Getting Real on Climate

I did several versions of the following piece in 2005 and afterwards, which I posted on sites including Daily Kos. I was most inspired by a Mark Hertsgaard piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that year. It was the first I’d seen to say that because the climate was already changed and changing, we were going to have to deal with that as well as preventing even worse changes in the future.

 In his more recent book, HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011), Hertsgaard traced his own awakening to this that year to an interview with David King, chief science advisor to the British government. At the time this was controversial. As Al Gore admits in his new book, The Future, he was among those who didn’t want people talking about dealing with effects of what’s already caused, because it would distract from what had to be done to lessen greenhouse gas emissions and all the other efforts to prevent worse effects in the farther future. He’s changed his mind about it now.

 But it was shocking to me as well in 2005 that climate disruption had already begun and was going to be manifesting effects for decades no matter how much greenhouse pollution was lessened now. It started me on investigating just what this meant, which led to exploring the concepts in this essay.

 I saw that because of these relatively unfamiliar concepts, and in particular the need to think and act along two tracks simultaneously, dealing with the climate future was going to be an even greater challenge in the evolution of humanity’s ability to understand the world, and to apply that understanding to this complex problem of  survival.  If it passes that test, then humanity takes another step to a greater destiny. 

 When discussing this two track challenge, I came up against that all too frequently bedeviling factor of nomenclature. For once again, the scientific and planning experts chose really unfortunate words to attach to each of these tracks: adaptation and mitigation. Neither of these words clearly distinguishes itself from the other, either can be applied in some way to the other track, and neither adequately describes what it’s about. They are also distressingly flat and abstract.

 I struggled for years to figure out better words to apply. Hertsgaard actually did very well in talking about “protection” and “prevention.” But I notice that in his book he’s reverted to the adaptation/mitigation terminology. I suppose that’s because they’ve become the most widely accepted terms. But frankly, I can’t accept them. I just don’t think that way. These days I’ve settled on discussing addressing the effects of global heating already underway or in the cards, and addressing the causes of climate disruption in the farther future. While perhaps not scientifically precise, the distinction between effects and cause make things much clearer to me, and I hope to others.

 I’ve edited one version of these 2005 essays down to the basic contentions. I’ve included some of the evidence I used, although individual facts may have become obsolete. None I fear has been superceded by anything more cheerful.

I've edited out in particular a political argument that now seems obsolete, but in a few years, may not. I argued that if Democrats were only going to talk about the causes, Republicans were eventually going to do a quick 180 and say—yes, global heating is real, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it, so we should apply all our energies to dealing with its effects—even if the methods we choose involve spewing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Some seven or eight years later, this looks less likely in the foreseeable future, as Republicans have become officially the party of global heating denial. But it could still happen, and it still might cause political chaos. For now, however, the point is that we must urgently link the efforts to address cause and effects simultaneously, if humanity is to have a chance.

Getting Real on Climate

 

Part of the problem is that there isn’t one problem: there are two.

There is the Climate Crisis of the next fifty years, which will require society to deal with effects of what it has already caused.   And then there is the possible end-game of the farther future, which requires different sets of actions now to prevent it.

Two sets of problems with different actions required. Getting this wrong is politically suicidal, not to mention self-destructive on a vastly larger scale.

It’s Here

This is what we must accept first.  It’s not “almost too late” to stop the Climate Crisis.  It is too late.  Moreover, it has been too late for decades.

It’s here.  It’s inevitably going to get worse for our lifetimes, and the lifetimes of today’s children and grandchildren.  We have to deal with it.

Perhaps the time beyond that can be affected for the better by what we do today.  And that’s the reason we should cut emissions.  For the farther future, beyond 2055.  So the Earth does not become an unrecognizable and unlivable planet.

Until then, the Climate Crisis will be our reality, and very likely our defining reality. 

But after that, things could get even worse.  And that’s something we probably can do something about.  And we should.

This is the framework we should be talking about. 

In this space I’m going to summarize a basic framework that I believe is emerging from the science and from the reporting on it by analysts with far more specific experience and better credentials in the field than me. 

The effects of global heating have been difficult for people to understand, as well as to face.  Global heating involves factors like time lag, feedback and tipping points, that are unfamiliar in political discourse and approaches to societal crises.

The Climate Crisis 2005-2055

These are rough approximations, meant to suggest that we have two problems: the first is the Climate Crisis we are already in, though these are early stages.  It will unfold over the next several decades, regardless of what we do about CO2 emissions.  We can’t prevent it, but there are other actions we need to take to respond.

Update 2011: According to Hertsgaard's HOT, UK climate expert David King told him that the effects of emissions up to that moment will cause climate effects for about 25 years, suggesting that's the lag-time.  But mid-century is still a pretty good guess as to when this could become the runaway cataclysm and collapse, if nothing about emissions is done soon. 

Climate Cataclysm and Climate Collapse 2055-2300

These are prospects for the long-term future if we don’t start cutting and soon stopping greenhouse gas emissions.  It is the outer limit of possibility, a virtually lifeless planet.

We don’t know if that’s what will happen, or if the climate will stabilize at some intermediate stage that nevertheless could mean the end of life as we know it on earth (killing many species of animals and plants, except those that can survive and evolve in the heat of the dinosaur age), which would include the end of civilization and probably our species on this planet.  If such Armageddon were to happen, we don’t know if it will take two hundred or five hundred years.  But in fifty years, it’s likely we’ll know a lot more.  But the end of this century going forward is likely to be frighteningly bad.

The important thing to emphasize about the far future is, because of time lag and feedback effects and tipping points, what we do now will contribute to this future, one way or another. 

It may already be too late.  But right now it’s most useful to look at this in two stages.  If we do, we’ll see that the actions necessary are different, and the actions that people are fighting about now aren’t the appropriate ones.  One thing is becoming pretty certain: even if Kyoto-style reductions in fossil fuel emissions were to actually be enacted, they will probably not reduce the Climate Crisis for the next several decades, and they certainly will not end it. 

 And when they don’t, and people have misunderstood why they are necessary (which is to possibly the farther future), they will feel lied to and cheated.  And if we don’t do what we really need to do for the Climate Crisis period, people and the environment will suffer because the kinds of actions that could ameliorate the effects of the Climate Crisis weren’t taken.

To understand how all of this is possible, we need to introduce a few basic concepts.

Lag-time

We’re used to dealing with crises when they become crises, not when someone predicts they will.  Most of the time, even though people have suffered and died needlessly, the problem is fixed before it gets out of hand, or the crisis ends (like an epidemic that runs out of victims without immunity) and eventually things get back to normal.

That’s not the nature of the Climate Crisis.  The Cause is cumulative over time. Once changed, it establishes a new baseline.  What’s done to cause it occurs decades before the effect.

And ending the crisis, changing the effect, is not a matter of slowly subtracting the stuff that caused it.  Because once the effect is caused, it takes on a life of its own.  

So the first factor is lag-time: the time between the cause and effect.  When that time is measured in decades, while so much of our political life is measured in much smaller increments of time (from tomorrow’s news cycle to next week’s poll numbers to four years at most), it is difficult for politicians to take responsibility.  Especially when nearly everything else in our lives geared to small time frames: the quarterly report, the yearly income, the flavor of the week.

Mark  Hertsgaard explained all this last February:

 

“At the core of the global warming dilemma is a fact neither side of the debate likes to talk about: It is already too late to prevent global warming and the climate change it sets off. Environmentalists won't say this for fear of sounding alarmist or defeatist. Politicians won't say it because then they'd have to do something about it. The world's top climate scientists have been sending this message, however, with increasing urgency for many years. “

After studying the matter since 1988, the United Nations panel of some 2000 scientists issued its report in 2001: 

“The panel said that human-caused global warming had already begun, and much sooner than expected. What's more, the problem is bound to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it gets better.”

“Until now, most public discussion about global warming has focused on how to prevent it -- for example, by implementing the Kyoto Protocol… But prevention is no longer a sufficient option. No matter how many "green" cars and solar panels Kyoto eventually calls into existence, the hard fact is that a certain amount of global warming is inevitable.

 

The world community therefore must make a strategic shift. It must expand its response to global warming to emphasize both long-term and short-term protection. Rising sea levels and more weather-related disasters will be a fact of life on this planet for decades to come, and we have to get ready for them. “

 

"Contrary to the impression given by some news reports, global warming is not like a light switch that can be turned off if we simply stop burning so much oil, coal and gas. There is a lag effect of about 50 to 100 years. That's how long carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, remains in the atmosphere after it is emitted from auto tailpipes, home furnaces and industrial smokestacks. So even if humanity stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the planet would continue warming for decades. “

         But time lag isn’t the only structural element involved.  The climate is at its simplest a complex system, and systems have their own behaviors that “systems dynamics” and related disciplines are only beginning to understand. 

