The Science and Politics of Climate Change, part 2
Ξ March 21st, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, International Terroirs, Interviews, Wine & Politics, Wine News |
Here presented is part two of my conversation with Climatologist Gregory V. Jones, America’s most rigorous voice in the science as it relates to climate change and viticulture. As the reader learned in part one, Professor Jones of Southern Oregon University, has written extensively on the interlinked disciplines. In part one he spoke of his intriguing background and of his international perspective and expertise. Also discussed was ethno-climatological observations of how we experience climate changes over time, or, more to the point, how we don’t. In this section he further reflects upon that psychologically cross-cultural fixture, but more importantly, Professor Jones here explores climate change through the double registers of science and politics. How do we hear a message above the noise? What are we to make of the recent ‘Climate Gate’ debacle involving the University of East Anglia and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? Enjoy.
Admin Excuse me for tipping my political hand, but in the bad old days of the Bush Administration everything issue was thoroughly politicized. Climate change was one of the topics about which you could not effectively speak. Have you noticed a significant loosening of tongues and any increase in research programs since the beginning of the Obama Administration?
Gregory Jones Well, a little bit. There are actually a lot of stories behind the scenes. I really don’t think this is a Republican/Democrat kind of thing. I think it is more tied to variations of conservative Big Business versus environmental. And that is not purely Democrat/Republican. And the reason I get back to this is that I think that there have been scenarios that have played out in other administrations, for example, that of Clinton/Gore, that were very interesting. One of the most recognized hurricane researchers in the world, out of Colorado State University, from every story I’ve heard on it, he had his funding pulled out from under him because he wouldn’t say what Al Gore wanted him to say. That in and of itself tells you that yeah, the Bush Administration muted some things around the science of climate change, but the Clinton/Gore Administration did the same thing. And I am sure it goes on behind the scenes of virtually every administration with every issue. They are going to pander to what they’re being paid to pander to.
So I don’t know… I’m very anti-two party system government here in America. They don’t represent me whatsoever! Obama doesn’t represent me. Neither did Bush. Why should I even be associated with them? So I’m telling you my political leanings! (laughs) Bit I do think it is a little bit more open right now. I think that there are still issues that the business lobbyists are controlling what’s happening relative to the Republican and the Democratic moderate side of things. It may get better, but in this economic climate the first very thing that went away is the climate change issue. So again, that gets to the idea of the urgency and the perception. The urgency is right now dealing with lack of jobs and other issues, the economic climate, and not so much about cap and trade and being good stewards of our atmosphere.
Yes. You know things are changing in however a quiet and subterranean way, off the political radar, as it were, when some of the most radicalized environmentalists, many Republican, are emerging these days from out of Dick Cheney’s Wyoming! There it is environmental degradation, sub-surface water displacement etc., owing to various mining operations and technologies. It is rather ironic that conservative minds are being changed in such in-your-face ways. Sportsmen and the NRA, as well, have aligned themselves with water conservation activists.
GJ That’s going on in my neck of the woods, too. In Northern California and Southern Oregon, Klamath River issues have created the same kind of thing, where now tribes, farmers, business and environmental groups have pretty much all come together and realized that the dams have to come off the rivers. The problem is that it doesn’t play itself out in a year or two. They’re talking about 20 to 25 years before it will ever happen. In the meantime, the salmon in the Klamath River system could go extinct.
There is something about official news organizations that repeat certain framing devices around debates when in fact, behind the scenes, in very quiet ways, opinions are being changed and folks are coming to shared understandings through very novel issue combinations. Half the time I wonder why do I even read or watch this or that particular debate when I know full well that it doesn’t accurately reflect the reality on the ground.
