Sharon

"Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming."

People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming has to do with them - and that's a rhetorical failure. Speaking at NESEA, one of my fellow panelists mentioned Bill McKibben's highly successful efforts through Project 350 and Step-It-Up, and I had to argue with her - because, with all due respect to Bill McKibben who I like and admire, those movements have been extremely effective in reaching people already inclined to be reached, and totally ineffective at changing the way people think about global warming. At the same time that highly effective movements are arranging million person demonstrations in the streets, most of the people who will actually tell their congressfolk whether to vote for change were watching Law and Order SVU.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not attacking activists. But the correct measures of activism's success are all showing failure here - popular engagement is disappearing. You can point out that most of the denialist activists are idiots all you want, and show people all the good science you want, and get the same people who will demonstrate for many good causes to come out and march all you want, and not make any meaningful change.

So what's the alternative? Focus on accomplishing the right ends, rather than on getting people to share the same worldview. Ends can be shifted much more easily than worldviews - what people want is a much shiftier thing than basic values or who they trust or how they see the larger world.

Back in October, I went to Georgia to speak at a conference at an Mercer College on Climate Change - one of the first climate change conferences held at an Evangelical University. Most of the people who brought me were political conservatives or moderates, and I expressed surprise, several times, that they'd be so pleased to have a leftist Jewish envrionmentalist come talk to them. Every time I did, the conversation went like this "Oh, who even knows anymore what liberal and conservative mean anymore? I'm so sick of the discussion - neither side is dealing with what's essential!" The point was our common goals - not our common politics.

Everywhere I speak, I run into that general frustration with politics, with barriers that no one knows how to get past - and an overwhelming passion for solutions, for things like changing lives and building better communal infrastructure and transforming institutions. There simply are not enough people who care deeply about global warming in the US - and there may never be, other than brief spikes of interest when something happens. By the time it fully grasps everyone's attention, it will probably be too late to do much. But people are often fairly dying to get past the old political barriers and talk about what to do.

The question that arises is this - is the preservation of a planet, a climate and a place that we can actually live in, an ecology that supports billions of lives a first or second order problem? Is the preservation of millions of lives a first-order moral requirement? If it is a first-order problem, indeed *the* first order problem, then you can compromise on many second-order problems in order to deal with it and to achieve desired outcomes. If it isn't a first order problem, indeed, one of the central first order problems, then we may as well sit around waiting until everyone cares - because the outcome is the same either way.

Sharon

First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll.

Waking up from this entrancement and becoming aware that options exist has given me opportunity and motivation in my own life. As hobo poet Vachel Lindsay remarked, "I am further from slavery than most men." This has been an unexpected gift from downshifting (dropping out) from mainstream consumer culture and exploring what can variously be called simple living, "green", diy, urban homesteading, welfare and poverty, community, or even paradise. As Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted, we must expect the unexpected, or we'll never find it.

The wealth we hold may not be obvious. Indeed, it takes an eye for beauty to see the wealth that abounds in my neighborhood. Our wealth lies not in consensus reality dollars, but in our collective security and abundance. We have each other, and we will always have each other. As governments fall short on cash and their enforcers (police, zoning, etc.) disappear, our freedom increases. We use this freedom to create realities that make sense in light of the world we inhabit. We invite homeless people to squat the houses that are falling down from neglect. We scatter seeds of plants that nourish ourselves and the community of life in vacant lots and alley ways. We rediscover handy skills in the dumpster of history. We raise animals and build structures that do not fit into zoning's view of safety, but that do fit into a paradigm of making sense. We raise our children with the knowledge that another life is possible, and provide them the tools they need to make a living in the economy of community. "

The New York Times has a good piece, I think, on the way for-profit educational programs are profitting from the recession - without necessarily returning anything of great value. I worry about all the people who think that going back to school is the solution to their problems - most of them are going to take on considerable debt in the assumption that by the time they are done, things will be better and there will be a job for them.

They tell people, 'If you don't have a college degree, you won't be able to get a job,' " said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. "They tell them, 'You'll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you'll get all your financial aid covered.' "

A spokeswoman for the school's owner, ITT Educational Services, Lauren Littlefield, said the company had no comment.

More debt, for most people, is not going to be the solution to their problems. Moreover, most community colleges will offer similar programs for vastly less money than the private for-profit institutions. In most cases, entry into these kinds of programs is a bad idea, and I hope all my readers will discourage folks from making that kind of desperate bid.

Meanwhile, as the stripped down, pathetic version of national health care we might even get totters towards failure, we learn that Maternal mortality rates have doubled in the US in 20 years, almost all of them preventable. Oh, and just for a real shocker, African American women die three times as often in childbirth as white women.

White women have a mortality rate of 9.5 per 100,000 pregnancies, the CDC said. For African-American women, that rate is 32.7 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies.

"Women's health is at risk," said Strauss. "We spend the most, and yet women are more likely to die than in 40 other countries. And that disconnect is what makes it such a problem."

Note that this is tucked way, way down on the CNN front page - way below the news about a few Prius owners and their problems, way, way, way below the Death of Peter Graves or the induction of Abba into some hall of fame. Decline and fall stuff always is.

As the States struggle with their budgets, the easiest places to cut are with those who have no power - the disabled, the poor, children. The usual first victims. Here's a good example, in Virginia (I'm not singling them out, they just happened to settle their budget the other day):

Funding for schools will drop $646 million over the next two years; the state will also cut more than $1 billion from health programs. Class sizes will rise. A prison will close, judges who die or retire won't be replaced and funding for local sheriff's offices will drop 6 percent.

Medical care providers will see Medicaid payments from the state trimmed, and fewer poor children will be enrolled in state health care, although those health cuts could be tempered by anticipated federal funds

States are between a rock and hard place, but refusing to raise taxes on the middle class and upper classes while stripping the most vulnerable of the basics is particularly charming - and fairly typical. I expect New York to do the same, if it can ever pass a budget. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, there's some proof that there's more fat to cut in state budgets - they don't have to wholly screw the poor.

On a more cheery note, I get a lot of questions about vertical farming, and I've often got to explain that the resource investment in hydroponics often is more than it is worth. But this is really cool - a low tech, low investment window garden model for people in apartments:

Willem Van Cotthem is a researcher specializing in combating desertification, an occupation he describes on his other blog, "Desertification". Here lies the origin of his low-cost, low-tech methods to grow plants and crops. Van Cotthem manages to grow vegetables and fruits in the middle of the desert with minimal water (pictures). Apart from the methods using plastic bottles described above, he also uses mini-greenhouses made of trash (yoghurt pots, plastic bags) to produce vegetable and (fruit) tree seedlings. All systems can be used both indoors and outdoors.

