Something awful is happening in the waters off Peru's northern coast, where some 3,000 dolphins have died and washed ashore since January. This rates as one of the worst, if not the worst, Unusual Mortality Event (UME) ever recorded.
(I've been writing about the UME with marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico since BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster here and here and here.)
In recent weeks more than 1,200 dead seabirds, mostly
pelicans, have washed up along the same Peruvian beaches. And Saturday the
government declared a health alert along Peru's northern coastline, urging
residents and tourists to stay away from the beach while it investigates the
unexplained deaths. It also warned local officials to wear protective gear
when handling dead birds and animals.
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20 April 2012
The scientists were a little tired and burned out. For two weeks, they had been aboard a research ship in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to find and analyze deep-sea communities of coral on the dark bottom, nearly a mile below.
A robot submersible was down there now. Charles Fisher, a Penn State biologist who specializes in corals, was doing other work as he kept an eye on the video feed.
Suddenly, he stopped.
They had found the reef they were searching for.
And it didn't look good. Something was wrong.
Two years after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and a three-month gusher that released five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the laborious and meticulous process of quantifying the damage is still under way.
Much of the research by the government remains confidential because it may ultimately be part of legal proceedings against BP, the company that owned the rig.
But some results are being made public, including the recent findings of several Pennsylvania scientists studying deep-sea corals.
Last month, coral experts from Temple University and Pennsylvania State University, plus a geochemist from Haverford College, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that coral colonies at a site seven miles from the well - and in the path of the drifting oil - suffered severe effects.
The corals showed "widespread signs of stress," according to the paper.
Of 43 kinds of coral, a quarter of them showed impacts to more than 90 percent of the colony. They were covered with brown goo. They had lost tissue.---
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Hug the Monster - Bill Blakemore
Sometimes, the right metaphor can save your life.
“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force
trainers to those headed into harm’s way.
The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you
find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.
If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive
“brainlock” — you’re lost.
But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize
the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense
energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also
engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of
survival go way up.
Around the world, a growing number of people are showing
signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to
be a great crisis facing us all.
Established scientists, community and government leaders and
journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that
manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if
humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly
to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective
civilization.”
Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance
of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.
For many years now, the worlds scientists and economists
have depicted upheavals in security plans, financial networks, and food
and water systems due to the rapidity with which annual global temperature is
rising as a result of excess carbon emissions.
But those who have also hugged this monster are finding that
doing so transforms the crisis:
- for government leaders around the world, into a wide field of ways to inspire action as they begin to find reasons for what the Holocaust scholar Philip Hallie calls “realistic hope.”
- for climate scientists, economists and other academic specialists, into the most fascinating, challenging and complex puzzle they’ve ever faced together — fascinating and challenging, not least because its biggest unknown is “what will the humans do?” (The world’s scientists have been the heroes and leaders of this story from the start. They’ve had to live longest with the fear it can induce.)
- and for journalists, into what we call “a great story” – and please note that for us professional reporters, the word “story” is a term of art. This story is exciting professionally for its enormous and unprecedented journalistic problems, and for the variety it presents to our imaginations and skills, our art and our craft. It may even be greater, in some ways, than the approach of World War Two must have been for journalists in the 1930s, given the projected effects of the rapid global change the world’s climate scientists report is now under way.
The climate scientists and some other experts have actually
been hugging this monster, transforming their fearful inner climate into
action, doing so for some time, albeit privately.
Past Silence ‘for Fear of Paralyzing the Public’
A few years ago, this reporter heard a prominent climate and
environment scientist speaking at a large but off-the-record conference of
experts and policy makers from around the world who had gathered at Harvard
University’s Kennedy School.
(The conference was held under “Chatham House Rules”; in
hopes of encouraging vigorous and free discussion, they allow the content of
talks and discussions to be reported later but not the identity of the speakers
or participants.)
He told us that he and most other climate scientists often
simply didn’t want to speak openly about what they were learning about how
disruptive and frightening the changes of manmade global warming were clearly
going to be for “fear of paralyzing the public.”
That speaker now has an influential job in the Obama
administration.
But even The White House is showing signs of more open
discussion about climate change in the near future. President Obama recently
told Rolling Stone that global warming may well be an issue even during his
reelection campaign, which would likely highlight the question of just how how
serious — even frightening — it is.
References in some media to looming catastrophic
consequences of climate change seem to this reporter to be more frequent.
A few days ago in the New York Times, a thoroughgoing front page article about global warming
quoted a range of scientists on the overall effect of the global upheavals that
can be expected from manmade global warming. Here are three excerpts — bolded
highlights mine:
- “‘The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,’ said Raymond T. Pierre-humbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. ‘Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.’” (Recent scientific studies report the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is proving to be higher than expected.)
- “Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late.”
