We know Randal is a man of few/no words. I can read Randal through his virtual body language. What he is trying to say is:
This video depicts critical thinking in its highest form. But we must think critical about critical thinking.
While a problem clearly exists, it is not clear to me that anyone is to blame for it. For example, whom would you blame for the fall of Rome. You could identify individuals who somewhat prominently enacted the fall, but it is hard to say that any individual was personally responsible for it. Instead, the collapse is better understood as systemic and historical, even inevitable. And so it is, I am suggesting, with the collapse of critical thinking in the classroom.
Most of my colleagues disagree with me on this. They say that the problem IS the students. In particular, they say that many students today lack the critical thinking skills necessary for higher learning. The solution, they say, is to teach these skills to them.
I agree that we need to do something about the ongoing decline of thinking in the classroom, but I also note that our best efforts to teach critical thinking are failing to make much of a difference. This suggests that a key part of the problem is how we currently think about the problem. We need to begin to think “out of the box” of our own thinking, cultivating what in Zen is called “beginner’s mind.” The idea is that if we could sit with this problem without assuming we know what the problem is or what we need to do about it, then the insights of a fresh view might germinate in the openness of our beginner’s mind. As Suzuki Roshi says, the expert recognizes only a few possibilities where the beginner recognizes many.
Another way of saying this is that we need to cultivate conceptual distance from our core assumptions. This is notoriously difficult to do because our core assumptions are mental constructs we look through rather than objects in our field of vision we look at. As the ancient Chinese proverb puts it, “We cannot see the face of Mount Lu when we are standing on it.” In order to become aware of our core assumptions, we must pull our awareness back from what we are seeing and redirect it inward to illuminate the mental constructs structuring how we are looking.
And so I have written this essay to challenge the almost automatic assumption that our students lack critical thinking skills. I suggest, to the contrary, that the “problem” of classroom idiocy and the “solution” of teaching critical thinking skills are better understood as political expressions performing a valuable function. The value of classroom idiocy is to insulate students from the hazards to the soul brought about by extended exposures to dysfunctional learning environments. The value of the genuinely earnest if mostly unsuccessful attempt to teach critical thinking skills is to insulate faculty from guilt or blame for the collapse of learning in their classrooms by displacing responsibility to the primary victims.
Morrie and Subcultures of Authenticity
While I was thinking this through I happened to read Tuesdays with Morrie. Something Morrie is quoted as saying clicked with me and helped me to clarify my own vague leanings relative to this problem. He suggested that when your culture is misdirected and flawed, as is the case at this time with our increasingly corporate mono-culture aggressively involved in the coco-colonization of the entire planet, you must invent your own subculture. At one point, close to his death, he explains what he means,
Here’s what I mean by building your own little subculture….I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society—determine those for you. (155)
This passage clarifies what I suspect about the seeming incapacity of so many students to think: that is, having a history of awful school experiences, they no longer connect thinking—which they often do wonderfully in other contexts—with the classroom. Thus they would seem to be creating their own subculture. In Morrie’s terms, they do not disregard every rule of the academic community but resist letting the academy determine the “big things” for themselves—namely, how they think and what they value.
I recall Thoureau’s quip—that if he knew that someone was coming to his front door in order to help him become a better person, he would rush out the back door lest any of the help rub off on him. Similarly, poor classroom performance may stem more from the intuitive resistance of students to our well-meaning efforts to “colonize” their minds than from an incapacity to think critically. Ironically, if this is so, then poor classroom performance may indicate a capacity to think critically rather than a lack of that capacity.
Critical Thinking Skills and Global Mind Change
A passage in another book I was reading at the time (Willis Harman, Global Mind Change) helped me to distill the thought that poor performance reflects a deep spiritual intuition and not just an incapacity to think. Harman opines that we in the modern period have become so impressed with the powers of what he calls “prediction and control science” that we have been seduced into accepting that this less than comprehensive approach could lead us to grasp the nature of the whole:
It is impossible to create a well-working society on a knowledge base that is fundamentally inadequate, seriously incomplete, and mistaken in its basic assumptions. Yet that is precisely what the modern world has been trying to do. If one takes seriously the implication that Western science is an artifact of Western society, based on implicit assumptions compatible with that society’s basic reality outlook, it follows that the primary impetus for a fundamental change in its underlying assumptions will not come from scientists, but from the surrounding culture. (116-117)
I draw attention to the notion that Western science is an “artifact” of Western culture, and that Western culture, being limited in its underlying assumptions, is currently undergoing a healthy and necessary process of deep adjustment and change in those assumptions. As Hartman says, this process is not being driven by the orthodox members of the specialized communities of scientific inquiry within the academy but from forces and people outside the academy.
By extension, our school structures—our curriculum, our pedagogy, our understanding of critical thinking—are artifacts of that same culture. And since we are in a time of deep change in the foundations of our culture, this process is wreaking havoc in the otherwise seemingly “neutral” areas as the curriculum, pedagogy, and critical thinking. And the havoc in these areas is mostly coming from outside the academy or from “outsiders” within the academy. Let me give three examples of what might count as havoc in neutral areas as it applies to ostensible student stupidity.
Havoc #1: Many students are beginning to note that the type of “critical thinking” fostered in the classroom is, relative to the larger context of the human urge to a good life, narrow and limited. As one student wit put it, “It won’t get me a job and it isn’t good for my soul.” More particularly, what is called critical thinking in the classroom tends to be reductionist (explaining complex phenomena in terms of more elemental events), positivistic (limiting the “real” to what is physically observable or which can be proved), and quantitative (understanding qualities in terms of quantities). This is not to suggest that this type of thinking is bad, just that it is incomplete. The picture of reality we get from it is not wrong, just partial. And the picture is most incomplete in the area of the greatest human importance, in the values, qualities, and purposes of human life itself.
Havoc #2: Many students have long since decided that, from the point of view of true learning, much of what goes on in the typical classroom is wasteful…if not destructive. Current educational research supports the students in this. It does not speak well for the critical environment of academia when students feel intuitively that they are not learning and current research supports them…and yet the waste continues.
Havoc #3: Many students are beginning to see that the doctor, as it were, is not healed. That is, students are noting that their teachers often do not model the life of the mind in its higher, more ideal aspects. Even worse, academia rarely functions as a learning community but rather as a mere association of isolated and hugely specialized hermits. You could say, then, that a fundamental experience of students is that while the outer machinery of our learning community is up and operating, the inner spirit is all too often down and absent. Students in large numbers are now declining the invitation to become academic thinkers. Significantly, “academic thinker” is now a term of approbation.
Creativity and Letting go into the Flow
In Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go, Shaun McNiff talks about his 20 plus years of experience working with people in creativity workshops. These workshops are designed to help the participants “let go” so they can allow the spontaneous process of creation to “flow” through them. McNiff reports that the people who generally have the most difficulty letting go in his workshops are teachers. Since we would ordinarily expect teachers to be the easiest to reach, McNiff wonders if their resistance is a result of the particular approach to learning emphasized in our educational systems:
It is intriguing how schoolteachers participating in my creative arts workshops are often the most resistant to free and open expression. Teachers are known for demanding clear directions and immediate applications because school is almost totally focused on training the literal mind. (23)
Exploring further the implications that teachers as a group have the greatest resistance to letting go into the flow, McNiff speculates about how conventional classroom pedagogy brings this resistance about:
There are many things that we teach in school that involve the mastery of sequential skills that build upon one another. Most of the educational system is established on the assumption that learning follows a logical and predicable pattern of acquiring knowledge. Educators are actually required to produce lesson plans and structure their classes around measurable outcomes. We then test students at various intervals to determine whether or not they are performing at acceptable standards.
In other words, McNiff identifies teachers’ expectation for linear, step-by-step instructions as an obstacle to their progress in art and creativity. Teachers have difficulty insofar as they expect step-by-step instructions. To be told simply to “let go” runs contrary to the culture of the classroom.
Significantly, many of those endeavoring to teach critical thinking are looking for the critical-thinking equivalent of precisely the same step-by-step instructions that the teachers in McNiff’s workshop are expecting for art. Many teachers assume that what they need in order to help students to think critically is a set of clear, linear, step-by-step instructions. This is the critical thinking equivalent of the fill in the numbers approach to art—an easy to follow technique that will enable the novice to produce minimally decent work by simply following the numbered steps. As one colleague put it in a First-Year Seminar workshop, “I want someone to teach me how to teach them how to think.”
The acceptance of a deep disjunction between creativity and criticism is so well established in academia that many academics have difficulty accepting that lessons from art might apply to problems in thinking. But in terms of cognitive functioning, criticism and creativity are quite similar, and what they both have in common is the exercise of imagination.
