Linking Research and Innovation on Waterfront through Technology for Excellence of Resilience to face Climate Change
The shrink of bio-diversity, unprecedented climate swings and the raising costs of maintenance are symptoms of a planet struggling with Climate Change. To reestablish a healthy condition, cities seek to develop strategies of adaptation to make the built environment more resilient to face floods, droughts, high tides, tropical hurricanes and urban heat islands effect. Resilient urban environments are able to face the present challenges like sponges are able to absorb without degrade.
The concept of sponge implies porosity, urban waterscapes, sustainable strategy and cultural heritage. It requires a shift in the way cities have been designed in terms of dealing with Green infrastructure; planning with nature; regionalization, infrastructure; transportation; sustainable urban development and circular economy. Sponges take and give, they are passive and active and open a new realm of opportunities. Which urban strategies should be implemented? How solutions to adapt and mitigate will be able to enhance the resilience of cities?
Sustainable open solution on waterfront, facing climate change emerges from interdisciplinary and comparative cases to preserve the setting/world/locality. Recent research that proposes innovative resilience methodologies is also increasingly relevant.
Call for papers
SOS Climate Waterfront invites original high-quality papers presenting current research, accommodating a broad spectrum of approaches ranging from speculative, informal investigations to conventional scientific research, including but not limited to the following topics:
Sustainable strategy and Cultural heritage
Urban waterscapes
Porosity
This is a call for a peer reviewed book. Paper acceptance will be subject to a two-stage reviewing process, consisting of an initial abstract review and a later double-blind peer review of full-length manuscripts. The paper publication will be subject to review acceptance, compliance with submission deadlines and formatting guidelines.
OS Climate Waterfront Editorial Board
Pedro Ressano Garcia Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies
Maria Rita Pais Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies
Claudia Mattogno La Sapienza University of Rome
Tullia Digiacomo La Sapienza University of Rome
Lucyna Nyka Gdansk University of Technology
Justyna Borucka Gdansk University of Technology
Alkmini Paka Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Anastasia Tzaka Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Katarina Larsen KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Lina Suleiman KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm
Aliaksandr Piahanau and Per Högselius are organising an online workshop based at our division at KTH on 1 February 2023. Our colleagues are inviting scholars from around the world to discuss the “European Energy Shortages during the Short Coal Age (1869-1960)”. Of course, the workshop hits the zeitgeist, as current rearranging energy systems take discussions about fossil energy shortages in Europe to the forefront of the public discourse. Below you find the call for papers both as text and as a PDF for download. Please consider applying!
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Call for Papers for an online workshop at KTH Royal Institute of Technology
European Energy Shortages during the Short Coal Age
(1860-1960)
Figure 1. Primary Energy Consumption in Europe. Source: Fouquet (2016).
Date: 1 February 2023
Format: online
Objective: a workshop with the intention to produce a special issue or an edited volume
The winter of 2022-2023 in Europe may become the harshest since 1944 due to fuel and electricity scarcity. This is an obvious moment for revisiting historical energy shortages. The proposed workshop will target the period of repeated fuel shortages in Europe from roughly 1860 to 1960 – the century during which coal dominated European energy supply. Throughout this period coal supplied more than 50 % of all energy (figure 1).
Coal’s supremacy in the European energy balance peaked around the First World War. This dominance was enabled by a small group of leading coal producers: Britain, Germany, and, later, Poland, which exported the fuel to a range of other countries in Europe and beyond. British coal production peaked in 1913 (at nearly 300 million tons) and the number of coal miners reached its maximum in 1919 (at over 1 million). The peak was followed by rapid decline. Germany and other coal-producing countries went down the same path later on. For Europe as a whole, however, coal consumption peaked only in the 1960s (figure 2), after which coal lost its dominant position to oil and gas in relative terms as well. From the 1960s, the European coal consumption entered a lengthy period of decline. We propose to label the period during which coal dominated European energy use – from around 1860 to 1960 – “the Short Coal Age,” challenging the more commonly used periodization in the focus is traditionally on the (Long) Coal Age and its links with the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Steam.
