In behavioral biology there is a fair amount of attention to individual quality, which may be determined by genes or parasite load or energy balance, or some interaction among these (and other) factors. Individual quality is honestly indicated by some trait or behavior; a large bright thing hanging of your head, a long bout of complex and energetic dancing, or a very loud complicated song, may be impossible to achieve in an individual with insufficient energy or some sort of disease. Therefore, other individuals looking to choose a mate can observe the traits or behaviors and do what the old guy in the cave said: “Choose wisely.”
The story of climate change has always been more of worst-case, or at least, worser-case scenarios developing and less about good news showing up out of nowhere and making us unexpectedly happy.
A few decades ago, it became clear that the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere primarily as CO2 was going to cause a greenhouse effect (yes, dear reader, we’ve known this for looooong time … the idea that this is a recent and still untested idea is a lie you’ve been fed so many times some of you may have begun to believe it). At that time climate scientists thought, reasonably, that there would be a diverse set of responses to the increase in CO2 and/or the increase in heat, some of which would accentuate the effects (positive feedback) and others would reduce the effects (negative feedback). Over time, the list of possible ameliorating effects became shorter and shorter and eventually pretty much disappeared. There is no double secret save-our-butts-at-the-last-minute Carbon “sink” nor is there any natural response that would cause cooling to somehow be caused by warming. Meanwhile, the list of accentuating effects has grown. Melting permafrost releases copious green house gasses. Melting sea ice in the Arctic allows the Arctic Sea to warm even more. Global warming-caused aridity causes numerous fires which coat the Greenland ice with soot, causing it to melt faster and do less of the work of reflecting sunlight back into space. And so on and so forth.
For these reasons, several years go you’d have climate scientists saying “well, this is important, and change is coming, but there’s good news and bad news” and then the good news all went away and the bad news all stuck around, and every now and then, a new bad news item not previously thought of came along and lengthened that list. So already, climate change is worse than we thought.
Then we have the problem of scary empirical reality.
The Ghost of the Eemian
One of the most significant negative effects of global warming is likely to be sea level rise. Sea level rise so far has been significant, measurable, and important, but not large. As the earth warms because of increased levels of greenhouse gasses, the temperature of the ocean has increased, and this has caused the water in the ocean to expand, raising the level of the sea. At the same time, glaciers have been melting all across the planet, adding additional water to the sea, causing additional sea level rise.
So you can see that there is a link between temperature and sea level rise. More heat, more sea level rise. But there’s a problem with this model. Based on prior experience, it seems that our planet normally responds to heat like we are experiencing now with a much higher sea level. During the Eemian period, the last time conditions were similar to the present, sea level was about 5 to 7 meters higher than now. In other words, given an admittedly small sample of 2 instances, when global temperatures are roughly like they are now, sea level can be anywhere between their current levels and 7 meters higher than current levels.
This is not the kind of relationship between important variables that allows us to say that sea levels are going to go down, or stay at their current level, or rise very slowly. These are the kinds of numbers that tell us that we really don’t know what is going to happen over the next few decades, but that the chance that sea level will drop is zero, and the chance that sea level will rise only a little is slim, and the chance that sea level will rise quickly and a great deal at some point in time, or in a few spurts, is pretty good.
Predicting genocide using information about voting patterns
Which brings us to more details about the problem of sea level. Sea levels will rise the most not because of warming oceans but because of glaciers … whopping big continental glaciers … falling apart and slipping into the sea, or melting very rapidly and sending copious meltwater into the sea. Everything we know about the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers seems to indicate that at least some of this is going to involve large events, where big parts of big glaciers slide into the sea, rather than melting slowly like an ice cube in your sink. Also, the rates of melting during a handful of events observed over the last couple of years were entirely unpredicted and shocked scientists watching the process. Also, previously unknown causes of rapid melting are as we speak being discovered and measured.
Putting this another way, it would be a reasonable guess that the rate of continental glacial melting will be much higher than previously estimated, but also, the timing and speed of this ice wastage is pretty much unknown, and quite possibly unknowable except in very broad terms.
We have some very fancy models based on physics of ice melting and a few other variables that can be used to estimate ice melt and sea level rise. The problem is, these unpredictable and large scale catastrophic events have never been observed to happen. Yet, we think that they can happen in part because the rate of sea level rise thousands of years ago at the end of the last glacial maximum was so fast at times that it must have involved some pretty rapid events, more rapid than our models are able to predict. Our models can’t predict these events not because the events can not happen but because the models have no way of dealing with them.