          Much system behavior is counter-intuitive.  My own example is sitting in traffic twenty or so cars away from a red light.  If you notice, you tend to move up when the light is red and stop when it is green.  That’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the way that system works.  A lag effect is part of the reason.  Counter-intuitive is not very helpful when you need to convince large numbers of people, in a society that prizes simple if not simplistic issues and solutions.

Feedback

Feedback is another important factor in global heating.  Feedback is basically an effect becoming a cause of other effects, which affect the original cause.  Often it amplifies the original effect, like feedback from a noisy speaker into a microphone makes more noise, or distortion.

In the past year, climate scientists have studied several feedback effects. A study  of the 2003 heat wave in Europe—extreme summer heat which itself led to deaths estimated in the tens of thousands, making it a severely under-reported catastrophe—showed that plants expended more CO2 “breathing” in the heat than they took out of the atmosphere in photosynthesis.

 They were actually sending more carbon dioxide into the air than they were absorbing---a finding that shocked experts who believed that climate change would accelerate green plant growth in Europe, which normally would take carbon out of the atmosphere.  But extreme heat set up a feedback system, in which heat caused plants to behave in ways which would eventually increase the heating.

A related study showed that extreme heat waves also released CO2 stored in soil, which would add to the feedback effect of heat creating heat.

What feedback means for the Climate Crisis is substantially more trouble ahead than more linear analyzes suggested.  Because of lag time, experts expect that heat waves like the one in 2003 will occur every other year by the 2050s.  “By the end of the century,” one scientist warned, “2003 would be a cool year."   Add to that not-yet quantified increases due to feedback effects.

Another example is the melting of Arctic ice. One scientist explained: “What we're seeing is a process in which we start to lose ice cover during the summer," he said, "so areas which formerly had ice are now open water, which is dark."

"These dark areas absorb a lot of the Sun's energy, much more than the ice; and what happens then is that the oceans start to warm up, and it becomes very difficult for ice to form during the following autumn and winter. It looks like this is exactly what we're seeing - a positive feedback effect, a 'tipping-point'." 

Tipping Point

Over the period of the Climate Crisis half-century, feedback will worsen situations that seem to occur without cause, but are results of time-lag. What this might mean for this period of present to near future will be discussed a bit below.  But let’s follow the logic of the feedback effect to the ultimate danger.

The greatest threat scientists fear is reaching the point of no return, when a process takes on a life of its own and can no longer be stopped.  These days it’s often called the tipping point.

The tipping point might be described as the moment when positive feedback effects reacting to phenomena that can’t be controlled because their cause was in the past (time-lagged), creates catastrophic and self-reinforcing change. 

Where most of the world’s ice is now concentrated, once the melting ice passes its tipping point, it could mean complete melting, with huge rises in sea level that would inundate coastal cities. 

Consider this report:

Experts say Greenland's 3,000 metre (9,800 ft) thick ice sheet, which has been melting at ever higher altitudes in summers in recent years, may be vulnerable to a runaway thaw.

If the Greenland sheet melted entirely over the next few centuries, world sea levels would rise by about 7 metres (23 ft). Antarctica's far bigger ice cap is likely to be more resilient as the giant continent acts as a deep freeze.

A melting of the Arctic "may happen very abruptly. It's one of the big unknowns and would be irreversible," said Paal Prestrud, head of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

“The concern is that there are tipping points out there that could be passed before we're halfway through the century," said Tim Lenton, an earth systems modeller at Britain's University of East Anglia."

The infusion of cold water into certain warmer ocean currents possibly could create another tipping point, which would result in the ultimate paradox of global heating causing a new Ice Age---the scenario in a report to the Pentagon in 2004, and dramatized in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.

 

Atmospheric temperature change is itself a candidate for causing a cascade of effects that could radically change the planet. That possibility was given a dramatic and shuddering boost last week with the finding that CO2 levels are now higher by some 27 % than at any time in the past 650,000 years.  That’s a point in time at which our species still had nearly a half million years to evolve to the point we could be called almost human.

Back beyond 650,000 years is an earth that cannot support humans or much of any other familiar life forms. This is the ultimate end point: a planet too hot and dry to sustain much of life as we know it.

 

The 2 degrees of separation

The difference between the ongoing, onrushing Climate Crisis and Climate Cataclysm is a matter of degree.  Maybe one degree.

Mark Lynas in his Open Letter to the Montreal conference stated that at two degrees C above pre-industrial temperature or more, ”we'll likely lose the Greenland ice sheet - flooding coastal cities across the world - as well as coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, and many of the world's major breadbaskets, as deserts sweep across continental interiors.”  He reckons the planet has ten years to prevent this by seriously reducing emissions.

We’re at about one degree F higher now, about a half degree C.  Some predictions, based on our current rate of increasing fossil fuel CO2 levels through 2050, show a large rise by the end of the century of from 2 to 11 degrees C.

There are bound to be more surprises as information is gathered and calculations become more sophisticated.  No climate scientists, however, are looking for things to cool off anytime soon.
The lesson of 100 year predictions is this: we may be able to affect the future of our great-grandchildren’s children by moving aggressively to renewable and sustainable energy systems.  Some people alive right now will have to do something anyway when oil starts to run out, and renewable energy is likely to benefit people in their own lifetimes with better health, for instance. 

It may not save the far future, but if there’s any chance for us to save it, we should take it. That’s our responsibility, and I believe it will be the defining test of our civilization and of humanity itself.  If we don’t face this responsibility and Earth becomes barren because we didn’t, we don’t deserve to survive anyway.  Unfortunately we’ll take down the only known ecosystem in the universe with us.

The Climate Crisis

Even though cutting emissions may benefit the far future no matter why we do it, I believe it’s wrong to continue insisting that cutting CO2 is going to prevent the Climate Crisis, and especially that it is the single way to deal with the Climate Crisis.

If we insist that cutting emissions will do it, and the climate continues to get worse, all credibility will be lost.  Let’s do it, but for the right reasons.

More to the point, we’re going to have our hands full long before the end of the century, and we’d better face up to what might be needed.  That’s what our science fiction gathering of scientists and world leaders would be talking about now.

What are those effects?  As Katrina was about to hit the Gulf Coast, Ross Gelbspan wrote an oped piece that catalogued the year’s weather effects the press wasn’t reporting, at least not coherently as a gathering Climate Crisis.  They included: a two foot snowfall in Los Angeles, 124 mph winds that shut power in Scandavia, the Midwest drought that sent the Missouri River to its lowest recorded level, drought in Europe that caused wildfires in Spain and low water levels in France, 37 inches of rain in one day in Bombay that killed 1,000;, and a lethal heat wave in Arizona that killed 20 people in one week.

“The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying, “ he wrote. Yet the dots are not connected “because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.”    

 Just this past week, studies on a couple of large but specific problems were released.

Disease: A World Health Organization study estimated that the Climate Crisis contributes more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year, now.  By 2030, a conservative estimate is they could double.

Why? Hotter temperatures mean that disease-carrying insects flourish where it was too cold before, and they live longer and reproduce more in places where cold winters kept their numbers down.  For example:

Just this week, WHO officials reported that warmer temperatures and heavy rains in South Asia have led to the worst outbreak of dengue fever there in years. The mosquito-borne illness, which is now beginning to taper off, has infected 120,000 South Asians this year and killed at least 1,000.

Senior U.S. and international officials said they now regard climate change as a major public health threat. Howard Frumkin, who directs the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called climate change “a significant global health challenge” in an interview this week.

Parasites that cause killing diarrhea flourish in the heat.  Though poor people and poor countries are the most vulnerable to disease as well as heat waves and hurricanes, being rich doesn’t guarantee immunity.  Rising temperatures also correlate with deaths from air pollution---from smog.

Water.  In a study also released last week: "Climate change experts led by Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., found that at least one-sixth of the world's population, including much of the industrial world and a quarter of global economic output, appeared vulnerable to water shortages brought about by climate change."

Another study of 12 other models agrees generally with this conclusion. "I think this will be one of the first greenhouse gas-related problems that will fall on the civilized world," Barnett said. In particular, glacier and snow melt that furnishes fresh water to many places will fade in warmer climate.  This will also affect the ecosystems of rivers and their relationship to the ocean, and could lead to a lot of other effects, like a drain on protein from disappearing fish species.