Figure 2. Estimation of energy consumption in Terawatt-hours provided by coal in Europe. Source: OurWorldInData.org
Long-term data on coal consumption and prices show big fluctuations in European coal markets, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. High demand frequently encountered low supply, creating a classical “shortage” situation. Some of the mismatches between demand and supply had disastrous consequences for Europe, as reflected in contemporary public discussions (figure 3). Yet energy historians have so far not addressed the nature of European coal shortages sufficiently. In both scholarly and recent public debates historical coal shortages remain largely overshadowed by the oil shocks of the 1970s. Only a few studies have examined coal scarcity (see, for example, Weiller 1940; Lemenorel 1981; Mayer 1988; Kapstein 1990; Izmestieva 1998; Triebel 2009; Chancerel 2012; Mathis 2018).
This gap calls for interdisciplinary and international research cooperation in order to assess the story of long-term energy shortages in Europe. The participants of the planned workshop are invited to reflect together upon coal shortages, their manifold faces and outcomes, during the centenarian apogee of King Coal’s rule in Europe. The workshop aims to bring together researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds, such as history, energy studies, international relations, the technological and environmental humanities, geography, economics, media studies and anthropology.
We propose to structure the workshop around three theoretical angles. The first angle is the discursive understanding of the shortage phenomena; the second relates to their temporal dynamics; the third concerns their spatial (and geopolitical) effects.
By the discursive angle we mean narratives, arguments and ideas provoked by questions like – what happens when our massive flow of cheap energy suddenly disappears? The British intellectual William S. Jevons warned in his Coal Question (1865) that the coal dependence will menace modern society in near future. Jevons feared that the approaching coal depletion would ruin the industrial way of life in Britain and its international position. Reflecting upon the ideas of scarcity in an industrialised economy, British English coined the term “shortage” as a synonym for “lack” and “scarcity” (used for the first time in 1868). For the next hundred years, this term became primarily used in relation to the lack of labour and of coal. In a retrospective analysis, historians confirmed the importance of shortages for the modern development. On the one hand, coal shortages (and price peaks) pushed energy transition, promoting oil, water power and gas technologies (Fouquet 2016). On the other hand, the ability to stop the coal distribution tremendously empowered modern workers. As Mitchell (2011) famously argued in Carbon Democracy, by menacing or performing “energy sabotage” by acting in the checkpoints of the fossil-fuel-based economy such as mines, railways and ports, coal professionals were able to secure more rights and freedom than any time before. We are interested in deepening this reflection by asking what kind of fears and hopes, challenges and opportunities, coal and its shortages provoked in different contexts.
Figure 3. Word frequency referring to coal shortage. Note the two major peaks in 1919 and 1946. The dates of the first visible peak surged in 1873 and the last in 1971 might serve as alternative brackets for the “Short Coal Age” in Europe. Source: Google books 2019 British English corpus.
Our second theoretical focus is chronological. The uncommon time-frame of 1860-1960 as a single European period offers a possibility to check the long-term patterns where researchers usually look for the discontinuity associated with the two world wars. The focus also reveals that the “Short Coal Age” was a paradoxical period from another point of view. The relative coal abundance between 1860 and 1960 was also perforated by repeated moments of drastic energy scarcity. Ethan B. Kapstein, for example, argued that the late World War II coal shortage in Europe was “the most devastating energy crisis in its modern history” (1990, 17). However, the coal undersupply of 1917-21, which occurred at the peak of European coal dependence, seems to have been even more serious. Smaller coal shortages struck in 1873-4, 1899-1903, 1926 and 1956. This uneven spread of coal shortages, which occurred in times of both peace and war, is another fascinating subject, and we aim to develop a chronological mapping of coal shortages in Europe.
