Global Warming's New Math

[Alex Colter]

Don't Panic! <http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html>

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> You're right to fear the wild, Laura. I have a policy about young would-be
> tree workers who come to me seeking training. If they claim to be unafraid
> of climbing trees and working in them, I refuse to have them on my crew.
> There is a wide gulf, really, between paralyzing fear and the fear of due
> respect. I get nervous sometimes when I have to confront a situation I
> haven't met before, but that respect empowers me, too. I've never seen any
> animal disappear more quickly than the bear I caught eating the horses'
> food one day on the homestead I was caretaking. When she looked up and saw
> me walking at her with a sledgehammer in my hand, I'm fairly sure she saw
> Thor approaching in thunderous wrath and she bolted like lightning. Each
> time I saw her after, she vanished almost quickly as I saw her. One person
> said she saw her once, after I'd confronter her, huddled under the window
> and quivering, watching in terror down the road she'd run up. And bears are
> very smart animals, with good memories. They seem to synthesize memories,
> and develop new approaches to established problems. And there's always
> something new to learn about bugs. Just last week I learned we have a
> voracious beetle native here to the California hills that is much bigger
> and uglier than the palmetto bugs of the South. They can draw blood when
> they bite, too.
>
> It is not my intention to demean city folk. I'm glad people live in the
> cities, there is much I value in cities. My sweetheart is a San Francisco
> girl who lived some years in Manhattan, too, and who does not drive. I wish
> rural public transportation was better in the USA, so I could drive less
> than I do, and I drive as little as possible, walking whenever I have the
> option. There are museums in the city, and libraries, universities,
> theaters, symphonies, and so on. Ideas thrive where people gather. I do,
> however, regret that many town dwellers seem to regard nature by rumor or
> synecdoche, or to personify nature as the aggressor in the man v. nature
> conflict. There seems commonly to be a disregard or disdain among them for
> the conflicts endemic in wilderness. And I grant that when I hear about
> city people killing each other, I often fail to differentiate between the
> cosmopolitan and the gangster. It's easier to conflate what we do not know.
>
> And, yes, there is no easy way to the ground where all are regarded with
> dispassionate equanimity, and each given a fair representation in policy.
> But I do believe the realm of intellectual debate is where ideas gain the
> impetus necessary to enact positive change. It's a faith of sorts, I
> suppose. I believe in the power of ideas.
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 10:05 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> What you say makes a lot of sense, Ian.  I'll admit I'm an urbanist in
>> outlook and values.  I don't romanticize the wild - it scares the shit out
>> of me.  It's that place with animals that bite you and weird bugs and you
>> have to drive everywhere.  Seriously, I need to live in a city because I
>> never learned to drive, having always lived within several blocks of the
>> subway.  You're absolutely right in saying that our respective habitats
>> shape our views on this issue (issue?  debate?).  I think we can both agree
>> that we want something between the human-less world where plankton frolic,
>> but no human is there to right sonnets or haiku about it; and the foul
>> nuclear soup we're making of it, in which no one and nothing will frolic
>> ever again.  But as Joseph says, there's no easy route to the middle
>> ground.
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ian Livingston **
>> Sent: Jul 23, 2012 9:30 PM
>> To: kelber at mindspring.com
>> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>> > I'm amazed at how many people fall for this easy notion that "we" are
>> destroying what would otherwise be a
>> > "beautiful" and, somehow, moral planet by our evil human machinations.
>>  The tragedy of global warming is that
>> > we're fucking ourselves over, not that we're destroying a planet that
>> would have no  attributes, positive or
>> > negative, if we attribute-applying humans weren't here.
>>
>> Well, this may be where I part tracks with you on this topic, Laura. I
>> don't do Gaian, know nothing or next to nothing about Gaia, except as one
>> name of a pagan goddess of primitive tribes. I have, however, lived a
>> significant portion of my life studying and living in wilderness and / or
>> working in the interface between humans and non-humans, primarily as a
>> miner, forester, logger, and arborist. My years living in wild places have
>> seen me in camps in Alaska, Wyoming, and Washington, and living in remote
>> places off the grid in Wisconsin, Washington, and California. I have spent
>> very few of my years within the city limits, and I do not incline to see
>> the world through the anthropocentric perspective without considering other
>> possible perspectives. I have witnessed the intelligence of wild animals.
>> They can exhibit crafty, playful, curious, gentle, fierce, voracious, and a
>> whole slew of other qualified attributes. We humans, in this case we
>> English-speaking humans, apply those labels, but the behaviors just are
>> evident in the animal world. Good and evil are irrelevant, but good and bad
>> are not. Most wild animals know good from bad, only not in human terms.
>> Some things produce happiness, others do not, and still others cause
>> weakness, pain, sickness, or death.
>>
>> Although I apply the label, the world remains beautiful without me. And
>> the tragedy, qua tragedy, in the human decimation of the what is pristine
>> in the world is that we in our hubris are destroying not only ourselves and
>> our future, but that we are, in fact, destroying scores of species every
>> year. It is impossible to know the long-term effects of the human plunder
>> of the planet. Hell, there could be some less than devastating results of
>> our craving for safety, comfort, and esteemed status, I don't know. But
>> from my first-hand observations, we aren't doing the biosphere many favors.
>>
>> It's a question of values. Do we value humans more than the biosphere? Is
>> our comfort more important than the survival of plankton in the Pacific
>> Ocean? For my part, because they contribute to the continued diversity and
>> health of life on Earth, I think the plankton have a much greater value
