On December 1, RSA-US cosponsored a screening of the Age of Stupid with Science & the Arts at CUNY Graduate Center http://web.gc.cuny.edu/sciart. Thanks to Adrienne Klein, co-director of Science and the Arts at CUNY Graduate Center, for coordinating the event, and to Professor Charles J. Vörösmarty, Director of the CUNY Environmental Cross-Roads Initiative http://www.cuny.edu/news/salute-to-scholars/winter09/a-glimpse-through-the-microscope.html , for his insights and comments
Comments on The Age of Stupid by Charles J. Vörösmarty
This film is an interesting and provocative piece that does a great job of raising our consciousness on major strategic threats to the planet and mankind. While I was expecting a film solely on climate change, I was surprised to see raised many affiliated issues, ranging from economic development to social equity to energy management to human behavior. It tells us we must do business in a different way with a planning horizon of many generations.
On the climate issues…some scenes are apocalyptic and in my view a bit overstated. One overall assumption is that we are heading for more extremes in weather. There is, however, some ambiguity on the veracity of this assertion. In response to a question raised by a program manager at NASA, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences will soon be addressing this issue with respect to the hydrologic cycle (floods and droughts). The major loss of ice sheets portrayed in the movie would be the most extreme of scenarios and unlikely to happen by 2050 according to most scientists. The comment to the effect that if we do nothing and pass the 2 degree boundary on planetary heating would result in the planet’s life forms perishing is obviously overstated.
Climate change and water availability issues are at the same time critical. Some in the audience may not be aware that under various climate change scenarios, not all places on Earth will see high levels of water shortage, and indeed, many places could benefit from more rainfall and hence augmented water resources over what they see today; there will be winners and losers and the patterns are highly regional. The challenge is that the forecast models are weakest at predicting these sub-global patterns, so this gives planners a very difficult target to aim for.
While I am all for renewables, they have to be sensibly implemented and they are not without their consequences. At MIT, some colleagues have examined the impact on the climate system should wind turbines, distributed globally, be tasked with supplying 10% of global energy consumption. An unintended, predicted impact is that, due to the changes in the physics of the land-atmosphere boundary, the land surface is likely to warm by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. An interesting surprise! We might say that are no free lunches and no silver bullets.
There are many intertwined issues raised in the film: economic development, energy policy, and human behavior, among others. For me, it was this mish-mash of ideas through which the most interesting elements of the film emerged. The global challenge is not simply one of climate change.
While I was a student in college in the 70’s, I was taught that the preeminent global crisis would probably emerge from excessive population growth and the corresponding lack of resources. An old professor of mine summed up the problem as being all about human greed and sex. The most dire predictions of global calamity have been averted time and again –due to provident technology, use of energy, and the benefits of economic development. But with so many mouths to feed and aspirations for a better life in the picture today and a population projected to continue increasing to perhaps 10 billion, planetary constraints must be factored into any scenario of the future. A recent paper in the journal Nature raises the specter of meeting and exceeding planetary boundaries for sustainability. Two elements of the Earth system – excessive use of nitrogen (needed to feed our large population and our livestock) and the loss of species—may have already exceeded the limits, all before the onset of forecasted, substantial climate change. Pandemic nitrogen pollution is particularly difficult to manage as it is highly mobile, with some of it moving off of targeted croplands and then passing to the atmosphere (as another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide) and flowing into rivers and coastal waters, where it creates algal and harmful algal blooms and oxygen dead zones, and has been implicated in the collapse of fisheries.
I might suggest that the issue at hand really has as much to do with planetary biology, chemistry, and physics, as it does with governance. Have we proven as a species that we can effectively govern ourselves, as evidenced by our interactions within our cities, within our nation-states, across national boundaries? I’ll let you decide and then pose the question: Are we equipped to think sufficiently differently in order to confront the many global change issues, which arguably are much bigger than anything we have attempted to manage before? There is entrenched poverty and asymmetry between rich vs. poor – the film referenced the “resource curse” in Nigeria, for example. It seems hard for humans to share… greed easily rules the day. We have a history of making bad judgments. Katrina was the perfect storm on several levels, including poor emergency preparedness, poor maintenance of flood protection, chronic destruction of the delta and its natural ecosystems, human incompetence and refusal to believe that the “big one” would someday actually hit.
The management and mismanagement of human water supplies means the building of reservoirs and irrigation systems, which have served societies well, but cause irreparable damage to freshwater aquatic biodiversity by changing the natural water levels, flows, and temperature in rivers downstream to which these organisms are adapted.
We also lack a culture of thinking about earth system management, with perhaps the obvious struggles we see unfolding in the climate change debate. The International Geophysical Year, about 50 years ago, really marks the birth of modern Earth system science in which we have come to appreciate the interconnected facets of the planet and their often unpredictable and non-linear behaviors. The issues are highly complex and interrelated and, because the science is relatively young, we lack sufficient knowledge on how to manage this as a whole system.
