These 5 charts show why the world is still failing on climate change – Vox:

There’s (rightly) a lot of talk these days about climate-change denialism on the right. It’s problematic that so many people are letting their ideology color their perceptions in a way that causes them to minimize the problem.

But it’s not just Fox News viewers who are letting what they want to believe get in the way of understanding the true nature of what’s happening. I wish more people working to address the issue of climate change were honest enough to pay attention to Roger Pielke, Jr.

“Oh, we don’t like what that man is saying. It is challenging to my worldview. Therefore I will denigrate and dismiss him.”

Sigh. Our public discourse around this issue is badly polluted by tribalistic cultural-identity concerns, and not just on one side.

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“Studying things from a psychological angle does help to make sense of climate-change scepticism. But the true source of the problem, research suggests, is not that people are irrational. Instead, it is that their reasoning powers have become disabled by a polluted science-communication environment.”

– Dan Kahan, Why we are poles apart on climate change

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dendroica:

A Few Winners, But Many More Losers With Climate Change in the Southwest

Dramatic distribution losses and a few major distribution gains are forecasted for southwestern bird and reptile species as the climate changes, according to just-published research by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of New Mexico, and Northern Arizona University.

Overall, the study forecasted species distribution losses – that is, where species are able to live – of nearly half for all but one of the 5 reptile species they examined, including for the iconic chuckwalla. The threatened Sonoran (Morafka’s) desert tortoise, however, is projected to experience little to no habitat losses from climate change.

Breeding bird ranges exhibited greater expansions and contractions than did reptile species. For example, black-throated sparrows and gray vireos are projected to experience major gains in breeding habitat, but pygmy nuthatches, sage thrashers and Williamson sapsuckers are forecasted to experience large losses in breeding habitat, in some cases by as much as 80 percent. Thus, these three species might be expected to experience large future population declines. The iconic pinyon jay is expected to experience from one-fourth to one-third loss in breeding habitat in the future, as its welfare is tied to declining pinyon pine habitat.

“Not surprisingly, whether a species is projected to be a winner or a loser depends primarily on its natural history and habitat needs and requirements,” said USGS scientist Charles van Riper III, the lead author on the study. “Land managers should be aware of these potential changes so that they can adjust their management practices accordingly.”

On birds:

Overall: Black-throated sparrow and gray vireo are projected to experience major gains in breeding habitat. In contrast, pygmy nuthatches, sage thrashers and Williamson sapsuckers are projected to experience large losses in breeding habitat. Thus, these three species might be expected to experience large future population declines. (Note: species are linked to their in-depth report summaries.)

• Black-throated sparrow: breeding range projected to increase by 34-47 percent between 2010 and 2099.
• Gray vireo: breeding range projected to increase from 58-71 percent between 2010 and 2099.
• Virginia’s warbler: breeding range projected to decrease slightly, by 1.5-7 percent between 2010 and 2099.
• Sage thrasher: breeding range projected to decrease by 78 percent between 2010 and 2099.
• Pinyon jay: breeding range projected to decrease by 25-31 percent between 2010 and 2099.
• Pygmy nuthatch: breeding range projected to decrease by 75-81 percent between 2010 and 2099
• Williamson’s sapsucker: breeding range projected to decrease by 73-78 percent between 2010-2099.

(Read more: USGS Release)

Image: Pygmy Nuthatch / National Park Service

Pygmy nuthatches are really neat birds. I hope they make it through the Anthropocene funnel. A world without them would be a poorer world.

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(From a comment on this.)

My own response has evolved. There’s the initial shock of learning how actually bad things are going to be, and it’s only human to react strongly and emotionally to that, especially as a parent.

But it’s important to realize, too, that life will go on. Many people’s grandkids who would otherwise have lived will probably either die or never be born because of climate change; many others will have lives that will be deeply unpleasant. But people will still be here. We’re a weedy species. Like cockroaches and starlings, we won’t vanish. An almost unthinkable number of other species probably will, but humans — at least some humans — will remain. They’ll still fall in love, share special moments, tell stories, laugh… Your grandkids probably have as good a shot at that as anyone’s. So there’s that.

Also, after the Sixth Great Extinction has run its course, a few million years from now, there will be a new flowering of species radiating their way into the vacant niches. And through all that, the silverfish probably won’t even notice, except for there having been a brief and unexplained hiccup of warmth and moisture and starchy book bindings, now passed.

For me it comes down to a choice between despair and hope. Tolkien wrote that “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” It haunted him, and he spent his life crafting a story to dramatize what he thought about how a person should respond to seeing things like that. Look at Denethor’s actions after he looks in the Palantir, versus Aragorn’s. Or look at Frodo and Sam, and their responses to Galadriel’s Mirror.

That Guardian piece I linked to isn’t giving you Lovelock’s views directly; like the Mirror of Galadriel, The Guardian is dangerous as a guide of deeds. We need to know what’s coming in order to prepare ourselves and to counter those who would mislead. But we also need to appreciate that if things are going downhill the way they appear to be, we should recognize and honor what we have today. I think that’s the point Lovelock was trying to make in that interview, though I’m not sure his interviewer really understood.

