Connecting climate change to everyday life: Guest blogger Christine Shearer
I regularly meet new people through this blog. Recently Christine Shearer contacted me to look over some paragraphs in her forthcoming book. Christine is a sociologist working on climate change. As my readers know, I believe that perspectives from many different fields are what we need to move our addressing climate change forward. I asked, and she agreed to write a guest blog.
Connecting climate change to everyday life by Christine Shearer
One of the interesting things, sociologically, about climate change science is just how political it has become. It is not, however, that people merely fall on different sides on the issue, depending upon their views concerning government regulation. In many ways this divide was socially engineered. In their research, sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap track how those opposed to climate change regulations helped transform growing national understanding and concern over global warming into a “nonproblem”, creating a political climate conducive toward the US Congress rejecting the binding greenhouse gas limits of the Kyoto Protocol. Regulation opponents did this by borrowing tactics from Big Tobacco: demanding certainty as the only acceptable standard for action, while simultaneously funding research to deliberately create uncertainty. Historian Naomi Oreskes has traced how many of the same scientists that questioned the science on smoking also went on to question acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change. These efforts are aided by the media, which too often confuse balanced journalism with presenting various views on an issue, ignoring the weight of scientific consensus.
After Kyoto, public perception of global warming as a problem shrank among U.S. Republicans, marking the beginning of a growing partisan divide concerning global warming and the need for action. Conservatives are arguably exposed to more media sources that question climate change, such as the recently leaked memo of a Fox News editor ordering its journalists to always state that climate change data has been called into question when discussing the topic. Gallup surveys also suggest there has been a measurable decrease since Kyoto in just how severe a problem much of the U.S. public – Republicans and Democrats – regard climate change.
This has been the brilliance of the climate change “doubt” campaign – to tame down the urgency with which people wanted action on climate change, and to create pockets of the US population that are absolutely convinced the entire issue is a hoax.
More concerning is that this is happening while the information on climate change is growing more alarming, with glaciers melting more rapidly than many models had predicted, with new studies suggesting carbon dioxide may stay in the atmosphere for longer than had been previously estimated, and with increasing signs that many of the world’s carbon sinks are growing stressed. The disconnect between scientific research and mainstream public opinion is huge, with many scientists quietly acquiescing that we should be performing small-scale experiments of geoengineering, since the social dynamics concerning climate change look so unlikely to change anytime soon.
That is why many organizations like 350.org have been calling for a social movement on this issue, to create the large-scale response needed to push social change. Activists have been trying to argue that action on climate change is a win-win-win: we clean up our environment, stimulate the economy with new technologies and jobs, and remove our dependence on unstable fuels.
What this movement needs, however, is some urgency. Research on climate change and risk perception show people think of climate change as a distant concern, not immediate to them, and not as pressing as other issues like the economic crisis. This is a problem, because the history of social movements and social change show that people often do not get active and involved in an issue until they can connect it to their daily lives, until it touches them personally. The economic crisis is touching people personally. Climate change, in the public mind - not so much.
This is where climate scientists could have a very important role to play: to begin shattering the taboo between weather and climate.
Right now, the conventional wisdom is that no specific weather event can be attributed to climate change. This is of course “true.” But it is the wrong question, and its persistence is having disastrous effects. First, it reinforces the public view that climate change is a remote, long-term concern not immediately affecting them. Second, it falls into the “uncertainty” argument - since you can't say that climate change “caused” a weather event, it ends up being an argument of doubt (and inaction) that plays into climate deniers' hands.
Again, the problem is it’s the wrong question, and we need to reframe the issue. Luckily, some are already doing this. In his paper “How Warm Was This Summer?” NASA scientist James Hansen suggests climate scientists reframe the question to: “Would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” To which he says: “An appropriate answer in that case is ‘almost certainly not.’”
Other scientists, for example, Ben Santer are using climate models as a “control experiment” for pre-industrial greenhouse gas levels, to determine how many times an extreme event of a given magnitude should have been observed in the absence of human interference, and compare that to present conditions, called “fractional attributable risk.
These are much needed advances, for both scientific and public understanding. The more people connect daily occurrences to increasing greenhouse gases, the more they’ll want to do something about it. Now.
The next step, of course, is getting the media and meteorologists to pay attention. But the more scientists discuss daily events, the more social scientists, activists, and other concerned people will demand attention be paid to it. And that will help raise the broader attention and concern we need around climate change. Because the best option, of course, is mitigation. And sadly it is an option we have yet to try.
Christine Shearer
Christine Shearer is a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch, and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UC Santa Barbara. She is managing editor of Conducive, and author of the forthcoming book, "Kivalina: A Climate Change Story" (Haymarket Books, 2011).
Figure 1: Conceptual framework showing (in the shaded area) the steps involved in planned adaptation to climate variability and change from Application of environmentally sound technologies for adaptation to climate change; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, Bonn, Germany, Technical Paper FCCC/TP/2006/2, 107 p
Reader Comments
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So, given that average world temperatures have fallen so quickly during No-Dec., how would you account for this record breaker. You think it's climate change or just weather?
