This week’s guest Vandana Shiva says it is no longer climate “change” but “climate havoc”. Then U. of California Distinguished Professor Michael Prather: methane stays in the atmosphere longer than we were told. Dr. Michael Polanyi on logging industry myths Canada tells the world, more self-delusion on emissions driving disruption of the atmosphere. I’m Alex Smith with three interviews, let’s go.

LIsten to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

 

We all watched with shock: a Hurricane wrecked whole towns in upland Appalachia, about seven hours drive from the sea. North Carolina and Tennessee were already choking on three days of extreme rainfall before new waves of water washing in with Hurricane Helene.

Ironically, one of the hardest hit places was Asheville North Carolina. I’ve seen Asheville described before as a possible climate haven, being cooler than the coastal plains and too far inland for hurricanes. Not any more. There are no places safe from climate change.

Barely reported, on the other side of the world, Katmandu and all of Nepal suffered through similar scenes. At least 130 people died as rivers broke their banks and hillsides – complete with buildings – slid into the muddy rushing waters. Some of those buildings looked quite old. They stood the test of time – until now.

Las Vegas is in another record heat wave and Phoenix just recorded it’s hottest September day since records began. It was roasting – up ot 50 degrees C – in northern Mexico, even as ANOTHER big hurricane hit further down on Mexico’s Pacific Coast with big wreckage, including in Acapulco. That was Hurricane John. It is highly unusual for two Cat 4 Hurricanes to hit North America in the same week.

Radio Ecoshock guest meteorologist Jeff Masters writes: “Helene’s Cat 4 landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.”

This program is named “Ecoshock” partly because we will all suffer personal and social shock as a different and hostile climate emerges, a side-effect of our discovery of fossil fuels and concurrent population explosion. These recent events are so shocking, even experts don’t know what to think. It seems like every day includes gigantic never-before-seen events, wiping out yesterday’s headlines of impossible news. We are living in the climate storm – as our next eminent guest explains.

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THE OTHER WORLDVIEW

VANDANA SHIVA

If this civilization is suicidal, who will tell us? Do humans have to live this way? Over decades, Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva answers. Dr. Shiva trained in atomic research, with a Canadian Doctorate. She is based in Delhi, but works with groups all over the world. Vandana is an environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalization leader. Her core base begins with food, from natural production to healthy bodies and societies.

Now Dr. Shiva adds to 20 previous books with a new must-read work called “The Nature of Nature, The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change”.

A destabilized climate has burned India with long-lasting record heat waves, drought in some places with unbelievable rains and floods in other parts of the country. It is my understanding the Indian Government took steps to save lives in both typhoons and heat waves. But surely there is a point where any country, from America to India, cannot cope with strings of mega disasters.

But this interview goes much farther than recent climate-driven disasters. Working over decades with people all over the world, Vandana Shiva is going to the root causes. Science is not enough. Western technology is definitely not enough. We need to do more than “understand” Nature, she says, we need to work with Nature’s technology – the miracle of sustainable life.

THE CLIMATE PROCESS HAS BEEN SOLD

We talk a lot about climate in this interview. In particular, I was struck by Dr. Shiva’s analysis of the COP Climate negotiations. Here is my understanding from her book. They began with government agencies and non-profits, along with a lot of volunteer time with scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By the 2015 Paris Accords, she says, these agreements to protect climate – and biodiversity in the Convention on Biodiversity – morphed from protecting Nature to protecting large corporations. At the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, there were more industry lobby representatives than non-profit groups. Oil and gas companies can easily afford the flights, hotel rooms, and hospitality suites with free food and drinks. They can also afford to buy voices from impoverished countries, including governments.

COP28 last year was a disaster, funded and held by big oil in Abu Dhabi. The President of the COP was a national oil company executive. This year’s COP is even worse, in fossil-rich Azerbaijan. The process was taken over. And yet Western people, including well-funded environment groups, still think they can “change the system from the inside”.