What all these methods have in common, is that they hardly use any water, basically by minimizing evaporation. Moreover, because of the low cost (using 100 percent trash), the systems can be used even by the poorest of people. Plastic rubbish is, unfortunately, everywhere. Van Cotthem's blogs can be a bit chaotic to navigate, but his work is definitely worth a look.

Also a nice BBC piece on the history of the Guerrilla Gardening movement. What I think is most fascinating about this is the degree to which most cities encourage and are pleased by people gardening this way - they can't afford to deal with urban blight themselves, but are grateful when it is done.

Sharon

Sharon

Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.

Hayes pointed out that the original "problem that had no name" was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed -- an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband -- only now, bearing them was considered a "choice": if you felt stuck, it was your own fault. What's more, though today's soccer moms may argue, quite rightly, that caretaking is undervalued in a society that measures success by a paycheck, their role is made possible by the size of their husband's. In that way, they've been more of a pendulum swing than true game changers.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food -- who these days can't wax poetic about compost? -- it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

You'd think I'd love this, wouldn't you ;-)? And in some ways I do, but I'm troubled by it too. It may well be that Peggy Orenstein's (the Times article's author) "friends with coops" are taking the first steps in a radical disconnect from their culture of affluence, but it is more likely that they are getting chickens so that their lucky kids won't have to eat factory farmed eggs. This, in and of itself is not totally trivial - every contribution to reducing the number of CAFOs in this country is a good one - but without larger context, it isn't an answer to the problem that women have rotten choices. It isn't a third way if it is only viable for affluent women. Nor is it a third way unless it represents the accomplishment of something meaningful - if it establishes the possibility that others could have the same set of choices.

Orenstein uses the word "precious" here - and I think it may be in her community. Contrast that, however, with the women that Hayes is writing about in her book (full disclosure, Hayes once contacted me about interviewing me for the book, but from one thing and another it never happened) - most of them with household incomes under 40,000 dollars, most of them engaged collectively (with extended family or partners) in a project where everyone, male and female, does a lot of domestic labor. Hayes' work is about rejecting consumer culture and the assumptions about the "housewifization" of economic activity that make invisible domestic labor, that translate into valuelessness. She focuses on women in _Radical Homemakers_ but finds that the most successful households are the ones that have the highest degree of egalitarianism - that is, what's radical about it is that everyone involved is working to expand the household informal economy and limit the control exercised by the formal economy. All of this may be true of the women Orenstein knows - but there's no indication of it in the article.

I have often argued that the version of American feminism that largely succeeded - the one in which freedom was framed in the terms money and the right to work 60 hours a week for someone who times your bathroom breaks - succeeded because it was so very profitable for industrial capitalism. Besides the enormous pool of new workers, it offered new consumers, and created a large market for households to purchase services once done for free by women.

My argument has never been that women alone should have continued to provide these services for free, but rather that it is no accident that parts of the feminist vision that would have been less profitable, like state subsidized childcare, or a truly egalitarian distribution of domestic work did not succeed. It was far more profitable to send everyone to work and privatize the making of meals, the cutting of lawns, the tending of children - and to shift the labor onto the poorest and often least white folks around. Since only the most affluent of us can afford to pay nannies and house cleaners fairly, the equity that affluent women and men achieve often is built on the backs of poorer people who take on the labor that they escaped.

Housewifization of labor renders the household economy invisible, and things that are invisible can be infinitely exploited. Reclaiming the household economy, then, is a radical act. Making the case for the economic and social value of household labor, and making it the valued territory of both men and women does make a major shift in the culture. Refusing to exploit other people - only using the labor of others when you can pay them fairly is a radical act. Reducing your dependence on the industrial economy, your vulnerability, and having a measure of resilience in the face of economic instability is radical. But it only works if what you are doing isn't precious - if you aren't just making sure your lucky kids have clean food and contact with clean ground, but that others do as well. It only works if what you are doing is not the recreation of a simulacrum of a household economy - rather like Marie Antoinette's farm, where she milked cows on a silver stool - but an actual household economy, where domestic work produces a meaningful part of your household economy. And that requires fundamental shifts in how you view your home, your family, your economic and social culture. Otherwise, it is just precious - and empty.

The chicken coop can be a symbol - it takes a service that has been done exploitatively and destructively, and says "I can do this myself, non-destructively and without exploitation." But it works as a symbol only when you recognize the larger context of the act - the industrial chicken is a legacy of our desire not to know what price is laid on others and on nature to meet our desires, it is a legacy of our sense that the household economy doesn't have value, it is a legacy of our sense that ordinary and everyday things aren't important - it is an enormously powerful symbol if you are aware of what underlies it, and live your life in accordance with what it symbolizes. But if all it is is a coop, a way out of the conversation that begins "Oh, do you work?" well, it just doesn't work.

Sharon

I admit, I'm pretty impressed by it! Plus it fulfills the maxim that all my covers must have food on them, whether the books are about food or not.

Second of all, if you want to see someone's impression of me headlocking a fellow science blogger in a free-for-all, I'm in panel three of this very funny comic:

http://ataraxiatheatre.com/2010/03/12/what-erv-really-stands-for/

Clearly, I need to do more direct battle with my fellow science bloggers - and cultivate a better vocabulary in creative name calling.

Sharon

More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance.

DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida's food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007.

Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also, I think, a compelling measure of the economic situation. But it is more than that - food stampls, as I've been arguing for many years, are important because as they become more universal (we're already at 1-in-9 Americans using food stamps, next year's numbers will probably be 1-in-8, and many states are at 1-in-6 - and American children are at 1-in-4) food stamps become more important. They shift from a safety net program to a basic food subsidy that serves a larger and larger percentage of Americans who can't afford food. And that should look very strange to all of us.

The case for industrial agriculture has rested heavily on cheap food over the years - the idea that it was worth all the subsidies, the land degradation, the health costs because we all had plenty was a fundamental premise of the move to industrial farming. But if industrial agriculture can't provide affordable food even with its massive subsidies (at this point a large portion of industrially produced food is being subsidized twice - first at the agricultural subsidy level and then at the food stamp level) what is the compelling case for large scale industrial conventional production?

Perhaps the focus should move. Michael Pollan has proposed, for example, that food stamps should pay double when used at farmer's markets. Right now only about 40% of all farmer's markets in the US are set up to take food stamps - making food stamp and WIC acceptance universal, and doubling pay outs when used to buy healthy food would do a lot both for local agriculture and for those who are struggling to eat and eat well.

The case for bringing agricultural subsidies to small family farmers is more complex, and among others, Gene Logsdon has argued that subsidizing organic agriculture (which is beginning to occur) may not be the answer:

This is supposed to be good news. Our dear government has finally recognized that organic farmers are at least as deserving of bribery as all those sinful chemical farmers. After all, industrial agriculture gets $17.2 billion dollars in direct payments every year so surely a little bit of money ought also to go to holy, humble, horse and hoe husbandmen who also help keep the world from starvation. In fact, organic farmers now have their very own farm subsidy program under the Environmental Quality Incentive Program to the tune of $50 million bucks. Ain't that wonderful?

