SIX
Mother Nature
God always forgives. Man often forgives. Nature never forgives.
—Saying
We are wickedly bad at dealing with the implications of compound math.
—Jeremy Grantham, investor
On July 31, 2015, USA Today reported that in Bandar Mahshahr, a city of a hundred thousand residents in southwestern Iran that is adjacent to the Persian Gulf, the heat index soared to a staggering 163 degrees Fahrenheit:
A heat wave continued to bake the Middle East, already one of the hottest places on earth.
“That was one of the most incredible temperature observations I have ever seen, and it is one of the most extreme readings ever in the world,” AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani said in a statement.
While the temperature was “only” 115 degrees, the dew point was an unfathomable 90 degrees. The combination of heat and humidity, measured by the dew point, is what makes the heat index—or what the temperature actually feels like outside.
“A strong ridge of high pressure has persisted over the Middle East through much of July, resulting in the extreme heat wave in what many would consider one of the hottest places in the world,” Sagliani said.
Reading that story, I was reminded of a new phrase I had learned a year earlier while attending the World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia. The phrase was “black elephant.”
A “black elephant,” it was explained to me by the London-based investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, is a cross between a “black swan”—a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications—and “the elephant in the room: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”
“Currently,” Sweidan told me, “there are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there”—global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, and mass biodiversity extinction, just to name four. “When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans that no one could have predicted, but in fact they are black elephants, very visible right now”—we’re just not dealing with them with the scale and speed that are necessary.
A 163-degree heat index in Iran is, indeed, a black elephant: you can see it sitting in the room, you can feel it, and you can read about it in the newspaper. And like any black elephant, you also know that it is so far outside the norm that it has all the characteristics of a black swan—that it is the harbinger of some very big, unpredictable changes in our climate system that we may be unable to control. Yet somehow this has not penetrated the mass consciousness of Washington, D.C., and particularly the Republican Party. “During the Cold War we wrote a blank check to deter a low-probability event—a nuclear war—with high consequence,” observed Robert Litwak, a vice president of the Wilson Center and a former adviser to President Clinton on nuclear proliferation. “Now we won’t even put a nickel [tax] on gasoline to deter a high-probability event—climate change—with high consequence.”
It’s true that no single weather event can conclusively tell you anything one way or another about climate change, but what is striking about this moment is how many totally outside-the-norm weather and climate readings have been piling up. These readings scream to us that when it comes to climate change, biodiversity loss, and population growth, particularly in the most vulnerable countries, Mother Nature has also entered the second half of the chessboard, just like Moore’s law and the Market. And in many ways, she has been driven there by the multiple accelerations in technology and globalization.
When you have more and more people on the planet and then you amplify the impact that each one person can have, the “power of many” can become incredibly constructive, if harnessed to the right objectives. But left unrestrained, untempered by any kind of conservation ethic, it can be an incredibly destructive force. And that is what’s been happening. While the power of men and machines and flows has been reshaping the workplace and politics and geopolitics and the economy, and even some of our ethical choices, the power of many is driving the acceleration in Mother Nature, which is reshaping the whole biosphere, the whole global ecological system. It is altering the physical and climatic contours of Planet Earth, the only home we have.
Learning to Speak Climate
You can actually hear the changes before you see some of them. Just listen to how people speak these days, the expressions they now use. They know something is up. I call this language “climate-speak.” It’s already spoken in a lot of countries, and our kids certainly will be fluent in it. You’ve probably been speaking it yourself, but you just don’t know it.
I first learned climate-speak while writing columns about Greenland’s ice sheet, which I toured in August 2008, with Connie Hedegaard, then Denmark’s minister of climate and energy. Greenland is one of the best places to observe the effects of climate change. It’s the world’s biggest island, but it has only fifty-five thousand inhabitants and no industry, so the condition of its huge ice sheet—as well as its temperature, precipitation, and winds—is highly influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge there. Whatever happens in China or Brazil gets felt in Greenland. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change and therefore fluent in climate-speak.
It’s easy to learn. There are only four phrases you have to master.
