David-Wallace Wells & Daniel Swain on the Return of the "Urban Firestorm:" Some Reflections

 

30 December 2021: the Marshall fire in Boulder County, Colorado

I've been paying attention to climate change since around 1990, and it's been foremost on my radar for about 20 years. And, as with many, I suppose I have a bit of burnout from seeing the rock move only inches when we need to have moved it miles. But this event really renewed my vigor. It really sobered me up--and I'm already on the wagon. This article by David Wallace-Wells (author of Uninhabitable Earth), like his book, made me realize how vulnerable we all are. The article is more of an interview than a report. Wallace-Wells has an extended conversation with University of Colorado (Boulder) climate scientist Daniel Swain. 

The truly frightening thing about this fire was that it was not a "forest fire"--it originated on the plains, in the grasslands with only limited woodlands in the vicinity--and it quickly became an "urban firestorm."* Most of us have read about great fires that destroyed whole cities: London, Chicago, and San Francisco pop to mind. But that was then. In the twentieth century, these fires were unknown except for the intentional fire-bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and Hamburg, among others. Since 1945 we haven't seen these intentional fires in urban areas, and our ability to prevent and control fires has prevented fires from devouring whole city blocks and killing hundreds and thousands of people. But as the events in Boulder county show, the urban firestorm may be back--or its suburban off-spring is now emerging. 

So just another climate change-related risk? Not if you live in the American West, or perhaps, if things continue, in other parts of the world, too. And if you live in Colorado Springs, as I do, you read this article and learn that the circumstances in Boulder appear very (very) little different than here in Colorado Springs. In mid-December, Colorado Springs (and all the way into Iowa) suffered a windstorm that downed trees and power lines and blew over semis. That storm and left us without power for about two and one-half days. Wind gusts of up to 100 mph were recorded. We, too, are on prairie with its dry grasses and close to the foothills of the Rockies and the forests that surround Pikes Peak. And we, too, have suffered from the same drought that Swain and Wallace-Wells describe in their interview. When I reflect back on our storm and the inconvenience that we suffered (we stayed a couple of nights with our daughter and son-in-law), it strikes me that we were lucky not to have also experienced out-of-control fires as well. 

Now for the bad news: I don't believe that there's a safe place. The effects of "climate enabled, weather-driven" disasters will only increase: droughts, fires, windstorms and derechos, tornadoes, hurricanes, extremes of heat and cold, and so on. Of course, you may say that we've always had to deal with these events, but we're not talking (at least at this point) about unique events. We're dealing with these familiar events that have grown in frequency and magnitude to the point where we're talking about "urban firestorms" once again; where we're setting meteorological and climate records constantly, and where insurance pay-outs for such disasters hit new highs on a regular basis (for those in who can obtain and afford insurance). 

And what will we do about this? 

*I suppose that given the locale, the authors might have termed the event a "suburban firestorm," which, given the reduced density of suburban homes & businesses (and frequency of great big parking lots) should make the prospect all the more frightening. 

Thoughts 23 Dec. 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

In 1965, Adlai Stevenson managed to give a more poetic treatment, in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

If the transhumanist [e.g., Ray Kurzweil] represent one extreme in the diversity of evolutionary visions in this book—the transcend-at-all-costs, techno-positive, biology-is-for-wimps, let’s-engineer-the-universe sense of optimism—then [Thomas] Berry represents perhaps the other side of the picture, a corrective argument for a radically biocentric approach to the future, a deconstruction of human arrogance, and a deeper embrace of our immanent spiritual connection with the natural world.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

In the last few years, the conventional wisdom has emerged that eating animal products results in a greater contribution to greenhouse warming of the planet than does eating plants. Because we worry with good reason that global warming is a major threat to planetary health and humanity’s future, we believe we should do whatever we can personally to mitigate it. This has led newspapers to publish analyses of “how to shop, cook and eat in a warming world,” as The New York Times did in April 2019, and to suggest that the fewer animal products we consume (and certainly the less beef, lamb, and dairy, as these seemingly have the greatest climate footprints), the healthier the planet will be.

This may indeed be true. While acknowledging that livestock can be raised in ways that are relatively climate friendly and much of it is (in the United States, for instance, more, say, than in Brazil), the implication is that the most climate-friendly eating pattern is one that omits these foods—a vegan diet—and that that’s how we should eat. For those who don’t think they can become a vegan, the Times suggests, then “another approach would be to simply eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains.”

The problem, of course, is that this thinking once again assumes that the conventional healthy diet—or even an unconventional and arguably unnatural diet, per Geoffrey Rose’s thinking, like the vegan diet—is indeed healthy for all of us. It builds on a foundation of the bad science in nutrition research of the past fifty years, and it shows little concern for the absence of clinical trials that might actually test it. It’s also the lean person’s perspective. If those of us who are predisposed to be insulin resistant, obese, and/or diabetic in the modern food environment get fat or stay fat eating beans, legumes, and grains, we have a conflict that must be resolved.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

Love and Saint Augustine

Hannah Arendt, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott (Editor), Judith Chelius Stark (Editor)

“It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy (beatum esse velle), our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.”

