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Valerie S. Banschbach
Department of Biology
Imagining a Wedge
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe leaves me wondering why we
haven’t started the hard work of planning for adaptation to climate change, adapting to a world
that will be warmer by at least 4 degrees Celsius than our current world, and why we are unable
to undertake any serious efforts at greenhouse gas mitigation efforts. Consider the interplay
between science and society in America and the controversy over causes and consequences of
climate change. According to the other Colbert, the one on television, the American public
appreciates scientists for ingenious technology that fuels our economy and agriculture, fortifies
our military defense systems and generates healthcare innovations that prolong our lives. He
contends, however, that this same public is not so grateful for depressing warnings about
disruption to the earth’s climate, ecosystems, biodiversity and water cycle. I think Stephen
Colbert tapped into a bulging vein of American public sentiment when, in his book I Am
America (and So Can You), he entitled the chapter about science “Science: Thanks for the
Nukes, Now Go Away.”
We, in the United States, seem largely content to live among more than 100 nuclear
power plants, all of which were commissioned prior to 1973 and many of which live on past their
originally planned lifespan. The grasp science has on harnessing nuclear fission safely and
efficiently appears impressive: a typical fission event releases two hundred million electron volts
of energy, while burning a pile of coal or TNT might release only a tiny fraction of that energy.
The bargain we’ve struck to acquire all of that nuclear energy is to accept the highly radioactive
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waste products of the nuclear fission events with no clear long-term plan for where to put the
waste. When nuclear power technology was first rolled out to the citizens of the United States, a
significant public relations campaign by the federal government touting power “too cheap to
meter” helped quell fears about the safety of nuclear energy.1
Science enables us to mine fossil fuel resources from every niche of the Earth. We now
extract our fuels from the most extreme situations: miles below the surface of the oceans, where
typical pressures amount to half a ton per square centimeter, and deep under mountains of rock
via blasting those mountains apart with more than 3 million pounds of explosives per day (in
West Virginia alone). Major accidents wrought by energy usage and extraction include a coal
sludge pond from a Tennessee coal-fired power plant bursting through its earthen dike, releasing
a billion gallons of fly ash and drowning an area of 300 acres with toxic ash to depths of 6 feet in
2008; the Chernobyl nuclear power plant mishap in 1986 that left more than 330,000 people
homeless and sent radioactive fallout over much of Western Europe, as well as the then Soviet
Union; and, most recently, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the full scope of which I cannot
capture at the time of writing this essay, but an estimate on June 15, 2010 places the figure at 2.5
million gallons of oil released per day, perhaps lasting until August. But a technological optimist
would say the number and substance of the catastrophes, to date, is much less devastating than
one would predict given the quantity and scope of operations that take these daily gambles to
exploit energy resources worldwide. Nevertheless, while those pretty spectacular feats of
science are entrusted to be carried out by engineers and the corporations that profit from their
work, the public Colbert spoofs seems to lack trust in scientists who are working on the much
1
Collins, M. and Freudenberg, W. 2010. Technological Risk Messages: Comparing Nuclear Power and
Nanotechnology. Presentation at Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences Conference, Portland, OR.
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less spectacular tasks involved in collecting data on temperature, organisms, ice melt, water
availability, and more, figuring out what those data reveal about climate trends over time.
Elizabeth Kolbert takes us on a tour of that routine science, gathering the evidence for our
understanding of how climate is changing. She describes biologists William Bradshaw and
Christina Holzapfel (and their students) searching in the stagnant water at the edges of ponds for
mosquito larvae, across the United States. Their work has demonstrated that these larvae
recently evolved to remain active longer into the late summer and fall, taking advantage of the
longer growing season already created by climate change. This arcane-seeming entomological
project leads to conclusions with widespread ramifications. Public health officials quip, “It’s a
great time to be a virus!” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) predicts that a warmer world will experience the spread of diseases to new areas, and
IPCC public health researchers provide evidence that in developing countries, incidence of some
diseases has already increased due to climate change. Mosquitoes are a key vector species
transmitting diseases and parasitic infections including malaria, encephalitis, West Nile virus,
Yellow fever, Dengue fever, heartworm, botflies and Rift Valley fever. The more time the
mosquito larvae spend feeding and bulking up to prepare for overwintering, the more chance
they will emerge from the winter as strong adults spreading disease in the next growing season.
