Some thoughts from Beau on whether it was a coup attempt

It’s been one revolution around the sun since Trump and part of the Republican Party enacted the coup attempt they’d been working on since well before the 2020 election. A lot of folks have a lot to say about it for a lot of reasons. My attention was particularly caught by this take from corrupt scumbag Lindsey Graham:

For those who are unclear, what happened on January 6, 2020 was an explicitly political event, no matter what label you apply to it. You cannot politicize something that is entirely political, anymore than you can make the ocean more wet.

That said, the question of what label we should be using for those events still seems to be a matter of discussion, and I think Beau’s response is better than anything I have to say on the topic:

Confessions of a former snake wrangler: FOIA, privacy, and vaccine misinformation.

In 2009, I was working as a contractor ecologist for the Endangered Resources division of the Wisconsin Department of Natural resources. Specifically, I was part of a team that was doing a population survey for several kinds of snake, including two species of garter snake that are currently listed as “special concern”. Part of the work we were doing was to just get a feel for the overall snake community in southern Wisconsin. In addition to the five garter snake species in Wisconsin (though we didn’t catch all of them, if memory serves), there were hognoses, brown snakes, ringneck snakes, and so on. We also recorded metadata – when and where each snake was caught, what the weather was doing, etc.

The primary goal of the work was to determine whether the Plains and Butler’s garter snakes should be reclassified as “endangered” in Wisconsin.

The history of endangered species is a grim one, and there’s a long-standing problem of people seeking out the last survivors, to collect them as exotic pets, or as trophies, or to kill them as obstructions to development. There’s also the problem of people wanting their “last chance to see” something that may soon cease to exist, which can hasten that extinction. All that being the case, researchers have to take some precautions. It’s bad for the general public to know exactly where they can find an endangered species, because the odds are very good that will result in the species going extinct, at least in that area.

For that reason, and because there’s rarely a public need to know, that information is generally exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

So, what would have happened if someone had asked for all documents relating to our research on garter snakes?

With such a general request, the first thing to note is that the person asking would be getting a lot of information about things that aren’t garter snakes, because those data were collected as part of the garter snake research. Because FOIA requests are legally binding (which is a good thing!), such a general request would mean that we’d have to turn over information that everyone knows would not be relevant to the Garter Snake Transparency Coalition (who I just made up), because everyone knows they don’t care about ringneck snakes. If they narrowed the request to information specific to garter snakes that would help, because it would mean we could automatically set aside documents on other species.

Even with that narrower request, however, we’d need to go through our documents to make sure that there is no way they could be used to pinpoint the location of an endangered population. We would also need to go through and remove people’s names. A lot of the sites where we caught snakes were on private property (including people’s basements!), which means we’d need to make sure those people’s names aren’t included in the released documents, as they have nothing to do with the GSTC’s request, and they have a right to privacy. Snakes, alas, have no individual right to privacy under U.S. law, so the best we can do is to give them collective privacy, when their numbers are small enough.

And remember – every snake had its location recorded, so we’d have to go through and make sure that the locations people ARE allowed to know were present, but the locations that have to be redacted aren’t.

In other words, complying with a request like that can be pretty labor-intensive, and absent a directive to stop doing our normal work, we’d have had to fit that process in around it all.

So, let’s talk about the Pfizer vaccine:

I’m bringing this up because the prediction in the video was accurate, and I’m starting to see the “75 years” line going around on Twitter. I agree with Beau that it’s a good idea for this information to be released. I agree that it would be good to expedite it. That said, it’s not something that can be done without a big shift in resources and personnel for the duration of the project.

This is not a small snake study, this is a massive amount of stuff on the creation and testing of a vaccine, which means that instead of the few hundred pages I might have had to process about snakes, there are estimated to be over 400,000 pages to go through. For example, the FDA will need to both include as much relevant information as possible about the people on whom the vaccine was tested, without violating their privacy – a consideration not afforded to the snakes.

That’s not just about finding people know what to redact and what to release, it’s about finding people who can do the work and who can also handle confidential information, which is often its own set of training and requirements.

As Beau said, the plaintiffs seeking the release of these documents do have the power to narrow the scope of their request to specific areas of concern, like adverse reactions, side effects, and efficacy. That would cut down on the number of papers the FDA team would have to go through. To me it seems a little suspect that they’ve apparently been unwilling to do so. Holding out for the whole thing seems almost designed to stir up outrage and controversy, and such a broad request does make me wonder if some of the people involved are hoping to comb through everything stuff that can be used out of context to support a talking point. This comment from a Reuters article on the subject does little to quell that worry:

Indeed, several of the plaintiffs – a group that now includes more than 200 doctors, scientists, professors, public health professionals and journalists from around the world – have publicly questioned the efficacy of lockdown policies, mask mandates and the vaccine itself.