In light of these many challenges ahead, it may come as a surprise that we continue to do a very poor job of monitoring what’s really happening out there with respect to our environment. For example, the trend in investments in deploying U.S. earth-observing environmental monitoring satellites has actually gone down over the last decade and the availability of data from in situ instruments that measure water flow in rivers, the mainstay of water resource assessment, has declined significantly. We know more about water scarcity from the ground-based stations of 1985 than we do today. The concept of earth engineering (like installing mirrors to divert the sun’s energy away from the planet) is very experimental and we have no knowledge of the outcomes or the implications of such actions.
If there is one take-home message from the film and my subsequent comments, it is that the looming global crisis is a multi-headed beast, and much larger than the climate change question alone. In arriving at CUNY, I look forward to initiating an environmental roundtable to tackle such inter-disciplinary challenges. The CUNY Cross-Roads Initiative, located at City College, is slated to be a nationally and internationally recognized center for environmental research, and a unique meeting grounds for science and policy experts. Wish us luck.
Q&A –
Q1: The Sustainability Aspect – the word “we” – There isn’t a “we”. The wind farm example shows it’s us against them. How do we create awareness? I live in Long Beach, a barrier island, and awareness there is non-existent.
A: CV
I have no clear answer to your question. Look at history and the colossal mistakes that have been made. Our lifestyle is now energized by use of resources. Perhaps as these resources become more scarce and expensive we will modify our behavior and reduce use. But then again the problems are interlinked….how do we then manage the likely impoverishment of large segments of the populations that surely will arise with more expensive resources. Witness the impact of the recent fuel price surges, the impact on world food prices, the social instabilities, and the short-lived pursuit of biofuels meant to solve a much larger energy security question. We seem to be most skilled at reacting to the last disaster, or at least think that we do.
Q2: Two thoughts – we are very fortunate to live at this time. We have no memory of the depression and it is hard for us to look at this objectively. We are in the best time, in the best place, in the history of the world. Second, you should have a volcano expert on the task team. What we have done is similar to volcanic effects.
A: CV
We cannot easily change people. If you believe my old professor from college, we are good consumers and we are greedy and we like to procreate. I think we need to place back on the table the idea of population control, which we have thought much less about over the last 20-30 years than the climate issue. There is a group that calculated what would be the sustainable population for the whole Earth enjoying a “European” lifestyle. The population would need to be about 2 billion. We are already heading for 9-10 billion. I read in the Times recently that the Chinese are discussing the abandonment of their one-child policy because there are too few young people to care for the older generation. Imagine the consequences of such a decision in an economy with double-digit GDP growth.
Q3: A 2% rise in temps by mid century requires an 80% reduction in carbon emissions. It seems impossible. Where is the hope?
A: CV
Many believe we are already beyond turning the situation around. Carbon dioxide is long-lived in the atmosphere. We have a serious problem to mitigate, but the damage might already be done. So we must mitigate but we must also adapt – for example, how do we get ready for the rising sea level in New York City?
Q4: Vacuum Energy – the research needs more support. Capitalism isn’t interested in change.
A: CV
There are powerful lobbies against new technologies. The standard peer review process is highly conservative by nature. We also need high risk innovations and incubators for new ideas but the current system is stacked against it. There needs to be thinking about how to create a new mechanism to explore high risk/high payoff solutions.
Q5: What about a resurgence of nuclear power?
A: CV
I learned another thing in working in the field for over 30 years – that there is no free lunch. Nuclear power might work in France, but it is different in the US. The regulatory systems are different, and there are more diverse nuclear power configurations. There are other resources needed – water for example. This limits the cooling ability, especially if we build many new plants in areas where seasonal water availability (highly uncertain in the future) is at a premium. Do we sacrifice fish through thermal effluents? Do we reduce water flows to irrigators downstream if we use cooling towers? These are the kinds of tradeoffs that would come into the picture. There are also disposal, danger, and proliferation issues. One disaster would offset any gains.
Q6: What about recycling gray water?
A: CV
This depends on the location. There may be sense in using recycled water where effluents are co-located with, for example, sewage treatment plant and irrigation works. Singapore is a top recycler of wastewater, and even uses water recycled through sophisticated membrane filtration systems and mixed with other supplies as drinking water. There is of course a marketing issue, which you well might imagine. But overall recycling may have limited impact in solving the world’s biggest water problems. In this context, it is important to note that for every one pound of corn or wheat on the table, one thousand pounds of water is required. The number is 30-40,000 lbs of water for every pound of dressed meat. If you apply irrigation water this comes from rivers or groundwaters and creates many impacts on these source waters. The amount of water recycled or potentially recycled in my view is much less than what is needed for irrigation over much of the world.
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