• In total there are 2 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 2 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

#171: June - Sept. 2020 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
Chris OConnor

1A - OWNER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 17019
Joined: Sun May 05, 2002 2:43 pm
21
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 3511 times
Been thanked: 1309 times
Gender:
Contact:
United States of America

Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic
by Peter Wadhams


Please use this thread to discuss Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

A Farewell to Ice takes its title from Ernest Hemingway’s great novel of the American campaign in Italy in the First World War, A Farewell to Arms, famous for its gritty realism and romance, its condemnation of human idiocy as somehow redeemed by love, its rejection of authority, its bleak horror of battle and loss. These literary themes from Hemingway all find their way into the silent and insidious planetary war that the collapse of polar ice has begun, and into the urgent tale that Professor Peter Wadhams has to tell of the extreme changes these remote regions are suffering.

Dr Wadhams is a remarkable scientist, having first visited the Arctic in 1970 and then returned to the treacherous and seductive realms of glittering ice every year over decades of a highly distinguished scientific career leading the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. This haven for polar scientists from around the world has served as a vital base to understand the mysteries of the ice. Scott of the Antarctic gave his name to Dr Wadhams’ Institute after giving his life to the cause of polar science. Scott was among the last great explorers of the age of discovery, dying on the ice after reaching the South Pole in 1912.

Peter Wadhams tells us in this book of his own dangerous adventures on and under the ice. The introductory chapter, A Blue Arctic, begins with his difficult and dangerous submarine voyages to measure ice thickness. His underwater sonar calculations found a highly disturbing 15% loss from 1976 to 1987, published in Nature in 1990, a first portent of how the Arctic is the bleeding edge of climate change. From the former days when ice formed densely clustered floes of thick, heavy multi-year mountains, forming huge pressure ridges that blocked the paths of explorers, the situation now is that the final thin brittle sheets melt after just one winter. At the present rate the world will soon have a blue Arctic ocean, accelerating the catastrophic onset of global climate collapse.

As an aside, the challenge and beauty of polar adventure are encapsulated in one of the greatest poems in English literature, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by ST Coleridge, one of Wadhams’ Cambridge forebears. My commentary on this poem is at https://www.booktalk.org/post84467.html#p84467. Coleridge was taught at Cambridge by William Wales, astronomer to Captain James Cook on his voyages of discovery to the Southern Ocean 250 years ago. Hearing of these great adventures into uncharted wastes inspired the great lines of the 'ice, mast-high, floating by, as green as emerald'. This illustrious university heritage might just help to open up the conversations we need today to save our planet from the perils of warming. In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Sun Jun 21, 2020 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Harry Marks
Bookasaurus
Posts: 1920
Joined: Sun May 01, 2011 10:42 am
12
Location: Denver, CO
Has thanked: 2335 times
Been thanked: 1020 times
Ukraine

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote: In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
Good comparison. If I recall, the mariner shot the albatross just to show he could. I find it ironic that the most common denialist response to the evidence of global warming is to declare confidently that there is no way humans could cause such a drastic change.

Any suggestions how to get hold of the book? Is it basically a choice between Amazon Kindle or getting a paper version?
User avatar
Taylor

1F - BRONZE CONTRIBUTOR
Awesome
Posts: 962
Joined: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:39 pm
14
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 423 times
Been thanked: 591 times

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

The opening paragraphs of the introduction gives a stunning revelation, when considered from the point of view of the dates. (1976 to 1987)

Climate change was not yet a treacherous phenomenon, let alone the concept of Anthropogenic causes.

Put differently, Wadhams was indeed measuring ice loss but as he writes “ there was a larger picture going on” that he and other specialist were not looking at. For them there was a mystery to solve.

Ocean physics is in part the study of the formation or loss of ice at the earths poles. 45 years ago this measurable ice loss clearly raised some eyebrows. Wadhams is telling us that they were neophytes about the oceans and that a new field of study was to be born, nurtured. It’s fascinating in that they were at the beginning of learning what they did not know. Those pesky unknown unknowns.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
Good comparison. If I recall, the mariner shot the albatross just to show he could. I find it ironic that the most common denialist response to the evidence of global warming is to declare confidently that there is no way humans could cause such a drastic change.
Hi Harry, Your comment reminds me of my studies in existential morality, especially the existential themes of care, finitude and facticity. These are ideas brought into stark urgency by the collapse of the Arctic ice.

These existential themes mean that understanding the human situation requires that we ground our philosophy in concern for our relationships with finite facts. This differs from the old infinite imagination of religious myths of afterlife and a transcendent God, which generate an obsolete, dangerous and evil morality, giving false emotional comfort while distracting us from the impacts of our beliefs and actions.