While some members may have their own agendas, the group as a whole has pledged to publish all the information it receives from the FDA on its website and says it “takes no position on the data other than that it should be made publicly available to allow independent experts to conduct their own review and analyses.”

It also doesn’t help to have a Republican politician proudly displaying his ignorance of the scale of the request of the work that needs to be done to comply with it.

Earlier this month, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., introduced legislation that could force the FDA to release all documents relating to the vaccine within the next 100 days.

The legislation is a direct response to a request made last month by the federal agency to prolong releasing data on COVID vaccines for up to 55 years.

“How does a vaccine that receives approval in 108 days now require 55 years just to release information?” Norman said to Fox News. “It sounds like the beginning of a very bad joke.”

You’ll forgive me if I find the assessment of a conservative real estate investor to be less than useful in this case. I expect that there are people involved who do have legitimate interest in this, but it also seems that at least some folks are doing it for more political and self-serving reasons.

In case it needs to be said, the vaccine approval process is very different from the process of processing the documents generated BY that process. I also think that the urgency of getting a vaccine out during a raging pandemic is somewhat different from the urgency of getting every scrap of paper associated with vaccine approval out to the public.

I agree with Beau that they should do what they need to – bringing folks in from other departments, putting other projects on hold for a few months, and so on – to get this dealt with as soon as possible. That said, doing all of that isn’t going to happen overnight. It was never going to happen overnight. To me it seems entirely reasonable to say “this is how we normally do things, and this is how long this request will take, without changes at one or both ends of this process.” If there is a law passed or a court ruling mandating a faster turnaround, that will probably make it easier for the agency to get help and reassign resources, so I have no problem with the plaintiffs continuing to push. From what I can tell, this is just the beginning of a process, and the U.S. is set up in a way that requires an adversarial approach to things like this.

My problem is with the insistence that the scale of the request, and the response to it, are evidence of a coverup, rather than the first stages of a big task. I obviously can’t  say for certain that some of the people involved are bad-faith actors, but it wouldn’t be the first time freedom of information laws have been used for nefarious purposes. The time it takes to work out the logistics of this is being used to bolster anti-vax conspiracy talk, and that is a big problem. I think the only way to disarm that particular trap is to actually expedite the process. It’s likely that for some folks, it won’t be enough no matter how much is released. They’ll use any redactions as proof that “they’re hiding something”, and any delays as the same.

The reality is that things take work, and the public’s right to know – which again, I do think exists here – has to be balanced with rights to privacy, and (which I think is less legitimate) trade secrets. I want a very different world from the one we have now. I want things like vaccines to be open-source, and available to all without concern for profit. In case it’s not clear to my readers, “Big Pharma” is part of the capitalist structure I want to dismantle.

But we’re not there yet, and while we’re doing that work, we are also stuck with the work generated by the system we’re trying to replace.

Keep pushing for transparency, just don’t use the lack of instant gratification as an excuse to spread conspiracy theories.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

The bipartisan war on American retirement

Retirement is a tricky subject in the U.S., for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the work ethic is central. Basically, time spent not working is a sin against God, or against The Economy. It’s also taken as proof that your poverty is your own fault, and if you’re working 80 hours and still struggling, well then you should “work smarter, not harder”. It’s hard not to feel that this leads a lot of people to feel that it’s virtuous of them to keep working past retirement age, and that one “shouldn’t” retire until physically unable to keep working.

The first time I thought about this was probably a few years back when a co-worker told me they were looking at other jobs not because the place we were at wasn’t good to work for, but because the retirement-age folks higher up in that person’s branch of the organization simply didn’t seem interested in retiring. For my co-worker, there wasn’t any reasonable prospect of advancement, because jobs weren’t opening up due to retirement.

Beyond the work ethic issue, I think an awful lot of people rely on their workplace for a significant portion of their social interaction, which makes leaving all the more difficult.

All of that, however, is about people who have the ability to retire, but don’t want to for one reason or another. All things being equal, there shouldn’t be any problem with people not retiring for a great many professions (I don’t know that it’s good to have folks in their 70s or 80s writing laws and setting policies, for example). The reality is that for a great many older Americans, retirement is increasingly not an option.

