These days we live in a hyperpolarized political environment where most people assume that if you’re not all the way over to one extreme, you must be all the way over to the other. That’s a major cause of the collective stupidities that afflict the world today, since the opposite of one bad idea is quite reliably another bad idea. Me—well, put it down to autism if you like, but I’m fine with offending both sides. For years now, in fact, if I don’t field roughly equal numbers of shrill denunciations from both sides, I doublecheck my thinking.
Two weeks ago we discussed one example of the polarization just mentioned: the frankly weird myopia of the collective imagination that prevents so many people from noticing that perpetual progress and overnight catastrophe aren’t the only possible shapes of the future. This post is going to tackle another example. Yes, it’s time for us to revisit global climate change.
No doubt there are gentle, nonconfrontational ways to address this. I’m in a raffish mood, though, and so what I propose to do instead is go straight into a discussion about three things each side gets hopelessly wrong. (The list could be made much lengthier on both sides, but three for each will do.) Once we’ve done that, it’ll be much easier to talk about two things. The first is why, more than thirty years after climate change started grabbing headlines, nothing has actually been done to stop or even slow the changing climate. The second is to look at where the climate is actually headed. Each of these questions has a straightforward answer, but neither answer is thinkable from either of the two extremist positions that are fashionable these days.
We’ll start with the conservative end of the spectrum. The dogma being pushed by powerful corporate interests on this extreme, and enthusiastically backed up by citizen activists on and offline, is that climate change isn’t happening, that anthropogenic CO2 emissions aren’t causing it, and that it’s not a problem anyway. If this reminds you of Bart Simpson’s “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me, and you can’t prove anything,” dear reader, let’s just say you’re not alone. Let’s discuss the realities of the situation one claim at a time.
1: The global climate is changing. Anyone who gardens in the eastern half of North America knows from personal experience that this is true. Many areas in that whole continental region have become two entire USDA climate zones warmer in the last three quarters of a century. Those zones aren’t arbitrarily assigned; they’re determined by hard and fast details such as the dates of first and last frost, and they’re shifting slowly, raggedly, but inexorably northward.
Here in southern New England I’ve got a ringside seat for one aspect of that set of changes. Does the phrase “New England winter” suggest to you, dear reader, mild temperatures, plenty of sunshine, and more rain than snow? That’s certainly not what it once meant, but far more often than not, that’s what it means now. This year, like last year, we had our first dose of shirtsleeve weather in February. If you tried to go dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh last Christmas, the way people reliably did here a century ago, you’d have had a hard time of it.
It’s not just a New England thing, either. A few months ago, people who watch global weather were left gasping at the news that torrential rains had fallen over much of the southern Sahara, as the monsoon belt continues to creep northward. More recently, the arid lands of central Australia got similar treatment, as heavy rains in the Queensland mountains left Lake Eyre overflowing its banks. Meanwhile southern Europe has been hammered by drought as the Sahara slips across the Mediterranean basin and sinks its claws into Spain, southern France, and Italy.
It’s telling that the only argument conservatives have in their attempts to rebut these ongoing changes is to point to some isolated factoid that appears to be going the other way, and insisting that this proves that nothing’s changing anywhere. The current favorite along these lines is the fact that the Antarctic ice cap grew sharply over the last couple of years due to increased precipitation. If you know anything about how the atmosphere works, increased precipitation at the poles is a huge shrieking klaxon; for thousands of years now, the atmosphere on each side of the equator has been divided into three bands, each with its own pattern of air circulation, and one result of that is that the poles get very little precipitation.
In terms of its annual precipitation, in fact, Antarctica is a desert, and so is Greenland. More to the point, both were deserts. In recent decades, Greenland’s been getting rain in summer—let that sink in for a moment—and now Antarctica’s getting increased precipitation, too: snow, for now. All this is a foreshadowing of a tremendous change in global climate which neither side of the climate wars seems to have taken into account. (We’ll get to that in due time.)
2. Human pollution affects the climate. The attempts to deny this are simple handwaving. The physics of the process by which CO2 increases the heat retention capacity of the atmosphere have been well understood for around a century and a half. The modest amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t deprive it of effect—there are plenty of chemicals that can have drastic effects on your body if your blood contains them in parts per million concentrations, you know. As for the arguments that temperature spikes in prehistory were followed rather than preceded by CO2 spikes, therefore a CO2 spike can’t cause a temperature spike, this is like insisting that if certain car crashes were caused by the driver having a fatal heart attack, then getting into a car crash without having a heart attack first can’t hurt you.
Any number of things can cause the global temperature to shift. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is one of them. Several sudden temperature spikes in prehistory—the Toarcian greenhouse event 183 million years ago in the Jurassic and the Cenomanian-Turonian greenhouse event 94 million years ago in the Cretaceous—do seem to have been caused by greenhouse gas emissions. (Scientists these days like to insist that these were volcanic emissions; I wonder myself if the geological markers of these events are the last remaining traces of two long-extinct intelligent species that decided to try their hands, or other appendages, at burning fossil fuels.) So it’s not as though a CO2-driven temperature spike has never happened before.
3. Anthropogenic climate change is a source of serious problems. Here it’s going to be necessary to step carefully, since the left has been just as eager to overinflate the costs of climate change as the right has been to downplay them. We’ll be talking about the flipside of this issue in a moment. For the time being, it’s important to note that increasingly turbulent and unstable weather imposes rising costs on economies around the world. The chart below shows the cost of weather-related natural disasters worldwide by year and type, in current dollars. As you can see, it’s skyrocketed in recent years. Those costs don’t exist in a vacuum; they have to be paid out of the proceeds of economic activity, and impose an ever-increasing burden on the world’s economies. There are plenty of reasons why economic affairs are such a mess these days, but the rising tide of costs from weather-related disasters isn’t helping.
