We have a long way to go before even fairly sophisticated members of the media understand what’s happening now and what’s coming if we don’t act soon (see Royal Society: “There are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record”).
Brad Johnson has a telling example.
President Barack Obama’s pledge to forestall mass extinction from global warming is a laughing matter to NPR. Today, Morning Edition Steve Inskeep broke into guffaws of laughter as PolitiFact editor Bill Adair mocked Obama’s plan “to devote billions of dollars annually” to help “ensure that fish and wildlife survive the impacts of climate change.” Adair said he thought that meant supplying “air conditioners for bears,” considering the promise on par with the one Obama made about college football rankings:
INSKEEP: What are some of the more obscure promises on the campaign trail they said they were going to work on?
ADAIR: One we really enjoyed was the Obama promise to help species adapt to climate change. We decided that meant air conditioners for bears, which are probably not get funded now that Republicans are controlling the house.
INSKEEP: Did he misspeak? “Help species adapt”? Not not deal with climate change, but help species adapt to climate change.
ADAIR: Well, that’s what the promise said. He got very detailed in his policy statements on the campaign. It’s clear he was trying to appeal to very precise constituencies. And so we saw a lot of promises like that. My personal favorite was his promise was to push for a playoff system for college football.
Listen here:
Scientists estimate that around a quarter of the world’s species “” around a million different species “” will be committed to extinction by 2050 if global warming is unabated, and nearly 60 percent of new U.S. endangerment findings describe global warming as an extinction factor.
Despite Adair’s mockery, PolitiFact’s website fairly described the efforts by the Democratic congress to fulfill the president’s pledge. The House of Representatives passed language in the Waxman-Markey climate bill that reserved significant funding to assist species adaptation, and Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Max Baucus (D-MT) introduced legislation to create a Natural Resources Climate Change Adaptation Fund. The polluter-paid mechanism to fund this effort, a cap-and-trade market that limited carbon pollution, died in the Senate after vociferous opposition from Republicans. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) now plans to introduce legislation to prevent any arm of the federal government taking action to protect species against accelerating climate change from fossil fuel pollution.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
So how are they going to help species adapt?
[JR: Typically it is more about habitat preservation.]
I hope that President Obama is using this stuff to paint the right into a corner. Otherwise Aggggg….
Well at least neither Inskeep nor Adair said:
“We don’t need no stinkin’ environment!”
Inskeep is a reason that I no longer listen to Morning Edition from beginning to end as was my religious custom when Bob Edwards was on. I just listen to the newscast at the top of the hour for five minutes to hear where the floods are today. I guess I’d still listen if I was trapped in my car on a morning commute rather than the A.M. shock jocks.
You can quote me:
Morning Edition is somewhat better than shock jock radio.
I think you’re off base a bit on this one. After all, they’re mocking this promise because it WASN’T a promise to actually do anything to stop climate change – or at least that’s what is implied. The promise makes it sound like he’s saying “we’re not going to actually do anything to stop climate change, but we’ll do our best to save as many species from dying off because of it.”
[JR: Listen to it. They are mocking the notion of adaptation. It wasn't an either/or with mitigation.]
Well, as a biologist I have to admit I shared the laughter a little. I heard this exchange first hand as well. My thought was, yes, how can we help an animal adapt; technically meaning affecting the evolutionary process. A better response from Mr. Inskeep would have been “Genetic engineering for bears?”
Most efforts to support biological diversity in the face of climate change involve the maintenance of habitat corridors oriented either north/south or across elevation gradients. This involves land management and acquisition. Both of which can cost a lot of $$$. There are also proposals to collect and move animal and plant populations from one conservation area to another.
[JR: The point is sophisticated media observers are supposed to understand it's habtitat stuff, not mock it like some Tea Partier.]
