And So It Warms

July 16, 2015 8:19 PM

Scott K. Johnson, an Hydrologist and freelance writer for Ars Technica attended the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-10) held on June 11-12.

For a science writer, however, the event was fundamentally a tedious experience. On the first night of the conference, one of the presenters actually invaded my dreams. In the dream, I was in some sort of friendly geology group, gathering to discuss some interesting research. When this fellow announced his topic, I interrupted him. “Wait—is this more of that retired medical doctor’s weird theory about volcanoes that you talked about for two hours last time?” I asked. The presenter blinked, puzzled by my tone, and said, “Well, yeah. Of course.” The rest of the group shot me pained glances and sank down in their chairs.

That’s kind of what the conference was like.
posted by michswiss (27 comments total)

So the ICCC was like the SDCC held the same weekend, just with more fantasy...
oops, June, not July
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:22 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Where's a sinkhole when you need one?
posted by bird internet at 9:10 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Tony Abbott didn't happen to be there, did he?
posted by um at 9:10 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

“I accept that the planet has warmed,” said conservative columnist Mark Steyn from the podium. “And I rejoice that it is warm.”
That's what we should be seeing, less Climate Change Denial and more Climate Change Support. At least it'd e honest, because responding to the Oncoming Climate Disaster... moving people away from the rising sea, building large climate-controlled communities, developing lab-made foods to replace the dying agriculture... will result in so much more Economic Activity and Economic Growth, as opposed to trying to prevent it, which if successful, would probably result in a net reduction in Economic Activity - not to mention taking some control of the Economy away from the MegaCorporations and Billionaires, which is the last thing most people calling themselves 'Libertarians' want. (Because it's the Uber OWNERS, not the Uber Drivers they all want to be) It would be a much more interesting debate if they could at least be honest. (But doesn't that go for a lot of things?)
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:16 PM on July 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

No, but these guys were sponsors of the event and it probably wouldn't be a difficult process to draw a connection.
posted by michswiss at 9:16 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Missed a trick not calling this 'And yet, it warms'
posted by Sebmojo at 9:31 PM on July 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Anyhow whenever I come across someone who has an entrenched viewpoint that I think they are wrong about, my approach is simply to ask "what contrary evidence would you find persuasive?" If the answer boils down to 'no amount of contrary evidence would be sufficient', or alternatively, demands for evidence so overwhelming that it boils down to a request to know the innermost thoughts of God, well I just saved myself a fruitless argument.
posted by um at 10:45 PM on July 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

evidence so overwhelming that it boils down to a request to know the innermost thoughts of God

Actually, the Pope has spoken up about the subject now, which is nearly as close as you can get to hearing the innermost thoughts of God (sort of, in a way, if you are Catholic), and this still wasn't enough for the deniers.
posted by el io at 11:13 PM on July 16, 2015 [17 favorites]

You rejoice that it's warm? Come to central Europe, we're having one of the hottest summers on record!

Of course, you won't have air conditioning - it's virtually unheard of here because till the last few summers it NEVER GOT HOT.
posted by photo guy at 11:33 PM on July 16, 2015

el io Actually, the Pope has spoken up about the subject now, which is nearly as close as you can get to hearing the innermost thoughts of God (sort of, in a way, if you are Catholic), and this still wasn't enough for the deniers.

But then they just get all #notmypope about it.

oneswellfoopmoving people away from the rising sea, building large climate-controlled communities, developing lab-made foods to replace the dying agriculture... will result in so much more Economic Activity and Economic Growth, as opposed to trying to prevent it, which if successful, would probably result in a net reduction in Economic Activity

Yeah, subsistence and conservation are pretty much the enemy of pure capitalism, and without some unforeseen breakthroughs or large reforms, I think that future is possible. And the worse things get, the more desperate people will get, and that will drive profitable conflict and demand for scientific solutions.
posted by JauntyFedora at 11:42 PM on July 16, 2015

But then they just get all #notmypope about it.

surely this will lead to a widely-followed antipope
posted by NoraReed at 12:20 AM on July 17, 2015 [20 favorites]

surely this will lead to a widely-followed antipope

The upside of this is, if we can get them close enough in a suitable containment vessel, the Pope and Antipope with release nearly endless renewable energy and solve part of the problem!
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:04 AM on July 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Actually, the Pope has spoken up about the subject now, which is nearly as close as you can get to hearing the innermost thoughts of God (sort of, in a way, if you are Catholic), and this still wasn't enough for the deniers.