When climate deniers express their false confidence that our planet is too big for us to have any effect on it, they are rejecting human finitude as a moral principle, and in effect continuing the old false memes of transcendental religious fantasy and its corrupt schemes of social control. Their attitude is grounded in the emotional assumption that planetary resources are infinite. That false belief could partly be sustained before the modern industrial epoch, although even in the stone age human action already began to cause mass extinction of animal species.

Continuing this infinite mentality today with the accelerating power and reach of modern technology reflects the old flat earth fantasy of refusal to engage with the finite facts discovered by science. Coleridge’s parable of the albatross hung around the mariner’s neck points to this infinite attitude that feels it can transgress with impunity against unknown boundaries. Seeing the shooting of the sacred bird as a transgression presents a natural sense of the sacred, very distinct from how religions have tried to capture and control sanctity in church buildings and traditions. The transcendental does have a valid place in religion, but only when properly grounded in immanent temporal reality, as explained by natural science.

The moral turpitude of indifference to extinction is a key reason why I insist that evidence and logic must be the highest moral values in a coherent existential philosophy. The complexity of natural biodiversity is of priceless value. Species have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve, and their loss irretrievably degrades local ecosystems and our whole planetary community of the web of life, human and natural. Allowing the Arctic to melt would cause irreversible global tipping points that will grossly amplify the moral tragedy of mass extinction, while also deeply imperilling human security.
Harry Marks wrote:Any suggestions how to get hold of the book? Is it basically a choice between Amazon Kindle or getting a paper version?
I am reading A Farewell to Ice on Kindle for PC, which I find very convenient, much as I love the feel and smell and look and sound and material presence of paper.
User avatar
Harry Marks
Bookasaurus
Posts: 1920
Joined: Sun May 01, 2011 10:42 am
12
Location: Denver, CO
Has thanked: 2335 times
Been thanked: 1020 times
Ukraine

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:These existential themes mean that understanding the human situation requires that we ground our philosophy in concern for our relationships with finite facts. This differs from the old infinite imagination of religious myths of afterlife and a transcendent God, which generate an obsolete, dangerous and evil morality, giving false emotional comfort while distracting us from the impacts of our beliefs and actions.
You have given me quite a bit to think about here. But it is directly relevant to the on-going reassessment within Christianity. The whole idea of transcendence is having to be integrated with a more functional theology. It used to be a "direction" (up, by contrast with the horizontal relations between people, essentially) and this lent itself to, as you say, imagery of the infinite. One might say we are now having to think of relations more like spherical geometry, in which "wherever you go, there you are" (as a prominent explainer of Zen puts it). Or, perhaps, in which
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
One of the guideposts of the revised theology is wildness. The notions of God as "wholly other" may emerge more from wildness than from imagery of impenetrably prescient invisible control. Wildness is our origin and, in some sense, our destination. We are shaped by it, but also we are shaped for it. To be able to inhabit our cozy world of light-switch convenience with enough understanding to be subjects of wildness, i.e. agents of wildness, without being destructive agents as exploiters of wildness, that is a tall order but begins to be seen as a worthy objective.

Warfare should have been sufficient clue that we needed to re-learn our innermost identity, but it wasn't. So now we see if our intelligentsia can learn to see itself not as above and superior to the unlettered hoi polloi of democracy, but as salt and light. Instead of the directors of the aimless hordes of cannon fodder, holding the reins of power, we have no choice but to become humble supplicants on behalf of a life with the wild rather than against the wild.
Robert Tulip wrote:When climate deniers express their false confidence that our planet is too big for us to have any effect on it, they are rejecting human finitude as a moral principle, and in effect continuing the old false memes of transcendental religious fantasy and its corrupt schemes of social control. Their attitude is grounded in the emotional assumption that planetary resources are infinite. That false belief could partly be sustained before the modern industrial epoch, although even in the stone age human action already began to cause mass extinction of animal species.
The moral ability to find myself in others, on which Christianity is based IMO, is grounded, as you say, in the ability to find a path for all of us in rational acceptance of our finitude. Religion has always understood the gift of mortality to be integral to the gift of meaning, but now we are meeting it in the everyday and the common life, not only in far-off time and sporadic convulsions of violence.
Robert Tulip wrote:Continuing this infinite mentality today with the accelerating power and reach of modern technology reflects the old flat earth fantasy of refusal to engage with the finite facts discovered by science. Coleridge’s parable of the albatross hung around the mariner’s neck points to this infinite attitude that feels it can transgress with impunity against unknown boundaries. Seeing the shooting of the sacred bird as a transgression presents a natural sense of the sacred, very distinct from how religions have tried to capture and control sanctity in church buildings and traditions. The transcendental does have a valid place in religion, but only when properly grounded in immanent temporal reality, as explained by natural science.
Yes, I think this is correct, that the infinite has become an image for impunity, and I see no alternative to viewing this process as one of fantasy, in its essence. Where once we had stories of impunity due to power over other people, and I think of Camus' "Caligula" as an example, we now must tell stories of impunity as corrupt and destructive fantasy about the nature of human life together. Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" is a good start on how this looks in a world where honesty is easily sacrificed to immediate gain. There is no stronger touchstone than honesty for the emergence of a new relation to wildness.
Robert Tulip wrote:The moral turpitude of indifference to extinction is a key reason why I insist that evidence and logic must be the highest moral values in a coherent existential philosophy. The complexity of natural biodiversity is of priceless value. Species have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve, and their loss irretrievably degrades local ecosystems and our whole planetary community of the web of life, human and natural.
There are layers of irony in the term "priceless value". It comes from our inability to think about value except in terms of price, so that we turn to apophatic terminology, in essence. The same incongruity of "rational" thought with the true nature of things is found in the old saying that a cynic "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

