Best friends become enemies.  Enemies are friends. Business is great. The market tanks. Winter yesterday, summer today, new rules tomorrow. Welcome to whiplash, the time of self-inflicted wounds.  What to do? We talk with Dana R. Fisher, expert in social action and author of “Saving Ourselves”. Then senior Australian scientist David Karoly with the frank view from Down-Under.

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

 

“The last time we had warmer temperatures than we might get in 2100 due to the ‘drill baby drill“ scenario’ what I will call, if you like, the ongoing greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels: the planet would heat 4 degrees [C] or more of global warming.  The continents would heat 6 degrees or more of global warming.  Antarctica would hit 6 degrees or more of global warming.  The West Antarctic ice sheet would lead to 10 meters [32 feet] of sea level rise  That would be a very different planet.”

– Dr. David Karoly, March 12, 2025 on Radio Ecoshock.

Listen to or download this 2 minute show song “Whiplash“. The lyrics by Alex Smith are at the bottom of this blog post.  The whole song is Creative Commons, meaning you or anyone can use it for non-profit purposes.

 

SAVING OURSELVES

DANA FISHER

After an accident, as you come out of shock, your brain serves up two immediate questions: where am I? Is there still danger? Much of the world is in shock now. This is a perfect time for the book “Saving Ourselves – From Climate shocks to Climate Action”. The author is Professor Dana R. Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity.  Dana is an expert in the study and practice of activism. She spent decades right alongside activists – but also writing reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Dana knows what works.

Listen to or download this 26 minute interview with Dana Fisher in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

 

We witness the attempted murder of climate science and health care in the United States.  Outside the United States, repression of science and activism might shock people in other countries into more activism to protect Nature.  Or… the same mental poisons will spread through social media to infect Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia with climate denial.

 

THE ANTHROSHIFT

On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a deadly surprise attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor.  Just two months later, by order of the American Government, the auto industry stopped making cars, commercial trucks or car parts.  Production changed to military vehicles almost overnight.  it took a wave of fear and anger sweeping across the U.S. population to make that happen.  In her book “Saving Ourselves” Dana says current institutions will not save us.  We need an “AnthroShift”.

Fisher describes Anthroshift:

“AnthroShift. In 2019, Andrew Jorgenson and I introduced this new social theory that explains how social actors are reconfigured in the aftermath of widespread perceptions and experiences of risk.19 When risk becomes so common that it is felt across society, the interrelations among the main actors – coming from the state, market, and civil society sectors – shift substantially.”

It sounds like we just have to wait until more things break down and humans are desperate.  Then the best will come out in us, and we will work together.  World history does not agree.  Most popular revolutions became violent (like the French and the Soviet Communists) and then fell into Dictatorships and war.  Maybe this time is different.

Other regressive actors also know there is a window of opportunity in crisis.  This is what Naomi Klein wrote about in her book “The Shock Doctrine”.  (It’s a good time to read that book again.) Like wise it appears that Elon Musk and his merry band of coding pranksters hope to build a new order by continually damaging the old structure, by breaking things and selling off salvaged parts.  The “window” is not always open for good breezes to blow in.  Check out this earlier Radio Ecoshock show “Can We Count on Catastrophe?”

It is sad to read in “Saving Ourselves” about innovative and inspiring protests at international climate meetings, like “the Human Dike” at the Hague in 2000.  In the last two years of COP climate meetings were held in authoritarian states.  There were no crowds to chant or call out.  In Azerbaijan, protesters were not allowed to speak above whispers, and only in an area off to one side.  Hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists attended and got VIP treatment.  Is that part of the climate movement over?

Now we see in the United States – and possibly more countries to come – when humans really understand a threat they may instead choose denial and a desire to return to the past.  They attack the messengers and try to wipe away knowledge of what is happening.  This psychological trait alone is an important positive feedback loop driving more global warming.

Dana devotes whole chapters to hard realities like “Saving Ourselves Won’t Be Popular and  Will Be Disruptive” and “Saving Ourselves Will Take a Disaster (or Many)“.  One chapter was also published by the Brookings Institute in February 2024.

Be sure to check out Dana’s short and powerful Ted Talk on YouTube “How to be an “apocalyptic optimist”.

I hope every listener will dig deeper into Dana’s work, at danarfisher.com.

ALEX THINKS: Maybe we could picture a four year breakdown of science, health, and the economy in the United States.  During this birth by fire, better humans find one another and begin building new social networks that begin new cleaner functions.  That may take years.  There is a problem with this scenario of dark hope: Unless fossil fuel emissions also crash, crash hard, and stay down, this climate is not able to absorb another ten years of emissions without triggering tipping points and various feedback loops.  We don’t have the time to waste.  I still think we have to work from where we are – rather than waiting for or expecting a shock big enough to force the change.

This may happen by some wave of minds across many continents, a viral decision – but that is too mystical to nail down.  However, we can never discount novel movements and solutions that are hidden from us now.  These seem obvious once they happen.

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DAVID KAROLY

VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER

Coming up, Australian scientist David Karoly with a frank assessment of climate during retro-fossil politics in America.

America is threatening allies and abandoning international aid. In response, defense spending is going up in countries like Germany, the UK, and Canada.  As climate science is gutted in the United States, countries around the world realize their dependence on everything from U.S. satellites to databases.  Will global science take a hit – or can the rest of the world carry the burden?  Will climate defense spending go up too?

We start with America’s staunch military and scientific ally in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia.  Our guest is one of the most experienced climate scientists in that country.  Dr. David Karoly retired from his post as  Chief Scientist at CSIRO and Leader of the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub.  He is now an Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne and a Councillor on the Climate Council of Australia.

