Looking for motivation
Why would a politician want to work on planned relocation?
When I can, I try to read the front section of the NYT from beginning to end.
I notice each time that there are no ads. It's clear it makes little business sense for the paper to be physically printed, but I am grateful for the curated, final collection of stories that make up the front section. Someday they'll begin printing only on Sunday, and I will mourn.
This morning I was absorbed by stories about the Israel-Hamas war (including three op-eds and an editorial on the subject), the idea of asking for forgiveness in Minnesota, and the background of Judge Tanya Chutkan. I paged through every section of the physical paper, in fact.
Not a single story about climate.
Anyone alive and aware right now recognizes that we're in the midst of several overlapping crises. Yes, we're seeing a ferociously speedy departure from the stable climate on which our civilization has depended for the last several thousand years, but what's happening on the Lebanon border?
What's the best way to live in this context? The only hint of an answer I have found for myself is to focus on whatever I can learn about the bundle of issues I'm working on now (today, climate adaptation in coastal cities) while contemplating and acknowledging the grief and horror of all the other situations. I don't always succeed. But I do know that rising sea levels remain important even when they drop out of the news.
So here I am, writing about climate again, forgive me.
I'm interested in motivating public sector leaders to begin planning intentionally to work with Congress and communities on relocating populations to safer places over time. That's a lot of abstract processes in one sentence, and all of them will require large-scale institutional and legal reforms. But the first step is motivation. Where will that motivation come from?
It may come from a series of coastal disasters happening within a short time, bringing home the visceral sense that extreme flooding events are right here, right now. It may come from a spray of coastal municipal defaults or bankruptcies, as cities are left with less revenue while still obligated to provide the same services. It may come from plain old moral horror, as existing leaders come to recognize that the safety of citizens is a basic requirement of governance.
Motivation does not come from scientific facts these days. If it did, what we learned this past week about Western Antarctica would have done the job.
Much of the uncertainty about when, exactly, the heat now baked into the climate system will cause debilitating sea level rise along the East Coast of the US stems from uncertainty about Western Antarctica. Scientists know that melting glaciers there might cause two or ten feet of sea level rise to show up on our shores very quickly, but they used to be pretty confident that this sort of event was unlikely to happen until toward the end of this century, or even beyond.
Now they're not so sure. Things may be moving much more quickly in Western Antarctica than scientists had thought.
Last week, a study in Science Advances ("Annual mass budget of Antarctic ice shelves from 1997 to 2021") found that key floating ice shelves effectively damming or blocking glaciers from flowing into the ocean had lost a tremendous amount of mass over the last couple of decades. In particular, scientists found the Thwaites ice sheet (protecting the Thwaites "Doomsday" Glacier) had lost 70 percent of its mass between 1997 and 2021. That's a lot; in fact, that adds up to 4.1 trillion tons of melt added to the Amundsen Sea.
Because the ice sheet is already floating on the ocean, having it melt doesn't add to sea level rise. All that additional fresh water does, though, make the water around Antarctica lighter (less dense and salty), which in turn weakens the giant conveyor belts of ocean circulation that keep water off the East Coast and moderate temperatures. But if the glacier melts, that's big for sea level rise. And this thinning trend is part of an overall phase change for Western Antarctica: the warmer water underneath Thwaites is having a bigger effect than scientists might have expected. The National Snow and Ice Center had this to say last week about the continent:
"There is growing evidence that the Antarctic sea ice system has entered a new regime, featuring a much stronger influence of warm ocean waters limiting ice growth.”
This is just another update, but what it demonstrates is that the changes are happening more quickly than scientists would have thought just a few years ago, and the outcomes for civilization are likely to hit more quickly (2050? 2070?) and be more severe.
Leadership is the necessary element at this point. All the legal reform notions and institutional ideas in the world won't make a difference unless leaders take them on board, talk about them, push for them, and own their political consequences.
It's a tall order. It requires looking beyond current news cycles. I'm sympathetic—that's not an easy task these days.
I agree with your sentiments but I think you misunderstand the motivations for change. It has never been science, for example, and rarely has it been about "doing the right thing".
