1361. Film Review: The Last Mountain

By Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com, June 22, 2011

Is there another state in the union more cruelly defaced than West Virginia? Its mountains have been blown up, its forests ripped out and thrown away, and the green new land that the settlers discovered decades ago now includes a wasteland of a million dead and toxic acres. Nationally, one in 100,000 people get brain tumors. In a West Virginia town surrounded by strip mining, six neighbors have developed brain tumors. What are the odds of that?

"The Last Mountain" is a blunt and enraged documentary about how such things came to be. It is about Coal River Mountain, the site of a last stand against Massey Energy, a company it says disregarded environmental concerns, compromised the political process and poisoned great stretches of the state in the name of corporate profits. Now lakes of sludge loom above towns, rivers are dead and dying, and heavy metals invade the bloodstreams and brains of the inhabitants.

Yes, we need coal. Yes, West Virginia has a lot of it and once had a lot more. Coal is a major contributor to global warming, but those very words "global warming" are anathema to those whose minds have been bought and paid for by Big Energy.

I would like to see a comparison of the dollars spent on (1) greener energy and (2) political lobbying by a firm like Massey, the villain in "The Last Mountain." Corporations by their nature exist to maximize profits. Their executives are compelled to enact draconian measures to further them. It's how they work.

The bad guy in "The Last Mountain" is Don Blankenship, who was chairman and CEO of Massey from 2000 until 2010. He doesn't believe in climate change and once equated energy conservation with communism. It was on his watch that 29 miners were killed in the explosion at Massey's Upper Big Branch mine on April 5, 2010. From Wikipedia: "In 2005, Blankenship wrote a memo to employees telling them that maximizing coal production was more important than spending time constructing things like support beams or ventilation shafts."

Also from Wikipedia: "When groundwater pollution from coal slurry injection by Massey Energy began contaminating wells around Blankenship's home, Massey paid to build a water line to his home from a neighboring town. Blankenship did not offer to provide uncontaminated water to any of his neighbors."

He fits my notion of a bad man. My notion of a heroine is Maria Gunnoe, a West Virginia woman who is one of the leaders of the campaign to defend Coal River Mountain. Articulate and plainspoken, she has been transformed by the campaign.

A film like "The Last Mountain" fills me with restless anger. I have seen many documentaries like this, all telling versions of the same story: When there is money to be made at the cost of the environment, it is the environment that will suffer. And the suffering will be justified by denying global warming and "defending free enterprise." I understand that corporations exist to make profits, but I believe government exists to regulate them.

Another hero in this film is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who visits West Virginia frequently on behalf of the environmental activists and lobbied President Obama to reverse some (not all) of the Bush administration's moves to weaken green laws.

Still, it all comes back to the fact that we need energy. As I watched the film's aerial shots over the harsh and ugly landscapes left behind by Massey, it occurred to me that something was missing. No, not simply trees and other living things. I would have liked to see some wind turbines.

1360. Cuba Calls for Elimination of All Nuclear Weapons

By Cuban News Agency, March 20, 2014 

The world's first underwater nuclear explosion conducted by the United States near Bikin Atoll island in 1946.

HAVANA--Cuba called before the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU ) in Geneva , Switzerland for the total elimination of nuclear weapons and noted the decision of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States ( CELAC) to declare the region a zone of peace .

"The problems the world is facing today are very complex. We live moments in which climate change and the existence of nuclear weapons threaten the survival of our species," the vice president of the Cuban Parliament , Ana María Mari Machado, said during the 130th assembly of the IPU.

The Cuban deputy considered unacceptable to continue spending substantial resources on armaments and its further development, including nuclear, and not the promotion of the right to development of peoples, Prensa Latina news agency reported.

With excessive resources devoted to war we could combat the existing extreme poverty, feed the hungry and prevent the death of more than 11 million children that die each year from starvation and preventable diseases, she said.

Mari Machado stated that the promotion of peace, solidarity, social justice and sustainable development are the only way to secure the future.

The Vice President of the National Assembly of People's Power said that this spirit inspires CELAC, which seeks ways for development through solidarity and cooperation between peoples, in order to improve welfare.

She noted that at the recent summit of the bloc, held in Havana, it proclaimed the region as a zone of peace and made a commitment to further nuclear disarmament as a priority objective, and the contribution to general and complete disarmament.

1359. Art Exhibit: Glimpses Behind the Walls of Tehran's Red Light District in the 1970s

By Elaine Sciolino, The New York Times, March 20, 2014 

PARIS — Kaveh Golestan was 52 on the bright spring day he died. He was killed in a minefield in northern Iraq in 2003 while working as a cameraman with the BBC.

Many journalists who encountered Mr. Golestan over his long career (including me) knew him as a hard-news photographer and cameraman. He was one of the finest chroniclers of the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran, his native country; the nearly eight-year Iran-Iraq war; and Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. His photographs of the revolution won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

What is less known is that in the years before the revolution, when Iran was still a Westernized monarchy, Mr. Golestan recorded in stark black-and-white the daily lives of Iran’s dispossessed. An exhibition of one of his most dramatic subjects — prostitutes confined to Tehran’s red-light district known as the Citadel of Shahr-e No (New City) — opens in the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam on Thursday and runs through May 4. The complete collection of 61 images will appear as part of a larger photographic, painting and film exhibition on Iran entitled “Unedited History: Iran 1960-2014,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris from May 16 to Aug. 24.

The Citadel was an old neighborhood of filthy alleyways in Tehran that was established in the 1920s as a red-light district to house scores of prostitutes. In the 1930s and 1940s, the neighborhood became a thriving sex quarter with rampant crime. Female prostitutes walked the streets seminaked. One of the side streets became famous for its young male prostitutes.

After the 1953 C.I.A.-led coup that reinstated the shah, the authorities walled off the area, turning it into a ghetto whose inhabitants were almost exclusively female prostitutes and their children; only men were allowed to access it through an iron gate.

By the 1970s, about 1,500 prostitutes worked, and most of them lived, in the Citadel. Their daughters often followed them into prostitution; their sons often turned to drugs. Sometimes men came for sex, sometimes to drink, do drugs, watch films or sightsee.

In the ghetto, there was a health center, a police station, a social-work office and a crude education service that taught basic reading and writing to women and their children. But the women suffered — from poverty, violence, heroin addiction, syphilis and destitution when they became too old to work.

Mr. Golestan’s work is the only existing photographic document of the Citadel. It first appeared as three photo essays in the daily Ayandegan newspaper in 1977; some of the photographs were included in a book of his photographs on Iran (“Kaveh Golestan 1950-2003: Recording the Truth in Iran”) published after his death. In 1978, the photographs were exhibited for 14 days at the University of Tehran, before the show was abruptly shut down without explanation. Later that year, they were briefly displayed in an underground exhibition at the Tehran Art fair.

The Amsterdam exhibition includes 45 images and is the first time the same original vintage prints have been shown together since then.

Mr. Golestan took notes on everything he photographed, and alongside the photographs, the exhibition will include excerpts from his diaries, newspaper clippings and audio interviews that he conducted in and about the area. The Citadel, he wrote, “confines some of Tehran’s prostitutes within its walls, like a detention center with a tight beehive of tiny cells.” He added, “The lives of the residents have plummeted to the lowest depths of human existence.”

He forged friendships with many of the women, photographing them regularly between 1975 and 1977. His images capture their degradation and despair: one woman with ample breasts visible in a low-cut polka-dot dress covers her eyes with one hand; one girl in a black dress with a white Peter-Pan collar and puffy sleeves looks as if she is no older than 14; another woman covers her head and upper body with a veil, but reveals her bare legs.

Ceilings leak; carpets are torn; mattresses are threadbare; plaster and paint are peeling. The place looks as if it smells of rot.

As the revolution unfolded, radical mobs attacked and set fire to sites they considered symbols of decadence, including the Citadel neighborhood. Most of the women are believed to have escaped, but there was no official investigation and no official count of the casualties. Some of the women were imprisoned and executed by firing squads; others were arrested and “reformed” according to Islamic revolutionary principles. The Citadel site was bulldozed as an act of cultural cleansing and in its place a park with a lake was built.

“You look at these photos and these women are looking right back at you and you have the feeling you are quite intimate with them,” said Kim Knoppers, the curator of the exhibition at Foam. “You forget the sense of time and place. The photos become universal images, which resonates in Amsterdam. We are so well-known for our own red-light district.”

Mr. Golestan’s original prints remained in his archive in Iran until about two years ago. Vali Mahlouji, a London-based Iranian curator and a distant cousin of Mr. Golestan’s widow, Hengameh, who is also a photographer, sought them out to create a complete archive of Mr. Golestan’s work.