In the book, Shiva writes:

“… to make matters worse, polluters are expanding and accelerating the destruction by taking over international environmental treaties that were actually created to regulate their practices. Instead, they are mutating the treaties into instruments for creating new markets in pollution and environmental damage.”

You really should listen to this interview. It may seem shocking. Parts of the book will be so new to people in the developed world. Shiva is more than just a “rude awakening” for self-indulgent western readers/listeners – it’s like going through a buzz-saw of everything you were told about climate and nature on this planet. Shiva speaks for many voices not heard.

Listen to or download my 29 minute interview with Vandana Shiva in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

 

NOT A FAN OF BILL GATES

From “The Nature of Nature” by Shiva:

“Bill Gates is not government – he is not a ‘party’ in UN negotiations – but in Paris, for the first time, he emerged as the ‘master’ of global platforms, using the COP to promote geo-engineering, genetic engineering and now fake food, Net Zero and carbon offsets. Through manipulation, Gates has replaced elected governments and displaced democracy. He has substituted the principle of ‘polluter pays’ with ‘polluter gets paid’, using false climate solutions to create new markets, enclose new commons and find new ways to make money.”

She continues:

“Gates promotes industrial, mechanical systems of carbon capture as a technological innovation. But fake trees, which capture carbon mechanically, cannot perform photosynthesis; they cannot produce food and fiber; they cannot give or sustain life — they cannot create humus and living soil; they cannot regenerate and conserve water.

It is a mechanical mind that sees one function only and tries to substitute it without taking into consideration a diversity of functions. Net Zero is not zero emissions; it is about making more money through clever financial jugglery.”

I would add: Gates is also putting up a billion dollars to build the first commercial “small” nuclear reactor, and says this is the answer to both powering AI and other heavy industry that needs a big power supply. But his influence has not been all bad. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded efforts to wipe out diseases, especially in Africa and East Asia. Drug companies did not find that profitable. The Gates’ have saved lives with their medical efforts, including in India. Humans are complex.

THE THIRD POLE

Rich countries have research stations in Antarctica. Northern media watch the Arctic. But there is widespread ignorance of disappearing ice in the Himalayas.  By some estimates, more than 1.4 billion humans are directly affected by disappearing Himalayan ice. Their livelihoods, economy and food security all hang in the balance. Those lives are not reported by the New York Times. We discuss it in our interview.

[Images: Before and after glacier melt in Himalayas courtesy of Royal Geographical Society via David Breashears in YaleEnvironment 360]

Check out this earlier book by Vandana Shiva: “Climate Change at the Third Pole: The Impact of Climate Instability on Himalayan Ecosystems and Himalayan Communities”. (New Delhi: Navdanya/RFSTE, 2009.)

DEAD FOOD

Vandana Shiva is famous for her advocacy for healthy food. She says commercial food (which most of us eat) is “dead” because it comes from dead soil. In agribusiness, soil life is killed by intensive farming with only chemically-produced fertilizers and lots of herbicides and insecticides at work.

Some years ago, Canadian scientists found records of nutrients in food in the early 1950’s. They tested current supermarket foods and found less than half, sometimes much less than half, of 1950’s vitamins and essential nutrients (like minerals) are in the food we eat.

As the BBC said of Shiva: “She’s been called the ‘Gandhi of grain,’ the ‘rock star’ of the anti-GMO movement and an ‘eco-warrior goddess.’ . . . Above all, [she] is a staunch believer that the food we eat matters. It makes us who we are, physically, culturally and spiritually.”

Shiva finds a reinforcing loop where food production methods (using fossil fuels for agrochemicals, transportation, cooling, packaging etc.) create more climate instability.  Megacorporations answer with solutions needing even more fossil fuels. Unnatural food creates bad climate creates more anti-natural food.