Media reports of older workers have often been framed as feel-good stories, such as a viral news report of an 89-year-old pizza delivery man who received a $12,000 tip raised by a customer out of remorse, as he works 30 hours a week because he can’t afford to retire on social security benefits alone. Or an 84-year-old woman who started a new job as a motel housekeeper in Maine in July 2020. Or an 81-year-old woman in Ohio who volunteered to start working at her favorite restaurant in November 2021 because it shut down temporarily due to an inability to hire and retain enough staff.

But the grim reality is millions of Americans are working into their senior years because they can’t afford not to have a job.

Over the next decade, the number of workers ages 75 and older is expected to increase in the US by 96.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with their labor force participation rate projected to rise from 8.9% in 2020 to 11.7% by 2030, a rate that has steadily increased from 4.7% in 1996.

This is a problem that’s only going to get worse, as millennials are poorer across the board than our elders were at our age. For a lot of us, retirement is a pipe dream. Even if we still have a functional society in 30 years, the leadership of the United States seems committed to the neoliberal obsession with turning everything into a for-profit enterprise, no matter how much misery and death that causes:

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think our best path towards a better life for our elderly population is the same kind of organizing I advocate for most other things. Building a society that values life will only happen through collective effort to overcome those who want the current trends to continue, and have the power to make that happen, absent real opposition. The reality is that the Democratic Party, despite their rhetoric, are as dogmatically committed to the cult of the Free Market as the Republicans. They will mix a little praise into their hatred of the left, but only enough to bolster the “lesser evil” argument at campaign time. When they actually take power, they keep increasing war funding, attack the social safety net (as discussed in the video), continue expanding fossil fuel extraction, and keep talking about how we “need a strong Republican party“.

The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them
–Julius Nyerere

The ideology of our political leadership, while moving somewhat left on social issues, has been moving to the right on economic policy and “security” policy for all of my life. Electing more Democrats will not solve anything. Our only hope is to organize, build collective power, and change the world despite their opposition.

All we have is us.

 

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Youth climate activists in Wales have the right response to an attempt at placation.

On top of the pandemic, 2021 continued the escalation of climate chaos, and our leaders continue to fail us at a breathtaking scale.

It’s been clear to me for a while that political institutions in a lot of the world have gotten very good at ignoring the kinds of activism we’re most used to seeing in liberal democracies. I think that dismissal is particularly bad, and particularly galling when it’s directed at children. Kids who’re socially or politically active tend to both be lauded for it, and rewarded with speeches about how we should listen to the clear-sighted wisdom of the youth, and ignored beyond that.

It feels like it’s all about teaching people to be satisfied with the feeling of doing the right thing, rather than demanding the change that’s actually needed. That’s why I’m pretty happy to see this story out of Wales:

Young members of an environmental group have turned down an award from a council, accusing it of not doing enough to tackle climate change.

Pontypridd’s Young Friends of the Earth has been campaigning for changes to address the climate emergency.

It said Rhondda Cynon Taf council has not done enough since the devastating floods in 2020 after Storm Dennis.

Group member Alice, 13, said: “It would be hypocritical for us to take the award.”

“We feel Rhondda Cynon Taf council – and the world – isn’t taking action against climate change,” she added.

“The major changes we could do as a county would be big decisions and not small day-to-day ones.

“Because if you sit in a house which is on fire you wouldn’t just sit there as the flames surrounded you and start making a plan how you’re going to deal with the fire.

“You’re going to act immediately and get water and you’re going to put the fire out. You wouldn’t sit there doing nothing. The world isn’t in the best shape and they’re not doing enough about it.”

Alice added that there was “action immediately” when the pandemic hit, and the same needed to be done for the climate change emergency.

“We need that with climate change because if we don’t get it sorted out we might not be here.”

When Storm Dennis caused widespread flooding across south Wales in February 2020, Pontypridd was one of the worst affected towns.

Homes and businesses were hit, with the middle of the town centre flooded after the River Taff burst its banks.

“When we saw the town flood last year we knew climate change was getting worse and despite what people were saying about it getting better because it’s not,” said Alice.

“I felt terrified when I saw water running down the main street because if water can reach that high because of a storm, imagine what it will be like in 10 years.”

Dan, 12, another member of Young Friends of the Earth, said: “I would have expected Rhondda Cynon Taf council to declare a climate emergency after the Welsh government did.