The exhibition is the first part of his new project “Archaeology of the Final Decade,” which documents the cultural life of Iran in the years before the 1979 revolution. He intends to expand it into a nonprofit foundation to revive Iran’s historical and cultural material that was destroyed, banned or underrepresented in the Islamic Republic. He has opened discussions with museums and galleries in the United States to take the Golestan show there.

“The mission is to bring back and put into circulation artistic work that went underground because of the revolution and the policies that followed,” said Mr. Mahlouji in a telephone interview from London. “We want to create a link between where we were in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s and what happened after Iran’s cultural revolution of the 1980s. We’re starting by putting Kaveh on the artistic map.”

The content of Mr. Golestan’s exhibit might appeal to the authorities as it shows the “decadence” of the Old Regime; but it would have to be rejected because the women in the photographs have not covered their hair. (Despite the fact that prostitution in Iran’s Islamic Republic is illegal and punishments severe, the practice still flourishes.)

For colleagues and friends of Mr. Golestan, the exhibition is a fitting way to keep his spirit — and his art — alive. “He was driven by a social conscience and he always found a way to express it in his photography,” said Reza Deghati, the Iranian-French photojournalist and philanthropist who worked side-by-side with Mr. Golestan in Iran during the revolution. “His work is a real eye-opener.”

Mr. Deghati worked for Newsweek, Mr. Golestan for Time, but they often traveled together, and for long stretches were the only resident photographers working for American publications.

“I never had the sense there was competition between us,” Mr. Deghati said. “We were much too young for that.”

“Kaveh Golestan: The Citadel” runs at the Foam Photography Museum through May 4. The complete collection of 61 images will appear as part of a wider exhibition on Iran titled “Unedited History: Iran 1960-2014,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris from May 16 to Aug. 24.

1358. Visions of Post-Capitalist Economies: A Conversation Between Gar Alperovitz and Michael Albert

By Gar Alperovitz and Michael Albert, Truthout, March 21, 2014

Gar Alperovitz 

Gar Alperovitz and Michael Albert have been at the forefront of efforts to design and build an economy beyond capitalism for decades - efforts that have become even more relevant in our age of economic and ecological crises. Albert’s Participatory Economics (Parecon), developed in collaboration with Robin Hahnel, outlines a comprehensive vision of an ethical economic system, in which bottom-up democratic decision making takes the place of market-driven competition. Gar Alperovitz’s Pluralist Commonwealth model extrapolates from existing experiments in the democratization of wealth to build a systemic and multilayered answer to the urgent systemic challenges we are facing as a society. While both share a fundamental commitment to real democracy and true economic justice, the differences between Alperovitz and Albert’s respective models help illuminate what’s really at stake in system change. They recently sat down to better understand where their trajectories intersect or diverge; below is a transcript of the highlights of their conversation:

Michael Albert

THE MODELS
MICHAEL ALBERT: Participatory economics proposes a small set of institutions that define the heart of a new type of economy. These institutions are conceived to further various values: self-management, solidarity, diversity, ecological sanity. The idea is that as you carry out economic activities - in other words, as you produce and you allocate and consume - you simultaneously accomplish not only those functions, but by virtue of what the institutions require of us as we operate, you also advance those values. 

The basic institutions that are meant to accomplish this are few. There are worker and consumer self-managing councils; where self-management means that people should have a say in decisions proportionate to the degree they are affected by them. There is equitable remuneration - referring to the share we get in the economy in the form of income, our claim on the social product. Under participatory economy, these are in proportion to how long we work, how hard we work and the onerousness of the conditions under which we work. There is also what's called balanced job complexes, which is a way of organizing the tasks that we do, so that our work lives, our economic activity and production, has a comparably empowering effect on us all. Finally, there is an allocative system to apportion work, labor and effort - the goods and services we produce - that isn't a market or central planning but is something we call participatory planning. So in a nutshell, that's participatory economics.

GAR ALPEROVITZ: Even though I disagree with many aspects of Michael's model, what I like about it [is] its rigor and clarity. Parecon is a very tough-minded economic vision and model, and it sets a standard for us to look at. 

One place to start (with my own work) is that - given the specific historical conditions we face in the United States - I'm primarily interested in the question of how we begin to move in the direction of a model that realizes the kinds of values that Michael just laid out, though is different in structure. I am interested in the political economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question is one of "reconstructive" communities as a cultural, as well as a political, fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger system - given the power and cultural relationships - can move toward managing the connections between the developing communities. There are many, many hard questions here - including, obviously, ones related to ecological sustainability and climate change.

I've called the model for what this might plausibly look like in practice "the pluralist commonwealth": commonwealth because it seeks transitionally to restructure political reality by democratizing the ownership of wealth, pluralist because it embraces a variety of institutional approaches toward that end. The model includes some planning, a great deal of decommodification and partial use of markets in certain areas. It adheres to the principle of subsidiarity, meaning we decentralize as far as possible to the local level where direct democracy is truly possible, but we are also not afraid to look toward institutional forms like regional or national public ownership when the problems are best solved at those scales. More broadly, it's a community-centered vision, starting with the questions "How does the community I live in begin to restructure? What are the next steps that could move us toward a larger egalitarian, democratic and ecologically sustainable culture?" As we move toward the pluralist commonwealth, economic interventions that stabilize communities - for instance by localizing the flows of goods and services or by promoting worker ownership - not only have immediate practical benefits but provide the necessary preconditions for the growth and development of a renewed culture of sustainable democracy that can serve as the basis for still further transformations at larger scales. But the model is designed to make maximal use of actual on-the-ground forms of democratized ownership - the millions of employee-owners, the thousands of community development corporations and cooperatives that already exist in the US serve as a key starting point.

Importantly, the focus is on transitional forms, not on ultimate theoretical final states. A full description of the model, its elements and many of the challenges that come up in connection with the approach is available at pluralistcommonwealth.org.

ON EXPERIMENTATION AND POSSIBILITY
MICHAEL ALBERT: I appreciate in Gar's work the emphasis on being attentive to what is possible now. I think where we may have a difference is on the importance, not only of addressing what's possible now but also whether or not this leads where we want to go - which to me means that we have to have some understanding of where we're trying to go. So for instance, Gar mentioned that his understanding of the future would include some markets. Well, if we mean the same thing by "markets" (people use the term in all sorts of conflicting ways), then I would probably disagree. Markets are a form of allocation that I don't think a good classless, self-managing society can have and have it be consistent with those kinds of values. Now that doesn't mean that you can just say: no markets tomorrow. That's the part I agree with Gar about.

GAR ALPEROVITZ:  We need to remember the importance of learning and experimentation. I think that Michael's projection is utopian in the best sense of that term; I don't see that as a negative. It's where we might be when we get to where we want to be. But I think, both as a historian and as an economist, that the problem is quite different from that: How, in the specific historical condition of the United States today, do we move toward a more egalitarian society, one that transforms the ownership of capital, one that builds and nurtures community and that is ecologically sustainable? Lay three or four decades on the table: How do we move toward these larger goals? 

So I'm much more interested in an evolutionary approach that reconstructs community, changes power relationships and also moves toward a kind of large-scale geographic planning that can stabilize communities in a society of 300 million. I come from Racine, Wisconsin, a city of about 100,000. The rug was pulled out from under the economy there: Industries moved out, all driven by the capitalist relationships dominant in the marketplace. What would be ways to stabilize economies, stabilizing the health of communities so that we can build constructive kinship and other relationships of democratic participation in them?

MICHAEL ALBERT: I agree we need to experiment - but we have been doing this for, conservatively, a couple hundred years and some things we have learned. We may not know all the different options various kinds of workplaces will adopt, from country to country, from locale to locale, etc. But we do know that there are a few institutional choices that really aren't optional. We can't have private ownership of the means of productions and vast corporations and make believe that we're going to have self-management for everybody. In the political sphere, you can't have a dictatorship and make believe that you're going to have public participation, freedom and self-management and justice. Those institutions are contradictory.

So participatory economics doesn't say that all workplaces will look alike. It does say, however, that we need to apportion work in such a way that 20 percent don't dominate 80 percent. 

GAR ALPEROVITZ: Let me clarify several different points in agreement and disagreement. I don't disagree in principle; finding ways to organize work in which people are not locked into unequal power relationships is very important. Having said that, it's not easily done, and it's complicated.

For example, I was recently out at Isthmus Engineering in Wisconsin, a worker-owned company that was in Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. It is a real high-tech, very advanced-scale, robotic building worker-owned cooperative, and nobody in their right mind in that place wants to be the power player. You'd think somebody would want to take control of the damn thing. Not at all. No one wants to be in charge. So what do they do? What they do is hire a manager who wants to do that, subject to the recall of the workers themselves. And they regularly recall them, when they don't like what they're doing. So how people actually in the practice of the workplace want to allocate different roles becomes extremely complex.

