More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 17 - July 10, 2023
“All the time-limited frames are bullshit,” said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist. “Nothing special happens when the ‘carbon budget’ runs out or we pass whatever temperature target you care about, instead the costs of emissions steadily rise.”22
What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end, nor that civilization would collapse, if temperatures rose above 1.5 degrees Celsius.24
But if that’s the case, the impact is dwarfed by the 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did.28 Moreover, that decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled.
While global sea levels rose 7.5 inches (0.19 meters) between 1901 and 2010,30 the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 2.2 feet (0.66 meters) by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 2.7 feet (0.83 meters) in its high-end scenario. Even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.
What about fires? Dr. Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in California who has researched the topic for forty years, told me, “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”
In early 2020, scientists challenged the notion that rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean were making coral reef fish species oblivious to predators. The seven scientists who published their study in the journal Nature had, three years earlier, raised questions about the marine biologist who had made such claims in the journal Science in 2016. After an investigation, James Cook University in Australia concluded that the biologist had fabricated her data.
Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25 percent surplus, and experts believe we will produce even more despite climate change.38 Food production, the FAO finds, will depend more on access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, just as it did in the last century.
In its fourth assessment report, the IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) just 4.5 percent.40 Does any of that really sound like the end of the world?
For the last twenty years, the Rwandan government has been taking minerals from its neighbor and exporting them as its own. To protect and obscure its activities, Rwanda has financed and overseen the low-intensity conflict in Eastern Congo, according to experts.
“It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that” at a four-degree temperature rise.58 I pointed out that there is nothing in any of the IPCC reports that has ever suggested anything like what she is attributing to Anderson and Rockström.
In fact, scientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels.64 And, again, technical improvements, such as fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, mattered more than climate change.
Technological change significantly outweighs climate change in every single one of FAO’s scenarios.
The experts agreed in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly.69 But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters.
Pielke then shows normalized hurricane losses for the same period. Normalized means that Pielke and his coauthors adjusted the damage data to account for the massive development of America’s coastlines, like Miami’s, since 1900. Once this is done there is no trend of rising costs.
Is the United States unique? It’s not. “Scholars have done similar analyses of normalized tropical cyclone losses in Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, China, and the Andhra Pradesh region in India,” Pielke notes. “In each case they have found no trend in normalized losses.”74 And it’s not just hurricanes. “There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally,” he wrote later. “In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.”
But climate change so far has not resulted in increases in the frequency or intensity of many types of extreme weather. The IPCC “concluded that there’s little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes,” explains Pielke. “There have been more heat waves and intense precipitation, but these phenomena are not significant drivers of disaster costs.”
Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario.
In other words, the problems from sea level rise that Oppenheimer calls “unmanageable” are situations like the ones that already occur, from which societies recover, and to which they adapt.
We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, without question. There is nothing automatic about adaptation.
As such, it’s misleading for environmental activists to invoke people like Bernadette, and the risks she faces from climate change, without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine her standard of living, and the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes.
Fires in Australia are similar. Greater fire damage in Australia is, as in California, due in part to greater development in fire-prone areas, and in part to the accumulation of wood fuel. One scientist estimates that there is ten times more wood fuel in Australia’s forests today than when Europeans arrived. The main reason is that the government of Australia, as in California, refused to do controlled burns, for both environmental and human health reasons. As such, the fires would have occurred even had Australia’s climate not warmed.