To clarify this, consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a group of creative artists and a group of critical thinkers have their attention drawn to the same thing. The artists paint what they see while the thinkers comment on what they see. Would not the result in each case be a diversity of responses of merit, where the responses of both artists and thinkers would diverge rather than converge? This is because in each case the responses had to be “imagined.”
Before the modern period it was thought that imagination was the primary means by which the mind came to discover and fashion truth. For example, Aristotle says in the Poetics that imagination is higher and more philosophical than history because it brings us beyond the particular sensual detail to the truth, which is something larger and more abstract than mere perception. But in the empirical tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imagination is reduced to a capacity for “fancy.” In other words, imagination is no longer the capacity to look behind the particulars of what we are seeing to the substance, if you will, of things unseen, but is merely a “toy” of the mind. As John Locke famously put it in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, imagination is the power to rearrange sense data. For example, to fill in the shape of a horse with the color of gold vase is to “imagine” a golden horse.
I am challenging this view of imagination as fancy. I am suggesting instead that the pre-modern and Kantian influenced Romantic view is more useful—that imagination is an exalted power of the mind, the ability to look beyond what is given to find meaning when the available evidence is uncertain, ambiguous, and apparently confused. Thus, the interplay of imagination and uncertainty is the binding element between critical and creative thinking. To be critical is not simply to evaluate the given. It is to reshape it, to look behind it, to question it, to see into it, to move beyond it. Critical thinking, like creativity, is an imaginative response arising out of an encounter with uncertainty. Accordingly, in order to cultivate critical thinking, we have to foster calm and sustained encounters with uncertainty, and any endeavor to reduce critical thinking to a “skill” that can be mastered in a linear, step-by-step process is doomed to fail.
Unfortunately, our educational systems give little emphasis to educating the imagination. Even worse, since educating the imagination requires fostering large and sustained encounters with uncertainty, the education of the imagination actually runs counter to the culture of schooling.
Calculation and the Crisis of Humanity
Where McNiff suggests that we should not try to teach critical thinking as a linear skill, the implication in Heidegger’s late essay, “Discourse on Thinking,” is that we should not be trying to teach critical thinking at all.
Published in 1959, the “Discourse on Thinking” was originally a Memorial Address delivered to honor the German composer, Conradin Kreutzer. In this essay Heidegger contrasts “meditative thinking,” which he holds to be of the utmost importance to the human being, with “calculative thinking,” which he sees as coming to dominate all thinking in our increasingly instrumental/technical society. He is not opposed to calculative thinking; instead, he is opposed to the growing tendency in our society to limit what is called thinking to calculation merely.
Heidegger begins the essay by lamenting how “thought-poor” we contemporary people are coming to be:
Let us not fool ourselves. All of us, including those of us who think professionally, as it were, are often enough thought-poor; we all are far too easily thought-less. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. (45)
Heidegger reflects on this growing tendency to “thoughtlessness” and concludes that the fact that people today are in flight from thinking, a flight that most of us “neither see nor admit” and often even “flatly deny,” means that this flight must spring from a deep and dark process. This process, further, “gnaws at the very marrow” of what it is to be human.
According to Heidegger, the dark process gnawing the marrow of humanity is the tendency to collapse all thinking to calculation. Heidegger then describes meditative thinking, contrasting it with calculative thinking. Where calculative thinking “plans and investigates,” meditative thinking “contemplates the meaning” of things. Heidegger laments the possibility that everything “will now fall into the clutches of planning and calculation, of organization and autonomy.” The totality of this collapse into calculation is a disaster because it involves the loss of humanity’s highest gift—the ability to discover meaning by being open to the abiding mystery of things.
Heidegger says the threat of annihilation posed by the atomic age is not our greatest danger. The greater danger is the monopolization of all thinking by calculative thinking. And accepting calculative thinking as the only way of thinking is a greater threat to humanity than even the threat of nuclear annihilation because in limiting thinking to calculation, the human being will “have denied and thrown away his own essential nature—that he is a meditative being.”
Heidegger closes by pointing out that the “releasement toward things” and the “openness to the mystery” which characterize meditative thinking will never happen by themselves. “They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking.” (56)
Significantly, what counts as critical thinking in higher education is what Heidegger calls calculative thinking. Indeed, where in academia does meditative thinking have a home? Who has gotten tenure recently for meditating on the essence of things so successfully as to thereby manage to make a large, personal opening to their mystery! True, the ruminations of a few (mostly dead) thinkers are studied (mostly calculatively), but to ruminate oneself is not, generally speaking, honored.
In attempting to teach critical thinking, we may be functioning in the grand scheme to increase the hegemony of calculative thinking, the very thing that Heidegger identifies as the greatest threat to humanity at this time! The resistance to critical thinking that current students demonstrate aligns them, not us, with the movement of what the German metaphysical philosophers would have called the spirit of the times.
I add, parenthetically, that discussions of teaching versus research rarely consider whether research AND teaching may not BOTH be deeply flawed. If you consider the life of the mind in its fullest, most ethically transforming sense, then it is not clear that the current understanding of what constitutes research is an expression of the mind’s highest imperatives. From the point of view of an evolved understanding of culture and the higher mental pursuits, much of the life of research seems small, narrow, and contaminated with bad values.
Conversely, teaching is often thought of entirely in terms of skill in presenting the results of (or engendering an interest in) such research. The possibility that teaching could be truly critical (and therefore creative)—a form of alchemy in Jung’s sense—this is still not widely grasped as a possibility. What may be needed is not to continue trying to privilege teaching relative to research but to completely abandon them both.
Is Critical Thinking a Skill on the Decline?
Thomas Hobbes remarks in the Leviathan (which he took to be a truism) that people are often displeased with their relative endowment of wealth, talent, looks, or birth, but they are never displeased with their own measure of critical common sense. In a technical age, where “sizing up the world” is more a matter of technical skill than of common sense, Hobbes’ words may no longer seem a truism. But even in our technical age few people go around lamenting their lack of common sense. Even as the faculty laments students’ inability to think critically, students are not themselves lamenting their own inability to think critically.
This is significant. One untapped source of information regarding what is going wrong in the classroom is what the students themselves think! Some limited information comes in, mostly in the form of questions on course evaluation forms. The problem is that the evaluation forms reflect the very discomfort with uncertainty that McGriff identifies as a block to creativity. For example, students are asked whether their instructor comes to class prepared and whether the course was well laid out in advance, whether the requirements and expectations were made clear to them ahead of time, etc. Students are not, however, invited to tell their “stories” about the larger picture of what they see as going on.
At any rate, most students do not feel that they lack the capacity to be critical. Something close to the opposite is the case. Students generally feel they know perfectly well what is going on in school: they have concluded (with supporting evidence) that thinking for themselves is simply not the way to succeed in school.
Evidently a large communication disorder occurs in the classroom. From the faculty point of view, the presenting problem is that students lack the capacity to think critically. From the student point of view, however, the presenting problem is more that it is not safe in the classroom for them to think for themselves. Even when directly asked what they think, students tend to take the request as a coded invitation to parrot a predetermined thought sequence. Thus, where faculty see students as trying to think critically and failing, students see themselves as trying to parrot the classroom party line and, for the most part, succeeding.
Is the Problem Political?
It is well known that political disempowerment can produce evidence of idiocy, which can then be used to further justify disempowerment, thereby completing a self-fulfilling loop. Let me tell a couple of anecdotes to explore this tendency.
When I was teaching composition as a graduate student, I remember that the Teaching Assistants would often gather and swap stories about how dumb the students were. I remember thinking then that what I was experiencing in the classroom was so hugely and staggeringly dumb that something more than mere stupidity was required to account for it. Many of my students were functioning in a way that I described then as “dumber than dumb.” I am now convinced that what appeared to my colleagues then (and now) as a cognitive dysfunction is actually a political dysfunction. My suspicion is that many students, lacking safety and power in the classroom, are underfunctioning. Safety and power are political categories.
A second anecdote: I recall helping someone whose car would not start. I lifted up the hood and saw that the cable to the battery had come loose. Since the cable connection had cracked and no longer fit tightly, I tried to explain to the driver how to reattach the cable since it was likely to come loose again. She went into what I would now describe as a mild trance state and began to repeat like a mantra that she was not mechanically minded. I could readily accept that. But I also knew that even someone who was not mechanically could grasp the problem. She was not trying to understand and failing; she was blocking. Something other than mechanical incompetence was needed to explain her inability to grasp that she needed to attach the battery cable to the battery.