>> than do humans. We *can* live harmoniously in the biosphere, we have done
>> in the past, and there may come a time when humans are able to apply their
>> technological genius to harboring rather than harming other species, as we
>> do on small scales already, but for that to happen on a large scale will
>> require a significant shift in values. Capitalist economics be damned, we
>> need restraint, not oil, not fracking, not coal, uranium, or any of the
>> other toxins we so eagerly unearth or enearth, to coin a term. City folk
>> have a remarkable talent for distancing themselves from these truths, but
>> city folk have only romantic associations with the wild, derived from
>> media, a few camping or backpacking trips, or a season on somebody's farm.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:27 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Exactly.  Those judgments don't exist.  I emphasized the negative
>>> attributes just to counter the beatific Gaian view of a pristine,
>>> human-free Earth.   I'm amazed at how many people fall for this easy notion
>>> that "we" are destroying what would otherwise be a "beautiful" and,
>>> somehow, moral planet by our evil human machinations.  The tragedy of
>>> global warming is that we're fucking ourselves over, not that we're
>>> destroying a planet that would have no  attributes, positive or negative,
>>> if we attribute-applying humans weren't here.
>>>
>>> Laura
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: malignd at aol.com
>>> Sent: Jul 23, 2012 6:17 PM
>>> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>>
>>> Without us "cold" and "dispassionate" and "ugly" don't exist.  We
>>> created the context for understanding those judgements.  Not that I'm
>>> voting for my own obliteration ...
>>>
>>> Nature, without humans, is cold and dispassionate, and just as likely to
>>> be ugly.  I vote for us.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: kelber <kelber at mindspring.com>
>>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> Sent: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 11:38 pm
>>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>>
>>>  You know,  a friend asked me that question once, in a slightly
>>> different form:  If you were giving the human race a grade, what would it
>>> be?  A month or so earlier,  I might have said D or F.  But I said "A."
>>>  Why?  I had just finished reading Gravity's Rainbow for the first time.
>>>  And it struck me what a wonderful thing human intelligence is, that it
>>> could create such a mind-expanding novel, filled with wit and morality and
>>> silliness and fascinating connections.  Why do we consider the Hitlers, the
>>> Monsantos, the sadists, the criminally greedy the ultimate shapers of the
>>> human legacy?  Why can't the essence of what it is to be human be defined
>>> by the Pynchons, the Oscar Wildes, the cruciverbalists, the non-stop party
>>> people, the beekeepers, the folklorists, the loving grandmas, and on and
>>> on?  Intelligence, even though it sometimes takes an evil turn, is a rarity
>>> worth preserving.  Nature, without humans, is cold and dispassionate, and
>>> just as likely to be ugly.  I vote for us.
>>>
>>>  Laura
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Rich
>>> Sent: Jul 22, 2012 10:02 PM
>>> To: David Morris
>>> Cc: Monte Davis , Dave Monroe , pynchon -l
>>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>>
>>> **
>>> Is humanity even worth saving? I'm ever wavering
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> On Jul 22, 2012, at 9:40 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>   We've (are) lost.  New Orleans and the rest of the world's coastal
>>> cities are Atlantas's.  And bye bye to countless species.
>>>
>>>  The 20th/21st Centuries won't be fondly remembered.
>>>
>>> On Sunday, July 22, 2012, Monte Davis wrote:
>>>
>>>> The core argument, without caveats and qualifications:
>>>>
>>>> 1) From Kyoto through Copenhagen, a 2 degree C. global increase has been
>>>> widely accepted as a threshold we really don't wanna cross;
>>>> 2) We can calculate how much more fossil-fuel burning will get us there;
>>>> 3) Current proven reserves held by energy co's and nation/companies are
>>>> about *six times* that  amount;
>>>> 4) The stock price of energy companies (and the credit-worthiness of
>>>> Saudi
>>>> Arabia, Venezuela, USA states fracking their shale, et al) is tightly
>>>> correlated with their reserves. Ergo, any combination of
>>>> policies/actions
>>>> that would be effective in keeping the increase under 2 degrees would in
>>>> effect say to all those parties: "Five-sixths of that collective asset
>>>> just
>>>> became worthless." (Yeah, I know, coal & oil & gas are also feedstocks
>>>> for
>>>> polymers, fertilizers etc, but at this level that's a detail. Yeah,  I
>>>> know,
>>>> CO2 capture & sequestration is possible -- but do the math, and it would
>>>> require infrastructure -- and expenditure -- on the same scale as all
>>>> today's pipelines and refineries and tankers and coal trains.)
>>>>
>>>> Some of you are no doubt saying "duhh," but it snapped my head around
>>>> even
>>>> though I've been reading McKibben & co for a long time. It's the
>>>> difference
>>>> between a handwaved "the fossil-fuel industry can't keep growing in
>>>> future
>>>> decades as it has for the last century or two"... and saying to that
>>>> industry, the world's largest: "five-sixths of the biggest asset
>>>> investors
>>>> recognize in you *right now* is a mirage." That makes it much easier to
>>>> understand the fervor of denial.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
>>>> Behalf
>>>> Of Dave Monroe
>>>> Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2012 9:35 PM
>>>> To: pynchon -l
>>>> Subject: Global Warming's New Math
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-mat
>>>> h-20120719<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-mat%20h-20120719>
>>>>
>>>>  **
>>>
>>>  ** **
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
>> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust
>> in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
>> groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
>> urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>>  **
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
> the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
> reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
> groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
> urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>
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