By this point my conservative readers will doubtless be glaring at their computer screens and muttering darkly about how rising costs don’t equal the end of the world that liberals have been promising in such lavish terms for decades now. They’re right, of course, and this is the point at which I finish belaboring them and start dealing out similar treatment to the other side.
That has more in common with the side just outlined than either one likes to admit. Once again, we’ve got dogma being pushed by powerful corporate interests, and enthusiastically backed up by citizen activists on and offline. This dogma insists that climate change is a world-ending cataclysm, that nobody benefits from it, and that the green agenda being pushed by climate change activists and their corporate sponsors will surely save the world if only everyone else shuts up and does what they’re told. Once again, we’ll discuss the realities one at a time.
4. Climate change doesn’t mean the end of the world. If there’s one rhetorical gimmick that the left has worked not merely to death, but straight through the afterlife and into some other incarnation, it’s the claim that unless somebody or other does something or other about climate change sometime very soon, we will all be fried to a crackly crisp in a planet-sized wok. That particular strategy has been used so long that people on the other side of the issue like to point out just how many supposed deadlines for planetary survival we’ve punched through since the climate change band first struck up its now-overfamiliar tune.
If you have any knowledge of paleoclimatology, furthermore, you know that the entire claim is garbage. Until global temperatures started rising a few decades ago, in fact, the earth was colder than it’s been at any point for the last 200 million years. During most of our planet’s history, in fact, it has been a jungle planet, with tropical forests extending clear across what now counts as the temperate zone, no glaciers anywhere, very few deserts, and semitropical conditions at the poles. That, not our current near-deepfreeze, is earth’s normal climate. Life thrived under those conditions; compare a tiger to a tyrannosaur or a buffalo to a brontosaur and you can see just how shrunken and huddled living things have become in the bitterly cold conditions of the last ten million years or so.
If the climate keeps warming at its current pace, there will certainly be discontinuities and disruptions, especially but not only to human civilization. Sea levels will rise, rain belts will shift, delicate specialist species will die out and be replaced by tougher, more flexible generalist species, and so on. None of that justifies the sort of frantic apocalyptic squawking typified by Mark Lynas’s meretricious 2007 book Six Degrees, and repeated at earsplitting volume by politicians and media flacks for decades now.
5. Climate change has winners as well as losers. Russia has had the biggest grain crops in its long history in the last few years. Why? The great constraint on the Russian wheat crop is not soil—Russia has some of the best soil in the world—or water, but the length of the growing season, which is curtailed across much of the country due to the bitterly cold climate. As climate change has shifted growing zones northward, Russian farms have hauled in one bumper crop after another. That’s been a serious disadvantage to NATO, which wasn’t expecting huge Russian wheat exports to help pay for tanks, shells, and drones for the Ukraine war, but it’s been an immense advantage for Africa and many other countries where malnutrition is a serious issue, and where cheap Russian wheat is even more welcome than usual just now.
The heavy rains across the southern Sahara mentioned earlier are a harbinger of an even more significant change for the better. Until 4000 years ago, when cooling global temperatures drove the monsoon belt too far south, the lifeless deserts of the Sahara, the Arabian peninsula, and northwestern India were grasslands watered by heavy annual rains. As the climate warms, we’re approaching the threshold at which that process will go in reverse. Imagine for a moment what it will mean when nations such as Mali, Niger, and Chad, currently among the world’s poorest and most barren countries, become the breadbaskets of Africa. Imagine what will change when Saudi Arabia becomes a major exporter of wheat.
That doesn’t mean that everyone will benefit from climate change. No question, the costs imposed by the changing climate are high already, and they’ll get much, much worse. Whole nations will be devastated by the changes, just as whole nations will benefit from them. That doesn’t justify the left’s insistence that climate change hurts everyone everywhere.
6: The measures pushed in the name of climate change aren’t slowing climate change, and were never intended to do so. Here the best place to start is the familiar graph below, which shows the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last half century. About halfway through that graph, the world’s industrial nations started imposing burdensome regulations and paying for hugely expensive green energy projects that were supposedly going to keep climate change in check. Can you see the least sign that any of it has had an effect? Neither can I.
What makes this all the more striking is that there are measures that could have reduced global carbon emissions sharply. They were discussed in detail as far back as the 1970s, and when the current wave of climate change activism started receiving massive doses of corporate funding, some of us made sure that they got plenty of discussion in online conversations and at peak oil conferences. There were several things that set them apart from the measures that ended up being adopted, but two differences were particularly striking.
The first difference was that they all focused on efficient energy use. Most housing in the industrial world, for example, is wretchedly insulated and leaks heat like so many sieves. For a fraction of the money that’s been poured into offshore wind turbines, the US could have made grants available to homeowners and apartment landlords to fund better insulation and weatherization in its housing stock, and cut energy use significantly without the least decrease in quality of life. The second difference is that all the projects we had in mind made individuals, families, and communities more resilient. The grants just described, for example, would have created hundreds of thousands of working class jobs, and their work would have made it easier for people across the country to weather climate change comfortably.
All of this was discussed in great detail at the time. None of these projects were adopted by the government and corporate interests who took over the climate change cause and turned it into an excuse for a great many gargantuan, expensive, and ineffective gimmicks instead. I don’t think this was any kind of accident, because it reflects a kind of thinking that’s become pervasive all through the industrial world in recent decades.
Most people in the US are familiar with the bitter joke about the doctor who says, “A patient cured is a customer lost.” I’m not sure how many people realize that it’s not a joke. It’s called the disease management model, and it governs medical care in the United States and a growing number of other countries. The disease management model is entirely oriented to maximizing profit for the medical and pharmaceutical industries, irrespective of the impact on mere patients. Thus it backs away from the idea of curing people of illnesses. Instead, the goal is to keep people sick enough that they have to keep consuming medical care, but not too sick that they lose their medical coverage and drop out of the system.