Something similar is the case with our students. Even someone who truly lacked critical thinking skills would do better in the critical thinking area in the classroom than our students are doing. Something other than the lack of a skill is needed to explain what is going on here.
I have a suggestion as to what it is.
Two Worlds means a Double Truth
When I lived in England I had a British friend who visited the Soviet Union a couple of years before its political collapse. He tells this fascinating story.
He visited the Soviet Union with his wife, an evangelical Christian. The two of them were part of a tour that had been assigned a guide to take them around Moscow. He said that for three days his wife badgered their guide with continual requests to visit a church. The guide patiently explained that churches were only needed in capitalist societies to promise “pie in the sky” as a compensation for the exploitation of capitalism. And so it went.
On Sunday morning the guide visited my friend’s hotel room. She had come, she said, to take the couple to worship services. The wife was stunned. “But you said all week that there were no churches!”
“Well of course,” the guide replied, “that is what my job requires me to say. However, since you indicated that you wanted to attend church services, I have come to offer to take you to my church.”
I suggest that both our students and that guide live in two worlds, each with its own truth, and they feel no inner imperative to reconcile the two. Thus, the lack of critical ability which students so frequently display, like the guide’s ostensible atheism, may have a different source than a lack of the capacity to be critical. Once again, the explanation for the lack of critical abilities may be more political than cognitive.
How Critical Are the Critical Thinkers Themselves?
To faculty students all too often seem only to care about their grade. How many of us have finished a scintillating explanation of an important point and, after asking for questions, have heard the inevitable, “Will this be on the exam?” (Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards is an excellent look at how standard grading, based on stimulus/response assumptions, generates disincentives to curiosity-driven learning.)
If you think of our promotion and tenure system as a grading system for faculty, then unpleasant similarities become evident. Just like the students, faculty are obsessed with what they will be tested on. Even worse, they subject their own learning interests through the filter of whether it will be on the tenure test. All too often, if it is not going to be on the test, then they drop their interest. Worst of all, some of those who follow the integrity of inner guidance end up paying for it on the test.
The worst behaviors of our students mirror our own. Whenever the patient’s illness mirrors that of the physician, the way forward is for the physicians to heal themselves. Sadly, physicians who set out to heal, so to speak, run the risk of being punished for their poor state of health.
Safe Spaces and Civil Classrooms
If my analysis is in the rough correct, that students can think critically perfectly well but are just not doing it in school, then we would need to bridge the gap between these two worlds.
I used to think that all we needed to do was cultivate a nurturing, accepting atmosphere in the classroom, what the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh calls the feeling of “inter-being.” The idea is that when students feel safe, the natural critical capacities that they already have would begin to emerge. But Sharon Welch, in Sweet Dreams in America: Making Ethics and Spirituality Work, has some helpful things to say about the inadequacy of merely cultivating safe spaces. She recalls that a central goal of the consciousness-raising groups of the early women’s movement was the creation of “safe spaces.” In these safe spaces women could tell their stories without fear of criticism or invalidation. In this way women were able to learn that what they had experienced as personal suffering had a collective aspect. Also, many women had the powerful experience of being listened to for the first time. As Welch says, “Being silenced by men, afraid to speak, many women flourished in these settings, and discovered new insights about ourselves and our society.” (84)
There is a similarity with our classes. Many students have never had the experience of being listened to in a classroom because classroom speech is governed by the requirement to give the “right” answer, the assumption being that the purpose of speaking is to demonstrate that one can “perform” the right answer. In this sense, having an environment in which uncritical support is given for anything that may be said is helpful and healing.
But Welch points out that uncritical safe places only worked where there was not much diversity of experience. As soon as differences emerged, the concept of safety, understood as uncritical acceptance, functioned more to silence speech than to elicit it. “There was no room for women to speak who wanted to challenge what was said, who wanted to point out how they were limited and controlled not just by men but also by women, and sometimes by the women in the room.” (84)
Again, such is the experience in our classrooms. Diversity of viewpoint exists already, much of it highly polarized. In such a context, the notion of uncritically accepting anything that is said in order to preserve a “safe place” does not recommend itself. Welch says that she no longer tries to make her classes “safe” but instead tries to insure that they are “civil.” As she says, “We do not claim that the space here is ‘safe’; nor do we seek to humiliate people or elicit intense conflict. Instead, our goal is to learn how to grow from the process of open conflict and disagreement.”
This capacity to learn to grow from a civil process of open conflict and disagreement characterizes better what is needed in the classroom than the practice of uncritically accepting anything that may happen to be said.
Sadly, we have another “heal thyself” problem here. Often differences of vision, interpretation, or judgement among faculty are not articulated openly in a civil environment in which each is invited to persuade by making a case as well as being open to persuasion by hearing a case. Instead, faculty disagreements are often marked by bitterness and hidden agendas. We are not likely to have civil classrooms until we can be civil ourselves in the larger classroom of life.
As for the problem of how to create civil classrooms, there is no step-by-step formula by which to do so. A key idea is that students, once freed from the top-down authority of social discipline, can help co-design their class. Our task at this point, then, is not to identify or select methods or techniques to accomplish what we are trying to do but to challenge our understanding of what we are trying to do. If we change our emphasis from trying to teach thinking to that of cultivating it in ourselves and recognizing it in others, our problem may mostly take care of itself.
Not sure if I can agree with you Randal, but a good thought.
UDB, my only hope is that you cut and pasted the previous novel. If so, well, good shot at Randal. If not, holy fuck man you need a hobby and you need it now.
Well Douche it was almost on the nut! But that was what I was thinking moments after I pooped my pants! These our the thought's I have at this time.
My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain's famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli), identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before - lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Consider the standard example of stretching the truth with numbers - a case quite relevant to my story. Statistics recognizes different measures of an "average," or central tendency. The mean is our usual concept of an overall average - add up the items and divide them by the number of sharers (100 candy bars collected for five kids next Halloween will yield 20 for each in a just world). The median, a different measure of central tendency, is the half-way point. If I line up five kids by height, the median child is shorter than two and taller than the other two (who might have trouble getting their mean share of the candy). A politician in power might say with pride, "The mean income of our citizens is $15,000 per year." The leader of the opposition might retort, "But half our citizens make less than $10,000 per year." Both are right, but neither cites a statistic with impassive objectivity. The first invokes a mean, the second a median. (Means are higher than medians in such cases because one millionaire may outweigh hundreds of poor people in setting a mean; but he can balance only one mendicant in calculating a median).
The larger issue that creates a common distrust or contempt for statistics is more troubling. Many people make an unfortunate and invalid separation between heart and mind, or feeling and intellect. In some contemporary traditions, abetted by attitudes stereotypically centered on Southern California, feelings are exalted as more "real" and the only proper basis for action - if it feels good, do it - while intellect gets short shrift as a hang-up of outmoded elitism. Statistics, in this absurd dichotomy, often become the symbol of the enemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."
This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving. It declares holy war on the downgrading of intellect by telling a small story about the utility of dry, academic knowledge about science. Heart and head are focal points of one body, one personality.
In July 1982, I learned that I was suffering from abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and serious cancer usually associated with exposure to asbestos. When I revived after surgery, I asked my first question of my doctor and chemotherapist: "What is the best technical literature about mesothelioma?" She replied, with a touch of diplomacy (the only departure she has ever made from direct frankness), that the medical literature contained nothing really worth reading.
Of course, trying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all. As soon as I could walk, I made a beeline for Harvard's Countway medical library and punched mesothelioma into the computer's bibliographic search program. An hour later, surrounded by the latest literature on abdominal mesothelioma, I realized with a gulp why my doctor had offered that humane advice. The literature couldn't have been more brutally clear: mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. I sat stunned for about fifteen minutes, then smiled and said to myself: so that's why they didn't give me anything to read. Then my mind started to work again, thank goodness.
If a little learning could ever be a dangerous thing, I had encountered a classic example. Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don't know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. "A sanguine personality," he replied. Fortunately (since one can't reconstruct oneself at short notice and for a definite purpose), I am, if anything, even-tempered and confident in just this manner.
Hence the dilemma for humane doctors: since attitude matters so critically, should such a sombre conclusion be advertised, especially since few people have sufficient understanding of statistics to evaluate what the statements really mean? From years of experience with the small-scale evolution of Bahamian land snails treated quantitatively, I have developed this technical knowledge - and I am convinced that it played a major role in saving my life. Knowledge is indeed power, in Bacon's proverb.
The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as "I will probably be dead in eight months" - the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn't so, and since attitude matters so much.