Our third point targets the spatial dimension. Coal supply and its shortages affected different areas in varying degree and unevenly sparked both international competition and cooperation. By accident or not, the “Short Coal Age” in Europe was also a period of intense international confrontations and warfare. The half-century before 1914, when coal was exported in big volumes out of Europe, were the heydays of European imperialism in Africa and Asia. Coal exports assured British domination over the oceans through establishment of coaling stations, which led On Barak to propose the term “coalonialism” (2021). But since 1914, Europe cut its overseas coal exports, increasingly becoming a net coal importing region (figure 4). The two world wars demonstrated that modern total warfare was a kind of state-run competition of endurance, where home-front economy was as important as frontline combat. Military campaign devoured giant portions of energy and its success was largely defined by the amount of coal which one side could mobilize (Tooze 2007). The world wars brought new territorial rearrangements over important coal areas (such as Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and Silesia), but also sped up an international cooperation in coal supply on the European level. The Versailles conference of 1919-20 formalised a first international system of coal exchange, which was included in peace treaties (Soutou 1989). Dealing with the ruinous coal shortages, the winning coalitions established the European Coal Commission in 1919 (which later was integrated into the Economic Commission of the League of Nations), and the European Coal Organisation in 1945, later replaced by the much more powerful (and successful) European Community of Coal and Steel in 1951. The transition to an oil-and-gas economy in the 1960s not only freed Europe from the dictate of the coal mining industry, but also, possibly, left international conflicts over coalfields to the past – at least until 2014, when war broke out in Eastern Europe’s chief coal mining centre, located in Ukraine’s Donbass region.
Figure 4. Coal trade balance in Europe, in million ton (exports minus imports; without Russia and Turkey). Data sourced from: B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, Europe. 1750 – 1988. 3d edition. 1992, 465-72.
Most of all, we are interested in studies on coal supply breakdowns and how they affected European coal dependent actors, such as importing countries, industries and urban communities. International organisations or summits, dealing with coal shortages, are also relevant cases. Comparative studies juxtaposing different geographical, temporal or social cases, are particularly welcomed.
Researchers are invited to discuss one of the following topics:
Dynamics. What were the agents and structural forces underlying particular coal shortages? How did the coal shortages directly affect actors and society?
Adaptations. Which strategies were considered and tested in order to improve the energy situation and/or overcome the crisis? What were the short- and long-term results?
Wider impact. Which changes did coal shortages bring in power, economy and social structures? Who were the winners and losers, who was not affected and why? What kind of challenges and opportunities did coal shortages create? How was the European environment affected by energy shortages and attempts to overcome it?
Revelations. How did people understand coal shortages in broader sense? Were coal shortages integrated into a particular narrative or political discourse? To what extent did these shortages affect the dominant ideological assumptions?
Expectations. How did actors and society forecast future coal supply? Which measures were taken in order to avoid new shortages? How effective were these measures during coal shortages?
The workshop is planned to be held online on 1 February 2023. Interested researchers are invited to submit a paper proposal (up to 500 words) and a short bio to Aliaksandr Piahanau (piahanau@gmail.com) by 15 November 2022. Selected speakers will then be asked to submit full papers (up to 8,000 words including references) by 15 January 2022. After the workshop, we hope to turn its papers into a special issue for a major peer-reviewed academic journal, or, alternatively, into an edited volume.
Organisers: Aliaksandr Piahanau, postdoc researcher in energy history (piahanau@gmail.com) and Per Högselius, professor of history of technology (perho@kth.se), KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
We are happy to announce that the next Stockholm Archipelago Lecture is coming up on 10 November 2022 at 5pm (Stockholm time). Rob Nixon is going to give his presentation titled “The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life”. Feel free to join digitally! You find the link below.
Abstract:
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? Since the great recession of 2008, we have witnessed an upsurge in public science writing that has popularized research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the forest as collective intelligence.
This talk roots the current appeal of forest communication in a widespread discontent with neoliberalism’s antipathy to cooperative ways of being. Nixon argues that the science of forest dynamics offers a counter-narrative of flourishing, an allegory for what George Monbiot has called “private sufficiency and public wealth.
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Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, Orion, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere.
Environmental justice struggles in the global South are central to Nixon’s work. He is a particularly fascinated by the animating role that artists can play in relation to social movements.