“They are one of the few councils in Wales not to declare it and after Storm Dennis I’d have thought it would have been the first thing they would have done.

I very much agree with the sentiment that we need actions, not awards. I’m not actually certain of this, but I feel like there is a lot more that even local governments could be doing, not just in terms of prioritizing the move away from fossil fuels and preparing for extreme weather events, but also in terms of pushing regional and national governments to do more, and helping both their constituents and fellow governmental bodies participate in the pressure campaigns. Ideally, we want the kind of action that can build momentum for greater action in the future.

I’m also encouraged to see the level of strategic thinking involved here:

The group, which has a core of about eight members, was also savvy enough to know that it might get more publicity for its cause if it turned down the award.

They viewed a YouTube clip of the moment in the film Brassed Off when band leader Danny turns down a prize to draw attention to the plight of ravaged mining communities and explains: “Us winning this trophy won’t mean bugger all to most people. But us refusing it … then it becomes news.”

Dan Wright, 12, said: “If we had accepted the award, we might have got in the local paper. More people now will know what we’ve done. Perhaps they’ll join us on a march or do their own research on the climate. When I first heard about the award I felt excited but then thought they were trying to greenwash themselves.”

I don’t think I started thinking about that kind of strategy until I was in my 20s, and it’s encouraging to see it in today’s kids. On the one hand, it continues to be infuriating that children need to spend their time on this, but on the other hand, I think that if we’re ever going to have a truly just and democratic society, we will need to spend less time working to generate profit, and more time involved in our own governance in a far more direct manner than we see in representative democracies. I believe that simply electing representatives and trusting them to do well by us has more or less proven itself to be a failure. It concentrates power in the hands of people who are then able to use that power to further empower themselves, rather like we see in capitalism. As far as I can tell, the only solution is a populace that participates in the running of society at least as actively we we currently participate in wage labor and consumerism.

We should not look to children for hope. That’s an unfair burden to place on them, and an abdication of our responsibility. It’s just another form of selling out their future for our own comfort. What we should be doing, in addition to taking real action on climate change, is educating ourselves and our children about what it means to govern ourselves, and to build and live in a society that values life.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Another year begins

2021 was an interesting year, to say the least. The biggest “event” of the year, for my household, was our move from Glasgow to Dublin. When we first moved to Glasgow, we intended to find a way to stay in Scotland, but the pandemic basically robbed us of a year’s worth of job hunting, and we ended up having to leave the UK. For various reasons, Dublin ended up being the best option for us, so after half a year in Scotland and a year in Pandemicland, we had to relocate again.

I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a non-stressful move, but this one was horrible in its own unique way. Tegan contracted COVID, so we postponed our move by a month (while paying rent on both apartments). Despite the delay, her test came back positive three weeks after recovery, which meant that we had to split up. Tegan found a cheap hotel for a couple weeks, and I made the journey with cat, dog, and suitcase by myself.

We live in a society that forces us to pay to live. That’s annoying by itself, but I’m used to it. That said, there’s a special rage that comes from going into debt to pay for things – like a moving service or a functional apartment – only to not even get what you’ve paid for. The movers decided that our book boxes, being full of books, were too heavy for them to carry up the stairs, so I had to move a large portion of our stuff myself (with the help of a new neighbor who has sadly moved since then). Having to do part of the movers’ job for them was annoying, but it paled in comparison to the condition of the apartment when I arrived.

We got this flat because it was our only option. We spent months reaching out to Dublin landlords for apartments more in our range, and this was literally the only place that responded. As a consequence, we’re in Rich People Country, and paying for the “privilege”. For the price I was expecting an apartment that worked better than our last couple of flats. Instead, the fridge was broken. I was in strict quarantine from the moment I arrived, so we’d arranged for a friend here to bring me groceries. I put my leftovers in the fridge, where they were kept nice and warm, and went bad in short order.

I had to spend the better part of a month hounding the management company before they scheduled a fridge replacement. I also had to wrestle with them to remove a some pieces of furniture we’d asked to be dealt with a couple months before.

Keep in mind, this flat was vacant for at least three months before I arrived, and we paid full rent for two months before arriving. Needless to say, I’m not happy with how much money we’ve had to pay for an apartment with more problems than any of the much cheaper ones I’ve rented in the past. That’s not the end of the crap we’ve had to deal with because of the move, but I think that’s a decent summary how of much of this past year felt.

That said, there were good things too.

