. Maybe they are, but if so I think they're wrong.

Not enough people would believe them.

I would.

[Politicalboi]

27. But they are telling us that

And the world around us is telling us that. No mobs yet. They either don't believe it, or don't want to believe it. Their god won't let that happen.

[tclambert]

10. I don't think they're scared enough.

By the time people at large do get scared enough, it will be too late because of the decades of lag time in the climate system.

[JDPriestly]

11. K&R. Check this out!

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/

[Enthusiast]

26. Adapting to the sea level rise?

Thanks, JD.

[handmade34]

12. K&R

for message and photography

[Dont call me Shirley]

17. It's time now to cut off the financial welfare payments to the fossil fuel industry.

"Starve them to the point where they can then be drowned in the bathtub"

Take all that welfare money from the oil, coal, war industries and put it towards clean energy, teaching responsible parenthood, teaching our children to be responsible for their own actions, creating peace and cooperation.

[GliderGuider]

18. Who will bell the cat?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_cat

The fable concerns a group of mice who debate plans to nullify the threat of a marauding cat. One of them proposes placing a bell around its neck, so that they are warned of its approach. The plan is applauded by the others, until one mouse asks who will volunteer to place the bell on the cat. All of them make excuses. The story is used to teach the wisdom of evaluating a plan not only on how desirable the outcome would be, but also on how it can be executed. It provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility, and how this affects the value of a given plan.

[burfman]

19. don't be so down.....have some faith that we can fix these problems.....

I remember reading about the Manhattan horse manure problem in Scientific America maybe back in the 70's.

So I did a search on the problem and found this text from referenced from the super freakonomic book:

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/29/the-horse-manure-problem/

Paragraph #1:

In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows.

Paragraph #2:

When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.
This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good…But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity – when given proper incentives – is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.


My comments in relation to this forum:

The technological fixes are right around the corner.... cheap solar, wind, energy storage and everyone will be breathing a lot easier.
Of course our government could do a bit more to hasten the day when these things happen, but hey don't give up and assume we have to start living like we did in the 1800's to fix these problems....

Burfman