The first is: “Just a few years ago,… but then something changed…” This is the Greenland version: Just a few years ago, you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a forty-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But then the rising winter temperatures in Greenland melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. And you can put that dogsled in a museum. According to a study published in the journal Nature in December 2015, by fifteen scientists, Greenland is losing ice at an accelerating rate. “We find that 2003–2010 mass loss not only more than doubled relative to the 1983–2003 period, but also relative to the net mass loss rate throughout the twentieth century.” NASA currently states that Greenland is losing 287 billion tons of ice per year, The Washington Post reported on December 16, 2015. When I visited in 2008 it was “only” 200 billion a year.
The second phrase is: “Wow, I’ve never seen that before…” It rained in December and January in Ilulissat, Greenland, the year I visited. This is well above the Arctic Circle! It’s not supposed to rain there in winter. Konrad Steffen, then director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, which monitors the ice, said to me on that visit: “Twenty years ago, if I had told the people of Ilulissat that it would rain at Christmas 2007, they would have just laughed at me. Today it is a reality.”
The third phrase is: “Well, usually, but now I don’t know anymore…” Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that the accumulated wisdom and intuitions of older people are not as valuable as they once were. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on August 1 didn’t show up this year …
And the last phrase is: “We haven’t seen something like that since…” Then fill in the blank with some crazy large number of years ago. Here’s Andrew Freedman writing for ClimateCentral.org on May 3, 2013, after the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reported for the first time that we had briefly hit the highest CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in human history—four hundred parts per million: “The last time there was this much carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere, modern humans didn’t exist. Megatoothed sharks prowled the oceans, the world’s seas were up to 100 feet higher than they are today, and the global average surface temperature was up to 11°F warmer than it is now.”
Or consider the paragraph from a January 7, 2016, story on the environment on Bloomberg.com: “CO2 is famously enter
ing the atmosphere about 100 times faster than it did when the planet emerged from the most recent ice age, about 12,000 years ago. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 35 percent higher than its peak for the last 800,000 years. Sea-levels are higher than they’ve been in 115,000 years, and the rise is accelerating. A century of synthetic-fertilizer production has disrupted the earth’s nitrogen cycle more dramatically than any event in 2.5 billion years” (italics added).
And sometimes the records being broken as Mother Nature enters the second half of the chessboard are so numerous and profound, government agencies tracking them seem to run out of even climate-speak to describe the black elephants they are seeing. Here’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report issued in April 2016: In “March, the average temperature for the globe was 2.20 degrees F above the 20th century average. This was not only the highest for the month of March in the 1880–2016 record, but also the highest monthly temperature departure among all months on record, surpassing the previous all-time record set last month by 0.02 degrees F. March also marked the 11th consecutive month a monthly global temperature record has been broken, and is the longest such streak in NOAA’s 137-year climate record.” But then came July 2016. It was not only the hottest July on record but, as Discover magazine noted, “since July is typically the warmest month of the year globally, that means it was the hottest of all 1,639 months on record.”
That’s all climate-speak—“surpassing,” “highest,” “record,” “broken,” “biggest,” “longest.” These numbers are staggering. They’re telling you that something big and fundamentally different is happening, something we humans have not experienced in a long, long time. Our planet is being reshaped by the rising power of many as the boundaries that have defined our biosphere for millennia are being breached or nearly breached, one by one.
Our Garden of Eden
To understand the importance of this moment from an environmental point of view we need to stop for a quick tutorial on geological epochs.
“The study of the Earth from the beginning of time to the present has been the task of geologists who attempt to unravel the events that have shaped our planet as it is today,” explains ScienceViews.com, the history of science website. That is because “the Earth carries the history of geological events in its rock layers … By assembling all these layers together, scientists have worked out what is known as the stratigraphic column or record of the various ages of rock. This record spans the 4.6 billion year record of Earth’s history. In order to simplify the huge amount of geological information, geologists have broken Earth’s history down into sections, which are called geological eras, periods, and epochs.”
The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, but the fossil record shows signs of simple life starting only about 3.8 billion years ago, and complex life forms only about 600 million years ago. Over the millennia, life forms have changed and evolved, depending on the epoch. For the last 11,500 years or so, geologists tell us, we have been in the Holocene epoch, which followed the Pleistocene epoch, also known as “the Great Ice Age.”
Why should we care? Because we will miss the Holocene if it goes, and it appears to be going.