WHAT MUST BE DONE?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: I don't claim to have a sophisticated view of how transitions might take place in the specific conditions facing other countries, but I do think a lot about the United States. Here, we need to develop communitywide structures of democratic ownership, we need to work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local city, state, regional level. We need to go forward in nationalizing several large corporations: I think that's possible; we nationalized General Motors; we nationalized several of the big banks, de facto; we nationalized Chrysler; we nationalized AIG. I think there will be more crises, and at some point, rather than being bailed out by the government, the public may keep the corporations it has to rescue.
We're talking about democratizing the ownership of wealth or socializing in some form. I think that needs to be a precondition in any of the systems we're talking about. Worker ownership is only one form of democratizing ownership. There are also, for instance, citywide models. In Colorado, we just had the takeover ("municipalizing") of the electrical utility. That's citywide, geographic ownership of the means of production, it's democratic ownership. There are 2,000 public utilities which could become the basis of a whole municipal scheme or strategy. A number of the states already are moving toward ownership of state banks. Most people are simply unaware of these developments expanding public ownership through municipal and state ownership. These are geographic ownership structures that point toward regional or national forms of public ownership for larger-scale entities.  
The Pluralist Commonwealth model begins at the level of an ordinary community reorienting itself but also aims at steadily beginning to develop the institutional substructure necessary for future larger changes. I think the appropriate near-term trajectory of change we're working with is 30 years; that's a timeframe that's reasonable for developing participation to the degree possible, ecological sustainability, reconstruction of community, laying groundwork for a reconstruction of a non-growth system over time. 

MICHAEL ALBERT: You mention nationalizing, and it could be a good thing or a bad thing. It can be a good thing if it's moving us in a good direction and a bad thing if it's moving us in a bad direction. That seems pretty obvious. But if we look at it over time, we have lots and lots of instances that are not good, that don't move us in a positive direction. 
What characterizes positive direction? Positive direction is more and more people having a more and more appropriate level of say over their own lives. It is more and more people getting a fairer and fairer share of a social product and getting a fairer set of burdens they have to fulfill to be a part of society. If we can agree about that, we can demand changes in the minimum wage, changes in the wage structure in a particular firm. We can demand new budget items in our national or local budget. And we can fight for the changes in ways that create an infrastructure that will aid us rather than be corrupted and hurt us in the future. 

There’s a resistance for some people to saying what we want, as if doing so would cause us to trample real and desirable options. If we say we don’t want a division of labor that would put 20 percent above 80 percent, somehow that’s going to cause a problem. If it won’t cause a problem to agree on that, then let’s say it and move on. If we say that we don’t want people to own the means of production and to get their income in the form of profit because that makes class division, crushes solidarity, demolishes dignity, and creates skewed income distribution, then we should say it. That isn’t extrapolating so far into the future or into details that it somehow restricts us. On the contrary, it can help orient us. We have to think about how to make demands and how to build structures that are part of the trajectory of change that takes us where we want to go.

GAR ALPEROVITZ: For 40 years, my argument has been that democratizing ownership of wealth has been the key to egalitarian society and the goals of egalitarian society. But you start at the local level, both at the workplace, community and other institutions and you reconstruct the egalitarian democratized structure as well as participatory structure. And as this happens, we learn more how to move toward the vision that is much larger than just the community level. 

That doesn't mean there isn't an absence of fear that bad dynamics are going to emerge. For instance, worker-owned co-ops, on their own, floating in the market, tend to replicate the behavior of worker-owned capitalists in some circumstances. They sometimes develop positive participatory schemes, sometimes not. We know from the studies of worker-owned plywood companies in the US, they can tend to develop conservative attitudes, not socialist attitudes. So even though I'm an advocate of further democratization of the workplace, we also need to be building larger structures.

This is what's happening, for instance, in cities like Cleveland: The notion is a communitywide ownership structure that encompasses partially independent worker-owned companies. And these businesses are partly supported by the purchasing power of nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals that depend on lots of public money and this arrangement then begins to give stability to the whole geographic community, articulating a vision and politics that builds for the entire community. It's a mixed model that is being tested. 

I think the question that most critics of your model, Michael, have raised is important: the notion of each person laying down what he or she plans to buy or needs against a production schedule, that is, what they'll actually contribute, becomes an extremely difficult path to envision as realistic. Somebody pointed out recently in an article in Jacobin that if you look at just the kitchen goods for sale on Amazon, there are millions of items. Now that's not the society we want, obviously, but it points to the extreme difficulty of the planning problem if you don't use some forms of market to adjudicate purchases and production. 

I think we need to move experimentally with planning and markets, as well as with community development forms that don't include either one. 

MICHAEL ALBERT: You mention that markets will corrupt a worker cooperative because markets create a context in which there's a tremendous incentive to maximize not just profits for owners but surplus among that workforce. So with markets we see colluding, polluting the environment, speed-ups exploiting workers who are weaker, and so on. The solution you suggest is to have community-wide participation that puts restraints on how market pressures and incentives play out. I don't disagree with that as part of an answer. 

But another way to proceed is to understand that the problem is the impact of the market. And to understand that a corporate division divides the work classes into two classes, one above and one below. If we understand these sources of subversion of our aims, then we can build a movement where people are aware that over the long haul, we have to solve the problem of the division of labor and the problem of allocation, because if we don't, the old corporate and market structures will corrupt what we're doing. 

It’s certainly true that if you have millions of goods, and you ask, can Joe look at all those millions of goods, evaluate them and decide how much of each he wants - that’s absurd. Joe can’t do it, and he’s also not remotely interested in doing it. But even now, of course, neither Joe nor you or I evaluate all possible options. We just find options that suit us. So in a participatory economy, the consumer and the producer basically have to indicate their desires for different categories of clothing or food or housing, or various kinds of luxury goods or enjoyable goods. That doesn’t mean we have to itemize down to the color or the size. Many things are statistically determinable once you have the overall inclinations of people. 

In Venezuela diverse local experiments are trying to move toward a more egalitarian society in which wealth and power are democratized. And in these experiments, two things come up pretty often, as immediate short-term issues: the division of labor in the workplace and the impact markets in corrupting possibilities. 

So for instance, in the countryside they have consumer co-ops. And then nearby, there are producer communes that are producing, for instance, agricultural goods the neighbors are going to consume. Instead of having a market determine how this transaction between the people who are farming and the people who are eating in the countryside will occur, they meet together and negotiate cooperatively what they think is just and fair and right. That's potentially a beginning for participatory planning. 
What happened in Yugoslavia is instructive: they made a revolution, got rid of the capitalists, instituted market socialism and initially had workplaces where everybody was treating everyone equally, everyone calling everybody comrade and so on. But over time, because of the competitive pressure of markets, these Yugoslav workplaces have to cut costs, make alienated decisions, to pollute and on and on. If they previously met together in councils and decided they wanted things like day care, air-conditioning for everybody and clean air in the workplace and wanted to clean up for the community and so on, then, nonetheless, under the pressure of competition, they had to start going back on those decisions. And because most people didn't want to be the ones to make such degrading choices, they went out and hired managers - from business schools in capitalist countries to a large extent. 

This is what we're talking about when we talk about replacing markets and changing the division of labor so everyone does a fair share of empowering and disempowering work. Management pe se doesn’t disappear. Rather, managing and conceptualizing and organizing and doing agendas and all sorts of various empowering tasks, as well as the rote tasks, are handled in a way which doesn't elevate some people to dominating others.

ON THE GROUND
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Let's again return to what's happening on the ground - all but ignored by the mainstream press. What's interesting is that a truly massive process is under way that I have not seen happen in my entire adult life, particularly with regard to the ownership of capital and the development of co-ops and worker-owned companies and land trusts and community-owned structures and municipalization strategies. Though the public press does not cover this, it is, in fact, explosive. In my experience most activists and radical theorists are also unaware of the range of activity. (Our website community-wealth.org is one useful resource for coverage of these developments). As people learn more and more about the development of this pattern of democratization, they are also teaching each other principles that can be applied at higher levels as we move forward, for instance in a state-by-state move toward single-payer health care.

The most interesting developments that are going on, in my experience, are those that build and anchor workplaces in communities. In Cleveland - and an increasing number of other cities in the United States - what you have is a quasi-public entity, that is, a hospital or university that has a lot of public money in it, providing support by purchasing goods and services from worker-owned companies linked together as is part of a geographic communitywide structure, with part of the surplus feeding back into the community to create new businesses. So it's not just about the workers, but as a matter of structure and principle, it's a vision that builds a community - or commune - and that's happening experimentally in many parts of the country. 

