Category: Adaptation

Adaptation, Climate denial, Climate science, Ecological change, Trump damage to climate

The false summit of climate change progress

There are several reasons why the changes underway represent a false summit leaving an extremely steep climate landscape yet to be scaled. It is important to realize that most of these changes are promises, rather than anything close to becoming reality. In the US, we can count on GOP elected officials at the state and federal level to oppose most of the proposed changes to energy policy and climate change mitigation. The GOP will protect the fossil fuel industry in myriad ways that will leave the average voter at a loss to say exactly what is happening.
Continue reading The false summit of climate change progress

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, Climate science, Ecological change, Extreme weather and climate change

On the survival of civilization – Earth Day 2020

An Australian NGO has been following the anthropogenic decimation of our planet for the past few years. The group, known as The Commission For The Future of Humanity, notes that there are ten existential issues that could spell the demise of civilization during this century. No single one of these is unfolding in isolation because they are potentially mutually reinforcing calamities on a global scale. … Continue reading On the survival of civilization – Earth Day 2020

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, biosphere carbon management, Climate science, Ecological change, Environmental politics

The Long Game: Facing Reality in the Environmental Century

170907084916-01-golf-wildfire-trnd-super-teaseGolfing while the mountains burn. Photo from Beacon Rock Golf Course.

Personally, I would rate the likelihood of staying under two degrees of warming as under 10 percent. – Michael Oppenheimer 2017

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.  – Thomas Merton

Under a concrete sky on 5 November 2014, Michele and I awoke to realize that Paul LePage had been re-elected as governor of Maine. Once again, Mainers had split their votes three ways and LePage was elected by a minority of the voters to another four-year term. We were deeply disappointed because during his first term LePage had made clear his disdain for environmental concerns. Little did we know that the next few years would make LePage’s first term look like the good old days. Continue reading “The Long Game: Facing Reality in the Environmental Century”

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, biosphere carbon management, Climate science, Ecological change, Environmental politics, Sustainability science

Ecology, Loss, and Triage

Rainforest-burning-NASA-2014Amazonia burning. NASA Earth Observatory 2014

“I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.”

–Anne Frank

On Sunday, 30 April 2017, the New York Times reported that global marine fisheries are being pushed to the brink. This and countless other imminent losses prompt me to once again point out that management of the global biosphere is necessary if we are to have any hope of controlling climate change and feeding ourselves. Human impacts on ecosystems are pushing the living planet into a new regime characterized by disrupted ecological relationships and accelerating extinctions on local, regional, and global scales. Ecological disruption causes ongoing positive feedbacks from widely-distributed natural sources of emissions, thus further disrupting the climate system. Globally, we are approaching a state of unmanageability on many fronts. Continue reading “Ecology, Loss, and Triage”

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, biosphere carbon management, Ecological change

Carbon capture and sequestration the old fashioned way

For The Natural Resources Council of Maine
HellisheidiPowerStation01The Hellisheiði Power Station in Iceland. Wikipedia

Last week the mainstream media and many of the social media outlets hailed the experiment in Iceland that has demonstrated the ability to capture CO2 from the air and turn it into rock. The Guardian proclaimed “CO2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough” and the journal Science headlined “Inject baby, inject!”. A similar, highly engineered coal-fired power plant operating in Canada has struggled to show cost effectiveness. Science saluted the technology in Iceland as a breakthrough that if scaled up could rapidly sequester large quantities of climate-warming CO2.

Oh, really now? Continue reading “Carbon capture and sequestration the old fashioned way”

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, Higher education, Sustainability science

Curriculum for sustainability in the environmental century

This is the opening keynote address to the national conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education held in October 2015 in Minneapolis. Here I outline my argument for the curriculum reform necessary to meet the environmental and sustainability challenges of the coming decades. I don’t know that my recommendations are the only path forward, but I assert that it is high … Continue reading Curriculum for sustainability in the environmental century

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, Economy

A positive vision for Maine: A knowledge-based adaptation economy

Presently the governor of Maine has proposed a tax on nonprofits. This would severely impact the private colleges and universities in the state.  Per my argument below, this is coming at a time when re-investment in higher education is absolutely essential if we are to develop the adaptive capacity to respond to climate change.  Moreover, the state’s public institutions that comprise the University of Maine system are presently in the process of financial meltdown.  The U Maine system requires broad scale systematic foundational restructuring if it is to survive.  
The blog below provides a plan for a better future for Maine.  Leaders in the state are not talking about the kind of foundational change that is needed, and this is my attempt to at least start the conversation.  A version of this will appear in the Maine press in the near future.  A later installment will detail exactly how a knowledge economy will make money for Maine
This morning a new report from the U Maine Climate Institute was released.   This report confirms that natural resources in Maine are under imminent threat from climate change.

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A slow motion train wreck is underway in Maine. This collision will play out over the next few decades and leave the state with an increasingly damaged economy and devastated natural resources. An economy with fewer and fewer young workers is running headlong into the effects of climate change on our natural resources. Continue reading “A positive vision for Maine: A knowledge-based adaptation economy”

Stephen Mulkey