This is another way that the Climate Crisis interacts with systems dynamics: it fools with the existing webs of life.  Species crash is already a problem, as habitats disappear or change because of development and exploitation.  The wetlands around New Orleans that used to protect the city against the force of hurricanes have disappeared, and the lack of them is an acknowledged cause of that city’s flooding.  Just because we ignore how the natural world supports our lives doesn’t mean we won’t suffer when those systems collapse, even before we’ve cared enough to figure out how they interrelate and are interdependent. Destroying keystone species and otherwise shredding the web of life can affect us even in the Climate Crisis period.

As it becomes worse, the Climate Crisis can unleash the ultimate human folly: warfare.

As Mark Hertsgaard pointed out, that Pentagon study “said that by 2020, climate change could unleash a series of interlocking catastrophes including mega-droughts, mass starvation and even nuclear war as countries like China and India battle over river valleys and other sources of scarce food and water.” 

What Should We Be Doing?

Mark Mark Hertsgaard:

"The need for such a two-track strategy of prevention and protection is gaining acceptance from most of the world's governments. In Britain, the Department of the Environment promises to publish its strategy for adapting to global warming by the end of 2005.

At the most recent international meeting on global warming, held in Buenos Aires in December, a majority of the delegates supported the establishment of a fund to aid countries already suffering from the early effects of global warming.

The world community therefore must make a strategic shift. It must expand its response to global warming to emphasize both long-term and short-term protection. Rising sea levels and more weather-related disasters will be a fact of life on this planet for decades to come, and we have to get ready for them.

Among the steps needed to defend ourselves is quick action to fortify emergency response capabilities worldwide, to shield or relocate vulnerable coastal communities and to prepare for increased migration flows by environmental refugees.We must also play offense. We must retroactively shrink the amount of warming facing us by redoubling efforts to remove existing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them where they are no longer dangerous." 

In addition a 2004 study suggested that global heating could mean the extinction of a million species by 2050. We need to put preventive measures beyond carbon on the Climate Crisis agenda.

There are so many specific areas to work on that regardless of what part of this two-track thesis anyone accepts, there's work to be done.  But ultimately an understanding and a working acceptance that this is a two track process is essential.  Because there may yet be temptations to argue about them as either/or propositions.  But this they cannot be.  That's part of the test for these generations.

There's much to overcome. As Ross Gelbspan wrote, "the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.” But part of the problem, along with the millions spent on disinformation and on p.r. positioning,  is that people just don’t want to hear about it much---not in the way it is presented.  Because it seems so hopeless.  Even on these blogs, a piece on global heating is almost guaranteed to be unread.

But the emotional work to face the future must be done.  Hope isn't simply something you feel.  It's something you enact.  Hope for the future is made in the present.

Climate Crisis 1989: After the Warming

I wrote this piece in 2007 and never published (or posted) it anywhere before, to the best of my recollection.  But it belongs here both as part of this climate crisis awareness history and because it summarizes a television program that deserves to remain part of the dialogue: James Burke's After the Warming, which I quote from in the previous essay.  I'm happy to say that in 2012 it can be seen on YouTube, although not with the quality of the rare and at the moment unavailable DVD version.  I'm not happy to say that 5 years after I wrote this and 23 years after these 1989 warnings, the climate crisis is still not being addressed directly or with the appropriate urgency and scale. 

Nor that Dr. James Hansen, whose 1988 Senate testimony is mentioned, just referred to it in a Washington Post oped in which he says that in terms of its relationship to extreme weather, it's now worse than he thought back then.






We called it Greenhouse Summer. Chicago had seven days over 100 degrees F, and a string of 18 straight over 90. Pittsburgh had more than five times the average number of days above 90, making 1988 the hottest summer in a century. In more than 70 US cities, hot weather exacerbated lingering and dangerous air pollution.

With the heat came drought, especially in the Midwest and South, where it contributed to a 31% decline in the country’s grain harvest. In the West, forest fires lingered into autumn. Titanic fires in Yellowstone resulted from the worst heat, drought and wind conditions there in 300 years.

The phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect and the predicted catastrophes of CO2-induced global heating were not new in 1988. The first research began in the 1950s, the first tentative conclusions were being drawn in the 1960s, including the possibility of apocalyptic consequences. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned it in a casual conversation with playwright Arthur Miller, as Miller noted. Kurt Vonnegut described the same theory we know today as told to him by a young visitor, in an article published before the first moon landing. By the first Earth Day in 1970, many of us just out of college knew about it.

It was the fact that it was a known theory that made people sit up and take notice in the hot summers of the late 1980s.  In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate that global warming was happening and was going to get worse unless countermeasures are taken.

Then in 1989 and 1990, the first spasm of articles and books came out (Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature; Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle.) I believe it was around then that one of the TV networks did a miniseries about it, similar to The Day After, though I don't know what it was called and haven't so far been able to find reference to it.

 But it was definitely in 1989 that James Burke made a two-part television program called After the Warming. (Officially it's dated 1990.) James Burke was known in the US for at least two fascinating and provocative television series seen on PBS, both relating the history of technological development to other aspects of history, such as politics, warfare, social change, even fashion. They were Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.

Burke was so good on television because he explained things simply, yet the connections he made were dazzling in their complexity. He was a lively, even aggressive presence, but engaging. You had to watch him. He came at the end of a short golden age for these series, beginning perhaps with Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. The most elaborate, most famous of them—and just about the last one—was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I don’t know when it was actually broadcast. I happened to see the second part, but it was only a few years ago, when I found the two-VHS tape set in the library, that I saw the whole thing.  It is revelatory in so many ways, and I’m now about to describe it in detail.

The premise of After the Warming is that Burke is speaking from the year 2050, when the world has changed enormously because of climate change. He is looking back on the past fifty years or so, describing how human civilization dealt with the challenge.

But the first 50 minutes goes back much further than that, to describe the influence of climate on human history---beginning with pre-history. Humans became human, Burke says, during the Ice Age, and perhaps because of it. Because game became scarcer, hunting was more complicated, and required cooperation and communication. Humans responded by inventing language. Because plants were scarcer, humans explored for food, and with sea water frozen and sea levels down in such areas as the Bering Straits, they were able to migrate farther.

  Then the planet warmed, the seas rose, and the populations of the Americas and Australia were separated from Europe and Asia. The warmer temperatures and abundance of water led to better growing, more population, the beginning of agriculture and cities. There was so much grain in Iraq in 7000 BC that a system of accounting was needed, so writing was invented.

In 3000 BC drought struck the prosperous area of Egypt. The Nile was the only reliable water source when it flooded, which led to developing systems of irrigation and a host of related innovation: “maps to design the irrigation network, surveying and engineering to lay it out, mud and straw bricks to build it, geometry to measure reservoir volume, metallurgy to make the tools, a calendar to get the river flood date right, management to run it all, tax collectors to cream off the profits, and a state bureaucracy to spend them.” That is, the basics of modern civilization, according to Burke.

Climate changes didn’t have to be global or even very large to have major effects. A change in rain patterns doomed the great civilization of Mycenae, where because of shifting cold air patterns, it didn’t rain for a hundred years. By 300 BC it was warm and moist again in Europe. The Alpine passes in northern Italy became open year round, allowing Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world. China seized the same sort of opportunity in its part of the world. Good weather opened up the “Silk Road” and sea routes, so these two superpowers began trading.

But in 500 AD, the global temperature went down. The Huns of central Asia suffered freezing drought, and invaded the south, displacing other “barbarians” who eventually overran the Roman Empire and ushered in the Dark Ages. A half century later, the temperature went up. Vikings colonized Greenland, where there was grass for sheep. Then it turned cold again in 1300. Greenland had no trees, and soon sea ice isolated it. By 1408, the last colony died out.

 The Little Ice Age gripped Europe in the 16th century, but in England, new technologies were developed to cope with it. Burke demonstrated the innovations of the new manor house: “Stone walls and gravel surround to keep out wet and mud, no more open colonnades and courtyards, steep roofs and guttering to handle a lot of rain, but in spite of the cold they put in big glass windows. New technology… changed their lives.” Like chimneys and fireplaces to heat up small rooms separately. Everyone no longer living around one central fire in a big common room. Those smaller rooms had tapestry, paneling, plasterwork and curtained beds to keep the warmth in and cold out. So now there was privacy. And with those private beds, romance. The chimney allowed for heated offices, so accounts could be kept all year, instead of stopping when the ink froze: more business. The cold meant more life lived indoors, and led to indoor entertainment, like making music.