Interestingly, in Argentina, if you look at the recuperated factories and other businesses, many of them now are actually moving toward the model I just suggested, with places like the municipality (for instance Buenos Aires) purchasing from them as a way to stabilize their market and to socialize their procurement for public use, schools and hospitals, for instance. That structure of using a larger public institution - in this case, city government - to sustain and nurture different patterns of cooperative production stabilizes the market. This points toward a larger systemic vision, where it’s an open question whether that eventually ends up using markets in some cases or cooperative parecon styles in some areas or public planning in other areas. 

MICHAEL ALBERT: I don't disagree that there are many experiments and in those experiments, people learn principles and those principles can be applied more broadly. There can be instances of governments helping local experiments to stabilizing their operations, but I don't think this is going to happen at a significant scale anytime soon in the US unless movements force it. And I don't disagree that in Venezuela and, to an extent, in Argentina, the government has indeed helped experiments become more and more participatory, more and more moving toward self-management, and that is exciting. I was very much excited by the taking of the firms in Argentina. I am excited in the United States, by the development of co-ops and the extent to which people in the co-ops really do want something new and more generally by the simple fact of the changing consciousness in the United States, which is very much drifting away from faith in capitalism.

GAR ALPEROVITZ: On that latter point, that's exactly where you and I agree entirely!

MICHAEL ALBERT: But where we seem to disagree is around participatory planning. Most people don't criticize Parecon because of its notion of what is equitable, or its notion of self-management, or its notion that we should have solidarity; they criticize it for being too complex. The claim is that at some point the participatory planning process simply burdens people in a manner that people won't accept, or shouldn't have to accept and that we should try to do it in a more efficient way, for instance, through markets.

My problem with this objection is twofold. First, it very quickly comes to the conclusion that it's too complex, there are too many steps or too many people involved in the planning process - all of which there are answers for, which, however, are generally ignored by the critic. And second, it goes back to markets as a solution. The problem with markets isn't necessarily their complexity (although some of the ones that exist today are so complex that nobody knows remotely what they're all about!). The problem with markets is not that they demand too much of us. The problem is that they turn us into egomaniacs. They destroy the ecology. They produce class difference and gargantuan income differentials, much poverty and some plenty. 

It may be that participatory planning will in practice ultimately require some very clever refinements so as to reduce the amount of time and complexity that's involved with that part of our lives. But to say that we can't go through this process of experimentation and refinement and that therefore we have to fall back on markets, is analogous, to saying that democracy puts complex demands on the voters and therefore it would be much easier to have a dictator decide. Actually, it's even worse, because you could imagine a dictator who is reasonably humane but markets are structurally incapable of delivering humane outcomes. In such an approach one is literally trading a fear of complexity, for a certainty of cataclysm. 

GAR ALPEROVITZ: Michael, we just discussed two specific models in which worker-ownership is combined with one or another form of public planning and a third where this is partially true. In Cleveland and in Buenos Aires, the use of public purchasing partially stabilizes the market for worker-cooperatives. In Venezuela, co-ops themselves provide support for each other (while in practice they also receive public support, i.e. another form of planning in the real world.) The critical point here - for a transitional strategy - is to understand the complexity of these processes and at the same time attempt to foster further movement, practically, toward a more evolved model like the one developed in the Pluralist Commonwealth without jumping steps and creating chaos in the learning and development process.

ON VALUES
MICHAEL ALBERT: Gar, you're involved in what I think are incredibly important and valuable experiments trying to do things in new ways. Wouldn't it be advantageous when working with people who are setting up co-ops to help them understand that they don't want to replicate the old division of labor, which will corrupt their values and aspirations - that they should want to organize their work in a new way that has everyone participating and empowered? Wouldn't it be advantageous to help them understand how market pressures will conspire to corrupt their creativity? And wouldn't it be desirable to help them see that there are ways to avoid those ills? 

GAR ALPEROVITZ: On participatory planning within the firm or within the community, on restructuring jobs and the culture of work - with rotation and open-book management and so forth - that sort of thing is already being developed in many parts of the country, experimentally, and I certainly agree that that is the direction to go.
Caveat, what you find is that in many situations is that many people don't want to do these things! The reality of the world we live in is that people sometimes aren't interested in many circumstances; no matter how much young radicals yell at them, that isn't what they want to do right now. So you have to work with the reality, and it's particularly important because what we often find is that people who care about these issues, actually don't want to deal with what poor black people who are interested in co-ops or what working-class people who are actually trying to develop worker-owned firms actually think and feel. We need to learn to listen to what the people need and want and not try to impose on them a whole schema that they may not. This is historically difficult stuff: how do we balance the project of raising consciousness, advancing a vision of utopia, with the real and honest engagement in real-world experiments?

And more may be possible than we think. As I said earlier, there has been a change in consciousness that makes this one of the most interesting periods of American history, maybe the most interesting. There's a loss of belief in the corporate system; there's a recognition that something is fundamentally wrong, So there's an opening to a whole different vision of where to go forward. I think that's where we are in the question, so let's not blow it; let's see what we can develop over time.

MICHAEL ALBERT: We agree that there’s a giant opening. We agree that we don’t want to blow it. We agree that it’s certainly the case that lots of times people don’t want to change their circumstances dramatically in a direction which doesn’t seem worthwhile or which even seems like it might even be some kind of con game. 
Using the Venezuelan example, it’s frequently the case that the workers themselves resist efforts to introduce workers management, not because they resist the idea of self-management per se, but because they think it’s a scam to get them to work harder, without them really having any more power than they do now. So of course, one doesn’t impose something, but one does have to discuss it if you’re ever going to get there. And that means talking about changing the division of labor and about the problems with markets and a real alternative.

I could be wrong about this, but I think that markets as an institution, even without private ownership, are one of the worst creations of humanity in its entire history. They warp human development, warp personality, misprice virtually everything. They skew development away from human well-being for most of the population. They violate the ecology. They produce class division. It seems to me that saying these things should be no more controversial than saying we don’t want dictatorship or we don’t want private ownership. No one would say that the fact that we need to experiment, to learn, to listen, implies that we ought to hold in reserve or even jettison our understanding that private ownership and dictatorship are disastrous.

I agree with you, it is a big deal to articulate what the participatory alternative is. But the discussion shouldn’t be that any participatory alternative is too complex or demanding so we have to fall back to markets. Falling back to markets is like falling back to dictatorship. There has to be a constructive suggestion of an alternative way of doing allocation. To the extent we can force government to utilize some of its gargantuan resources to benefit experiments that really would enhance the well-being of the population, that’s terrific. But we don’t want to do it in a way that elevates the government as being our savior and dissolves movements. We want to do it in a way that builds movements and builds continuing pressure. 

Setting up a co-op is good. Setting up a co-op with self-management is better. Setting up a co-op with self-management and with balanced job complexes is even better. Setting one up like that, and that’s in a position to negotiate with its consumers is terrific. And if they can get aid from public funds to stabilize and ensure survival, better still. But I don’t think that is the road all by itself to a better society: We also have to have massive movements which are making demands both in specific institutions, say like General Motors, and also in society as a whole.

GAR ALPEROVITZ: That goes without saying, Michael. I totally agree with that! That's what I've been saying and writing about for years. But once you get away from the abstract that we're talking about, these principles, if you actually get your hands dirty and start talking to different groups other than the gang of young people who find these ideas accessible very quickly, it's a different game. How do we reach ordinary Americans in my hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, where the problems are just extreme? How do we begin to understand them and where they are coming from and actually work with them in a way that works? That requires both understanding of the principles, but also being willing to test different ideas with them: patience and humility.

ALTERNATIVES
MICHAEL ALBERT: I was in Argentina in a room with about 50 people that were there from different occupied factories and I'd been asked to come and speak. We started around the room, and the first person who spoke described their situations and concerns. And by the time we got to the seventh person, a lot of people in the room were crying. This person spoke and put it very eloquently and said: I never thought I could possibly ever be saying anything like this - he, too, was tearing up. He said that we took over the workplace; the owners and the upper management were gone, because they didn't want to be a part of a workplace that they thought was going to fail. And we took it over and made it work. But now he had to say, I'm afraid Margaret Thatcher was right, there is no alternative. This is why they were crying.

He said: We took it over. We were so excited. We made our wages equal. We instituted democracy. We had a workers' council. We made our decisions democratically. And after a period of time, all the old crap came back. All the old alienation came back, and now it just feels the way it used to feel. And they were all saying it, person after person was saying it. I talked to a woman in one of those workplaces who had been working in a glass factory, in front of an open furnace all day long. Then they take over the factory and they go around the room and ask who wants to do the finances and keep the books, and nobody would do it. And she volunteered to do it. She's just a worker, the same as everybody else in the place; she hasn't gone to school or anything. I asked her "what was the hardest thing to learn?" She wouldn't tell me. So I asked again and she didn't want to tell me. "Was it to do the financial books?" No. "Was it to operate the computer?" No. "Was it to do accounting?" No. What was it? I was at a loss. She says "Well, first I had to learn to read." 