I was not, of course, overjoyed, but I didn't read the statement in this vernacular way either. My technical training enjoined a different perspective on "eight months median mortality." The point is a subtle one, but profound - for it embodies the distinctive way of thinking in my own field of evolutionary biology and natural history.
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.
But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation.
When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was: fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in that half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair.
Another technical point then added even more solace. I immediately recognized that the distribution of variation about the eight-month median would almost surely be what statisticians call "right skewed." (In a symmetrical distribution, the profile of variation to the left of the central tendency is a mirror image of variation to the right. In skewed distributions, variation to one side of the central tendency is more stretched out - left skewed if extended to the left, right skewed if stretched out to the right.) The distribution of variation had to be right skewed, I reasoned. After all, the left of the distribution contains an irrevocable lower boundary of zero (since mesothelioma can only be identified at death or before). Thus, there isn't much room for the distribution's lower (or left) half - it must be scrunched up between zero and eight months. But the upper (or right) half can extend out for years and years, even if nobody ultimately survives. The distribution must be right skewed, and I needed to know how long the extended tail ran - for I had already concluded that my favorable profile made me a good candidate for that part of the curve.
The distribution was indeed, strongly right skewed, with a long tail (however small) that extended for several years above the eight month median. I saw no reason why I shouldn't be in that small tail, and I breathed a very long sigh of relief. My technical knowledge had helped. I had read the graph correctly. I had asked the right question and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, the most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances - substantial time. I didn't have to stop and immediately follow Isaiah's injunction to Hezekiah - set thine house in order for thou shalt die, and not live. I would have time to think, to plan, and to fight.
One final point about statistical distributions. They apply only to a prescribed set of circumstances - in this case to survival with mesothelioma under conventional modes of treatment. If circumstances change, the distribution may alter. I was placed on an experimental protocol of treatment and, if fortune holds, will be in the first cohort of a new distribution with high median and a right tail extending to death by natural causes at advanced old age.
It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
The swords of battle are numerous, and none more effective than humor. My death was announced at a meeting of my colleagues in Scotland, and I almost experienced the delicious pleasure of reading my obituary penned by one of my best friends (the so-and-so got suspicious and checked; he too is a statistician, and didn't expect to find me so far out on the right tail). Still, the incident provided my first good laugh after the diagnosis. Just think, I almost got to repeat Mark Twain's most famous line of all: the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Therefore Douche you can see that the space time continuance and the flux compasitator were not in sync with the mainframe of thought on this video?
LOLOL!! Sorry dude! Just la'Douche And I messin'n around.:) But now that you posted this link it got me thinking about this They had seen it coming, for days already. It had been building up on a special web page by the Weather Service, and it had been reported in the papers. »Weather warning for eclipse day,« the Saturday Star had blurted on November 30: »The South African Weather Service is forecasting fine weather for the Limpopo Lowveld on December 3, but an ominous 'partly cloudy becoming cloudy' on December 4, the day of the eclipse.« And this day was now dawning, over those low-lying areas in the extreme Northeast of South Africa, along the Zimbabwean border and between Botswana and Mocambique. Would the weather have held ...?
The days before had been sunny and hot indeed, quite surprising for the growing crowd of eclipse chasers that was converging here, expecting to encounter the rainy season. And the night skies on the eve of the eclipse had been exceptionally clear, with the duo of Magellanic clouds culminating on the black canvas above the lowveld. But when dawn came to the Limpopo province (formerly known as the Northern Province and even earlier being part of Transvaal) at 4:30 a.m., the picture had changed: The sky was now a mix of blue patches and cloud layers moving in different directions but generally coming in from the East. Just as they had predicted: There was a system about to sweep over our base camp at the Nwanedi Resort (in the National Park of the same name), east of Tshisipe, and it was evident that plans C, D and E would have to be abandoned.
»Plan A« had been, for years, to travel to Australia for this eclipse because the prospects of a rainy season seemed to make Southern Africa the far worse choise for a December event. That assessment had changed in the minds of many after a) the marvellous experience of the June 2001 eclipse in Zambia (that almost cried out for an encore in this thrilling part of our planet) and b) the »official« climate analysis which, in September 2001, gave Australia a surprisingly modest edge over certain regions in Southern Africa. Here the eclipse would also be longer (up to 1 minute and 30 seconds) than in Oz and much higher in the sky, getting there would take less time, and while the African section of the track of totality would fall onto a region rich in touristy sights, the Aussie part would meet a particularly remote part of that country.
»Plan B« in our minds had then centered on Zimbabwe which we had encountered (briefly) in 2001 as a particularly friendly and attractive country. Alas, the disputed elections in early 2002 would not bring stability but lead to a rapid deterioration of the social and economic situation there, finally crowning South Africa as the clear leader (with Botswana somehow falling thru our cracks). Here then the northern section of the Kruger National Park might have been a prime location, but it had soon become clear that others might have the same idea: access would be limited, it was said, e.g. on an official park web page, and special camps would be available only at high prices. (Much later we would learn that in fact many vancancies were left at the regular low rates in the existing camps - apparently some miscalculation.)
Thus our idea had become, before setting out on the journey, to search for suitable observing spots where the center line of the eclipse would intersect roads, west of the park. And so the plans C, D and E were born, during an extensive scouting trip the crew of vehicle two (including the author) undertook on December 2 when the cloudless skies still seemed to say that only geometry counted and the weather would not be a decisive factor. Ours was the 2nd of 3 Toyota Hilux 4x4 vehicles with roof tents that were crusing around South Africa independently at that time: One was on what would become a 6500-km 3-week journey all the way from Cape Town via a previously unvisited confluence point to the eclipse zone and back to Jo'burg, ours was on a 3500-km 2-week trip all over the the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, and the third one was here only for one week. All in all we would be nine, mostly veterans of the 2001 Zambian trip - and all three vehicles were supposed to meet near the town Musina (formerly known as Messina) later on Dec. 2nd.
Before that, however, us 2-weekers went to all the suitable observing spots, armed with a GPS receiver and the only (moderately) detailled road map available that had geographic coordinates on it. The preceding week had been devoted to taking in as many of the highlights of South Africa's Northeast as possible, with the Loskop Dam, the Blyde River Canyon and its waterfalls, the Echo Caves, the middle section of the Kruger National Park, the Magoebaskloof and the Modjadji region where the country really began to »feel like Africa.« Here the famous »Rain Queen« used to reside, but she - as well as her daughter - had died just after the 2001 eclipse, leaving this position vacant for the time being. The narrow path of totality had finally been entered just North of Thohoyandou, and crossing the scenic Soutpansberg we had finally ended up in the Nwanedi National Park.
The Nwanedi Resort (now belonging to the Aventura chain and still undergoing frantic upgrade work just days before the eclipse) would prove to be a convenient logistical center for our expedition. Finding vacant campgrounds had been no problem whatsoever, given that November is a particularly slow season with the South Africans (where the big holidays start only in December) and foreigners alike. Rarely did we have to pay more than 100 rand (roughly 11 euros or dollars at that time) for one night. But in the remote - even by South African standards - eclipse zone such places are a rarity, and we were quite happy when we managed to stay here for three nights in a row (and that without any reservation). Remarkably there had been no rate hike at all because of the eclipse, and you could still get your camp site for 50 rand per car, plus 20 rand per person.
The location was beautiful (except for the mosquitos, that is), albeit a bit inconvenient in astronomical terms as the Resort is surrounded by mountains and a major dam. Still observing the eclipse would have been possible from here, geometry-wise, despite the early hour - staying right here would have been Plan C. Totality would come at 8:19 local time, but with the Sun already over 40 degrees up, well clear of all the mountains. Apparently we weren't the only ones who had noticed that as the camp grounds filled up quickly and other eclipse activities unfolded in the area. The province government seemed to have defined some spots around the Resort as official viewing sites for dignitaries, a TV helicopter made some low overflights, and reporters for South Africa's TV ended up in the Resort's office (when they noticed that their mobile phones wouldn't work here).
Those reporters would also hijack our group (miraculously all three Toyotas would indeed reach the predetermined meeting point, albeit in the nick of time) for impromptu interviews - which were used indeed for the main evening news on eclipse eve. And while we couldn't watch those (did anyone videotape the SABC news on Dec. 3???), several times people would approach us later, recalling at least our faces. Based on the scouting trip and revisits of some of the sites most in the group were in favor of observing the eclipse from a rocky side road forking off just where a fine gravel and sand road was intersected by the center line not far from the Resort and halfway between two small villages. Travelling there (»Plan D«) would take less than 45 minutes, and one would be surrounded by many of the fascinating baobab trees that abound in this part of Limpopo province (and the allegedly thickest specimen in the world was only a few km away). Here we would have gotten some 1 minute 25 seconds of totality.