For some everyday physical science, Kolbert tagged along with geophysicist and
permafrost expert Vladimir Romanovsky, driving around Alaska in a beat-up rented truck to
collect data at some of his sixty permafrost monitoring sites. She gives us a sense of how
Romanovsky’s work shows the warming of the permafrost and increasing depth of the active
layer (the soil that is not permanently frozen), thawing each summer above the shrinking
permafrost layer. The good news about that could be the increased plant growth on the active
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layer; those plants will absorb CO2, helping combat further accumulation of that greenhouse gas.
Unfortunately, there is harder to grasp bad news about one of the many feedback loops related to
climate change: as the permafrost melts, methane (a potent greenhouse gas) will be released and
as much as 450 billion metric tons of methane may accumulate in the atmosphere from this
process. That amount of methane added to the atmosphere during a relatively short time span of
a few decades should be enough to significantly accelerate climate change.
Certainly, the lifestyle of the organisms, non-human and human, that live on the
permafrost will be changing as they adapt, migrate or go extinct. In Alaska, the distribution of
indigenous peoples (including Inuit, North Athabascan, Aleut, Yupiak, Tlingi, Haida, Eyak and
Tsimshian cultures) closely maps to the distribution of climate zones and communities of plants
and animals. As recently as 75 years ago, some of those indigenous people lived as nomadic
communities, moving with changing environmental conditions. Now, however, they live in
permanent settlements. Large fires and major changes in the distribution of wildlife are coming
as a result of warming. As fauna and flora shift and adapt with warming, indigenous Alaskans
will need to adapt or move. For example, some native Alaskans who rely upon moose will need
to begin hunting caribou, but there will be some transitional years when neither big game species
is common in large areas of Alaska. Government resources will be needed to facilitate
adaptation.
Island peoples are also under a good deal of pressure. Government officials for the island
nation of Maldives held a cabinet meeting underwater, while scuba-diving offshore in the ocean,
shortly before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, 2009, to make a
public statement about how rising sea levels already impact their country and how the future
submersion of their remaining land will leave them homeless. From following the travails of
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people living in the extreme northern regions and on modestly-sized islands, we can get a sense
of what the range of adaptation needs will be. Kolbert describes the plans that the Dutch are
hatching to deal with their below sea level land, as sea level rises. The Dutch, however, enjoy a
high level of economic development and therefore some economic capacity to deal with this
problem, unlike many of the islanders of small nations, native peoples of Alaska, and people of
the developing nations of the world. As habitats change, more droughts and desertification
unfold, and rises in sea level alter habitats, adaptation will require planning and resources,
resources that the 4% of the world’s population who consume 25% of the world’s fossil fuel
resources might need to provide.2 If you are a citizen of the USA, you are part of that 4%, and if
you are an average consumer in the USA, you emit more carbon than anyone in the world except
the people of some small, very wealthy and/or oil-rich nations. (Qatar, United Arab Emirates,
Bahrain, Kuwait, and Luxembourg, the Netherlands Antilles, and Trinidad and Tobago are the
only nations to exceed our per capita CO2 consumption, according to 2007 International Energy
Agency data.3)
Quite apart from the drama of the challenges that lie in the future, Kolbert’s ride-alongs
show us the plodding work necessary to collect little bits of data that add up to a forecast for an
entirely changed world. Manual labor, such as the hiking, digging, tree-climbing, streamwading, and other physical tasks that make up fieldwork, or repetitive lab bench tasks, including
pipetting liquids, measuring out tiny quantities of chemicals, peering through the microscope
2
Worldwatch Institute, 2008. The State of Consumption Today. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810
3
International Energy Agency. 2009. Co2 Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion—Highlights.
http://www.iea.org/publications/free_new_Desc.asp?PUBS_ID=2143
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looking for tiny differences of form—those tasks done over and over again constitute the daily
routine for most scientists. I am a biologist and spend summer days excavating soil for ant
colonies, lying face-down on the ground, trying to follow an individual worker ant as she travels
through the leaf litter, checking baits and traps that are mostly empty, counting the number of
segments in the antennae of insects only a millimeter or two in length to try to separate species X
from species Y in a taxonomic key. Kolbert accurately depicts the tedium that creates the pile of
data regarding climate change and suggests the pile of data has grown to a mountain.