The neighborhood is very pretty, grocery stores are within walking distance, and the pets both seem to like our new digs. Tegan’s research team continues to be Good People, and thanks to a little quirk of Irish immigration law, I’ve had little choice but to work on my writing. Tegan is working on her PhD, and so I’m allowed to live here as a “spousal dependent”, which means I’m prohibited from seeking any kind of conventional wage labor. I never really intended to rely on writing to make ends meet, but now it’s basically the only option I’ve got. It’s not a corner I wanted to be backed into, but now that I’m here, I might as well make the best of it, and that’s going to be my primary focus in this coming year.

As it stands, I’m making less than minimum wage through Patreon, and I think the best way for me to improve that situation is to do more, better. Specifically, to increase the frequency with which I post, in the hopes of increasing readership. The focus of my efforts won’t change a whole lot, but the overall feel of the blog may change a bit, as I’ll have a wide variety of stuff posted between my more involved bits of writing.

Overall, 2022 is already starting out better than 2021. We’re not moving this year, we’re not stuck in a flat that came with a roach infestation, and we’re both vaccinated and boosted (the soreness in my left shoulder should be gone tomorrow). It feels like every year, planning for the future becomes more pointless, but for the short term, I have the space to work on things that are important to me, which makes me very lucky. I’m still struggling with the difficulties of untreated ADHD, but while I’d love for that to change, it helps that I have time to deal with the bullshit my brain throws at me.

I have no idea if this will be a “good” year, but there are a lot of indications that – for me and Tegan – it will be better than last year.

I hope the same is true for all of you, and I hope that we’re all pleasantly surprised by life going forward.

Happy New Year!

Abolition requires more than just swapping out people. It requires reshaping the world.

If you’re at all aware of the history of U.S. foreign policy over the last century, any time a left-wing movement achieves some kind of success, you’re faced with the joy of a step in the right direction, mixed with the feeling that it’s only a matter of time before there’s another corporate-backed effort to put a far-right regime in power. It’s annoying, because that reaction feels sort of fatalistic – like no matter how much we do, there’s always a handful of obscenely wealthy extremists who prefer mass murder to anything that even looks like a threat to their power.

That’s the case right now, with the recent victory of Gabriel Boric in Chile’s presidential election. It’s impossible for me to see this welcome move to the left without remembering the events that made it such a big deal. With a nation as powerful, and as committed to capitalism as the U.S., it’s hard not to worry that we’re never going to actually have a shot at a better future without the U.S. itself undergoing revolutionary change. That change itself is constantly being fought by the U.S. government, more or less as part of standard operating procedure. A couple recent examples are the assassination of Michael Reinoehl by U.S. Marshalls (possibly on the orders of then-President Trump), and the imprisonment of Florida anti-fascist Daniel Baker in association with the events of January 6th. What’s interesting about that case is that Baker’s 44 month sentence is for merely suggesting that people on the left should do what Kyle Rittenhouse did in Kenosha, and organize an armed opposition to the fascist mob that was planning to attack the capitol and possibly murder lawmakers.

“Dan’s case speaks volumes about how the state represses the left much differently than it treats the far right,” Brad Thomson, civil rights attorney at the People’s Law Office, who did not represent Baker, told me. “Here, Dan was sentenced to three and a half years for online posts opposing another January 6 incident. But for actual participants from January 6, we’re seeing charges and sentences far below that.” Thomson added that “every case is unique, but the overall message people will get from this is that online speech calling for militant antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer than actually taking militant action with fascists.”

Any effort at ending capitalism on this planet will have to account for U.S. intelligence agencies, even if the U.S. armed forces never get involved. This has led to a lot of people calling – rightly in my opinion, for the abolition of the CIA. The problem is that as with policing, merely replacing the people currently involved in the organization won’t actually solve the problem. Beau of the Fifth Column does a good job of breaking down why:

We’re surrounded by a sort of global mental infrastructure, built over countless generations and maintained far better than any material infrastructure, by those whose power and privilege come from that very infrastructure. Trains and power lines help everybody, but those at the top can get power and transit for themselves, even if the rest of us are stuck without. The infrastructure of hierarchy and competition, on the other hand, only serves those at the top, and they will spend unimaginable sums to maintain and improve that infrastructure, by setting laws, and by spreading propaganda to the masses.

