A Change in the Wind

The Reporter: A Committed Observer

One of the puzzles the 21^st-century has put to journalism in general and reporting on the environment in particular is this: How does one who cares about the planet report on issues without becoming a shrill advocate, boring, or just plain repetitious?

The hopelessly muddied word "objectivity" is no help here. Objectively speaking we as a species are changing the planet hugely every single day of the year, but that is no more newsworthy on this particular day than the fact that airplanes landed safely."Fairness" as a concept isn't much better, because -- as many estimable reporters and editors have pointed out -- the concept of "fairness" led to countless stories in which the vast majority of scientists who believed in global warming were outweighed in the public mind by the handful that didn't. (That mistake is now known as "false balance.")

Most troubling of all, it's pretty clear from looking at website traffic that the environment is much less interesting to most people than celebrity, Hollywood, politics, pets, television, or even (God help us) Bratz. Statistically speaking, one cannot really justify giving a lot of coverage to the planet – even though we of course depend on its health for our very survival.

An editor named Gil Thalen, formerly of the Tampa Tribune, as quoted in the irreplaceable The Elements of Journalism, has an answer to this question.

Thelen has described the journalist's role as that of a "committed observer."

What he means by that, Thelen explains, is that the journalist is not removed from the community. Journalists are "interdependent" with the needs of their fellow citizens. If there is a key issue in town that needs resolution and is being explored by local institutions, "we have a commitment to reporting on this process over the long term, as an observer." It would be irresponsible to cover the issue haphazardly – or ignore it because it seems dul.. The journalist should be committed to helping to resolve the issue, Thelen argues, and the way he or she does that is by playing the role of the responsible reporter.

Thelen's ideas are echoed in the words of other journalists [Ed. Note – who were interviewed by the authors] as well, who talk about the press creating a common language, a common understanding, or being part of the glue that defines and holds a community together.

This is the proper understanding that many journalists have about the role of Engaged Independence.

Not sure if this phrase is sexy enough to stick in the memory, but in my life the concept makes sense. Reporters are committed to the nation – and the truth. Not an easy role to play, but a crucial one. And as The Los Angeles Times continues to commit suicide – firing another 300, cutting another section, and bleeding out all over the public square – understanding these principles becomes more important than ever, because finding a business model to replace the newspaper ain't gonna be easy.

Irreversible Climate Change and Drought in the Southwest

The big news in climate this week was the publication of a study by Susan Solomon, who testified before Congress on climate change about this time last year, on irreversible climate change. Even if we ceased emitting carbon dioxide today, Solomon and her coauthors show that we will be dealing with a thousand years of warming. And, they warn, the decline in heating due to a diminishing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be balanced out by the uptake of heat through the ocean, a slow process of mixing. (That's if we stopped emitting, which of course we won't.)

Solomon stressed in numerous interviews that this doesn't mean we should give up. She told NPR:

"I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it," she says. "Because committing to something that you can't back out of seems to me like a step that you'd want to take even more carefully than something you thought you could reverse."

But this post focuses on another finding: the drought in the Southwest associated with this warming, which they correlate on a degree basis. They write:

...changes [in precipitation in] the southwestern North America...would be [about 10%] less for 2 degrees C of global mean warming. For comparison the American "dust bowl" was associated with averaged rainfall decreases of a similar decline over 10-20 years, similar to major droughts in Europe and Western Australian in the l940's and l950's.

Note that -- probably by coincidence -- the pattern the models show below fits our rainfall of the last couple of years quite well. Decent precip in November, falling off over the rest of the water year. 

Plus, a bonus graph...Solomon and her team correlate drought and CO2 concentrations:

Hmmmm...are we ready for the New Dust Bowl?

Chekhov Would Have Loved This Line

From the irreplaceable Overheard in New York:

Barista walking in, to no one in particular:

"Unfortunately, I'm here."

--Starbucks, Brighton Beach

House Republicans Vote Unanimously Against Obama Stimulus: Risky?

Using a poker metaphor, publius argues that the House GOP today took a big chance by voting unanimously against Obama and the Democrats economic stimulus plan:

That’s...what the House Republicans did today when they voted unanimously against the stimulus – they went all in before the flop.  And now they too are completely at the mercy of the flop -- and fate -- with a less than stellar hand.