She is also critical of UK environmentalists like George Monbiot who wrote “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming—and save the planet.” Of Mark Lynas, she says

“Quite clearly, the living earth is inadequate for them and needs to be re-engineered. Mark Lynas, an ecomodernist, also works for the Gates-funded Cornell Alliance for Science which promotes the genetic engineering of seeds and food. They do not understand that food is not a Microsoft programme that needs to be rebooted.”

REALLY? Yes really…

In one short sentence Shiva writes “Mycorrhizal fungi can hold 30 percent of emissions.” Really? Yes the June 5 2023 paper by Hawkins et al. found fungi absorbed about 36% of global fossil fuel emissions. Don’t doubt Shiva’s scholarship and facts…

Mycorrhizal fungi hold CO2 equivalent to a third of global fossil fuel emissions

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00167-7

ONE OBJECTION

One doubt I have about Shiva’s new book is assigning so many evils of industrial civilization to the one percent. Like Karl Marx, I believe those at the top are just as deluded as those at the bottom. We know Jeff Bezos does not become a multi-billionaire, or Gautam Adani, without millions of customers buying products, participating in the Nature-wrecking machine. Who are the one percent, and does that give the rest of us a pass?  Hear Shiva’s answer in the interview.

NO CLIMATE SALVATION WITHOUT NATURE

I recently spoke with Philippe Ciais, from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in France. He told us human interference is turning the plant world from a carbon sink that holds our emissions, to a carbon source. We can’t save a livable climate without saving natural systems. Vandana Shiva said that loudly for years – in books and speeches all over the world.

ROOT OF THE POLYCRISIS

Shiva writes:

“At the root of the polycrisis is a mechanical, militaristic mind, a monoculture of the mind, which reduces the biodiverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine. It is time to recognise the difference between the fake science and false solutions of the 1% and the deep ecological sciences of living systems, and real ecological solutions to the real, interconnected crises we face.”

Coming up, why methane is hanging in the atmosphere longer, and the myths of carbon-neutral logging.

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SURPRISE! METHANE LASTS LONGER

MICHAEL PRATHER

You know more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes global warming. But methane and nitrous oxide are more powerful warming gases. They are increasing as methane pours out from gas fracking, leaky pipelines, and industry. Natural methane production by tropical bogs and thawing permafrost add even more as Earth heats up. But it’s a short-lived gas right? Maybe not.

Humans changed the atmosphere – a part of Earth most difficult to study. Atmospheric scientists specialize in this research. Among the leaders is Dr. Michael J. Prather. With a long history of publications, Michael is Distinguished Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. Prather and co-author the late Dr. Lei Zhu just found the dangerous warming gas methane can last longer in the atmosphere than we thought. Models and climate expectations may need to be changed.

Listen to or download my 16 minute interview with Michael Prather in CD Quality

 

The new science we discuss in this interview is: “Resetting tropospheric OH and CH4 lifetime with ultraviolet H2O absorption.”

Michael Prather’s Univ. of Cal. Irvine bio says:

“He is currently deputy principal investigator on a 5-year $30M NASA aircraft mission that will measure the chemical reactivity of the atmosphere while circumnavigating the globe over 4 seasons. “

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), methane or CH4 has a relatively short lifespan in the atmosphere, lasting about a decade (see this WMO factsheet) Robert Howarth of Cornell warned methane lasts much longer. Howarth emphasized that methane’s effects can persist much longer. He pointed out some methane can remain in the atmosphere for up to 80 years or more, particularly when considering its indirect effects and the time it takes for all methane-related processes to fully dissipate.

THE THEORY ACCORDING TO ALEX

if I have this right, according to this new science there is a chain reaction to an invisible band of solar light that interacts with water vapor to reduce the production of hydroxyl radicals, the molecules mainly responsible for the breakdown of methane. We know the warmer atmosphere can hold more water. Could a wetter atmosphere further increase the lifetime of methane?

