2007/11/22
Happy Thanksgiving.
We in the US have much to be thankful for, even recognizing the many challenges we face. We have options and opportunities born of the wealth that we have not yet squandered, so we have abundant reason for expressing quiet gratitude for what we have and to renew a commitment to future prosperity of body, mind and spirit.
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Last week I had an unexpected opportunity to give a presentation to environmental managers and scientists at the Northeast Regional Coastal Zone Managers meeting convened in Providence, RI by NOAA. I was there in place of Dr. Lynne Carter, a nationally and internationally recognized environmental scientist. Lynne had been the intended speaker and was looking forward to discussing adaptation strategies for climate change, but was given an equally unexpected opportunity to testify before the US Senate along with other scientists on the need for the federal government to increase support for the systematic monitoring of climate change and the dissemination of information and tools to states and localities to facilitate their planning for adaptation. I was a somewhat unlikely participant, being the only accountant in the room, and by no means a substitute for Lynne's scientific background, so I chose to take a different track to the same subject, but more on that in a minute.
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A brief digression on the subject of Climate Change and Adaptation: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has divided human responsive action to climate change into two categories: Mitigation of cause( or what I prefer to call Prevention and Remediation), and Adaptation to Effect( which I prefer to subdivide into Sustaining and Evolving). Much of society's attention to date had been on mitigation, in the hope that we can significantly stabilize and reverse the impact of human induced causes in order to preserve something approaching an environmental status quo (i.e., the planet we currently know and love).
But it is becoming increasingly obvious that efforts at prevention and remediation are not progressing fast enough and intensively enough to avert significant impacts if Climate Change continues to evolve at its current pace. Therefore, preparing for impacts becomes imperative, and will take on growing importance.
I first met Lynne Carter in 2004 when Leslie Kane and I convened a workshop for municipal officials along the Connecticut shoreline on the subject of Climate Change and its possible impact on land use policy. The objective of this workshop was to translate the projections of the IPCC and related studies of the subject into terms that were as relevant as possible to our local level. I didn't want to hear about polar bears and tundra. I wanted a clearer sense of what we could expect in Connecticut.
Lynne was one of a half dozen experts of national stature that Leslie had recruited to the panel. She and others on the panel (Gary Yohe, Dwight Merriam, Michael Ludwig among them) gave us a balanced but sobering assessment of the possible impacts of Climate Change on communities. I left the workshop with two firm conclusions:
- the possible impacts of natural forces, with all the attendant uncertainties, could not be ignored by responsible public officials; and
- the capacity of civic institutions to respond to a phenomenon of this breadth and complexity was grossly inadequate and would need to be redefined, and quickly.
Three weeks later, I happened upon an unexpected event of shoreline flooding which I estimated to be an analog of what Lynne suggested could occur in forty to sixty years from now, and possibly as soon as twenty. It gave visual substance to the theories I had heard three weeks earlier, and it motivated me to study the local manifestations of shoreline storms and seasonal high tides as proxies for sea level rise in order to better understand in systemic terms how we might be affected over time.
Since our workshop, Lynne and a colleague, Beth Raps, have founded the Adaptation Network in order to facilitate the transfer of information and organization of effort among communities and institutions engaged in adaptation efforts. My own efforts have been limited to promoting the need for management planning among government and civic institutions in Connecticut. That experience has further solidified, and not diminished, my concern about our civic capacity to respond to the challenges of Climate Change.
As an accountant, auditor and consultant by background, I can appreciate and accept the science of climate change when it is presented in a credible and professional matter, but it is beyond my professional knowledge to judge its most arcane assumptions and proofs. But that is not unlike many other issues we deal with in business. Our effort is oriented to the orderly development of financial and operational information about a diverse world of activities, and the controlled action upon that information in complex organizations. It is this skill that becomes relevant, and I would dare say vital, in the second half of the Climate Change dynamic: the management of human response based on whatever scientific conclusions are deemed relevant as the basis for prudent civic action. And it is from this perspective that I approach the subject of Climate Change in general, and adaptive response specifically.