Most of us have seen this in action in our own lives or those of our family or friends. One friend of mine, for instance, suffered for many years from severe asthma. Her physician prescribed drugs and inhalers, which didn’t keep her from having to be rushed to the hospital a couple of times a year when her airway decided to close up. One day she happened to read that some cases of this kind are due to wheat allergy. She dropped wheat from her diet, and for the first time in many years her asthma went away. Thrilled by this, she went to her doctor, only to find that the doctor was aware of the role of wheat allergy in asthma. “Why didn’t you tell me?” my friend demanded. “We prefer to medicate for that,” was the doctor’s bland reply.
I’d like to suggest that a similar style of thinking undergirds most official responses to crisis in today’s world. Call it the crisis management model. As with the disease management model, it seeks not to solve problems but to exploit them: to use each crisis, real or manufactured, to make people more frightened, vulnerable, and dependent, so that they can be pressured into accepting ever more burdensome restrictions and costs for the benefit of the corporate-bureaucratic system that rules them. The Stalinist fantasies retailed by the overpaid and undertalented intellectuals of the WEF and its kindred institutions are just the most lurid examples of a broader pattern.
It requires something like this, I think, to make sense of the bizarre disconnection between the strident rhetoric of impending doom being shoveled about so freely by celebrities in the climate change circuit and the fantastic carbon output of their own lifestyles. If they actually believed that life on earth was threatened by climate change, it’s hard to believe that they would go on living absurdly extravagant lives with bigger carbon footprints than a midsized Indonesian city; even hypocrisy can only stretch so far. Their behavior makes sense to me only if they know perfectly well that the planet’s survival isn’t actually at risk.
The difficulty with both management models, though, is that sooner or later the designated suckers catch on to the real rules of the game. That’s why so many Americans assume as a matter of course these days that their doctors are lying to them, why alternative health care is so popular here, and why herbalism and other forms of do-it-yourself healing are becoming especially common. Equally, it’s why the shrill pronouncements of climate change activists get so little traction any more. It’s become clear to most people that something’s very wrong with the claims being circulated, and that’s why so many have responded by turning to the first three mistaken beliefs I’ve discussed here.
Of course there’s a downside in both cases. People who refuse to go to a physician may end up dying earlier than they otherwise would, of some disease a physician might have been able to detect and treat—though admittedly they also may avoid the drug side effects and botched medical treatments that end so many lives prematurely these days. Equally, since the climate really is changing, the costs are piling up, but the end of the world is still pulling a no-show, a great many people on both sides of the debate are likely to be blindsided by events as they proceed. I’lll be on hiatus for the first half of next month, but when I return, we’ll talk about where the climate appears to be headed and what that means for our future.
Brilliant article Mr. Greer.
I have always thought that Al Gore-esque image of a post-climate change world as a barren wasteland with everyplace either underwater or a desert with a bunch of big hurricanes everywhere is incredibly stupid. It’s inspired in large part by Biblical notions of imminent apocalypse no doubt.
In reality, when the Earth has been warmer, it has always been wetter due to more H2O being the liquid and gaseous phases. And all of this water doesn’t just stay in hurricane clouds or higher oceans, it falls as rain and makes the Earth more tropical and marshy historically!
Maybe the reason why there are more forest fires is …there are more forests!
It is worth noting also that historically, Ice Ages and even “Little Ice Ages” have been rougher periods for human civilization (whether or not you consider “civilization” to be a bad thing) while warmer periods have been better.
The first civilizations emerged after the end of the last Ice Age, although the extent of causality for the so-called “Neolithic Revolution” remains a source of dispute.
The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in 536 really altered history by stimying the Emperor Justinian’s efforts to re-conquer the lost provinces of the old Western Roman Empire. This is particuarly since, the climatic event may have facilitated the conditions for the disastrous plague that began in 541 that would continue to have outbreaks on and off for two and a quarter centuries by weakening immune systems. Also, it added pressures on the empire by pushing various tribes like the Lombards, Avars, and Slavs to seek greener pastures within Roman territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age
There were similar breakdowns of civilizations as far afield as Central America during this period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmlTL6OxFoc&t=1115s
Hence why many consider 536 the true beginning of the “Dark Ages” in the literal and figurative senses. Much of the area around what we would call Europe only began to recover economically with the start of the Medieval Warm Period.
More recently, there was the “Little Ice Age” that began towards the end of the 13th Century and lasted until the early 19th Century. This combined with another plague (“The Black Death”) was a period of constant peasant revolts, religous division, upheaval, revolution, etc, sometimes called “The General Crisis”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
When I think of the crisis management model, honestly I can’t think of a better example right now than the way the debate about the budget deficit’s been handled. There’s endless hand-wringing about the coming blowup that’s coming, and about the steps to take them, but in the end, the preferred route is to ride the turkey all the way home. I sometimes wonder whether, with how interconnected the global economy is these days, the after-effects are going to be more or less catastrophic than expected.
I am unsure what the life cycle of a greater elemental looks like particularly around the evolution of one from say a 3rd plane entity to a 4th. Would you be able to discuss this somewhat? Do they die and then rebirth into a new plane(t) entity? Death and rebirth seem to be a part of that cycle for man. If they die do the lesser elementals that are the manifestations of their soul, the mind and body so to speak, left to operate according to their prior dictates? How do they begin as a 4th plane entity? Are they like children? 4th plane is hopefully a protected state. Can you describe somewhat what we might expect during such a transition and shortly after?