Politics is about personal power and personal money for individual politicians. There is a logic to it; without personal power then they cannot change things, and without money they cannot survive in politics. Therefore the political causes they will support and expound will be those that give them votes and public support (or can be manipulated to do so) and those that pay them money; donations and sponsorships and perhaps back-handers, often including payments with political strings attached - most politicians end up surprisingly rich, after all!
Except for those reasons above, politicians work for themselves first and the people they are supposed to represent second.
That means they will only promote causes and policies that get them elected, and the public that vote for them are, on average, not very bright. The average IQ is 100 (by definition) so for everyone you know with an IQ of 130 there is an individual with an IQ of 70. And they probably have a job, perhaps a wife and kids. And a vote. And you and I and many people you know, grew up with, work with, talk to, are all living in a bubble of intelligence that a majority of others don't share.
Most people just want to live their lives with no trouble, go to work, get paid, pay the bills, have some fun, sleep soundly at night and not worry about things that don't seem to affect the important stuff (to them). And many of those people don't actually understand things like climate change anyway - here in Europe there is still a very common misconception that if the climate in the north became 3*C or 5*C
warmer, that would mean vineyards in England and Belgium and the beaches would be like the French Riviera - bring it on!
So when politicians (or indeed mainstream news channels) want to get serious about climate change, to tell people they should get scared, that it may ruin their lives and plans, then they really, really don't want to hear that. And they certainly will not vote for anyone or anything that makes their life harder or more expensive, and politicians that represent their interests (and their own interests) will stay well away from the whole subject.
So it is left to 'the markets' to deal with climate change issues. The current best example is from insurance companies that have long recognised the threats of climate change to the insurance business. Some of the best and most advanced analysis I've seen over the last two decades has come from the Lloyds of London insurance organisation in their reports for the insurance industry. So when insurers won't insure houses in flood risk areas, such as large parts of Florida now, that means buyers can't get mortgages and renters can't insure their belongings and the properties quietly become worthless. That will slowly reverse the recent surge in incomers into a vulnerable region, not because people are climate aware, but because the markets (insurance companies and banks) have acted on financial risks. Meanwhile, 'the people' are still stupid enough to want to move there!
There is, though, another factor that I think is important. Anyone that is following the climate science will quickly realise that the scale of change cannot be managed. It is simply not possible to shift people from areas at risk to areas at lower risk. You cannot evacuate Florida and put those people somewhere else; the Floridians wouldn't want to move and the people everywhere else wouldn't want them either! And you certainly can't evacuate Manhattan or London - such a move is beyond comprehension. Any government that tried to impose such a change would be thrown out or, in America, cause an uprising, probably armed and violent.
There is also a wider picture. In my single lifetime the world human population has grown from 2.4 billion to 8.2 billion, all on the basis of fossil fuels, and way beyond the capacity of the Earth to sustain without fossil fuels. There WILL be a depopulation, in ways difficult to watch, and I would say that has already started. I would say most governments know this and expect serious public issues, without starting more of their own. Already the problems of migration are worldwide, and climate migration is going to turbocharge that. The widespread shift to the Far Right (including Trump) is just one of the symptoms of fear, even for people that don 't understand the why's.
It is already too late to stop climate change. The trigger events, such as fast-increasing methane releases, carbon sinks becoming carbon producers, oceans heating, AMOC turning off, glaciers melting and long term sea level rises are ale already 'baked in', even if the climate models haven't caught up yet. The last time this planet had atmospheric carbon at these levels, before humans existed, the seas were 10 metres to 30 metres higher, so at the moment we are living in the time lag. If we stopped fossil fuels today, that sea level rise would still happen.
My own understanding of the future is based on Dr James Lovelock's scenarios of the Gaian planet's autonomous systems correcting the 'fever' given to it by the virus of humanity, and that correction will involve taking the human population back to sustainable levels and into balance with the rest of life on Earth. I would guess that would be around 2 billion people, and whatever technology we currently have will be pretty much gone in such a scenario. I would guess it'll become 'cargo cult' for the next religion. I take some comfort that it might happen that way, and also that it'll happen after I'm dead and so won't have to watch it happening! 🙂
The alternatives might be even worse.