Then came three decades of warming. With hot, moist summers and warm winters, crop yields in England were at historic highs. Food was cheaper, work was plentiful, and in these prosperous times, people had more children. More households created the need for more household goods. Here’s where Burke shines, with one of those very specific chains of circumstance and (perhaps) causality: the demand for more household goods included iron cooking pots. But to heat the iron to make the pots required wood, which was in dwindling supply. There was lots of coal, but impurities in it spoiled the iron—until someone figured out how to burn out the impurities, to make coke that would be used to make iron. It was at this point that James Watt figured out how to make a steam engine, but he needed high quality iron to make it work. Now he had it. The industrial revolution began—all because of improvement in the weather.

It is at this point that FutureBurke pauses to note the irony in iron: the growing populations and now the steam engine began the era of mass production, and expanding economies and populations. Europe needed more natural resources to keep the machines going, and so the era of colonization began. From coal-fed railroads to oil-fed cars and the next round of petroleum-based innovations—in an age of moderate climate—the cause of the next great climate change was literally being manufactured.

The second fifty minutes of After the Warming begins in our recent past, moves into what was the future in 1989 (when the show was made) but is now also in our past, and then into what is still the future.

Burke reviews the discovery of the CO2 based global warming phenomenon beginning in the late 1950s with the same experiments and measurements in Hawaii that Al Gore describes in An Inconvenient Truth. He described the early manifestations of heating, and the endless studies. He projects inaction into the future, into the 1990s.

But in his scenario, a series of devastating droughts resulting in hundreds of thousands starving in Third World countries, plus food shortages in the US, and a series of wars in the Middle East over oil, pushed the United States into finally supporting action on global warming…in the year 2000.

Think about this for a moment. There have been devastating droughts in Africa and Asia, and hundreds of thousands have died in wars and genocides (as in Darfur) that are likely related to them. There’s been drought in the American West for several years, though globalization has kept food supplies up in the US. And we’ve certainly had wars in the Middle East, though no one announces that they are about oil. Burke’s description may turn out to be how the historians describe our recent past. But we don’t allow ourselves to see it that way.

Burke next posits something startling, based on something that hasn’t happened—but might yet. In his year 2000, Pacific nations had become major powers, to the extent that they led the fight to address global heating. Burke named Japan, which probably seemed more reasonable in the 1980s than now. But how many decades are we from a China and perhaps an India so economically powerful that world leadership does fall to them?

In any case, Burke posits something that by the realities of our 21st century, we might well find incredible: a Planetary Management Authority to organize and enforce efforts to address global heating. The efforts themselves are familiar to us now, however strange they might have seen in 1989, like carbon trading. But there’s a twist in Burke’s history of the future that is just beginning to be talked about: how to get less developed nations into the process. Burke’s PMA manages a system in which advanced nations trade expertise for carbon use rights, as they cut their emissions. That expertise is applied to helping less developed nations become prosperous with clean technologies, as well as to create better health care and education.

The methods used to cut emissions are startlingly familiar: everything from the end of incandescent light bulbs to tax credits for energy efficiency and computer controlled homes to manage that efficiency, plus various clean energy technologies including solar and wind. Burke throws in some realistic details, some of them already on the mark: beginning in 2008, there are several years of devastating tropical storms that kill hundreds of thousands in Australia, Bangladesh and Florida. By 2010 there are refugees and military confrontations at borders over food and water shortages.

But the PMA has some military authority, and must stop a wave of Indonesians trying to get into Australia. By 2010 the global temperature has gone up by 3 degrees F, and water levels have risen by over a foot. Two million have died by starvation. A temperature rise of 5F is forecast for 2020. In that decade, there is greater concentration on local energy systems. Societies are reorganizing into smaller communities instead of big cities. Forestry is a major career. Water is a greater problem. Major rivers in the US and Russia have gone dry. Sea walls are going up to protect coastal cities.

Though there is grain growing in the far north, and being transported through newly opened Arctic waters, there is severe drought in the US. And despite the ongoing transformation, the effects of past greenhouse gas emissions continue to multiply and create feedback loops. Ocean plankton, which now absorbs CO2, begins dying because of the hotter water temperatures, and that CO2 is no longer being absorbed.

Without plankton, the only hope for absorbing CO2 becomes the forests. When several South American nations fail to halt deforestation, the PMA organizes a sea and land blockade to force enforcement. Because of the land required for cattle that had resulted in decades of deforestation, beef is so highly taxed that it disappears from most tables.

Still…by 2020 the temperature has risen 5.4 degrees. The sea has risen 2 feet. Between 2025-2040 it has risen 3 feet, breaking into sewage treatment plants and toxic waste dumps, and spreading disease. In 2050, the PMA assesses its half century of crisis management. There have been 20 million deaths by starvation, but only one nuclear exchange (in the Middle East.)  Kansas and the Riviera are arid, there are palm trees in Massachusetts. But the civilized world is very different than it was in 2000, and carbon neutrality has been achieved.

But then data from the deep ocean comes in, indicating that melting ice and rain in the far north has added so much fresh water to the oceans that the great ocean conveyor—the deep currents snaking in a particular pattern that sets our climate—is slowing down. The result of warmer water is less carbon being absorbed, so the globe is heating twice as fast.

The PMA concludes that carbon emissions will have to be reduced to almost pre-industrial levels of the year 1800. FutureBurke, who has been upbeat throughout, and lives in a prosperous looking if conspicuously energy efficient dwelling with lots of computerized technology, now mentions that the prospects beyond 2050 could have been a lot better if humanity had used that 20 years---between 1980, when global warming became apparent, and 2000, when the PMA was established—to start action instead of arguing.

He ends with a joke from our era. The one about the man who falls from the top of a skyscraper. As he passes the 17th floor somebody asks him how he’s doing. “So far, so good,” he replies.

So here we are. There seems little use in reciting again what has already happened and is happening now: the hundreds of millions of people displaced by drought and natural disasters, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic, the slowing down of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle, the dying and migrations of animal and plant species everywhere, the increase of pest-borne diseases with increased heat. The droughts, the storms, the heat waves—they’ve all become background noise.

 We’ve had many hotter summers after Greenhouse summer. Flying coast to coast in the US is becoming increasingly difficult because of weather-related delays and cancellations, but it’s just one more of those things, like the idiocy of removing our shoes for Homeland Security. Clearly there is increasing concern, and even increasing political pressure. Al Gore says that no matter who is elected President in 2008, dealing with the Climate Crisis will be high on his or her agenda. But we’ve let more than those 20 years go by.                           

Getting Warmer 2004

As climate disasters around the world increase in number and awful strangeness in 2012, I keep thinking about the early scenes of the 2004 climate crisis disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow.  They showed a series of apparently unrelated and decidedly freakish and violent weather events, culminating in a tornado epidemic that smashes through Los Angeles.  By now very similar events have in fact happened in various places.  So far in the U.S. the super-tornadoes that have ripped through and leveled huge areas, including in places that have seen few tornadoes before, have not hit major cities, let alone major media capitals.  But the damage done to Los Angeles in this film may be only a slight exaggeration of what would have happened if, for example, one of these tornado outbreaks had moved on to Washington, D.C., which it easily could have.

This piece appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section on May 30, 2004.  The intense political polarization on the climate crisis "issue" was well underway, and would only get worse.  But there was some hope that this movie and new documentary films would break the resistance, at least in terms of awareness.  By this summer of 2012--the hottest summer in the hottest year so far recorded, with between a fifth and a third of the U.S. in severe and protracted drought--polls are showing more acceptance of the reality of the climate crisis, and its causes.  But political paralysis remains the rule.
      

It's one scary movie. "Climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism," says the science adviser to the British government. "Temperatures are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter faster than any time in the past," says the international weather expert. "Climate change is poised to change our pattern of life," says the African ecologist. But the U.S. president won't listen.

  The number of extreme weather events doubles from a decade before: lethal heat waves in Europe, floods in Africa, droughts in Asia and the United States. A record 300 million people flee their homes from natural disasters. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hits record level. Warming increases the range and virulence of diseases. Trees die in New England. Glaciers melt faster in Alaska. There's a major influx of freshwater in the North Atlantic and a slowdown of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle. Antarctic ice flows faster into the ocean.

