I've become fascinated with real-time images of our planet, Earth. I can't stop looking at them.
At home and while traveling, I like falling asleep and waking up to an absolutely beautiful alarm clock application called Living Earth, available in iPhone and iPad configurations and more lately available as a desktop application for Macintosh computers. The app provides the user with an almost real-time picture of our planet. The standard view shows cloud cover as well as daylight versus darkness. It attempts to be a picture of Earth as it would be seen at this moment from space, except that a blue dot locates the user's place on the planet. It's mesmerizing and very peaceful.
Here's what Living Earth looked like yesterday afternoon.
Beautiful as the standard picture can be, the "Living Earth" app provides other options to view the Earth. Temperatures planet-wide may be examined. Winds and humidity, too.
But in another app, Earth Now, also available for iPad and iPhone and created by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, home of the Mars missions, I find a more interesting and frankly more disturbing list of "vital signs" for Planet Earth. They are: air temperature, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, gravity field, ozone, sea level, water vapor, and the visible Earth -- in the last case, essentially the same picture seen above from the "Living Earth" app.
After Superstorm Sandy, and after hearing U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, speak a week later in Arlington Town Hall, I find myself staring more and more frequently at the "sea level" photo on
"Earth Now." Markey, who is one of the most steadfast congressional proponents of solutions to "protect, prepare, and prevent" in the face of climate changes emanating from global warming, drew my attention to the variations in the sea. And the "sea level" photo from my Earth Now app -- admittedly, a government photo generated by NASA -- shows what Rep. Markey (pictured at right) told us at Arlington Town Hall: The sea has a higher level off the east coast of North America than in most other places around the world. By this, I mean the sea is actually higher in the Gulf of Mexico, in the waters adjacent to nearly the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and right up the the Grand Banks off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
Markey told us the science behind rising sea levels, and it's not nearly as complicated as you might expect: The sea is higher because it is warmer. Things expand when heated. Yes, even vast oceans of water expand when subjected to heat. Moreover, because of the topography of the seabed (and I confess I don't know much about the particulars of the topography), the waters off the east coast of North America are among the most susceptible in the world to rising sea level. From here, it's not hard to see why a large storm like Sandy caused so much havoc on the Eastern Seaboard. Our sea is higher. Our seaboard faces a clear and present danger. As Markey noted, Paul Revere rode west on April 19, 1775, from Boston through Cambridge, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Lexington to warn that the British were invading Boston by sea, having observed the famous signal of lanterns in the Old North Church: "One if by land, two if by sea." But today, it is not the British invading Boston from the sea. It is the very sea itself which threatens to invade Boston.
Markey showed us illustrations of what would have happened had Sandy switch course by even a few degrees and hit Boston. The Financial District and Faneuil Hall would have been flooded. Perhaps most unexpected, the Back Bay would have been flooded, perhaps devastated. If the surge went over the Charles River barrier at the Museum of Science, the water would have recreated the Back Bay that was filled in 120 years ago to create the base for some of Boston's most valuable commercial and residential real estate. Buildings would have succumbed as the Back Bay sought to create itself anew.
I hope and I pray that in the second term of President Obama's administration, climate change finally rises to the top of issues deserving action. I hope the public arena is filled with debate, proposals, and purpose to clean the damaged Earth as well as taking action to cope now and probably for many years to come -- decades, if not centuries -- with the impact of climate change. So I agree with, among other writers and publications, the lead piece "Talk of the Town" piece by Editor David Remnick in this
week's issue of The New Yorker, entitled "No More Magical Thinking."
Remnick's piece is a call for President Obama to initiate a comprehensive global warming response and announce it in his second inaugural speech. He should do so, in part, because that is what he promised to do when he secured his place as the Democratic nominee for president, not in 2012, but four years earlier in 2008. And it is what he should do because it is simply what must be done, and done at the very highest levels of our government. It is that urgent and important. Remnick (shown at left) of The New Yorker writes:
Ever since 1988, when NASA's James Hansen, a leading climate scientist, testified before the Senate, the public has been exposed to the issue of global warming. More recently, the consequences have come into painfully sharp focus. In 2010, the Pentagon declared, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that changes in the global climate are increasing the frequency and the intensity of cyclones, droughts, floods, and other radical weather events, and that the effects may destabilize governments; spark mass migrations, famine, and pandemics; and prompt military conflict in particularly vulnerable areas of the world including the Middle Eats, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Pentagon, that bastion of wooly radicals, did what the many denialists in the House of Representatives refuse to do: accept the basic science.