Frankly, I don’t think it was a completely irrational move considering the circumstances.  The House Republicans’ long-term prospects ain’t good – they’re locked into a declining, southern-centric demographic base getting smaller by the year.  Plus, it's not like voting for the stimulus will reverse these trends.  If it works, Obama will probably get credit regardless of what the GOP does.  Accordingly, the GOP decided to do something more drastic, and then hope for the best by hoping for the worst.

And it might work.  The flop might save them.  Maybe the economy will get even worse in 2 or 4 years.  If so, the Republicans can stand up and say, “if only we had cut more taxes, if only we hadn’t wasted all this money…”  And who knows?  If the economy continues to tank, that might get some traction.

But make no mistake – it’s an extremely risky strategy.  The GOP locked themselves into a game of Russian roullette today.  If the economy gets better, or if the GOP somehow manages to block it in the Senate, then the Republicans’ unanimous opposition could send the party into the wilderness for a long time to come.

He then compares this vote to the Republican opposition to the New Deal, which unquestionably did send the GOP into the wilderness when it succeeded. But though I almost always agree with this writer, in this case the comparison that comes to my mind is the Clinton economic plan. That too passed the House without a single Republican vote, helped revive the economy, but didn't hurt the GOP one bit. In fact they came charging back to take over the House two years later.

So -- I'm not sure they've risked all that much. Sorry to say.

Maybe It's Not Insomnia -- Just Your Sleeping Pattern

For those who have trouble sleeping, Newsweek has a genuinely mind-opening piece on insomnia: Five Myths about Insomnia. Myth Number One:

1. Humans Need Eight Hours Sleep a Night: There are many ways of sleeping and few cultures sleep in eight-hour consolidated blocks like we do. In places like Bali and New Guinea, people tend to slip in and out of sleep as they need it, napping more during the day, and getting up more at night. Until the industrial era, many Western Europeans divided the night into "the first sleep" and the "second sleep." They'd go to bed soon after dark, sleep for four hours then wake for an hour or two during which they'd write, pray, smoke, reflect on dreams they'd had, have sex or even visit neighbors. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest that this sleep pattern may be the one most in tune with our inherent circadian rhythms.

Damn, that makes sense. The link takes you to a study in Psychiatric Times:

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, which is about night in preindustrial times, A. Roger Ekirch, professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Roanoke, uncovered the fact that in preindustrial times before artificial illumination was widely used, persons typically slept in 2 shifts.1 They called the shifts "first sleep" and "second sleep." In those times, sleep was more closely associated with sunset and sunrise than it is now. Within an hour or so after sunset, persons retired to bed, slept for about 4 hours and then woke up. They remained awake for a few hours and then returned to sleep at about 2 am for another 4 hours or so...

Although diaries, court documents, and literature of the time indicate that this sleep pattern was widely acknowledged, this bit of history had been lost until the debut of Ekirch's work. The pattern of sleep he describes as the norm in days past is no longer the norm in developed countries where artificial light extends the day. Anthropologists, however, have observed a similar pattern of segmented sleep among some contemporary African tribes,1 such as the Tiv of central Nigeria, who even refer to their customary sleep patterns as first sleep and second sleep, just as the early Europeans did.

Maybe what we need is more time for sleep and fewer pills...

Lovelock Predicts Global Warming Will Kill Billions

Seasoned journalists tend to look down on the Q & A format as useful only for those who can't really write, but when it comes to truly original thinkers -- such as James Lovelock, famous for the Gaia idea that the earth is a self-regulating system -- I dare disagree.

It's difficult to hear "the voice" of genuine originals in brief snippets of quotes; frankly, they deserve a chance to speak at greater length. A good example is this alarming interview by New Scientist with Lovelock, in which he casually forecasts the death of billions of people this century, but at the same time offers an alternative to disaster.

Do you think we will survive?

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

Best of all, Lovelock as briefly as possible explains the "deep time" reason why so many scientists are so worried:

How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?

We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO₂ was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction.

I commend New Scientist for their open-mindedness, but must chide them for failing to distinguish (as Lovelock does) between the end of life as we know it (our civilization) and the end of our species ("mankind").

"One Last Chance to Save Mankind" was their headline, but as Andy Revkin and countless other scientific experts have said, the existence of our species is not threatened. Yet somehow, despite The Road and countless other harrowing stories of the apocalypse, the other obvious possibility -- the collapse of our way of life -- seems impossible for most non-scientists to believe. The New Yorker, for instance, last week sneered at "the doom boom" (not on-line).