This problem reminds me of my days living in the Eastern Congo. Things were mostly peaceful. But, there were some tensions among various social factions, including different ethnic groups, different classes, and so on. There was tension along the borders between Zaire, Rwanda, and Uganda. But there was nothing whatsoever going on during my time there that would have predicted the Rwandan Genocide, the Congo War I or the Congo War II, or any of the troubles that I now realize were just starting then. This would be especially true if we were making careful sociological observations, measuring variables, taking polls, counting things, and so on and so forth. Major social upheaval comes when it comes, and is rarely accurately predicted by those carefully measured and modeled variables, and the timing and magnitude of those upheavals is never known in advance. And as human society so often goes, so may well go the glaciers of Greenland and the Antarctic. Our physics based models are going to look rather silly, predicting a melting rate of several centimeters a year, when three or four big-gigantic glacial monster fragments fall into the ocean within a year or two of each other along with a steady stream of slush causing ten years worth of sea level rise faster than you can say “property values in New York City may be slightly depressed” three times.
The Good News
There is no good news. But what often happens is that a bit of research comes along and looks like good news. This research is then identified, pointed to, repeated again and again, over-interpreted, used to argue that global warming is not real, and even used to argue that those who have been saying all along that global warming is real are making it up, on someone’s payroll, are part of some huge conspiracy, etc. etc.
In other words, the progress of understanding of the potential future effects of climate change is set back significantly every time a research project with slightly good news, or even just less bad news than usual, is reported. This is ironic, because so many of those research projects have flaws in them that if taken account of suggest that the good news is not really there to begin with.
For example, a recent study seemed to show that the response of the planet to increased Carbon Dioxide is less than we expected it to be, but only over the short term. The difference between long term “climate sensitivity” (the amount of warming you get from a certain amount of greenhouse gas) and short term is probably where the heat goes not how much is added. Over the last few years, the ocean has been taking on a larger share of the heat from global warming, so the atmosphere has not warmed up as much (though it has warmed). But, the partial story … that “sensitivity” is less for the present decade has been translated by various re-tellers of the science to suggest that we’ll be fine. In fact, the slowdown in rate of atmospheric warming, which is still warming (like I just said) is called a “stall” in warming. But it is not a stall. It is a slow down in rate in atmospheric warming and a speed up in rate of oceanic warming. That is not really good news though it is reported as good news. But there isn’t good news, just slightly more complicated news. (See this for a summary of that particular story.)
Not long ago another set of nuanced scientific observations were converted by the once reputable Matt Ridley in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, an outlet guilty of publishing this sort of misleading commentary on a regular basis, into “good news.” In …
“Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change,” [Ridley] (falsely) asserts observations suggest global warming will be so low as to “be benificial.” This risible piece by Matt Ridley is so riddled with basic math and science errors it raises the question of how the Journal can possibly maintain its reputation as a credible source of news and financial analysis.
Ambiguous News
Of particular poignancy at the moment, since as I’m writing this the bodies of third graders are being pulled from a tornado-ravaged elementary school in Oklahoma, is discussion of the relationship between global warming and storminess. Storms are complicated. They vary in number from year to year, they vary in where they strike, and they vary in intensity per storm. Nonetheless there are patterns. There has been exactly one Atlantic hurricane in the south Atlantic ever, as far as we know. They only occur in the north. Tornadoes don’t occur randomly; they are clustered mostly in certain regions of the world and mostly occur during certain months, though there is a lot of variation. (I discuss this at length here and here.)
Hurricanes are fueled by warm seas, and ripped apart by high level winds. Global warming causes sea surfaces to warm, and may also strengthen tropical and subtropical high level winds. So, does global warming mean more hurricanes or fewer? Or fewer but when they happen, stronger ones? Or what?
In the US, severe thunderstorms, bad straight line winds, and swarms of tornadoes typically arise from moist and warm unstable air masses organized along west to east and south to north moving fronts, with the heat and moisture starting out in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a big warm wet place during the summer. It stands to reason that if you heat up the Gulf, you’ll get more of this, and global warming is heating up the Gulf. But the actual distribution and behavior of these fronts will also depend on the distribution of the famous “Jet Streams” and that is potentially altered by climate change. So, will global warming involve more tornadoes, stronger ones, or will they simply occur somewhere else? Or what?