Actually, catholics don't believe that the Pope knows the innermost thoughts of God. Catholics believe that the pope is simply preserved from fallibility when teaching about church doctrine. Catholics know that the pope's views on climate change are his own, but it would be nice to see Francis issue that disclaimer now and again.
posted by three blind mice at 2:10 AM on July 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

FOR NON-CATHOLICS: THE FOLLOWING VIEWS ARE THAT OF A MORTAL, FALLIBLE HUMAN BEING; NOT GOD. PLEASE REGARD ACCORDINGLY. WE NOW RETURN TO THE POPE ON CLIMATE CHANGE, ALREADY IN PROGRESS
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:35 AM on July 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

...I can't stop thinking about another pet issue people have while reading this.

I really hope there will never be an International Conference on Ethical Journalism.
posted by halifix at 3:38 AM on July 17, 2015

Pace three blind mice, most Catholics are not in fact in the habit of dismissing Papal teaching as ‘just his opinion, man’ except when infallibility applies. Catholics listen to the Holy Father’s public pronouncements because he is known to spend much of his time praying and meditating and is generally believed to receive particular guidance from the Holy Spirit. Aside from the fact that the Pope has access to information and analysis from a large staff of highly qualified people, including an Academy of Sciences whose membership is not constrained to Catholics or even religious believers.

Anyway ‘his views are his own’ is a silly thing to say when the views in question are the only ones compatible with basic scientific literacy (JM Bergoglio attended a technical school, learning chemistry) and a concern for human welfare (goes with the job).
posted by ormon nekas at 4:20 AM on July 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I hope someone has a list of attendees, or at least speakers. That will make the eventual personal-accountability reckoning easier.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:33 AM on July 17, 2015

I went to Heartland’s conference expecting a series of detailed critiques of climate studies

Did you really, though? Don't get me wrong - reading this is rage-inducing* but kind of what I expected so I'm not sure a science writer would have expected anything different.

*"Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who heads the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology gave a keynote speech [...] After his speech, a member of the audience asked if Smith could do anything about the National Science Foundation funding for climate research, complaining that “it only goes to one side.” Winning applause, Smith told the crowd that his committee had just cut NASA’s Earth science budget by close to 40 percent and was pushing the National Science Foundation to stop funding research that he perceives as useless."

(emphasis, and tears of fury, mine)
posted by billiebee at 4:45 AM on July 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

“That's what we should be seeing, less Climate Change Denial and more Climate Change Support. At least it'd be honest, because responding to the Oncoming Climate Disaster [...] will result in so much more Economic Activity”

Oh, you will! Denialism/‘skepticism’ is only one angle in the full-spectrum response to the climate crisis by organised wealth. Some of the Heartland talking heads are doubtless sincere, but many of their sponsors and supporters are more circumspect. They like us (the politicised public) to argue vigorously about which of their proposed panaceas we should choose, it keeps us from thinking too much about the economic paradigm shift that would be needed to actually solve the problem.

Philip Mirowski: Neoliberals neutralize their opponents by mounting a full spectrum response to crises: a short-term easily mobilized response to stymie their opponents; a subsequent medium-term response which involves a strong state in instituting more new-fangled markets; and a long-term science fiction response (also involving the state) to present an upbeat optimistic version of neoliberal doctrine. The shorter-term responses buy time for the thought collective to mobilize their longer-term panaceas. The book [Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 2013] describes the dynamic in greater detail, but here, let me just indicate that, in the case of the climate crisis, the short term response is global warming denialism; the medium-term response is to institute trading schemes for carbon emission permits and offsets; and the long term science fiction response is geoengineering (…) —but not, significantly, to actually cut back on carbon emissions. What Klein and others get wrong is that neoliberals are not really ‘anti-science’ as such; rather, ploys such as denialism simply postpone political attempts by opponents to cut emissions until they can recruit and train a cadre of entrepreneurial neoliberal scientists, whereas meanwhile the situation gets so dire that their preferred ‘market’ solutions come to seem the last refuge for a desperate populace. It is significant that each of these ‘ideas’ were innovated in neoliberal think tanks.