Jeez, I'd think after seeing our economy melt down in a matter of months to a fraction of its former self, the possibility of disaster might become more realistic. But to TNY, evidently not... 

Cadillac Records: Why Release It in Theaters, If You Shoot It for TV?

The story of Muddy Waters was brought to the big screen this past fall in Cadillac Records. It's a great story, but not -- unfortunately -- a great movie, despite some spectacular performances. Jeffrey Wright, quiet but fierce, could not be better as Muddy Waters. When he goes electric, you feel it in your bones. Mos Def completely disappears into the role of Chuck Berry: he not only inhabits the character, he looks like the man. And every time Beyonce sings, everything stops, except the chills...

...but although the movie answers a lot of questions you may have had about the electric blues and early rock and roll (such as -- why did Chuck Berry cross over, but not Muddy Waters?) as a story it gets lost. Visually it's held together mostly by the fact that seemingly all the characters smoke like fiends.

Fundamentally, it's not really clear whose movie this is. It's about Muddy Waters, mostly, but also about Leonard Chess, and Little Walter, as told by Willie Dixon. Not to mention a quasi-romance that develops between Chess (played by Adrien Brody) and Etta James (played by the aforementioned Beyonce).

Leonard Chess's son complained on NPR that this romance lacked reality, but in movie terms, the bigger problem is it lacks feeling. The writer/director gives us enormous close-ups of the two struggling not to kiss, bigger than you see on the small screen in soap operas, but their scenes go nowhere, and it's almost embarrassing to see these actors who can't figure out what to say making eyes at each other. (The contrast to a show such as Mad Men, with articulate characters shot with a Hawksian reserve, is striking -- Mad Men would look fine on the big screen, even though it's intended for home viewing!)

But the strangest thing of all is what happens when Beyonce sings. Just as in Dreamgirls, when she takes the mic in hand, the rest of the movie falls away...to forgetability. My god, can this girl sing!

Just look...and listen:

To Go Green, We Must Hope (Not Just Fear)

In a post called Obama and the Vision Thing, green business expert Joel Makower makes a great point:

For decades, environmental leaders in business, activism, and government have expressed frustration that the public isn't behind them, except in disappointingly small numbers, despite a litany of increasingly dire environmental problems. These same leaders express bewilderment at the painfully slow uptake of green products and personal habits, from buying organics to recycling to energy conservation. Even when people understand the issues and consequences of everyday actions — the direct relationship between inefficient light bulbs and the threat of global climate change, for example — they usually fail to act.

We've long known that fear is a limited motivator. Think of how persuasion has changed. A generation ago, we were told by advertisers to worry about ring around the collar, iron-poor blood, waxy yellow buildup, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Madison Avenue believed that driving fear into the hearts and minds of the public would unleash a wealth of sales and profits. No longer. Today, profits come from imbuing visions of sexual appeal, personal freedom, and a life without worry. Those positive images are the ones that inspire people to take action and, for better or worse, make choices in the marketplace.

What is the positive image of "green" that will inspire a nation — indeed, the world — to transform itself in the way that Obama and others are hoping: that create jobs, build economic opportunities, engender energy independence, attack climate change, improve public health, reduce environmental degradation, and ensure national security?

As it happens, I recently interviewed Andy Lipkis for Grist, and he brought up some of the happy consequences of change...and how kids can make it possible with relative ease. 

We were hired to help design and launch the Los Angeles recycling program by the city, but I don't think the authorities thought it would work. They planned to build a train line to take it to the desert.

It's part of the same myth that says that people won't conserve, that they won't change. Many changes are possible without diminishing our quality of life at all. We've seen that with recycling, and we could do the same thing with transportation. Would it be fun to have family outings on the bus once a week? If you want to implement a change, talk to kids. Kids can do things quickly, that don't require a lot of capital. Politicians cannot mandate lifestyle changes. But kids can help attract people to the idea of change rapidly and positively without a great upheaval.

But the fact that some activists can see the attractive aspects of change doesn't mean Makower is wrong. Far from it. We must see -- and show -- the good in change, and not just fear the consequences of inaction, even if, as our new Energy Secretary said this week, "We are on a path that scares me."