Rule number two: "Conservation practices that farmers have already adopted are not eligible for payment." Amazing grace. If you have already been doing what every responsible farmer should be doing, you don't get any money, sucker.

Logsdon goes on to observe that with the inclusion of "transitional" farmers and the emphasis on giving money to those previously making the biggest negative environmental impact, the subsidies will go disproportionately to industrial organic producers.

But at a bare minimum we could ask ourselves about whether agricultural subsidy payments should exist at all? Most organic and small scale producers would be happy just to have the playing field levelled a bit. At a minimum, we need to ask ourselves this -if the food we get industrially is unaffordable in an environmental sense and unaffordable in a practical "how do we get dinner" sense, what's the case for conventional corporate ag again?

Sharon

Spring doesn't come easily in upstate New York - she wrestles with Old Man Winter for a long, long time before he gives up. The first sign is the daffodils, up a small amount in February, giving false hope, but also inspiration - proof positive, as they fight through layers of snow and ice that spring may come in the guise of a fresh girl, but she is one tough young lady. But I have to remind myself - green stems do not mean spring.

Then comes the inevitable thaw, and the smell of wet earth, that scent that screams spring, but isn't quite because you'll have more frozen nights and wintry days yet. The grass, uncovered, greens up faintly, but the dominant colors are dull grey and brown, and we hold our breath for the change that can't come fast enough. The crocuses bloom, and that is a small change, a step forward, but the real thing hasn't come.

The birds come back, new ones each day - first the robins, of course, still in winter, but a tiny flit of hope for an end. Then the grackles come in waves (it is hard to be excited about grackles, but in winter, one can be happy about anything that prophecies its end). Then a bright dash of red winged blackbird, and then a sudden burst of new birds each day. But delightful though they are, the birds in themselves cannot carry spring.

Here, spring isn't a color, and it isn't a smell or a taste, and it doesn't even have wings (although it might have feathers, a la Emily Dickinson). Oh, spring has flavor - wild strawberries and overwintered spinach, dandelion greens and wild asparagus. Spring has smells - warm wet earth and daffodils, hyacinths and grass, and colors - the clear pure yellow of daffodils, the purple of crocuses, that sweet gold-green that blushes trees and the reddish tint of buds that preceeds it, the vibrant green of new grass. But it is none of those things.

It is a sound, a single sound, the end of wintery silence when the Peepers wake up and begin to call to one another for love. Peepers, for those of you who don't live where they do, are tiny frogs, who make a sound not entirely unlike the sounds of katydids or crickets when heard from a distance, but different, wonderfully strange and sweet up close. They are far too loud for their tiny size - standing next to a pond full of them, you would think you might go mad - except that after a long muffled winter of snow, you have to listen just a little longer.

One year, just once, I heard them begin to sing. We went to the wetlands on the edge of our property, walking along the road, and we stood in absolute silence and waited, and heard just one peeper take up the song for the first time - or maybe it just seemed that way. By that night, the whole watery area was in chorus, but just at the beginning, it was just one lonely peeper, calling out for love, hoping that somewhere there was someone else for him. It was strangely magical, and every year I try to duplicate it, to be there when they awaken, and spring truly begins.

This year we went, day after day, long before it was really likely that we'd hear them, when there was still ice along the edges of the water and patches of snow in the woods, but we went. And even Asher knew that when we got to the wetlands, we should stand, and be quiet and wait. And we would, hearing new bird songs each day, until something disturbed us. Yesterday, we got back late from the Greenmarket and errand running, and everyone was tired, so we did not walk out. And at chore time, as I was cooking dinner, Eric came back in and told me that the peepers were calling. We had already put the boys to bed, but ran upstairs, and opened the windows so that they could hear it too.

I missed the moment spring came to my place, but I expect that, no matter how hard I try and duplicate a near-miracle. Mostly, you don't see deep change happen, even though you know that it is occurring. You go out in the garden after an absence of a few days, and wonder how those tiny seedlings became those deep-rooted plants, or you look at your daughter and wonder how it is that she's lost the look of a toddler and become a child, with nobby knees and a galloping gait. Mostly the biggest transitions pass us by, and it is enough to say that you didn't miss anything important in its entirety. They say on hot nights in July you can hear the corn growing, and just once, I did hear the peepers awaken, but mostly the greatest transitions pass you by and that is our lot in life.

In a purely practical sense, were you looking at my mud-colored, snow patched landscape, you might wonder what changed, why I say that spring came. We still have more mud than green, things are still changing only incrementally, the daffodils still aren't yet open, although the purple crocuses brighten each morning. Things still squelch, and I know better than to plant out today - the peas I put in today will, as usual, sit waiting for dryer and more settled weather and end up being harvested at precisely the same time as the peas I plant out in two weeks - so why bother, except, of course, that I am chomping at the bit to plant anything outside. Seedlings are great, but they are not sufficient to sustain me.

All I can say is that I know this is it because it is - not very useful, I suppose, but I know that now no snowfall, no late frost, no burst of winter will make a difference in the consistent forward motion of energetic spring. So I wait to plant, the waiting is made easier by the singing of tiny frogs, frogs I almost never see, whose presence I would not suspect were it not for those short weeks in which their music dwarfs the birds and my noisy family, and shakes the foundations of winter. He's done for.

Spring has won, again. The rest will come slowly, achingly, and then it will burst upon us, and some people, looking at the flowers, the grass, the budding trees, will nod and say "spring is here." And we will smile at them and agree that it certainly is, and hold quietly the fact that we heard spring happen, and were there, if not for the golden moment, just after life returned anew.

Happy Spring,

Sharon

Even though forecasting should be handled with extreme caution, it is always desirable to look ahead as far as possible to make an intellectual judgment on the future supplies of crude oil. Over the years, accurate prediction of oil production was confronted by fluctuating ecological, economical, and political factors, which imposed many restrictions on its exploration, transportation, and supply and demand. The objective of this study is to develop a forecasting model to predict world crude oil supply with better accuracy than the existing models. Even though our approach originates from Hubbert model, it overcomes the limitations and restrictions associated with the original Hubbert model. As opposed to Hubbert single-cycle model, our model has more than one cycle depending on the historical oil production trend and known oil reserves. The presented method is a viable tool to predict the peak oil production rate and time. The model is simple, accurate, and totally data driven, which allows a continuous updating once new data are available. The analysis of 47 major oil producing countries estimates the world's ultimate crude oil reserve by 2140 BSTB and the remaining recoverable oil by 1161 BSTB. The world production is estimated to peak in 2014 at a rate of 79 MMSTB/D. OPEC has remaining reserve of 909 BSTB, which is about 78% of the world reserves. OPEC production is expected to peak in 2026 at a rate of 53 MMSTB/D. On the basis of 2005 world crude oil production and current recovery techniques, the world oil reserves are being depleted at an annual rate of 2.1%.

