What ARE the Odds?

WARNING: Book spoiler alert
I have to admit that I am a fairly pessimistic person. Not necessarily a "glass half empty" person, rather an expect the worst type of person. And I will admit that this class on climate change has not helped this aspect of my personality. As I have become more aware of the state of our climate and the vulnerable position that it is in, I have also become increasingly negative about the eventual outcome of it as well. I picture a dystopian world, something like the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". As Professor Allen put it, a sort of climate change apocalypse. But I have always wondered what is the possibility that we will be affected by these types of disasters due to climate change? (I found a study done that judges the accuracy and actual possibility of  "The Day After Tomorrow" of actually occurring introduced in Science Daily).

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich is only fueling my curiosity about the actual statistical probability that we will encounter the events that have been predicted by climate scientists. The main character, Mitchell, is some type of mathematical genius, or just greatly obsessed with the future and crazy events that could occur. He preforms these insane calculations of the probability that worst-case scenarios will actually occur. The thing that bothers me about Mitchell's situation is that he is hired by a big name company trying to save their asses and assets if a scenario like Mitchell predicts actually does occur. They aren't worried about their employee's and the safety of them, rather they are worried about the financial aspect of big disasters. This reminds me of certain companies trying to escape responsibilities and problems that they have created nowadays in order to stay rich (cigarette companies, oil companies, etc.). They don't care about the affect that their actions-- or inaction in this case-- have on others.

From what I assume. these crazy disasters are becoming very common in the future world that Mitchell lives in. More earthquakes and mega-storms, more damage and assets to be liable for. And the scary thing is, I feel like this future is not so far fetched. While Odds Against Tomorrow is a fiction novel, it has some very real feeling to it. This may be something that we see in 40 or 50 years, 60 if we're lucky. Granted, the novel has not come out and said that the catastrophic events that Mitchell is calculating for are directly caused by climate change, but I don't doubt it. The world that Mitchell lives in could very well be our own.

Edited to Add:
As the novel progresses, the capitalization of disasters grows and becomes something that all companies need, alongside their insurance plans and 401K payouts. FutureWorld is the future of business. Mitchell warns his clients of the imminent disasters that could strike at any moment and crush their empires and advises how to protect themselves against anything that has a minuscule chance of happening. That is, until something actually does. Hurricane Patricia (which closely resembles Hurricane Sandy that hit NYC in 2012) advances on New York City. After some research I discovered that Nathaniel Rich had been working on Odds Against Tomorrow for 5 years PRIOR to Hurricane Sandy. He actually had to go back through the book as it was being prepared to be published and edit details about Sandy into it. The rains are welcomed at first by the drought-ridden city, that is until they become stronger and don't stop. Mitchell becomes trapped in the city by one of his own disaster scenarios.

I will ruin a little of the book by saying that Mitchell and his co-worker Jane do escape the city (by a twenty thousand dollar art piece that Mitchell purchases on a whim, nonetheless). Mitchell and Jane  escape the effects of the storm, but others are not so lucky. I'm not just talking about the 15 feet of water that turned the city into modern day Venice and littered the city with floating corpses and "floatsams". I'm also talking about the monsters that the people of the city and surrounding areas became. Natural disasters set something crazy off in people. They revert to their animalistic roots. They become selfish and greedy. After all, they're working to survive and preserve themselves. Although this is a fictional piece, I am worried that this is the future that we face as the world becomes more riddled with disasters due to climate change. There is something eerie how about how wild and savage people become when there are no boundaries, no feelings of the everyday life that they are so accustomed to. Mitchell does what I have been so temped to do lately as I have learned about the future that this planet potentially faces as we deal with the effects of climate change. He walks away from it all. He starts over.

To me, this seems like the underlying reason for natural disasters. They are a chance for a fresh start. A chance to do it differently. Maybe it's the Earths way of giving us a second chance, a way of wiping the slate clean. Either that, or the Earth is punishing us for all of the damage that we have done. Destroying what we have built and lived to teach us a lesson. A lesson that we obviously aren't learning very well.

If Thoreau Saw Our World Now: Walden

One can only imagine....

From what I have read thus far in Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau would not be able to handle the world that we live in now. Thoreau wrote Walden in the mid-nineteenth century after spending over two years in the woods, away from civilization. He felt that everyone was too caught up in how everything looked and felt and did. Thoreau reiterates simplicity and practicality key. This book was written over 150 years ago, and it is more relevant than ever today. 

In the beginning of Walden, Thoreau explains his deciding to remove himself from civilization. He wanted to become more in touch with himself, and get away from the nature of everyday life. He believed that most aspects of how we live are not necessary. We do not need clothing of the highest fashion that won't last us and houses that are too big and beautiful for our means. Thoreau cites that "none of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter". Every other aspect of our lives is frivolous he says. We aren't really living how we are, rather just moving from place to place, doing things to take up time. Walden serves as Thoreau's journal during his time in the woods. While he recounts his time spent there, he introspectively analyzes life in sort of a meaning of life type of way.