The Beta on Downtown Phoenix

While visiting Phoenix recently, learned a useful new phrase -- "the beta." Learned it from the proprietor at Conspire, a very cool coffeeshop/arthouse/neighborhood collective said to have the best coffee in town.

Conspire was once an ordinary house, but has become a 21st-century hang-out., The Americano-style coffee is absolutely superb, perhaps the best I've ever had, and the chatter is spiky and upbeat.

I told the bright-eyed proprietor that his place was changing my opinion of Phoenix, which I imagined (based on the drive in to town) as "this monster city where everyone drove an Escalade."

A cruel over-generalization, obviously, but he took it in stride, admitted there was some truth to it, but said that his work/live neighborhood of galleries, restaurants, and such was different, and offered me "the beta" on where to go in what is known as the "Artisan Village."

He mentioned a cool house-turned-bar across the street, called The Lost Leaf. Tried out The Lost Leaf that night after a movie, and found it delightful -- it's for twentysomethings, mostly, so I'm too old to stay long, but if you're of that age and looking for a place to hang out, have some wine or beer, and flirt -- go.

Also worth checking out is a little restaurant nearby called The Nile Cafe, where proprietor David, who is as young and friendly as seemingly everyone else in the Roosevelt Row area, serves delicious and reasonably priced breakfast, lunch, and dinners in a "Mediterranean" style, meaning falafel, gyro, soups, Greek salads, and more. The lemon chicken soup is especially good. 

Being a poverty-stricken free-lance journalist, stayed while at the convention at the Phoenix Hostel, which is not listed in the phone book, but appropriately is readily available through the intertubes, costs about $20 a night, and is perfectly decent, if unspectacular. Given that most hotels these days seem to be run by surly Dementors, and offer rooms so reeking of stale cigarettes that even former smokers such as yours truly are repulsed, an ordinary house in which one shares a room with other itinerant travelers is actually a more restful experience.

So there's "the beta" on downtown Phoenix. I figured the term must be a computer-related, but it actually comes from the world of climbing, as in "Hey Jack, give me the beta on those moves over the roof."

Here's a picture of the back of the hostel, behind the men's dorm. As owner/operator "Sue City" said: "It's not so bad":

Barack, Your Climate Rhetoric Needs Work

I can't claim to be fully objective when it comes to Barack Obama, who is one of the best speakers I've ever heard, perhaps the best. But perhaps my fandom will make the following point a little sharper.

Mr. President, when you speak about the climate, you really haven't found your way. When you speak of terrorism, and the "false choice" between security and civil liberties, we thrill to your idealism. When you speak of the hard times we face, and challenges we must meet, we admire your sobriety, and your insistence that we are all in this together; red states, blue states, rich, poor, white, black, native and immigrant. When you allude to the criticism you often hear from your beautiful and accomplished wife, we understand your humility.

But when you speak of the climate, you haven't found an effective voice.

On June 3rd, in a speech marking your victory in the Democratic primaries, you said that "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." 

The phrasing was widely mocked on the Right, and with justification. It over-reached and over-promised. We can hope that an Obama administration will slow the inexorable rise of greenhouse gas emissions, and that such will mark the high-water mark for sea level rise, but the numbers say no.

In your Inaugural address, you declared that "With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet."

This somewhat less grandiose statement seemed to go over a little better, but it's a poorly mixed metaphor -- how does one roll back a ghost? And if climate change is a ghost, is it really necessary? 

Mr. President, this is not to imply that you don't know the subject. Your answers to questions on the campaign trail show that indeed you understand.

"There's no reason we can't do the same thing on climate change that we did on acid rain," you said in New Hampshire. "You remember everybody said it couldn't be done, it's too expensive, it's going to cost too much? But year after year we reduced those pollutants, and you don't hear much about acid rain any more. Because when we decide to tackle a problem, it gets solved. But we've got to make a decision collectively. As a people." 

This is the crux of the matter: our willingness to act, or, in Al Gore's phrase, our ability to find the political will. And, to be fair, some climate advocates admired the boldness of the inaugural address.

I disagree. As long as the climate issue is made part of the energy issue, it will be enslaved to the rise and fall in energy prices. Nothing will be done when gas prices are perceived to be too high, as we saw last summer, and the issue will be ignored when prices are low, as we see now. Given the division on the issue among the public, may I suggest, Mr. President, that you will need to find a better metaphor with which to inspire that political will on climate, because what you have said so far just isn't working.