It looks like this is an interesting attempt to adapt Hubbert Linearization to other factors. It is interesting, and the major news sites seem to have taken notice, which is good. That said, they seem to be using high estimates for Kuwait, perhaps because the paper comes out of a Kuwaiti University. But I think what's important is the degree to which the paper validates Hubbert's methodology. You can quibble about the OPEC projections, or any given figure - since reserves are such a contentious subject, what I think is more important is that it is coming out of an OPEC country, with a peak date in the near future.

Sharon

The other day I got embroiled in one of those endless discussions/debates/headbangings about what the best approach to greening the planet is. Of course, all of you know that my defining characteristics are my reasonableness, aversion to confrontation and sensitivity, so my role here was to calm the hot tempers and settle the differences of others, which I do from my sheer love of humanity. I provided a calm and rational perspective that I know helped settle everything right down, because that's just the kind of healing, caring person I am.

Ok, just on the off chance that anyone involved in that conversation says otherwise, I want ask you upfront, who will you believe - them or me? After all, the people saying I was fanning the flames of this stupid umm...integral argument are nothing more than two or three hundred ordinary voices, where as I am a professional idi...author. I daily produce hundreds of words that are pulled randomly out of my a...er...finely crafted and honed for maximum effect. Sometimes the words even make sentences. Once in a while even grammatical sentences. These words are read by as many as eight or nine people around the world every single day. So you can certainly imagine that my ravings...um wisdom should outrank the sworn testimony of several hundred people.

So you'll be proud to know that I, of course, natural leader that I am, did come up with a healing solution, something that we could come together on, a real commitment to change, a possible solution to the profound difficulties wrought upon us by the Great Change that comes sweeping (ok, stupid metaphor deleted)... But I did have an idea.

The idea was pie. And my position is that I'm for it. I know this is just the kind of hard-edged, radical position taking that you can expect on this blog, the reason you know you can turn here first to hear opinions that are beholden to no one...except the guy up the road with the cherry trees, who I can't afford to piss off if I want pie. But this kind of risky political statement in favor of pie is just the sort of thing I know you'll wish to support by donating a large portion of your salary to keep me going. Just click on the button on the sidebar that says "big heaping wads of cash."

I'm in favor of pie. I mean, what could be better than pie? It is commonly associated with good, noble things like motherhood, America, light bondage and domination, clowns and the federal reserve, so how could we not be for pie? In fact, who isn't for pie? Well...

I have to tell you the ugly truth. There are powerful anti-pie interests in our government, and people working night and day to restrict your pie access. But we here at Casaubons book (Who is "we" you ask in puzzlement? Well, Sharon has obviously gone off the deep end writing her book, as you can tell from this post, so mostly the voices in her head. But they sometimes wear cool hats, and one of them is named "Leo.") are committed to bringing you the truth about pie access and other equally crucial issues, like socks and beer.

It occurred to me, as I was healing the rift brought on by unnamed troublemakers not named Sharon, that pie can do a great deal to heal our environmental crisis. For example, today's climate change and peak oil news was particularly awful. There's the coal, the wars, that we still torture.... There's the fact that even if we halved our emissions, global warming will keep going for 600 years. And then there's the financial news...

All in all, I think the only possible reaction (other than hysterical weeping) to all this bad news on a cold, snowy afternoon is to put on fuzzy pajamas, bunny slippers and eat half a pie. Or to drink a lot of local beer, I guess. Heck, you could drink beer and eat pie together.

Yes, I know that's pathological of me, but sometimes a retreat into pathology is rather comforting. I doubt I'm the only person who has ever responded to the bad news about our environment by thinking "apple or pumpkin?" The reality is whether we believe in stockpiling ammo or creating sustainable ecovillages, the need to derive comfort where we can is our common ground.

Pie can bring us together. And that unifying power isn't limited to the peak oil movement - pie can cross religious, cultural and national boundaries. While there may be deep cultural divisions between those who believe that you should make your sweetened orange vegetable pies with sweet potatoes and those who vote for pumpkin, I believe these barriers can be crossed, if only we'll just take a piece of each with a lot of whipped cream.

Pie can be a powerful political motivator as well. Right now, money tends to be the most powerful tool in politics, but let us not underestimate the influence of pie. Pies in the face are a powerful tool of political resistance in Europe. I've heard rumors that Bill Clinton sent the Haitians back because the republicans offered him all the blueberry pies he wanted. Dick Cheney regularly sat around nude, plotting his attacks on Middle Eastern countries while eating entire mince pies. During his campaign, Obama made strong statements in favor of pie (this, actually, is true).

This kind of inside information isn't easy to come by - the author had to send several pies to congressional aides. Fortunately, they are sleep deprived, wired on coffee and often morally bankrupt so bribing them with pie is very, very easy.

But pie is also essentially, deeply democratic. Pie is an essential ingredient in town-meeting style democracy in many New England states, along with baked beans. And pie is about democracy - fundamentally, pie (and pasties, empanadas, dumplings, wontons and all the other pie relatives) are about stretching high value foods to share with everyone. If you have six apples and ten guests, someone gets screwed, unless you put them between two crusts with some spices and call it pie - everyone gets a piece of sweet apple, everyone gets some crust. Pies are a way of getting maximum enjoyment from high-value foods. Meat, fruit, spices - these things are special. But they can be enjoyed regularly if carefully combined with other ingredients. They are about democracy, frugality, comfort and family.

And pies are things that you have to produce either for yourself or in your locality. The truth is that frozen pie crust tastes awful, and that Sara Lee pies taste like corn syrup, which is what they are mostly made from. Real pie - good pie comes either out of your kitchen or a local bakery or diner where they make it fresh every single day from real ingredients. Pies are part of a whole lifestyle - if you want to eat pie, you have to cook, or you have to have a little Mom and Pop bakery. And those things are democratic too - as opposed to corporatist.

Sure, you say, but if I eat too much pie, I'll get fat. And lord knows, that's a real possibility. But here's the thing. How many of you have ever met a really fat Amish man? I haven't. And they eat pie more or less constantly, or so my Amish neighbors tell me. The trick is matching the pie to the pie lifestyle.

Pie can power a human-powered lifestyle in the way that junky processed crap can't. Certainly the Amish cookbooks I've seen are filled with pies. And back when dessert (or breakfast in New England) was routinely pie, people were a lot thinner. One might argue that pie isn't what makes you fat - it is not living the pie lifestyle. Because the pie lifestyle means picking berries or walking to the bakery. It means eating pie as a treat, and as the place where you put your special festival foods that you don't have all the time, while most of you meals are simple. (If you do get a little plump, perhaps these gents can help balance out the pie.)