And four months later, she is doing the accounting and the bookkeeping for this glass firm which is now functioning at a surplus, whereas the capitalists had been running it into the ground and losing money. But the downside was that she, as the accountant, was becoming a member of a class of people in that factory, about 20 percent, who were highly empowered and who appeared far more pivotal to the functioning of the factory - and who, over time, were bringing back the old alienation, even though she was just a wonderful person. 

So I tried to describe the idea of balanced job complexes. When they took over and the manager who was doing the accounting left, somebody volunteered because not many people wanted to do it. And I said: well, pretty soon what happened is that you had one-fifth of your workforce doing work that's really empowering, and after a while they're governing. And after a while they're paying themselves more because they think that they deserve more, and the rest of the people aren't even at the meeting where this gets decided.

And they agreed with this; it helped them see that there was a reason for this: It wasn't human nature. Thatcher wasn't right. It wasn't inevitable. So my experience is somewhat different from yours: I find that it's easy to talk to working people about, say, balanced job complexes - I have more trouble talking to perhaps half the young radicals nowadays and much more trouble talking to left academics. With the latter, it's almost impossible! 

GAR ALPEROVITZ: I don't think there's a difference in the value structure here. We may have some different experiences. I think there are some places where people will, in fact, pick up on those themes and try to develop rotations and accept the inefficiencies that they will experience in the short run. 

But all of this takes a lot of energy and a lot of time, and some people just don't want to do it. In some places, people will. And I think the question of experience, given the stage of history of the real world, where we are really at, will help us understand how to what extent we can push these developments in different areas. I regard this as a question of testing the real world. Not whether or not these principles about planning and markets are correct in the abstract: these questions are testable, and we should test them wherever we can. But I am cautious about imposing or trying to impose a vision on people who don't want to hear the vision. 

The critical thing is whether or not the communities in which we are engaged wish to do an experiment with and test the models that intellectuals and radicals, the left and theorists and so on come in with. And the answer is, in many cases, no. And for reasons that are good reasons, for instance, in some places, they are frightened to death that it will blow up the current structure of work and they'll lose their jobs. People will understand what you're talking about, but they are going to find the solutions, the mix of principles and problems that works for them, in their situation. And that mix is by no means obvious: By no means is theory a reliable guide to the way this comes out in the real world. 

The values you're talking about, I don't disagree with at all. What we're talking about is where we are in this stage of history with specific communities, all with different skills, levels of support, income and training and all ultimately exposed to the markets, whether they like it or not. This is the reality where we need to move and advance these different ideas. And to do so effectively, it seems to me to be a matter of testing as we go, on the one hand - and projecting a larger possible longer-term vision, on the other. I suspect that to the degree we actually keep testing and developing in the real world, there is likely to be convergence on several levels between the Parecon and the Pluralist Commonwealth models we each have written about at length.

1357. NASA-Funded Study Postulates Collapse of Industrial Civilization

By Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian, March 14, 2014

Safa Motesharrei

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:

".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."

Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."

However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.

The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:

"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."

The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.

1356. The AAAS Climate Science Panel: What We Know: The Reality, Risk and Response to Climate Change

By M.Molina (Chair), J. McCarthy (Co-Chair), D. Wall (Co-Chair), R. Alley, K. Cobb, J. Cole, S. Das, N. Diffenbaugh, K. Emanuel, H. Frumkin, K. Hayhoe, C. Parmesan, M. Sheppard, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Climate Science Panel, March 2014

[Editor's note: As a highly unusual step, I appeal to the reader to carefully read this highly readable, educational and crucially important document.  If you similarly find it important for others to read, please consider sending it to your friends and family asking them to read it and in turn sharing it with their family and friends.  Global warming and catastrophic climate change threatens much of life on Earth.  All citizens of the planet need to know about it and act to stop it.  If you prefer a PDF copy click here.  Thank you. KN.] 

The overwhelming evidence of human-caused climate change documents both current impacts with significant costs and extraordinary future risks to society and natural systems. The scientific community has convened conferences, published reports, spoken out at forums and proclaimed, through statements by virtually every national scientific academy and relevant major scientific organization — including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — that climate change puts the well-being of people of all nations at risk.

Surveys show that many Americans think climate change is still a topic of significant scientific disagreement.i Thus, it is important and increasingly urgent for the public to know there is now a high degree of agreement among climate scientists that human-caused climate change is real. Moreover, while the public is becoming aware that climate change is increasing the likelihood of certain local disasters, many people do not yet understand that there is a small, but real chance of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts on people in the United States and around the world.

It is not the purpose of this paper to explain why this disconnect between scientific knowledge and public perception has occurred. Nor are we seeking to provide yet another extensive review of the scientific evidence for climate change. Instead, we present key messages for every American about climate change.

1. Climate scientists agree: climate change is happening here and now. 
Based on well- established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analyses of peer- reviewed studies, and public statements issued by virtually every membership organization of experts in this field. Average global temperature has increased by about 1.4 ̊ F over the last 100 years. Sea level is rising, and some types of extreme events – such as heat waves and heavy precipitation events– are happening more frequently. Recent scientific findings indicate that climate change is likely responsible for the increase in the intensity of many of these events in recent years.

2. We are at risk of pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts. 
Earth’s climate is on a path to warm beyond the range of what has been experienced over the past millions of years.ii The range of uncertainty for the warming along the current emissions path is wide enough to encompass massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems: as global temperatures rise, there is a real risk, however small, that one or more critical parts of the Earth’s climate system will experience abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes. Disturbingly, scientists do not know how much warming is required to trigger such changes to the climate system. 

3. The sooner we act, the lower the risk and cost. 
And there is much we can do. Waiting to take action will inevitably increase costs, escalate risk, and foreclose options to address the risk. The CO2 we produce accumulates in Earth’s atmosphere for decades, centuries, and longer. It is not like pollution from smog or wastes in our lakes and rivers, where levels respond quickly to the effects of targeted policies. The effects of CO2 emissions cannot be reversed from one generation to the next until there is a large- scale, cost-effective way to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Moreover, as emissions continue and warming increases, the risk increases.

By making informed choices now, we can reduce risks for future generations and       yourselves, and help communities adapt to climate change. People have responded successfully to other major environmental challenges such as acid rain and the ozone hole with benefits greater than costs, and scientists working with economists believe there are ways to manage the risks of climate change while balancing current and future economic prosperity.

As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change. But we consider it to be our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

Climate Reality

A. Climate Scientists Agree: Humans are driving climate change
Many Americans believe scientists disagree. Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that humans are changing the climate.

In 2013, only 42% of American adults understood that “most scientists think global warming is happening” and 33% said, “... there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening.” Twenty percent said they “don’t know enough to say.”iv

Even Americans who have come to recognize that climate change is occurring know there are limits to their ability to make this judgment from their own experiences. It might appear as if it’s raining more or less often, that it’s hotter than usual, or there are more storms than there once were. But is this true climate change, or just natural variation? Does a particularly cold or snowy winter, such as the one the eastern United States experienced in 2013 and 14, or variations in rate of in global surface temperature change, call global warming into question? If the climate is changing, are human activities or natural factors responsible?

Americans look to experts for guidance. If people believe the experts are in doubt about whether global warming is happening, it is no surprise that they will have less confidence in their own beliefs. Perceived expert disagreement has other consequences for the American people. Research shows that Americans who think the scientific experts disagree about human-caused climate change are less likely to believe that it might have serious consequences. Failure to appreciate the scientific consensus reduces support for a broad societal response to the challenges and risks that climate change presents.v

So let us be clear: Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists conclude humans are changing the climate.

This widespread agreement is documented not by a single study but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from polls of scientists,iii,iv content analyses of peer-reviewed literaturev,vi and from public statements issued by virtually every expert scientific membership organization on this topic.vii The evidence is overwhelming: levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising. Temperatures are going up. Springs are arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. The patterns of rainfall and drought are changing. Heat waves are getting worse as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying.

The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, cardiovascular scientists, public health experts and others all agree smoking causes cancer. And this consensus among the health community has convinced most Americans that the health risks from smoking are real. A similar consensus now exists among climate scientists, a consensus that maintains climate change is happening, and human activity is the cause. The National Academy of Sciences, for example, says that “the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”viii

B. Climate change is happening now. And it is going to get worse. 
Climate Change is already happening. More heat waves, greater sea level rise, and other changes with consequences for human health, natural ecosystems, and agriculture are already occurring in the United States and worldwide. These problems are very likely to become worse over the next 10-20 years and beyond.

