The Decaffeination of Climate Change
Coffee beans as a climate change canary in a coal mine | ISSUE 5 | 01.24.19 |
What’s wild coffee got to do with climate change? | Photo by Michael Kenneally
QUICK GLANCE INDEX:
ONE | Climate Change Decaffeination. TWO | I Read the (Climate) News Today, Hoo, Boy. THREE | The End of Polar(bear)ization? FOUR | Circling around Planet Earth. | FIVE | A Dozen Years Before We’re Done For? SIX | It’s a Mad, Mad, Madhouse Effect World. SEVEN | ‘Push For Changes Big Enough to Matter.’ EIGHT | Sign Up for Climate Change. NINE | It’s a Natural Security Thing. TEN | You promised cartoons.
ONE | CLIMATE CHANGE DECAFFEINATION: Among climate change cognoscenti, there’s a regular theme as to what will finally turn the heads of those for whom climate change is not yet The Most Urgent Matter in the World. Which it is. But what if people’s morning coffee is affected? British botanist Aaron Davis has spent decades studying coffee cultivation. His research, as recounted in the 01.16.19 New York Times, records how a warming Earth is making it harder to grow coffee in traditional coffee-producing regions. That includes Ethiopia, home to coffee’s most popular bean, arabica.
He has mapped where farmers can grow coffee next: basically upcountry, where it’s cooler … In what is perhaps his most disheartening research, Dr. Davis has found that wild coffee, the dozens of varieties that once occurred under forest canopies on at least three continents, is at risk of vanishing forever. Among the world’s 124 coffee species, he and a team of scientists have concluded, 60 percent are at risk of extinction in the wild. Climate change and deforestation are to blame.
It matters because those wild varieties could be crucial for coffee’s survival in the era of global warming. In those plants could lie the genes that scientists need to develop new varieties that can grow on a hotter, drier planet…. For Dr. Davis, the loss of wild varieties is important not just for plant breeders, farmers and coffee drinkers. The loss of a species also means less food and less shelter in its ecosystem. The result, in his view, is a diminished Earth.
TWO | I READ THE (CLIMATE) NEWS TODAY, HOO, BOY
When it comes to snaring people’s alarm about climate change, Americans are influenced most by big disasters. And are beginning to warm up to paying to fight climate change. So says a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. The poll found 74 percent of Americans say extreme events in the past five years—hurricanes, droughts, floods and heat waves—have influenced their climate change views. The survey was done in November, before the U.S. government released a major climate change report. Americans are also willing to pay to fight climate change. But not a lot:
The share of Americans who said they think the climate is changing has held roughly steady over the last year — about 7 in 10 Americans think climate change is happening. Among those, 60 percent say climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans … The poll shows Americans are ready to pay more to deal with the changing climate — but not to pay very much. A majority of Americans, 57 percent, would support a proposal that would add a $1 monthly fee to their electricity bills to combat climate change. But most oppose proposals that would increase their own monthly costs by $10 or more.
That sounds a bit cheap given the stakes—fate of the human race, and all. The poll also addressed when people begin to connect climate change dots.
“They trust themselves and their own experiences,” says Heidi Roop, a climate scientist at the University of Washington’s Climate Impact Group who focuses on the science of climate change communication. For a long time, the idea that the acrid black billows from car and truck tailpipes and power plant smokestacks were altering the earth’s atmosphere still seemed abstract, with any impacts decades away. “With the extreme events that we’ve been seeing, we’re increasingly able to attribute, or pull out, how human-caused climate change is making those more severe.”
Climate change is not just a polar bear thing anymore. | Tim Rosscamp photo
THREE | THE END OF POLAR(BEAR)IZATION?
Speaking of polls, this story could launch a new connotation of ‘polarization.’ Almost half of all Americans say global warming "is harming us right now.” That’s the highest watermark ever in the decade-long survey “Climate Change in the American Mind,” by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Prior results showed Americans viewed climate change as a remote issue —"a polar bear problem, not a people problem," said Edward Maibach, a George Mason University professor.
In the latest survey, 48 percent of the 1,114 adults surveyed said they believed the impacts of climate change were being felt "right now" in the United States. That is up 9 percentage points since last spring and double the response recorded for the same question in early 2010. "That is a major change," said Maibach …
"And from everything I understand about the social science of how people think about climate change, it's when they get the fact that it's not just a polar bear problem, that's when they come to deeply care. It's when they come to really expect real solutions to be put forward by our national and our community leaders."
FOUR | CIRCLING AROUND PLANET EARTH
My brother David, whose cool ‘circular planet’ photo was featured in Issue 2, suggests I need cartoons and artwork higher up in this newsletter, to lessen the blow of things like the dollar-a-month climate change club fees suggested in the poll above. Well, then—how about a video of his circular photos? While not intended directly as an elegiac homage to what climate change threatens —this little blue planet of ours — they serve that role quite well. His keen naturalist and photographer’s eye captures the beauty and resonance of the natural world in planetary form.
FIVE | A DOZEN YEARS BEFORE WE’RE DONE FOR?
The meme to end all memes — we have 12 years to save the planet before all memes are kaput! — has been repeated ad infinitum on social media. The number arose from the daunting UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in early October 2018. In this 01.23.19 piece in Treehugger.com, Sami Grover picks apart the cavalier framing of doomsday’s supposed arrival just over a decade from now:
In many ways, it's a useful framing that drives home the urgency of the situation we face. There is also, however, a strong danger (nay, certainty) that it will be misunderstood and/or misrepresented. So let's first cover what it doesn't mean:
1) It does not mean that we have 12 years before we have to act.