Sverker Sörlin (KTH Professor of Environmental History and member of the Swedish Climate Council 2018-2022), Maria Wolrath Söderberg (docent in rhetorics with a specialisation in climate adaptation, Södertörns högskola) and Nina Wormbs (KTH Professor of History of Technology) have published a highly commentated opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter on 25 September 2022. Following Sweden’s close parliamentary election results, which find the left and the right block head to head with a slight advantage for the right, the three authors try to situate necessary climate policy within a potential future right-wing government. In the following we post our English translation of the article.
Photo: Unsplash
Translation:
DN Debatt. “It is patriotic to protect the climate”
It looks like that we are getting a government with low ambitions and bad premises to achieve the climate goal. But all is not lost. The person who searches through the parties’ fundamental ideological values can actually find something to build on – in all four parties. A smart leader does best when listening. To the person’s own conscience, to science and to the electorate – write three researchers.
In the past it was difficult for Sweden to live up to its reputation as a pioneering country for environmental policy. Just one out of 16 environmental goals set by the Riksdag/Parliament were met. Every year since 2018 the Swedish Climate Council has stated, that decided policies were inconclusive, and that Sweden belongs to the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, with an emission per citizen twice as high as the global average.
Emissions need to shrink with more than 10% per year, thus most in the next few years, for Sweden to have a chance to keep within the national emissions-budget specified in the Paris Climate Agreement. Before the pandemic hit, the rhythm of reduction was 1-2%. Nearly 2000 researchers recently have demanded that climate policy should be drastically sharpened.
This difficult situation has been drastically exacerbated by the election of the Swedish parliament. It looks like we are getting a government with parties which, according to several studies, have the lowest ambitions and the worst premises for reaching the climate goal.
The Moderates (M), Christian Democrats (KD) and Liberals (L) have put all their political weight into the electrifying campaign and they show no signs to reevaluate, even though we are witnessing skyrocketing prices. They do not want to offer adjustments to Swedish way of life, even though science is unified in saying that personal and societal transformations are necessary.
But isn’t there nevertheless a possibility for a powerful climate policy with the new government? We do not ask this question of changing the reasoning of a government without being unsettled by the possibility that climate politically invaluable years could be lost. This gives us the moral right, independently of the parties forming the government, to push that Sweden takes responsibility.
Big and durable political changes cannot happen during a conflict between the parties’ fundamental ideological values. Therefore we have evaluated those under the question whether they can be used – by smart and responsible leaders – to form the parties towards work on reforms. This is an urgent task.
We presume that the governing parties are not hypocritical, but that M, KD, and L actually want to achieve the climate goals they themselves have been involved in deciding. Hence it would be smart from the Moderates to link up to their conservative heritage and underscore that nature is not only a resource for the industry, but also has spiritual and national value. The conservative tradition highlights personal responsibility over the generations and that there are higher things other than material gains.
Even those who usually focus on ownership and entrepreneurship have something to pick up here. The business community is already criticising the right-wing parties for their unwillingness to see Sweden take the lead, most recently in the petition of 227 Swedish companies ahead of the election.
The Christian Democrat’s climate policy so far was messy and inconsistent. Agriculture is highlighted as already climate-smart (a puzzling exaggeration). Transition work is supposed to happen in other countries. They see a rising electricity usage unavoidable in Sweden.
But Christian values have a lot to offer. Christian Democratic parties on the continent like to emphasise the idea of solidarity: that you cannot unilaterally take advantage of the limited resources of the atmosphere just because you are a rich country. The creation should be managed for the good of all. Older generations need to think about younger ones. Christian values show special consideration with the people suffering and weak. Ideological conditions for being cautious thus exist.
A key point in liberalism is that one’s freedom should not inflict upon the freedom of others. The liberals’ climate policy is more ambitious than those proposed by the Moderates and Christian Democrats. L takes the climate crisis serious, but their hopes into techno-fixes, bio-fuel and CO2-captureing are unrealistic. Many of their favourite technologies take decades to materialise and it is not probable that they can be scaled up to the degree necessary.