There is one thing we know about storms. They are ultimately manifestations of heat, and more specifically, they result from the uneven redistribution of heat originally from the sun concentrated in tropical regions and moving towards polar regions by currents of water and air. In a heated up world there is more energy to feed storms. It is impossible to imagine a significantly warmed ocean and a significantly warmed atmosphere without significantly more storm activity and/or stronger storms, and maybe even some new kinds of storms. The problem is that it is hard to say what kinds of storms will increase, if there will be more of some kind of storm or more severe instances. For that matter, maybe all storm types will “increase” at one time or another, taking turns being the big storm problem for a few years, and sometimes that increase will be in numbers, sometimes in strength, sometimes manifest as a change in location of the patterned storm activity. That would be a statistical nightmare. It would be a lot of “moreness” of various phenomena but distributed across a range of different manifestations so that counting storms or measuring storms of specific types will show a pattern only after decades. This is why we sometimes look at overall damage to property from meteorological events over time, and there we do see a steady increase. It is also why the insurance companies, who are not stupid about these things, are so worried.
“Global warming appeasers” (people who pretend to understand the science but who are really trying to make climate change sound like it is not a big deal, like Ridley) and denialists alike are taking advantage of the statistical difficulty of measuring changes in patterns of storms to assert that “we can’t link storms, or storminess, to climate change.” But we can. We know there will be a link between a heated up earth and storm patterns, we are just more than a little uncertain as to what kind of change that will ultimately consist of.
Again, there will be no good news about storminess. Just more detailed news, and possibly a more nuanced understanding, which unfortunately will require more nuanced reporting and commentary.
There is a book called “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania” produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian “think” tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use some of their money to threaten law suits against people like me who object to their activities. (But they do so very ineffectively.)
This spring, I began receiving calls and emails from colleagues about a strange little book that was mailed to environmental science professors around the country. This was a big mailing, in total, a reported 100,000 copies were sent out. What was it about this little book that got us talking? Many things. First….
CLICK HERE to read John’s excellent blog post. You won’t want to miss this. Also, while you are there look at the other posts at John’s new blog, written with Dana Nuccitelli.
Again and again. Do you have to take a stupid pill every day to be a reporter? Or are reporters like this one speaking down to their audience. Either way, it’s shocking.
Several environmental advocacy groups are asking the US State Department to launch an investigation over the State Department’s handling of the Keystone XL review.
This is a bit nuanced but important, and I want to make clear what is going on here.
Normally, environmental impact assessments are done by private contractors ultimately hired by the entity that is building the project that could have the impacts. I often hear people complain that Trans Canada, the group that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the United States to allow the export of it’s bitumen (a kind of soft coal like oily thing) overseas to places like China and Europe, “hired the contractor” that did the environmental impact assessment, and therefore they are corrupt and evil and so on and so forth. But this is how it works. The entity doing the work is responsible to pay for and supply support for the review. There is nothing wrong with that.
Also, there is a more specific allegation that individuals who work for the contractor that did the Keystone XL Pipeline review have worked previously for Trans Canada and other oil interests and therefore the are corrupt and evil and so on and so forth. This, in itself, is also incorrect. Yes, those individuals have worked for Trans Canada and other oil interests, but this is normal, expected, and in fact, a good thing. You really don’t want to have individuals with zero experience working on these important jobs, and you really don’t want to have an industry where people get trained up, with advanced degrees and apprenticeship, to work in a given sub sector of environmental management, then allow them to have one contract then put them on an ice flow.
Having said all that, which is true and must be kept in mind when complaining about Trans Canada and Keystone XL, there is a problem. The system where corporations hire contractors to look into environmental effects is corruptible. This isn’t the most corruptible way to do this. If government agencies did the work themselves, or hired subcontractors, that would be corruptible too. There is no way to do this that is not corruptible.
For this reason, regulatory agencies are supposed to keep a close eye on what happens. There are forms that must be filled out honestly that might reveal potential conflicts of interest, for example. Once these forms are in the hands of the appropriate regulatory agencies, their veracity must be checked, and if there is any problem, that must be very closely looked into.
From the information I’ve seen, it seems almost 100% likely that the process of arranging for the second Keystone XL environmental impact assessment involved some serious mistakes, and there is almost as good of a chance that those mistakes involved purposeful manipulation of information by the environmental contractor as well as by the State Department itself.