The economic impact of weather events that are almost certainly related to the warming of the earth − the European heat wave of 200s (which left fifty thousand people dead) [emphasis added -- DTD], the Russian heat waves and forest fires of 2010, the droughts last year in Texas and Oklahoma, and the preëlection natural catastrophe known as Sandy − has been immense. The German insurer Munich Re estimates the cost of weather-related calamities in North America over the past three decades amounts to thirty-four billion dollars a year [again, emphasis added -- DTD]. Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, has said that Sandy will cost his state alone thirty-three billion. Harder to measure is the human toll around the world − the lives and communities disrupted and destroyed.
"If we are will to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it," Obama said in St. Paul, Minnesota, when he clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, future generations will look back and say, "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Those generations assuredly will not. Although Obama, unlike his predecessor, recognized the dimensions of the problem, he never pursued measures remotely equal to it.
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Inaction on climate change has an insidious ally: time. As the author and activist Bill McKibben writes in The New York Review of Books, "Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it. The distress signal is emitted at a frequency that scientists can hear it clearly, but it is seemingly just beyond the reach of most politicians." When the financial system collapsed, the effects were swift and dramatic. People could debate how best to fix the problem, but they could not doubt there was a problem and it had to be fixed. Yet, as Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, who studied the costs of climate change for the British government, has observed the risks are vastly greater than those posed by the collapse of the Western financial system.
<snip>
But Obama must now defeat an especially virulent form of magical thinking, entrenched on Capitol Hill and elsewhere: that a difficulty delayed is a difficulty allayed. Part of American exceptionalism is that, historically, this country has been the exceptional polluter and is therefore exceptionally responsible for leading the effort to heal the planet. It will be a colossal task, enlisting science, engineering, technology, regulation, legislation, and persuasion. We have seen the storms, the droughts, the costs, and the chaos; we know what lies in store if we fail to take action. The effort should begin with a sustained Presidential address to the country, perhaps from the Capitol, on Inauguration Day. It was there that John Kennedy initiated a race to the Moon − meagre stakes compared with the health of the planet we inhabit.
The Mission of Public Relations in a National Response to Climate Change
As a public relations professional, the steps necessary to cope with climate change will require execution of public relations campaigns repeatedly convincing skeptical publics of the necessity to change the use of land. Land use must change to adapt to and accommodate public works or private developments delivering services to ameliorate the impact of global climate change, repair the change, or protect people from change. This is Rep. Markey's admonition to protect, prepare, and prevent. I believe that in many cases, the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome -- "NIMBY," that is -- will threaten to block well-designed and necessary improvements. I believe that the debate will be skewed to the status quo, even when well-meaning people are involved.
The purpose of this blog is to write about NIMBY issues. I believe that many important NIMBY battles will grow out of the national response to climate change.
Four examples, encompassing locations in three states, should suffice to illustrate my point and my prediction.
First and second, the ideas of building harbor barriers to protect the major ports of the Northeast, similar to the barrier in London on the Thames River, or even a smaller barrier completed in 1969 to protect Stamford, Connecticut. The two proposals I show here are for Boston and New York.
Example 1: Boston Harbor Barrier
The Boston proposal has been around for a while. Developed in 1988 by Antonio Di Mambro + Associates, it was covered again two years ago in an Architecture Boston magazine article about water in Boston titled, "The High Tide of Opportunity." The Boston Harbor barrier would move the port facilities away from downtown, create recreational boating facilities, and open a major controlled gateway into the harbor plus add a secondary gateway for recreational use and harbor ferry use.
Example 2: New York Harbor Barrier
There are several proposals for a New York Harbor barrier system. The most ambitious would construction of a barrier between Breezy Point in Queens and Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Given all of Sandy's damage to those communities, especially Breezy Point and neighboring Belle Harbor on Rockaway, as well as the Brooklyn communities like Gerritsen Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Coney Island, the idea of a major public works construction project terminating in those communities with hundreds if not thousands of jobs might be very attractive. Another proposal would be a barrier in the Narrows, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Finally, to protect New York against a back-door storm surge from Long Island Sound (just ask the residents of Connecticut from Greenwich to Groton about the impact), a barrier is proposed for Throgs Neck at the eastern end of the East River strait.
One example of a barrier that worked in Superstorm Sandy was the 1969 system, two miles long, built to protect Stamford, Connecticut. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suggested to the New York Times that the barrier prevented $25 million in damage to more than 600 acres of homes and businesses, including downtown Stamford. (Elsewhere in New England, both Providence, Rhode Island, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, have harbor barriers as nautical gateways and protection for life and property.)
And a potential New York barrier would resemble one built a decade ago across the Gulf of Finland to protect Saint Petersburg, Russia, which has experienced increased flooding during the past 30 years -- in contrast to the annual floods it experienced since the city was built three centuries ago.