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I was as interested in learning from Providence conference as I was grateful for the opportunity to give a presentation. It was an opportunity to learn from environmental professionals at "ground zero" what they are observing in relation to climate change, and how they are responding to it. Interestingly, the people I met were not the "wild-eyed, sky-is-falling, we gotta save the earth yesterday" fanatics that are so often suggested by critics of environmental policy. I have attended other conferences on Climate Change, populated more by environmental advocates than environmental professionals, and I sense that their passion often over-rides a deep understanding and balanced sense of the issue. This group, by contrast, was very business-like and measured about a subject in which they are deeply immersed, and are investing their careers.
As with most conferences of this type, it is created of, by and for the professionals it serves. It is a show-and-tell of their recent projects and an opportunity for informal networking. Its presentations are, to the eye of the neophyte observer such as myself, immersed in the fog of acronyms and generally recognized concepts and assumptions that form the unspoken context of much of what is communicated. For a person such as myself attending a conference such as this, it is often like trying to follow the evening news on a Hispanic network.
Still, certain conclusions emerged from my observations that resonated with my understanding of the issue as I view it from a generalist's perspective.
- The impacts of climate change are being and have been observed on a discernible level at ground zero, even though the professionals strive to avoid applying that tag loosely to any and all observable changes in their environments.
- Useful tools are evolving at the local level, often in the absence of adequate and essential resource and policy support from the broader political establishment. But there is yet no effective platform for building a broadly accessible knowledge base or rapidly deploying best practices.
- At the county and local levels, concern about climate change impacts remains uneven, and traditional parochial political and professional turf issues too often limit the cooperation needed among communities to propagate policies and programs as effectively as possible and at necessary scale.
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I have given about a dozen presentations over the past two years to a variety of groups. They are all built around a set of photos I have taken of storm flooding and seasonal high tides on the Connecticut shoreline which I use as proxies for the impacts of sea level rise. As a management generalist, I use these photos to hypothesize how Climate Change will affect us when these occasional events become permanent facets of our lives. I speculate on the kinds of economic impacts and public policy issues that might arise from these conditions. Although I morph this core presentation to the particular focus of each audience, the basic message I try to convey is simply this:
Whether you believe in Climate Change or not, we have inadequate information at the local level to assess its progress and possible impacts, and we need to begin building that database now; and...
...while we begin building that database, we need to begin making contingent plans for the possibility (and I believe probability) that Climate Change will fulfill in some significant measure the warnings that scientists are giving us. We need to plan for impacts.
In addition to the above, I endeavored to convey three other thoughts to this group from the perspective of a management generalist who is more typical of the people they must deal with beyond their profession in the broader arenas of civic engagement and public policy.
1. You must not only continue to speak among yourselves as a profession, but you must begin to more aggressively engage the broader public, because the level of understanding of this subject, especially in public policy-making circles, is abysmal.
2. You must persist, for your message will not be gladly received by those who are non-professionals in your field; will in fact often be resisted overtly and covertly; and will be competing for their attention and the resources they control with a multitude of other priorities that have much greater immediacy and visibility, if not impact and urgency. To do this, you must leave your jargon at the lab, and learn to speak to the broader public in terms it can understand, and values and possible consequences that are most relevant to them.
3. You must persist, because none of this will come quick or easy, but failure is not an option.
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Three years ago, after reflecting on our Climate Change Workshop, I concluded intuitively that society had five years to organize itself to deal with the impacts of Climate Change before its rate of progress would reach a point where it would seriously begin to tax our resources and our organizational capacity to respond effectively. That judgment was before Katrina and Rita, before the escalating fires in the US west, the escalating droughts in Australia and the US southeast, the unrelenting rains and floods in the US southern midwest, and weather patterns in New England which bend even our notorious history for variability. That five year judgment was not based on science; it is the intuitive judgment of the kind that business executives and public policymakers must often make under conditions of uncertainty in their operating environments that are far less daunting than those that Accelerating Climate Change will present us. I remain convinced that the clock is ticking and our five year window has reduced to two years remaining with little progress to date.
Still, I left Providence with the comfort that genuine progress is being made; and the hope that Lynne and her colleagues in Washington made a deep impact.