If a version of me had lived in the 1840s, and I could go back in time and talk to him, what would I tell him? Would I show him pictures of the carnage of the Civil War? Or tell him uplifting stories about the beginning of the end of slavery? Talk about the bombing of Hiroshima? Or about the landings on the Moon? What would I want him to know about the future? And if he knew what was coming, how would I want him to respond?

I think I’d want him to go bird-watching. I’d want him to walk through a forest listening for the calls of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. I’d want him to watch Carolina Parakeets at play, or stand beneath a flock of Passenger Pigeons so huge it blocked out the sun.

Everything dies. Individuals, societies, species: all of us are coming to an end. One day life itself will come to an end. It can be comforting to imagine otherwise, but that’s a fantasy.

Climate scientists and magazine writers (and programmers) aren’t necessarily the best people to advise you on how to process that knowledge. I think poets are a better source. So I re-read Tolkien. Also, thanks to despairoftranslators, I’ve been reading Owls and Other Fantasies by Mary Oliver. God, I love that book.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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Watch Bill Nye Explain Climate Change to GOP Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn | Mother Jones

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Lovelock: ‘Enjoy life while you can’:

James Lovelock is not a prophet, at least not to me, at least not in the sense some people use the word, because I don’t believe that sort of prophesying actually is a thing that exists in the world. But he is smart, and attentive, and has a demonstrated ability to set aside convention and expectation and see big, unacknowledged truths. So maybe that means he is a prophet, of sorts.

And I don’t usually link to or even read The Guardian, because along with a lot of good information they also publish a noticeable amount of stuff that while ideologically congenial is also untrue, and I have a low threshold for that, because once I’ve caught you lying to me in the name of your cause, even a cause I support, how can I trust anything else you say?

So: he’s not a prophet, and it’s in The Guardian. But that aside, I think this piece is worth reading.

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Carbon targets, carbon taxes, and the search for Archimedes’ lever:

There’s no perfect solution to the climate problem, no one policy that will move the world. It’s going to be a long, ugly slog. It’s healthier just to accept that.

David Roberts continues to make me sad that he’s about to take a year-long hiatus from the Internet.

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How to write about climate: Pull up a barstool:

David Roberts burnt himself out through too much Twitter, so he’s announced that he’s going to stop writing about climate change for a year.

This makes me sad, because David Roberts is not particularly replaceable. He is more or less unique among people who write about climate in being intelligent, articulate, concerned, and (here’s the key part) scrupulously honest.

There are plenty of people who are committed advocates talking about climate. But too many of them have fallen prey to making themselves propagandists, willing to mislead and cherry-pick in the name of making their case.

Roberts never did that.

In this piece he offers instructions on how to replicate him while he’s gone. I’m not confident anyone will actually be able to do that. But it’s a nice thing to hope for.

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The biggest oversight in Obama’€™s climate plan is a doozy:

It’s coal! Obama plans to regulate carbon emissions from coal plants, but he’s doing nothing to stop coal leasing on public lands or coal exports through the Northwest to China.

For the last few years David Roberts has been one of my favorite sources on climate change policy. In an information landscape that often is polluted by spin (and not only on one side), I find his commentary clear-eyed and worth paying attention to.

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It took him what felt to me like a long time to finally make this speech, but at least he finally made it.

Now the real work begins.

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“Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to look up individual studies of whether, say, global warming does in fact cause more hurricanes. The best we can do, most of the time, is heed the advice of those whose opinions we respect, be they better-informed friends, clueless-but-cocksure folks who seem credible because they share our general worldview, or actual experts.”

– Journalist Hillary Rosner, from Pregnant Pause, on how her pregnancy has helped her better understand why climate-change denialism is so common.

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“btw, if your goal is not simply to get people to open-mindedly consider evidence using their own powers of reason — if you just want to make them believe something, who cares how— you are not a science communicator; you are a propagandist”

– Dan Kahan, What is to be done?

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It’s really nice when you get an opportunity to stop, step back, take stock, and really admire the way satire can point out how easy it is to (mis/ab)use statistics: Voting Democrat Causes Cancer.

The real humor I find in the whole thing, is the way this is overtly presented as a direct corollary to claims by Democrats advocating Health Care reform, with out any apparent consideration that this is the sort of thing lots of different groups do to add legitimacy to their position(s).

Like Climate change deniers … just to pick an example off the top of my head.

David Roberts has some very insightful things to say about the next steps in the battle over climate change: Heresy of the day: More science is not the answer.

It pains many geeky progressives to realize it, but science is largely beside the point here. It informs the strategy, but it is not itself a strategy. The relevant realm is sociopolitical, and so the strategy must be values-based, rhetorically savvy, and emotionally resonant. Repeating the facts won’t help.

The actual detail of his argument is right on. It’s not about “raising awareness” about what science has discovered. People are “aware” already, to the extent they’re willing to be. They need to be engaged not with more science per se, but with more detail on just how they stand to be affected by climate change, and how they will benefit from taking action.