I wonder if part of the reason so many people are able to dismiss climate change is even happening is that they move so much that they have no idea what used to be normal where they live. I’ve lived most of my life in the same area, and I can remember going trick or treating with snow on the ground, while the last few winters it’s looked like we were going to have green Christmases. This is a huge difference, but it’s only because I’ve lived in one spot for a long time I’m able to see it in such a visceral way.
On the topic of prior industrial civilizations: on the last open post I mentioned waiting for books on the Triassic to arrive because I was speculating about industrial genetic engineers in that time period. One of them has arrived and talks at length about a phenomena called a “thermal maximum”, of which the best known is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximums. These are very short lived spikes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures that appear in a blink of an eye and vanish just as quickly.
They are also always marked with a very thin layer of excess iron, nitrogen, and phosphorous, the byproducts of industry and fertilizers. They’ve also occurred at irregular intervals since the Carboniferous; which is when fossil fuels were first deposited in a meaningful amount. Assuming that the lack of earlier known thermal maximums is not the result of the evidence vanishing, I think the case can be made that the simplest explanation is that thermal maximums are always the result of industrial civilizations.
Hello Mr. Greer!
Is this new discussion series going to have a post on nuclear energy? If so, are you going to mention nuclear waste?
Right On! Shine the light of truth.
Thank you,
Tom
Cheers to a well deserved break!
Does anyone else remember the comic book series Cadillacs & Dinosaurs? I’m pretty sure the Cadillacs the T-Rex’s used to drive around back in the day were part of the problem.
https://totally-epic.kwakk.info/2020/03/31/1990-cadillacs-and-dinosaurs/
And a song to go with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8HuL0Xbx9c&ab_channel=Negativland-Topic
One thing I think deserves to be mentioned is that the 90-million-year spans between these greenhouse events are, in point of fact, long enough for even the “nonrenewable” resources like metals and fossil fuels to have replenished, as well as for even so-called “forever” chemicals such as PFAS to either break up through chemical )possibly even biochemical) reactions, settle in ocean-floor sediments, be subducted back into the mantle, or simply be buried under 90 million years’ worth of additional bedrock.
It’s hard to even think about it that way because of how long a timespan that is. as well as human (or at least Western) bias that whatever is now will either always be or will be improved through Science and Technology. Logarithmic scales, I think, have a tendency to obscure how far in the past/future these events really are. (If you live a full human lifetime and are discarnate for triple that length, it would take a full 321,000 incarnations to reach the next sapiogenic greenhouse gassing era.
I suspect part of the reason scientists don’t want to consider that these previous sessions of geologically quick global warming might be sapiogenic events is because (1) that would imply there were sapient civilizations before us that did exactly what we did, i.e., we’re not special, (2) industrial civilization can end and progress be thrown into reverse, because it clearly must have done so the past two times, and (3) that humanity’s ultimate legacy will not be to conquer the stars or even to destroy the world in the attempt, but just an unusual blip in the climate record and a handful of anonymous fossils. No monuments, no memories, not even nuclear waste pits – just nameless bones.
Sic transibit gloria humanorum.
The graph near the bottom of the page has the climate the last million years. Rapid climate change seems to be the normal condition.
https://iceage.museum.state.il.us/content/when-have-ice-ages-occurred
You can also look up the Younger Dryas. A climate switch flipped and although they have theories as to what happened, they are only speculative.
In the mean time the heat pump is still in Heat mode somewhat later in the year than usual, but it has stopped freezing at night so the garden is going.
“Greenland’s been getting rain in summer—let that sink in…” Knowing your writing skills, I sincerely doubt that does not have a double meaning…
My big worry about climate change has to do with something JMG mentioned a while ago, and that involves the direction of flow for the northern hemisphere’s atmospheric polar cell.
The north pole is very cold and air flows down from high in the atmosphere then out southward to about the 60th parallel where it has become sufficiently warm enough to rise and start flowing back towards the pole. Or at least that is how it works now.
But with the melting of the northern polar ice sheet that should no longer be true. Once the summer heat melts out the arctic sea ice , the water warms very rapidly. In late summer and in fall after a full melt out , the water at the north pole will be warmer than the continents that surround it. That should temporarily reverse the flow of the polar cell in the northern hemisphere. That means weather weirdness at harvest time in the northern hemisphere. After the sea ice freezes back up in the late fall and winter the old pattern should return, but that weather weirdness in the fall (in the northern hemisphere) should be one of the effects of climate change we should start seeing in the not too distant future (I am guessing 5-15 years). If this is correct, the loss of regular yearly harvests in the northern hemisphere could be one of the earlier effects of climate change.
Dear Archdruid:
I think that you are a genius , but in this case of Anthropogenic Climate Change you are wrong. How you’ll explain the climate optimuns like that that happened in the medieval age ?
I lived with my husband when he as deployed to Israel about 20 years ago. While I was living in Jerusalem, I found out about the Peace Industry. A tangle f NGO’s were supposed to be helping the Palestinians but once the wages and benefits of the NGO staffers were paid and their armoured SUV’s bought and maintained and few Palestinian drivers and translators were paid, there was never any money to help the actual poor people. It was in the interest of the Peace Industry to keep the Palestinians desperate so they could keep on getting UN and other donor money to facilitate their swanky lifestyles. The level of hypocrisy they swam in was extreme.
Maxine
@Brendhelm
Technically, there have been some hypothetical discussions of intelligent life before humans in the form of the Silurian hypothesis, though this is only one paper from 2018, and you are otherwise correct that this line of speculation has been rather rare: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6
When it comes to the possibility of prior industrial species, it’s not the most grim train of thought out there, but is the one that appears to be most anathema to our cultural preconceptions.