No matter where they live, Americans are experiencing the effects of climate change. Of course, extreme weather events of varied intensity have always occurred. Family photo albums, community lore and history books recount the big storms, droughts and floods that communities have borne. Against this backdrop of natural variation, however, something different is happening. Greenhouse gases from manmade sources such as smokestacks and tailpipes have altered our climate system. Greenhouse gases have supercharged the climate just as steroids supercharged hitting in Major League Baseball. Over the course of a baseball season in the steroid era, we witnessed more – and longer – homers, even though we cannot attribute any specific homer to steroids. Similarly, even though we cannot attribute any particular weather event to climate change, some types of extreme events such as heat waves are now more frequent.
Extreme weather is not just an abstract concept. It is a reality that affects people across the country. In 2013, two out of three Americans said weather in the U.S. has been worse over the past several years, up 12 percentage points since spring 2012. Many (51%) say weather in their local area has been worse over the past several years. Not surprisingly, then, the gap between what we know as scientists (that global warming impacts are here and now) and what Americans perceive is narrowing: about six in 10 Americans already say, “global warming is affecting weather in the U.S.”ix

The core science of climate change
After remaining relatively stable at around 280 parts-per-million (ppm) for millennia, carbon dioxide (CO2) began to rise in the 19th century as people burned fossil fuels in ever-increasing amounts. This upward trend continues today with concentrations breaking the 400 ppm mark just last year. The rate of increase during the last 100 to 150 years has been much more rapid than in other periods of the Earth’s history. The warming effect of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases is well- established and can be demonstrated with simple science experiments and satellite observations. Without the natural “greenhouse” effect from gases in our atmosphere, Earth would be a frozen planet.

In addition to greenhouse gases, there are many other forces that can cause changes in the Earth’s climate – including the creation and destruction of the Earth’s crust, the planet’s wobbly path around (and tilt toward) the sun, variation in the sun’s energy output, volcanic eruptions, shifting ocean currents, and natural changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases. These factors have driven the planet through eras of blazing heat and mile-thick ice sheets. But decades of human-generated greenhouse gases are now the major force driving the direction of climate change, currently overwhelming the effects of these other factors. Many studies show that the combined effects of natural drivers of climate cannot explain the temperature increase observed over the past half century.

Since the late 19th century, Earth’s global average temperature has risen by about 1.4° F. Although this may appear to be a small change, the Earth’s temperature has remained nearly as stable as that of the human body over the course of Western civilization. Just as a 1.4° F fever would be seen as significant in a child’s body, a similar change in our Earth’s temperature is also a concern for human society.

The difference was about 9° F between the last Ice Age, when half of North America was covered in a mile-thick ice sheet, and today. However, whereas that warming occurred over thousands of years, today’s atmosphere has already warmed by 1.4° F in just over 100 years. The projected rate of temperature change for this century is greater than that of any extended global warming period over the past 65 million years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that continuing on a path of rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 could cause another 4 to 8° F warming before the year 2100.x

Here’s a brief summary of some the impacts of climate change that are already occurring and will increase over the coming years:

Sea Ice
Arctic sea ice has been shrinking dramatically, and the rate of loss is accelerating.xi In September 2012, Arctic summer sea ice fell to a new record low at half the historical average - a loss in area nearly twice the size of Alaska.xii

Ice Sheets and Glaciers
The melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets has also accelerated notably.xiii Glaciers continue to melt rapidly, contributing to sea-level rise and also affecting water supplies for as many as a billion people around the world.xiv

Ocean Acidification 
The oceans are absorbing much of the CO2 that smokestacks and tailpipes emit into the atmosphere. As a result, the oceans are rapidly acidifying, with early impacts on shelled organisms such as oysters already documented. The current acidification rate is likely the fastest in 300 million years.xv

Ecological Impacts
As the world has gotten hotter, many of the world’s plants and animals, on land and in the oceans, have begun moving toward the poles. Where possible, some terrestrial species are moving up mountainsides, and marine species are moving to deeper depths and higher latitudes. These changes are happening on every continent and in every ocean.xvixviixviii In some places seasonal behaviors are taking place two or three weeks earlier than they did just a few decades ago.xix The organisms that cannot adapt to the new climate conditions — because they cannot move fast enough or run out of room — will be worse off.

Extinctions are likely to increase, as climate change combines with other human-related environmental pressures. Moreover, the impacts of climate change on ecosystem processes such as decomposition, plant production and nutrient cycling – processes that determine how much fossil fuel-derived CO2 the land and ocean will continue to sequester in coming decades – remain largely unknown.

Sea Level Rise
Sea level rise has also accelerated, making storm surges higher and pushing salt water into the aquifers that coastal communities depend on for fresh water, and increasing the extent of coastal flooding. Over the last two decades, sea levels have risen almost twice as fast as the average during the 20th century.xx Salt-water intrusion can be witnessed in southern Florida, where sea level rise is contributing to salt water infiltration of coastal wells.xxi

Floods, Heat Waves and Droughts
Global warming has changed the pattern of precipitation worldwide.xxii Flooding in the northern half of the eastern U.S., Great Plains and over much of the Midwest has been increasing, especially over the last several decades. These regional flooding trends in the northeast and upper Midwest are linked to increases in extreme precipitation and are consistent with the global trends driven by climate change.xxiii At the same time, areas such as the U.S. Southwest are witnessing more droughts, and these too are consistent with global climate change patterns projected by climate models as a consequence of rising CO2 levels.xxiv

Wildfires
Since 1950, heat waves worldwide have become longer and more frequent.xxv One study indicates that the global area hit by extremely hot summertime temperatures has increased 50-fold,xxvi and the fingerprint of global warming has been firmly identified in these trends.xxvii In the U.S., new record high temperatures now regularly outnumber new record lows by a ratio of 2:1.xxviii

Climate change has amplified the threat of wildfires in many places. In the western U.S., both the area burned by wildfires as well as the length of the fire season have increased substantially in recent decades. Earlier spring snowmelt and higher spring and summer temperatures contribute to this change.xxix Climate change has increased the threat of “mega-fires” – large fires that burn proportionately greater areas.xxx Warming has also led to wildfires present in some regions where they have been absent in recent history.xxxi

Effects on Health and Wellbeing
Climate disruption is already affecting human health and well-being in many ways, and health threats are expected to intensify.xxxii Some of the well-understood impacts include the direct effects of heat and the effects of other weather conditions such as droughts, floods, and severe storms. Heat waves cause deaths and illness, with urban dwellers, the elderly, the poor, and certain other especially vulnerable groups.xxxiii While heat-related deaths and illnesses have diminished in recent decades,
thanks to better forecasting, early warning systems, and/or increased air conditioning, factors such as the aging of the population are expected to increase vulnerability.xxxiv Storms and floods can injure and kill victims in the short term while lingering consequences may range from mold growth in flooded buildings (aggravating asthma) to contaminated drinking water supplies to post-traumatic stress and other mental health disorders.xxxv,xxxvi Some air pollutants increase with climate change, with
the potential to aggravate heart and respiratory diseases. Some plant products such as ragweed pollen reach higher concentrations for longer stretches each year, affecting people with allergies. xxxvii,xxxviii, xxxix,xl

Scientists have extensively studied the impact of climate change on the risk of infectious diseases.xli Climate change affects the life cycle and distribution of disease-carrying “vectors”— mosquitoes, ticks, and rodents, which transmit such diseases as West Nile virus, equine encephalitis, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Hantavirus.xlii There is uncertainty about how climate change will affect infectious disease risk, since many factors other than climate affect the spread of disease. The role of climate change on the ranges of vector-borne diseases in the U.S., such as Lyme disease, West Nile virus and dengue is an active area of research.xliii

Climate Change and National Security
Recent reports from U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and National Academy of Science studies have called attention to the implications of current and probable future climate change for U.S. national security.xliv They identify obvious coastal concerns relating to sea level rise, and others linked to storms, freshwater availability, and agricultural productivity around the globe. For example: “Climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.”xlv In the context of other global dynamics that give rise to political instability, and societal tensions, changes in climate are considered as potential threat multipliers or instability accelerants according to the CNA Military Advisory Board — a panel of our nation’s highest-ranking retired military leaders.xlvi Further, national security assets are often global first respondents to humanitarian needs associated with natural disasters including typhoons, hurricanes, and flooding.