This was on NPR too. Inskeep should listen to his own station.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/21/133092677/calif-plants-put-a-wrinkle-in-climate-change-plans
Calif. Plants Put A Wrinkle In Climate Change Plans
by Richard Harris
As the globe warms up, many plants and animals are moving uphill to keep their cool. Conservationists are anticipating much more of this as they make plans to help natural systems adapt to a warming planet. But a new study in Science has found that plants in northern California are bucking this uphill trend in preference for wetter, lower areas.
We should disparage Inskeep’s gaffe plenty. However, he is generally an intelligent and well-informed journalist. The fact that he has no understanding of how to help species adapt to climate change shows that we climate hawks have a way to go in informing the media.
Let’s be sure that Inskeep makes an on-air revision of his comments. What’s the best way to do that?
Although I’m bitterly disappointed with the general lack of coverage on climate change by NPT, I’m with Inskeep on this one. I think he was laughing out of dark humor, because he thought “helping species adapt” is absurd, and when he asked about Obama, incredulously, “Did he misspeak? Not deal with climate change,” he meant it would make more sense to do something constructive about slowing climate change than pursuing an impossible dream of “helping species adapt” to it.
It seems to me if you understand the complexity of relationships between species, which have taken millions of years of evolving in tandem to achieve, you have to acknowledge that it’s a very fragile interdependence that any major disruption will cause to fall apart like a house of cards.
Mocking Obama’s position because it doesn’t address the problem head-on is legitimate.
[JR: But that's now what they're doing.]
One of the basic premises of Ecology is that we need diversity. And not for aesthetic reasons: our habitat just as delicate as a panda’s. In the past, warmings of 2C have had a terrible toll on species, and 2C looks like a conservative estimate of what’s in store for us.
Helping species adapt in a meaningful way would require us to reverse the warming we’ve initiated.
The only way to “ensure that fish and wildlife survive the impacts of climate change.” is to actually address climate change. Helping them to adapt over short time periods will not necessarily ensure survival of the species; especially if we are not going to actually address the real cause of climate disruption.
So, billions for fish and wildlife adaptation…How much for human adaptation?
I completely understand the guffaws even if it lacks sophistication. Has anyone done any studies that show that any attempts to “save species” by relocation will help them survive climate disruption? How can we ensure that the new location will be “protected” from climate change? If climate disruption is destroying the habitat how will we preserve it OTHER THAN ACTUALLY ADDRESSING GHG EMISSION?
The climate is going through chaotic change, the ocean chemistry is changing, we emit ever increasing nitrogen and phosphorous waste into the waterways and oceans every year creating dead zones, we have unsustainable fishing practices that threaten collapse of many fishing industries, ozone and insect infestations threaten our forests, we are degrading our soil, pollution and climate disruption threaten sustainable freshwater security, BUT throwing billions at some vague plan to relocate animals and preserving habitat is OK.
guffaws of sad laughter….
To Michael Tucker #10, AMEN!!
There are very, very few in the media who are savy about the natural world. And for the most part, the NPR reporters aren’t sophisticated media observers. NPR consistently disappoints in that regard. The sophisticated media observers I hear on NPR, now that Daniel Schorr has finally given up on us, are mostly with the business reporting from American Public Media. Pretty much the same with my local newspaper. The business and weather sections are the only ones that provide dependable, accurate information.
Most of the informative environmental reporting is contained within the business section. A sign of the gutting the media has done and the resultant retention ofa handful of “jacks of all trades” reporters for the rest of the news sections.
I was listening to NPR when this happened and was pretty disgusted. I think that with all the attacks on NPR/PBS over the last 10-15 years from the right, they’ve overcompensated in trying to keep feeding at the trough. NPR is no different than most other ‘news’ organizations these days, they rarely ask difficult and probing questions. Just GIGO.
Jeffrey Davis:
Not really, even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, there’s plenty more warming in the pipeline. And warming already seen is having noticeable impact on species today.
There isn’t *a* problem, there are a multitude of problems to address. Addressing “the” problem (by which I assume you mean CO2 emissions) doesn’t mean we can ignore the other problems that result from already wired-in change due to past emissions and (frankly) the fact that we’ll continue to be adding CO2 to the atmosphere for some time regardless of how aggressive we are in attacking the problem.