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Among the many things I was grateful for this week was the publishing of an article I wrote for the Connecticut Society of Certified Public Accountants (CSCPA) on the subject of Climate Change and its possible implications for CPAs in the service of their clients and the general public. (This journal is limited to distribution within the membership, so don't bother trying to Google it.) In publishing the article, the Society did not presume to endorse the issue of Climate Change, or my particular take on it. What it did do was to open a dialog and create an awareness within our profession that we must have going forward. It is a dialog that must occur in many, if not all, professions and institutions of our society. CPAs are a conservative bunch philosophically, and properly so. As auditors, we are trained skeptics. Our job is to question and verify and take nothing for granted. I expect that my article will receive severe scrutiny from my peers. Again, properly so. What matters most is that the profession chose to engage the issue. I encourage readers in other callings to undertake the same effort within your communities of interest. We build the future one brick at a time.
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Wonderingmind42
A participant in the Providence conference referred me to a video posted on YouTube that addresses the subject of Climate Change in a unique but effective way. I encourage you to check out The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See posted by wonderingmind42.
I generally cringe at anything about this subject that tries to sensationalize it beyond the facts, which are sufficient in themselves. But the title is an attention grabber; the presentation is more measured. It is actually one of a series of videos he has posted on the subject that comprise not only a justification of concern, but a reasoned response to some of the most frequent counter charges of Climate Change Cynics. A high school science teacher by profession, he has made a case for concern about Climate Change that even adults might understand.
Some might find his approach hokey. But listen to the substance. It doesn't get simpler than this.
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And, if our paths don't cross again in the next few weeks, enjoy the holiday season.
Effective civic action and public policy must understand human emotion, and must respond to human emotion. But when it is founded on emotion, and not fact and logic, it is almost always destined to fail.
One of the reasons that mitigation is failing to progress as effectively as necessary (which you know as well as I) is because we are doing too many things that make us "feel good", and not enough of the critical tasks that will accomplish good. Collectively, our actions are based more on emotion than logic and the facts. It is as bogus to sell Climate Change on emotion as it is to sell Hummers and McMansions based on emotion. Even if you succeed in the sale, you fail in the result.
Am I devoid of emotion on this subject because I attempt to pursue it rationally? By no means. I become angry that certain officials at the highest level of our state government know very well the possible impacts that face us, but refuse to engage the issue meaningfully and publicly. I become angry at the thought that a state agency brags about "going green" by buying Renewable Energy Credits, which provide a fig leaf of credibility compared to what the same money could accomplish if invested in real conservation measures, which the same agency touts as the first line of environmental defense.
While some people plant two hundred pinwheels to "symbolize" how much wind power it would take to power our capitol city (which is itself an unrealistic possibility), the Department of Environmental Protection could invest two years of purchasing RECs into purchasing one decent wind turbine which could be planted prominently at one of its three major state parks on the shore, and really do something to educate the public by example.
And yes, when I visit our shore during a flooding event, and I give my imagination to the waves, and allow it to rise to the possibilities, it touches me with very definite emotions. When I watch people going about their normal lives on a street that could be under water in twenty to sixty years, I wonder what that transition will be like for them, or for those who unwittingly replace them. And when I look at our Town green on a warm November afternoon, and realize that it is conceivable that this center of 370 years of human heritage could be under water by the end of this century, I feel a sense of despair, realizing that you and I are making very little progress in preventing it.
I am tired of folks who get an emotional high of 'empowerment' because they've changed all the lightbulbs in their home to fluorescents, when in truth those individual efforts, though necessary and important, will not substitute for strategic efforts of critical mass on energy and transportation and building codes and a dozen other issues that are institutional and don't respond well when they respond to the "squeaky wheel", generally driven by emotion.
Soooo....when I'm not replacing fluorescents in my own home,and I try to influence the institutional forces that can bring critical resource and critical mass and critical impact to this issue, I strive to suppress my emotions long enough to think responsibly and hopefully act responsibly.
And when the time comes that I can no longer do that, then its time to leave.
Posted by: Sidney Gale | 2007.11.27 at 08:15 PM
"I have attended other conferences on Climate Change, populated more by environmental advocates than environmental professionals, and I sense that their passion often over-rides a deep understanding and balanced sense of the issue. "
Emotions are an inescapable part of the "human response" to global warming. The success of your own slideshow presentation is at a visceral, emotional level- facts about flooding and sea level rise will not prompt people to action or capture anyone's imagination, and this is generally where the scientists and other environmental managers you describe often fall short- they don't understand people. Doesn't your own motivation go beyond the realm of the rational?
Posted by: R Smith | 2007.11.27 at 06:43 PM