My point in showing all these pictures of barrier projects is this:
These projects can and do substantially protect millions of people and billions of dollars worth of property as well as prevent interruptions on a massive scale to economic activity in all arenas of economic and human life. Moreover, barriers for major ports like New York and Boston will entail thousands of construction jobs.
Yet, there will be opposition. The barriers will interrupt long-cherished views of open water. They will impact important paths of migration for land and sea animal life. And there're questions about who benefits; some people will be on one side of the barrier and protected. Others will pay taxes, suffer loss of views and other intangibles, and still be in harm's way. That's where public relations is called for!
The New York Times report of 7 November 2012 by Mireya Navarro, titled, "Weighing Sea Barriers as Protection for New York," describes a number of situations that all call for careful public relations and, in many cases, considerations of community relations carefully to have a healthy discussion and avoid or ameliorate the knee-jerk NIMBY outcome. Here's the applicable section of the Times coverage:
Brian A. Colle, a professor of atmospheric science who is part of the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, contends that barriers would have made a big difference when the storm pounded the area last week.
He said that if gates had been placed in strategic spots like the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey, they would have protected some of the areas that were swamped by floodwaters, including the edges of Lower Manhattan, low-lying areas of Brooklyn and Queens and the western part of Staten Island, as well as Jersey City and Hoboken, N.J.
“The idea is that you raise these barriers, and anywhere inside of that you’re basically protected,” Dr. Colle said, adding, “With a solid barrier, we basically can have business as usual in Lower Manhattan.”
But vexing questions remain. Would industries tolerate immense disruption from the construction of barriers in the city’s busy waterways? Would residents object to the marring of vistas? With climate change advancing, can scientists accurately predict the size of hurricanes that the sea gates would one day have to withstand?
And where would the $10 billion-plus in construction money come from? Even a study — taking into account the complexity of New York waterways, projections in the rise in sea levels and other factors — would take years and millions of dollars.
The scientists and engineers who have worked on conceptual designs for the city say a comprehensive study is needed on what would be the most effective locations and the most practical type of barriers — whether they swing close like a driveway gate or pivot up from the ocean floor, for example.
A feasibility study by the Army Corps of Engineers, which would have jurisdiction, would require authorization from Congress.
“A lot of things need to be taken into consideration before we throw up a giant wall,” said Chris Gardner, a spokesman for the corps.
Beyond the enormous potential cost, there is no question that there are drawbacks to sea barriers. A barrier that blocks the surge on one side would cause water levels on the other to rise close to a foot, Dr. Colle said, potentially worsening flooding in other areas.
“You could have about 20 percent more water on the other side of the barrier,” he said.
Furthermore, pollution from the runoff of storm water mixed with sewage would be trapped behind a barrier, with nowhere to go while the sea gate is closed.
There is also considerable concern about the environmental costs of disrupting tidal flows and salinity for fish and other aquatic life by building permanent infrastructure in New York Harbor and in the metropolitan area’s rivers.
“The harbor, the Hudson, the Hackensack and Raritan Rivers, Arthur Kill all have thriving ecosystems that benefit us economically and in terms of recreation,” said Paul Gallay, president of the environmental group Riverkeeper. “We understand everything needs to be on the table dealing with the new normal, but storm surge barriers may end up doing more harm than good.”
In other words: Good on you for proposing a solution that saves the city from a second nearly-sure disaster. But consider all the consequences -- and cope with them, too! Or else, among other things, get set for a public relations battle royale. This is an example of a situation that can be avoided, even with large projects like these.
And harbor barriers are just one type of project for the effects of climate change. They are an example of protecting communities and people from the effects of global warming.
Another sort of project is preventing further damage to the environment by shifting energy production to means that don't produce heat and pollutants. In this case, I am thinking of wind power.
Example 3: CapeWind
Wind power seems to be relatively easy -- I'll emphasize the "relatively" -- to site for inland locations in windy prairie conditions. I've seen wind turbine farms in southern Alberta, and I know there are some in Indiana. But my third and fourth examples for difficult NIMBY situations are not in the future; they're in the past, meaning we can learn from them. One case was Cape Wind, located in Nantucket Sound between Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Until his death, the patriarch of a certain politically famous family -- the patriarch himself was politically successful -- was known to oppose CapeWind, quite possibly because the patriarch in question, being Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, didn't like the idea of his view to the south from Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, being obstructed by CapeWind turbines.