The part of the scientific investigation that comes after the data gathering is interpretation
and synthesis. What we now take for granted as the scientific method was given voice in
Western civilization nearly 400 years ago by Francis Bacon in a metaphor from his True
Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature, when he contrasted different ways of
knowing the world carried out by “men of experiment or men of dogmas.” First, he noted the
“ants,” the “men of experiment,” gathering bits of information, like ants make piles of seeds in
their colonies; this methodology, however, seems to lack integration. Next came the “spiders,”
the “men of dogmas,” those who base their speculation completely upon human constructs, just
as a spider spins silk out of her own glands, a metaphor that critiques the reasoner who does not
require any observation of the natural world as a basis for conclusions. Bacon advocated an
approach that combines the data collection and the reasoning: be like the bee, he suggests, gather
nectar from many different flowers, and add glandular secretions (honey is a nice mixture of
flower nectar and bee spit) to make the best attempt at understanding the world.
Kolbert does a lovely job of showing what some of the metaphorical bees are doing; of
course, a bee colony does not thrive without tens of thousands of workers. A healthy colony of
honey bees (Apis mellifera) might consist of 40,000 to 60,000 workers. From the survey of
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science Kolbert reviews, you get a sense that the picture we have of the impacts of climate
change has come from tens of thousands of worker “bees” exploring different natural and urban
systems over time. My own tiny piece of the puzzle involves monitoring biodiversity. I spent
this summer working with a student researcher who picked through more than 1000 ants
collected in pitfall trapping. She examined every one under a microscope to discover what
species diversity exists in a local threatened ecosystem, the sandplain forest. While we were
thrilled to find more than 20 ant species, the ant diversity in Vermont is less than a tenth of the
species diversity in the tropics, in places such as Monteverde, Costa Rica.
One of Kolbert’s other research examples involves the golden toad of Monteverde. I’ve
travelled there for my own research and teaching six times since 1989, and Jay Savage, the
herpetologist who described the golden toad as a new species, was the Chair of my graduate
program at the University of Miami. So I’ve heard plenty about this toad. It was a delightfully
gaudy little creature, decked out in an overblown shade of orange, but my first trip to Monteverde was in 1989, so I never saw one in person. The golden toad stands for everything else,
glamorous, golden, or not, that will not be able to adapt to a drier, warmer climate replacing the
clouds that used to soak the mountain. Every few years, I accompany Saint Michael's College
students to Monteverde for our Biology Department “Tropical Ecology” course, and I can testify
that the place has changed dramatically since 1989. What strikes me most is the increase in
people who inhabit the area and work in the burgeoning tourism industry there now. Ecotourists
come hoping to view the endemic cloud forest species: the quetzal, an emerald green bird with
extravagant males bearing multi-colored tail feathers four times the length of their bodies; the
three-wattled bell bird, sporting the three worm-like structures that dangle from the face of the
males and the abrasive, loud “bonk” call that the birds make; and more than 30 species of
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hummingbirds at one place. A decline in what is able to exist in a new cloud forest, one without
many clouds, will certainly impact the local economy in Costa Rica, which depends on
biodiversity. We expend a lot of fossil fuel to go see the rainforest, though, when we live in the
United States. Sadly, our affinity for places like Costa Rica may help ensure their eventual
demise. For us, biodiversity is a curiosity, to seek out and enjoy for leisure or academic study,
but there is no longer a widespread understanding that biodiversity is essential to us. The
organization of Kolbert’s book makes this point clearly: we separate “Nature” from “Man.”
I understand that Kolbert’s separation of “Nature” and “Man” is a structural device for
the text, but let’s also use her choice of this structure to discuss how we came to the state of the
environment we have now. If nature is viewed as separate from us, then nature consists of
objects to be managed, a set of systems to study, and resources to extract. If we are part of
nature, then nature can be viewed as us, our kin, and a place where we belong. Rachel Carson
laid this split bare in 1962 with her seminal book Silent Spring. Carson, a scientist with a Master
of Science degree from Johns Hopkins University, synthesized the findings of more than 52
peer-reviewed research articles, revealing the devastating environmental impacts of DDT,
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a pesticide that was in widespread use in the United States
starting shortly after World War II. In 1959, usage across the United States amounted to 80
million pounds of DDT. But Carson’s book is not simply a big pile of data; Jack Lewis, in the
EPA Journal, called it “an exhaustively researched, carefully written, and beautifully reasoned
attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides” that led to a “revolution in public opinion.”
