We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too
— Jay Famiglietti
For many years now I have come across the same theme over and over again — Climate change: the poor will suffer most. (The Guardian, March 30, 2014).
... But [the UN report found that] those who did the least to cause climate change would be the first in the line of fire: the poor and the weak, and communities that were subjected to discrimination, the report found.
Scientists went to great lengths in the report to single out people and communities who would be most at risk of climate change, with detailed descriptions of locations and demographics.
"People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change," it said.
I always laugh when I read this kind of nonsense, for a couple of reasons. First, when did the poor not suffer the most in this best of all possible worlds? And second, this is a delusional story that rich people, usually well-off, liberal white people, like to tell themselves for lots of reasons we need not get into here.
Even The Guardian story I quoted above points out that climate change is a global phenomenon, so pretty much everybody on Earth is going to affected by it eventually. And since we are still in the early stages of this slow-moving catastrophe—slow on the human time scale—you never know who is going to take it up the wazoo or when. In short, "local" effects are almost wholly unpredictable at this early stage, excepting things like drowning island nations or displaced denizens of the Arctic.
Which brings me to California and its record-breaking drought. Talk about rich people taking it in the shorts! By itself, California is the 9th largest economy on Earth (or was, in 2012). This is some very bad luck in the specific sense outlined above, although it is not a matter of luck in the larger sense that humans are altering the Earth's climate, among other things, which is matter of destiny, or the predictable fate of our species.
And in that larger sense, where luck is not involved, it seems clear that natural drought tendencies in California have been very much exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change, which has made this the worst drought in the last 1200 years (graph below). I could talk about the evidence supporting that statement, but I'll skip it today. You can read what I know here, here, and here (and watch the excellent Stanford video at the end). Thus you will learn about the "ridiculously resilient ridge" sitting over the northeastern Pacific Ocean, which has prevented California from getting its normal winter rain and snow for some years now.
Historical drought coverage (%) in the western United States
And bear in mind that California still needs a "ridiculous" amount of rain to end its drought. And that in the estimate of NASA's Jay Famiglietti, The Golden State has about one year of reservoir water left. The water picture is more complicated than that because there is still lots of groundwater to deplete. Much has been made of the fact that about 80% of California's water usage is down to Big Agriculture in the Central Valley, where farmers are rapidly depleting the aquifers underlying it. In some places, the land is sinking because so much ground water has been withdrawn.
The drought in California is a catastrophe, and there are always many aspects to disaster on such epic scale. But all the particulars boil down to this: there is a collision between Nature and Humans, and Humans will not emerge unscathed in this ongoing Train Wreck. Nature will always win, intentional geo-engineering in the future be damned.
We find the meaning of the California drought in all of the above, and the lackadaisical human response to it. And if you think about it, what are Humans supposed to do about it? It stopped raining, etc. Humans think Nature is part of the Human World, but the truth is that Humans are part of Nature's World, and are thus subject to Nature's (now human-altered) whims. And that indisputable truth applies to rich people, too, which is apparently news to them.
Which brings me to Dave Roberts, an environmental writer at Grist. In a very interesting article called Hope & Fellowship which appears on the Ecological Buddhism website, Roberts struggles mightily with the meaning of it all. I won't quote the whole thing, although I could, so I urge you to read it yourself.
It’s difficult to see a way out of this [climate] dilemma that doesn’t involve considerable suffering. Limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, the widely agreed-upon threshold beyond which climate impacts are expected to become severe and irreversible, is likely off the table. Widespread adaptive measures are slow in coming, far more expensive than mitigation would have been, and subject to enormous inequality of impact based on wealth and class.
So, in this grim situation, do I have hope? It’s complicated.
It is complicated, for Roberts. Here is one source of his hopes.
Though it may seem odd, I find comfort in chaos theory. For all our sophistication, we remain terribly inept at the simple task of predicting what will happen more than a few years out. All our models fail. That means those who predict a steady extension of the status quo will be wrong, too.