In October and November 2019, she posted seven videos to YouTube and joined Twitter to promote them. “As important as your cause is,” said Jeffrey in one of the videos, an open letter to Extinction Rebellion, “your persistent exaggeration of the facts has the potential to do more harm than good to the scientific credibility of your cause as well as to the psychological well-being of my generation.”106
The author of The Uninhabitable Earth, like other activist journalists, simply exaggerated the exaggerations. He “assembled the best of this already selective science to paint a picture containing ‘enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic.’ ”108
The new good news is that carbon emissions have been declining in developed nations for more than a decade. In Europe, emissions in 2018 were 23 percent below 1990 levels. In the U.S., emissions fell 15 percent from 2005 to 2016.113
I continued to write about the Amazon throughout the years and so, when the firestorm of publicity over the Amazon raged in the late summer of 2019, I decided to call Dan Nepstad, a lead author of a recent IPCC report on the Amazon. I asked him whether it was true that the Amazon was a major source of Earth’s oxygen supply. “It’s bullshit,” he told me. “There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration, so it’s a wash.”11 According to an Oxford University ecologist who studies them, Amazon plants consume about 60
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Against the horrifying picture painted of an Amazon forest on the verge of disappearing, a full 80 percent remains standing. Between 18 to 20 percent of the Amazon forest is still “up for grabs” (terra devoluta) and remains at risk of being deforested.19
Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015.25 And the amount of forests in Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home nation, has doubled during the last century.26
Nor does any of this mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the loss of primary old-growth forests in the Amazon and elsewhere in the world. We should be. Old-growth forests offer unique habitats to species. While the total amount of forest cover in Sweden has doubled during the last century, many of the new forests have been in the form of monocultural tree farms.33 But if we are to protect the world’s remaining old-growth forests, we’re going to need to reject environmental colonialism and support nations in their aspirations to develop.
In Brazil, as in Nicaragua, my enthusiasm for socialist cooperatives was often greater than of that the small farmers who were supposed to benefit from them. Most of the small farmers I interviewed wanted to work their own plot of land. They might be great friends with their neighbors and even be related to them by birth or marriage, but they didn’t want to farm with them. They didn’t want to be taken advantage of by somebody who didn’t work as hard as them, they told me.
And the notion that the Amazon is populated mostly by indigenous people victimized by nonindigenous people is wrong. Just one million of the thirty million Brazilians who live in the Amazon region are indigenous, and some tribes control very large reserves.36 There are 690 indigenous reserves covering an astonishing 13 percent of Brazil’s landmass, almost all of them in the Amazon. Just nineteen thousand Yanomami Indians effectively own an area slightly larger than the size of Hungary.37 Some engage in logging.38
Sometime between AD 900 and 950, Maori hunter-gatherers arrived by boat at what is today known as New Zealand, likely from other Pacific islands to the northeast. To their delight they found the island thick with moas, ostrich-like birds that stood an astonishing sixteen feet tall. Moas weren’t able to fly. Nor did they have any other means to protect themselves from the Maori.39 To catch them, the Maori would set forest fires, which would push moas to the edges of the forest where they could be more easily slaughtered. The Maori came to rely so much on moas for food, as well as for tools and
...more
Fire allowed for the creation of sexually monogamous family units. And it allowed for the hearth as a place for reflection and discussion and widening social and group intelligence. All over the planet, deforestation through fire gave rise to agriculture by fertilizing soils favoring blueberries, hazelnuts, grains, and other useful crops. Today, many tree species require fire for their seeds to grow into trees. Fire is also essential, as we saw with both California and Australia, for clearing woody biomass from the forest floor.
In short, fire and deforestation for meat production are major parts of what made us humans.45
Greenpeace wasn’t the first organization that tried to prevent Brazil from modernizing and intensifying agriculture. In 2008, the World Bank published a report that “basically said that small is beautiful, that modern, technologically sophisticated agriculture (and especially the use of GMOs) was bad,” wrote the World Bank’s representative at the time to Brazil. The report said that “the path that should be followed was small and organic and local agriculture.”52
The report added insult to injury. The World Bank had already cut 90 percent of its development aid for Brazil’s agricultural research efforts as punishment because Brazil sought to grow food in the same ways that wealthy nations do.54
There was nothing “right wing” about the anger of Brazil’s president with foreign hypocrisy. Brazil’s former socialist president grew just as angry at the hypocrisy and neo-imperialism of foreign governments more than a decade earlier. “The wealthy countries are very smart, approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation,” said President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva in 2007, “but they already deforested everything.”68
As for the myth that the Amazon provides “20 percent of the world’s oxygen,” it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist. Four years later, a climatologist explained in the journal Science why there was nothing to be frightened of. “In almost all grocery lists of man’s environmental problems is found an item regarding oxygen supply. Fortunately for mankind, the supply is not vanishing as some have predicted.”74
Fishing nets and lines account for half of all waste within the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.24 Figgener reports finding “ghost nets swimming in our oceans,” rice bags, and other “big debris where turtles can become entangled.”25 “Recycling isn’t really working,” Figgener explains. “We’re not really recycling. When we do, it is kind of a downcycling, not an upcycling. Eventually, you know, recycling with plastics, unlike aluminum or glass, happens a few times, if at all, before it ends up in landfills.”26
The scientists seemed shocked by what they discovered: “The global weight of plastic pollution on the sea surface, from all size classes combined, is only 0.1 percent of the world annual production.”40 Even more astonishing, they found a hundred times less microplastic than they had been expecting to find.