Thank you, John so happy that you are rejoining the conversation on this issue. Remember Green wizards? I don’t blame you for turning to other topics of conversation.. I am working on a project that can get funded with some climate change money and that in fact it does address the storage of carbon. But it also has other social benefits, including community building, composting, soil, amendments, etc. And it can be done with recycled materials. I’m also trying to pull together just a list of terms that should be debunked that are being used by the corporations in order to confuse people about energy things like energy transition
Brendhelm @9: “If you live a full human lifetime and are discarnate for triple that length, it would take a full 321,000 incarnations to reach the next sapiogenic greenhouse gassing era.”
Contemplating the deep history of the planet can be lots of fun. I suppose those earlier “sapiogenic” events could be traces of earlier “swarms,” (as per Dion Fortune). Perhaps morphic resonance (as per Rupert Sheldrake) is making each succeeding swarm a little cleverer than the previous; the previous swarms never produced an Einstein? Never imagined nuclear power? Never found any use for uranium? I really should be embarrassed at myself, waxing so speculative on such scant evidence. It is fun, however.
Here in northern New England we are about to receive a rare May nor’easter. A big change from the last fifty years with an increase in wetter Spring weather and less sunny days. Speaking of crisis management, it will be interesting to see how the US property insurance industry handles the increasingly costly and frequent storm damage. Policy price hikes and cancellations are becoming noticeable .
Our relatively “safe” area from natural disasters seems less so these days.
David, well, that’s not the cause of the current wave of forest fires, as forest cover hasn’t expanded noticeably, but you’re right that the Al-Gore-calypse doesn’t make any sense. How those big hurricanes lumber around without ever raining on those deserts is an interesting question. As for warm vs. cold periods, granted.
N, that’s a fine example. The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that there’s a simple offramp to the budget deficit issue: default. Russia did it in 1998, and that marked the end of the post-Soviet depression in Russia and the beginning of the nation’s rise to its current robust economic condition. In the same way, the US will default on its debt sometime in the next decade or two, there will be vast amounts of squawking, and then things will get better. I’ve suspected more than once that one reason Trump got the presidency is that he’s experienced in taking large organizations through bankruptcy; all his recent actions — laying off excess personnel, shutting down unproductive departments, cutting unnecessary expenditures, renegotiating contracts with suppliers, etc. — are the things a CEO does when his company is getting ready for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Ben, I’ve never seen that discussed in the occult literature. It’s a fascinating question, though.
Anonymoose, mobility probably does have a lot to do with the blindness to changing climate. As for thermal maximums, that’s fascinating! What’s the name of that book? I’ll want to read it and include that in my take on planetary history.
Rafael, I’ll doubtless talk about that as we proceed, and yes, nuclear waste will have to be part of that discussion.
Tom, you’re welcome and thank you.
Justin, I somehow managed to miss Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, which is odd, because that was around during my relatively brief period as an alternative-comics buff. (Think original b&w Elfquest, and Cerebus the Aardvark before Dave Sim got pretentious.)
Brendhelm, exactly. 90 million years is longer than we can imagine — and it’s also quite long enough for the planet to reset. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if there were other sapient species in the intervals between, which didn’t happen to leave thermal maxima in the geological record because the earth didn’t have metallic ores and fossil fuels ready for them…and scientists would find that even less palatable, since it means that our brief period of technological extravagance is wholly dependent on the mere fact that the planet happened to have the buffet table set when we showed up.
Siliconguy, excellent. Yes, and that’s another nail in the coffin of both sides: climate change can happen very rapidly — rapidly enough to be a real mess for industrial society — but the biosphere’s used to that, since abrupt warming happens every hundred millennia or so.
Roldy, heh heh heh. I wonder how many people know that there are literally rivers of meltwater every summer on the Greenland ice sheet…
Dobbs, good. We’re going to be talking about that in detail in the next post on this subject. If the polar cell reverses, however, what that means is that the belt of heavy rains and turbulent weather that normally hovers around 60° north will move to 90° north, leading to warm, relatively stable weather across the northern hemisphere from around 30° north to the pole. Imagine for a moment the climate of Georgia in Labrador…
Anselmo, that’s quite a non sequitur. Go read my post again, and note especially the following two sentences: “Any number of things can cause the global temperature to shift. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is one of them.”
Maxine, that’s an excellent example of the crisis management model. Welfare schemes are another. It’s been pointed out repeatedly that you could pay every poor person in the US a hefty salary plus benefits for much less than it costs to run our welfare bureaucracy.
Ellen, I do indeed remember the Green Wizards project. If you can get some of the climate change money and do something useful with it, by all means, but I don’t recommend letting yourself become dependent on it — if you do, the system will own you, and manipulate you at will.
Chancy, that’s just it. Periods of climate transition like the one we’re going through see a lot of turbulent weather events and a lot of weather-related disasters. Since nobody’s doing anything that will actually affect the rate at which climate change is happening, getting ready for more trouble is sensible.
As you recall milder winters, I’d like to counter with old fashioned winter storms being almost a rarity in the South. But last winter there were at least two that I slipped and slid through. And those on the gulf coast got an extruh speshul winter storm, which those people hardly ever get. The winter before the last one also had two snow incidents as well. These are places that usually get no snow at all. People don’t have boot trays or snow shovels around here, wouldn’t know what they were or why you’d need them.
I used to live in snow country, it wasn’t that big of a deal for me to slide through it all. However, I distinctly remember how few winter storms there were back in the 80s down here. You remembered them because it gave you a reprieve from the misery that was school. You prayed for them and you were disappointed when they didn’t show up and they didn’t show up that often.
I think we can agree that the weather is changing. But into what and how and when, I have no idea and don’t really want to make statements about it.
It is very hard to have conversations across political lines these days, or to have opinions different from those popular in your social group. It feels a lot more dangerous than it used to, I think.