That’s why I no longer buy the idea that gradual or incremental reforms will save us. As things stand, we have to fight almost as hard for little changes as we do for big ones, and the little changes are both inadequate, and easily reversed. As with police abolition, success requires that we remove the justification for groups like the CIA, and for their actions.

There was a saying going around a while back, in some of the climate activist groups I was part of – if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together with others. Unfortunately, we need to go far and fast. We need a planet-wide overhaul of our political and economic infrastructure, and of the thought patterns and assumptions that support and perpetuate that infrastructure. Doing all of that at the speed I want to do it isn’t safe. I don’t see how it could be. The closer we get to real change, the more those at the top are going to rely on their oldest and most reliable tool: violence.

They will imprison people for the mere act of advocating armed opposition to militant fascism. They will summarily execute people who actually carry out such opposition. Many of the people who walk the halls of power today were themselves involved in ordering, aiding, or hiding numerous atrocities around the world, and it’s hard to see why they would stop now – it’s worked well for them so far.

The problem is that we’ve run out of safe options. Allowing things to continue as they are today means courting extinction, and at minimum guarantees hundreds of millions of needless deaths. As always, my preferred path forward relies on increasing our resilience and our capacity to take coordinated action, separate from any government systems or political parties. I think that gives us the best shot we’ll ever have at large-scale change with as little violence as possible. I also think it gives us our best shot at withstanding efforts to crush that change long enough to see it through. The biggest ray of hope I can see is that it’s getting harder for the government to hide what it’s doing around the world, and it feels like the U.S. empire is beginning to lose its grip a bit. It’s encouraging to see things like Boric’s win in Chile, and the return to power of the MAS party in Bolivia. Our job, in places like the U.S. and western Europe, is to do our part to keep an eye on what our governments are doing around the world, and to organize so that we can create ever-increasing political costs for the politicians and oligarchs behind this sort of foreign interference.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Bad news for the Thwaites Glacier

Most of the time, when we talk about melting sea ice, the focus is on the Arctic Ocean. There are a few reasons for this, the biggest one being that sea ice is a much larger part of what happens there, compared to the continent of Antarctica. It’s also a bit easier to measure what’s going on up there. Multiple countries have naval activity under the ice, and they keep track of thickness so they know where their submarines can or cannot surface. There are also many more people living in the Arctic circle, so more people pay attention to what’s happening there, because it affects their daily lives.

There are also three very big considerations when it comes to the rate and impact of global warming. The first is the albedo feedback loop – ice melts, exposing more water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, and so on. Melting sea ice speeds the rate at which warming happens. The second is that as more and more water is exposed for more of the year, the warmth rising from the water pushes arctic air south, leading to the “polar vortex” events with which we’ve become familiar. And last but certainly not least, the ice and low temperatures of the Arctic play a big role (along with salt concentration, also affected by meltwater) in driving the big oceanic currents that bring oxygen into the abyss, and keep northern regions like western Europe nice and warm. As the planet warms and ice melts, it’s expected that those currents will change, causing a huge change in weather patterns all around the planet on top of those we’re already seeing. I will be writing more about that very soon.

All of that is why we most often hear about Arctic sea ice. This post is about what’s happening on the other side of the planet. Ice around Antarctica plays many of the same roles, and it is also being closely monitored, but it gets a bit less press. The biggest news we tend to see is when a particularly large ice shelf breaks up, and that’s what this news is about – a breakup that we’ve been waiting for, and that we’ve been hoping would happen slowly, and not soon.

So much for that.

Scientists have discovered a series of worrying weaknesses in the ice shelf holding back one of Antarctica’s most dangerous glaciers, suggesting that this important buttress against sea level rise could shatter within the next three to five years.

Until recently, the ice shelf was seen as the most stable part of Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized frozen expanse that already contributes about 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. Because of this brace, the eastern portion of Thwaites flowed more slowly than the rest of the notorious “doomsday glacier.”

But new data show that the warming ocean is eroding the eastern ice shelf from below. Satellite images taken as recently as last month and presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union show several large, diagonal cracks extending across the floating ice wedge.

These weak spots are like cracks in a windshield, said Oregon State University glaciologist Erin Pettit. One more blow and they could spiderweb across the entire ice shelf surface.

“This eastern ice shelf is likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs,” she said. “Suddenly the whole thing would collapse.”

The failure of the shelf would not immediately accelerate global sea level rise. The shelf already floats on the ocean surface, taking up the same amount of space whether it is solid or liquid.