Thoughts 11 Dec. 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more.

Think of the of how this is playing out.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

As a child, Keynes celebrated the British Empire as a humaynitarian, democratic force in world affairs. When the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference taught him an uglier truth, he began an intellectual project to create a new global order that would fulfill the ideals of his youth, hoping to transform an international system founded on predation into a scheme of justice, stability, and aesthetic brilliance—without resorting to war. If nineteenth-century empire couldn’t do it, Keynes would devise a system that would.

Can Keynes's dream be realized in light of what Wallace-Wells argues in the preceding paragraph? I doubt it. Cf. William Ophuls.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.

Consider Arendt's contention in light of what Wallace-Wells said & Carter on Keynes above. This bodes trouble ahead.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

While there are many examples of the kind of creative leaps [Howard] Bloom described, consciousness certainly qualifies as Exhibit A on the how-the-heck-did-evolution-come-up-with-that? list. You don’t have to spend too much time at conferences where people are trying to explain human consciousness before you understand the appeal of the “God created it” point of view.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The reality is that science does not yield one simple answer, especially not with a new phenomenon like the coronavirus.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Factory farms are also ground zero for new, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as animals are bombarded with antibiotics that kill most bacteria but leave those that survive highly potent. Johns Hopkins professor Robert Lawrence calls antibiotic-resistant bacteria “the biggest human health risk of factory farms.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Nixon campaigned from the right but governed (with a Democratic Congress) from the center. His administration brought in affirmative action in federal hiring, big increases in spending and borrowing, wage and price controls, a dollar devaluation, détente with Soviet Union, and the opening of China, as well as disengagement from Vietnam, however grudging and brutal.

Thoughts 28 Nov 2021

Feel like you're sleeping too soundly, too comfortably with too many sweet dreams? Then read this book. 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

When it comes to global warming, the models are just as good, but the key input is a mystery: What will we do? The lessons there are unfortunately bleak. Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

All media present an abstract and selective version of reality, but compared to print television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. . . . [At best], because it portrays the world in ever small “bites” of sound and image, television creates what is tantamount to a cartoon of reality.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[C]rowds are moved by simple ideas, striking images, and repeated slogans that drive out deeper thought. To make matters worse, the anonymity of crowds induces individuals to behave viscerally, discarding both prudence and morality. In addition, because crowds are moved by images that are not logically connected or rooted in fact, members of crowds have a hard time distinguishing between reality and illusion. Thus, said Le Bon, crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[I]t’s life’s metaphysical edges that really intrigue me, like those between what we know, more or less, and what we don’t really know at all; between the past, present, and future; between events inside our minds and outside; and between the impossible and the inevitable.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.”

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

Although the United States provided the globe’s only major example of a liberal democracy successfully experimenting and resisting radical tyranny, it did not—indeed, could not—remain unaffected by its associations with totalitarian governments or domestic racism.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

It is only when a man’s historical consciousness has reached a certain point of maturity that he realizes how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought. When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member. This, of course, is already an historical inquiry. But various prejudices current at various times which I will not here enumerate have tended to deceive such inquirers into thinking that the conclusions they have reached will hold good far beyond the limits of that group and that time. They may even imagine that an absolute presupposition discovered within these limits can be more or less safely ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.

The Culture Code

Clotaire Rapaille

Ask most people why they work and they’re likely to answer “To make money.” The Culture Code shows us that this isn’t actually true, but there is a very strong connection between work and money in this culture.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

Because of the power and prestige that Oxford and Cambridge had down through the centuries (graduates were given, in effect, two votes in national elections until 1935), a large portion of prominent politicians, scholars, and leaders of society up till recent times had undergone three years of this weekly ritual: writing essays that they had to read aloud and that were evaluated entirely on the basis of hearing. I think this may explain something I’ve noticed till recently about English scholarly and political writing: it seems more accessible, spoken, and free of jargon than the same genres in German and U.S. academic writing.

David Wallace-Wells in Air Pollution & Climate Change

 Reading David Wallace-Wells seems always to be a downer. But that's because he's a thorough, detailed reporter of the awful truth. In this article, he informs us about air pollution, which is skimming away (and in some instances, ripping away) years of life and well-being from all of us. Most of the air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels and increasingly from burning forests. It's horrible in India and China (as I can personally attest); but only bad here in the U.S. and Europe. So "bad" is good enough for Americans? But then when it comes to our habits of consumption, as a people, we're often little better than a collection of addicts.

