COP 15: Let's all follow along

The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (bureaucratically known as COP -- for Conference of the Parties -- in recognition of the countries that were 'parties' to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) started today in Copenhagen. While most of the delegates spent the day cooling their heels in line (4 hours to register!), a variety of developments took place that were of interest.

1) Greenpeace activists scaled the roof of Canada's Parliament and unfurled banners. Shots of the event are here, videos here. They are posted in chronological order with the last footage being the first you encounter -- so be sure and go to the last page to view the earliest (and most interesting) footage from the beginning of the action.

2) Canada got noticed in the 'Fossil of the Day' award.

3) The US Environmental Protection Agency issued an 'endangerment finding' that greenhouse gases are a health issue and, hence, the EPA can regulate them administratively -- that is without congressional approval. This is the big club that the Obama administration hopes will spur Congress into action.

For those of you wishing to follow along on the two week journey that the negotiations will involve, Time has a listing of the 5 things to watch for at the conference. There are a number of options for following along and determining whether or not they occur -- from the traditional to the virtual:

A) Real-time updates on Twitter are available here.
B) Lots of the events are being webcast. Check out the list here.
C) The Climate Action Network puts out a daily newsletter.

Human Side of Disaster

The current issue of the Disaster and Social Crisis Research Network Electronic Newsletter has just been released. It is edited by Eduardo Runte, a former graduate student in Sociology at UNB whose MA thesis dealt with the experiences of electrical linemen during the ice storm of 1998. Eduardo is now in the PhD program at the Ecole des Mines in Paris. The contents of his thesis are summarized here and a description of his PhD work, dealing with the social processes involved in the creation of safety, can be found here.

The newsletter has a blurb for a new book by Thomas Drabek, The Human Side of Disaster, which it describes as follows:

When disaster strikes, people react, and usually, fear levels rise. Temporarily, however, one motivation supersedes all others: survival of self and those nearby, especially loved ones. Based on the author’s years of research and teaching experience, The Human Side of Disaster scientifically evaluates human responses in the face of disasters. This examination informs emergency managers and response teams and teaches them how to anticipate human behaviors in-crisis.

The book begins with four scenarios based on interviews and real events that introduce the human side of disaster. The stories examine how attention to, or lack of, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation affect outcomes. Each subsequent chapter refers back to the original Experiences chapter and provides insights that can be applied not only to events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods, but also to man-made threats including industrial accidents and acts of terrorism. The author explores how people’s responses can be predicted, the long term effects of disaster on the psyche, and the key issues involved in recovery.

A balanced interpretation of research, results, and experience, the book demonstrates how traditional warning methods and high-tech systems can work together to improve communications, evacuations, and reconstruction efforts. It highlights the role of the human element in any disaster situation and demonstrates how to use that element as part of a planned disaster response.

The Future of Flight

It's hard to grasp the scale of the commercial aviation business. Most of us don't fly that often and when we do there seem to be way more planes sitting on the ground than taking off. This personal perspective prevents us from appreciating the real magnitude of the operation -- something that these two videos really convey (be sure to view them in full screen mode for the full effect!)





Once you understand the scale of the operation, the environmental consequences become more apparent. As the Suzuki Foundation notes:

Jets account for somewhere between 4 and 9% of total human impact on the climate. .... A special characteristic of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. Scientific studies have shown that these high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact because they trigger a series of chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that have a net warming effect. The IPCC, for example, has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone.

Thus, comparisons such as the one below, which represent the comparative impact of carbon dioxide emissions alone and show air transport to have essentially the same impact per kilometer traveled as car transport, understate the impact of air travel.

Whatever happened to Conservation?

In a brilliant book, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, noted historian Samuel Hayes connects the emergence of the conservation movement at the turn of the 20th century during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt with the rise of a technocratic elite convinced that their knowledge could benefit the world. Governments created departments of Forestry, Fisheries, Natural Resources, Agriculture, etc. all populated with technocrats aiming to do what they saw as the morally correct thing: conserve resources for the benefit of all by avoiding unnecessary waste. It is stunning to realize how far the technocrats of today have drifted from that vision.