Carson made a bullet-proof case that DDT decimated bird populations across the United States
via reproductive failure due to significantly thinner egg shells, a decline in clutch size (number of
eggs) per bird, deaths of embryos, unhatched eggs and dead chicks, and pathological parental
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care resulting from the endocrine-disrupting properties of DDT. She raised the question: Might
DDT also disrupt the endocrine system of humans?
Manufacturers of pesticides unleashed a vehement response to Carson’s work. Rather
than refuting the scientific basis for her conclusions, the backlash focused upon her gender,
labeling the book “emotional rhetoric” and “hysteria,” dismissing her credentials and thereby her
authority to generate a review of scientific work. Carson’s work led directly to the establishment
of the US Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and the subsequent ban of
the general use of DDT in the USA by that agency in 1972. DDT is no longer manufactured in
the United States; however, when the last manufacturing plant for DDT in the United States
closed in 1983, its components were sold and reassembled in Indonesia to make DDT for use in
developing countries to control disease-bearing mosquitoes.
Historians of science refer to the science of ecology from the time of Silent Spring
forward as the “subversive science.” Some ecologists had found a new calling: instead of
studying how humans can best control and manage nature, they delineate the many deviations of
humans from the natural order of the world, document the damage, and try to prevent further
destruction. Physical scientists studying climate change have joined the group of subversive
scientists as they are now forced to deal with the backlash to their climate findings and forecasts.
Only when the data became so compelling did we hear the media suggest that some folks believe
there is a cabal of researchers trying to curtail progress with an extremist environmental agenda.
But when you look at the individuals across many fields of science, and the details of their work,
as Kolbert has, it is hard to imagine the coordination of all these researchers to perpetrate some
great hoax. Nevertheless, conspiracy theories thrive, and trust in hard-to-understand phenomena
that you cannot easily witness can be difficult.
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Stephen Colbert points out that trust is hard, in the case of climate science, perhaps due to
the do-it-yourself spirit and anti-elitism of the American public. “So who gave some lab-coated
pipette wielder permission to act like he knows more than I do about mitochondria, just because
he spent more than twenty years of his life studying them in the laboratory?” This is a spoof, but
the whole idea that there are “two sides” to every issue, so anyone can readily engage in a debate
on any topic, does not apply well to the scientific study of mitochondria or to the scientific study
of climate change. Particular scientists, experts in cellular metabolism, debate many issues
related to mitochondria and their function, asking questions such as: what role do mitochondria
play in sensing oxygen levels in tissues? Do low-oxygen (hypoxic) conditions lead to disruption
of the mitochondrial electron transport chain? Laymen, and perhaps even other scientists who do
not specialize in the area of cellular physiology, simply are not prepared to jump in and blog
about this debate, although we would hope that any determined person could, over time, acquire
the education needed to do so.
This leads us back to the other Kolbert and Bacon’s “bees.” Kolbert gives a clear, simple
and wholly accurate picture of the scientific community: there is no scientific debate raging over
whether climate change is occurring. The National Academies of Sciences of Brazil, Canada,
China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States
of America issued a joint statement in the summer of 2005 calling for the leaders of all nations to
“acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing” and to “take prompt
action to reduce the causes of climate change, adapt to its impacts and ensure that the issue is
included in all relevant national and international strategies.”4 The National Academies consist
4
Joint sciences’ academies statement: Global response to climate change. 2005.
http://www.nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
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of the most acclaimed “bees” in each of these nations—ones that have had a distinguished career
of scientific research leading to nomination and election by their peers to receive the honor of
academy membership. These scientists have taken the pile of climate data, reasoned through it
and made it their own. The task that remains for scientists researching climate change consists
of discovering the details of climate change’s time course, local effects, and effects on particular
species and ecosystems. Kolbert gives a perfect picture of the surprisingly dispassionate way
individual scientists and laboratories are approaching their study, while the media depicts raging
controversy.