What could be next? Rising sea levels swamp coastal cities. Famine in Europe. Nuclear wars for water. A million species threatened with extinction. The end of life on Earth as we know it.

Sounds exciting, but these aren't scenes from The Day After Tomorrow, the global warming disaster film that opened this weekend. They're from the real world. Everything in the first two paragraphs has happened or is the statement of a real person (including Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government). Everything in the third paragraph is science-based speculation.

  The movie itself takes huge liberties with known science, in the speed with which global warming brings on a new ice age. The paradoxical possibility of heat leading to ice is real: if cold water from melting glaciers change ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, Manhattan could get colder pretty quickly -- though in a decade, not a New York minute, as The Day After Tomorrow would have it.
But all by itself, heat is already causing problems like drought, crop failures, disease, violent storms -- and is threatening much more as the century proceeds.

Director Roland Emmerich has substituted climate change for the alien threat of his blockbuster Independence Day and the radiation monster of his remake of Godzilla. At first, scientists and environmentalists worried that the film's festival of instant catastrophe might make global warming seem as credible a threat as Van Helsing's vampires, Harry Potter's dementors or this summer's other movie villains. But that's changed, as the Worldwatch Institute and National Resources Defense Council are touting it on their Web sites, and Al Gore spoke at a premiere sponsored by Move-On.org.

Maybe they were all inspired by the Bush administration's attempted muzzling of NASA scientists (who earlier were talking openly about the Ice Age scenario) from responding to questions about the movie. Or maybe it's just that global warming couldn't be taken less seriously in the United States than it is already. While 72 percent of Americans said they were concerned about it in 2000, only 58 percent say so now, and only 15 percent believe it has anything to do with fossil fuel consumption.

Why are we so determined to be oblivious? Perhaps, after the Cold War's thermonuclear threat, and while trying to cope with international terrorism, we're suffering from apocalypse fatigue. Besides, it's hard to get upset about something that sounds so moderate and nice as "global warming." Even the "greenhouse effect" sounds decidedly unthreatening. Who's afraid of a greenhouse? Books continue to be published that contribute solid information, but none has had the simple eloquence or impact of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which got DDT banned and jump-started a new kind of environmental awareness.

Hence the hopes for this heavily advertised movie. But the highest hurdle to overcome may be the time-lapse nature of the problem. What is newest and most challenging about global warming is that once its effects are clearly apparent, it's too late to stop them. Climate and its effects interact with everything, especially the resources we depend on that are getting scarcer, like fresh water, and oil.

  Almost inevitably, many of the changes will be in how we approach life, as individuals and societies. If we get ahead of the curve, these changes will include global cooperation, common commitment, a surge of creativity, community, shared sacrifice and adjustments in values. If we let the crisis overwhelm us, the changes will be just as great but a lot harsher and more destructive.

We'll need a series of attitude adjustments about the future. We need to anticipate problems, not just react to them. We need to have the courage and confidence to act on those anticipations. And we must accept responsibility for the future. We need to think more comprehensively, as Buckminster Fuller used to say, and imagine alternative futures.

The climate crisis is the keystone issue of our time. Addressing it means addressing virtually every other significant environmental and energy problem. Maybe The Day After Tomorrow will nudge bigger audiences for greater educational efforts, and for political change. Perhaps it will revive what remains for me the most cogent media treatment of the subject, the 1990 international television production After the Warming. Host James Burke presented a plausible history of global warming from the perspective of a citizen in 2050. His future self compares us today -- in the do-nothing days before the day after tomorrow -- to the man who falls from the top of a tall building. As he passes the 17th floor, someone asks him how he's doing. "So far, so good," he replies.

The Climate Crisis

I recently realized that this piece is no longer on the Internet.  It was originally published on June 27, 2002, nearly ten years ago on Inlet.org, a site that no longer exists.  The title was simply "The Climate Crisis," and therein lies a tale already.  Though that expression--the Climate Crisis--was not original with me, it was not yet in common use.  It would be several years before Al Gore started using it, which is what gave it currency.  In fact, this piece advocates using it, as a more accurate name for the phenomenon that until then was usually called 'global warming,' and also to emphasize the urgency with which it must be addressed.

I offer several ideas in this piece.  Some have been tried, others have not.  Celebrities have gotten involved, though with uneven results, and mostly not with the specificity I suggested.  The "one big voice" of an environmental coalition hasn't really happened, although there are dedicated organizations and some coordination, especially to oppose specific legislation or executive action on the federal level.  The goal of elevating this to a moral issue has been only partially successful, and in building "emotional consensus" and a sense of urgency, we've gone two steps forward and three steps back, it seems. 

But the heart of this piece is about nomenclature, and even though the terms I suggested--Climate Crisis and 'global heating' have been a more widespread part of the dialogue, giving elements of this crisis the names that would be immediately meaningful and emotionally powerful to a broad public is still a big problem.  Witness the wimpy "climate change" as the reflexive new label, and especially the talk of "adaptation" and "mitigation," terms for the equally crucial but quite separate problems of dealing with the causes and the effects of global heating, which are confusing and meaningless to everyone not familiar with these bureaucratic terms taken from land use planning.  Some ridiculed the idea that calling it "global warming" was an important factor in the missing urgency , but I still believe it was and is.  Words matter.  They matter a lot.  The resistance and denial of those who really fear the Climate Crisis future may be more powerful.  But especially ten years later, there's nothing to be gained by soft-pedalling the stakes.      

In any case, since this isn't available elsewhere, I am reprinting it as it first appeared.  
© 2002 William Severini Kowinski

Somebody at the end of a Washington environmental organization's press conference recently asked the question: how do we create an "emotional consensus" in support of efforts to address global warming? Nobody had an adequate answer, but the question was exactly the right one.

Another recent C-Span moment recorded journalist Bill McKibben's comment that climate change "is the first morally compulsory, urgent issue since the Civil Rights movement."

Urgent, and a moral issue-- exactly right as well. Right now there is no emotional consensus, no sense of a moral issue. Yet climate change is emerging as the defining context of this century. Scenarios extrapolated from the most modest temperature rise predicted by major scientific organizations foresee large scale human suffering, disease and death, economic disruption and ecological disaster. Scenarios based on the higher end imply mass extinctions, the end of civilization and planetary life as we know it on this earth. It is hard to imagine a greater crisis, yet climate change is not an urgent issue in the U.S. Part of the reason is that this case simply hasn't been made in emotional and moral terms.

A lot of attention has been paid to getting the science right, and to refuting criticism of that science. News has mostly focused on details of treaties and legislation, and scattered reports of effects reputed to be caused by global warming (and then rightly or wrongly refuted.) In other words, from the public point of view, it's been boring and confusing.

Still, at least some information has made its way into the American mind. But there is no sense of urgency. Americans were more worried about Alar on their apples than they are about climate change. There is no real consensus on the stakes. That must change.

Political leaders can't get traction on this issue without public alarm. There are private interests with huge amounts of money and lots of influence opposing efforts to address climate change. As usual, all that can offset them enough to provide leverage for policymakers is public interest, and in this case, a public sense of urgency.

What is needed now goes beyond negotiating mitigation that tries to satisfy both technical and political requirements and winds up doing not enough of either. It goes beyond policy wonking and bureaucratic infighting. It even goes beyond attachment to pet issues, or pushing the usual emotional buttons to work people up to contribute to a campaign fund or flood a congressional office with emails. It requires imagination and concentration. It requires real information told in dramatic and comprehensible ways. It requires commitment to doing it until it is done.

The stakes are very high, for this is an issue like no other. That Civil Rights laws weren't passed when proposed in 1948 was tragic, but not fatal to the cause. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and America has benefited ever since. It was too late for some, but not for all. But if halting the acceleration of climate change is postponed, future efforts may simply be too late for everyone. Terrible and perhaps fatal effects will accelerate inexorably, no matter what treaties are then signed. Americans are used to being able to fix things at the last moment. What will happen when they can't?

In truth, no one can invent a moral issue or create an emotional consensus. But we can provide the spark and start the process by doing the best possible job of framing the issues with clarity and urgency, using the full range of tools available. To start thinking about such an effort, this is what I propose:

1. One big voice -- Existing environmental organizations must form a coalition organization or choose one of their number to run this campaign, but it must be a single voice and a single place the public knows to go to for information, linking with the appropriate other sources. A costly campaign will require a concentration of resources, so money should be channeled to one source. Publicity efforts should be part of a coordinated campaign with the same logo, slogans, and identifiable faces and/or voices in ads.

2. Don't say 'global warming'-- Turn up the heat on terminology. In fact entirely new terms are needed. I believe one of the reasons that global warming and climate change aren't considered urgent is that the words 'global warming' and 'climate change' have no urgency. Though 'warming' might describe a dangerous incremental rise in temperatures, the word itself has mostly good connotations. It's warm & cuddly. Happiness is a warm puppy. Listen to the warm. Can I warm up that coffee? Let's give a warm welcome to...

It takes a counterintuitive leap to think of "warming" as a bad thing. Even as a negative, it is at best, lukewarm. Nothing merely "warm" is urgent, especially in a negative sense. You may urgently desire a warm coat on a cold day, but people don't feel too warm. They feel too hot. Then it's urgent.

Global warming was a dubious improvement over the term it replaced, 'the greenhouse effect.' A useful metaphor to describe what happens when there's too much CO2 in the upper atmosphere, it is otherwise pretty abstract and definitely not scary. To most people, greenhouses are good. Flowers grow in them. They're pretty. The greenhouse effect sounds like it might make the whole world prettier.

There's been a recent move to the term "climate change," but it's too neutral: change can be good, and if the weather is too hot or too cold where you live, you might welcome a change. A better choice is "climate crisis." Ross Gelbspan uses it in the subtitle of his book, The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription. Crisis projects urgency. He also uses "heat" rather than "warming." Until even better terms are found, everyone involved should talk about "global heating" and "the climate crisis."
And if you don't think words have anything to do with it, think about the difference between anti-abortion and pro-life, or between pro-abortion and pro-choice. Few remember the language of a single subsection of the Civil Rights Act. They remember "I have a dream today."

3. Bring out the big guns and give them something imaginative to do. Use Hollywood faces and voices, send them places where something can be shown that indicates the effects of global heating. Send Julia Roberts to interview an Inuit elder on camera about the change in Arctic ice and weather patterns, and the effects on the animals and plants. Take an action hero to high altitudes, take Mariel Hemingway up to Mt. Kilimanjaro and measure the snow, and some swimsuit models to an island that will disappear under the water because of global heating.

4. Make this a moral issue. Get the Dalai Lama on camera-he is well aware of these issues. Get Nelson Mandella and Vaclev Havel-get the most articulate and morally respected people in the world. Get religious leaders of all faiths, and send this to where the Civil Rights movement got so much energy and force-the churches. Get Captain Kirk and Captain Picard. There won't be a future unless this is addressed.

5. Be relentless and build momentum. Get some billionaires to pay for relentless TV ads. There must be a few with consciences and consciousness. Do TV and radio programs and web sites, and urge existing TV shows to do something on it. Start by reframing the issue with urgency. Add details (what will happen, where and when.) Get new people on board and in front of the camera.

6. Start now. This campaign should be planned now, and the funds solicited to start it. The year after the 2002 congressional elections will be critical to getting the issue on every candidate's agenda in 2004.

Only if this becomes a priority issue, a moral issue, and an emotional consensus starts to develop, can any presidential candidate offer anything prominent and bold. Such a focus can work partly because the groundwork has been prepared. There's been grassroots activity and education that has increased awareness. There is now enough science to make the claims of a crisis more than credible, and there are many ideas for solutions, so it all doesn't sound hopeless.

What is needed now is the "emotional consensus", the sense of a moral necessity, a cause. I believe it is the responsibility of the environmental community and its organizations to lead first of all by
example, by giving this issue their priority and focus, not in the ordinary way, but by going all out to involve the public in a moral crusade to save the world.

I am an author and otherwise an underemployed writer with no power or influence and few connections. All I can do is offer these ideas in whatever way I can to people who can make things happen.

Greengate Mall.  All photos c by William Kowinski

Christmas at Greengate Mall

Greengate Mall opened in 1965 just outside my hometown of Greensburg, Pennsylvania.  In many ways it was the inspiration for the research that resulted in my book, The Malling of America.  Greengate figures in several chapters, including one in which I describe the all-night process of building the Christmas decorations. 

For over 30 years, Greengate Mall was a major center for Christmas activities for the county community. Even after other malls and shopping centers sprang up, Greengate continued to have the most elaborate Christmas decorations, including the center court train ride for children. When it was the only mall, and then the dominant one especially for the western side of the county, it was a bustling hive of shopping during this season, and the prime place for people to meet up with each other. More than a replacement for Greensburg's Main Street of old, it was the county's Main Street every Christmas.

By 1999, when I last visited it, Greengate was a ghost mall: a gleaming and almost empty shell, invaded by shabbiness and deterioration.  It soon closed altogether. But on that last visit, I could still marvel at its old essence.  Greengate was designed by Victor Gruen, a renowned architect who essentially invented the enclosed shopping mall with his design of Southdale in Minnesota, which opened only nine years before Greengate.  Greengate was also one of the few collaborations between Gruen and the Rouse Company, an important developer (begun by another visionary of the era, James Rouse) that helped define suburbs and cities across America in the second half of the twentieth century.

In many ways, Greengate was a kind of template for enclosed shopping malls that became part of ordinary life throughout the country.  Yet there was still something unique about it, which I tried to describe and define in my book.  Through its layout and architectural touches, it was especially theatrical, though in a subtle way.  I visited way too many malls in my researches, but Greengate remained special in my estimation.

So it could be argued that Greengate had architectural as well as historical significance.  It certainly had local significance for several generations.  But while Greensburg citizens rallied to save its handsome but dilapidated train station as an historic site, to my knowledge no one even considered Greengate worth preserving as a building that could be saved for other uses.  In any case, in the summer of 2003, it was erased from the physical landscape altogether.  What was once the colossus that replaced Main Street became a barren plain of cracked concrete, mounds of debris, and a huge hole bordered by the remnants of a deep foundation.

Shortly thereafter a brand new WalMart rose in its ashes.  When I drove around this new Big Box and its attached shopping center (nostalgically named after Greengate), the entire area was completely unrecognizable.  The roads, the very landscape had been changed.  It wasn't even possible to see exactly where Greengate Mall used to be.    

In 1985-its 20 year anniversary--Greengate installed this
time capsule.  In it, among other things, was a copy of
The Malling of America I signed.  The capsule and its
contents were "lost" during demolition.  Ironically, it
was supposed to be opened in 2005, the year that Walmart
opened there instead.

But if its historic significance had escaped the attention of preservationists, Greengate was and is still alive in the collective memory of Westmoreland County.  It has its own web site (Greengate Mall Revisited) and Facebook page, and has become part of online mall nostalgia, as represented by sites like livemalls, labelscar, and inevitably, deadmalls.

What people remember in particular is Christmas at Greengate. So along with excerpts from the chapter of The Malling of America that describes the night of Christmas decorating, I am adding photos I took of that Greengate Christmas (which I believe was in 1981), along with a selection of comments left at Greengate Revisited concerning Greengate Christmas memories.

Greengate was the first enclosed mall in the Greensburg area--in fact, the first in Westmoreland County.  But it remained such a community center, especially at Christmastime, partly because it was a mall for everyone (or nearly everyone), before non-urban retail began to split so decisively between high and low end. There were some differences, between what I called "bread & butter" malls and "high fashion" malls.  Greengate was more bread & butter, and it was managed as a hometown mall.

Greengate began in the wonder era for malls, when their magic was a combination of newness, easy and free parking and the fantastic comfort-controlled world inside them. With a fountain!That world was a combination of a variety of shops and eating places with a spacious and pleasant environment. It looked like an internal town square, a garden of Eden in a box, Main Street in a spaceship. It was always clean and shining (even in my last visit there in 1999, when it was almost empty of stores, the tile floors gleamed and the fountain gushed as high as ever.) It was the people's palace in the fabled land where every working man is king.

At Greengate that meant certain architectural touches, and lots of space: two levels of wide side courts and a big center court that soared to the ceiling. So the potential community, drawing from nearly all strata of the local population, had room to meet and lots to look at outside the stores. Greengate's management was in tune with its community: a family-oriented, house-proud working class culture with middle class incomes. This all got expressed in the Christmas season with elaborate decorations that built on traditional images for Christmas.

As the mall replaced Main Street, it certainly raised troublesome issues about the loss of public versus and the ascension of corporately controlled "public" space. But in retrospect, Greengate gave a different kind of life to some elements of community. Those Christmas displays enacted fantasy images more elaborately than any on Main Street, though they didn't replace the nostalgia many had for shopping along snowy streets, of the contrast of cold and darkness to the bright lights and warmth of department stores, or unbundling in a booth near the steamy windows of a coffee shop for hot chocolate. Still, for several generations Greengate provided its own set of experiences, and became the locus of nostalgia for seasons like this one.