Note that Mirowski contends that carbon markets, which do reduce carbon output in theory (at least, neo-classical economic theory, so you can enlist sincere support from leftish economists) were promoted in the knowledge that they would fail to limit output in practice, at least for a long while (the devil is in the details, and the details can be haggled over).
posted by ormon nekas at 5:05 AM on July 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

And geo-engineering silliness aside, I am sure that a small army of people employed by the same interests who sponsored this sad ‘conference’ are, as we speak, also busy designing strategies to profit from natural disasters, desertification, the sea level rise, etc, thinking up pro-warming talking points, & so on & so forth.

They will still be blindsided by the actual extent of the upheavals we are on track for over the coming century, of course…
posted by ormon nekas at 5:19 AM on July 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, as I read somewhere recently, the question of global warming will be whether the whole human race goes extinct or whether some portions of the 1% manage to stick it out over the next couple of centuries. The genocidal tactics described in that Mirowski piece are what the 1% believe they need to do to ensure that the rest of us perish while they survive.
posted by Sonny Jim at 5:44 AM on July 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Some of the Heartland talking heads are doubtless sincere, but many of their sponsors and supporters are more circumspect.

At some level it's really a no-brainer though. I sincerely doubt their sincerity:

"In an official submission to the White House earlier this year, U.S. coal giant Peabody Energy claims that greenhouse gas is a “non-existent harm” and a “benign gas that is essential to all life.”"

Chart showing that the potential profits warming effect of coal vastly exceeds that of other sources.

We've come to the point where policy outcomes are very clear, unless you continue to boldly deny the science:

"The cost of making cuts in greenhouse gas pollution rises with every day of delay and zero emissions must be the goal for this century."
posted by sneebler at 8:13 AM on July 17, 2015

Somehow I feel that the reality-based community has gotten really far behind here -- of course organizations with enormous vested interests in maintaining the status quo are going to be denialists, and of course they are going to fund politicians, "think tanks" and media outlets to support their views. There are trillions of dollars at stake for them here.

This should be where we start our conversation: given the money involved, the power associated with that much money, and the structure of domestic politics, how do we generate change? Bill McKibben's 2012 piece for Rolling Stone comes down to this:

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

The economics of this are insane, as crazy as the economics of ending slavery in the US. And, hang on, others have said this better:

The point here is not to associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels today.

In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy. No use trying to persuade people otherwise.

They (the energy companies and the denialists they fund) know this. We somehow don't, and are spending our time arguing with denialists on the web. That's a total distraction.
posted by PandaMomentum at 9:04 AM on July 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Tables set up outside the hotel’s main ballroom hosted conservative advocacy groups and think tanks like CFACT, the Ayn Rand Institute, and the Heritage Foundation (which attracted visitors with a life-size cardboard cut-out of Ronald Reagan).

Wow. Talk about your dog whistles. Now contrast the flip, glib and righteous-indignant attitude described in this piece with the attitude of the climatologists outlined in this piece, which was the subject of this FPP. Which of those two groups seem like grown-ups?
posted by eclectist at 9:20 AM on July 17, 2015

"I say let the world warm up, see what Boutros Boutros-Ghali-Ghali thinks about that! We'll grow oranges in Alaska!"


"Dale, you giblet-head, we live in Texas. It's already a hundred and ten in the summer, and if it gets one degree hotter, I'm gonna kick your ass!"
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:42 AM on July 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

I want to know where all of this climate change conspiracy money is. Not just because the known money given to climate change believing scientists is completely dwarfed by the money given to climate change denying scientists, but also because up to now I've been believing climate change exists for free, like a chump.
posted by ckape at 10:07 AM on July 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

ckape: Really? The rest of us on the internet have been getting our monthly checks. Hell, if you're not getting your money, you probably aren't taking advantage of the free uber-helicopter rides that all of us are getting (I think it's uber, I know the helicopters are unmarked and black).
posted by el io at 10:39 AM on July 17, 2015 [2 favorites]