Finally, a plan E (not considered seriously by us at that point) would have involved the only tarred road crossed by the center line in this area, the R 525. It was obvious that the pretty barren R 525/center line intersection would become mighty crowded on eclipse day, as there were at least two observing camps being set up there, including a very officially looking one for local politicians. It had even a Stonehenge-like monument for the eclipse to be unveiled which we could inspect in the still pre-veiled state. Apart from the Nwanedi area all land seems to be in private hands and is completey fenced in, so there were basically no other choices when you wanted to be on the center line (there was a third road huddling the Zim border which we checked, but it would take long to reach and there would be no good place to set up any instruments).
So far for the planning in the days before - and now what? Had Peter Hers been right all along who had advised to stay away from the mountains and to go as close to the Limpopo river (i.e. the border with Zimbabwe) as possible, based on the weather situation exactly 12 months earlier? Leaving the Nwanedi Resort seemed the obvious choice now, with the rapidly changing but obviously increasing cloudiness, and at 5:30 our convoy got moving - in a direction away from the center line crossings. The only hope was to escape from the cloud system by heading as far west as possible while still staying inside the zone of totality. Indeed the situation seemed to improve as we left the mountains of Nwanedi and headed into the lowveld and west on the R 525 - while a lot more cars were now sitting either next to the road or were in fact heading in the opposite direction, i.e. towards the clouds. The lure of the center line seemed to be stronger ...
In Tshipise we turned north onto the R 508, straight into Musina and then parallel to the Zim border on the R 572 - the cloud front was now well behind us but still threatening on the low Eastern horizon. Fortunately there was no traffic congestion (yet?) in or around Musina, and the R 572 was pretty empty. But the farther west you went, the more you approached the southern limit of the zone of totality: How far should we go to stay as far ahead of the clouds as possible and still get enough totality time? After perphaps 10 km on the big road there split off another, smaller gravel road going north to no apparent destination. It was here that the group deciced to split as well: Those with equatorial mounts needed time to set up and stayed just next to R 572 while the others headed into that mysterious side road. By then the first partial phase had long begun, and totality would be upon us in less than one hour.
The mystery road continued for a while, then made a sharp turn towards the west, and there was a gate, closed but not locked. In Africa this usually means that you can enter here, and that we did (without noticing a sign that granted access only to »licensed prospectors« - we still don't know for sure what was going on here). The gravel road continued amongst some baobab trees, and suddenly it was crystal-clear what we had to do: find a particularly beautiful one as a foreground for wide- angle shots of the eclipse. Just as we approached a particularly big specimen there was another path going away from the main road that would bring us to a perfect spot with respect to the tree. The quest was over. Now if only the weather would hold: The massive clouds had't followed us and still hang around only low in the East. The only threat were occasional isolated cumulus clouds approaching the Sun on an otherwise perfectly blue sky.
When the tripods were set up in strategic positions around the baobab, it was less than ½ hour to go until totality. The overall light level was already reduced, and soon the atmosphere would turn eerie as the Sun shrank to a smaller and smaller crescent. Sometimes it was covered by one of the cumulus cloud packets, and the crescent could be seen with the unshielded eye. The tension rose by the minute. We had solidly outrun the big clouds - a feat achieved for the first time in my 19-year eclipse chasing carreer, I may add - but those cumuli had no intention to dissolve, despite the sinking air temperature. When the umbra of the Moon would finally engulf us, the Sun sat just at the edge of such a cloud: a spectacular chain of Baily's Beads and the chromosphere were well seen, as was the corona (still surprisingly maximum-like).
But a few seconds later, the show disappeared behind the cloud (causing one observer to swear so loudly that this acoustic beacon will serve us well to time-synchronize the 5 video cameras running simultaneously :-), only to re-emerge a nail-biting 20 seconds or so later. Normally that would have been no big deal, bit with less than 1 ½ minutes of totality these seconds felt very long. Then the cloud became transparent again and moved off, and the corona could be seen in all its unspolit glory, hovering marvellously above our imposing baobab. And still another few seconds later the photosphere began to reappear behind the Moon, bringing totality to a close. Once again a long arc of Baily's Beads developped, and shortly thereafter another cumulus covered the Sun again. And some half hour later the big cloud field finally reached our site.
We had just made it: Had the eclipse taken place half an hour later - or had we not gone that far west - we would in all likelyhood have lost totality (as have so many who stayed behind in the Nwanedi area or in the Kruger Park, as we would soon learn). The subgroup with the equatorial mounts had even less cloud interruption that the baobapists and could add valuable high-resolution video and photographic records to our more scenic impressions. On the way back to Musina and further down the highway N1 finally a traffic jam materialized, with many eclipse afficionados leaving the eclipse zone towards the south simultaneously. The shape of the former was now a purely mathematical memory, but thanks to hundreds of new road signs pointing (more or less correctly) towards the "Eclipse Viewing Zone" from even hundreds of kilometers away the memory will linger for a while.
On eclipse day we made it to Polokwane (formerly known as Pietersburg), a big town half way between Musina and Pretoria - and apparently many other eclipse fans had come just as far as all but one hotel were fully booked. The one hotel that could still take us was a pretty luxurios one, connected to a major casino (and still the rate was just 20$ p.p.). We had to stay in a real hotel that one night (in all the others the roof tents had served us well): For one we wanted to watch our half-dozen videos on a decent TV set - and we were eager to see what the South African TV had made out of the eclipse. It was not even the first item on most of the evening news, but eventually we got to see the eclipse story on SABC three times, in different editing and with commentary in Afrikaans, Zulu and finally also English.
There were a wild mix of good and bad pictures of the eclipse itself, both from the Musina area (where a gap in the clouds had given a great crowd on one of the eclipse festivals there a fine view of totality) and Australia, where at least some sites had been lucky, too - and sound bites from many in South Africa who had been clouded out but were still happy about the rare event. On the next morning, only the two leading broadsheet newspapers (Beeld and The Star) put large pictures of the eclipse on their front pages (one from the Musina area, the other from Oz, with spectators in front of the very low corona), while the tabloids (The Citizen, Sowetan and Daily Sun) had other leaders and devoted less than one page to the event - this in sharp contrast to past eclipses in Latin America where esp. the tabloids couldn't get enough out of such a celestial spectacle.
The newspaper coverage leading up to the event had also been somewhat strange: While there were the usual previews and general facts with fancy color graphics and (mostly reasonable) safety advisories, many longer stories dealt with superstitions and esoteric interpretations of the eclipse - which some authors seemed to take dead serious. The Star, for example, on Nov. 30 went into deep astrological thoughts: »Wednesday morning's eclipse is a southern node eclipse. That makes it a Dragon's Tail eclipse. For astrologers this is a warning bell.« And since the eclipse would touch the same region of Africa as the last one just 1 ½ years earlier, »I see this as a powerful focus of cosmic energy on these countries« where more trouble could be brewing.
Strangely enough the article then advised readers to go to the Jo'burg Planetarium and buy a good astronomy book on the eclipse. The Sowetan on Dec. 1 saw things quite differently, however: »A new African age is dawning,« the paper claimed, as »according to Mathole Motshekga of the Kara Heritage Institute, an African intellectual powerhouse, Wednesday's eclipse is about renewal and the birth of a new age in Africa. [... W]e are moving into a female-dominated era and this female is a goddess called the Black Madonna. [... F]or the first time in history humanity will see the rise of woman power in the religious, economic and political arenas« - which would be a clear sign of hope for Southern Africa, moving beyond a century of atrocities.
Somewhat more enlightening were some articles on eclipse-related beliefs by the indigenous people of South Africa, but again no clear picture was painted. For example, the Sunday Times of Dec. 1 claimed that for the Venda - whose territory the track of totality would dominate - the eclipse (called »Mutshakavhili«) would be a bad thing, meaning that the normally kind god N'wali was angry about something and came to visit, often bringing on drought as a punishment. But according to The Star of Dec. 5 the Venda had been »very happy because our god came to visit us« - the two accounts agree, though, that the Venda believe one is not to watch an eclipse because then one would be hit by lightning and burn to ashes. Instead one should bow one's head in respect to N'wali.
Fortunately many South Africans as well as foreign visitors had done exactly the opposite and come in droves to the northern Limpopo area, usually off the beaten track - a few ten thousands overall, it seems. Even for South African journalists the trek north could be a strange experience: »And there are baobs,« Trish Murphy marvelled in The Citizen of Dec. 7 from the Musina area, »thousands of them standing head and shoulders above the other vegetation, their shiny, coppery bark catching the sunlight. The look like an alien army that has arrived from outer space and come to an uncertain halt, lost and bewildered.« The Saturday Star of Dec. 7 saw things more prosaic: »The economy of Limpopo received a big boost this week when thousands of local and foreign visitors converged on the the province [...]