In these photos you can see the evidence of large crowds.  To some extent, this went on for much of the Christmas shopping season.  I remember one visit when I ran into several people from various times in my local life, beginning with friends of my grandparents and including high school classmates I hadn't seen in years--one after the other, and then in bunches.  It was as surreal as a dream at times.

In the following excerpt, I write about the manager of Greengate Mall, Harry Overly.  He was already a legend in the mall business, and an extremely good guide to what made malls different and successful.  He was also a local legend. Health problems led to his semi-retirement by the late 1980s, but as the following text indicates, he didn't do Christmas up big only at Greengate Mall.  His elaborate decorations at his home were a traditional stop for Greensburgers, who drove by and dropped some money for charity in the pot held by a Christmas elf.  Over the years these locally famous Christmas displays accrued more than a million dollars in donations for several children's health programs, and eventually attracted national notice. In 1994 Overly created a charitable foundation to dispense the proceeds of the displays, and moved them to the Westmoreland County Fairgrounds, where they are still seen every Christmas season. Overly died in 1998 at the age of sixty-eight.  So in addition to some Greengate memories, this is for Harry.

This excerpt from The Malling of America (chapter 8) includes a few additional details from notes I took at the time about the 1981 season, as reflected in my 2002 paperback edition.

Decorating Greengate  (from The Malling of America)

Greengate was known throughout western Pennsylvania for its elaborate Christmas displays, which saturated the entire mall to create a total Christmas fantasy. Greengate had spent some $50,000 on decorations over the years, resulting in a grab bag of holiday images. The train that children rode in center court, for example, was called the Sugar Plum Express, and there the kids could (according to the sign at its entrance) "learn the true meaning of Christmas from the Wizard of Oz." But this year all the decorations were going to be new, and all tied into one Christmas theme: the story of the Nutcracker.

"This is the first time we've done a completely coordinated theme," said Karen Kozemchak. In her mid-twenties, she was Greengate's director of marketing, advertising and promotion. "We wanted something special this year because we're just finishing a major remodeling of the mall. We have a new floor, new fixtures, everything's been repainted, there are lots of new lights. We want to bring people in to see what we've done. Also we want to create a classier image. Our demographics show there's a more upscale market for us out there now. But we don't want to lose our old market either-the decorations came in with lots of purples and pinks, but we're mixing in red and green. This is a very red-and-green area."

"Don't tell him we spent seventy-seven thousand dollars on them," said Harry Overly, Greengate's sardonic manager.

The Christmas season has become a holiday celebrated, more than anywhere else in America, in the shopping mall. Downtown department stores by and large don't do it up as big as the malls now do, and this is where people come, not only to shop but to experience the season.

Christmas shopping is crucial to the mall's economic success. At least a quarter of annual retail sales and half of the retailers' profits are chalked up in these few weeks. More than a third of what consumers spend during the year is spent for Christmas. The mall environment is expensive to maintain-without a good Christmas, most malls could be in trouble. So they deck the halls of Maplewood Mall in Minnesota with pink angels dangling from the ceiling around huge simulated ice cream cones spinning over the central court; they hang giant green and gold banners at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa; they come donning and blitzering with the Los Angeles Premier Chorale Strolling Christmas Medieval Feast Ceremony in Costume at Promenade Mall in California. And at Greengate Mall, they produce the Nutcracker.

I remember it was where I first told Santa what I wanted for Christmas,” remembered one of the commenters. “I always loved going to Greengate Mall with my parents. It seemed like the holidays weren't the holidays unless we had our usual trip to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap.”

Harry led the way to the enormous workroom where the actual displays were being built. Working from designs prepared by Walter Schwartz of the Design Group in New York City, men in green work clothes hammered and sawed, while high school girls with bright orange handled scissors in the back pockets of their jeans applied details to dozens of already completed components that would be assembled into a number of large displays. There were colorful wooden castles, cardboard arches, tubular towers and oversized boxes swaddled in shiny gift wrap. It was part Cecil B. De Mille, part junior prom.

"We build all our stuff right here," Overly explained. "We usually just build freestyle, but we're building from blueprints this year because the Rouse Company wants to be able to duplicate this at other malls next year. Other centers around here spend as much as we do or more, but they don't have as much to show."

Harry beamed at all the activity and introduced me to one of the men working on the displays who had the size and some of the appearance of John Wayne. In fact his name turned out to be John. "John's been here about as long as I have," Harry reminisced. "Yeah," John said laconically. "But I'm still poor."

Harry led me to center court where some of the decorations were already going up. The latest addition was the thirty five foot high artificial Christmas tree itself. Harry was going out to inspect it. It was late in the day; the mall was closed and mostly dark, although center court was brightly lit.

Harry looked up and around. "Everything looks great so far," he said to the congregation of management and maintenance staff, and others hired specifically for the Christmas decorating job. "Everything, except for that damn tree."

There was a certain nervous stirring among the assembled, who for the most part pretended to be doing something else. "I hate that tree," Harry said flatly. "Did you ever see a real tree like that? The branches don't stick out like branches."

He as assured that it would look more treelike when the branches were properly fluffed and decorated, but he was apparently unconvinced. The discussion among the inner circle of four or five moved on to other subjects, but Harry kept returning his gaze to the tree, and sour comments about it punctuated every couple of sentences.

Then Harry began to ask questions about a large decorative golden ring, several feet in diameter, suspended from the ceiling over center court. He wanted to know what size screws were holding it and where they were placed into the support beams and ceiling struts. He asked how much the ring weighed and how the weight was distributed.
"I don't want the damn thing to fall," he said. Everyone assured him that it couldn't possibly fall. The support was adequate for a much heavier load, many times what the ring weighed. The weight was evenly distributed. It had been checked and rechecked.

"If it falls, it wouldn't fall straight down," Harry continued, as if no one had spoken. He kept looking at the ring. "It would sway a little. Probably it would hit the train track and derail the train. Or it could hit a train full of kids."

By now everyone in center court was standing still and looking up at the ring. Someone else calculated how the ring would fall. It might hit the tree. Or sway into a storefront. But in fact Overly had already concluded that the ring was more than adequately supported, and with a wave and a final okay-and with everybody else still looking up at the ring-he began to walk back to his office, out of the circle of light in center court and into the semidarkness. "Somebody has to ask these questions," he said with a shrug.

Then in the shadows he stopped and turned back for a final look. "I hate that tree," he said.

“I remember lights in the food court that would change colors (yellow, blue, green, etc) during Christmas as Charlie Brown music would play.” “There was a puppet show that kids would huddle around and watch.”

Stacey Smith

In the management offices, Harry overheard a discussion between Karen and Stacey Smith, the mall's receptionist and Karen's assistant for the Christmas preparations. Stacey explained to Harry what had just happened: a truck she had dispatched from the mall to pick up a load of materials needed for the displays returned full, but with only half the boxes it was sent to fetch. There hadn't been enough room for the rest.

"I asked the guy at the warehouse how much there was," Stacey said, "and he told me that one small truck could carry it all." Now the warehouse was closed and the rest of the boxes wouldn't be available until after the weekend.

"What did I teach you?" Harry said quietly.

"I should have sent a bigger truck anyway?" Stacey said.

"No," Harry said. "What do I always say? Don't take anything for granted. You ask them: How many boxes are there? How big is each box? Is it big enough for a man to fit in it?...You ask questions."

This was another of Harry Overly's functions within the Rouse Company: to groom employees for larger responsibilities in other Rouse malls and for the main office in Columbia. After three or four years of tutelage and raffish abuse-known in the company as "Harry's School of Charm"-they would be ready for bigger jobs. Stacey and Karen were Harry's latest pupils; in fact, in a few months Karen would be moving on.

For now, however, they all had to deal with Harry. But Karen had already managed a modicum of revenge for Harry's mall-treatment. Every Christmas season, Harry Overly's rambling ranch homestead on a rural road near Greensburg becomes a local legend. White Christmas lights outline every inch of it, as well as the fences around the grounds and the Christmas figures (snowman, sleigh) scattered within. On the nights before Christmas, a costumed Santa (usually a Greengate employee) is posted at Harry's gate to give small gifts to children in the many cars that line up to see the decorated house, and to take donations for a local charity. Like townsfolk coming to the lord's castle, carloads of people come to his manor every year.