To join freedom with responsibility is part of liberalism’s understanding of freedom, for example by living modestly. John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt have warned against the barbaric circumstances, which lurk around the corner if we do not manage to create a sustainable society, which in turn can only achieve legitimacy if it can be combined with justice, as the Paris Climate Agreement presumes. But in our time, liberalism’s understanding of freedom has been pushed into the direction that one’s freedom is to choose what one wants. Such a position does not at all guarantee that the planet could be preserved.
Within the government base, the Sweden Democrats stand out. They deny climate science and claim that “Sweden has no climate crisis”. They want to shift responsibility for the large Swedish emissions to other countries where it is envisaged that corresponding emission reductions can be made at a lower cost. The Sweden Democrats want to reduce electricity prices and prices for fossil fuels, remove the reduction obligation and the aviation tax, the very driving forces that the progressive business community wants to maintain and strengthen in order to speed up the transition.
Support can thus be found in the values that once bestowed on us conservative and liberal parties: solidarity, care for the neighbour, love of creation, freedom for all not to suffer from the freedom of choice of others.
SD draws from two irreconcilable myths: that Sweden is the best and that this is a pity for us. None are true. For a responsible right-wing government it would be easiest to completely isolate SD in questions of climate policy. But if SD demands influence on the basis of its de facto position of power, the governing parties should appeal to the natural ideology that SD’s sister parties in eastern and southern Europe run, where their own “national nature” is nurtured as a unifying primordial force. Successful climate work would also reduce the risk of large climate migration, which SD wants to prevent.
In order to achieve that the Swedish climate policy does not fully lose contact with its goal, we have to think about the becoming government parties as open for development. They have so far more or less ignored research and facts. At the same time, nine out of ten Swedes think the climate is an important question which influences them. There are also many in M, KD, and L who really want to see a sustainable future.
Regarding the climate question it is not the people that deceive, but politicians who deceive the people. Therefore, they should listen to their consciousness and take responsibility in regard to this fateful question. There is also support to be found in the value that once gave us conservative and liberal parties: solidarity, care for your neighbour, love towards creation, freedom for all to avoid suffering from the freedom of choice of others. The argument is not only that we all deserve that the climate goal can be reached and promises been kept (like with the saying “pacta sunt servanda”, pacts should be kept). The parties should also be positively surprised, to get sympathy and to be able to develop a long-lasting greener right-wing policy. The parallel is of course the Reinfeld-government’s wise triangulation of welfare policy. The new Moderates took over their opponents’ best policy, safety for everyone, and called it their own.
This is just the beginning. After that it should be clarified that Sweden listens to science (which is patriotic) and that we shape policies in accordance to research. Then Sweden does not need to be embarrassed amongst climate-progressive Europe.
Nina Wormbs, professor in history of technology at the division, has published a chapter together with Elina Eriksson (KTH Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap) and Maria Wolrath Söderberg (Södertörn) about the debate on flying in academia. This chapter with the title “Exceptionalism and Evasion: How Scholars Reason About Air Travel” is part of the edited volume “Academic Flying and the Means of Communication” by Kristian Bjørkdahl and Adrian Santiago Franco Duharte (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
Abstract:
Understanding how scholars reason about their own flying habits is important when dealing with the problems of large emissions from academic air travel. This study is based on a travel habits survey with scholars at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. KTH has relatively high emissions from air travel, but at the same time, it has a high profile in matters of sustainability and a lot of research related to this theme. One can therefore assume a high degree of knowledge about the climate crisis and the climate impact of various actions. It is also plausible that KTH scholars meet special expectations to be role models and that practices in conflict with their teaching can have consequences for the public confidence in the university. In this study, we look at how scholars reason about how emissions from their flying could be reduced. Their responses display a spectrum of varying attitudes, from climate scepticism to a commitment to radical transformation, with the majority in between, either suggesting different types of concrete changes or invoking arguments to justify the status quo. The proposed interventions, several of which are ingenious and wise, can guide university managements to strategies that have support from employees. The more reluctant arguments point to cultural and discursive habits that must be understood and met in an empathetic way.