The 10x16 foot cabin on Walden Pond that
 Henry David Thoreau built by hand and
 lived in for over 2 years, that served as the
inspiration for Walden.

I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying this book. I have to admit that I have not been the biggest fan of classic literature after being forced to read one too many classic novelist in high school. However in this classic piece, I found myself agreeing with Thoreau and his ideals and reading on actually interested in what he has to say. Thoreau experienced the most massive growth that we have ever seen, living at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Walden seems like it is Thoreau's way of expressing his displeasure with the mindset of growth that we have. 

As this class has progressed, I find myself getting more and more annoyed with how we live today and the amount of growth that we expect/need to work and thrive as a society. I feel like it shows just how greedy and selfish that we are. We always want bigger, and better, and more. And this is where we run into problems. The Earth can only handle this type of growth for so long before it stops allowing us to grow. I feel that the beginning stages of climate change are serving as its warning. We need to live differently. Below is one of the most popular quotes from Walden (it was underlined, starred, and circled in my book if that says anything), and I think it really points to the meaning of Walden and where Thoreau was go with this book.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".

Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

An Inconvenient Truth: What It Looks Like

In this lecture style documentary, Al Gore pieces together facts and figures to bring to light what climate change means and the potential effects that it will have on the Earth. Gore mentions a metaphor of a live frog placed in a hot pot of water versus a live frog placed in a pot of water that is gradually brought to a boil and the effect that it has on the frog as it relates us in our current situation regarding climate change. Gore says "it requires a sudden jolt to become aware of danger. If [the threat] seems gradual, we are capable of just sitting there and not responding".  Currently we are the frog in the pot of water gradually being brought to a boil and with this film Gore wants us to jump out of that pot of water by shocking us into action.

Here's the thing about An Inconvenient Truth. If I had watched it at the beginning of this semester, I would have been shocked as the majority of the general population that viewed it was. The purpose of this documentary was to bring to light the true reality of climate change and made it accessible to the public. The film did a great job of this,  however after being engrossed in all things climate change for the past month or so, the information provided in the film was not news to me. I can imagine it being eye opening for some, but I can also imagine it adding to their disbelief in climate change as anything inconvenient has the tendency to be disregarded. Overall I felt that the film was educational but it probably did not benefit me in the ways that it would someone who was more unaware about climate change.

That being said, I still found the documentary to be very relevant. I found it easier to connect the graphs and statistics with the real life examples and explanations that Gore provided with them. For the purpose of this blog post, I am going to focus on 3 parts that I feel coincide with what we have been talking about in class and are relevant to the effects of climate change.

Temperature Rise
The graph to the right shows the relation between carbon emissions (red) and and average global temperature (blue). Gore points out (from the top of a cherry picker fork lift) that each increase of CO2 has been accompanied by a rise in temperature that has in turn led to the last 5 ice ages. He makes a point to show how far above any previous CO2 emissions we are currently at (the yellow dot). Does this mean that once we reach a peak in temperature that we are going to experience another ice age? And if so, how long with this ice age last based on the current and increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?

Ice Melt

Related to this increase in temperature (and ice age as remnants of the last one) is the ice cover of glaciers and Arctic sea ice. Gore provided before and after pictures of areas heavily affected by this melt. We can talk about the effect of climate change on the world but its hard to imagine what this effect looks like. Pictures can  help show this, but even then it is still hard to grasp the enormity of the effect. One that struck me the was this one of Patagonia which generally has a cool and dry climate. The melt shown here occurred in 75 years. What happens when the ice melts? The oceans warm and the sea level rises, we know that. But what will this warming and rise look like. This question has been brought up multiple times in class and this short clip from An Inconvenient Truth shows what a 20 foot rise in sea level will look like. There is some discrepancy regarding just how much the ocean will actually rise as a result of the glaciers and Arctic sea ice melting, but I think that this clip does a fantastic job of showing what this rise could look like and  just how many people this single aspect of climate change has the potential to effect.

Dealing with It

A particular piece of information in this documentary that really stood out to me was how much we can cut our emissions by increasing the efficiency of our electrical appliances, vehicles, and renewable energy sources. The graph to the left shows how what adding different types of efficiencies have the potential to do to the United States overall CO2 emissions. Part of me questions the accuracy of this graph. There is another part of me wonders if these steps have to potential to affect our output so much, why are we not requiring that every home be outfitted with energy star appliances and solar panels? According to this film we can reduce the effect that we are having on it all. We have everything that we need to do something about it. Except we know why. Politics. Business. Money. It's what runs the world, and what is going to end up costing us our world.

"Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems..."

Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow