A dark day

Horrible news. I will miss you, Dan.

a trip

Last week the Fulbright people brought me and the other 4 Fulbright fellows in Chile together in Valpariaso, a bohemian city on the coast a little over an hour's bus ride away. We gathered on the campus of La Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, where we each gave a short presentation on our planned and ongoing activities here. After that we were treated to lunch and a visit to one of Pablo Neruda's houses (it is amazing that a poet could own so many houses), which was thoughtfully eccentric. While everyone else returned to Santiago that afternoon, we stayed for a couple of days.

Valparaiso has many parts that are grungy, with an air of a port city that has struggled to keep an economic base alive. The streetscapes are at least as colorful as anything I've seen, though from above they all share the same rusty corrugated metal look. The street art was ubiquitous, and of pretty decent quality most of the time. The ascensores, little train car things that haul you up and down the steep hillsides for 20 cents or so, a big tourist attraction, were impressively run down.

Sadly, after less than 36 hours there it became evident that a couple of us had consumed something that was not right. Our plans to return were delayed by a day while we just laid around the hotel room waiting for our bodies to recover to the point where we could handle the bus ride back to Santiago.

It was Fiestas Patrias weekend last weekend (18 Sept), so there were parades, rodeos, traditional dancing, and lots of meat eating. We didn't have the energy to do much related to it once we were back in Santiago (and we had done some of those activities the prior weekend). We did catch the TV report covering the terremoto (a mixture of white wine, pisco, sugar, and pineapple ice cream) drinking contest, with probably 15 minutes of footage of people raising pitchers of this foul mixture to their lips. In the paper that morning we saw a picture of a 79 year old woman, a legendary terremoto chugger apparently, who they reported 'drank like a 15 year old girl.' Now my translation could be off, but it is still disturbing on too many levels.

Anyway, life is busier now. I will be leading a two-day workshop for which I am not at all prepared, so there's some pressure building. My Spanish skills are not improving, which is disappointing, though I know what is needed is just more effort. It's just hard to muster that at the end of a long day's work. Tomorrow is Dia Mundial Sin Autos, which I'm looking forward to. More on that to come. Otherwise, everybody is happy.

Thoughts

I believe, as much as anything else, in serendipity. Within the last week I have been pummeled by climate change events. I could drone on for hours about this, but I'll try to contain myself. First, a recent article on which I was a co-author raised the ire of a visible meteorologist, someone who has long-standing disputes with some aspects of climate research (though notably, not with the effect of greenhouse gases on temperatures, or that human activities are driving rising temperatures). His main complaints relate to our willingness, despite our acknowledgment of uncertainty, to suggest ways to quantify some aspects of that uncertainty for the use of people responsible for planning. Of course, we do not state that this is the only thing planners should consider (and what representative of a water district, for instance, would plan for the future based solely on climate projections, regardless of how uncertainty is characterized?), and of course they should (and do) incorporate other societally driven changes (population growth, land use changes, and so on). That the new generation of climate (or earth system) models include some biophysical feedbacks between land cover and the atmosphere is an exciting advancement, and to see how this changes projections (and estimates of uncertainties) will produce new knowledge. So this person's inflammatory objections hone in on a frequently repeated message of his: that risk and vulnerability assessments should be pursued by communities considering all stresses on the system and that climate projections are a useless component of these assessments. Our paper by contrast summarizes how planners can determine for themselves, in ways that reflect the state of scientific understanding, for their region, time frame, resources, and acceptable risk level, to what degree climate projections should influence their planning decisions. So what’s so objectionable about that?


Occasionally in the morning we tap into NPR (thanks to this interweb thing) to listen to the tepid, moderate take on the day’s U.S. news. I was assaulted this morning by the voice of Rick Perry, an apparent republican candidate for president (are elections really over a year away?), who like so many others is fervently anti-government while suckling at the ample government teat for his salary, health care, and pension, and he even uses his political power to amass personal wealth. OK, he’s a corrupt hypocrite, but here’s the connection to my uneven line of thought: he also belched up the bile that he believes global warming is a hoax. After the experience of Bob Inglis who was willing to let the science of our changing climate affect his opinion that maybe we should do something about unfettered greenhouse gas emissions and was thus promptly replaced by a tea party representative, it is understandable that those who want to maintain their privilege as government employees will avoid facts and just toe the required line on this issue. The fact that the tea party is an entity manufactured by the notorious Koch brothers, who made their billions in the fossil fuel industry is not a secret, so how is it that this sort of disingenuous line spouted by Perry is not completely dismissed? (An aside: I've found that this isn't an issue so much in Chile. No matter what one's political persuasion there is a basic understanding of the findings of climate science, so while how to deal with climate change is argued, that it's happening and will intensify is pretty accepted. Chile essentially has no native fossil fuel industry. Could that be related?)  A study that came out of Yale this week shows most tea party members either think global warming isn’t caused by humans, or that it isn’t happening at all (but they're not alone: there's even a decent slice of democrats in this category). More shockingly, they are the group most likely to think of themselves as “very well informed” and that they “do not need any more information“ about global warming to make up their mind. So it seems like a sort of fundamentalism is the problem, a search by many people to just reach a conclusion and close the issue. There is obvious comfort in that, especially if you latch onto a belief that absolves us of any responsibility for negative impacts to the world our children and grandchildren will inherit. So, what to do? It seems that the answer lies in developing an image of a future that is actually fun, not just a list of things we really should give up. In the academic community I have seen stirs of this, cloaked in language about "intrinsic values" but really pretty good stuff. I'll climb off my soap box now.

Integrating fun and sustainability happened last Tuesday night, when I joined the Santiago ride of the Furiosos Ciclistas. One other person from the PUC and I joined several hundred other cyclists for a nighttime ride through downtown. It was a healthy mix of ages, falling between Critical Mass (though with very little confrontation with cars) and the San José Bike Party (though with no detectable alcohol or herbal combustibles). We did two loops: one through the old downtown area, ringing bells and chanting "somo ... caleta ... andamo bicicleta" (yes, there are supposed to be some 's's in there, but they are generally discarded in Chile). The second loop brought us past the multi-day vigil happening in front of the VTR TV station that lost it's reporter and crew in a plane crash last week. There were probably 15 minutes of somber silence there, which was a logistical issue since we completely blocked the entrance and exit, then we headed down the hill and back to the Plaza Italia, which is the starting point for everything here. To experience, even for an hour, a healthy crowd of friendly cyclists enjoying wide, smooth streets without cars or buses, really does give a sense that a better, and more fun, world is possible.

What kind of world is this?

If only it were so...
But instead we get the complicated place we live. Last Friday a small plane crashed into the sea in southern Chile, and all 21 passengers were killed. (That's nearly as many as were killed in auto accidents over a recent holiday weekend. Isn't news cheerful?). Among them was an extremely popular TV host and his crew, so the news has been featuring this story everywhere. Despite this, the president kept his appointment to meet with students, which appears to be a positive development toward resolving some of the disputes over education reform (and larger structural changes, though that may be too much to expect).

A painted protest sign in the channel of the Rio Mapocho reminded us of another ongoing issue related to the plans to build a massive hydroelectric project, the HidroAysén, in a relatively pristine area in the Patagonia region in southern Chile. This has been widely reported in scientific and popular press around the world. There is widespread opposition (there's an impressively produced and organized web site here). It does seem that, without having seen a single building with insulation, and only rarely things like double-paned windows, it is hard for a government to make a strong case for an urgently-needed increase in energy supply. The heating in a house typically consists of an estufa, a steel box with an open flame of burning gas in front. The heat generated by this is absorbed by whatever mass is right next to it, and most quickly escapes through the drafty windows and into cold concrete walls. It's so wasteful I'd rather be cold than light one of these things. Though of course when I find one that's on I do tend to stand next to it. So is building massive dams, permanently submerging stunning valleys (where indigenous people live), and running a 1200 mile long set of transmission lines the best solution for energy? To my outsider eyes it seems pretty misguided. I have heard some say that the energy is really aimed to supply more cheap energy to private mining companies, so the public won't even see a tangible benefit. Maybe this is another manifestation of the Chinese approach to using dams as social engineering, or maybe it just falls under the same criticism Peter Gleick levels toward the World Bank, that governments may (think they) know how to spend $7 billion on one huge water project, but they don't know how to manage 7000 $1 million projects even if they'd reap far more cumulative benefits.

So, how will my work on climate change impacts on water resources fit into the large-scale water development plans of the country? I'm still in the think of working out computer systems and re-writing code to get into that. But hopefully there will be more on this topic.