2) It does not mean that we have 12 years to completely decarbonize.
3) And it does not mean that the fight is over if we fail to reach our target in 12 years.
It was misreadings like these, Grover notes, that led to a cluster of Twitter kerfluffles this week, in which famed climate scientist Michael E. Mann defended new Democratic lightning rod Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from accusations of alarmism. Let’s pull up the tweet in question. Click through on your own to survey the kerfluffling:
Grover notes that what the 12-year figure does refer to is that if we’re going to have a snowball’s chance in hell (my phrase, not his) of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees, we have a bit more than a decade to cut global emissions some 45% based on 2010 levels.
We then have another two decades (until 2050) to reach zero net emissions… It's still an astoundingly daunting task. But many argue that the challenges that lie in the way of achieving it are largely political, not scientific. Among all the depressing headlines and scientific reports (of which there are many), there are plenty of bright spots to suggest we could make significant progress if our leaders would put our minds to it….
The UK has already brought power-sector emissions to Victorian-era levels. Shenzhen, China—a city of 11.9 million people—has already transitioned its entire bus fleet to electric vehicles. Norwegian oil demand may be peaking due to electric cars. Both utilities and cities are setting near net zero emissions targets within the timeframe we are talking about.
None of it is enough, Grover adds. But a climate movement is stirring and “we now need very bold commitments and near-term efforts to move us toward them fast. The ‘12 year’ figure is useful in focusing the mind and spurring us to action.”
SIX | IT’S A MAD, MAD, MADHOUSE EFFECT WORLD
Speaking of Mann, you could not concoct a better Dynamic Duo for creating an informed cartoon book on climate change denial than Mann and the great Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom Toles. The full title of their book, published in 2016, is illustrative: “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.” In a 06.18.18 profile of the work for The Environmentalist, John Lang writes about the bead the duo draws on climate change denialism, which has only been exacerbated since the book’s publication, by a certain Denier-In-Chief’s arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
This war — waged in the name of freedom and liberty by those on the US political-right — is implemented mostly by stealth and weaponized by think tanks who deem climate change solutions existential threats … A recent survey found that only 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed scientific articles didn’t agree with human-induced climate change. That, of course, still hasn’t put a dent in the fierce campaigns of those aligned to fossil-fuel interests, such as the Heartland and Competitive Enterprise Institutes.
Their product is doubt. It sounds benign, but it’s anything but. After gently sowing doubt’s seeds — especially into busy human minds who don’t have the time or inclination to understand this issue in all its complexity — they sit back and let their fabrications reverberate as far as they will fester. When Winston Churchill said “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has had a chance to get its pants on”, he may’ve never been more right.
“The Madhouse Effect,” Lang notes, is hardly cartoonish in how it “exposes an ugly thing beautifully, and with humour.”
SEVEN | ‘PUSH FOR CHANGES BIG ENOUGH TO MATTER’
I plan to do a couple future issues on the themes of hope and despair — and whether, as one climate scientist has noted, we need courage rather than hope in the face of four-alarm climate klaxons sounding worldwide. Meanwhile, that hope thing. Here’s a 10.08.18 Guardian piece, titled “Overwhelmed by Climate Change? Here’s What You Can Do.” You decide if it helps:
Although individual choices and actions are important, experts say people need to unite if the scale of this challenge is to be met, making the political space for politicians and big businesses to make the necessary changes … Bill McKibben, a leading climate campaigner and founder of 350.org, argues the most important thing people can do is come together to form movements – or join existing groups – that can “push for changes big enough to matter”, from city-wide renewable energy programmes to large-scale divestment from fossil fuels.
And cram that ballot box, the article concludes:
Jim Skea, a co-chair of the IPCC working group on mitigation said the report had presented governments “with pretty hard choices” … “We have pointed out the enormous benefits of keeping to 1.5C, and also the unprecedented shift in energy systems and transport that would be needed to achieve that … We show it can be done within laws of physics and chemistry. Then the final tickbox is political will. We cannot answer that. Only our audience can…”
EIGHT | SIGNING UP FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
In this newsletter’s mission to ferret out good climate change coverage and analysis, I like to point to good people to follow (Issue Two, Item Six) and sources to consider. This newsletter, of course. I also recommend inviting into your in-box the New York Times’ “Climate Fwd.” newsletter, a good global round-up of climate coverage.
NINE | IT’S A NATIONAL SECURITY THING
The debut episode in the third season of “Madame Secretary” addressed the effect of climate change on U.S. military bases. (A show, BTW, which is hand-holding me through the Trump Age, in the same way “West Wing” saw me through the Bush Era.) Many forward bases are in low-water zones and are at risk of being swamped. It’s not just a fictional plot twist even if climate change denialists took after the episode, those dears. Maybe THIS argument will make a dent in your climate change-denying veteran uncle this Thanksgiving. As John Conger notes in a January 2018 post to the The Center for Climate and Security:
In the Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the U.S. Congress asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to provide a report on “vulnerabilities to military installations and combatant commander requirements resulting from climate change over the next 20 years.” That report was delivered to Congress yesterday, prosaically-titled Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense …
The first sentence in the “background” section of the study is worth noting. It reaffirms that the DoD continues to take climate change seriously, as it has across four administrations, both Republican and Democrat. The sentence reads: “The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to Department of Defense (DoD or the Department) missions, operational plans, and installations.”
TEN | PS: YOU PROMISED CARTOONS
I did. Here you go.
NOTE: If you were forwarded this weekly email newsletter by a fine friend, please subscribe for free at: changingclimatetimes.substack.com And pass it forward! | Douglas Imbrogno | @douglaseye