CapeWind turned into a heated dispute among Bay State residents who favored wind power over most any other form of power, and urged federal and state officials to permit development of CapeWind, and citizens of the Commonwealth, largely on Cape Cod and the Islands, who opposed the change in scenery and raised other objections. Still, it was permitted and it's moving forward.
Example 4: Kingdom Community Wind
My final example of a massive public works project to avoid adding to climate change while nonetheless generating electric power is yet another wind farm. This time, it's the Kingdom Community Wind project on Lowell Mountain in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The enormity of this project -- it's not that big, actually, but it is situated on a prominent ridge line in a state whose ridge lines are celebrated in history -- gives me pause. As a blogger, I am inclined to look for ways to mollify the complaints of neighbors opposed to a project. In the case of Kingdom Wind, I do not know yet where I come down. I am, myself, in need of some public relations attention, as it were.
I have read about Kingdom Wind on its website and in the media. I have driven past the wind turbines so far in place on Lowell Mountain. I have read news accounts about protest activities of the opposition, some of which are silly but many of which are bold and disruptively eye-catching without being dangerous. I have read portions -- I admit I have not yet completed reading -- the account of the opposition by journalist Chris Braithwaite, who sides with the opponents in his book published this year, Stand Against the Wind: Civil Disobedience in the Green Mountain State.
Source: kingdomcommunitywind.com via Douglass on Pinterest. I confess I could add a photo taken closer to the mountain in which the turbines are more clearly in view. I might add that photo a bit later ...
The question for me is, in some measure, whether the wind turbine farm proposed for Lowell Mountain takes up and disposes forever (or at least for a long, long time) of a resource that is precious and irreplaceable, namely the Green Mountains ridge line. The history can be summarized briefly, even through it encompasses about three-quarters of a century. In the early 1930s, and inspired by the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina, Vermont interests and the federal government proposed a scenic parkway atop the ridges of Vermont's highest Green Mountains. Vermonters vehemently opposed the idea, as told rather recently by Vermont magazine in its July-August 2012 issue within the article titled, "Unalterably Opposed: Vermont and the Green Mountain Parkway," by Mark S. Hudson with photo illustrations from the Vermont Historical Society.
"Unalterably Opposed" describes opponents of the wind farm on Lowell Mountain, just as it described opposition to the Green Mountain Parkway -- and over the same land-use principle, to boot. The modern-day opponents have launched creative protests at home and, just last week, in the capital city of Montpelier, where they unfurled two banners from a hotel across from the Statehouse complaining about the support of recently re-elected Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) for the project. The photo below is from Burlington's WCAX-TV.
Oddly, they oppose Shumlin's professed support for petrochemical alternatives on the basis that he might own stock in oil and gas companies and somehow may be benefiting from his support of oil and gas alternatives. They also claim that the wind power does't necessarily provide enough electricity to warrant a change from traditional electric generation. All of which is at times a little strange, logically.
But to me, the lesson of the Green Mountain Parkway battle is that the ridge line of the Vermont Green Mountains is more precious than even the wide open spaces of Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts, and certainly more valuable than the even more open spaces of the Atlantic Ocean off the southern shores of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket where Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (D) is now pursuing more wind projects. I'm not clear for myself that I support the logic or the tactics of the Lowell Mountain protesters. I'm not even clear if I support their ends. After all, Lowell is just one mountain; the Green Mountain Parkway threatened every mountaintop in the spine of the state from Massachusetts north to Quebec. I can see the value of the opposition's ends, if not its means. But I'm not sure the value is worth stopping and dismantling an important alternative-energy step already taken.
It is these sorts of "Not In My Back Yard" -- "NIMBY" -- protests that cause the types of ambiguity and need for clarity of expression that public relations can help provide to all sides. You might also call this protest "NOTOOM" -- "Not On Top Of Our Mountain." The one thing I am convinced of is that the protesters in question are at root well-meaning. They are not, in the abrasive language of one-sided NIMBY specialists, "CAVEs" nor "BANANAs," which is to say they are not "citizens against virtually everything" nor are they people who believe in "building absolutely nothing near anything (or anyone)." But they are indeed "unalterably opposed" to the Lowell Mountain wind turbines. One might suggest that even at this point, a public relations campaign could inform and influence the opinions of the rest of the state and tip the result one way or the other.
I believe it may have been Dean Tony Saliba of the University of Dayton Engineering School, in welcoming a group including my son to the Class of 2013, who remarked that while politicians make policy, it is engineers who will design the improvements that save the world. I believe the United States' role in saving the planet, not to mention human beings and other species, from further degradation in the wake of climate change depends on good engineering -- and good public relations to allow well-designed engineering to proceed.
"Planet of the Flooded Apes and Other Primates," anyone? No-o-o-o!
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