I’m not going to try to prove this to you or even summarize the information because it is all well laid out in THIS PDF of a letter from Bold Nebraska, Center for Biological Diversity, Environment America, Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nebraska Farmers’ Union, Public Citizen, Sierra Club and 350.org. It would appear that the contractor, ERM, failed to disclose its ties to the American Petroleum Institute, TransCanada and other companies that stand to benefit from Keystone. There may be nothing wrong with having those ties but they must be disclosed so they can be looked into and monitored. Also, the State Department employees attempted to cover these ties up during the review process, which implies collusion between the regulatory agency and the contractor.
Private contractors hire other private contractors to do environmental review, and this process is overseen by regulatory agencies, with the State Department in this case being a regulatory agency. But who oversees that process, to makes sure it stays clean, fair, and legal? Well, you, the citizen. And who helps you do that? Organizations created by citizens, such as those noted above.
So that’s what is happening now. Time to act. Your move…..
Are your favorite sweaters covered with cat hair? Do you love to make quirky and one-of-a-kind crafting projects? If so, then it’s time to throw away your lint roller and curl up with your kitty! Crafting with Cat Hair shows readers how to transform stray clumps of fur into soft and adorable handicrafts. From kitty tote bags and finger puppets to fluffy cat toys, picture frames, and more, these projects are cat-friendly, eco-friendly, and require no special equipment or training. You can make most of these projects in under an hour—with a little help, of course, from your feline friends!
This week, Skeptically Speaking looks to the stars that light up the night sky, and fuse hydrogen and helium into the elements that make life possible. Science writer Jennifer Ouellette examines the possible evidence of ancient supernovae in bacterial fossils. Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains the controversy surrounding the so-called black hole firewall paradox. And astronomer Pamela Gay of CosmoQuest discusses the impact of U.S. sequester budget cuts on her research and outreach.
NEW YORK and COLORADO SPRINGS, May 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Over half of sustainable, responsible, impact (SRI) investment industry professionals say that retail investors (65 percent) and institutional investors (53 percent) are currently expressing interest in fossil fuel-free portfolios in the face of growing signs of climate change, according to First Affirmative Financial Network’s Fossil Fuels Divestment Survey.
Securities of fossil fuels firms, as an economic sector, may soon be on the decline.
Predictions as to when oil and gas will become a smaller part of the investment society makes into its total energy mix, in favor of renewables such as solar, wind and ocean energies, vary, ranging from 2060 on the long side (this prediction from oil industry powerhouse Shell) to 2030 or even sooner on the shorter side (as reported by Bloomberg). But so far, markets appear to be mispricing the risk this presents to fossil fuels companies, and their share prices for now remain high. In our opinion, it’s not too soon to consider divesting from fossil fuels while one might still recover significant value.
Genie Scott of the NCSE gives a talk on Creationism.
Executive director Genie Scott talks about the history of creationist legislation, including bills that allow teachers to “critically analyze” evolution or present the “full range of scientific views of origins”. Strategies, tactics, and more. When: 12/1/2012. Where: Eschaton 2012, Ottawa. Video courtesy of www.youtube.com/user/AtheismTV
(Don’t be put off by the audio problems in the beginning it gets fixed.)
An important study has just been published1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change.
The issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small.
This is not the first study to look at this question, but it is the most thorough effort. This should, however, be the last paper to report this kind of research because, really, we’re there; climate scientists are in very strong agreement about this issue and with this landmark study further demonstration of this fact is superfluous. (John Keegan discusses the merits of this paper relative to other similar efforts and closely examines issues such as sample size and bias here.)
How do we know there a consensus among scientists about human-caused climate change?
The research team, John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah Green, Mark Richardson, Barbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce, examined 11,944 abstracts published in peer reviewed scientific journals from 1991–2011 that covered the topics “Global Climate Change” or “Global Warming.” They coded the abstracts to signify the apparent position on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and found that 66.4% expressed no position, 32.4% indicated acceptance of AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% expressed uncertainty as to the cause of warming.
Removing those papers that did not express an opinion, 97.1% “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
The paper also looks at change over time in scientific consensus. The bottom line is that there isn’t much; consensus is not especially new. But there is a small trend, discussed by lead author John Cook in the video I provide below. Also, a look at the “reject AGW” papers shows that there are some patterns. Most are looking at large scale (known) change or cosmic sources of climate change, and they tend to be dated to the earlier part of the time range. Rabbet Run lists them here.
Consensus is often implied and not stated in peer reviewed papers
The researchers then invited the authors to rate the papers they had published. When this was done, the number of papers indicating no position on AGW dropped precipitously to 35.5%. In this rating system, 97.2% of papers endorse the consensus on AGW.
This is important for a couple of reasons. For one, it is an indication that the original coding was conservative, and did not involve assumptions about what the authors may have been thinking. It also shows something about how the scientific process works. If you look at any major scientific concept in the literature, you may find very little explicit endorsement of the overarching theoretical construct or model (like “Natural Selection” or “Germ Theory”) if that concept is fully established. Early writings on a particular major concept often refer to the concept itself and may cite early authors. For example one might see something like “Darwin’s concept of Natural Selection is being increasingly applied to understand the physical features of butterflies” with a reference to The Origin of Species. But after a while scientists stop mentioning the no-longer-novel overarching consensus and stop citing the seminal works. Climate science has moved into this state with respect to the human-caused warming of the earth because of the preponderance of evidence of AGW.
The Climate Change Consensus Gap
Depending on which poll you look at, and when the poll was taken, somewhat more than half of Americans either reject global warming as even being real, reject the human role, or simply don’t know about it. Given the scientific consensus, this is a little like saying that over half of Americans don’t accept Evolution as a valid set of theories and observations, despite the preponderance of evidence for that! (Hey, wait a minute…)
The point is, the gap between scientific consensus and public opinion is real, and very important. The consensus gap causes bad things to happen. For instance, it is quite reasonable for a government agency to fund or support public service announcements on drunk driving. There is a consensus that drunk driving causes deaths, injuries, and accidents. There is not a consensus gap in that area. But global warming also causes misery and mayhem. Shouldn’t there be public service announcements on saving energy and using alternative sources? The consensus gap means that there can’t be.
Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, “As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change”. Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.
Leadership is when those with influence head directly for the truth, talk about the right thing to do, and help other people to do the right thing. Main Stream Media does not have that … that leadership thing. Main Stream Media does not look at the scientific consensus and then make judgements about what stories to cover and how to cover them on that basis. Rather, Main Stream Media looks at the range of public opinion and treats that as consensus (or lack of) and acts accordingly. Which, in turn, reinforces or even sometimes widens the gap.
This also causes problems in the liminal area of media commentary. Opinion editorials in major outlets like the Wall Street Journal often exploit the Consensus Gap, manufacturing uncertainty or attracting readers from among the misinformed part of the public, and again, reinforcing or even widening the gap and enhancing the level of public misunderstanding or just plain old ignorance. With respect to global warming, it is time for that to stop. As noted by Brendan DeMelle:
It does not get any clearer than this. It should finally put to rest the claims of climate deniers that there is a scientific debate about global warming. Of course, this bunch isn’t known for being reasonable or susceptible to facts. But maybe the mainstream media outlets that have given deniers a megaphone will finally stop.
Global Warming, Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster
Editorials in Main Stream Media that exploit the consensus gap could be compared to editorials at the New York Times or in the Scientific American or your local newspaper that demand more attention be given to the plight of Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. The degree of scientific consensus that those creatures do not exist is about the same as the degree of consensus that AGW is real, though the public “belief” in crypto-critters is less than the public “belief” that AGW is not real. Why? Because Main Stream Media has not taken Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster seriously in quite some time.
Ten years from now it will be interesting to look back and see how Main Stream Media’s editorial writers who today are sticking with “the jury is still out” on AGW managed their reputations as they looked more and more like they belonged at the National Enquirer rather than a respected news outlet.
John Cook, the study’s lead author, has also blogged about it here and also has a video summarizing the paper, which he discusses some of the earlier research as well:
Dana Nuccitelli, another co-author, blogged about the research here and here.
The Consensus Project has a web site HERE and the twitter tag is #TCP
This is the paper: Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., Way, R., Jacobs, P., & Skuce, A. (2013). Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature Environmental Research Letters, 8 (2) DOI: 10.1088/1748–9326/8/2/024024
“First, we’re going to collect our data,” Jack, the archaeologist, was telling me as we slogged down the narrow overgrown path. He seemed annoyed. “Then, we’ll leave. Until we leave, they won’t leave. They think it would be rude. After they leave, we’ll go back and map in the abandoned camp.”