We are in a position to be technically capable of tearing up our existence by the roots and throwing ourselves out on the asphalt to perish slowly in the heat. In the process we will destroy the most marginalized (from the warped perspective of our struggle for status) life first, and proceed from there to the less and less marginalized until there is nothing left that we derive true value from, and we suffocate even the things we thought were important in these days of hubris.
Robert Tulip wrote: Allowing the Arctic to melt would cause irreversible global tipping points that will grossly amplify the moral tragedy of mass extinction, while also deeply imperilling human security.
The strange slow pace and cumulative drama of the GHG threat is unlike anything recorded in our history or our mythology. We can only understand it using means that, to the average person, resemble mystical mumbo-jumbo. An "apocalypse" is an unveiling, and it calls us to examine ourselves and our self-understanding. Much of Western society is now convinced of our peril, but outside of scientifically oriented circles they do not see it with any clarity or take on board the implications for the commonality of our fate and the degree of mutual obligation at the heart of our relationship with the wild world we emerged from.
User avatar
Harry Marks
Bookasaurus
Posts: 1920
Joined: Sun May 01, 2011 10:42 am
12
Location: Denver, CO
Has thanked: 2335 times
Been thanked: 1020 times
Ukraine

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

100 degrees F (> 37 degrees C) inside the Arctic Circle yesterday. Probably for the first time ever.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote: In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
I suppose we are all like the wedding guest accosted at the start of the poem by the mariner, who needs expiation through telling his tale. We want to get on with our business--go into the wedding celebration and not be bothered by troubles. But the mariner holds the wedding guest spellbound, and at the end the listener has become a "sadder and wiser man." Whether we'll undergo any lasting change is unknown.
These existential themes mean that understanding the human situation requires that we ground our philosophy in concern for our relationships with finite facts. This differs from the old infinite imagination of religious myths of afterlife and a transcendent God, which generate an obsolete, dangerous and evil morality, giving false emotional comfort while distracting us from the impacts of our beliefs and actions.

When climate deniers express their false confidence that our planet is too big for us to have any effect on it, they are rejecting human finitude as a moral principle, and in effect continuing the old false memes of transcendental religious fantasy and its corrupt schemes of social control. Their attitude is grounded in the emotional assumption that planetary resources are infinite. That false belief could partly be sustained before the modern industrial epoch, although even in the stone age human action already began to cause mass extinction of animal species.
There are probably several inputs toward GW denialism. I have not thought of religion as being at the top of the list, but have no facts to support a different cause. I am fairly sure that Donald Trump's dismissal of GW isn't based in his religion. On the other hand, in the few cases where people have held onto nature as the priority and not sacrificed it for material betterment, sacredness, rather than a rational appreciation of finiteness, might be the key element. Gods and spirits and what have you--maybe that's what works. It's a different result than emerged from Christian monotheism, although it also is true that the "ours to exploit" mentality that can be derived from Genesis has an antidote in the very same book--God saw his creation, and it was good. I note as well that Coleridge's tale of sin and expiation is set within a Christian framework.
Continuing this infinite mentality today with the accelerating power and reach of modern technology reflects the old flat earth fantasy of refusal to engage with the finite facts discovered by science. Coleridge’s parable of the albatross hung around the mariner’s neck points to this infinite attitude that feels it can transgress with impunity against unknown boundaries. Seeing the shooting of the sacred bird as a transgression presents a natural sense of the sacred, very distinct from how religions have tried to capture and control sanctity in church buildings and traditions. The transcendental does have a valid place in religion, but only when properly grounded in immanent temporal reality, as explained by natural science
I agree with that, although I'm unsure about science being the ground. Coleridge and Wordsworth feared the cold rationality of science, while being very interested in what it was revealing. Thoreau is my best model for the balance of the transcendental--which I think of merely as the poetic--and the scientific. Even he, though, couldn't escape participating in the withering away of the natural landscape. He supported himself as a surveyor, work that is needed for what we call development today. Thoreau was a natural scientist and one of the earliest practitioners of ecology. Today, natural science/ecology and applied science are at loggerheads, with all of the money and influence being with the latter.