In our email exchange, I asked how much extra warming is implied by this new understanding of methane in the atmosphere. His answer surprised me: none! I read Prather’s 2012 paper “Reactive greenhouse gas scenarios”. I admit: I still don t get it. If methane lasts longer than previous models showed, why doesn’t that add more warming?

The answer is simple: atmospheric scientists never believed their models were accurate when assessing the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere. The model results did not match observations. Dr. Prather helped developone of them: the Cloud-J atmospheric model at University of California Irvine. So they assumed methane lasted longer, and now we know that is true, and the mechanisms of how it works. That is the key lesson from this new paper.

In 2021, over 150 governments agreed to The Methane Pledge to cut emissions. Yet a new paper led by Drew Shindell warns methane is building in the atmosphere at the fastest rate in decades. Shindell and colleagues call it The methane imperative . This work adds to that concern: methane might push us into a new less viable climate state.

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MORE LOGGING LIES

MICHAEL POLANYI

For years governments and experts told us forests are like sponges soaking up our carbon dioxide waste. Even if you log them, the new green growth will suck up more carbon. But more honest reporting reveals logging leaves forests leaking more greenhouse gases than they recapture.

Canada has about nine percent of all forests, third biggest, behind Russia and Brazil. The Canadian government pushed that myth of forest sinks and neutral logging. They recently came clean, but of course not really clean. Our future climate may hang in the balance.

According to a new report released September 2024, “Logging Emerges as Canada’s Third Largest Climate Polluter.” Lead Author is Dr. Michael Polanyi at Nature Canada.

Listen to or download my 12 minute interview with Michael Polanyi in CD Quality

 

According to the Nature Canada Press Release:

“The report, released by Nature Canada, Nature Québec and NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), found that the logging industry in Canada emitted almost 150 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2022, more than 20% of Canada’s total reported emissions.”

About 46,000 Canadians work in logging. Many of my neighbors do. Before these new admissions, was the government just lying to protect a profitable industry – or did new science reveal the increase in emissions because of logging?

In 2023, Canadian wildfires released approximately 647 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere according to a NASA study. This is comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only China, the US, and India producing more. But that burst of carbon will not be counted as part of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s “natural”!

This new study from Nature Canada does not include estimates for the industrial process of harvesting and transporting the product, – all those diesel-burning trucks, heavy equipment and gas chain saws. So the real total for logging is even higher.

This report reminds me of aircraft emissions. Humans don’t count those in climate plans, because the many tons of greenhouse gases from airplanes burning fossil fuels don’t belong to any one country… So we pretend those aren’t there. Now we find the same process of trying to fool ourselves has been going on with logging reporting for years. There must be 50 ways to lie about our pollution. The sky of course, does not care. It just captures more energy, releasing climate havoc down below.

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Reporting from the climate battle zone, I’m Alex Smith. Please don’t wait to support this program if you can. This global climate program is entirely supported by listeners and blog readers like you.

Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

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MICHAEL MANN ON CNN

Credits for sound clips in this program: Marina Jurica CBS News 240925 – one of the few to check the latest science on how Hurricane Helene became so big so fast. Good work Marina!

The 1 hour version of Radio Ecoshock also has a brief clip of Dr. Michael Mann, Penn State, on CNN 9.27.24, (the Briana Keilor show) explaining sudden power growth of Hurricane Helene.

Watch the Michael Mann interview on CNN here.

 

But then Michael hits another hopeful note. He says some sources think we hit peak fossil fuel burning this year and it may start going down as early as next year. That does not match all the news coming across my desk. Big fossil fuel companies have invested trillions in increased future production. There is no popular or legislative move to stop them, not even to cut government subsidies to the wealthiest operations on Earth. I don’t argue with Michael Mann on science. I don’t “tug on Superman’s cape”.

But I don’t buy Michael’s hopeful views for our climate future. In predicting economic and social futures, we are both equally experts and equally blind. We will have to check back in 2026 to find out.