I had just arrived at the research camp in the Ituri Forest, then Zaire and now the Congo, after a rather long and harrowing journey that took me from Boston to New York to London to Lagos to Kinshasa to Kisingani to Isiro, all by plane, then over 250 kilometers of increasingly less road-like road, to the world’s most “remote” research site to be found among human settlements anywhere on the planet. Jack’s research involved looking at what happened to Efe Pygmy “camps” after they were abandoned. The Efe hunter-gatherers were known to move camp an average of once every two weeks or so. An archaeologist would want to know what happens to a camp once it is abandoned because many of the ancient sites we excavate are exactly that, abandoned settlements. Jack had been tracking Efe movement and camp abandonment patterns for one year, and the expectation was that I would continue his data collection for another year, as he and his wife returned to Montana to write up their results.
A typical Efe forest camp.The Efe, being very hospitable, were reluctant to leave a camp with visitors present, even if the visitors promised to leave with them, and certainly would never leave a camp if the visitors stayed behind. It just wasn’t done. Jack never told me how long it took for him and Helen to figure out that every time they visited a camp they were told would be abandoned that day, the Efe never actually moved, but eventually they came upon the method of arriving about the time of expected abandonment, collecting some preliminary data, and then leaving only to return hours, or perhaps a day, later.
“Oh, excuse, me have you moved yet? No? OK, see you tomorrow.”
When we arrived at the camp, which was located very near the Lese villages … the Lese are the farming people who with an overlapping culture and economy with the Efe … there were a lot of people there. This was a camp with several adult couples and a number of kids of all ages from baby up to nearly teenage. Since this was Jack and Helen’s last visit, they brought gifts to give to the people who had helped them out for the previous year. Project regulations and ethics required that any gifts be irrelevant to diet or economics, not usable as tools of poaching, not likely to change people’s status, and be likely to be used up or worn out quickly. So, everybody got plastic green sunglasses, the really cheap kind you buy by the dozen at a party store to use as favors.
A typical Lese village.The data collection involved listing all the people who were present, using coded references so no one could ever trace a real individual to any of our reports or publications. Years ago there was a revolution here in the Ituri during which lists of plantation workers or other employees, people who might be sympathetic to the Belgian colonials, were used to find and sometimes kill sympathizers. In case something like that ever happened again, we did not want our records to be used to identify people who were friendly to outsiders who might be seen as oppressors. That we tried very hard to not be oppressors was hardly the point; violent revolutions often get such things wrong. We would also offer everyone in the camp the opportunity to display their tools and other durable items so that we could inventory and photograph them. This was done voluntarily, but in this particular culture there was no proscription against it as long as we were looking only at regular household items or hunting weapons. Any sacred ritual items would be kept hidden, most likely, and we would not ask about them.
It was a party, a good time, lots of conversation, some weeping over the fact that the much beloved Jack and Helen would be moving back to the States, lots of fun with the green sunglasses, lots of data collected. Then, we left, and the next day we returned to map in the locations of the small dome shaped leaf-covered huts and other structures, fire hearths, stick chairs, drying racks, midden piles, trampled central-use areas, and so on and so forth. This is what the abandoned camp of a people known in the literature, and generally to outsiders, as “nomads” looked like. There was lots of stuff there, but all of it was made from materials available on the spot, transformed from wild growing plants to architecture and kitchen furniture, but eventually thrown out or left behind. Everything else was carried by the Efe, in one trip, to the next camp they would build from natural materials. Or almost everything.
Saying goodbye to Jack and Helen.To understand the movement of the Efe across the landscape, one had to first understand the seasonal cycles of the villages and the forest. While the Efe were hunter gatherers, living off the land in the African rain forest, they also associated with the Lese Villagers, farmers who grew crops in swidden (slash and burn) gardens. Sometimes the Efe men helped the Lese to develop the gardens, especially new gardens, by cutting and burning trees, in exchange for some goods, often tobacco and marijuana (which were always consumed together). But much more regularly, the women worked in the gardens planting, tending, harvesting, and processing rice, peanuts, cassava, plantains, and other crops. These gardens had a seasonal cycle. Being almost on the equator, there were two growing seasons, a wet season for “dry” country rice and a less wet season for growing peanuts. The other crops were grown year round. So, there was a harvesting and planting season around June, and another harvesting and planting season around November.