- “‘Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, “We’re sure it’s not a problem,” ‘ said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. ‘It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.’“
‘A Risk to the Collective (Global) Civilization’
Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization”
(meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or
unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and
government and policy leaders around the world.
Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself —
have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among
peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often
experienced and sometimes engaged in.
Careful not to prompt destructive panic, nor to lose
credibility, responsible experts have been careful to temper their public
depictions of what the world’s climate science has been revealing about the
worst effects — if humanity does not handle the problem immediately — of the
rapid climatic and oceanic changes already under way.
But clearly, with so enormous and inclusive a truth as this
one, the proven details of which are widely available to anyone with access to
the Internet, “the truth will out, we see it day by day,” as English poet
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote long ago.
And so, inevitably, experts and leaders around the world are
beginning to be more open about the frightening prospects.
However, in doing so, they are also beginning to demonstrate
how to hug this monster — to embrace the fear it instills. They need to have
done so to speak with credibility.
This is something leaders may do almost instinctively, as in
the famous case of FDR.
‘Nothing to Fear But…’ – Leaders’ Meta-Psychology in a Grave
Crisis
“We have nothing to fear… but fear itself!” — FDR’s most
famous words. Soon after he was elected president in the midst of the Great
Depression, he delivered them before the newsreel cameras with an intentionally
determined and jaunty self-confidence.
He was using even his voice and body language to demonstrate
the affect — the attitude — with which to hug the monster, fear.
It was a form of meta-psychology, asking Americans to think about
their own psychology, in this case their fear, asking them to get their minds
around it, embrace it, and, in a way, to become their own shrinks — to examine
their fears and try to convert them into effective action, to get on with it.
This reporter has seen a variety of leaders in the United
States and other countries in recent years begin to do something similar
regarding manmade global warming — in speeches at the global climate summit in
Durban, South Africa, in December 2011, at a variety of policy, scientific and
academic conferences, and in news reports about leaders at all levels from
local activists and mayors to governors to heads of state.
(It’s even tempting to suspect that the growing number of
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies now flowing out of Hollywood are
somehow a response to the growing concern and quiet fear that more people may
be feeling as the worrisome news from climate scientists increases alongside
inescapable and increasingly erratic and extreme weather and shifting seasons.)
“Hug the Monster: How Fear Can Save Your Life” is the title
of a chapter in The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save
Your Life, the book in which this reporter, after five years of wrestling
with the enormous and daunting story of manmade global warming, first learned
the phrase “Hug the monster” — a phrase that immediately struck me for its
pertinence to the climate story.
The book was written by Ben Sherwood after he served as
executive producer for ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” during which, as he
explains it, he had noticed so many survivors of different kinds among the
guests on the TV show that he set out to discover and report what was known in
different companies and disciplines about who survives different kinds of
crises and why.
He published it in 2009, two years before he became
president of ABC News, and established a related website, www.thesurvivorsclub.org.
Nowhere in the book does Sherwood mention climate change,
but here’s a passage from the end of that chapter that struck this reporter for
its relevance to the increasingly public questions about how our global
civilization will deal with the advance of global warming:
Fear as a Security System — When Properly Used (Air Force
Mantra)
“Without a doubt, fear is the most ancient, efficient, and
effective security system in the world. Over many thousands of years, our
magnificently wired brains have sensed, reacted, and then acted upon every imaginable
threat. Practically speaking, when you manage fear, your chances improve in
almost every situation. But if your alarms go haywire, your odds plummet.”
He concludes:
“For survival then, here’s the bottom line. If you’re scared
out of your mind, try to remember this Air Force mantra: Hug The monster.
Wrap your arms around fear, wrestle it under control, and turn it into a
driving force in your plan of attack. ‘Survival is not about bravery and
heroics,’ award-winning journalist Laurence Gonzales writes in his superb book Deep
Survival. ‘Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: They turn it into
anger and focus.’ The good news is that you can learn to subdue the monster and
extinguish some of the clanging bells. The more you practice, the easier it
becomes. Indeed, with enough hugs, you can even tame the beast and turn him
into your best friend and most dependable ally.”
As a growing number of professional journalists around the
world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin
of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is
unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.
But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and
personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug
this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.
For us journalists, the core responsibilities of our
profession include knowing how to report unpleasant but important facts — and
to do so in ways that nonetheless engage groups small and large, even in a
sense “entertain” them, as in entertaining the mind, and to try to win their
tacit appreciation for doing so.
Obviously, when the news is horrendous, such as, say, a
looming world war or the rapid climb in global temperature and ocean
acidification, our job includes the very essence of what it means to hug the
monster.
But as this reporter and a growing number of others now
working the story can report, once we do so, manmade global warming transforms
into “a great story” (in our profession’s term of art) — and even one in which
it is possible to glimpse a number of reasons for “realistic hope.”
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