In 2004, Boykoff and Boykoff studied several years’ worth of climate change articles in
four leading newspapers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and
the Los Angeles Times) and found that these newspapers repeatedly portrayed controversy over
climate change as the story. But the scientific community had already reached a consensus with
no controversy raging at all.5 However, even scientists themselves have underreported the
severity of the climate change threat. Muselli and Freudenberg, in 2010, examined the scientific
reports regarding actual levels and impacts of climate change and found that 85% of the peerreviewed scientific research articles published about climate change impacts showed results
more severe than those predicted by the IPCC.6 It appears that society has influenced scientists
to present more positive conclusions than the data warrant because of pressure on anyone who
announces that we are on track for major difficulties and the fact that the media are loath to
5
Boykoff, M.T. and J.M. Boykoff. 2004. Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige press. Global
Environmental Change, 14 (2004): 125 – 136.
6
Muselli, V. and W. Freudenberg, 2010. Reexamining Climate Change Debates: Turning a green discourse brown.
Forthcoming in Global Environmental Change. Presented as a paper at the Association for Environmental Studies
and Sciences Conference in June, 2010, Portland, Oregon.
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report any pessimistic findings without balancing them with a more cheerful counterpoint (even
if that counterpoint has no scientific validity). We are barely getting started with the accelerating
rate of climate change, and the forecasts are underestimates of what is coming.
Why haven’t we started the hard work of planning for adaptation to climate change,
adapting to a world that will be warmer by at least 4 degrees Celsius than our current world, and
why we are unable to undertake any serious efforts at greenhouse gas mitigation efforts? When
we consider the interplay between science and society, we should acknowledge that right now,
for some of us living in the societies of the U.S.A. and other industrialized nations, we are
thriving like viruses: it’s a great time to be a human. Some of us experience so much prosperity
that the key diseases that challenge us come from our excessive food intake and lack of physical
exertion, not from crop failure and lack of clean water. With such ease of living, it is hard to
imagine doing anything too drastic by way of change. Kolbert quotes physicist Marty Hoffert:
“Right now, we’re going to just burn everything up; we’re going to heat the atmosphere to the
temperature it was in the Cretaceous, when there were crocodiles at the poles. And then everything will collapse.” But we don’t see any crocodiles in Lake Champlain yet, and for some
people that kind of direct view of the problem will be needed. In the meantime, it is easiest to sit
back and hope for a breakthrough technology that will allow us to continue our current lifestyle,
uninterrupted, and allow the rest of the world to adopt a similar ease of living. Remember that
we in the USA use 25% of the world’s energy resources and we are 4% of the world’s population, so to bring everyone else up to that level means we will need energy equivalent to that
found on six planet Earths—a massive breakthrough indeed. Don’t count on that breakthrough.
What can you do instead? As Kolbert describes, Pacala and Socolow (2004), presented
stabilization wedges that we could use to flatten out the rising CO2 emissions curve, all based
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upon existing technologies. But they aren’t easy fixes, nor are they palatable to all consumers of
energy or to all environmental activists.7 Each wedge is an action that will reduce the amount of
carbon released into the atmosphere by one billion metric tons per year. Some of the 15 wedges
are controversial (e.g., carbon capture and sequestration; doubled use of nuclear power), but only
7 wedges are needed to flatten out the rising CO2 emissions curve. What do the wedges require?
Action. Cooperation on a massive scale is necessary, but at least one wedge could be accomplished via the sum of individual actions. For example, one stabilization wedge consists of each
of us driving half the number of car miles we currently drive. Could you do this? If you do, be
prepared for someone to call you a hypocrite—you’re still driving some miles, after all. You
flew on an airplane to visit your family; your food travels thousands of miles to reach your plate;
perhaps you eat meat, the production of which releases between one-fifth and one-half of all
greenhouse gas emissions;8 and maybe you just outfitted your dorm room with goods shipped
from China. However, the point of the wedges is that we can jump in and attack the problem
from multiple angles. Any start we make is both necessary and important. So what’s next? Are
there other wedges you can imagine?
7
Carbon Mitigation Initiative. 2009. Stabilization Wedges. Princeton University (with sponsorship from BP and
Ford).
8
Worldwatch Institute. 2009. Livestock emissions: Still grossly underestimated? Available at:
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6297
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