Collecting data from an abandoned camp.In return for their work in the fields, Efe could take food from the gardens. In the end, about half of the food the Efe ate consisted of agricultural produce procured in exchange for this work and the other half of their food came from the forest, mostly hunted meat but also gathered fruits and roots and other things.
And the forest had it’s seasonal cycle as well. During the dry season, which lasted several weeks around November and December, certain animals were easier to hunt because the streams they hid in, or that would impair hunter’s movement through the forest, were very low. Staring in late June and running into August, the famous African Killer Honey Bees (the wild version of our own domesticated honey bee) produced copious honey in nests about 100 feet up in the forest canopy. The Efe men were very dedicated to harvesting this honey.
If you think about that information for a bit you’ll notice possible conflict. For example, the Efe are drawn to the deep forest for Honey Season, but this overlaps with the mid-year harvest and planting. The November harvest and planting overlapped and conflicted with the dry season hunting. You might guess that men and women would have different opinions about where to reside during these periods of conflicts. The women would never stay overnight in a farm village during harvest; they moved each day by foot from the Efe camp to the gardens and back. But as it became more desirable to camp farther and farther into the forest, that commute became longer and longer. We say (usually tongue in cheek) that Western couples fight over certain things, like money or how to raise the kids or what channel to watch on TV. Efe couples argue over where to put the camp in relation to the horticultural villages vs. the deep forest.
I ended up never continuing Jack and Helen’s data collection project. That I would spend a year doing Part II of another graduate student’s thesis was an idea cooked up by our shared advisor, but neither Jack nor I saw the benefit in doing that. He had enough data, I had other things to do. So, instead, I studied the larger scale structure of Efe nomadism, of their movements across the landscape and their use of forest resources.
I discovered that each Efe group possessed (and that is a carefully chosen word) rights to a trail, usually one single trail but sometimes something a bit more complicated, that ran from the villages out into the forest. Along this trail, at intervals of almost exactly 1.5 kilometers, was a potential camp site. Of these camp sites, a handful were used again and again as the Efe moved through their seasonal cycle. Some of the other camps were used only occasionally. This was interesting, because it meant that even though the efe might move over 20 times a year, the part of their movement in the deep forest had them return to the same exact four or five camps again and again for years. They would also repeatedly use the same camps near the villages, but since village farmers often moved their swidden gardens, wiping out grown-over sections of the forest in one area and abandoning a garden elsewhere, the Efe “village camps” … the camps used during planting and harvest seasons … were often destroyed or otherwise became inconvenient.
Efe hunter. As a general rule, if you don’t know at least approximately where something is in the forest before you go looking for it, you’re not likely to find it.I also discovered that the Efe named each of their camps. This should not be surprising. Humans everywhere use place names to navigate and situate themselves in space. As with place names generally, the names of camps often had a meaningful history. One camp was named “Near the rotten orange tree.” That was a camp located near a garden where there once stood a citrus tree, long gone. That was revealing because there were no villages anywhere near the old orang tree today, the original village having been left decades ago. The best camp name I encountered was “Place the women refuse to pass.” This meant that this was the location along that particular group’s trail that the women refused to move camp beyond during the seasons they commuted to work in the gardens. As it was, this camp was about two hours walk from the villages. No wonder they refused to live beyond that point while working in the farms!
And now we come to the interesting anthropological lesson that emerges when we look at other cultures, in this case, the Efe and Lese. In books and articles about the Pygmies of the Central African rain forest, the Pygmies (including the Efe as well as other groups with different names) are often called “nomads.” Nomads, we all know, are people who move a lot. The term also invokes, for many, a certain amount of randomness, or at least, uncertainty in where one might be moving next. There is indeed uncertainty, of a sort, among the Efe as to when they are going to move and where to. But this is simply because one does not need to decide when or where until it is time to do so. There is a constant negotiation happening between members of a particular group as to when to move, and which camp to move to. If there is a big enough difference between different families in a camp, they can easily move to two different locations for a while, or one group can stay and others leave. But these differences never lead to the men going one place while the women go elsewhere, even though the biggest conflict is usually between men and women. The point is, their movement is not random, but well considered and systematic, yet in at the scale of days or weeks in advance, not very predictable at any level of detail.
