An Inconvenient Truth Book Review
In 1968, a biologist named Garrett Hardin published a remarkable little essay entitled Tragedy of the Commons.
He laid out dynamics of human behavior that underlie a good deal of the trouble we face in the world, today.
The elegant simplicity of his model cannot fully represent complex reality, but it is such a clear model that it remains a valuable perspective in considering large-scale use of common resources, like air and water, the subject of Gore's work.
This model considers the common use of a pasture by a group of farmers.
Imagine a pasture that can support a hundred head of cattle.
Ten farmers share this pasture, and each is raising ten head.
Under these conditions, maximum utilization of the pasture results.
If each farmer were to add just one steer to his herd, the pasture would be over-grazed, and each farmer would have to supplant the fresh grass with hay.
Instead, imagine that only one of the farmers increases his herd to eleven.
The pasture is still over-grazed, even if only slightly, so all the farmers will again have to provide a little hay for their herds.
The farmer with the eleven head also has to provide some extra hay, but only that required for his own herd.
He reaps the entire benefit of his extra steer, yet only has to provide a tenth of the total extra hay now being supplied by the whole community.
He has, in effect, passed off on the rest of the community nine-tenths of the cost of his behavior, while he keeps all of the net gain.
This propensity for humanity to pass off the cost while retaining the gain from exploiting common resources leads to inevitable exhaustion of those resources.
For Hardin, this farmer, because he is not fairly and directly affected by the consequences of his behavior is, by definition, not a responsible member of the community.
Hardin then develops the idea of "mutually agreed upon coercion" or "contrived responsibility," which relates to societal structuring in ways such that people are by this definition "responsible.
"For example, by collective agreement, a person responsible for the heat in a hotel will live in the hotel.
Or, a factory that uses the water from a stream must, by law, place its intake downstream from its exhaust.
In the case of our farmers, private property might provide the solution whereby each owns or leases a tenth of the pasture to graze however he sees fit.
One farmer may under graze his plot and then sell hay to another who overgrazes.
Fast-forward thirty-eight years.
It may come as a surprise to many if not most Americans that a political system such as we have today, one that has produced a troubled government blinded by sand kicked-up chasing phantom weapon systems and whirling dervishes around the shifting dunes of the Middle-East, when it is not squinting to focus on the genital status of married couples, can at times produce individuals with clear vision and intelligent priorities.
One of these surprises is Al Gore, someone who, as our Vice-President and presidential candidate, failed to make this distinction sufficiently evident.
In a fine new book, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has characterized modern humanity as a "force of nature.
"The collective power of routine human activity now has to be considered right along with volcanoes, plate tectonics, and nuclear war.
Our collective behavior is altering the course of earth's history, particularly our consumption of fossil fuels, and the liberation of CO2 with its dire consequences.
Although he does not reference Garrett Hardin, and does not need to, it is clear that his study is concerned with the two encompassing "commons" on Earth:its oceans and its atmosphere, primarily focusing on the atmosphere.
He has devoted years to the study of global warming, and created a slide show which he as presented all over the world.
Now, this book (as well as a movie) based on the slide show has been published.
The book's presentation is excellent, comprehensive, compelling ...
and unsettling.
(There is also some Gore family biographical information that is interesting but a little distracting.
) Beginning with some gorgeous pictures of the earth from space, the book is fully-illustrated with remarkable before-and-after views of the havoc global temperature rise is already wreaking:Japan's Mt.
Kilimanjaro seen thirty-five years go followed by the same view today.
There is hardly any snow left.
Lake Chad in Africa, then the sixth-largest lake on Earth, the size of Lake Erie, now forty years later not much more than a spot of mud.
(The loss of this lake, drought, and other consequences of global warming are stressing millions of people in Africa, directly contributing to famine and war.
The US produces about a quarter of the greenhouse gases worldwide, Africa five-percent, so "our way of life" is directly reflected in the misery of several million African people.
It is hard to credit the US for being "responsible.
")A half dozen pieces of Antarctica the size of Rhode Island or larger have melted in the last ten years.
There are many more disturbing examples.
Our own Glacier National Park will be entirely devoid of glaciers in about fifteen years.
Life on the plains will be severely altered if the Rockies lose their winter snowcaps, which the data suggests they are going to do if we do not change our ways.