GJ Sure, sure. Just going back to conversations you’ve had with people in the wine industry, and I have them as well. There are two different viewpoints. You have to look at the winemaker’s side of things. You know, anybody who owns a winery and is producing wine they are never going to stand at the front door of their cellar and say, “Yeah, climate change is impacting me” and then have it look, have people look, differently on their product. I can go to the back door of the cellar and they will tell me, “Yeah, climate is a real issue for me. I’ve had to change not only how I manage my vineyards but how the fruit comes in, and how I’m processing it.” But they are not going to stand at the front door and say that! Unless they’re proactive and trying to show that they’re trying to be better stewards through adaptation and mitigation. So I think there’s a lot of that out there. And I respect it. Completely.
But I also really respect people that have stood up and have really talked about it. A great example of is that of Paul Dolan of the Mendocino Wine Company. I think Parducci is part of their ownership, but Paul Dolan has been very out-going, talking about how this is a significant issue that all of us need to be concerned with. He’s been very proactive, and he’s a producer; it affects his bottom line. But for every one of Paul that is out there talking about this kind of thing, there are hundreds and thousands who really don’t say very much. And even get to the denial stage.
And the nature of marketing, they simply haven’t figured out a way to use the issue profitably. Wine marketing is often about removing the threat to the consumer of actually having to learn anything, certainly with respect to purchasing decisions. That dumbing down of the public from within the marketing strategies of the wine industry itself I find particularly hard to grasp.
GJ I think there have been some people who have been successful at this. The Kiwis and a few of the Aussies; probably the Kiwis have been on the forefront of it by really developing great strategies showing carbon neutrality, or at least some level of mitigation/adaptation and proactive strategies, because the British market really almost demanded it. So there was a very strong play by some of the Kiwi producers to work that market, playing the game very well, I think. But in the mean time they’ve also become more energy efficient, more sustainable, because they looked at themselves critically in terms of water, carbon and chemical usage. I think that there are some out there that are doing some really good things.
Then on the other side of the coin, I was just mentioning winemakers and people who own wine-making production facilities, but you can also go to the vineyards. You can’t talk to somebody who has been growing grapes for 30 years and have them tell you things are exactly the same. They are just not. They are just absolutely not. They [growers] don’t make wholesale changes. You don’t all of a sudden one day say “It’s just too hot. I’ll do something different”. They are making strategic changes year in, year out that reflect the overall environmental conditions that they are producing in. If they didn’t, their vineyards wouldn’t be alive and producing today. They just wouldn’t.
So I think that part of what is going on when you talk to somebody, a grower, and you ask have they noticed climate change, well, they hem and haw, and say “Well, yeah, but I haven’t really been doing anything”. But if you ask them what have they been doing for 20 years? Have they changed anything in their operation? Then, all of a sudden, it will all come out. “Well, yeah, you know, I do a different strategy of leaf-pulling; I maintain my canopy a little bit different; we planted a new block over here and we changed the row orientation; we put in a slightly different type of irrigation system to manage water more efficiently….” So all of a sudden they start talking about all the things that they have done to adapt to their environmental changes. But if you asked him at one fell swoop about climate change? They’d say, “Nah” Haven’t done much.”
Excellent. A quick question. What is your take on the email scandal out of the University of East Anglia, the so-called ‘Climate Gate’?
GJ I think it was a crime. I think the people who stole them should be prosecuted.
The authorities are trying to find out who hacked the computers. I have heard mention of some Russian organization, the Russian Mafia, perhaps. Do you have any information?
GJ I don’t really have any information, but I am going to give you what my feeling is. I think Big Oil and Gas funded some right-wing, skeptical group to hire the Russian mafia, or some arm of the mafia, to go in and hack the emails. They’ll never be traced back to where they really came from. That is unfortunate. I think it was clearly a crime. I think the real downside to the whole thing is that if I had been involved in that scandal, I’m sure I would have written things that would have been misconstrued, and that I would be at the center of it, too. You and I could send emails for the next sixth months and then somebody hacks them and uses them against us in one way, shape or form. I would expect that to happen because that is the way the press and blood-thirsty people want it.