Andy:
Andy says:
So first you laugh at it and then you give us a good description of some of the keys in helping species adapt (making sure there are migration corridors to habitat at higher latitudes or elevations, land acquisition and management for the establishment of plant communities etc that will thrive in a warmer/drier/wetter climate depending on where you’re at, etc etc).
Andy, the key here I think is that “adaptation” has meanings in common language different than the meaning in evolutionary biology. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Obama was using a common language definition, such as “adapt to environmental changes”, in particular via emigration as one example.
Nobody knows why the frogs have been disappearing. The bat disease is peculiar, and affects multiple species in North American. The bee colony collapse disorder is affecting bumblebees as well as honeybees.
Bats and frogs eat insects; bees pollinate crops. This is not an species isolated in the Arctic.
You can’t say bees, bats and frogs are disappearing due to climate change. It probably is a manmade problem.
Species adaptation is not a laughing matter and President Obama may have been referring to work by a man who macroeconomist and Columbia Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs often refers to as his mentor: Harvard biology Professor EO Wilson. As one specific example, if I remember correctly. he was talking about creating routes across highways etc. for species to migrate from south to north in the northern hemisphere as global temperatures increase.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson
http://www.eowilson.org/
LifeCorps is a technology access network that will link conservation managers with organizations that have technological capabilities that are traditionally unavailable in conservation work.
Because LifeCorps technology solutions can be accessed through the LifeCorps website, conservationists anywhere on the planet can look beyond their local environment for solutions that can’t be found near home but exist within the network.
http://www.eowilson.org/
Charlie Rose interviews EO Wilson & James Wattson
http://www.eowilson.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=34
A Columbia’s State of the Planet 2004, EO Wilson calls this century “The Century the Environment”
(Wally Broeker leads)
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sop2004/real/sop04_highlights.ram
On all subjects, Inskeep spins the most editorial attitude into his interviews and stories of any NPR lead. It’s surprising that his inappropriate guffaws haven’t prompted more complaints from listeners since he began as co-anchor of Morning Edition.
I think I’m with wits end #8-the idea of adaptation is a quasi-denialist trope designed to make us believe that anthropogenic climate change is only a little problem, one that can be handled without any great changes to our destructive habits. I remember when I first saw it being pushed, by, if I remember correctly, that arch-opportunist and dissembler Lomborg, or one of his clones. In one of his chameleon moves he lept from denialist to pseudo-realist. You know it was his ‘Sure there’s climate change all right, but it’s only a little problem compared to A,B,C etc all these other BIG problems, and, in any case we can simply adapt to it’ phase. Pretty soon the denialist industry had a sub-branch pushing the adaptation message, along with the usual stupid disinformation (more people die in the cold, let’s make wine in Scotland etc). Clearly, of course, we have nearly as little chance of adapting to what is coming as the dinosaurs had of adapting to their changed environment.
> Mocking Obama’s position because it doesn’t address the problem head-on is legitimate.
> [JR: But that's not what they're doing.]
That’s what I got from it – and they’re right to mock. There is no possible way of helping species adapt to any significant degree. What would we do? Give trees a pep talk to fight off pine beetles? Tell corals to walk off the increased acidity? Build artificial ice flows for polar bears to hunt on? Build outdoor A/C for lizards?
INSKEEP: Did he misspeak? “Help species adapt”? Not not deal with climate change, but help species adapt to climate change.
Innskeep is right. The only way we avoid mass extinction is by stopping carbon pollution. There is no adaptation and to talk about it is going to lull people in to a false sense of security. Stop burning fossil fuels or watch the mass extinction happen before our eyes.
Ah, I now see what others mean:
INSKEEP: …Not deal with climate change…
He’s not suggesting that Obama has never stated we should deal with climate change, just that it’s the only option for saving species.
JR, why not ask Inskeep how he meant his comments??