Instead, for many Americans, breakfasts is false pie - poptarts, which despite a plastic resemblance are not pies at all - because they aren't actually food. The poptart lifestyle makes you fat, the pie lifestyle makes you thin, or thinner. We need to speak out against the fake pie and its accompanying lifestyle.

Pie makes you thin. It brings about democracy. It brings about agrarian or relocalized societies and economies. It provides comfort, crossing political lines. People talk about oil as the "master resource" but perhaps we need to start reconsidering the power of pie to create a sustainable, human powered economy. Pie-centered societies, ones that provide a chicken in every pot pie, are what we're striving for. We can all consume less, and still have an evenly distributed piece of the pie.

Which is why I must say to you with a heavy heart - we are facing peak pie. Corporate interventions, and the "better than homemade" slogan has resulted in a US population that mostly doesn't know how to cook anymore. Millions of people think that pumpkin comes from a can. Farmers are still going out of business at an appalling rate. The majority of our pie ingredients are contaminated by pesticides. Our ability to provide for our pie needs is deeply threatened. We are facing the final destruction of the pie lifestyle - and the end of the last remnents of our democracy.

So what can we do about it? How can we fight back for the pie lifestyle, for Mom, Teddy Bears and Apple (or Peach) pie? The only way to deal with this depletion crisis is to start living the pie lifestyle. Bake a pie today from locally grown ingredients. Eat a pie today, and use it to fuel human powered activity - dump your leaf blower and get out a rake, get rid of the power mower and bring out the push mower, lose the chainsaw and get the bucksaw down.

Make a pie and give it to a neighbor. Give out the recipe. Get together and make pies for elderly shut ins or the school bake sale or to buy solar lighting for the neighborhood watch. Throw a pie at a warmonger - we'll have a bake sale to raise your bail. Point to the coal plant builders and the energy wasters and tell people - they are against pie! Start "Pie Eating Veterans for the Truth" and tar polluters and heavy emitters with the scorned label "pie haters." Don't forget to mention that they don't like mothers, babies or kittens either. Have a town meeting and hand out pie. Give out pie at the voting booths, to hungry people in the park, to the shelter and soup kitchen. Try pies from other places, other lands - and send the money you would have spent on poptarts to good causes. When the world seems to suck, eat pie, and use that energy to get back on your feet and fight again! Pie can save the world!

Sharon

It turns out that in a tradition that dates all the way back to 2009, science bloggers celebrate "Pi day" on March 14, with pie. Lots of pies. In fact, competition for the most awesome pie. With prizes, glory and honor. And we (my readership) could win it all for the glory of well, something or other.

Here's the deal: (Go here to see this with links and all the other details)
In 2010, the Pi Day Pie Bake-Off returns, but this year the rules are different, the prizes are bigger, and we are excited to have a co-sponsor for the contest: food website and staff favorite, Serious Eats, whose past coverage of pies has been impressive.

To enter the 2010 Pi Day Bake-Off, first upload a photo of your pie to Photograzing on Serious Eats. Then, email your pie submission to pi@scienceblogs.com. Please include your name, blog or website if you want us to link to it, and the link to the photo on Photograzing. We will email you to remind you when your pie has gone up for the vote, so you can pester your friends to vote for you.

Realistically, I have a book due in three weeks and no working digital camera, so the odds are good that my "Paleoclimatology Ice Core Flurry Pie" may remain only a dream. I am relying on you, dearest readership, to bring glory and honor to my blog. Do me proud, pie folk!

Sharon

CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it's not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.

Actuallly, if you think this is an accurate metaphor, I'd say the answer is...yeah, there's something to worry about. Don't get me wrong, I agree with them that carbon is the central issue, and the shorter lifespan of methane in the atmosphere does mean that it has to be released quite precipitously to cause a major crisis. But think about the analogy - hit another car at 60 miles an hour and it is a disaster - some of the passengers will probably be kiled, but there remains the chance that some will merely survive badly hurt. Do it at 90 and everyone is dead.

This shouldn't take away from our attention on CO2. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be seriously concerned about this. Real Climate rightly puts this in perspective:

Anyway, so far it is at most a very small feedback. The Siberian Margin might rival the whole rest of the world ocean as a methane source, but the ocean source overall is much smaller than the land source. Most of the methane in the atmosphere comes from wetlands, natural and artificial associated with rice agriculture. The ocean is small potatoes, and there is enough uncertainty in the methane budget to accommodate adjustments in the sources without too much overturning of apple carts.

For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth's climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

We are not seeing evidence that clearly indicates abrupt climate change, and the change in methane concentrations is comparatively small. Nor do we know that this will lead to larger scale feedback mechanisms. That is, people predicting "now is the time to panic" are wrong on several levels - they should have been responding (not panicking) long since and so far, we don't know this will lead to the worst outcomes.

That said, however, the sentence that no one has seen or proposed a mechanism in which this happens doesn't really console me. In models and predictions prior to the revelation that methane levels were increasing, the assumption had been that methane wouldn't rise until fairly late in the game - ie, until recently, no one had expected gradual increases this soon, which suggests that the science still hasn't caught up.

The most likely outcome is that this will lead to a gradual increase in methane (and CO2) as the world warms. This is unhelpful, but only one of many serious feedbacks that make it harder and harder to stop climate change.

But we do know that while we may not have a useful mechanism for describing it, large scale methane releases probably have contributed to abrupt climate change the past, although not in the last 100,000 years, and it would be very much premature to indicate it is happening now.

But what I do think is that this is a useful contribution to the case of the precautionary principle - because what we don't know could very well do us a great deal of harm. As the Real Climate authors imply, carbon dioxide-caused global warming is a plenty good case for precaution, but there are factors that should make us nervous. We know that in historic terms the climate has changed very rapidly, over decades or even a few years. We know that an abrupt climate change would be a world-wide disaster. What we don't know is how likely we are to precipitate one, or even how one might be precipitated. And sometimes to "we don't know" we must add "and we shouldn't wait until we're sure, we should act now."

Sharon

From the UAK press release:

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

And

They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.

Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.

From the New York Times today:

Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.

But climate experts familiar with the new research, reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, said that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane's role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is a far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.

The paper is behind a paywall for those not in the reporting business, but I will link more as more comes available. If correct, this is not good news - the prior assumption was that increased levels of methane in the arctic were linked primarily to methane bubbling out of freshwater areas - but there's much more methane here to release.

Here's an NSF piece on the potential role of methane in abrupt climate change. I should emphasize here that we have no idea this methane release could cause something similar to occur, but this strikes me as a compelling case for the precautionary principle - precisely because we have no idea.

An abrupt release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from ice sheets that extended to Earth's low latitudes some 635 million years ago caused a dramatic shift in climate, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

"What we now need to know is the sensitivity of the trigger," he said. "How much forcing does it take to move from one stable state to the other--and are we approaching something like that today with current carbon dioxide warming?"

