More Grim Matters

More Grim Matters

We won’t know when we have passed the point of no return for a changing climate. Current changes are only apparent to butterflies, migratory birds, sea fish and gardeners. At some point, linear changes become catastrophic ones, as temperatures soar, winds howl and natural feedback processes take over. Perhaps one day we will be able to say it was when the earth passed 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide plus the carbon dioxide equivalent of other warming gases such as methane and nitrous oxide), perhaps 450 ppm. When feedback processes take over and climate change starts to accelerate, it’s out of our hands. (There are always dangerous, desperate measures.) The atmosphere now has a concentration of carbon dioxide plus carbon dioxide equivalents of 430 ppm (390 ppm Carbon dioxide, 50 ppm other warming gases). This is about 150 ppm above the ‘natural’ background of 280 ppm and 20 ppm below the predicted ‘tipping point’ of 450 ppm (an educated guess), at which point climate change becomes nonlinear. Essentially we are at the point where feedback processes (methane bubbling out of tundra pools, melting Arctic ice, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets) take hold.

Our economic lives have tremendous momentum. To decarbonize industrial infrastructure (turn carbon producing industry into photo-voltaics or nuclear power; create energy reductions on the scale needed) takes fifty years, if one replaces 2% of the carbon producing infrastructure every year. Fifty years is the time such energy shifts (from wood to coal, or coal and oil to electricity made from coal and oil) have taken in the past, under purely economic incentives. To insulate all buildings, replace inefficient motors, appliances, light bulbs, pipeline designs, inefficient industrial processes with efficient ones also takes time. Because doing all that involves using carbon based infrastructure (trucks, trains, mining machinery), and because the economy and population will continue to grow, the carbon content of the atmosphere is virtually certain to rise another 100-150 ppm before the changeover (whenever we start it) is complete. The climate system also has tremendous momentum and much warming is stored up in it but not yet expressed. With the best will in the world (turning the system around in, say 20 years), we’re in for a wild ride. But we haven’t yet started.

A grim outlook, perhaps: even if we save energy with more efficient houses, cars, light bulbs, electrify the economy with photo-voltaic panels or nuclear power (this saves the 60-70% of carbon wasted in converting fossil fuels to electricity, the 90% of it wasted in powering automobiles), stop overfishing the oceans, stop destructive farming practices, stop engaging in polluting industrial chemistries, give poor third world women more control over their lives so they limit the number of their children), the earth is still going to warm (4ºC? 9ºC?), sea level rise (3'? 7’? 80'?), rains beat down or fail, glaciers melt, reservoirs dry up, the oceans acidify, ocean currents slow. On the other hand, if we listen to the economic optimists and burn up all the available fossil fuels in the next 100-400 years (the speed of depletion depends on the rate of use), we will certainly see catastrophes: a temperature rise of 9-20ºC, collapsing forests, Arctic farms, a sea level rise of 80-400 feet (putting modern coastal settlements below the cleansing waves). The richest or best organized among us will be able to deal with the changes for a while. When fossil fuels are gone, so is easily obtainable energy, and unless a technological society capable of making solar voltaic panels, or solar thermal devices, and probably nuclear power plants, survives, the people at the tropical poles will live in a permanent stone age, growing some food, hunting animals, taking their hot baths in mineral springs at the edge of the sea.

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Culture provides life with meaning. Science, part of culture, tells stories that explain the world. Without culture, we are reduced to eating, breathing, defecating, perhaps reproducing (but how to raise the children? Why bother?): the fate of stranded men like Robinson Crusoe. I write because I want to be part of the ongoing dialogue between people and their culture, people shop to define themselves in their culture (what they can afford, the objects they choose to buy), children are brought up in ways that conform or don’t conform to cultural norms. Culture defines our view of the future and the past. As a plains Indian remarked, when the buffalo were gone, life was over. His people defined themselves by their relationship to the buffalo; without buffalo, life became meaningless. Modern lives are defined by their place in the so-called meritocracy of rationalist western society and culture. Western material lives (hot running water, clean clothes, abundant food, nuclear weapons) are the product of that rationalist culture. We westerners live apart from nature in a man-made world of sidewalks, houses, cars. In a hunting and gathering culture people are seen as separate from nature (which they explain with different stories and which may be terrifying) but also as part of it. Such people are far better observers of their natural surroundings than we, and far better integrated with them. With the energy from fossil fuels, we have constructed a heated, well washed world apart from the messy chaotic natural world. So the scientist sits in his laboratory, the banker in his office, and paved roads penetrate the countryside. Our rationalist approach (together with fossil fuels) has let us understand the natural world in a way the hunter never would, though he understood his place in that world better than we. Our world is a mechanical one, of cars, roads, furnaces, fans (for instance, to move the mephitic air from cavernous chicken houses). In this world, nature for the most part is incidental, and put to use.

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Empires collapse when they run out of resources, or when, through no fault of their own, those resources are compromised by nature herself. (A drying climate, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis are examples.) Many, perhaps most, empires expand their populations, their use of resources and their conquests of other lands with no thought of the future. To an extent, hunting and gathering bands may have done this too and so slowly forced each other into new habitats. Growth equaled success and human fertility let populations cope with great losses. Rome began to falter after it conquered the poorer agricultural peoples of northern Europe (Gaul, Britain, Germany). These new provinces, unlike the richer older civilizations of the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral, did not return a profit—the cost of keeping them was more than the territories brought in. And soils near home wore out under a more and more capitalist exploitation. The Sumerian empire failed as its soils salted up from heavy summertime irrigation and as new lands to bring under irrigation ran out. (But the Sumerians lasted longer than the modern West has.) The Hohokum empire of southern Arizona faced the same problem and survived by rotating its fields on a ten year growing cycle. The Anasazi civilization of Chaco Canyon probably collapsed because of a long drought (the flowering of the civilization corresponded with a period of above average rainfall in the Southwest). The drought came after soils had been depleted by decades or centuries of continuous corn; and after the intensive cutting of pinion pine for firewood (for cooking and to fire pottery) and ponderosa pine for building timbers (for monumental shrines and dwellings) had changed the local ecosystems (removing some of their food resources) and accelerated sheet erosion on the uplands, preventing regeneration of the trees and increasing the likelihood of flooding and downcutting of streams.

The modern West has taken the whole world as its resource base. It is changing the atmosphere by its emissions; its rivers and coasts by dams, erosion and nutrient pollution; its soils by the relentless growing of cereal crops; the planet’s other organisms (frogs, dolphins, songbirds, tigers) by its pollutants and expansive settlement patterns. Driven by the search for profit, it does this essentially without a thought, shedding few tears of regret (growth is necessary, a platted suburb looks better than a messy meadow, you can see wonderful nature shows on TV). The human population continues to grow. While the current biomass of ants is greater, humans have the greatest biomass of any animal in their size class to occupy the earth. Perhaps more people are alive now than ever lived. This is a measure of our evolutionary success. Every successful plant or animal changes the planet. But few have changed it so greatly, or will take as much of it with them, as we.