The image on the left shows an oil storage tank. Everything looks normal. But, an infrared view of the same tank taken at the same time, shows the tank is leaking methane. This is the sort of thing that drove the original conservationists batty -- the unnecessary and unproductive waste of valuable resources. Leaks like this -- from wells, storage tanks, and pipelines -- are commonplace and few companies do anything about them despite the fact that the EPA has evidence showing such fixes to be cost effective.



Given that nobody is seriously monitoring this, it is hard to get a real estimate of the problem. However, the EPA estimates a total of about 3 trillion cubic feet. This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States. As people have begun to pay attention, government scientists and industry officials have come to the conclusion that the real figure is almost certainly higher.

New Book: William Catton Returns with "Bottleneck"

George Mobus, Assoc. Prof. of Computing Software Systems at the Univ. of Washington Tacoma does a lengthy review of William R. Catton's Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse. The book is posed as a sequel to Catton's 1983 book, Overshoot, which has become a classic of literature in environmental sociology. The review is posted at The Oil Drum.

Warning: this book does not have a happy ending.

"In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called a population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return."

Visualizing Sociology

Many of the posts on this blog have featured stunning visual graphs and images to depict sociological ideas. With the Internet and sophisticated graphics software, this seems to be a growing trend in sociology. So I thought I feature a few sites that specifically address visual images in sociology.

Sociological Images

International Visual Sociology Association

The Gallery at Visual Sociology

This image is from the "Harvesting Stories" collection.

Homogenization of America

Diversity, whether social or ecological, increases resilience. When it is only this far between McDonald's restaurants in the US, one has to wonder how diversity is fairing! The greatest distance between 2 McDonald's is 107 miles in South Dakota.

NB Power sale

For those wanting to follow along on the debate about the proposed sale of NB Power to Hydro Quebec, the Memorandum of Understanding outlines the terms of the proposed sale. It is obvious from the emerging public opposition that the Graham government has a basic problem: a lack of public trust. David Alward, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, is trying to reinforce that feeling. His Reply to the Speech from the Throne focuses entirely on the NB Power sale and leads with the trust issue (there was no mandate for the sale, not selling NB Power was part of the Liberal platform in the 2003 and 2006 elections) before he gets to his substantive criticism. The recent statement by the NB Auditor General, noting that the sale won't help the provincial debt, undermines one of the major arguments for the sale and, by doing so, legitimizes the lack of trust. The Liberals make their case here.

The Great Agricultural Land Grab

What do you do if your country has an increasing population, a lack of agricultural land and lots of cash? The standard answer coming from the CEO's of large corporations in the developed world is "give us money to develop more productive crops. We developed 'miracle rice' back in the 60's and with sufficient development funds we can save you again."

Increasingly, however, it appears that these countries are opting for an alternative solution: shopping for agricultural land in even less developed countries. When I visited my daughter last Christmas, she had this fascinating map up on her wall. Taken from an article in The Guardian, it graphically depicts the location of various land purchases made by several wealthy developing countries: China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emerits. Convinced they will not be able to provide the food necessary for their future populations, they have started to invest heavily in countries with historically unproductive agricultural lands like Sudan and Ethiopia, with the intent of using the land to support their burgeoning populations. A number of people have questioned the ethics of such actions since these African countries are already unable to feed their populations and, hence, can ill afford to use their land for export crops.

Thanks to the efforts of the folks at Grain and their related website (farmlandgrab.org), these developments are receiving an increasing amount of attention. The recent NYTimes Magazine article 'Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism' provides a good overview of the issue.

Stewart Brand on 4 Environmental Heresies

Stewart Brand, the author of the Whole Earth Catalog, was one of the leaders of the 60's environmental movement. He has recently been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. His ideas (Cities are Green! Nukes are Green! Gene modification is Green! Geoengineering is Probably Necessary!) have recently been published in WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto a review of which is available here.

For the video inclined, he covers much the same ground in this TED talk.