As for climate change, yes, this is one of the topics where this is most true. Along with ‘culture war’ issues, and vaccines.
@JMG
Thank you for a nuanced and rational essay on climate change, once again. Just a point:
Climate change is *one of the* ecological crises caused by human activity in today’s time, with others being water pollution, soil pollution, etc. The standard approach to dealing with the former of the latter two is building expensive energy-guzzling (fossil fuels, in other words) sewage- or effluent-treatment plants; needless to say, they have their own carbon footprints. I remember innocently pointing this out to a friend who works in an STP, and I’ll just say that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the fact that environmental clean-up tech can have its own carbon footprint, too. Now, I’m not an absolutist in these matters – I personally support the idea that if there is no eco-friendly alternative, a given technology should be adopted and used, so long as it’s used to treat water; however, if an option is available, then it’s worth exploring with an open mind. Fortunately, water treatment is an area where such a technology exists, and it’s called Constructed Wetlands (CW for short). Here’s an interesting intro to the subject from Appropedia: https://www.appropedia.org/Constructed_wetlands#:~:text=Constructed%20wetlands%20(CW)%2C%20or,for%20the%20removal%20of%20pollutants.
I strongly believe that if enough R&D funds are poured into this instead of nano this and quantum that, it would really help the situation.
Are you familiar with the works of Naomi Klein? Her book The Shock Doctrine seems to be making some of the same points you are.
@JMG
Funny, I often hear that the US would more likely choose to inflate away the debt as opposed to going through the process of defaulting. Is there a particular reason why you think that default is more or less where we’re going?
I am specifically worried about the transition phase for the northern hemisphere’s polar cell. It looks like it will go through a period of time (decades ?) in which it alternates between the old and new pattern. And the energy needed to reverse the flow of the air in polar cell is at its greatest in late summer and early fall.
What worries me is something freakish, like sudden, short lived, ice storms across North America (or Asia) in September killing the harvest. Farms are still dependent on the weather for a good harvest. And most farmland is in the Northern Hemisphere.
(maybe a lot more attention to mushroom crops?? )
JMG wrote,
The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that there’s a simple offramp to the budget deficit issue: default.
I’m guessing that this would require many essays to elucidate, but could you please say a bit about what the more immediate (first couple years) effects of such a default might be?
Thanks,
Edward
JMG,
The book in question is Mesozoic Biological Events and Ecosystems in East Asia, edited by Zheng and Chang. It is specifically the parts talking about the Carnian Pluvial Event and Oceanic Anoxic Event 1b where I found the comments about disruptions to the nitrogen, phosphorous, and iron cycles seeming to correlate with thermal maximums.
My daughters attend a high achieving high school in a midwest US university town [very liberal]. During their earth science class, they spend a few weeks learning about climate change. I was curious to hear if any of their classmates demonstrated any passion for the issue. Nobody! Perhaps the in-school learning makes climate change ‘just another subject’, like how we in the 80s learned about Russian nukes. I’m sure we didn’t have the same level of fear that our parents did when they in school.
My kids’ passions are likely tempered by my conservatism that does affect their lives: riding bikes when it’s cold, not using the a/c often, setting the house thermostat lower than ‘warm’ in winter, etc.. They don’t love any of those things!
I’ll be curious to see how the rest of their generation responds to climate changes in the future. Here’s hoping that less passion can lead to more effective actions.
This essay is a welcome dose of sanity in the climate change ‘debate’. I remember first hearing about global warming in 1989 from the English environmentalist Jonathan Porritt. I’m pretty sure that he said we’d likely be dead by now, or at least be living in swamps and eating frogs. Interesting to note that Porritt went on to become a Sir and a CBE and has various other titles, plus is a friend of and advisor to our current king . Being an early-adopter preacher of doom seems to have paid off nicely for him.
In other random news, I visited a vineyard in Norway a couple of months back. Yes, you read that right. They are popping up there, and enterprising locals are making some very nice varieties. I may be tempted to give it a go myself – rural housing and land is very cheap in Scandinavia, for some reason.
Looking forward to seeing you and others at Glastonbury. I’m down to give a talk about Norwegian ecophilosophy, and how it scored an embarrassing own goal.
By coincidence, I just reread Dogma Chapter 8 that discusses a lot about the astral light and its manifestations in human society. From that point of view, it seems you are pointing out two contradictory currents of the astral light – which actually are not opposed – they are both in their own ways trying to adhere to ‘business as usual’. To have real and meaningful change, one would need to start from the premise that both antagonists are engaged in wishful thinking.
I have sometimes wondered whether we are playing the role of an ecological frenzor at a planetary scale. The planet system, like a temperate forest, tends to hoard energy in fossil fuels, withdrawing carbon from the atmosphere and risking a death by freezing. Just like a forest fire releases the energy stored in the oak trees of a mature forest, sapient species who binge on energy seek out and release the trapped carbon back into the atmosphere to save the earth from freezing.
Hi JMG – I love your attitude, taking it in stride when people that disagree with you get bent out of shape and start lobbing nasty comments at your opinions, and probably your character. I decided to stop replying on Pinterest because it seems that whenever I disagree with someone’s political opinions there, and POLITELY ( as taught by you, thanks) reply in the comments section – I get some hateful feedback, name calling, shaming, cursing the horse I rode in on. It seems that you can’t have a polite difference of opinion with anyone, anymore.