The chairperson of the Limpopo Tourism and Parks board Edgar Mushwana, said the province had invested just over R6-million [about 650'000 dollars or euros] into the marketing of the eclipse event but generated more than R140-million [15 million dollars/euros] in revenue. [...] 'The most satisfying feeling was that people left with a positive message. There were no accidents reported. The feeling of security was very high. That is why most of them promised to come back,' he said.« The Limpopo government now felt that the eclipse had put this province firmly on the map. Eclipse-wise, however, the story quoted a local astronomy professor, nearly all of South Africa had been clouded out and only a small area west of Musina - our area - was lucky.
With that in mind our expedition quickly approached its conclusion: Other sights visited on the way back to Jo'burg included the spectacularly rugged Marakele National Park, the delicious hot springs of Warmbaths and the Tswaing meteorite crater, a brother of Arizona's Barringer Crater but full of water and densely vegetated. Some eclipse celebrities were encountered enroute, e.g. the Poitevins (lucky a bit south of Musina), the Winters (unlucky in the Kruger Park) and Barrie Jones of UK's Open University who had experienced completely cloud-free conditions in Botswana. Would have been a nice destination, too - or one for the future. And maybe one can even go to South Africa without an eclipse: The next one will take place there only in 2030 ...
First version drafted Dec. 11-12, first pictures added Dec. 14, 2002. Still more pictures taken by our group (as well as a pro- and an epilogue) will be added later. Another report from this trip is here (in German) and more pictures are here (at the bottom) and here. Lots more links can be found in the header of the Cosmic Mirror # 246
That was pretty deep my man. I started to drift off into a trance like state envisioning rubbing rhino shit all over my face. You know I hear rhino shit contributes to global warming.
Global warming......Hmmm.........Just a few thoughts here as I haven't truly thought it all out. I am just throwing out a few things off the top of my head:
If Earth’s climate changes meaningfully—and the National Academy of Sciences, previously skeptical, said in 2005 that signs of climate change have become significant—there could be broad-based disruption of the global economy unparalleled by any event other than World War II.
Economic change means winners as well as losers. Huge sums will be made and lost if the global climate changes. Everyone wonders what warming might do to the environment—but what might it do to the global distribution of money and power?
Whether mainly natural or mainly artificial, climate change could bring different regions of the world tremendous benefits as well as drastic problems. The world had been mostly warming for thousands of years before the industrial era began, and that warming has been indisputably favorable to the spread of civilization. The trouble is that the world’s economic geography is today organized according to a climate that has largely prevailed since the Middle Ages—runaway climate change would force big changes in the physical ordering of society. In the past, small climate changes have had substantial impact on agriculture, trade routes, and the types of products and commodities that sell. Larger climate shifts have catalyzed the rise and fall of whole societies. The Mayan Empire, for instance, did not disappear “mysteriously”; it likely fell into decline owing to decades of drought that ruined its agricultural base and deprived its cities of drinking water. On the other side of the coin, Europe’s Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from around 1000 to 1400, was essential to the rise of Spain, France, and England: Those clement centuries allowed the expansion of farm production, population, cities, and universities, which in turn set the stage for the Industrial Revolution. Unless greenhouse-effect theory is completely wrong—and science increasingly supports the idea that it is right—21st-century climate change means that sweeping social and economic changes are in the works.
To date the greenhouse-effect debate has been largely carried out in abstractions—arguments about the distant past (what do those 100,000-year-old ice cores in Greenland really tell us about ancient temperatures, anyway?) coupled to computer-model conjecture regarding the 22nd century, with the occasional Hollywood disaster movie thrown in. Soon, both abstraction and postapocalyptic fantasy could be pushed aside by the economic and political realities of a warming world. If the global climate continues changing, many people and nations will find themselves in possession of land and resources of rising value, while others will suffer dire losses—and these winners and losers could start appearing faster than you might imagine. Add artificially triggered climate change to the volatility already initiated by globalization, and the next few decades may see previously unthinkable levels of economic upheaval, in which fortunes are won and lost based as much on the physical climate as on the business climate.
It may sound odd to ask of global warming, What’s in it for me? But the question is neither crass nor tongue-in-cheek. The ways in which climate change could skew the world’s distribution of wealth should help us appreciate just how profoundly an artificial greenhouse effect might shake our lives. Moreover, some of the lasting effects of climate change are likely to come not so much from the warming itself but from how we react to it: If the world warms appreciably, men and women will not sit by idly, eating bonbons and reading weather reports; there will be instead what economists call “adaptive response,” most likely a great deal of it. Some aspects of this response may inflame tensions between those who are winning and those who are losing. How people, the global economy, and the international power structure adapt to climate change may influence how we live for generations. If the world warms, who will win? Who will lose? And what’s in it for you?
LAND
Real estate might be expected to appreciate steadily in value during the 21st century, given that both the global population and global prosperity are rising. The supply of land is fixed, and if there’s a fixed supply of something but a growing demand, appreciation should be automatic. That’s unless climate change increases the supply of land by warming currently frosty areas while throwing the amount of desirable land into tremendous flux. My hometown of Buffalo, New York, for example, is today so déclassé that some of its stately Beaux-Arts homes, built during the Gilded Age and overlooking a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, sell for about the price of one-bedroom condos in Boston or San Francisco. If a warming world makes the area less cold and snowy, Buffalo might become one of the country’s desirable addresses.
At the same time, Arizona and Nevada, blazing growth markets today, might become unbearably hot and see their real-estate markets crash. If the oceans rise, Florida’s rapid growth could be, well, swamped by an increase in its perilously high groundwater table. Houston could decline, made insufferable by worsened summertime humidity, while the splendid, rustic Laurentide Mountains region north of Montreal, if warmed up a bit, might transmogrify into the new Poconos.
These are just a few of many possible examples. Climate change could upset the applecarts of real-estate values all over the world, with low-latitude properties tanking while high latitudes become the Sun Belt of the mid-21st century.
Local changes in housing demand are only small beer. To consider the big picture, examine a Mercator projection of our planet, and observe how the Earth’s landmasses spread from the equator to the poles. Assume global warming is reasonably uniform. (Some computer models suggest that warming will vary widely by region; for the purposes of this article, suffice it to say that all predictions regarding an artificial greenhouse effect are extremely uncertain.) The equatorial and low-latitude areas of the world presumably will become hotter and less desirable as places of habitation, plus less valuable in economic terms; with a few exceptions, these areas are home to developing nations where living standards are already low.
So where is the high-latitude landmass that might grow more valuable in a warming world? By accident of geography, except for Antarctica nearly all such land is in the Northern Hemisphere, whose continents are broad west-to-east. Only a relatively small portion of South America, which narrows as one travels south, is high latitude, and none of Africa or Australia is. (Cape Town is roughly the same distance from the equator as Cape Hatteras; Melbourne is about the same distance from the equator as Manhattan.) More specifically, nearly all the added land-value benefits of a warming world might accrue to Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia, and Scandinavia.
This raises the possibility that an artificial greenhouse effect could harm nations that are already hard pressed and benefit nations that are already affluent. If Alaska turned temperate, it would drive conservationists to distraction, but it would also open for development an area more than twice the size of Texas. Rising world temperatures might throw Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and other low-latitude nations into generations of misery, while causing Canada, Greenland, and Scandinavia to experience a rip-roarin’ economic boom. Many Greenlanders are already cheering the retreat of glaciers, since this melting stands to make their vast island far more valuable. Last July, The Wall Street Journal reported that the growing season in the portion of Greenland open to cultivation is already two weeks longer than it was in the 1970s.
And Russia! For generations poets have bemoaned this realm as cursed by enormous, foreboding, harsh Siberia. What if the region in question were instead enormous, temperate, inviting Siberia? Climate change could place Russia in possession of the largest new region of pristine, exploitable land since the sailing ships of Europe first spied the shores of what would be called North America. The snows of Siberia cover soils that have never been depleted by controlled agriculture. What’s more, beneath Siberia’s snow may lie geologic formations that hold vast deposits of fossil fuels, as well as mineral resources. When considering ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to regulate greenhouse gases, the Moscow government dragged its feet, though the treaty was worded to offer the Russians extensive favors. Why might this have happened? Perhaps because Russia might be much better off in a warming world: Warming’s benefits to Russia could exceed those to all other nations combined.