Here's a sample of what Wallace-Wells writes:

Perhaps, like me, you have spent the last five years in a state of panic about climate change. Perhaps it has inflamed your politics, and your sense of self. It should. The world is already warmer than it has ever been in the history of human civilisation. We have already exceeded the narrow temperature window which gave rise to everything we know as agriculture and society and politics and culture. The last time there was as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is today, temperatures weren’t 1.2°C warmer than the pre-industrial base level, as they are now, but about 3°C, with forests growing in the Antarctic and sea levels twenty metres higher.

The climate is changing ten times faster than ever before in a planetary history that includes mass extinctions which wiped out more than 90 per cent of life on Earth. Half of that damage has been done in the last 25 years, since the publication of Al Gore’s first book on global warming and the formation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – in other words, with the full knowledge of the scientific community and the effective consent of global political leaders. A quarter of the change has taken place since Barack Obama was elected president, having hubristically proclaimed that ‘this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.’ Just a few years later, he bragged to an audience in Texas that ‘suddenly, America is the biggest oil producer. That was me, people.’"

And you thought climate change was our only & biggest threat.

Of course, we could get two birds with one stone by moving quickly away from fossil fuels. But do we have the wisdom & foresight to do so?

LRB.CO.UK

David Wallace-Wells · Ten Million a Year: Dying to Breathe · LRB 2 December 2021

Wherever you look, the earth is in flames. The residue is carbon monoxide

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 4 September 2021

2018 publication more important than ever

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

[78.] Judaeo-Christian thought demythologized nature. While continuing to admire its grandeur and immensity, it no longer saw nature as divine. In doing so, it emphasizes all the more our human responsibility for nature. This rediscovery of nature can never be at the cost of the freedom and responsibility of human beings who, as part of the world, have the duty to cultivate their abilities in order to protect it and develop its potential. If we acknowledge the value and the fragility of nature and, at the same time, our God-given abilities, we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress. A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power.

79. In this universe, shaped by open and intercommunicating systems, we can discern countless forms of relationship and participation. This leads us to think of the whole as open to God’s transcendence, within which it develops. Faith allows us to interpret the meaning and the mysterious beauty of what is unfolding. We are free to apply our intelligence towards things evolving positively, or towards adding new ills, new causes of suffering and real setbacks. This is what makes for the excitement and drama of human history, in which freedom, growth, salvation and love can blossom, or lead towards decadence and mutual destruction. The work of the Church seeks not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for nature, but at the same time “she must above all protect mankind from self-destruction.”

Pope Francis. Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality (pp. 49-50). Melville House. Kindle Edition. 

Now from William Patrick Ophuls Requiem for Modern Politics by William Ophuls

Quotes from Ophuls, Pt. 2

Despotism may govern without faith, liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral ties not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with the people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the deity?

Alexi de Tocqueville, p. 29

As much biblical prophet as political philosopher, brokes decisively with Hobbes and the Enlightenment mainstream by brining religion back into politics. The Marxist sovereign has the duty to . . . end the class domination and social oppression that has marred all previous history. When this overweaning objective is joined to the general enlightenment drive for social perfection, the result is an ideological crusade for an earthly paradise – in effect, a secular religion. By resurrecting the eschatological element that Hobbbes had tried to exclude from politics, Marx unleased a new era of quasireligous warfare, both withing and between states. . . . As a political doctrine, Marxism therefore combines the autoritariansim of Hobbes with the very worst aspect of premodern politics: the religious element that Hobbes tried so hard to get rid of. p. 42

Other voices: 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Our leaders’ apparent failure, though, has less to do with gross character flaws and more to do with the ever greater empowerment of social groups and the generally rising complexity of our world.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Spiro Agnew’s career has about it a somnambulant surefootedness, an inevitability of advance, that reminds one of Mencken’s Coolidge, of the juggernaut of snooze: “There were massive evidences of celestial intervention at every step of Coolidge’s career, and he went through life clothed in immunities that defied and made a mock of all the accepted laws of nature.” . . . . It was said that Nixon regretted his choice [of Agnew], his deal with [Strom] Thurmond. But Agnew was a guided missile, swung into place, aimed, activated, launched with the minute calculation that marks Nixon. Once the missile was fired, the less attention it drew to itself the better—like a torpedo churning quietly toward its goal. Agnew has a neckless, lidded flow to him, with wraparound hair, a tubular perfection to his suits or golf outfits, quiet burbling oratory. Subaquatic. He was almost out of sight by campaign’s end; but a good sonar system could hear him burrowing ahead, on course.

Kinds of Power

James Hillman

Economics is our contemporary theology, regardless of how we spend Sunday. Economics is the only effective syncretistic cult remaining in the world today, our world’s only ecumenical faith. It provides the daily ritual, uniting Christian, Hindu, Mormon, atheist, Buddhist, Sikh, Adventist, animist, evangelist, Muslim, Jew, fundamentalist and New-Ager in the common temple, admitting all alike, from which the money changers have not been thrown out, the Swiss bank.