In addition to belief in the infiniteness of resources, our culture believes in the infiniteness of human ingenuity. We think we can get ourselves out of whatever scrapes we face, because we believe we have so often done so by our amazing technology. Even those who fully accept the GW thesis may think this is the ace in the hole. The problem with refuting that belief is that our technology has indeed produced good results--make that spectacular results. What we always miss due to our native egotism is that the benefits have not accrued to other species, only to ourselves.
The moral turpitude of indifference to extinction is a key reason why I insist that evidence and logic must be the highest moral values in a coherent existential philosophy. The complexity of natural biodiversity is of priceless value. Species have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve, and their loss irretrievably degrades local ecosystems and our whole planetary community of the web of life, human and natural. Allowing the Arctic to melt would cause irreversible global tipping points that will grossly amplify the moral tragedy of mass extinction, while also deeply imperilling human security.
Unfortunately, it is hard to be hopeful, i.e. full of hope. By any indication of past performance, only our own security matters, so any benefits to other species would be incidental. We have many ways of deluding ourselves that it is safe to proceed down the path that has already produced mass extinctions.
User avatar
Taylor

1F - BRONZE CONTRIBUTOR
Awesome
Posts: 962
Joined: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:39 pm
14
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 423 times
Been thanked: 591 times

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

Robert, DWill, Harry you guys are amazing :appl: . The first half dozen posts in this thread should be broadcast globally. You three are spot on. Thank you.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic

Unread post

Harry Marks wrote:You have given me quite a bit to think about here.
Great! We have had some superb conversations over the years Harry. I think putting the facts of climate science into an existential philosophical worldview is essential to appreciate why only a finite factual framework can make our thinking systematic and rigorous.

I have been working rather ambitiously on a scientific article with the title Large Scale Ocean Based Algae Production: A Personal Research Journey. I just received comments from an ocean scientist politely explaining why many of my assumptions and suggestions are not feasible. Although that is disappointing, and means my ambitious ideas are not immediately realistic, I am happy to have this reality check. Trying to engage directly in scientific fields where I lack expertise is obviously a hard ask. But it has been an interesting way of thinking for me. The philosophical ground is where I can defend my views more adequately, looking at big picture policy implications. Even so, a fertile creative imagination can help open productive conversations to liberate discussion about practical priorities and alternatives. My genre is more utopia than dystopia, using utopian imagination about the boundaries of the possible to open people’s minds and create hope in rather bleak circumstances.

To speak of bleak, these problems raised by the fragility and sensitivity of the Arctic are top of mind for me. I am working in my paper to balance technological and strategic discussion, which is quite a challenge.
Harry Marks wrote:It is directly relevant to the on-going reassessment within Christianity. The whole idea of transcendence is having to be integrated with a more functional theology.
Your phrase “functional theology” will seem out of place to many in a discussion of the melting Arctic. “Functional theology” is not only out of place at first sight, scientists would often see it as an oxymoron, self-contradictory, since theology is generally seen as lacking any practical function due to its pervasive fantasy assumptions. Yet perhaps these big mythological stories from religion can help us to step back from the immediacy of science and politics to place the urgent ethical issues of allowing our planet to collapse around our ears in some sort of strategic context.

Language about “transcendence” is exactly the metaphysical mentality that scientists traditionally find hardest to engage with, due to its associations with escaping reality into comforting fantasy. I like your idea of exploring a functional theory of transcendence as a way to reassess Christianity. For example, in terms of Arctic collapse, we can see the previous long-lasting orderly natural stability of the ice over the last few million years as existing under the grace of God, while the sudden current death spiral of polar ice results from the depraved state of corruption that humanity has inflicted upon the planet. The practical ecological function of theology can be to work out how to transform a state of corruption into a state of grace.

I find this sense of natural transcendence seen in stable planetary order the most meaningful and coherent way to interpret metaphysical language about grace. Strong Biblical support for this line of thinking comes from the line in Revelation 11:18 which says the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. Enlisting theology to explain why we should not destroy the earth is entirely functional, as a way to mitigate wrath, interpreted in terms of natural collapse.
Post Reply

Return to “A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic - by Peter Wadhams”