The Why of Climate

I've never quite been able to wrap my head around what the deal is with particularly vociferous climate change skeptics, and why they think the way they do. Note that I'm not talking about the average person here, who most likely has only encountered very limited information and has drawn their conclusions based on their own observations and what they get from the media. The folks I'm thinking of here are more those who are, to put it bluntly, wild-eyed about it, ranging from furious notes in newspaper comment threads to sending death threats to climate scientists.

The idea that it's just about the money doesn't ring true to me. Sure, some opposition I've encountered is predicated on the notion that climate change was made up by scientists so that they could get more grant money - yes, I actually did encounter someone claiming that - or that it's just another tax grab. Personally, I'm curious as to how or whether these arguments will change once we start getting ice-free summers in the Arctic, but I don't think it's really explanatory of what's going on here. A lot of the talk seems to be particularly emotionally charged.

Whatever's going on, it's something I'd like to be able to understand, so that I can take it into account in my own thinking. Besides, if you have any hope at all of getting an argument of yours through to someone else, you need to know where they're coming from. What may be a slam-dunk argument for you could just be a rubber ball bouncing off a concrete wall when used on someone else. So it's something that I do think about, off and on - the question of the manner in which some people reach the conclusion that climate change is bunk.

My latest theory - for some people, at least, it may be based on a mix of weather and humility.

A snow-covered tree in downtown New Westminster - January 15, 2012.

I'd intended to be in Seattle right now, attending a convention and exploring the Emerald City during the rainiest time of the year. Instead, earlier this week four inches of snow fell on the city, and while that's essentially nothing for eastern cities that know well the cold touch of winter, here in the Pacific Northwest winter means rain and lots of it. Those four inches of snow represented a substantial chunk of Seattle's total yearly snowfall average, and it played merry hell with transportation around the city. In particular, Wednesday's afternoon Vancouver-Seattle run of the Amtrak Cascades was cancelled because of weather issues, leaving me high and dry in the Lower Mainland, and it wasn't until today that normal Cascades service started to resume along the length of the route.

It's not a shock that this happened, though, when you know why - the jet stream, a powerful air current that's one of the prime governors of Canadian weather, bent to the south and allowed a sustained blast of cold Arctic air to rush in over the Pacific Northwest, transforming the usual rain into freezing rain and snow. The jet stream was likewise the proximate cause of the unseasonably mild and dry December experienced across North America, because it stayed far to the north and kept the arctic air bottled up tight - this is why cities in Alaska have seen more than four meters of snow pile up so far this winter.

Seeing things such as this, then - weather patterns at the mercy of air currents, cities paralyzed by forces of nature - is it any wonder that some people have trouble accepting the notion that humanity is a prime influencer of the climate? Look at the English language, for example - "force of nature" is just another way of saying "something that cannot be stopped." We're accustomed to thinking of nature as something above us, beyond us, that we're powerless to control.

That may be so, but the failing here is just because we can't control something, that doesn't mean we're unable to influence it. One of the prime notions of climate change is that by adding heat, and thus energy, to the system of nature, we are potentially influencing it in a negative manner. Nature will still barrel on, wholly heedless of us, but the danger is that it will barrel on in a new direction, one in which we're not used to dealing with. That's what the big uncertainty is here - we have no idea precisely what dumping all this energy into the system will do. We've unintentionally begun a grand climate experiment with Earth as the laboratory... but it's not a scientifically rigorous experiment, unfortunately.

There's no control group, you see.

A Change in the Method

I've been trying to make this weblog the best I can make it. Part of that has been the update schedule; I've strived to have something new up here every day, and I've kept that standard since April 2009. I don't know how many tens of thousands of words I must have written over the last nineteen months - and now, I realize, that's the problem.

Before I kept this weblog, I was a writer - still am, at that. But lately I've come to realize that the creative effort I expend on my posts, the amount of time that I devote to polishing concepts and typing out rants, jeopardizes that. I want to write more stories, and I feel like the way I presently maintain things is complicating that.

So I've thought, and this is my conclusion: effective today, Acts of Minor Treason will be converting into more of a photoblog, with every-other-day posting. From time to time I'll post more substantive things on the other days, depending on my ability to get them prepared - but not every day.

Thanks to everyone who's read, and who I hope will continue to read. Without that, there wouldn't be much reason for me to go on at all.

A City of Villages

While riding home on Wilson Avenue last Saturday afternoon, trying desperately to stay ahead of the dark clouds scudding in from the northwest as a concrete retaining wall rose to separate me from the industrial district and highway to the south, I encountered something so utterly out-of-place that I had to stop and take a photo.

I've been trying to expand my familiarity with Toronto in recent months, but even then, potted plants hanging from a streetlight with no commercial properties in sight aren't precisely common. As it happens, this plant and the others like it along that stretch of Wilson Avenue were placed by Emery Village, a Business Improvement Area anchored around the intersection of Finch Avenue West and Weston Road and, as point of fact, appears to be the sole BIA in the entirety of North York. Founded in 2003, it appears to be one of the newer ones.

What I don't understand is why so many BIAs now have to identify themselves as a village. Beyond Emery Village, we've got Davisville Village and Liberty Village and Mirvish Village and practically anything else you care to name and stick "village" at the end of. Of the sixty-seven BIAs presently listed on the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas website, twenty-three are "villages." While a few of them, such as Forest Hill Village and Parkdale Village, are legitimate in that Forest Hill and Parkdale actually were independent villages before becoming part of Toronto, we've also got names like, say, Yonge-Lawrence Village that have no basis in history.

Is it just because "village" is good for marketing? If that's the case, what does this preoccupation with the village life say about us?

I can see what the average person might get out of a village - something charming, maybe, something quaint, something nice to show off to everyone back home. Maybe it's the idea of a stronger, more interconnected city, the prospect of reconnecting with the people next door, or simply the security of uncomplicated peace that you'd find in a country village where everyone stands up for each other. Villages have practically been fetishized since the beginning of the Industrial Age as reminders of a less complicated, more pure lifestyle, and the rural impulse that villages represent keeps cropping up again and again, most recently in the "decivilization" meme I wrote about back in April.

To me, it's something different. Villages don't suggest security and bucolic happiness to me. They suggest isolation, provincialism and parochialism. The traditional concept of a village hardly even exists anymore - even in the back of the back woods, you can at least get dial-up internet to supplement your satellite television.

In the end, it's an appeal to mythologized history. What's never asked, though, is this: should we be lionizing this meme? Is the idea of the village something that should be supported and evangelized? Shouldn't we be looking not to the past, but to the future?

Yes, Virginia, People Really Are That Stupid

Despite my better judgement, I can't help but be just slightly nervous at the prospect of stepping on a plane in August. No matter how aware I am of how safe flying is, there will be a small part of my brain that recognizes there is a chance, however miniscule, that I'll never step off again; whether that chance is greater or lesser than, say, Earth being sterilized by a gamma-ray burst between now and then is open for debate.

Intellectually, though, I know there's no real danger. Realistically, I know that I'm in far more danger crossing the street at an intersection with the lights in my favor, and if the latest news is any indication, the driver that hit me would probably be texting.

The Toronto Star reported today on the findings of a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study that found truckers driving while text-messaging were twenty-three times more likely to get into an accident than truckers with their full attention on the road. The study found that when the truckers took their eyes off the road to read a message, they did so for "nearly five seconds" - and when you're on the lanes at a hundred per, that's practically forever.

I've always heard it said that the reason teenagers are so liable to get into accidents is because of a sense of "youthful invincibility," that nothing bad could possibly happen to them because, you know, they're them and not someone else. The general implication, never said outright, was that that these attitudes went away with adulthood. At least, that's the implication I derived from it while growing up, but now, I can see that's just wishful thinking. I know that not only do I still feel the same way now as I did when I was 18, I'll probably still feel the same way I did when I was 18 - mentally, at least - when I'm 80.

It's not as if this situation was engineered by the study; plenty of people, far too many, do this sort of thing of their own accord. Talking on a cell phone while driving is so common now as to be wholly unremarkable. While bicycling along Queens Quay a few weeks ago, I was caught behind another cyclist wearing earbuds and no helmet, who was so oblivious she almost cut off a right-turning car. Texting while driving is only the latest manifestation of the go-go-go, always-on 24/7 culture that makes me refuse to get a cell phone in the first place, evidence of the degree to which we prize convenience and efficiency over as pedestrian a matter as safety.

If you'd asked me about this a few years ago, I'd have hoped that "texting while driving" would fall into the same domain of ridiculousness as "shaving while driving" or "applying lipstick while driving." Unfortunately, though, texting seems to be gaining more and more cultural acceptance by the day, even if I still have difficulty figuring out why everyone is so crazy for it - so you can send messages without having to talk. So what?

It's news like this that makes me wonder if low-level solipsism is a more common psychological condition than we think.

In Defense of the Island Airport

In Which Andrew Will Somehow Mask His Irritation at VIA Rail Settling the Strike Nine Hours After He Cancels His Reservations With Them

Recently I've begun seeing flyers around Parkdale, flyers which feature an infant in a breathing mask and criticize the five four hundred "TOXIC diesel trains" that will be roaring through the neighborhood when the Blue22 rail link between Union Station and Toronto Pearson International Airport comes to fruition. Personally, I have always thought that Blue22 was ridiculous, the sort of project only a politician could support. For one, it steals valuable rail corridor space that could be put to much better use as a western extension of the Downtown Relief Line.

I think this conflict all stems from a misapprehension of the situation at hand. See, personally I don't think air travel, in its most common form, has staying power. Those big turbofan jetliners, the Boeings and the Airbuses and Ilyushins, are not the cheapest machines in the world to operate. There's an old joke: what's the easiest way to become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and buy an airline. The environmental cost is no less, even if it's not commonly thought of; a 2006 Guardian piece reported a "general consensus" that aviation was responsible for 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Here in Toronto, I think the Island Airport - officially, Toronto City Centre Airport - provides a much-needed alternative. For the last three years, Porter Airlines has been the sole passenger airline operating from YTZ, flying Bombardier Q400 turboprop aircraft on short-haul routes in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. When I was planning for my trip to Montreal next month for the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, Anticipation SF, I was only interested in VIA Rail or Porter Airlines because the two of them offered the lowest environmental impact.

Nevertheless, the Island Airport has historically had a fractious relationship with the city of Toronto, both old and new. The controversy goes back to the late 1970s, when the first whispers of passenger service out of YTZ reached City Hall, and reached a fever pitch in 2006 when Porter Airlines began its operations. Mayor David Miller, you see, doesn't like the idea of the Island Airport, and was elected on a platform that included a halt on the construction of a bridge across the narrow Western Gap to the airport - perhaps out of the hope that ferry-only access might choke Porter's profit margins like Hercules in the crib.

It hasn't really worked out that way, but Miller still opposes the idea of passenger aircraft flying from the Island. Personally, I think the city should encourage development and use of the Island Airport. No matter how much Pearson's management might want it to be otherwise, there is no reason to believe that the status quo will last forever. Short-haul flights on efficient aircraft like the Q400 are far more sustainable a mode of transportation than modern jetliners.

For a mayor who's staking so much, like the Jarvis bike lane project, on his environmentalist creds, Miller's continued opposition to the Island Airport seems quixotic and more than a bit shortsighted to me. For my part, I imagine what's possible - a pedestrian and transit bridge that flies across the Western Gap, and a platform where travellers can step straight on a streetcar and step off again at Union Station.

It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, cleaner, and quieter than Blue22.

The Virtues of a Lonely Planet

Humans, for the most part, are a gregarious bunch. In the beginning we needed it to stay alive. For humans, with intelligence and endurance but limited raw fighting power compared to animals that can take a man's head off with one sweep of a claw or clamp of a jaw, strength and safety came from numbers. An intelligent species that didn't have that drive to build communities, where members could survive and thrive on an individual basis, might never build up enough inertia to lay down civilizations.

Technology has only brought us together more and more steadily. The last ten years, in particular, have seen interconnectedness spread like a restless spider's web. When I graduated from high school eight years ago nobody had a mobile phone, and now they use them to cheat on tests. This interconnectivity is becoming more and more of a social need. The Transhuman Space supplement Broken Dreams had among its offerings an urban legend, popular in 2100, of people dying of shock when they were cut off from data networks.