Allow me to speak for all of humanity when I say...crap.

Sharon

Eric had a horrible moment the other day in class. Students were coming in and he was calling up a youtube video on space exploration for his students to see. But somehow while answering a student question, he committed a typo, which brought up, on a huge screen a hard-core porn site with very explicit visuals. After a second or two the students' laughter alerted Eric to the problem, but he was about as embarassed as any human being could possibly be - and terrified that students might think he'd done it on purpose. He immediately apologized profusely, emailed his department chair about what happened just in case anyone took offense, and let's just say he's still blushing.

This got us on one of those great party conversations about your most embarassing moment. I still think mine is hysterically funny, even though I can't tell the story without turning red. Eric thinks that because it only involved a few people, mine wasn't as bad. I am willing to bet that my midwife has told this story a bunch of times, though, so I'm not convinced only a few people know ;-).

It was during the very end of my pregnancy with Isaiah. Let's just say that that night my husband and I were using a time-honored traditional method of trying to naturally induce labor - sex. And at the very moment of happiness, I felt a puddle of liquid appear underneath my butt. This is a little worrisome because you are not supposed to have sex after your water breaks, for fear of contamination of the little bugger. I wasn't quite clear on whether this constituted "after" since it was pretty much simultaneous, but it seemed potentially problematic.

Well there are two choices here. Either my water broke or I peed my pants. I had read the baby books and I knew that the way you tell whether the liquid is pee or not is to sniff it - amniotic fluid smells sweetish, pee smells like pee. I tell my husband "I think my water just broke" and we get down to sniff the sheets. The sheets smell sweet - quite sweet, actually. Almost fruity.

It is rather late, but we call my neighbor to watch the younger kids, call my midwife who is very gracious about being awakened in the night, and head to the hospital. We get there. We test for amniotic fluid. The test is negative, and my now slightly-annoyed midwife says wearily that I must have wet my pants. I'm pretty offended by this and swear I didn't, and demand that she repeat the test, saying that it definitely smelled sweet. She repeats, the results are the same, I go home. My midwife clearly thinks I'm an idiot and an incontinent one at that - and I'm wondering if she's right. My neighbor is gracious but probably doesn't think I'm that bright either - what kind of imbecile can't tell pee from amniotic fluid?

So we go upstairs, tired and cranky and while Eric takes a shower, I go and change the sheets. As I do so, I find in my sheets a plastic sippy cup belonging to one of my older sons that was once filled with apple juice, tangled in the blankets, its cap slightly askew.

How about you? Got a favorite embarassing moment to entertain the group with?

Sharon

A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don't necessarily agree on this subject, or they don't see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they don't know what to believe. So sometimes, we need to back up, and make the case for something that is always new to some people. The truth is that if my writing is to be anything other than preaching to the converted, we have to answer the skeptics.

That's why I was so delighted when I got an email from Frazzlehead who asked me why this particular energy crisis was different than the one of the 1970s. She observed that she'd been reading 1970s back to the land texts, and finding the exact same narrative in them - that we're running out of oil, that soon the economy will crash and we'll need to go back to farming. Why, she asked, is it right this time?

"I look at the date it was written and think, see? They've been saying this for ages - and it hasn't happened. Still, something in my gut tells me that it's different this time, that this isn't just a robot waving it's silly arms saying "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Danger!" ... that something really is wrong and things will change dramatically.
What I can't quite put my finger on is the evidence for *this* time being the *real* time.
Is the Boy just crying wolf again? Or is there really a wolf?
Can you help me see why *this time* it is for real?"

This is an extremely important question - the fact is, ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when we recognized we really can have "world" wars, since the advent of the military capacity to destroy the lives of billions, since we recognized our impact on the earth, we've been afraid we'd destroy it. How do we know that this time, we really are?
Or, as I've argued, how do we know that we're doing enough harm that even if we don't actually achieve apocalypse, it isn't going to be fun.

And of course, this is a good question for climate change as well. There's a small grain of truth in the oft-repeated claim that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting an ice age - only a small one but we need to look at that truth. The fact is, many people remember these predictions of the end of everything, and remember Y2K as well, and then think "the evidence is against those who say things are going to change - we've heard this before" This is a reasonable critique, and one that requires a good answer - or a series of them. That is, it isn't enough to say "Well, this time we're right."

The reason we want multiple answers here is that there are several questions. The first one is this "What are the differences between the scientific and technical cases for peak oil now, and climate change now vs. then." But that's only part of the answer. Because most of us aren't climate scientists or petroleum geologists, and we're not going to read every single bit of information on this subject, so to some degree, we have to rely on our own analysis. We can weigh the credibility of the technical analyses to one degree or another, but we also need grounds for distinguishing between those analyses. The ideal grounds would be that we completely understand everything the scientists are saying, but since that's not true, we need another set of analytic tools.

So the next question we have to answer is this - what present day evidence do we have for each case? How can I see this with my own eyes? And how do the various available accounts I'm being offered match up with both the scientific evidence and the evidence of my eyes? That is, both the "disasters are coming" and the "it'll never happen" crowds are telling stories - they are giving an account of the past and the future. Picking the right story depends on our being able to match up evidence with the narrative being provided to us.

And while those two data points are convincing, they aren't everything we need to know to make a decision - we also need to ask ourselves how to apply an imperfect case for something. That is, assuming that very few things about the future can be known with absolute certainty, we need to know what the case for action is - that is, how should we use the information above? What tools of analysis will get us the best results?

I'm going to go through these questions, one at a time, to the best of my ability. Because the subject is such a long one, this will appear in two parts.

First, the technical analysis:

First of all, what was the evidence for 1970s style depletion analyses? I'm going to admit here that I am somewhat handicapped on this question by having been born during the 1970s oil crisis - that is, I have no direct experience of the data that was coming in during that period - I was busy analyzing the comparative merits of growing up to be a garbage collector (cool truck) or a vet (cool puppies and kittens), and thus not paying much (any) attention to petroleum geology.

That said, I've seen the same accounts Frazzlehead has, popular narratives in which we were "running out of oil" but I've seen far fewer scholarly accounts that make that same claim. This is not to say that there weren't any, just that they are much more difficult to find than people think.

In fact, peak oil theory doesn't make the claim that "we're running out of oil" either, except in the sense that whenever you make any use of a non-renewable resource, you are reducing the amount that's left and contributing to the larger process of "running out." The peak of oil production occurs at the moment that we have used ½ of the oil in the ground. No peak oil scholar that I've ever seen has suggested that we are in immanent danger of having the world run out, but rather that demand (how much oil we'd like to burn) will exceed supply (the amount we can get out of the ground) at some point. Some consequences under the current system of this difference between demand and supply would be higher prices, spot shortages, poor people being priced out of the market altogether, and gradually more and more people being priced out or having their usage dramatically reduced. But that's not the same as actually running out.