Excellent piece of writing JMG! I’m of the school that, since it was much warmer 8k years ago, which fueled civilization, and drastically colder 300+years ago in the Maunder Minimum, it’s useless to worry about it…In the 1500s, the Thames and Seine froze over and even had buildings on them, and in France, wolf packs crossed the Seine and attacked people on the streets of Paris…These fluctuations are probably a combination of the Milankovitch cycles, variations in cosmic ray flux, and a hundred other factors too complex for us to understand…
Call me weird but reading that essay makes me feel warm and comfortable. It is interesting that while for many the opposite is true, knowing that you know very little can make you feel so relaxed. I recently read David Bohms “On Dialogue” where he talks of being able to hold opinions “in suspense” without deciding whether they are true or not as a necessary precondition for true dialogue. But that’s it isn’t it? Just to be able to allow oneself to have fascinating thoughts like “intelligent dinosaurs 90 million years ago” without feeling the urge to suppress the idea to protect ones…hmm…sense of identification. If you can hold all those fascinating ideas in suspense and let them interact which each other, maybe you get a small glimpse of reality, almost unseizable, almost unspeakable, but very real. (here’s a very close analogy to quantum physics, btw.)
I guess your hiatus is due to your forthcoming trip to England? If so, I wish you a safe journey and a very good time! England is a wonderful place in many ways and I hope you can make the most of it!
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Other Owen, that’s the value of using paleoclimatology as a source of data. It allows us to look past the day-by-day and year-by-year data turbulence, compare decade and century timescales to prehistoric models, and get a sense of where we’re going. I’ll discuss those snowy winters, and even more striking events such as the summer snowfall in Texas a few years back, as we proceed.
Pygmycory, I know. That’s one of the reasons I treasure this blog’s commentariat.
Viduraawakened, good. Yes, and that’s also a point we’ll be discussing at length — one of the things that happened with the mass marketing of climate change is that all the other forms of ecological disruption got swept under the rug. CW is a great ecotechnic method; the problem is that building them provides jobs for working class people with shovels, not topheavy tech corporations, and so it gets ignored.
Joan, the problem with Klein’s book is that it only looks at the corporate end of the crisis management model and ignores the government-bureaucracy end of it. That’s common enough — and of course on the other side of the aisle, you get people that ignore the corporate end of things and fixate on the government-bureaucracy end. Neither side wants to talk about how deeply the two are interconnected!
N, the problem with hyperinflation, from the perspective of the rich, is that it erases the value of all debt, and thus strips wealth from the rich as well as the poor. Bonds and real estate holdings aren’t going to be worth much, after all, if the dollar in which they’re denominated loses 99% of its value! Default, especially if it’s a technical default of foreign debt followed by renegotiation, gets rid of debt in a far more selective way and allows all other debt to retain its value. Thus, in a society where debt is the foundation of wealth, I expect default to be the default choice (so to speak).
Dobbs, oh, granted, the transition phase could be a bear, but we simply don’t know. It could involve hurricanes in the Arctic Ocean instead of ice storms in the Great Plains.
Edward, I can do better than that. Here are some actual defaults:
Argentina, 1982, 1989, 2001, 2005, 2014, 2020 (I have no idea why anyone loans them money)
Australia, 1931
Cyprus, 2012-2013
Germany, 1953
Mexico, 1982
Russia, 1998
Look up the consequences in history websites and you’ll get a very good idea of what the potential range of possibilities can be.
Moose, thanks for this!
ChadK, I suspect that once it became an officially approved subject for study at schools, all the potential interest trickled away in a hurry. As for action, though, at this stage all we can hope to do is adapt.
Jason, thank you for this. I’m not in the least surprised that vineyards are being planted in Norway; England was a significant wine producer in Roman times, as I recall. I’ll look forward to seeing you and hearing about the embarrassing story.
Paul, excellent. Yes, that would follow, wouldn’t it?
MCB, it’s occurred to me more than once that Gaia may have evolved us because she wanted to turn the thermostat up a few notches, and a bunch of monkeys with shovels seemed like the best way to do it. So you may be right; intelligent species may be one of the recurrent control mechanisms of the global biosphere.
Dana, autism has its advantages, and one of them is that the shrieks and bellows of the professionally offended on both sides of the aisle are just noise. I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anyone else, but it’s always worked for me. 😉
Pyrrhus, the main cause of the Little Ice Age is actually known at this point. When Old World diseases annihilated 95%+ of the population of the New World, runaway forest growth across North and South America sucked so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it had a hard impact on climate. Did you know that the Amazon rain forest basically didn’t exist in 1492? The earliest Spanish explorers described the Amazon basin as a settled land full of farms and cities; their testimony was dismissed more recently, but new technology has found the cities and shown that they were right. That many gigatons of carbon drained out of the atmosphere drove global cooling.
Nachtgurke, you’re weird. 😉 Agreed; in my case, knowing that human beings aren’t that important in the great scheme of things, and are likely just one intelligent species among many that the planet has pupped, is very comforting. Thank you for the good wishes!
Australia did have grants for home insulation, briefly, before they fell prey to politics in 2010. The Home Insulation Program led to a rush of inexperienced tradesmen laying insulation in people’s ceilings. After the third one got electrocuted by house wiring, the Opposition used the program as a symbol of government waste and incompetence (the “Pink Batts scandal”). Prime Minister Kevin Rudd quietly shelved the whole program to save his political hide.
I live in southern Appalachia and have noticed the climate changing since my youth. It definitely got hotter in the late summer, say in August. The summers went from being hot, but reasonably temperate, and now it’s basically a jungle in the summer. But, the other thing I noticed is that all of the seasons “shifted” about 3 weeks. It used to get cold the first of December, but now it gets cold around Christmas. Likewise, we could plant potatoes and cold weather crops in late February, but now we always get a good week of really cold weather in the middle of March. Good thing this is fairly predictable for our farms.
1.) I presume that quite a lot of people use “the end of the world” (or similar) as a figure of speech rather than, say, the universe literally coming to an end.