The outcome of the climate crisis depends not just on physical forces but on human beings, complex economic, social, and technological systems, and complex systems are nonlinear. We forget this; our instinct is to think the future will look like the recent past, only more so. We don’t anticipate the lateral moves, the lurches, the phase shifts. Because of this, the Very Serious thing to do is always to predict that things will not substantially change. If you say, “There will be a series of brilliant innovations that make clean energy cheap,” or, “There will be a sea change in public opinion on climate,” or, “Young people will take over and revive politics,” you sound like a hippie dreamer. Those aspirations are a matter of faith, a triumph of hope over experience.
And yet: things change! History unfolds along the lines of what Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium.” Things can appear stable for years and years while tensions gather beneath the surface, hairline fractures develop, and the whole system becomes highly sensitive to small perturbations. (The butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane, etc.)
We do not know what those perturbations will be or when they will emerge, but we know from history that Don Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” are inevitable. The North American natural gas boom, the precipitous decline in solar PV prices, the financial crisis — none were widely predicted. And there will be more like them.
Will unexpected, rapid changes in coming decades be good or bad, positive or negative? That depends on millions of individual choices made in the interim. Some of those choices, if they happen at just the right moment, could be just the perturbations that spark cascading changes in social, economic, or technological systems. Some of those choices, in other words, will be incredibly significant.
And what does all this really amount to? Roberts is saying maybe we'll get lucky!
That is Roberts' best and only consolation. He also concludes that we need to find each other now more than ever (his "fellowship" = harmonizing).
But speaking of The Golden State, where some humans have been "living it up" for a long time now, it seems the climate dice came up snake-eyes. Sorry, Mr. Roberts, we didn't get lucky.
And that's the meaning in the smaller "early stages" sense of the California drought. In the larger sense, where destiny is concerned, The Eagles said it best in their immortal tune Hotel California.
Mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice
And she said "we are all just prisoners here of our own device...
Last thing I remember, I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man, "we are programmed to receive.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!"
The problem is really very simple to understand. We have an entire way of life built on extracting using nature's resources and sinks at rates far higher than it can sustain for long. It's not just fossil fuel use, although if we took that away we wouldn't have 99.9% of the stuff around us. It's also water, exploitation of other species, land use, and so on.
Our choices are: stop doing so, or don't stop doing so and wait for the convergence of environmental and economic issues that will force us to stop.
If we stop doing so on our own voluntarily, we will need to be prepared to face a world with much less material wealth, but as has been pointed out here, this is not an option for us. At least, few to no one seriously discusses it. And unfortunately, we are individuals who compete against each other for status, and groups of individuals who compete against other groups, and voluntarily choosing less isn't a winning formula in that competition.
We also have scores of professional liars usually called economists who tell us we can invent our way out of it and maintain that wealth, and most desperately want to believe it.
Additionally, ignoring resource peaks and assuming other environmental issues don't become unbearable before 2050, we're only at the midway point at best for really ramping up our extraction and pollution abilities. The OECD comprises about 1/6th of the world's population, and the other 5/6ths want to be like us.
I read Roberts's article. He's basically asking for faith and interpersonal communion. It's a religious response in the face of the unthinkable. He doesn't want to think about the worst, so he's inventing a way for himself not to think about it. There's also a lot of hero narrative in there, too. We all tell ourselves stories about how we're the noblest of all. A feature I've seen a lot lately is about how faith and hope are a more noble personal trait than despair and its twin, facing reality.
The world summits on climate change should really have an archway at the entrance with the words above it, "MAYBE WE'LL GET LUCKY!", because that's what everyone is thinking. Instead of facing our problem squarely and boldly, we ignore the first option of abandoning (not just tweaking) the practices that are leading us towards the downslope of the rollercoaster. We're hoping there will be some miracle that bends the downslope up. We tell ourselves that that hope is noble, even though it will only ensure we maintain the practices that are the root cause of our worries.
Posted by: Jim | 03/21/2015 at 01:15 PM