This article investigates the 1974 Nordic Environmental ProtectionConvention. It shows that the ulterior motives for such a conventionwere Nordic ambitions to regulate and reduce transboundary pollution originating outside of the Nordic region. Emphasizing theinter-organizational dynamics between institutionalized Nordiccooperation and international organizations, it examines how theNordics drew on developments within international organizations and how they pursued their agenda of shaping international environmental law within the OECD. Ultimately, the article argues thatthe Nordic countries tried to create a model convention to beexported to and implemented at the international level with theaim of reducing transboundary pollution and establishing transnational responsibilities and accountabilities. By setting out this argument and shedding light on the first legally binding internationalconvention to address transboundary pollution with proceduralprinciples, the article breaks new ground on the history of Nordicenvironmental cooperation as well as on the development of international environmental law.
I am spending a long weekend with my parents in the Lower Rhine region, not far from the Ruhr area. It is the end of August in Germany and, like much of Europe, the country is suffering from persistent heat and drought. It’s that “summer of the century” again. Record low water levels are being reported from the Rhine near Duisburg, the city where I was born. The media speak of a “historic low”. The Rhine and other rivers in Germany have exposed their Hunger Stones. These stones in the riverbed mark exceptional periods of drought over the last centuries. They remind of the people’s suffering during these times, and their reappearance should alert the following generations to the dependence of humans on their environment and make them aware of the abundance and the deprivations that nature holds in store.
The last historic low on the Lower Rhine near Duisburg was just four years ago, in 2018. How can and how do we want to deal with the fact that natural events that we have long considered extraordinary are occurring at ever shorter intervals? In 2002, the people bordering the river Elbe experienced the “flood of the century”. Only last year, in 2021, a “century flood” hit the Ahr Valley. When such “century events” occur at intervals of decades, the extraordinary becomes commonplace. The residents of the flooded villages in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate worry now that they have fallen into public oblivion after the first large wave of donations. Even a catastrophe, it seems, can be gotten used to.
The concept of the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” refers to this habituation effect. A “shifting baseline” can be translated to a changing reference. Our ideas of the ordinary or normal change over time because our references change. The two-year Covid-19 pandemic has made us practice some new behaviors, such as wearing face masks and keeping our distance, which now seem normal to us. The ongoing war in Ukraine has brought with it the fear of a creeping acceptance or even numbing of the European population. The war situation becomes normal. Likewise, in times of global climate change, we experience environmental changes as normal that previous generations experienced as extraordinary, extreme or catastrophic.
The originator of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Canadian fisheries expert Daniel Pauly, had such long-term environmental changes in mind when, in the 1990s, he described his observation that each new generation of fishermen along the North American coast was hauling in smaller and smaller catches over the course of a century. Instead of questioning it, they accepted their situation. The overfishing of the oceans rose to new dimensions obvious, but the fishermen’s concern did not. Taken together, Pauly’s observations were symptomatic of one finding: those most affected by an environmental condition were most accommodating.
Pauly used the medical term “syndrome” to describe his diagnosis that people are able to normalize extreme situations relatively quickly. What we consider ordinary or normal is not naturally given but derived from the lived context. Normality needs a frame of reference. Every generation experiences the situation into which it is born as normal. Poverty and war can seem as normal as can peace and prosperity. A life expectancy of roughly 40 years was just as normal in Germany around 1880 as roughly 80 years are today.
The “baseline” designates the respective reference. We measure and evaluate our situation in spatial and temporal comparison. We compare our economic power not with the countries of the Global South but with our European neighbors. Our temporal baseline is our lifetime or generational time, which is commonly measured in 30-year periods. Our reference is usually our own childhood. The baseline of my generation is the 1960s, 70s and 80s. “Everything was better back then” means that the 1970s were best. And vice versa: despite all its problems, every generation wants to believe that it lives in the best of all possible worlds.
In addition to lived normality, statistical normality is an expression of our baselines shifting over time. The average, the mean, is calculated from data collected over specific periods of time. Here, too, the reference values are constantly being newly agreed upon. The “summer of the century” is a statistical entity. It states that, on average, one summer in every hundred will be extremely hot and dry. When we speak of the “warmest summer on record”, we mean records that make it possible to form mean values in a meaningful way. Those systematic weather records have been around for 150 years since the late 19th century. When we speak of the “two-degree target”, we mean limiting global warming, i.e., the global average temperature increase, to 2 degrees Celsius “since industrialization”. A period of about 250 years serves as our baseline. Likewise, the zero point of gauge is not the lowest point in the Rhine’s riverbed, but the geographical location at which the water level gauge is placed. Gauge zero is a convention.
Whether measured values or data reconstructed from ice cores and sediments, climate research has a wealth of reliable information to share that goes far beyond the time we have ourselves experienced. Yet again, what appears as statistically normal or deviant depends on the time period we refer to. If we were to extend the time span to include the entire history of the earth with its many warm and cold periods, our present climatic changes would be practically negligible. However, if we compare ourselves with the current stable warm period of the last 12,000 years, the Holocene, the climate change of the last 200 years becomes highly significant. What we perceive, and what we perceive as normal, depends on the baseline, the “climatological reference period”. Like the generational span, the climatological reference period encompasses 30 years. Average temperatures are formed over periods of 30 years. This reference period determines our “normal climate”. Until recently, our normal climate was derived from the period 1961 to 1990. In 2021, the reference period was updated to the new period 1991 to 2020.
It makes sense to update the statistical reference periods, just as it makes sense to use generational time as a moving temporal frame of reference. The new statistical reference period is more up-to-date and closer to the climate experienced by the living population. However, the mean temperature of the new reference period is more than 1 degree higher than the mean temperature of the previous reference period. Very warm years are statistically no longer noticeable, because all years in this new period were relatively too warm. Shifting baselines are important not only in social psychology but also in statistics. When the frame of reference for statistical observation changes, deviations can become invisible – they are statistically normalized.
On the one hand, acclimatization may be our best coping strategy to deal with climate change. It seems as if humans cannot experience situations as permanently extreme, nor can they remain on constant alert. Normalizing a situation by shifting the reference points is an individual and collective adaptation strategy. As a society, we delegate dealing with extremes to our institutions. We institutionalize preparedness for crises and disasters. “Climate adaptation” is one such collective strategy that envisages new social and technical solutions to normalize climate change.
On the other hand, we will have to cope with the fact that long-term and especially slow changes can neither be experienced nor easily recorded statistically. They fall out of our lived time, and as series of data they often remain abstract. They also fall outside of the short cycles of media and politics. Daily press and daily politics make the baseline the day, the month, the year, possibly the legislative period. Political and medial memories are short. Pauly perceived the habituation effect of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome as a problem because habituation makes it difficult to mobilize for political opinion-forming and political change. After all, the normal is not necessarily the desirable, at least not always and for everyone.
Stories and events are needed to raise awareness about slow changes such as climate change. Stories can renew memories beyond our own generation. Historical dimensions can become concrete to us like the Hunger Stones in the river Rhine, which allow unique insights into the lives of past centuries. And isn’t the bread and butter of our profession of historiography to narrate, analyze and comment on changes over long periods of time? Besides recollecting the past, future narratives and science fiction stories can project current questions and problems into the future to make them concrete for us. This was Rachel Carson’s plot device in her book Silent Spring. Finally, it will also be important to communicate long-term statistical trends. The World Meteorological Organization WMO recommended keeping the reference period 1961 to 1990 to assess long-term climate developments. For us not to acclimatize to new social, political and environmental climates too quickly, we need meaningful baselines.
Our colleague Anna Storm (now professor of technology and social change at Linköping University) has been involved in an intellectual exchange with the state-owned power company Vattenfall about the future of Ågesta Nuclear Power Plant in the context of its decommissioning in the magazine NyTeknik.