It is safe to say that if people in the 1970s were claiming that we were in immanent danger of running out, they were really, really deeply mistaken - and that that mistake can't be chalked up to improvements in science. But I suspect that most geologists weren't saying that - instead, they were saying something more complicated and nuanced, and, as is often the case, complicated, nuanced ideas got dumbed down to something less accurate but more exciting sounding.

To get some evidence of this, let's look at _The Limits to Growth_ which was perhaps the single most famous text that said we were "running out of oil" in the 1970s. But, of course, that's not what it said at all. I'm going to quote here Richard Heinberg's analysis of TLTG, because I think he covers all the salient points:

"Several economists have attempted to debunk the conclusions presented in LTG. For example, in _Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse_, Ronald Bailey wrote that "In 1972 The Limits to Growth predicted that at exponential growth rates, the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993." _Facts Not Fears: A Parents Guide to Teaching Kids about the Environment_ by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw repeated part of this list and pointed out that "The world did not run out of gold by 1981, or zinc by 1990, or petroleum by 1992, as the book predicted."

However, these were not predictions contained in the book. The reference for these claim is Table 4...The table lists three sets of numbers: a static reserve index (how long known reserves would last at 1972 rates of consumption); an exponential reserve index (how long known reserves would last at an exponentially increasing rate of consumption); and an expontential index calculated using five times the known reserves (that is, assuming substantial new discoveries of the resources in question). Criticisms of LTG focused only on the second, 'exponential reserve' set of numbers which was the most pessimistic, even though the authors clearly stated that this did not constitute a prediction, but merely a statistical extrapolation." (Powerdown, 93-94)

That is, critiques of _The Limits To Growth_ were made out of context. The authors knew that it was very, very unlikely that we would have massive growth of consumption without any new discoveries, and weren't proposing that would happen - they were providing context for their larger conclusion that we are at risk of overshoot.

In fact, _The Limits To Growth_ was probably fairly accurate in their overall claims, as the updates have demonstrated. It is important to note that TLTG made the claim, to the extent it claimed things, rather than observed them, that collapse was likely to come not in the 1970s, but at the very end of the 20th or beginning of the 21st century.

They claimed that *overshoot* - the point at which we were exceeding the capacity of the earth to sustain us would happen earlier than that - and in fact, there's compelling evidence they were right. But they never claimed that the crisis point would be reached at the same moment we reached overshoot - instead, they suggested otherwise. This is an important distinction. That is, TLTG emphasized how urgent it was that we begin to make policy and practical changes that would abate the crisis in the 1970s - that was the time to respond. But those policy changes were designed to avoid an outcome that would occur decades later - and there's a case to be made that some of them are, in fact, occurring decades later as predicted.

Richard Heinberg at one point observed that he hasn't been able to find a single example of any peer reviewed paper predicting we were actually going to run out of oil in the 1970s - and yet, many people "knew" that this was the case. I don't know if that fact is still true - even if there are some, that doesn't mean they were right. But there certainly aren't a large number of them.

What was true in the 1970s, is that *American* oil prediction hit its peak. In 1970, American production peaked, just as M.King Hubbert said it would. At the time, nearly everyone denied that Hubbert was right - after all, we'd just produced more oil than we ever had before - why would we expect shortfalls? Well, the reality is that that's just how it works - the peak is the point at which you produce more than you ever have - or ever will again. So America actually was experiencing serious oil shortfalls, and because of the OPEC embargo, was unable to meet demand.

Looking through my collection of older back-to-the-land accounts, I see several of them claim that we can't depend on foreign oil. And that may be at the root of our belief that we thought we were running out in the 1970s - we believed that America would largely have to rely on its own oil supplies, which were patently inadequate to meet even 1970s demand. In that sense, we were "running out of oil" because we had ample evidence that we might not always be able to buy it, and our supply was inadequate. That politics changed, and the bottom dropped out of the oil price, giving OPEC incentives to keep our supply coming was a great result - but if the embargo had continued, we might genuinely have been "running out." And this is a good reminder that absolute oil supplies and political access to them are both relevant.

That's an important point on peak oil - because access has as much effect as absolute reserves. So, for example, an oil crisis could arise because of our inability to increase imports, or because of structural failures in refining capacity that cause shortages before the absolute peak, or because of geopolitical issues. On the one hand, peak oil is a very simple idea. On the other, if you interpret the term to mean "the point at which supply can no longer meet demand" it gets very complicated. As we saw in 2008, for example, when oil price spiked, many oil producing nations cut exports, reserving oil for their populations while poor importing nations cut imports and experience shortages.

In fact, the 1970s oil shocks offer a useful kind of support for the claims of peak oil in the present. The oil shocks were fundamentally political in nature, but they also offer proof of the fact that a. there are peaks, and b. such peaks are inherently disruptive. The reduction in available oil in the US after its peak left us in a tough spot, politically speaking, and vulnerable to supply constraints caused by outside forces. Several peak oil scholars have correlated regional peaks with periods of societal disruption - that is, when we experience substantial declines in resource access, it causes major problems.

The same argument can be made about the frequently quoted claim that in the 1970s, scientists were predicting an ice age, and now they are predicting catastrophic warming. In fact, in the 1970s, there was some discussion of the possibility of a new ice age, for several reasons. The first is that in the 1970s, particulate emission pollution was so severe that it caused a considerable cooling of the planet. So it seemed possible that we were entering a cooling cycle.

We were also statistically at the end of a period of climate stability, and the possibility that there might be an ice age was discussed. But even Richard Lindzen, one of the formest Global Warming skeptics, has admitted that this was never more than the equivalent of scientists batting an idea around. That is, there never was any strong scientific consensus that we were entering into a period of global cooling *and* most research on this subject was speaking only of natural cycles.

For example, perhaps the most famous article on this subject appeared in Science in 1976, and included the phrase "in the absence of human perturbation of the climate." That is, the prediction that global cooling would occur was *explicitly* made with the caveat that if we mess with the climate this probably won't happen. But, as usual, the nuance was removed, and what we get is the idea that we once were really sure we were going to have global cooling.

It is also very important to note that scientists *also* were predicting Global Warming well before the 1970s. A Swedish chemist named Arrhenius discovered and predicted global warming at the turn of the last century, documenting that it was already underway. Charles Keeling was doing work on Global Warming in the 1950s and 60s, and continued to do this work until his death in 2005. In 1979, as Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report was being compiled, anthropogenic global warming was cited as one of the most serious problems of the century. So it would be more accurate to say that in the 1970s, there was considerable debate over whether warming or cooling would be the primary concern, and by the end of that decade, there was a growing consensus that global warming was far more likely.