I know virtually everybody who was at the center of that scandal. I know Phil Jones well, I know [Keith] Briffa, I know Michael Mann [Penn State], I know all those guys. There may have been a little bit of this or that which showed up as being not quite copacetic all the way through. But, in general, I don’t see it as a real issue. What I do see is that every scientific operation going on out there has some room for error and failings. This just probably brought that to the forefront.
It means the IPCC will get tighter, they’ll get better and I think they’ll correct a lot of the issues that are out there. But did they do things that were wrong? Maybe. Maybe they didn’t want to be around some of the barking skeptics; and maybe they did say things that weren’t flattering to that side, maybe limiting them from debate. That’s not right. But, in general, did they massage the data, did they hide things? No.
We know that very few of the emails show the slightest traces of data massaging or distortion. But what is most amusing is that the email data base was preserved intact, this according to the information-sharing protocols of the scientific community in general. Which is to say the material was just sitting there, subject to internal review by any number of supervising authorities at any time!
GJ Sure. I think it was all very unfortunate. I kind of saddens me in one respect, that our culture has to stoop to these kinds of ways; but it also, I think, may produce a better outcome in the long run because it forces those scientists and other scientists within that same discipline, and the IPCC, to look at itself little harder.
Climate change can be centrally about temperature change, but as you’ve pointed out in your scientific essays it is also very importantly about variability. Variability would include elements such as rainfall patterns, opportunistic pathogens and insect species, new epidemiological patterns. Can you speak about these other dimensions?
GJ I think that probably the biggest thing about the variability piece is that it all has to do with the shape of the distribution looks like. When we typically talk about climate change, this idea that temperatures go up X, that’s all about a shift of the distribution. The distribution moves so many units to the positive side depending if it is warming or cooling. But the problem with that is that climates are not expected to just change in their average, they are also expected to change in terms of the shape of the distribution, or, in other words, its variability. And so if we have changes in the mean and changes in the variability, what that does is produce more extremes on the warm side, but it also continues: It doesn’t mean that frosts and freezes go away. It means that cold weather still exists, and it could still be very problematic in many places. But yet the variability on the high end could be even more problematic.
And so that variability component is so critical for people to understand because evidence from not only just wine region analyses, both in the past and in the future, but from other things, too, are showing that our climate is appearing to be more variable in a warmer world. When the atmosphere on average is cooler, it tends to be a little less variable; warmer, more variable. But it is not a perfect one-to-one everywhere in every location; but that is kind of what the evidence is showing us.
I’ll give you a great example here in my region. The past two Octobers, well, really October 2008, we had the coldest temperatures ever recorded in October, the middle of October, preceded two weeks prior by the warmest temperatures ever recorded in September! Those kinds of things have been cropping up little by little, in temperature, but also in precipitation. Heavy rain events are more frequent in many places, which is causing slightly greater soil erosion issues.
Germany has always been having to deal with this because they have a lot of steep-slope viticulture. But it really didn’t strike me until I was a meeting one time there and we were doing some touring. We just happened to tour by a place where I say a bulldozer down at the bottom of a vineyard bulldozing dirt, putting it in a truck, the truck drove around along the slope up to the top of the vineyard, and they redistributed the dirt down the row. What they were telling me is that they had been seeing so much more rain coming in heavy, single events than being spread out over the year. Their erosion events were becoming more problematic.
I’ve heard and read studies that get to the same issue in different places in the world that we’re seeing heavier rain events than we are seeing more spread out rain kind of thing. That right there is a variability extreme kind of issue. The act of singular events like winter freezes are a little less extreme of late, but they still occur. Walla Walla this past December got down to 10 degrees; that’s at the damaging point for grape vines. Those kinds of things still happen. They just don’t go away. These extreme issues, whether they be with rainfall, hail even, of Winter freezes or Spring frosts, they are still risks to the industry depending on where you are.
END OF PART 2
Pt. 1 On Wine and Climate Change
Pt. 3 Gregory V. Jones On Pests, Pathogens, and Parker
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