All of this is well known within the Rouse Company. On this particular evening at Greengate, after Harry had left, Karen was told that he'd made off with another box of the mall's Christmas lights for his house. So Karen told me about the corporate practical joke pulled on Overly at a meeting the previous year in Columbia, to which she had been a willing party.

Karen's part in the joke was to make a short film that her co-conspirators would show at the end of the company's conference on mall energy conservation, after all the statistics and graphs had been presented. Karen's film began with a shot of an extension cord being plugged into an outlet at Greengate mall. Then the cord was followed out of the room, winding down a supply tunnel and into the mall parking lot, then across the highway and down portions of various roads, until finally it snaked down a long driveway and was shown being connected to a string of Christmas lights.

The last shot was of Harry Overly's house, all lit up.

Many recalled riding the train through the snow-covered Christmas village. “I remember the animated deer with the jerky movements that built toys as kids rode through the display.” Another recalled a young adult perspective, of accompanying nieces and nephews, and watching “how big their eyes would be when they first walked into the center courtyard... Nothing made my parents more happy then seeing [the children] laugh as they went round and round on the train.”

"The snow is thinner this year," Karen told the fifty or so people gathered in the mall community room at three o'clock in the morning. "So be careful because once it tears, that's it." The crew-some regular mall part-timers mixed in with community college students majoring in retail and relatives of the mall staff-nodded, put down their soft drinks and coffee, and headed back to center court.

Karen Kozemchak's duties ranged from coordinating market studies and writing radio ads, to counting the number of staples that would be used in a year's promotions. Some malls have two or three people to do what she did. In fact, her immediate predecessor at Greengate had lasted about a month. One morning his resignation was found on his desk and he was never heard from again-he simply disappeared. But for Karen, no time was busier than these few weeks, and these few days in particular. While the decorations were going up, she would be at the mall for forty-eight continuous hours.

After Harry's unfavorable reaction to the tree, Karen began replacing lights and starting the fluffing process, getting up high in the basket of the Snorklelift 40-a big, noisy machine that extends a hydraulic arm upward and side to side from a tractor-like cab on wheels. Then the tree lights were tested in the silent mall, causing the fragments of glittery stuff dangling from the ceiling to spangle shadows across the darkened storefronts.

Then out of the shadows the parade of elves began. Boys in sweatshirts, girls in sweaters and fresh jeans, carried some of the thirty animated figures from the workroom and stacked them against the storefronts. Then they brought out the oversized gift-wrapped boxes-they were large but empty, so each elf could carry several. Those working at center court turned to see this prodigious parade and smiled.

Then a crew of strangers arrived to set up the tracks and kid-sized train. They were a motley crew that usually works for carnivals. "You crazy old man!" one of them would shout at the grizzled individual wearing a beat-up logo cap with bill turned up that said CHRISTY'S BAR BE QUE and an ancient T-shirt that said 4 x 4 FORD "You put the wheels on backwards!"

Karen watched them carefully, nursing a bottle of Squirt. "They're wild men," she said. Yet there was something absurdly evocative about them: large men hammering spikes into tiny ties, like some strange parody of the building of the railroad across the American West.

After the carnival crew disappeared back into the night, the next task was to lay a base of chicken wire over the entire court inside the train tracks. Then a crew of girls began cutting and laying down the Dacron snow carpet, inserting tiny lights underneath to create an effect of snow gently illuminated by moonlight.

This work continued after the 3 A.M. break. A girl gathered a string of tiny bulbs already turned on; she held them like a bouquet of light. Moving carefully through the webs of glass, two women stapled down the snow. Some of the girls walked on the snow carpets in their socks, but Karen and Stacey had come prepared: Stacey with a pair of white moccasins, Karen with brown.

Then the big displays were fitted together, installed, moved around and installed again. By five in the morning, the final elements were being added-the flags of starched felt, the hot-pink dusted Styrofoam balls. A boy threw loose plastic snow around the castle and towers, which were tubes covered with vinyl in shades of azalea and American Beauty rose. A man who has been wiring lights "inside" the Christmas tree, suddenly emerges through the bottom branches. One girl was off by herself, absorbed in arranging the Dacron snow carpet on a hill of wire, bending forward from the waist with her feet flat on the floor. Her work was as delicate and graceful as that supple physical movement, but also careful and deliberate. When she was finished, her particular area could not have looked more like wind-driven snow.

The work continued on through the morning-25,000 yards of ribbon, 150 pounds of diamond dust, 850 pounds of scattered snow, 4,000 sets of miniature lights, and 24,000 feet of snow blanket. Several crews came and went, working diligently, fighting fatigue, getting silly, getting angry, making friends.

The process was familiar to me from my participation in college stage plays: setting the lights, laying the cable and wiring, assembling the sets, moving things around, getting it all to look right, through the hours of labor and fatigue. The burly guys do the lifting, the girls do the work requiring patient attention and care, and the people in charge function as producers and directors, speaking with kindness but always rearranging and re-doing, never settling for less than perfection.

By early afternoon the towers were topped with snow cones, the figures were all in place and animated, and the train was moving smoothly through the displays with its first load of enchanted children aboard. Already customers were exclaiming and taking pictures. Some participants from earlier crews returned to look at the finished product. A television crew from a Pittsburgh station arrived to film the displays for the Greengate Christmas commercial, using the Snorklelift as a makeshift movie crane.
The official tree light-up occurred on the next weekend, followed a week later by the Christmas parade, with the Hempfield High School band and majorettes and color guard marching around the parking lot and through the mall. The parade ended in center court, where the Nutcracker (played in costume by Stacey) and the wooden soldiers cracked open the Nut, out which emerged, who else but Santa Claus.

The pay-off for all the hours of effort, all the quiet artistry and gimmickry, all the money and calculation and enthusiasm and care, was the ballet of cars at the traffic lights leading to the mall. As Christmas came nearer, there were constant lines on the highway, and lines of parents and children at center court to get into the miniature train, lines on the side court to get pictures taken with Santa, lines at the pizza place, and lines to the ladies' room.

It's the Christmas Paradise Parade, the Captivated Shopper's jingle of her ankle cuffs, the finest hour of the Retail Drama, when the customers dance after the Phillipe designer handbags, Pant-Her Coordinates, Bromley opossum-trimmed nylon coats, and misses' White Stag Outerwear, the Oneida flatware and Nikko Ming Tree twenty-piece service dinnerware, the oral water jets, Pastamatic 700, battery tooth polisher kits, energy boots, Crazy Foam, pulsar quartz watches, Fantasy Ultima II makeup kit complete with cell renewal lotion, plush-touch velours, Vanity Fair French Flirts, Swiss Army shirts, Maidenform Delectables, personalized blazer buttons, Izod Lacoste bicycle jackets in navy, kelly or eggplant, blueberry sleepware Jammies Nightshirts in a Jar, Wintuck orlon fisherman sweaters, the Buns Calendar, Ciao garment bags, ceramic pagodas, plus 20 percent off all chemical services at Great Expectations Hair Salon, their Christmas special.

Meanwhile, down the highway at Westmoreland Mall, flamenco Muzak plays as people line up at Orange Julius and at the glass elevator that goes from one floor to the other. One of the Star Wars soundtracks animates teenagers in Camelot Music, as well as their older siblings knotted in spontaneous reunions with dimly recalled high school classmates home for the holidays. The serious shoppers-heartbreaking young women with modified wedge haircuts and perms, their frankly svelte figures in pullover splitneck tops and black polyester-knit flared pants, each dragging three blond kids and a doubleknit sloppo husbands who looks like he's been drinking beer in a Laundromat for twenty years-are spinning through aisles of genuine walnut jewelry boxes with sardonyx Incolay stone tops, Infinity Model Qa speakers with optional pedestals, TV Action News Team dolls, financial planning programs, imitation Christian Dior velours, anti-cling crepeset lounging pajamas, wrap-tie shawl cardigans, electric crock pots, handsome wall dividers, multi-option video games...while old men sit on benches in the non-shade of the non-palm trees.

The sheer numbers are stimulating, exciting, from the rarely filled but now overflowing parking lot to the jammed courts where old acquaintance is renewed amidst the shopping din. All the elements that the mall manages start to click, and the energy takes over-people exciting people in a visual and aural riot of images. Products, colors, light, music and sentiment-they all make for the Retail Drama's big finish.
"It's a madhouse," one customer at Greengate said, not complaining. Another turned from the center court display. "Isn't it something?" she said. "Hurry up," her companion told her. "We've still got two more malls to hit today."