Here
Average Temperature Lower Atmosphere
Looks like the averages are about back to same flat line of the last 11-12 years.
If you explore that site a little further you'll find sea surface temperatures have really plummeted over the last six months. Given how warm the seas have been around Greenland, Hudson Bay, the rest of the world's seas must be really cold. Kind of freaky what ocean currents can do, isn't it.
No
Mr. Florida, did you ever watch the Smothers Brothers show. One time, Tom, the dumb one, explained how there must have been more people in the past than the present. He explained it something like this"
Well you had two parents, right?
And each of them had 2 parents. That makes 4. And each of them had 2 parents. That makes eight...etc. See, more people.
Now, suppose there was more ice area being created. The heat must be withdrawn from the water to create ice and we know that would be added to the atmosphere which would increase the heat in the atmosphere which would increase temperatures. Therefore the more ice area created the hotter the world would become, right?
Likewise the decrease in ice area withdraws heat from the atmosphere to melt the ice and that would, likewise cool the Earth. So, the melting Arctic ice and other glaciers are proof that the Earth is cooling. The global warming thing must be nonsense, right?
I didn't know that.
January 5, 2011
Repeat of a negative Arctic Oscillation leads to warm Arctic, low sea ice extent
Arctic sea ice extent for December 2010 was the lowest in the satellite record for that month. These low ice conditions are linked to a strong negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation, similar to the situation that dominated the winter of 2009-2010.
Overview of conditions
Arctic sea ice extent averaged over December 2010 was 12.00 million square kilometers (4.63 million square miles). This is the lowest December ice extent recorded in satellite observations from 1979 to 2010, 270,000 square kilometers (104,000 square miles) below the previous record low of 12.27 million square kilometers (4.74 million square miles) set in 2006 and 1.35 million square kilometers (521,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.
As in November, ice extent in December 2010 was unusually low in both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Arctic, but particularly in Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait (between southern Baffin Island and Labrador), and in Davis Strait (between Baffin Island and Greenland). Normally, these areas are completely frozen over by late November. In the middle of December, ice extent stopped increasing for about a week, an unusual but not unique event.Conditions in context
The low ice conditions in December occurred in conjunction with above-average air temperatures in regions where ice would normally expand at this time of year. Air temperatures over eastern Siberia were 6 to 10 degrees Celsius (11 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in December. Over the eastern Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Baffin Bay/Davis Strait and Hudson Bay, temperatures were at least 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than average. Southern Baffin Island had the largest anomalies, with temperatures over 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than normal. By sharp contrast, temperatures were lower than average (4 to 7 degrees Celsius, 7 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit) over the Alaska-Yukon border, north-central Eurasia, and Scandinavia.
The warm temperatures in December came from two sources: unfrozen areas of the ocean continued to release heat to the atmosphere, and an unusual circulation pattern brought warm air into the Arctic from the south. Although the air temperatures were still below freezing on average, the additional ocean and atmospheric heat slowed ice growth.December 2010 compared to past years
December 2010 had the lowest ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records. The linear rate of decline for the month is –3.5% per decade.
Negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation
As in December 2009, a strongly negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation dominated the middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2010, bringing higher-than-normal pressures to the Arctic region, with lower-than-normal pressures in middle latitudes. However, unlike 2009, when higher-than normal pressures centered near the central Arctic, in December 2010 higher pressures centered near Iceland and the eastern tip of the Aleutians in the Pacific, and yielded a different pattern of winds. As a result, different areas experienced warm anomalies in 2010, and a different pattern of ice extent emerged.
Our January 5, 2010 post discussed the connection between very warm temperatures over much of the high Arctic in December 2009 and a strongly negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation.
2010 year in review
Despite a late date of the maximum in winter sea ice extent, the minimum sea ice extent for September 2010 was third lowest in the 1979 to 2010 satellite record, above only 2007 (the record low) and 2008. The late summer of 2010 saw an open Northwest Passage: this year, the deep water channel (the northern route) from M'Clure Strait to Lancaster Sound was navigable. The Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast also became briefly navigable.
2010 started out with a highly negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation, an atmospheric pattern that in the past has favored the survival of old ice through the winter, and more ice at the end of this summer. But this tendency seems to be changing. A recent study led by Julienne Strove of NSIDC showed that while wind patterns linked with the strongly negative Arctic Oscillation winter of 2009-2010 transported much old ice into the southern Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, most of this ice later melted. It may be that with a warmer Arctic, old rules regarding links between the atmospheric pressure patterns and sea ice extent no longer hold. So far the winter of 2010-2011 has also had a strongly negative Arctic Oscillation, but it is not yet clear how this pattern will affect summer sea ice.
Link
:)
"Although the air temperatures were still below freezing on average, the additional ocean and atmospheric heat slowed ice growth."
See why we need Tunnels?
Big night tonight!! Go ducks!!
:)
Yeah, I heard he was fan of the Arizona Cardinals ,too. The whole team, their coaches and families must all be loons , too,no doubt.
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