Listen to or download this 28 minute interview with David Karoly in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

 

David pulls no punches in this interview.  As you heard in the introduction, he finds our current “drill, baby drill” attitude toward more and more fossil fuel expansion will lead to AT LEAST three degrees C. of warming over pre-industrial.  Most scientists consider this level of climate change may end this civilization while wiping out countless other species.  Then it gets hotter in following centuries.

In my opinion, our current course is climate suicide.

ANTARCTICA – KEY TO OUR FUTURE

We talk about Australia’s silent neighbor: Antarctica.  After a few years of delay, the Australian icebreaker RSV Nuyina is heading out on it’s first Polar research expedition, with 60 scientists on board. They are looking for climate impacts on the Denman Glacier, potentially a source of massive sea level rise.

By the way, the BedMachine Antarctica project found a canyon beneath the Denman glacier that is the lowest point of land on the planet (not covered by liquid water).  It is 3,500 meters or 11,500 feet (over 2 miles) below sea level!  The glacier above has retreated more than 5.4 kilometers, over 3 miles in just that last 20 years.  It is melting quickly.  If the whole Denman glacier melts away (which would take at least hundreds of years) – sea level goes up around the world by 1.5 meters – from just that one Antarctic ice field.  We must know what is happening there.  A crew of Australian and world scientists is one their way to find out more.

The United States has three year-round bases and two research vessels in Antarctica.  American polar research is in danger of cuts and staff reductions.  Anything and anybody who ever talked about climate science may be heading back to America.  Is that serious, and can Australia fill in?

China built a futuristic Antarctic station, one of several outposts it maintains there.  While science is being carried out, we have reports these bases are dual use.  They include a military and spy component.  Should we worry that an American withdrawal from Antarctic research will enable further Chinese expansion there?

AUSTRALIAN SCENE

Australia gets intense fire years, sometime several in a row. But that can flip to extreme rains and flooding in parts of the country, as recently.  I think this past summer, just ending now, is the second hottest for Australia.  Do Australians and their government tend to forget about bushfire danger during the in-between years – or is this danger burned into the national consciousness after Black Saturday and similar deadly mass fire events?

American climate science was attacked by Internet rumors and social media attacks against climate regulations.  Rupert Murdoch’s media helped.  All this can spread to Australia, home to the Murdoch media empire and to powerful coal and gas interests.  Can Australia withstand them, or could the science denial disease spread there, endangering climate science?

Canada and Australia are like peas in a pod.  Both are large countries with relatively small populations.  We get extreme everything from wildfires to heat.  At times our governments talk a good climate game, then switch back to resource-friendly parties – all the while pumping out more and more coal, gas, and oil.

Both these countries are wealthy enough to withstand and rebuild from early climate-powered hits like fires or floods, to a point.  But developing countries cannot afford to deal with the impacts.  The United Nations fund to help those countries is sometimes promised, always underfunded. Now one of the major funders, the United States, has withdrawn.

Slashing climate aid is a recipe not just for disaster, but for mass migration.  If crops fail or it is too hot to live, millions of humans may have to leave, creating the very fears pushing right-wing politics in Europe, North America and Australia.  You would think even the right-wing anti-immigration people would get that: global warming pushes people toward cooler more survivable spaces like Australia, North America and Northern Europe.  The first trickle of many millions still to come has begun.

Extreme Heat = More Mass Migration (replay)

 

Public awareness of the awful possibilities of a climate shift seems to rise and fall in waves.  Australia had the Garnaut report in 2008.  In 2011, great science and ideas came out of the “Four Degrees Or More? Australia in a Hot World” conference in Melbourne.  The keynote speech by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is still worth listening to.  We knew then climate could go too far for civilization, maybe even for mammals.  Do we get more denial the worse extreme weather events get?

 

My 2013 interview with David Karoly is here.

 

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OVER AND OUT

Scientists are disappearing from requests for radio interviews, afraid to talk about their own work.  Suddenly lots of folks, including previous guests, are “traveling”, too engaged in a project to talk, or just not replying to out-of-agency media requests.  Meanwhile, after several weeks of personal hair-on-fire moments, including upsetting threats to takeover my beloved home country Canada, my brain has been singed.

After many months of new programs, I may need a week or so to rethink, rebuild, and explore the shaking landscape. I seek frontiers that desperately need sunlight and your ears.  But not yet.  Next week we talk with Dana R. Fisher about “Disasterology” and the destruction of disaster prediction and response in the United States.  We also hear what Michael Mann and Jeff Masters are saying in these crazy times.

Please support Radio Ecoshock if you can.  Only listeners keep this radio show free for all, around the world.  Just pitch in here.

I’m Alex Smith.  Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

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LYRICS FOR SHOW SONG: “Whiplash”

Whiplash
You don’t know which way it’s going
Whiplash
What just happened today
Who fired the government?
Who sold the mainland
To syndicate?
Who made friends into enemies
And enemies to friends?

You promised yesterday never
to do what you just did.
Pretty face said you didn’t
hired congressman keeps it hid.
Spin out a new one
spin out of control
Captain whiplash
and his side man
counting clicks and
counting polls.

Stand up again tomorrow
Who knows what you will find?
Knock you back by evening
Blow your ever-loving mind.
Strap in now
Smashing common sense
Get ready for the hurricane
Get ready for the heat
Captain whiplash
In the pilot seat.

Captain Ketamine beside him
Fly the people off to mars
Blows up in the atmosphere
Never sees the stars
Here comes the crash
Whiplash.