In 2019, a team of scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it had discovered that sunlight breaks down polystyrene in ocean water over a period as short as decades.44
By the late 1970s, ivory was no longer used for piano keys. While some musicians claimed a fondness for ivory keys, most asserted the superiority of plastic. “I was glad to see it go,” a quality control manager for a piano keyboard maker told The New York Times in 1977. “The tusks had to be handled very carefully to prevent disease. The plastic covering we use today is a far superior product in terms of its durability.” And it’s not the case that plastic was uglier. “The best ivory has no grain and looks just like plastic.”61
As such, the intense media and public focus on plastic, like the intense focus on climate change, risks distracting us from other equally important—perhaps more important—threats to endangered sea life, which may be easier to address than climate change or plastic waste. For example, overfishing, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “is one of the most important non-climatic drivers affecting the sustainability of fisheries.”71 The amount of fish and fish products for human consumption has increased from 11 percent in 1976 to 27 percent in 2016, and is projected to
...more
Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy to manufacture and recycle. Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process.80 Of course, if the extra energy required by glass were produced from emissions-free sources, it wouldn’t necessarily matter that glass bottles required more energy to make and move. “If the energy is nuclear power or renewables there should be less of an environmental impact,” notes Figgener.81
As for bioplastics, they do not necessarily degrade faster than ordinary plastics made from fossil fuels. Some bioplastics, including cellulose, are just as durable as plastics made from petroleum products. While bioplastics biodegrade more quickly than fossil plastic, they are not reused as often as ordinary plastics, and they are more difficult to recycle.82 The lack of reuse and recycling infrastructure reduces the resource-productivity of bioplastics, increasing both their environmental impact and economic cost.83 “People just assume that because it’s ‘bio’ it means it’s somehow better,”
...more
Plastics are made from a waste by-product of oil and gas production and thus require no additional land to be used. By contrast, switching from fossil plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States by 5 to 15 percent. To replace fossil plastic with corn-based bioplastic would require thirty to forty-five million acres of corn, which is equivalent to 40 percent of the entire U.S. corn harvest, or thirty million acres of switchgrass.87
We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants. Consider how dangerous that instinct was in the case of tortoiseshell.
For poor nations, creating the infrastructure for modern energy, sewage, and floodwater management will be a higher priority than plastic waste, just as they were for the United States and China before them. The lack of a system to collect and manage human waste through pipes, sewers, and purification systems poses a far greater threat to human health.
Claims that the extinction rate is accelerating and that “half a million terrestrial species . . . may already be doomed to extinction” rest upon something called species area model. Conservation biologists Robert H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson created the model in 1967. This model rests on the assumption that the number of new species that migrate to an island would decline over time. The idea was that as more species competed for declining resources, fewer would survive.6 Fortunately, the assumptions of the species area model proved to be wrong. In 2011, the British scientific journal Nature
...more
The real threat to the gorillas and other wildlife isn’t economic growth and fossil fuels, I learned during my visit in December 2014, but rather poverty and wood fuels. In the Congo, wood and charcoal constitute more than 90 percent of residential primary energy. “The place where gorillas are located,” noted Caleb on our phone call, “is near villages that need charcoal for cooking.” 22
Scientists estimate that between five and “tens of millions” of people have been displaced from their homes by conservationists since the creation of Yosemite National Park in California in 1864. A Cornell University sociologist estimated that Europeans created at least fourteen million conservation refugees in Africa alone.39 Displacing people from their lands wasn’t incidental to conservation but rather central to it. “The displacement of people who herded, gathered forest products, or cultivated land was a central feature of twentieth century nature conservation in southern and eastern
...more