Climate change can influence resource competition and place new burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions. The reports call attention to the fact that these burdens can trigger violence. There is a growing recognition that the displacement of large numbers of people due to water scarcity and agricultural failure, as in the recent history of Syria, can exacerbate tensions that can lead to civil unrest. Senior officers and officials in the U.S. DOD are now regularly speaking publically about how an unabated rise in greenhouse gas emissions could add additional burdens to the infrastructure and mission capacity of our military forces.xlvii

II. CLIMATE RISKS
Given the high stakes, it is valuable to understand not just what is most likely to happen, but what might possibly happen to our climate. There is a possibility that temperatures will rise much higher and impacts will be much worse than expected. Moreover, as global temperature rises, the risk increases that one or more important parts of the Earth's climate system will experience changes that may be abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible, causing large damages and high costs. xlviii

We manage risk every day, often without thinking about it. We buckle our seat belts, latch our kids into car seats and buy insurance for a host of unlikely, but serious possibilities such as losing our homes or belongings to theft, fire or flood. We don’t think these things will happen, but we cannot be sure they won’t. Uncertainty means risk. Much of our day-to-day risk management is to lessen the danger directly. For example, we purchase cars with the latest safety devices and use these. But another form of risk management is to spread the risk, as with insurance. This helps with recovery if the unthinkable happens.

When we take the long view on climate change, we face these same uncertainties and risks. Climate projections for the year 2100 (when many children born this year will still be living) give a range of plausible temperatures. We are uncertain whether we will experience the high or low end of the range, but the risks of bad outcomes increase greatly at the high end of warming scenarios. By analogy, we are acting like people who take risks with their health (e.g., with behaviors like smoking, poor food choices) but still hoping to live long lives free of serious illness.

To make decisions about managing a risk, we consider the likelihood that a particular event will happen, the consequences if it did, and the cost of effective actions to prevent it. These are the same steps that go into making decisions about climate change. The process starts with an understanding of the risks. What is the likelihood that extreme climate changes will occur, and if they do, what consequences will we face? How much will it cost to prevent the risk?

A. High-risk scenarios: the high-side projections
Where there is a range of uncertainty, the high-side projections represent tail risk, a common concept in the world of finance. As most people understand, no investment is a sure thing. There is a range of possibilities about how that investment will fare. You could lose all you invested or make many times what you paid, but the most likely result is closer to the middle of these extremes. Although the chance of a very bad outcome — or tail risk — is small, it cannot be ignored. That is why advisors often recommend not investing any more than you can afford to lose.

With our future health and well-being at stake, it is common sense to consider the tail risks of climate change as a part of future plans. Consider the example of a seaside community in Florida. There are three futures to consider. Even under the most optimistic scenario (very aggressive greenhouse gas reductions and minimal melting), sea level is projected to rise about one foot this century.xlix The middle-of-the-road projection for the current pathway is about two feet. This is a fairly likely possibility. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates the probability of a sea level rise of 2 to 3 feet to be more than about 60%.l But the tail risk projection as forecast by the U.S. National Climate Assessment sees the community contending with a sea level rise of close to seven feet.li

Below are some of the high-side projections and tail risks we incur by following the current path for CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these projections derive from computer simulations of Earth and its climate system. These models apply the best understanding science has to offer about how our climate works and how it will change in the future. There are many such models and all of them have been validated, to varying degrees, by their ability to replicate past climate changes.

Global Temperature
According to the IPCC, given the current pathway for carbon emissions the high-end of the “likely” range for the expected increase in global temperature is about 8 ̊ F by the end of the century.lii This is similar to the roughly 9° F warming that ended the last ice age. It is important to remember that temperature change due to CO2 emissions is essentially irreversible for several hundred years since this CO2 is removed from the atmosphere only very slowly by natural processes.liii
Floods, Heat Waves, Drought
Globally, if human society follows the high-end scenario, extreme heat events that currently occur only once every 20 years are projected to occur annually.liv Global warming will also lead to shifting precipitation patterns and concentration of precipitation into heavier downpours — critical risk factors for flooding and drought.

Sea Level
Sea level rise projections over the next century vary considerably, with the high-end scenarios yielding a rise of up to 6 or 7 feet by 2100. lv,lvi About 7 to 8 million people in the U.S. live within 6 feet of the local high tide line, and storm surge can extend flooding far beyond the high tide line, as witnessed in Superstorm Sandy.lvii Coastal flooding events that currently occur once every 100 years will occur much more frequently, possibly as often as yearly for many locations, rendering many cities and communities uninhabitable as is.lviii

Current greenhouse gas emissions would have considerable impact on sea level rise beyond the year 2100. In addition to driving sea level rise in the 21st century, current emissions might lead to dramatically higher sea level rise in the distant future, possibly beyond 16 feet, which is higher than the elevation of many major cities around the world. There is a slight risk that such large rise could occur faster than expected (see below).lix

B. Abrupt climate change
Most projections of climate change presume that future changes — greenhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and effects such as sea level rise — will happen incrementally. A given amount of emission will lead to a given amount of temperature increase that will lead to a given amount of smooth incremental sea level rise. However, the geological record for the climate reflects instances where a relatively small change in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole. In other words, pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes that have massively disruptive and large-scale impacts. At that point, even if we do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, potentially unstoppable processes are set in motion. We can think of this as sudden climate brake and steering failure where the problem and its consequences are no longer something we can control. In climate terms, abrupt change means change occurring over periods as short as decades or even years.lx

The risk of abrupt climate change is particularly challenging because, while plausible, we have few historical measurements to guide our judgment of likelihood. The financial meltdown of 2008 was a good example of this kind of risk. We had no history of intertwined real estate and financial markets to draw on, and few experts recognized the risk indicators that led to enormous and rapid economic consequences. It is no surprise that we use a metaphor like bursting bubbles for such highly damaging financial events. We do not recognize we are in one; things seem stable, until suddenly they are not.
If human emissions cause temperatures to increase toward the high end of our projections, we increase the risk that we will push parts of our climate system past certain thresholds that lead to abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes to our planet and impacts for Americans and people worldwide.

Some of the planetary climate-related systems — both physical and biological —that could trigger such abrupt changes for the planet, if pushed past their limits, include: large-scale ice sheet collapse, collapse of part of the Gulf Stream, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and coral reef die-off. Disturbingly, there is low confidence in the estimates of the temperature thresholds that would trigger such changes. While some scenarios – such as the disruption of the Gulf Stream/Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and rapid methane release from the sea floor – based on the latest research are considered very unlikely, this does not mean their likelihood has gone to zero.lxi Given the complexity of these systems and uncertainties in how they will respond to high-end warming, there may be surprises that we are not yet aware of. As per the National Academy of Sciences Report on Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: “...‘dragons’ in the climate system still may exist.”lxii

Some potential climate change scenarios include: ecosystem collapse
Climate change threatens the collapse of some ecosystems and amplifies extinction pressures on species, which have already elevated extinction rates well above natural background rates.lxiii,lxiv,lxv The rate of climate change now may be as fast as any extended warming period over the past 65 million years, and it is projected to accelerate in the coming decades.lxvi When rapid climate change is added to other sources of extinction pressure such as ocean acidification, land use, invasive species, and/or exploitation, the resulting rates of extinction are likely to place our era among a handful of severe biodiversity crises in the Earth’s geological record.

Arctic sea ice collapse 
Warmer Arctic temperatures have caused Arctic summer sea ice to shrink rapidly over the past decade, with potentially large consequences including shifts in climate and weather around the northern hemisphere. Projections suggest that late summer sea ice may disappear entirely in the coming decades.lxvii The loss of Arctic sea ice has serious consequences for the Earth’s climate system. Arctic sea ice covers an important portion of the planet’s surface and reflects sunlight back into space that would otherwise warm the ocean. The loss of Arctic sea ice creates a feedback loop, as lost ice leads to additional ocean warming. The ice loss has major effects on the Arctic, and may have effects on weather patterns extending into the lower latitudes.lxviii,lxix

Large-Scale Sea Ice Collapse 
Large-scale melting of both the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets include large-scale losses of ice, potentially leading to tens of feet of sea level rise. While most of these losses are projected as being unlikely to occur before 2100, we may pass the point where these losses will be set in motion in the coming decades, with at least a slight chance that we have already done so.lxx

In Antarctica, marine ice/ice sheet instability threatens abrupt and large losses from both the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and portions of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Any significant ice loss likely would be irreversible for thousands of years. Simulations of warming and ice loss during earlier warm periods of the last 5 million years indicate these areas can contribute 23 feet of sea level rise.lxxi

Some studies indicate that abrupt and irreversible ice loss from WAIS is possible, yet uncertainty regarding the threshold is such that it is not possible to say what temperature rise is necessary to trigger collapse.lxxii,lxxiii An abrupt change in the WAIS this century is deemed plausible, with an unknown but probably low probability.lxxiv Recently an acceleration of ice loss from the WAIS has been observed, and it is not possible to dismiss or confirm that these changes are associated with destabilization of the WAIS.lxxv

Destabilization of sea floor methane
Frozen methane in the shallow shelves of the Arctic Ocean represents an unlikely but potentially strong feedback loop in a warming climate. Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas. While the release of these deposits due to global warming is likely to be slow and mitigated by dissolution into the sea, these deposits are large and vulnerable to warming expected on the higher emission pathway.lxxvi The release of Arctic methane hydrates to the atmosphere would further increase, and perhaps substantially, the rate of global warming.lxxvii

Permafrost melt
The release of CO2 and methane from thawing Arctic permafrost represents another critical feedback loop triggered by global warming.