And in fact you suggest quite well just how devastating this could be to what people in rich countries over the last century came to think of as “normal life” :
This latest Ice Age we apes-with-a-tool-industry have evolved in during the last millions of years,
(not to be confused with the glacial periods that have been the norm during it – we’ve been out of one in the last ~12ky),
if it ends,
(which seems increasingly more likely),
we’ll have to deal with a climate poorly suited to us.
(Not to mention the transition will be rough.)
Even worse, the end of Earths normal “hot” climate after the PETM 56 Mya, was also (like you point out) what allowed mammals to thrive !
And during some of these hotter than normal Earths we would have had the equators too hot for mammals to survive, much less thrive in !
(It doesn’t help that on these timescales, the Sun is slowly getting appreciably hotter, which makes our situation even more precarious.)
So, forgive me if this makes me an egotistical mammal, but no, I’m not happy about the risks we are taking here !
(Other non-domesticated mammals have it very rough right now, but life in general would otherwise bounce back once the Industrial era was over.)
And sure, humans are very adaptable… but life in these hot ant/arctic jungles,
(that might end up as our only options once the hundreds-of-years transition of the end of our Ice Age is over),
is likely to be quite unpleasant, starting with those months of daytime and nighttime that these latitudes are infamous for. And I doubt civilizations will be able to rise there (YMMV on whether you consider this a good thing).
2.) The Sahara seems to have been for a while now in a ~15ky cycle between a “Green Sahara” and one that is even drier than now, seemingly mostly driven by orbital cycles. While anthropogenic climate change might mess with this cycle, its pre-existence means its a very unstable foundation to make any conclusions about causes.
3.) Recent changes around the Mediterranean seem to be quite a mess : some areas seem to be getting more droughts, others a climate that is more tropical-like : with much more rainy ‘winters’ (including on its Northern side). Some seemingly are getting both, alternating. (See above remarks about transition being rough.)
JMG,
From an economic perspective one of the first canaries in the coal mine will be the downhill skiing industry. I was an avid skier in my youth taking the bus with my friends to Mt Hood on Saturdays. I gave it up years ago because it got too expensive and much too car-centric for my evolving tastes.
But as a industry it gets a double whammy as ski seasons in North America keep getting shorter while the cost of driving a car to the resort escalates every year. At this point more and more ski resorts are closing down each season as the spread between revenue and costs gets smaller. The only ones still doing well have become little more than slope side real estate schemes, and that is coming to an end.
Recently the Ski area on Mt Bachelor in central Oregon was put up for sale by its corporate owner because it is totally located on leased land in a national forest so there is no real estate potential. A group of locals tried to raise money to buy the place and keep it local but that failed. Now it is in limbo waiting for the axe to fall, though you would be hard pressed to find anyone in Bend to admit that.
Depending on a person’s answer on anthropogenic climate change, you could probably safely guess their answers to twenty other questions on various subjects.. It is sad how tribal this has become. There are so few friends with whom I feel comfortable talking about any of these subjects anymore. with my more right leaning friends, it doesn’t matter so much because I have never been part of that tribe anyhow. With my left leaning ones it is harder because that has been my orientation all my life and I have far more friends there. I fear some feel that I have left the church or joined the enemy. I find that I talk less and less to fewer and fewer people about anything of importance. Perhaps at my age people can blame it on senility. It is sadder to me though than I often let on.
It amuses me too that right and left and liberal and conservative have pretty much ceased to have any meaning to me. It all seems to be a matter of which tribe you have chosen.
Stephen
Here’s another data point for ya, JMG. I’ve just had half a year’s precipitation in the last three days. And it still refuses to stop bloody raining. I reckon it will be August before I can get out on the paddocks to do anything – we missed the autumn pasture sowing window, so there’ll be bugger all feed for the cattle this winter. To top it all off, I can’t see the dung beetles not drowning across the whole district, so next summer will likely be a parasite nightmare.
Stop the world, I want to get off…
@ViduraAwakened, JMG – I find it highly interesting that people focus on climate change, pollution, and other unwelcome side effects of our lifestyles. The bottom line is there are 8 billion of us here, who require somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy per day in order to stay reasonably healthy and active. The end result is that an estimated one-sixth of the Earth’s biomass has been redirected toward human consumption. We have paved over some 50,000 square miles of the Earth’s surface with more land dedicated to parking lots, building rooftops, and dirt or gravel roads. And don’t get me started on lawns, the ecological deserts of the suburbs. Fully one-half of the Earth’s land area is now dedicated to human use. One-third of the Earth’s forests have been lost to agriculture and managed forests. Humans have decimated entire fisheries and brought many species to near-extinction through hunting, fishing, and habitat destruction.
For some reason, we seem to want extravagant lifestyles while pretending to have a minimal footprint. But that’s just not the case. What is dedicated to human use is largely denied to other species excepting those that serve us. We care about climate change and pollution because they affect us directly, but from the standpoint of the Earth’s ecosystem as a whole, these are hardly the only players, or even the most important ones. But those others don’t affect us quite so noticeably, so we don’t lose much sleep over them.
“Moulin is a sinkhole within a glacier or ice sheet that’s circular or somewhat circular. It’s a vertical shaft where water enters from the surface.”
I knew there was a word for a sinkhole on a glacier. All the surface water and rain goes down and comes out elsewhere. There is some concern that it lubricates the bottom of the glacier causing it to slide into the ocean faster.
@ Brendhelm and @jmg
One thing I’ve always been curious about, if there was a civilization like ours 90 million years ago, I’d imagine metal and concrete are gone, but wouldn’t there be some fossils? We have dinosaur fossils and bugs and stuff, so why not some fossils of mid-sized raccoon creatures called cyons (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-billion-years/)?
Any insights (including good books) on this would be appreciated!
thx
Jerry
And here in New Zealand my roses are putting out their last buds somewhat late.