Of course, it could be argued that politicians seldom give much thought—one way or the other—to actions whose value will become clear only after they leave office, so perhaps Moscow does not have a grand strategy to warm the world for its own good. But a warmer world may be much to Russia’s liking, whether it comes by strategy or accident. And how long until high-latitude nations realize global warming might be in their interests? In recent years, Canada has increased its greenhouse-gas output more rapidly than most other rich countries. Maybe this is a result of prosperity and oil-field development—or maybe those wily Canadians have a master plan for their huge expanse of currently uninhabitable land.
Global warming might do more for the North, however, than just opening up new land. Temperatures are rising on average, but when are they rising? Daytime? Nighttime? Winter? Summer? One fear about artificially triggered climate change has been that global warming would lead to scorching summer-afternoon highs, which would kill crops and brown out the electric power grid. Instead, so far a good share of the warming—especially in North America—has come in the form of nighttime and winter lows that are less low. Higher lows reduce the harshness of winter in northern climes and moderate the demand for energy. And fewer freezes allow extended growing seasons, boosting farm production. In North America, spring comes ever earlier—in recent years, trees have flowered in Washington, D.C., almost a week earlier on average than a generation ago. People may find this creepy, but earlier springs and milder winters can have economic value to agriculture—and lest we forget, all modern societies, including the United States, are grounded in agriculture.
If a primary impact of an artificially warmed world is to make land in Canada, Greenland, Russia, Scandinavia, and the United States more valuable, this could have three powerful effects on the 21st-century global situation.
First, historically privileged northern societies might not decline geopolitically, as many commentators have predicted. Indeed, the great age of northern power may lie ahead, if Earth’s very climate is on the verge of conferring boons to that part of the world. Should it turn out that headlong fossil-fuel combustion by northern nations has set in motion climate change that strengthens the relative world position of those same nations, future essayists will have a field day. But the prospect is serious. By the middle of the 21st century, a new global balance of power may emerge in which Russia and America are once again the world’s paired superpowers—only this time during a Warming War instead of a Cold War.
Second, if northern societies find that climate change makes them more wealthy, the quest for world equity could be dealt a huge setback. Despite the popular misconception, globalized economics have been a positive force for increased equity. As the Indian economist Surjit Bhalla has shown, the developing world produced 29 percent of the globe’s income in 1950; by 2000 that share had risen to 42 percent, while the developing world’s share of population rose at a slower rate. All other things being equal, we might expect continued economic globalization to distribute wealth more widely. But if climate change increases the value of northern land and resources, while leaving nations near the equator hotter and wracked by storms or droughts, all other things would not be equal.
That brings us to the third great concern: If climate change causes developing nations to falter, and social conditions within them deteriorate, many millions of jobless or hungry refugees may come to the borders of the favored North, demanding to be let in. If the very Earth itself turns against poor nations, punishing them with heat and storms, how could the United States morally deny the refugees succor?
Shifts in the relative values of places and resources have often led to war, and it is all too imaginable that climate change will cause nations to envy each other’s territory. This envy is likely to run both north-south and up-down. North-south? Suppose climate change made Brazil less habitable, while bringing an agreeable mild clime to the vast and fertile Argentinean pampas to Brazil’s south. São Paulo is already one of the world’s largest cities. Would a desperate, overheated Brazil of the year 2037—its population exploding—hesitate to attack Argentina for cool, inviting land? Now consider the up-down prospect: the desire to leave low-lying areas for altitude. Here’s an example: Since its independence, in 1947, Pakistan has kept a hand in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. Today Americans view this issue through the lens of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but from Islamabad’s perspective, the goal has always been to keep Afghanistan available as a place for retreat, should Pakistan lose a war with India. What if the climate warms, rendering much of Pakistan unbearable to its citizens? (Temperatures of 100-plus degrees are already common in the Punjab.) Afghanistan’s high plateaus, dry and rocky as they are, might start looking pleasingly temperate as Pakistan warms, and the Afghans might see yet another army headed their way.
A warming climate could cause other landgrabs on a national scale. Today Greenland is a largely self-governing territory of Denmark that the world leaves in peace because no nation covets its shivering expanse. Should the Earth warm, Copenhagen might assert greater jurisdiction over Greenland, or stronger governments might scheme to seize this dwarf continent, which is roughly three times the size of Texas. Today Antarctica is under international administration, and this arrangement is generally accepted because the continent has no value beyond scientific research. If the world warmed for a long time—and it would likely take centuries for the Antarctic ice sheet to melt completely—international jockeying to seize or conquer Antarctica might become intense. Some geologists believe large oil deposits are under the Antarctic crust: In earlier epochs, the austral pole was densely vegetated and had conditions suitable for the formation of fossil fuels.
And though I’ve said to this point that Canada would stand to become more valuable in a warming world, actually, Canada and Nunavut would. For centuries, Europeans drove the indigenous peoples of what is now Canada farther and farther north. In 1993, Canada agreed to grant a degree of independence to the primarily Inuit population of Nunavut, and this large, cold region in the country’s northeast has been mainly self-governing since 1999. The Inuit believe they are ensconced in the one place in this hemisphere that the descendants of Europe will never, ever want. This could turn out to be wrong.
For investors, finding attractive land to buy and hold for a warming world is fraught with difficulties, particularly when looking abroad. If considering plots on the pampas, for example, should one negotiate with the current Argentinian owners or the future Brazilian ones? Perhaps a safer route would be the contrarian one, focused on the likelihood of falling land values in places people may leave. If strict carbon-dioxide regulations are enacted, corporations will shop for “offsets,” including projects that absorb carbon dioxide from the sky. Growing trees is a potential greenhouse-gas offset, and can be done comparatively cheaply in parts of the developing world, even on land that people may stop wanting. If you jump into the greenhouse-offset business, what you might plant is leucaena, a rapidly growing tree species suited to the tropics that metabolizes carbon dioxide faster than most trees. But you’ll want to own the land in order to control the sale of the credits. Consider a possible sequence of events: First, climate change makes parts of the developing world even less habitable than they are today; then, refugees flee these areas; finally, land can be snapped up at Filene’s Basement prices—and used to grow leucaena trees.
WATER
If Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is to be believed, you should start selling coastal real estate now. Gore’s film maintains that an artificial greenhouse effect could raise sea levels 20 feet in the near future, flooding Manhattan, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities; Micronesia would simply disappear below the waves. Gore’s is the doomsday number, but the scientific consensus is worrisome enough: In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences warned that oceans may rise between four inches and three feet by the year 2100. Four inches may not sound like a lot, but it would imperil parts of coastal Florida and the Carolinas, among other places. A three-foot sea-level rise would flood significant portions of Bangladesh, threaten the national survival of the Netherlands, and damage many coastal cities, while submerging pretty much all of the world’s trendy beach destinations to boot. And the Asian Tigers? Shanghai and Hong Kong sit right on the water. Raise the deep a few feet, and these Tiger cities would be abandoned.
The global temperature increase of the last century—about one degree Fahrenheit—was modest and did not cause any dangerous sea-level rise. Sea-level worries turn on the possibility that there is some nonlinear aspect of the climate system, a “tipping point” that could cause the rate of global warming to accelerate markedly. One reason global warming has not happened as fast as expected appears to be that the oceans have absorbed much of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity. Studies suggest, however, that the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide may be slowing; as the absorption rate declines, atmospheric buildup will happen faster, and climate change could speed up. At the first sign of an increase in the rate of global warming: Sell, sell, sell your coastal properties. Unload those London and Seattle waterfront holdings. Buy land and real property in Omaha or Ontario.
An artificial greenhouse effect may also alter ocean currents in unpredictable ways. Already there is some evidence that the arctic currents are changing, while the major North Atlantic current that moves warm water north from the equator may be losing energy. If the North Atlantic current falters, temperatures could fall in Europe even as the world overall warms. Most of Europe lies to the north of Maine yet is temperate because the North Atlantic current carries huge volumes of warm water to the seas off Scotland; that warm water is Europe’s weathermaker. Geological studies show that the North Atlantic current has stopped in the past. If this current stops again because of artificial climate change, Europe might take on the climate of present-day Newfoundland. As a result, it might depopulate, while the economic value of everything within its icy expanse declines. The European Union makes approximately the same contribution to the global economy as the United States makes: Significantly falling temperatures in Europe could trigger a worldwide recession.