With the way things are going, I'm surprised that sort of legend, maybe revolving around an inopportunely broken BlackBerry or iPhone, hasn't already gained substantial traction in reality.

On July 4th, Australian time, the Sydney Morning Herald carried an opinion piece by Brigid Delaney entitled "It's a lonely planet out there - get used to it," which held up modern networking tools as "symptoms of the death of our ability to be alone." Ordinary people have never been in a position to share as much information as widely and as frequently as they do today. In the article, Delaney takes umbrage with the increasing abandonment of solitude, and asks if "the 11pm call from the boss [is] better than nothing, silence, being disconnected - and perhaps missing out?"

This is one issue I've been worried about myself. I don't have a mobile phone, nor do I have any particular interest in getting one, which seems to make me a definite freak of nature when compared with the rest of my age group. For now, mobile phones remain in the "accessory" stage, and while they're far more commonplace than they were ten years ago, culture has yet to substantially shift toward the assumption of 24/7 availability for everyone, or at least mostly everyone.

How long do we have before this changes? It's probably sooner rather than later. It might already be here, and I just haven't realized it. What concerns me is that inevitable moment when the system flips from one state to another, when a mobile phone ceases being an optional device you carry to assist you with your life and instead becomes an expectation, and if you don't have one there must be something wrong with you. I read a story like this recently - though I can't, unfortunately, remember the title or author and don't have it close at hand - in a world where "bugseyes," the logical conclusion of smartphone evolution, were universal, and a character who did not wear one fell under police suspicion for no other reason than that he did not wear one.

I'm worried this is where we're heading. That in the crowd's headlong stampede toward connection, away from solitude and toward the endlessly yammering, clamoring din of the world, the pendulum will be pushed too far and get stuck. No matter how much of a social butterfly a person may be, in the end there's always a necessity for a pause, silence, and reflection. Constant communication is constant distraction. It interrupts. It can very easily be like trying to play Jenga during an earthquake.

Perhaps it's because I'm a writer, and I need long stretches of solitude to put my thoughts in order and come to terms with the world, that I tend to think this way. There's a discipline in self-reliance, in putting distractions aside - and if we discard that, what else will become of us, in the end?

Also, the Fourth of July. I know there are at least a few Americans reading this, so here's the flag of the United States and also Ohio's. Now go drink and attend barbecues and watch fireworks. Your media gives me the impression that doing so is your patriotic duty.

roughly luddite ranting concluded; thank you for your patience

City Council's Dragon-Pokers

For the last five days, Toronto has been trudging through a city workers' strike - though, like many other things, this is simplified in common parlance to a "garbage strike" because city workers pick up garbage in most of the City of Toronto - bringing a halt to meetings of municipal government. Striking workers have set up a picket line at City Hall, and the city announced that council meetings would be suspended for the duration. Ordinarily this might not be much of a problem, as whether a particular motion gets passed now or later is rarely of much consequence.

It's an unusual time, though. Recently the city inked an agreement with Bombardier to buy new Flexity Outlook streetcars to run on the existing streetcar system and the planned Transit City lines, but the $1.2 billion deal had to have funding committed by June 27th or else it would lapse. The dust-up between City Hall and Ottawa over an improper application for federal stimulus funding was a big enough complication as it is without the strike thrown into the mix.

Nevertheless, important things can still get done. An special session of Council is being held this morning in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for the sole purpose of dealing with the streetcar issue - at this point, it looks like the TTC is going to fumble for the rest of the cash itself, although the particulars of its financial gymnastics haven't yet hit the streets. Furthermore, the striking workers won't be picketing the convention centre or otherwise interfering with the meeting. Pretty good, right?

Not for everyone. Yesterday, Councillor Karen Stintz, who sits in City Council's right wing and is one of the more credible contenders for the Toronto mayoralty in 2010, sent a letter to Mayor David Miller on behalf of a loose coalition of councillors called the "responsible government group." In it she criticized the plan for council to sit in the Convention Centre.

"There is absolutely no justification for holding this meeting off site," Stintz wrote in the letter, which was excerpted in the Toronto Star yesterday. "We have critical business to conduct and council should not have any reservations about crossing picket lines to do so."

For hell's sake.