In Anna’s first article from 28 July 2022, she displays her consternation by the fact that Sweden’s first nuclear power plant (1963-1974) was already being dismantled, disregarding demands for making this cultural heritage of modern Sweden accessible to a wider audience via the cooperation with musea and heritage scholars. Especially in the case of the iconic control room, Anna objected to the practice of the company.
Five days later, on 02 August, Melker Drottz, the acting head of decommissioning of Ågestaverket from Vattenfall, published a response to Anna in the same magazine. In his eyes, Vattenfall did simply, what they were legally obliged to do. Since the control room, among other facilities, would be an irradiated environment, he objected to Anna’s wishes for creating a cultural venue from this heritage site. Furthermore, he pointed to the various other ways, Vattenfall would contribute to the memory of the Ågesta plant.
One day later, on 03 August, Anna responded by stating that future generations also need the actual sites as witnesses of their cultural history. In her understanding, photographs and oral stories will not be enough.
Anna Storm
Here are full citations for this exchange:
Storm, Anna: “Ågestaverket – en unik kärnkraftsanläggning slängd i containrar”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-07-28, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/agestaverket-en-unik-karnkraftsanlaggning-slangd-i-containrar-7035908 [2022-08-09].
Drottz, Melker (operativ chef för nedmontering och rivning av Ågestaverket, Vattenfall): Replik “Vi är skyldiga att montera ned Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-08-02, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/vi-ar-skyldiga-att-montera-ned-agestaverket-7035985 [2022-08-09].
Storm, Anna: Slutreplik “Det hade varit möjligt att behålla kontrollrummet från Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/det-hade-varit-mojligt-att-behalla-kontrollrummet-fran-agestaverket-7036016 [2022-08-09].
We are happy to share the news that Professor Sverker Sörlin was nominated by Sveriges Radio P1 to be one of the hosts for the aclaimed radio show Sommar. The show has been running during the summer weeks since the sixties. Every year a number of profiles of various backgrounds (research, arts, acting, politics etc) are choosen to host the show for a one hour session. The hosts choose the topic themselves and the music that goes with it.
The names are announced at the end of May each years, and the days before are always full of Swedes speculating in the lunch room about who will be on the list the upcoming sumer. It is an honorable nomination, and we are all very proud and happy that Sverker is one of the hosts this year.
“-My summer speaks about the love towards life and about such things that help us to live, for example empathy, justice and education. Therefore it will be about the vision of the fossil-free wellfare state Sweden. This is the new Green Norrland’s test case.”
Sverker’s show will air on 7 July, but is accessable at the Swedish Radio webpage after. The show is always in Swedish.
Please check out the broadcast via Radio Sweden’s Website. The producer of the session is Niklas Zachrisson.
Abstract (from Radio Sweden):
Sverker Sörlin är prisbelönt författare och professor i miljöhistoria vid Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan.
Under lång tid har Sverker Sörlin också varit del av den svenska kulturdebatten som skribent i bland annat Dagens Nyheter. Han har skrivit en rad böcker, främst inom området idéhistoria, men också självbiografiskt om längdskidåkning, sjukdom och bildning.
I sin avhandling ”Framtidslandet” från 1988 beskrev han den första industriella revolutionen i Norrland i slutet av 1800-talet. En liknande utveckling sker idag – och framtidshoppet kring norra Sveriges nya stora industrier växer återigen.
You can read and even listen to the full text on the Aeon-Website. Here is a small extract from Erik’s piece:
The recently resurfaced planet, I argue, can be traced back to fantasies like Richardson’s. Contemporary planetary governance relies on a specific trajectory of planetary monitoring. Even though efforts to map and measure global space have a far longer history – not least as a primary vehicle of Western colonialism and imperialism – the efforts to monitor and govern planetary dynamics have also relied on a particular history of knowing, seeing and measuring the planet. Thinking of the planet as an interconnected system required quantified and centralised approaches as well as a wide set of scientific instruments and technologies. A specific kind of planet was able to emerge, not by itself, but through the interconnected histories of geopolitics, technology and grand visions of planetary monitoring.
Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