As worldwide ice melts, the seas rise, and if the Arctic (which is a floating plate of ice on average merely ten feet thick) or Greenland goes, a hundred million people around the world will be experiencing their own New Orleans-style post-Katrina syndrome.
The frequency of major storms world wide is up fifty percent in thirty-five years, and the book has fabulous space photos of a whole crowd of hurricanes.
Gore provides graphs showing undeniably clear trends toward calamity:graphs matching CO2 with temperature rise, of population growth, of carbon emissions per person, and others.
Using sophisticated geologic surveying techniques some patterns have been traced back centuries.
The correlations are unmistakable.
Our march like lemmings to the now endangered sea * began with, and has been unremitting since, the dawn of the industrial age, and the concomitant population explosion.
But it is not a"steady" passage.
It is becoming exponential, as the march became a jog, became a trot, and has become an all-out dash to disaster.
We are in trouble right now, racing for the finish.
Interspersed with these effective pictures and graphs is a calm, telling narrative about big trouble.
Gore depicts and explains the serpentine earth-circling ocean currents that largely determine weather patterns around the world.
He shows how humanity's misbehavior, in addition to causing huge melt-offs from the poles (which it turns out are especially vulnerable) is now beginning to impact Greenland by the amazing phenomenon called "moulins.
"If Greenland starts to melt, and its ice mass lubricated by these moulins begins sliding into the sea, among the probable consequences (due to some intellectually interesting ocean dynamics) will be a rapid and complete cessation of the serpentine current, triggering a new Ice Age in Europe while stopping the warm Gulf Stream along our own eastern coast, and altering every aspect of our existence, certainly for the worse.
These are just some of the concerns explored in Gore's study.
It is a book that is hard to put down.
He takes pains to demonstrate that there is no serious disagreement what-so-ever among the world's scientists about the fundamentals of the phenomenon of human-caused global warming, and its dangerous consequences, with accumulating knowledge increasingly worrisome.
Yet ordinary people of the world, in their hopeful yearnings, continue to embrace the disinformation provided by the popular press from profoundly vested interests such as oil and coal conglomerates asserting the variability of"natural causes.
" Our own government officials, known to accept from time-to-time a little financial consideration from these same sources, have been uniformly single-minded in looking the other way, any other way.
In what Gore terms the "developed world," 132 nations have signed the Kyoto Treaty; two have not.
The US is one of those two.
We are the farmer with eleven head, but the commons is not merely a pasture.
It is the entire atmosphere of Planet Earth with no external community to absorb our transgressions, leading to consequences that promise to be fatal to life as we know it.
However, the US is just in the vanguard of the impending catastrophe, leading the way.
All the peoples of the earth are exploiting the atmosphere as a commons, polluting it relentlessly, if not so massively as we are, in-order-to accrue specific benefit from one activity or another.
The huge burn-offs of Brazilian forests by farmers, or the pervasive wood-fire cooking throughout Africa contribute their smaller share of the problem.
Even though we are united less by our collective power than by our collective vulnerability, Gore ends the work on a generally hopeful note.
Humanity has recognized and by regulation considerably abated the crisis of ozone depletion, another crisis of our own making.
He indicates many ways in which we can alter our behavior to restrain this other beast CO2 we have been unleashing, and directs the reader to many resources and agencies engaged in the issue.
He believes we have the time (though not a great deal of it) and talent to correct our ways.
There is scant reason for believing humanity will readily temper its historically self-interested behavior, this time.
Getting at the source of chlorinated hydrocarbons is pretty easy compared to the universality of CO2 production around the world.
"Everybody" makes CO2, and contriving the Hardin-style structures necessary for responsible utilization of Earth's resources to contain it is going to be a huge challenge.
**I can only hope Mr.
Gore is as right in his optimism as he is convincing in this beautiful, alarming book.
* See also the March '06 Scientific American article, "The Acidification of the Oceans.
" Also touched on in Gore's book.
About a third of the CO2 released is absorbed by the oceans, wherein it becomes carbonic acid.
The resulting drop in ocean alkalinity threatens at least all shell fish and coral whose shells are vulnerable to dissolving if the oceans become too close to acidic, taking out a big chunk of the sea-borne food chain ...
maybe all of it.