While staying ready to sell your holdings in Europe, look for purchase opportunities near the waters of the Arctic Circle. In 2005, a Russian research ship became the first surface vessel ever to reach the North Pole without the aid of an icebreaker. If arctic sea ice melts, shipping traffic will begin transiting the North Pole. Andrew Revkin’s 2006 book, The North Pole Was Here, profiles Pat Broe, who in 1997 bought the isolated far-north port of Churchill, Manitoba, from the Canadian government for $7. Assuming arctic ice continues to melt, the world’s cargo vessels may begin sailing due north to shave thousands of miles off their trips, and the port of Churchill may be bustling. If arctic polar ice disappears and container vessels course the North Pole seas, shipping costs may decline—to the benefit of consumers. Asian manufacturers, especially, should see their costs of shipping to the United States and the European Union fall. At the same time, heavily trafficked southern shipping routes linking East Asia to Europe and to America’s East Coast could see less traffic, and port cities along that route—such as Singapore—might decline. Concurrently, good relations with Nunavut could become of interest to the world’s corporations.
Oh, and there may be oil under the arctic waters. Who would own that oil? The United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, and Denmark already assert legally complex claims to parts of the North Pole seas—including portions that other nations consider open waters not subject to sovereign control. Today it seems absurd to imagine the governments of the world fighting over the North Pole seas, but in the past many causes of battle have seemed absurd before the artillery fire began. Canada is already conducting naval exercises in the arctic waters, and making no secret of this.
Then again, perhaps ownership of these waters will go in an entirely different direction. The 21st century is likely to see a movement to create private-property rights in the ocean (ocean property rights are the most promising solution to overfishing of the open seas). Private-property rights in the North Pole seas, should they come into existence, might generate a rush to rival the Sooners’ settlement of Oklahoma in the late 1800s.
Whatever happens to our oceans, climate change might also cause economic turmoil by affecting freshwater supplies. Today nearly all primary commodities, including petroleum, appear in ample supply. Freshwater is an exception: China is depleting aquifers at an alarming rate in order to produce enough rice to feed itself, while freshwater is scarce in much of the Middle East and parts of Africa. Freshwater depletion is especially worrisome in Egypt, Libya, and several Persian Gulf states. Greenhouse-effect science is so uncertain that researchers have little idea whether a warming world would experience more or less precipitation. If it turns out that rain and snow decline as the world warms, dwindling supplies of drinking water and freshwater for agriculture may be the next resource emergency. For investors this would suggest a cautious view of the booms in China and Dubai, as both places may soon face freshwater-supply problems. (Cost-effective desalinization continues to elude engineers.) On the other hand, where water rights are available in these areas, grab them.
Much of the effect that global warming will have on our water is speculative, so water-related climate change will be a high-risk/high-reward matter for investors and societies alike. The biggest fear is that artificially triggered climate change will shift rainfall away from today’s productive breadbasket areas and toward what are now deserts or, worse, toward the oceans. (From the human perspective, all ocean rain represents wasted freshwater.) The reason Malthusian catastrophes have not occurred as humanity has grown is that for most of the last half century, farm yields have increased faster than population. But the global agricultural system is perilously poised on the assumption that growing conditions will continue to be good in the breadbasket areas of the United States, India, China, and South America. If rainfall shifts away from those areas, there could be significant human suffering for many, many years, even if, say, Siberian agriculture eventually replaces lost production elsewhere. By reducing farm yield, rainfall changes could also cause skyrocketing prices for commodity crops, something the global economy has rarely observed in the last 30 years.
Recent studies show that in the last few decades, precipitation in North America is increasingly the result of a few downpours rather than lots of showers. Downpours cause flooding and property damage, while being of less use to agriculture than frequent soft rains. Because the relationship between artificially triggered climate change and rainfall is conjectural, investors presently have no way to avoid buying land in places that someday might be hit with frequent downpours. But this concern surely raises a red flag about investments in India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, where monsoon rains are already a leading social problem.
Water-related investments might be attractive in another way: for hydropower. Zero-emission hydropower might become a premium energy form if greenhouse gases are strictly regulated. Quebec is the Saudi Arabia of roaring water. Already the hydropower complex around James Bay is one of the world’s leading sources of water- generated electricity. For 30 years, environmentalists and some Cree activists opposed plans to construct a grand hydropower complex that essentially would dam all large rivers flowing into the James and Hudson bays. But it’s not hard to imagine Canada completing the reengineering of northern Quebec for hydropower, if demand from New England and the Midwest becomes strong enough. Similarly, there is hydropower potential in the Chilean portions of Patagonia. This is a wild and beautiful region little touched by human activity—and an intriguing place to snap up land for hydropower reservoirs.
ADAPTATION
Last October, the treasury office of the United Kingdom estimated that unless we adapt, global warming could eventually subtract as much as 20 percent of the gross domestic product from the world economy. Needless to say, if that happens, not even the cleverest portfolio will help you. This estimate is worst-case, however, and has many economists skeptical. Optimists think dangerous global warming might be averted at surprisingly low cost (see “Some Convenient Truths,” September 2006). Once regulations create a profit incentive for the invention of greenhouse-gas-reducing technology, an outpouring of innovation is likely. Some of those who formulate greenhouse- gas-control ideas will become rich; everyone will benefit from the environmental safeguards the ideas confer.
Enactment of some form of binding greenhouse-gas rules is now essential both to slow the rate of greenhouse-gas accumulation and to create an incentive for inventors, engineers, and businesspeople to devise the ideas that will push society beyond the fossil-fuel age. The New York Times recently groused that George W. Bush’s fiscal 2007 budget includes only $4.2 billion for federal research that might cut greenhouse-gas emissions. This is the wrong concern: Progress would be faster if the federal government spent nothing at all on greenhouse-gas-reduction research—but enacted regulations that gave the private sector a significant profit motive to find solutions that work in actual use, as opposed to on paper in government studies. The market has caused the greenhouse-gas problem, and the market is the best hope of solving it. Offering market incentives for the development of greenhouse-gas controls—indeed, encouraging profit making in greenhouse-gas controls—is the most promising path to avoiding the harm that could befall the dispossessed of developing nations as the global climate changes.
Yet if global-warming theory is right, higher global temperatures are already inevitable. Even the most optimistic scenario for reform envisions decades of additional greenhouse-gas accumulation in the atmosphere, and that in turn means a warming world. The warming may be manageable, but it is probably unstoppable in the short term. This suggests that a major investment sector of the near future will be climate-change adaptation. Crops that grow in high temperatures, homes and buildings designed to stay cool during heat waves, vehicles that run on far less fuel, waterfront structures that can resist stronger storms—the list of needed adaptations will be long, and all involve producing, buying, and selling. Environmentalists don’t like talk of adaptation, as it implies making our peace with a warmer world. That peace, though, must be made—and the sooner businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs get to work, the better.
Why, ultimately, should nations act to control greenhouse gases, rather than just letting climate turmoil happen and seeing who profits? One reason is that the cost of controls is likely to be much lower than the cost of rebuilding the world. Coastal cities could be abandoned and rebuilt inland, for instance, but improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in order to stave off rising sea levels should be far more cost-effective. Reforms that prevent major economic and social disruption from climate change are likely to be less expensive, across the board, than reacting to the change. The history of antipollution programs shows that it is always cheaper to prevent emissions than to reverse any damage they cause.
For the United States, there’s another argument that is particularly keen. The present ordering of the world favors the United States in nearly every respect—political, economic, even natural, considering America’s excellent balance of land and resources. Maybe a warming world would favor the United States more; this is certainly possible. But when the global order already places America at No. 1, why would we want to run the risk of climate change that alters that order? Keeping the world economic system and the global balance of power the way they are seems very strongly in the U.S. national interest—and keeping things the way they are requires prevention of significant climate change. That, in the end, is what’s in it for us.
Please God! No more cut and pastes please!
Almost fooled me for a start. Then DOH!..........
On the other hand, War and Peace might be a good Christmas read for Glumbert..........
Actually, I thought the video was lighthearted. Had kind of a humorous slant, not a pissed off slant. And it must be true, in a way. The entire country shuts down on that day, but what should people do that don't observe that holiday? I guess they eat at Chinese restaurants. Although, every single Chinese restaurant I've ever been in absolutely adores Christmas decorations, year round. I have often wondered if Asians who travel here, (not born here), have any understanding of what that means to the average American. I mean, here in town we think, "Christmas decorations still up in June, how LAZY!". I don't think they know the difference between decorating "pretty", and decorating "Christmas". Christmas decorations ARE pretty, so it's understandable if they use them without full disclosure. But, it is a little odd sometimes to be eating in a restaurant in July with pointsettas strategicaly placed, and multi-colored strings of Christmas lights adorning the windows and bannisters.
Aw well, third glass of wine syndrome. Just thinkin me thinks. randal, is that from a SK book? I think it might be! LOL
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