The amount of carbon stored in the permafrost is the largest reservoir of readily accessible organic carbon on land.lxxviii However, the positive feedback warming due to the loss of carbon from frozen soils is generally missing from the major climate change models.lxxix Not surprisingly, methane and carbon dioxide emissions from thawing permafrost are thus regarded as a key uncertainty in climate change projections.
Disturbingly, there is low confidence in the estimates of expected emissions from thawing permafrost.lxxx While an abrupt release on the timescale of a few decades is judged unlikely, this conclusion is based on immature science and sparse monitoring capabilities.lxxxi The high end of the best estimate range for the total carbon released from thawed permafrost by 2100 is 250 GtC on the higher pathway. Other individual estimates are far higher.lxxxii

III. CLIMATE RESPONSE

A. The sooner we act, the lower the risk and cost
The longer we wait to respond, the more the risks of climate change will increase. Conversely, the sooner we take action, the more options we will have to reduce risk and limit the human and economic cost of climate change.

What steps society takes to meet the challenge of climate change — the questions of when, how and to what extent we respond — is a matter on which all Americans must decide. We urge that these decisions be guided by two inescapable facts: first, the effects of any additional CO2 emissions will last for centuries; second, there is a risk of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes in the Earth’s climate system with massively disruptive impacts.

Emissions of greenhouse gases today commit the planet to unavoidable warming and other impacts in the future. As we continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions, we accelerate and compound the effects and risks of climate change into the future. Conversely, the sooner we make a concerted effort to curtail the burning of fossil fuels as our primary energy source and releasing the CO2 to the air, the lower our risk and cost will be.

B. There is much we can do
We've successfully faced environmental challenges before. There's much we can do to respond to the challenge and risks of climate change, particularly by tapping America's strength in innovation.

The United States is one of the most resourceful and innovative societies in the world. We are a nation of problem solvers. When scientists identified the grave environmental threats posed by the acid rain and the ozone hole, they worked together with other stakeholders — consumers, industry and government — to develop solutions that would successfully reduce the threat while minimizing short- and long-term economic impacts. As we hope this paper has made clear, however, successfully responding to climate change will test our resolve and ingenuity in ways unlike any other environmental challenge we have faced.

Many of our major cities — New York, Seattle, Boston and Chicago are just a few — have assessed the scientific evidence, and decided to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

We believe that our responsibility as scientists is to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people fully understand the climate realities and risks we face. Prior experience shows that we and future generations will be better off when science effectively informs decision-making and action. Armed with scientific understanding about the gravity of certain environmental problems, our nation has successfully used innovative approaches to address these challenges.

In summary, responding effectively to the challenge of climate change requires a full understanding that there is now a high degree of agreement among climate scientists about the fact that climate change is happening now, because of human activities, and that the risks –including the possibility for abrupt and disruptive changes — will increase the longer greenhouse gas emissions continue.

Notes:
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Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/files/Climate-Beliefs-April-2013.pdf
ii National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
iii Doran, P. and M. Zimmerman (2009). Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 90 (3), 22-23. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009EO030002/abstract
iv Cook et al. (2013). Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 8 024024.
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024
v Oreskes, N. (2004). The scientific consensus on climate change. Science, 306. http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/Research/Climate_Change/Oreskes%202004%20Climate%20change.pdf
vi Cook et al. (2013).
vii National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Consensus. http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific- consensus
viii National Research Council. (2010). Advancing the Science of Climate Change. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
ix Leiserowitz et al. (2013) Extreme weather and climate change in the American mind, April 2013. Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/report/climate-change- american-mind-series-spring-2013
x IPCC (2013). Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Table SPM.2, Page 25.
xi IPCC (2013). AR5 WGI SPM.
xii National Snow and Ice Data Center, (2012). Arctic sea ice extent settles at record seasonal minimum. Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis, September 19, 2012. http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/09/arctic-sea-ice-extent-settles-at-record-seasonal-minimum/
xiii IPCC (2013). AR5 WGI SPM xiv IPCC (2013). AR5 WGI SPM
xv Hönisch et al. (2012). The geological record of ocean acidification. Science, 335 (6072), 1058-63. doi: 10.1126/science.1208277
xvi Parmesan, C. (2006). Ecological and evolutionary responses to recent climate change. Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics, 37, 637669.
xvii Cleland, E.E., Chuine, I., Menzel, A., Mooney, H.A. & Schwartz, M.D. (2007). Shifting plant phenology in response to global change. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 22, 357365.
xviii Parmesan, C. and Yohe, G. (2003). A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems. Nature, 421, 37-42.
xix Linderholm, Hans W. (2006). Review: Growing season changes in the last century. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 137. http://research.eeescience.utoledo.edu/lees/papers_PDF/Linderholm_2006_AFM.pdf
xx IPCC (2013). AR5 WGI SPM
xxi Langevin, C. D. and Zygnerski, M. (2013). Effect of sea-level rise on salt water intrusion near a coastal well field in southeastern Florida. Ground Water, 51, 781–803.
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xxii Trenberth, K. E. (2011). Changes in precipitation with climate change. Climate Research, 47, 123- 138.
xxiii Melillo et al. (2013). Third National Climate Assessment Draft Report. Washington, DC: United States Global Change Research Program.
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xxv Trenberth, K.E., P.D. Jones, P. Ambenje, R. Bojariu, D. Easterling, A. Klein Tank, D. Parker, F. Rahimzadeh, J.A. Renwick, M. Rusticucci, B. Soden and P. Zhai. (2007). Chapter 3, Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
xxvi Hansen, James, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy. (2012). Perception of climate change. August 6, 2012. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10.1073/pnas.1205276109 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1205276109.abstract
xxvii Gutowski, W.J., G.C. Hegerl, G.J. Holland, T.R. Knutson, L.O. Mearns, R.J. Stouffer, P.J. Webster, M.F. Wehner, F.W. Zwiers. (2008). Causes of Observed Changes in Extremes and Projections of Future Changes in Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. Regions of Focus: North America, Hawaii, Caribbean, and U.S. Pacific Islands. T.R. Karl, G.A. Meehl, C.D. Miller, S.J. Hassol, A.M. Waple, and W.L. Murray (eds.). A Report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Washington, DC.
xxviii Meehl, G. A., C. Tebaldi, G. Walton, D. Easterling, and L. McDaniel. (2009). Relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L23701.
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xxxvii Kinney, P.L. (2008). Climate change, air quality, and human health. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 35, 459-467.
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WHAT WE KNOW: THE REALITY, RISKS AND RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
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xl Ariano, R., G.W. Canonica, and G. Passalacqua. (2010). Possible role of climate changes in 23 variations in pollen seasons and allergic sensitizations during 27 years. Annals of Allergy, 24 Asthma & Immunology, 104, 215-222.
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xliii Karl, T.R. et al. (2009).
xliv United States Department of Defense (2011). 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. Washington, DC. http://www.defense.gov/pubs/2014_Quadrennial_Defense_Review.pdf
xlv National Research Council (2011). National Security Implications of Climate Change for U.S. Naval Forces. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
xlvi Goodman, S., Sullivan, G. (2013). Climate change as a “threat multiplier.” Politico. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/climate-change-is-threat-multiplier-87338.html
xlvii Castellaw, Lt. Gen. J., Titley, R. Adm. D. (2014). The U.S. military leads on climate change. The Hill. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/200412-the-us-military-leads-on-climate- change
xlviii National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... xlix IPCC (2013). AR5 WGI SPM
l IPCC (2013). AR5 WGI SPM
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lii IPCC (2012). IPCC Guidance Note for Lead Authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties. “Likely” defined by the IPCC as a probability of 66% -100%.
liii IPCC (2013). Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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lx National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxi National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxii National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxiii National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxiv National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change....
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lxvi National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxvii National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change....
lxviii Francis, J. A. and S. J. Vavrus (2012) Evidence Linking Arctic Amplification to Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes, Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L06801. doi:10.1029/2012GL051000
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lxx IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxi IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxii IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxiii National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxxiv National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxxv IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxvi IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxvii IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxviii IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxix IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxx IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.
lxxxi National Research Council (2013). Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.... lxxxii IPCC AR5 WGI Technical Summary.