Yet, at the same time, the Efe are the opposite of nomadic. Consider their Lese village farmer neighbors. They live in permanent villages. But, over time, the Lese use up garden space and firewood in the vicinity of their village. Also, a mini-epidemic of disease in a given village will cause people to not want to live there any more. So, over the course of a person’s life, say a person who lives to 70 years old, one might move seven or eight times from one village to another just in service to the agricultural cycle.
But wait, there’s more. Among the villagers, men and women, when they are married, move to one parent’s village or another for a while, then try to start their own village, and that sometimes does not work out, so they move again. So, around the age of marriage, a person may move three or four times in two or three years. A young man might spend two or three years working at a plantation far from their village, or spend some time in the army. A woman and her children might move to near a chief’s village if her husband is caught doing something wrong and forced into indentured service for a few months. Every now and then the government comes along and moves any village that is too far out in the forest closer to the road so it is easier to tax them. Then later, the government disappears (remember, this is a remote area) and everyone moves back. If grandma gets really sick part of the family might move far away to a mission hospital, because the family is required to supply food and labor to support grandma’s stay in what amounts to a hospice. And so on and so forth.
Betweeen all of these factors, Lese farmers might move 20 times in their life.
Let’s view “nomadism” among the Efe hunter gatherers and the Lese villagers from a slightly different perspective. Let’s ask the question: How many different places have you slept a total of 100 nights or more? That eliminates short forays, fishing trips, very short marriages, etc. Or, putting it a slightly different way, let’s look at the list of places one lives ranked by how many nights one has slept there in a lifetime. Nomads, given our usual conception of them, should have a very long list with a small number of nights at each place, while settled people should have a list with a short number of localities each associated with hundreds or thousands of nights, even if there is a tail of several places with a small number of nights each down hear the bottom of the list.
If we look at the “nomadic” hunter gatherers of the Ituri Forest, the Efe, their list will have five or six places that account for 80% or more of their nights, if we adjust for the frequently destroyed camps in or near the gardens. The Lese farmers, on the other hand, will have over a dozen localities with a several hundred nights in each. By that reckoning, the Lese are more nomadic over a lifetime, even if the Efe are constantly moving.
Minnesotans who go away for college and whose families have a cabin (maybe a series of cabins over time) up north and who spend part of their lives moving opportunistically from apartment to apartment in South Minneapolis are pretty nomadic too. I myself moved once before the age of 16, then about every six months for the next 15 years, chasing relationships, jobs, schools, and doing field work.
Finally, let’s look at nomadism in one more way. If you move every several years, occasionally more often such as around the time of marriage, then at any given time the landscape you know is the landscape you live in, and the memories of details of the landscape of your childhood or other times gone by both fades and becomes obsolete. But if you move constantly, but over the same exact landscape all the time like the Efe do, then your knowledge of every bit of the landscape is detailed an intense and constantly updated and renewed. The Efe know every root that ever tripped them and every rocky pile that ever harbored a small forest animal procurable for dinner and every mature fruit tree and every patch of tasty forest yams in the place they live. The other part of my research, looking at Efe diet, came to this conclusion: There is a fair amount of food in the rain forest, but the only way to find any of it is to know in advance where it is located. Otherwise, the costs in time and energy to discover it excede its caloric value.
The Efe are not nomadic. They are, rather, constant inspectors of their rather large home, centered on their traditionally used trail, consisting of a half dozen venues to sleep and live.
More stuff about the Congo
A while back I wrote a Novella, as a fundraising effort for the Secular Student Alliance, set in the eastern Congo. A cleaned up version of it is available here: Sungudogo
You can read the harrowing real life story of a season of field research in the same region, in a series of blog posts, by clicking HERE (then click through to the next blog post, and the next, and the next, until you’ve read them all!).
And, THIS LINK will get you to a selection of other stories set in the region.
Jack’s research was written up here:
Ethnoarchaeology Among the Efe Pygmies, Zaire: Spatial Organization of Campsites, by J. W. Fisher, Jr. and H. C. Strickland. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 78:473–484.
” produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian “think” tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use some of their money to threaten law suits against people like me who object to their activities. (But they do so very ineffectively.)
or J. Philippe Rushton’s 
, also produced by entities with an anti-social (in this case, racist) agenda, with piles of free copies sent out to a gazillion people. This is the same thing, but for climate change. It is a climate denialist book.
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