One of the biggest problems with this strike is that neither the city nor the union is in any position to budge. The union, rightly, sees itself as defending concessions it won previously and is unwilling to sacrifice when other unionized city employees, such as police, fire, and EMS, don't have to share it. The city, on the other hand, can't afford weakness. Mayor Miller's always been a friend of the unions, and quickly giving in would only assure his defeat in 2010.

There is already enough acrimony on both sides over justifiable grievances. This situation is bad enough as it is, and what we don't need is for the city to give the union even more of a reason to dig in its heels - and this over something that is, in the long run, irrelevant. In ten years it will be remembered as a historical curiosity, a trivia tidbit or a sentence on a Wikipedia page, as one of Toronto City Council's handful of extraordinary meetings.

Toronto's councillors should work to resolve the issues that face the city before they inflame existing ones.

Live in the Present, Or Else

While most people just party like it's 1999, I tend to still live that way. Compared to my contemporaries I'm a technological dinosaur. The laptop on which I wrote this post and the digital camera with which I gather photos to release into the public domain are, effectively, my only handholds in the 21st century. I don't have an mp3 player. I don't own a cellphone. I certainly don't think that my life is more hollow now than it would be if that wasn't the case.

I'm not a luddite. I don't begrudge the existence or ubiquity of cell phones; I only see no reason and have no desire to have one for myself. I like being unreachable when I leave the apartment. I enjoy solitude when I go out walkin', solitude that's never interrupted by some jangling ringtone. If I'm in unfamiliar terrain, that's what the map book in my backpack pocket's for. My camera eats enough batteries as it is.

I've made a choice to live without that, to live outside that web of instantaneous communication and text messaging and Facebook-on-the-go. What concerns me is that inevitably, inexorably, unless something's done about it, things like owning a cell phone will cease to become a personal choice and will instead be the result of social compulsion - that you have a cell phone because you must.

This is already going on at the University of Missouri. According to an article by Beverly G. Rivera in the Columbia Missourian, starting with the upcoming school year, students in its journalism program will be required to purchase an iPhone or iPod touch. Why? Apparently, it's so that they can be repurposed into learning enhancers. "Lectures are the worst possible learning format," UM associate dean Brian Brooks was quoted as saying in the Missourian.

That's funny, because in my university experience, lectures were always the best part of the course. I always loathed having to truck my ass out of the dorm or the apartment for some for-the-birds seminar. But then, considering I'm already unusual for not owning a cell phone, I'll jot that down as me being some kind of strange outlier.

The article goes on to elaborate that "the requirement will not be enforced" and students will not be penalized if they don't buy an iPhone or iPod touch. Nevertheless, I can only imagine that this is the first step on a long, downward path. Sooner or later requirements like this will be practically enforced, and people who refuse to go along with them will be punished. How long before being able to be contacted 24/7, regardless of location, ceases to be something that's merely encouraged, however strongly, and becomes an actual condition of employment as necessary as references on your resumé? How many years will pass before these devices, or something like them, become so ubiquitous that not having them will in itself be worthy of suspicion?

Why exercise choice when you can just be swept up by the wave, and left fighting to keep your head above water?

Aren't You Being Just a Wee Bit Presumptuous

Last night I introduced a friend of mine to this weblog, after he concluded that there is no way I'd be making money from it considering the number of hits I get, so it's a good thing all around that I didn't bother with Blogspot's ad program. One of his comments resonated with me, in that it's something I've been carrying around in the back of my brain for a while now.

"I see you define yourself as a science fiction writer," he said. "Interesting."

How we define ourselves is of paramount importance in modern society. It's at the core of almost every philosophy and religion. In J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5, the Vorlon question - "Who are you?" - was one of the arc words that resounded through the series and bound it all together. Most of us define ourselves by our job, by what we do. He's a paramedic, she's a Member of Parliament, that guy over there is scrubbing ants off a sixtieth-story window. What am I, in that estimation? None of your business - I try to keep my work and my weblog separate. Nevertheless--

Roles have always been of great importance in human communities. Many Western surnames - Smith, Fletcher, Boatwright - have their origins in the responsibilities some distant ancestor held in some medieval town. For the vast majority of history everyone had to work, and work well. It was only with the development of agriculture, irrigation, and centralized communities that an aristocracy had the chance to quaff the sweat of the peasants. Today, for many people it's a simple, if unconscious, equation - your job is who you are.

