Do we have a choice? is there still time? to change course, to find better ways? will we listen to the crashing waves? learn to ride them with the tide? stop trying to hold em back? trying to dominate the relentless ocean?

Can conservation, stewardship, reconciliation… work better in a fluid medium where one cannot draw lines on a map to keep nature bound and separate from us?

Questions I have aplenty… perhaps this film will offer some answers. Here’s a trailer for Ocean Frontiers: As I told a friend earlier today,  I am chuffed!

My latest commentary for KVPR‘s “The Moral Is” aired this week. You can listen to me reading this via the program archive. Or you can read it yourself right here in this slightly extended version, with links: Sunset over a warming northern ocean

As temperatures continue to soar during this long hot summer, the number of Americans willing to accept the reality of climate change also rose slightly. Yet there are many stoking “skepticism” of the scientific consensus that climate change is largely driven by human actions.

Must people experience heat personally to believe that the world is getting hotter? Will they swing the other way if we get a cold winter, likely because climate models indicate not uniform warming, but increases in extremes of weather? Call it global weirding instead of mere warming. The human mind has a tendency to extrapolate based on immediate experience, and is often unable to grasp events unfolding over an arc of time much longer than our lifespans. Yet grasp such trends we must if we are to survive as a species clinging to the thin living crust of this dynamic planet that has seen far worse cataclysms in the past and may do so again in the future, perhaps with our help.

We live in the Anthropocene, a new era in the Earth’s history where industrialized humans have become a true global geological force. Will we also now accept planetary stewardship, and begin to live in ways that minimize rather than exaggerate the fluctuations on this dynamic planet? The first step to recovery is acceptance of the problem, which in this case depends on understanding how our everyday short-term local actions add up to long-term planetary impacts.

Fortunately, we have invented a variety of methods and tools to help us overcome our sensory and cognitive limitations, and through science, develop a better understanding of long-term dynamics. Unfortunately, there are those who would prefer to keep this scientific knowledge at bay to further short-term profits. Two news stories from this long hot summer underscore the tension between these two driving forces in American public discourse.

Physicist Richard Muller of Berkeley, among the most prominent of climate-change skeptics, running the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study with funding from the Koch brothers (who have millions invested in maintaining short-term profits through persistent denial of long-term consequences), published a mea culpa in the New York Times when his own reanalysis of climate data led him to the same conclusions climatologists had reached over a decade ago: that ‘humans are almost entirely the cause’ of potentially catastrophic climate change! While this illustrates how science works, by rigorously testing hypotheses with data, it also shows the pitfalls of not trusting experts from the field who have spent years doing exactly that. Must we remain paralyzed in inaction, or worse, persist in our bad fossil-fuel burning habits for decades while professional skeptics funded by vested interests keep on challenging the experts’ consensus?

Meanwhile, Bill McKibben, that noted environmentalist Cassandra who has been beating his head for two decades against the walls of well-funded climate change denialism, raised a truly terrifying specter in Rolling Stone magazine based on new analyses of the mathematics of our dependence on fossil fuels. To sum up McKibben’s meticulously detailed argument (a must read even if—or because—it may have you curling up in a fetal position): while governments continue to fiddle on their promise made in Kyoto to keep global temperature rise below 2°C, which gives us room to add no more than 565 gigatons more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are in fact planning to add over 5 times that amount, 2795 gigatons! That last, truly scary number is from a new analysis accounting for all the fossil fuel reserves that are already factored into the business plans of the oil companies and national economic policies! In other words, we are already going ahead with plans to make climate change much much worse, even as denialist skepticism keeps concern about this looming catastrophe at the bottom of the American public’s priorities in this election season.

In this final stretch of the long Presidential election cycle, when everyone is hurling charges at each other about various “moral values”, where is the leadership on this deepest moral crisis confronting humanity: when will we truly become better stewards of our Earth?
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