**See the September '06 Scientific American article, "A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check," for an examination of what we can do to save ourselves.
He laid out dynamics of human behavior that underlie a good deal of the trouble we face in the world, today.
The elegant simplicity of his model cannot fully represent complex reality, but it is such a clear model that it remains a valuable perspective in considering large-scale use of common resources, like air and water, the subject of Gore's work.
This model considers the common use of a pasture by a group of farmers.
Imagine a pasture that can support a hundred head of cattle.
Ten farmers share this pasture, and each is raising ten head.
Under these conditions, maximum utilization of the pasture results.
If each farmer were to add just one steer to his herd, the pasture would be over-grazed, and each farmer would have to supplant the fresh grass with hay.
Instead, imagine that only one of the farmers increases his herd to eleven.
The pasture is still over-grazed, even if only slightly, so all the farmers will again have to provide a little hay for their herds.
The farmer with the eleven head also has to provide some extra hay, but only that required for his own herd.
He reaps the entire benefit of his extra steer, yet only has to provide a tenth of the total extra hay now being supplied by the whole community.
He has, in effect, passed off on the rest of the community nine-tenths of the cost of his behavior, while he keeps all of the net gain.
This propensity for humanity to pass off the cost while retaining the gain from exploiting common resources leads to inevitable exhaustion of those resources.
For Hardin, this farmer, because he is not fairly and directly affected by the consequences of his behavior is, by definition, not a responsible member of the community.
Hardin then develops the idea of "mutually agreed upon coercion" or "contrived responsibility," which relates to societal structuring in ways such that people are by this definition "responsible.
"For example, by collective agreement, a person responsible for the heat in a hotel will live in the hotel.
Or, a factory that uses the water from a stream must, by law, place its intake downstream from its exhaust.
In the case of our farmers, private property might provide the solution whereby each owns or leases a tenth of the pasture to graze however he sees fit.
One farmer may under graze his plot and then sell hay to another who overgrazes.
Fast-forward thirty-eight years.
It may come as a surprise to many if not most Americans that a political system such as we have today, one that has produced a troubled government blinded by sand kicked-up chasing phantom weapon systems and whirling dervishes around the shifting dunes of the Middle-East, when it is not squinting to focus on the genital status of married couples, can at times produce individuals with clear vision and intelligent priorities.
One of these surprises is Al Gore, someone who, as our Vice-President and presidential candidate, failed to make this distinction sufficiently evident.
In a fine new book, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has characterized modern humanity as a "force of nature.
"The collective power of routine human activity now has to be considered right along with volcanoes, plate tectonics, and nuclear war.
Our collective behavior is altering the course of earth's history, particularly our consumption of fossil fuels, and the liberation of CO2 with its dire consequences.
Although he does not reference Garrett Hardin, and does not need to, it is clear that his study is concerned with the two encompassing "commons" on Earth:its oceans and its atmosphere, primarily focusing on the atmosphere.
He has devoted years to the study of global warming, and created a slide show which he as presented all over the world.
Now, this book (as well as a movie) based on the slide show has been published.
The book's presentation is excellent, comprehensive, compelling ...
and unsettling.
(There is also some Gore family biographical information that is interesting but a little distracting.
) Beginning with some gorgeous pictures of the earth from space, the book is fully-illustrated with remarkable before-and-after views of the havoc global temperature rise is already wreaking:Japan's Mt.
Kilimanjaro seen thirty-five years go followed by the same view today.
There is hardly any snow left.
Lake Chad in Africa, then the sixth-largest lake on Earth, the size of Lake Erie, now forty years later not much more than a spot of mud.
(The loss of this lake, drought, and other consequences of global warming are stressing millions of people in Africa, directly contributing to famine and war.
The US produces about a quarter of the greenhouse gases worldwide, Africa five-percent, so "our way of life" is directly reflected in the misery of several million African people.
It is hard to credit the US for being "responsible.
")A half dozen pieces of Antarctica the size of Rhode Island or larger have melted in the last ten years.
There are many more disturbing examples.
Our own Glacier National Park will be entirely devoid of glaciers in about fifteen years.
Life on the plains will be severely altered if the Rockies lose their winter snowcaps, which the data suggests they are going to do if we do not change our ways.
