Wake The Happy Words

Is it strange that Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading climatologist, should qualify his recent New York Review of Books essay-style review as “personal views under the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution”? Is he concerned about government interference? Censorship? Or is invoking the First Amendment now standard form when a scientist feels disposed to share opinions on politically contentious issues?

Whatever the case, Hansen’s article “The Threat to the Planet,” in which he outlines the history of his role in the global warming debate and reviews three recent books on the matter, is soberly explicative and mandatory reading, wherever you stand on the issue. Hansen is probably the guy most responsible for raising awareness of the issue since the late 1980s. Being familiar with his background and research is certainly helpful.

I recently finished reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, a science-minded travelogue by Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s a staff writer for the New Yorker (prior to 1999 she worked for The New York Times). Trekking to the Arctic and several colorfully named locales like Shishmaref, Alaska, or others like the Swiss Camp research station in Greenland, Kolbert–in terse, quintessentially journalistic passages–canvasses the essentials of recent environmental happenings and their biospheric consequences. In Shishmaref, since the 1990s, the sea ice has shifted so rapidly that the island–just 22 feet above sea level–has become vulnerable to storm surges which have disrupted its primary industry, seal hunting, making life on the island virtually untenable. In 2004, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a survey of possible mainland sites for relocation of the village. Kolbert reports that a full move will cost the U.S. government nearly $180 million.

In the book’s chapter on Greenland, she writes of the rapidly melting ice sheets: Greenland possesses about 8% of the world’s total ice, the melting of which has been responsible for a nine inch rise in sea levels over the last century.

Her approach throughout is cautious, elegant, and easy to follow, relaying only the elemental science and leaving the extrapolation to the specialists she’s interviewing. You’ll discover a few simple graphs and tables employed to illustrate statistical deltas and recent logarithmic shifts toward biospheric red zones. Possibly the most illuminating (and frightening) is the one Al Gore had such fun with in An Inconvenient Truth, namely that recent ice coring in Antarctica has revealed the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is higher today in 2005 than it’s been in nearly half a million years. (Half a million years, in case you’re wondering, takes us back to the Pleistocene, when wooly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats were still around.)

As Kolbert puts it:

The Vostok record demonstrates that, at 378 parts per million, current CO2 levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million, was reached around 325,000 years ago). It is believed that the last time carbon dioxide levels were comparable to today’s was three and a half million years ago, during what is known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, and it is likely that they have not been much higher since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and the sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today. A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me–only half-jokingly–this way: “It’s true that we’ve had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs.”

In 2005 we were at 378 parts per million atmospheric CO2. Conservative projections place us at well in excess of 500 million ppm CO2 by 2100. Dangerous anthropogenic interference, aka DAI–the point at which recovering from our contribution to the upswing becomes impossible–is estimated to occur at between 400 and 500 million ppm. We’re on the verge of crossing the Rubicon as I type this, in other words.

James Hansen calls Kolbert’s work “a good book to start with” before moving on to other more technically rigorous books like Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers or Eugene Linden’s The Winds of Change.

Before Kolbert’s book, I’d actually recommend checking out An Inconvenient Truth, of course steeling yourself against director Davis Guggenheim’s irritable tendency to linger overlong on still shots of Gore looking solemnly and self-importantly out plane windows, and just absorbing the elemental science. It’s a terrific introduction to the basic issues and sore spots. No need to walk out alarmed or absolutely convinced, just leave more aware than you were going in.

Finally, consider this, perhaps the most intriguing paragraph in the James Hansen review linked above:

The reader might assume that I have long been close to Gore, since I testified before his Senate committee in 1989 and participated in scientific “roundtable” discussions in his Senate office. In fact, Gore was displeased when I declined to provide him with images of increasing drought generated by a computer model of climate change. (I didn’t trust the model’s estimates of precipitation.) After Clinton and Gore were elected, I declined a suggestion from the White House to write a rebuttal to a New York Times Op-Ed article that played down global warming and criticized the Vice President. I did not hear from Gore for more than a decade, until January of this year, when he asked me to critically assess his slide show. When we met, he said that he “wanted to apologize,” but, without letting him explain what he was apologizing for, I said, “Your insight was better than mine.”

I first encountered Thomas More’s Utopia in an undergraduate philosophy class, ‘introduction to’ or some such covering the discipline’s greatest hits. Make that over a decade ago, actually, which means I remember approximately zero percent (not counting the title and byline). An excerpted version from Jim Gunn’s The Road to Science Fiction series (Vol 1, “From Gilgamesh to Wells”) I’ve just read is included as an example of European proto-science fiction.

Consider the subtle irony in the Greek root components of the word Utopia, i.e. ou, “not,” and topos, “place,” apparently a pun on eu, “good,” and topos, “place.” Or the name of a traveler More encounters in the book: Raphael, “healed by God,” and last name, Hythloday, which in Greek means something like “speaking nonsense.” Or the term Abraxa (an alternate name for the land of Utopia) with its roots in Egyptian occultism and which, in old Jewish tradition, signified the highest heaven–nothing above it–also translatable as “no place.” Double meanings and puns aside, the science fictive significance, according to Gunn, is that the text was “the start of a new way of organizing an author’s ideas about how to improve human conditions.”

My own (disorganized) notes: The island is moon-shaped, suggesting a place of dreams and mysteries, a womblike respite, light within darkness. The water ringing the island is filled with hidden rocks, perilous obstacles set against would-be visitors seeking enlightenment. As with Plato’s cave, only natives can bring strangers across. Attacks by naval fleets (war machines, industry, aspects of science) are deflected. Illumination is unachievable by way of mechanistic violence.

Scientific concepts presented: breeding, imprinting, navigation. Also: “If they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws.” Early recognition of governmental simulacra?

A possible problem (unless we discount Hythloday’s testimony–or we’re supposed to assume More is): “For they having rooted out of the minds of their people all the seeds both of ambition and faction, there is no danger of any commotion at home.” Lock up the poets and lobotomize the nonconformists? Drown the seeds of ambition to ensure a kind of intellectually sedate tranquility? Nothing, of course, would violate the letter of science fiction more.