But when the shelf fails, the eastern third of Thwaites Glacier will triple in speed, spitting formerly landlocked ice into the sea. Total collapse of Thwaites could result in several feet of sea level rise, scientists say, endangering millions of people in coastal areas.

“It’s upwardly mobile in terms of how much ice it could put into the ocean in the future as these processes continue,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a leader of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). He spoke to reporters via Zoom from McMurdo Station on the coast of Antarctica, where he is awaiting a flight to his field site atop the crumbling ice shelf.

“Things are evolving really rapidly here,” Scambos added. “It’s daunting.”

Pettit and Scambos’s observations also show that the warming ocean is loosening the ice shelf’s grip on the underwater mountain that helps it act as a brace against the ice river at its back. Even if the fractures don’t cause the shelf to disintegrate, it is likely to become completely unmoored from the seafloor within the next decade.

Other researchers from the ITGC revealed chaos in the “grounding zone” where the land-bound portion of the glacier connects to the floating shelf that extends out over the sea. Ocean water there is hot, by Antarctic standards, and where it enters crevasses it can create “hot spots” of melting.

Without its protective ice shelf, scientists fear that Thwaites may become vulnerable to ice cliff collapse, a process in which towering walls of ice that directly overlook the ocean start to crumble into the sea.

This process hasn’t been observed in Antarctica. But “if it started instantiating it would become self-sustaining and cause quite a bit of retreat for certain glaciers” including Thwaites, said Anna Crawford, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews.

This would continue the already measurable acceleration of sea level rise, as NASA reported in 2018:

We’re a very long way away from the scenario in my “flooded Manhattan” stories, and there’s no guarantee it’ll ever get to that point, but we are already seeing things like “ghost forests”, caused by salt creeping into the groundwater as seas rise, and multiple island nations are understandably concerned about their looming inundation. On the whole, I think adapting ourselves to sea level rise could be one of the easier climate problems to solve. It will require a lot of construction work, but that’s one thing that we’re generally quite good at, around the world. As always, I think the bigger problem is ensuring just treatment of those affected as part of a broader fight for environmental justice.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Suffocating Seas: An update on this blog’s namesake climate catastrophe

The title of this blog comes from a frustration I had, back in 2010, about the absurdly optimistic climate scenarios that were being described by politicians and pundits as “alarmist”. At that point in time, I remember people scoffing at the notion that we might see two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and most of the other effects of a warming planet, like crop failures, were largely ignored. Honestly, climate change in general was being largely ignored, which is part of how we got where we are today.

So I started out to write about worst-case scenarios, and the possibility of warming oceans leading to widespread anoxic conditions struck me as particularly worrisome. More on this later, but that exact scenario is the most likely cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as The Great Dying. All the food we get from the sea requires oxygen to survive. Specifically, it requires dissolved oxygen, which means oxygen molecules in the water that are not part of the H2O molecules, but that saturate the space between water molecules. The air we breathe is around 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. In aquatic environments, H2O is roughly analogous to nitrogen in air, when it comes to respiration, but the concentration of oxygen available for “breathing” is much lower. This isn’t a problem – gills tend to be very efficient, and aquatic life has evolved to deal with that. What it does mean is that despite oxygen being a major component of water, most of what’s there isn’t actually usable for breathing. There are a number of factors that affect how much there is, but temperature is a big one, and it’s feeding into a rise in so-called “dead zones”.

As ocean and atmospheric scientists focused on climate, we believe that oceanic oxygen levels are the next big casualty of global warming. To stop this, we need to build on the momentum of the recent COP26 summit and expand our attention to the perilous state of oceanic oxygen levels—the life support system of our planet. We need to accelerate ocean-based climate solutions that boost oxygen, including nature-based solutions like those discussed at COP26.

As the amount of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, not only does it warm air by trapping radiation, it warms water. The interplay between oceans and the atmosphere is complex and interwoven, but simply, oceans have taken up about 90 percent of the excess heat created by climate change during the Anthropocene. Bodies of water can absorb CO2 and O2, but only to a temperature-dependent limit. Gas solubility decreases with warming temperatures; that is, warmer water holds less oxygen. This decrease in oxygen content, coupled with a large-scale die-off of oxygen-generating phytoplankton resulting not just from climate change, but from plastic pollution and industrial run-off, compromises ecosystems, asphyxiating marine life and leading to further die-offs. Large swaths of the oceans have lost 10–40 percent of their oxygen, and that loss is expected to accelerate with climate change.