As worldwide ice melts, the seas rise, and if the Arctic (which is a floating plate of ice on average merely ten feet thick) or Greenland goes, a hundred million people around the world will be experiencing their own New Orleans-style post-Katrina syndrome.
The frequency of major storms world wide is up fifty percent in thirty-five years, and the book has fabulous space photos of a whole crowd of hurricanes.
Gore provides graphs showing undeniably clear trends toward calamity:graphs matching CO2 with temperature rise, of population growth, of carbon emissions per person, and others.
Using sophisticated geologic surveying techniques some patterns have been traced back centuries.
The correlations are unmistakable.
Our march like lemmings to the now endangered sea * began with, and has been unremitting since, the dawn of the industrial age, and the concomitant population explosion.
But it is not a"steady" passage.
It is becoming exponential, as the march became a jog, became a trot, and has become an all-out dash to disaster.
We are in trouble right now, racing for the finish.
Interspersed with these effective pictures and graphs is a calm, telling narrative about big trouble.
Gore depicts and explains the serpentine earth-circling ocean currents that largely determine weather patterns around the world.
He shows how humanity's misbehavior, in addition to causing huge melt-offs from the poles (which it turns out are especially vulnerable) is now beginning to impact Greenland by the amazing phenomenon called "moulins.
"If Greenland starts to melt, and its ice mass lubricated by these moulins begins sliding into the sea, among the probable consequences (due to some intellectually interesting ocean dynamics) will be a rapid and complete cessation of the serpentine current, triggering a new Ice Age in Europe while stopping the warm Gulf Stream along our own eastern coast, and altering every aspect of our existence, certainly for the worse.
These are just some of the concerns explored in Gore's study.
It is a book that is hard to put down.
He takes pains to demonstrate that there is no serious disagreement what-so-ever among the world's scientists about the fundamentals of the phenomenon of human-caused global warming, and its dangerous consequences, with accumulating knowledge increasingly worrisome.
Yet ordinary people of the world, in their hopeful yearnings, continue to embrace the disinformation provided by the popular press from profoundly vested interests such as oil and coal conglomerates asserting the variability of"natural causes.
" Our own government officials, known to accept from time-to-time a little financial consideration from these same sources, have been uniformly single-minded in looking the other way, any other way.
In what Gore terms the "developed world," 132 nations have signed the Kyoto Treaty; two have not.
The US is one of those two.
We are the farmer with eleven head, but the commons is not merely a pasture.
It is the entire atmosphere of Planet Earth with no external community to absorb our transgressions, leading to consequences that promise to be fatal to life as we know it.
However, the US is just in the vanguard of the impending catastrophe, leading the way.
All the peoples of the earth are exploiting the atmosphere as a commons, polluting it relentlessly, if not so massively as we are, in-order-to accrue specific benefit from one activity or another.
The huge burn-offs of Brazilian forests by farmers, or the pervasive wood-fire cooking throughout Africa contribute their smaller share of the problem.
Even though we are united less by our collective power than by our collective vulnerability, Gore ends the work on a generally hopeful note.
Humanity has recognized and by regulation considerably abated the crisis of ozone depletion, another crisis of our own making.
He indicates many ways in which we can alter our behavior to restrain this other beast CO2 we have been unleashing, and directs the reader to many resources and agencies engaged in the issue.
He believes we have the time (though not a great deal of it) and talent to correct our ways.
There is scant reason for believing humanity will readily temper its historically self-interested behavior, this time.
Getting at the source of chlorinated hydrocarbons is pretty easy compared to the universality of CO2 production around the world.
"Everybody" makes CO2, and contriving the Hardin-style structures necessary for responsible utilization of Earth's resources to contain it is going to be a huge challenge.
**I can only hope Mr.
Gore is as right in his optimism as he is convincing in this beautiful, alarming book.
* See also the March '06 Scientific American article, "The Acidification of the Oceans.
" Also touched on in Gore's book.
About a third of the CO2 released is absorbed by the oceans, wherein it becomes carbonic acid.
The resulting drop in ocean alkalinity threatens at least all shell fish and coral whose shells are vulnerable to dissolving if the oceans become too close to acidic, taking out a big chunk of the sea-borne food chain ...
maybe all of it.
**See the September '06 Scientific American article, "A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check," for an examination of what we can do to save ourselves.
Source...