Washington Window

Planetary "conversation" crucial to global survival?

Thoreau, Gore, Gordon &  Abdussamatov

One of the most fun aspects of having a "blog" in cyberspace is the capacity for discovery and exploration of what other people on our planet are doing and saying, thinking and wondering.

It's said that Thoreau cried when he first laid eyes on Harvard's library, considerably smaller a collection than it is today.

Why did young Henry David sit on the steps and, perhaps apocryphally, bawl his eyes out?

"Because I realized no matter how long I lived, I could never read them all."

I just love that quote; always have. The point? We've all got a lot to learn and keep on learning. Living on Earth may be the best "ride" in the galaxy, but if we continue soiling our nest before at least some of us can get off this rock, the human experiment may devolve until our galactic mentors hit "Delete."

Earth's survival as a viable ecosystem for humanity, as well as other critters and veggies with which we share Life and, for many species, on which we are depending  for a sustainable future beyond our contemporary event horizon, may ultimately turn on: the quality of our observations; the intelligence of our analyses; and the degree to which we as a species communicate, adapt, grow, compete or cooperate as future history unfolds. Existence may depend on it!

 "Thinking globally, acting locally" in matters impacting and modifying our planetary ecosystems will require consensus if they're to have constructive effects or, perhaps more importantly, help us to avoid or to mitigate future ecological catastrophies and,  in the worst case (for us), ecosystem collapse.

New data challenges conventional climate "catechism"?

Case in point: From a regular Cape Cod Today blog denizen, we learned today about an article that hit a Russian blog yesterday. Now that in and of itself is "way cool," just to think of it. We are a long way from the "two tin cans and a piece of string" that inspired Dr. Alexander Graham Bell to develop telefonic communication when in less than a day we can read what Russians are reading.

The fact that the article is from the National Geographic News Service hardly matters, as what's fascinating is that Russians are reading it and commenting on it, and that we can jump right in. Why not? We're together in space today!

Now, the "donor" of this piece of information no doubt has his own agenda, as do all of us here, but his sharing the "raw data" is the most constructive way to advance his viewpoint, whether we're going to agree with his interpretation of what this means -- or doesn't -- and whether our minds are even open enough to consider it, kind of like the Rorschach test, which blogs most certainly are.

Here's what's up.

At the tail end of comments to my previous blog post, the one saying Jim Gordon of Cape Wind is too nice of a guy and isn't playing rough enough with his critics, the conversation had become, well, boring and stale. The "usual suspects," dumping out their boilerplate critiques, out-of-context snippets and diatribes laced with personal invective belying their ignorance, had all but run out of steam, bored even with their own redundant prattlings.

 Then along comes "this guy," firing in a web reference that ricochets around the world, literally, and opens up an entirely new and decidedly interesting element of these broader "global warming" and "energy emergency" debates.

 "Well," as Ronald Reagan might say: there's this Russian astronomer, name of Habibullo Abdussamatov, which is no doubt impossible to say after even one shot of Stolichnaya Gold (alas), who happens to be the head of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Now let's not be chauvinistic here. This is a very big deal, at least to Vlad Putin, who hails from St. Petersburg, and who by the way is less than panicked by global warming. Paraphrasing him, he's got a lot of tundra in Siberia, and if a warmer planet shifts the "breadbasket of the world" from Nebraska to there, that's OK. Vlad's already playing hardball in the oil field; we can't ignore him!

Dr. Abdussamatov, according to the article published yesterday at a Russian blog site (which is linked for you below), says the polar ice caps on Mars are melting and "the red planet is experiencing a warming trend at the same time as Earth." This is significant, if accurate, because it suggests solar radiation is a significant contributor, if not "the" primary cause, to global warming. Hmm!

This would mean that the "human industrial insult" to Earth's rising fever and atmospherics may not be "the only thing happening," which means that we'd not really be very certain whether or to what degree anything we may do by way of mitigation or "forestalling the inevitable" will work, or work in time to avoid the impending ramifications of planetary responses to sea ice melting.

Uh, oh! You mean it may not be all George Bush's fault for not signing us up for Kyoto's Protocols? Well, yeah! I know Bobby Kennedy, Jr. wants to blame ol' Georgie for everything from Hurricane Katrina to the sinking of Atlantis to the future overwash of the coastal cities and oceanic atolls worldwide, but: "No."

See, there is some question whether all of the hype about Veep AlGore.com's "inconvenient truth" may be leaving out some of the caveats from our qualified planet-level scientists, as differentiated from "world class," meaning it is not enough that you have a Ph. D. in wildlife biology for you to pontificate about "ionospheric reflections of 'greenhouse' gas'," or the "oceanic capacity for CO2 uptake," which are among the most significant uncertainties in models used in climatological prognostication, because then you have no more credentials to talk about it than I do, or worse yet, some of our most vociferous bloggers.