The dramatic loss of oxygen from our bodies of water is compounding climate-related feedback mechanisms described by scientists in many fields, hundreds of whom signed the 2018 Kiel Declaration on Ocean Deoxygenation. This declaration has culminated in the new Global Ocean Oxygen Decade, a project under the U.N. Global Ocean Decade (2021–2030). Yet, despite years of research into climate change and its effect on temperature, we know comparatively little about its effect on oxygen levels and what falling oxygen levels, in turn, may do to the atmosphere. To address this unfolding crisis, we need more research and more data.

In the past 200 years, humans have shown remarkable ability to change the planet by altering the timescales in which the Earth cycles chemicals such as CO2. We need to evaluate any possible solutions for their impact on not just greenhouse gases but other critical elements of life, such as oxygen levels. As the financial world invests in climate change solutions focused on CO2 drawdown, and possibly including future geoengineering efforts such as iron fertilization, we run the risk of causing secondary harm by exacerbating oxygen loss. We need to evaluate potential unintended consequences of climate solutions on the full life support system.

Beyond enhanced monitoring of oxygen and the establishment of an oxygen accounting system, such an agenda encompasses fully valuing the ecosystem co-benefits of carbon sequestration by our ocean’s seaweed, seagrasses, mangroves and other wetlands. These so-called “blue carbon” nature-based solutions are also remarkable at oxygenating our planet through photosynthesis. The theme of COP26 chosen by the host country (U.K.) was “nature-based solutions.” And we saw a lot of primarily terrestrial focused (forestry) initiatives and commitments that are an excellent step forward. We hope this year’s conference and next year’s COP27 help oceanic nature-based solutions to come into their own, propelled by the U.N. Global Ocean Decade.

Putting oxygen into the climate story motivates us to do the work to understand the deep systemic changes happening in our complex atmospheric and oceanic systems. Even as we celebrated the return of humpback whales in 2020 to an increasingly clean New York Harbor and Hudson River, dead fish littered the Hudson River in the summer as warmer waters carried less oxygen. Ecosystem changes connected to physical and chemical systems-level data may point the way to new approaches to climate solutions—ones that encompass an enhanced understanding of the life support system of our planet and that complement our understanding of drawdown to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Roughly 40 percent of the world depends on the ocean for their livelihoods. If we do not stop marine life from oxygen-starvation, we propagate a further travesty on ourselves.

I think it’s important to understand that not all life on Earth has the requirement for oxygen that is common among the organisms that surround us. Because we require an environment with a certain oxygen saturation, we simply don’t interact with life forms that rely on, for example, sulfur as an electron receptor. This applies both on land and in the water, but possibly the most common anoxic environment on Earth is the muck under bodies of water. When oxygen concentration dips low enough, anaerobic life gets to come out and play, and that’s bad for us aerobic critters. If a dead zone becomes permanent, rather than seasonal like the ones described in the article I quoted, then the rise in anaerobic life, and its waste products, will mean that lack of oxygen will not be the only problem – you also see a rise in sulfur compounds that are poisonous to us all by themselves. It may also be possible for sulfide-saturated waters to release toxic gas that could suffocate coastal areas.

Our oceans are so huge that it’s hard to wrap our heads around the scale. From everything I’ve read, it should be thousands of years before heat-driven dead zones in the oceans start gassing low-lying land, but it does seem to be a real possibility. Furthermore, I think it’s worth remembering a few things:

The first predictions of global warming due to fossil fuel emissions, in the 1890s, projected a timeline of 3,000 years to the “palm trees growing in Sweden” mark. As it stands today, I think we will be lucky if it takes 300 from the same starting point (meaning we’re over a century in), and the most common refrain from living climate scientists seems to be that everything is happening faster than anyone expected.

Chemical changes like this aren’t really something a lot of people are talking about, but I think if they do happen, it will be similar to how sea level rise has been happening – unevenly, and more or less destructive depending on local conditions. It will be a long time before we get to the water levels in my “flooded NYC” stories, but we’ve already seen the city’s subways flooded a number of times in the last few years. I don’t think it’s out of the question for there to be localized “gas events” driven by aquatic dead zones centuries before anoxic conditions exist in a majority of our oceans.

We are living through an event unlike anything our species, or any of those with which we share the planet, have experienced. Knowledge of our history can help us, but it cannot guide us. The reality is that things are moving fast, and the only certainty we have is that the world in which our civilization was born no longer exists, and this new one is not pulling its punches.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.