In both cases, one of the most important bits of evidence is the degree of scientific consensus - that is, the sheer number of scholars and researchers that agree that they are seeing evidence of something. Since these scientists will generally come at this issue from different directions - one person studying ice cores in the arctic, another sea level rises, one petroleum geologist studying future projections, another talking about the history of discovery. So while hardly infalliable, scientific consensus matters.

And in both cases, we can claim that there is an enormous difference between scientific consensus now and scientific consensus then. For example, consensus on global warming is overwhelming. The oft-stated claim that there are no peer-reviewed scholarly articles that cast real doubt on the anthropogenic (human caused) nature of climate change is not quite true, but there are very few of them - a handful at best, mostly in minor journals, and compared to 10,000 and more such articles in peer reviewed scholarly journals that take the other position. There are a few real scholars (and a bunch of paid shills for the energy industry) who sincerely believe that climate change is not anthropogenic (there's no one who doesn't believe the climate is changing, btw), but the reality is that there are tiny, dissenting minorities on every scholarly community.

It is still possible, for example, to find a few doctors who don't believe cigarettes cause cancer. It is still possible to find some historians who don't think the Holocaust ever happened. But these are few, and they don't change the fact that the overwhelming majority believe otherwise, and, more importantly, that the overwhelming majority of the evidence supports anthropogenic global warming.

In regards to peak oil, the scientific consensus is actually harder to figure out. Every once in a while I run into someone who is a peak oil believer and a global warming skeptic, which I find quite funny. That is, the scientific evidence for global warming is so much greater than for immanent peak oil (which in no means implies that both are not true, merely that there is less certainty and less research in regards to peak oil) that it seems odd to me that one could evaluate the evidence for the less certain one, agree with it, and then dismiss the evidence for the other.

But saying that there's more controversy in the study of peak oil that climate change is not to say that there is no scientific consensus on peak oil. In 2007, the General Accounting Office of the US Congress released a report that argued that a majority of relevant scholars and oil experts now believe that a peak has already happened or is immanent. There are still significant dissenting viewpoints - he IEA, for example, officially repudiates peak oil while simultaneously predicting year over year supply declines as high as 6% and seriously supply constraints into the 2040s. This amounts effectively to an acknowledgement of peak oil, since virtually no serious assessments put the peak that late - the US Geological Survey, for example, puts the world peak at 2023.

The truth is that it is very hard to predict an oil peak, except in hindsight. At the 2006 ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) conference, I heard peak oil researchers give dates that ranged from 2012 or later to 2005 - so even the experts who do believe in peak oil are uncertain. Because there is no reliable reserve data on total available oil, we can only look at the history of our discoveries (that is, discoveries peaked in the 1960s - since then we've been finding a dramatically decreasing amount of new oil each year, despite all the people who hype each new discovery as the answer), how much of the globe has been mapped for oil (the vast majority) and estimate likelihoods. And also, we can do the math showing current rates of decline (most of the major producers are declining significantly), and look at how much oil we'd need to find in order to put off the problem. The answer is "a hell of a lot" - that is, as Matthew Simmons put it, even if we found a massive oil field, as big as the North Sea, for example, it would only delay the whole world's oil peak by a matter of months.

The next question would be how well the predictions, model and data match up with what we're actually seeing right now. For example, in regards to peak oil, while we don't know with certainty whether or not the Saudi giant oil fields have actually peaked, we can look and see what is actually happening in the world. Some Saudi authorities claim that the peak is a long way out, others that it is very near (many oil company executives now openly admit peak oil). What we did see was that during the period of record high oil prices in 2008, the Saudis were unable to increase production as much as one would have expected, given the powerful incentive of $100+ oil - their claim was that they didn't want to, but this seems unlikely at best ;-). So far, peak oil theory best fits the facts.

The same is true with climate change theory. For example, climate change dissenters often argue that the sun is sending more heat our way. But if that were true, we'd be seeing more warming in the upper atmosphere as well as closer to the earth. But in fact, the opposite is true - the upper atmosphere is cooler. Since the sun's rays have to go through the upper atmosphere to get to the earth, that's not consistent. But if the earth itself is trapping carbon and increasing heat, it would make sense that we would find the upper atmosphere cooler than the lower.

The correlation of man-made C02 levels with planetary warming is another place we can see the evidence of global warming. The ice reductions in the arctic, and the thinning of the edges of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are another.

That is not to say that there is no inconsistency in climate systems - we are talking about a large, enormously complex system, being modeled by thousands of researchers. It is not an easy thing to figure out, and not every bit of data is going to be perfect. But the overwhelming reality is that the story here fits the data extremely well - the account of anthropogenic global warming fits what we are seeing - if anything, we have tended to underestimate our impact.

We can also see the evidence of our own eyes in both cases - we can see the rise in food prices, gas prices, the warming of our regions, the changes in planting zones and snowfall, the increased frequence of drought. These are not sufficient evidence - any one year, any one locality can be explained. But there is no doubt that billions of people around the world are seeing these things, and that our vision is a small piece of the picture.

Going back, for a moment, to _The Limits to Growth_, one of the things that appears a lot in later modeling, in, for example, the 30 Year Update of TLTG, is that feedback loops and intersections are a bigger problem than any individual problem. And for those people wondering whether these problems are really as bad as they think they are, this is probably the most important thing to know - in the 1970s, we were worried about individual problems - a shortage of oil, for example, or about pollution, or a coming ice age. Right now, the biggest concern we have is of the intersection of inter-related problems. That is, the problem is not our ability to respond to one problem, but our ability to respond to multiple, overwhelming simultaneous crises.

_The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update_ found that almost all its "business as usual" scenarios led to collapse , *EVEN IF* the sheer quantities of resources available were *DOUBLED* over what we have any evidence at all for - that is, even if we had enough energy to go along, pollution built and cancer rates skyrocketed, while soil erosion rose to make food production fail to keep pace with population growth. That is, these scenarios don't depend on a shortage or crisis in any single place - they operate as a system of feedback loops influencing one another. As the authors put it,

"A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)

In the 1970s, environmental activists were responding to the very first warning signs of depletion and climate change. Many of them interpreted scientific warnings on these points to mean that we were facing an immediate, definite crisis down to the particulars. But that's not what they were being told. Instead, people were being warned about the longer term consequences of their actions in no uncertain terms. And in fact, our ability to cope managed to push these issues off, in many cases for decades, but again, as we put our limits further off, we drew our resources down further. Soon, the bill comes due.

Now this is all a fairly compelling case, but it isn't all the truth that ever was, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. That is, there is absolutely no point in exaggerating scientific evidence to pretend we know everything with perfect, utter certainty. So my next post will be about the question of how we use this data - that is, if we think the odds are strongly in favor of something, but we don't have perfect certainty, how do we know what to do? There are logical tools for that, and my next post on this subject will discuss them.

Sharon