Me, I tend not to follow that logic. In prosperous times, defining oneself by one's job always struck me as being somewhat hollow, and today it seems a road to needless stress and panic. For a long time I believed I'd be insulated from the recession, but now I've seen a bit of it in the distance, like the Cloverfield monster in Manhattan's metal mountains. It could come as just deserts for failure or it could come as a necessity, nothing personal, but there are only a handful of people who are really safe from losing their jobs.

I've read science fiction for as long as I can recall. During my childhood we had the entire run of Star Trek on Columbia House VHS, I burned through Ender's Game while I was still in grade school, and I only regret that I wasn't aware of the short-story magazines when they could really have given me focus. With the publication of "The Platinum Desolation" in December, I stepped over a threshold which, when I started writing seriously back in 1997, seemed as distant as the summit of Olympus Mons.

There are tons of bottom-rung science fiction authors like me, I know. All I have to my name is one short story in a well-reviewed book of short stories and the briefest of entries on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database - the latter of which I was as surprised as anyone to stumble upon. I still choose to define myself by that because I earned it, and because no matter what happens, no one can take that away from me.

you can't take the sky from me

Two Cars in Every Garage and A Pool in Every School

I was not what you'd call an athletic kid when I was in elementary school. Rather, I was the one who'd poke around the spinning bookshelves during slow times in class, sit on a bench all recess, and spend the evening playing Nintendo after jumping off the bus. Now that I have a fuller understanding of how difficult it is to turn around habits firmly established in childhood, I think there is an important place for physical education in the school system. Just because I was a lump didn't mean gym class still wasn't fun; there was a network of boxy, concrete storage rooms known collectively as "the bomb shelter" under the gym itself, and games like Zach's "nettball" were fun and energetic distractions from actual schoolwork.

I grew up in Barrie, a city on the very northern fringe of the Greater Toronto Area, but which is in reality a town of 30,000 people with suburbs for 90,000 more inexpertly stapled to its ragged edges. Our complaints with the Simcoe County School Board were confined essentially to the unnecessarily expensive elegance of their headquarters, hidden away in a Midhurst forest, and the fact that the air conditioning systems for all the schools were remotely controlled from that central office. What we never complained about was a lack of pools.

Since moving to Toronto, one of the regular stories I've noticed in the media's rotation is the Toronto District School Board mulling over whether to close school pools to bring its budget under control. This is always - surprise! astonishment! - opposed by the union representing Toronto's school teachers, CUPE 4400. The union put out a press release yesterday criticizing the TDSB for, among other potential terminations, gearing up to shutter thirty-nine school pools "to avoid a deficit of just about 1%" of its budget.

"Every year we go through the same fight," the union's president said in the release. Every year I hear about the tragedy and horror of Toronto's schoolchildren not having access to pools. Every year I hear this and I wonder -- why? Why is it so important, so vital, that Toronto schools have pools?

My classes included some swimming from time to very occasional time, and when it was necessary to toss a pack of Grade 5s into the water, we would all trek up the streets to the local YMCA. Other times, we would load up a bus and make our way down to the Allandale Recreation Centre, home of what must've been the biggest pools in Barrie. These were dedicated areas, focused on maintaining pools in good quality, and what they did was worth it.

It's my own belief that organizations should focus on what they're best at. Despite the budget problems of last year, the City of Toronto still operates dozens of public pools throughout the city. Why should it be a school's job to maintain pools when that money could go toward hiring more teachers or buying new textbooks or educational equipment? This is something I've never understood.

I can understand why the union would raise hell about the possibility of its members being thrown out of a job, particularly in this kind of economic climate. Realistically, though, I can't see any reason why schools should be in the pool business to begin with. There's no shortage of pools in schools listed on the City of Toronto Parks and Rec department's website - if that's the case, it should be the City's responsibility to maintain them, and not the board of education.

As a non-parenthetical aside, the transpiring frood known as Tesseract has started up his own weblog, Screaming Through Static. I offer you the possibility of reading it to see what he comes up with.