Sorry! I know that's a Faulknerian sentence-paragraph and my English teacher is spinning in her grave, but the point is: all of this is very complicated, if I may be excused for understatement. Planetary systems ecology and its physics, chemistry or socio-political ramifications are not amenable to hyperbole.

Now, I'm not a scientist, and I don't play one on TV. Well, actually Captain Cousteau sometimes did, and I worked for him, and Forrest Gump-like truth be told, I wrote a couple of the earlier "journalistic" articles on global warming and sea-level rise back in 1982 and 1983, when Reagan's EPA was studying whether these were sufficiently serious issues to merit consideration in the siting of coastal (or "future" coastal!) hazardous waste repository sites to be used in isolating toxic chemicals cleaned up during Superfund remediations.

Bottom line: Global warming is "real." Sea-level rise is a happening thing. We human "tool-makers" definitely have, are, do and will impact the atmosphere.

Can we do anything about global warming? If so, what? Why?

The actual questions are: What are the impacts of the "human element" on the total process; what will be the impact if we modify our collective behavior (and if we don't, substantially); and is the human component of sufficient "weight" in the total process to mandate we take radical steps to alter our behavior before we reach planetary carrying capacity? In sum, can we do anything about it?

More questions: whether scientific consensus is "missing something;" what is the present accuracy of the predictive models; and do we know enough for us to "navigate" Spaceship Earth into a future where we believe we ought to take some kind of responsibility and control, if we can, rather than sacrificing our virgins to the volcano gods or dancing "sky clad" under the Moon at equinox?

Because what's going on, to transport us to a Star Trek metaphor, is no less than a "battle for the helm" of that Spaceship Earth, and whether it's going to become "Lifeboat Earth" if we choose not to or are unable to alter our future behavior. Planetary carrying capacity is an ever-changing, evolving factor!

 In March 1982, in The Cousteau Society's Calypso Log magazine then sent to our 225,000 members in fifty countries around the world, I quoted a top US climate scientist, Dr. William W. Kellogg, who after outlining what we knew and didn't yet know about global climate process and their potential implications, said this: "Even after we know enough to persuade society to halt its CO2 production, if that point is ever reached, it might take another 500 years for the temperature rise to slow or cease."

 And Dr. Kellogg wasn't taking into account a future, like now, where we'd have access to climate processes on Mars and throughout our solar system. But please don't get me and particularly Dr. Kellogg wrong here. It's quite real!

Yes, earth is warming and we are contributing to the process. Dr. Kellogg was a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, CO, funded principally by the National Academy of Sciences, which has more recently firmly weighed in on global warming and potential impacts.

What Dr. Kellogg wondered was whether, if we ever chose to try, we could do enough to make any significant difference in various outcomes because of the momentum of climate change on the planetary level, and because the human element may not have been the only, or even primary, contributing element.

That jury is still out. More about all of that later. Keep checking this blog.

Back to Russia and the Mars Factor

But for now, "Let's go back to Russia," with Dr. Abdussamatov, and his assertion that Martian polar ice melting may pin planetary warmings on solar radiation hitting the entire solar system, and his belief Earth's warming is caused by this.

According to the National Geo article, other scientists are dismissing Dr. Abdussamatov's conclusions. Conventional understanding is that Mars and Earth "wobble" in their orbits differently, and most scientists believe that it's pure cosmic coincidence we and the Martians are currently between ice ages.

Hey, that's the way science is supposed to work! You know:  repeatable results, logical hypotheses, peer review and conclusions following from the data and laws of physics, which apply even on Mars... at least in this quadrant of "our" universe.  The problem for us, we have to do something! Anything! Or do we?

 My personal view is that there are many, many reasons and rationales for America trying to diversify and secure our energy sources, making Cape Wind a potentially viable approach, if as Governor Patrick says the science is sound and the siting process is fair. Sure, some big egos are hanging out there with a position it'll be difficult for them to change, even if the windmills will be a tiny blip on their horizons and more fish will congregate around them than now.

 Global warming, sea-level rise and the doomsday predictions of globalists wanting to use planetary crises to subvert American national sovereignty and subordinate our values and behavior to some ephemeral international agenda notwithstanding, Cape Wind is simply a potentially better way to generate a lot of electricity, with a net carbon reduction, economics enhanced by policy to address a range of problems more pressing than sea-changes a half-millennium into our future. Tying Cape Wind to coastal inundation is, at best, a stretch, if not as disingenuous as some of the arguments raised against the project.

But let's "talk about it," and if you want to play, go and read the Russian article, dive into Google or wherever and dig up whatever other evidence you'll find, then come back and tell us about it, respectfully and intelligently, or don't.

Find the Russian blog site with the "Hot Mars" article here.