For most of the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, its climate was not very hospitable to human beings, as it oscillated between “punishing ice ages and lush warm periods” that “locked humanity into seminomadic lifestyles,” explained Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, one of the world’s leading Earth scientists, and one of my teachers on all things climate. It’s only been in the last eleven thousand years that we have enjoyed the calm, stable climate conditions that allowed our ancestors to emerge from their Paleolithic caves and create seasonal agriculture, domesticate animals, erect cities and towns, and eventually launch the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the information technology revolution.
This period, which geologists named the Holocene, was an “almost miraculously stable and warm interglacial equilibrium, which is the only state of the planet we know for sure can support the modern world as we know it,” said Rockström, the author of Big World, Small Planet. It finally gave us the ideal balance of “forests, savannahs, coral reefs, grasslands, fish, mammals, bacteria, air quality, ice cover, temperature, fresh water availability and productive soils” on which our civilization was built.
As geological epochs go, the Holocene has been our “Garden of Eden era,” added Rockström. In this Holocene we’ve maintained just the right amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, acidity in the oceans, coral in the sea, tropical forest cover along the equator, and ice at the two poles to store water and reflect the sun’s rays, to support human life and a steadily growing world population. The balance between all of them determined our climate and ultimately our weather. And when any of these systems got somewhat out of balance, Mother Nature had an amazing capacity to absorb, buffer, and mute the worst impacts on the planet as a whole.
But that cannot go on indefinitely without limits. Mother Nature’s bumpers, buffers, and spare tires are not inexhaustible. And right now all of our climate-speak and all of those black elephants are telling us that we are stressing to the limits and beyond many of the individual systems in our system of systems that has provided human beings with the most stable and benign geological epoch we have ever known—the Holocene.
Talk about reshaping the world …
“We are threatening to push Earth out of this sweet spot,” said Rockström, and into a geological epoch that is not likely to be anywhere near as inviting and conducive for human life and civilization as the Holocene. That is what the current debate is all about.
The essential argument is that since the Industrial Revolution—and particularly since 1950—there has been a vast acceleration of human impacts on all the Earth’s key ecosystems and stabilizers that have kept us balanced in the Holocene. These impacts have become so great in recent decades, and have started to transform the operations of so many individual systems, that many scientists believe they are driving us out of the relatively benign Holocene into a new, uncharted geological epoch.
This is what I mean by “the power of many.” We as a species are now a force of, in, and on nature. That has never been said of humans before the twentieth century, but starting in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Industrial Revolution reached many new parts of the globe with full force, particularly places such as China, India, and Brazil, populations and middle classes started to expand together. In effect, many more people around the world started living an American middle-class lifestyle—cars, single-family homes, highways, air travel, high-protein diets.
Then, starting in the 2000s, the supernova created another surge of global industrial manufacturing, urbanization, telecommunications, tourism, and trade. The combination of all of these trends has begun to put pressure on each one of the Earth’s major ecosystems and its plumbing to a degree never witnessed before in the history of our planet. The result: our Garden of Eden way of life is now in danger.
The Great Acceleration
In order to establish just how profoundly that is the case, it was important for Earth scientists to try to quantify the accelerating stresses on Mother Nature, which were almost certainly pushing her out of her comfort zones and past certain normal operating boundaries. They gave these stresses a name: “the Great Acceleration.” As I noted in chapter one, the Great Acceleration graphs were first assembled in a book published in 2004, Global Change and the Earth System, by a team of scientists led by Will Steffen—an American chemist and formerly the executive director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute.
The graphs vividly illustrate the “power of many”: just how many technological, social, and environmental forces, in the hands of more and more people, were having an accelerating impact on Mother Nature’s body—the human and biophysical landscapes of the planet—from 1750 to 2000, and particularly since 1950. When Steffen and his colleagues Wendy Broadga
te, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig published an updated version of the Great Acceleration graphs—bringing them from 1750 to 2010—in the Anthropocene Review, March 2, 2015, they were even more convinced that these accelerations were pushing us past the Holocene’s planetary boundaries into an unknowable unknown.
This was how they put it:
The Great Acceleration marks the phenomenal growth of the global socio-economic system, the human part of the Earth System. It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In little over two generations—or a single lifetime—humanity (or until very recently a small fraction of it) has become a planetary-scale geological force. Hitherto human activities were insignificant compared with the biophysical Earth System, and the two could operate independently. However, it is now impossible to view one as separate from the other. The Great Acceleration trends provide a dynamic view of the emergent, planetary-scale coupling, via globalization, between the socio-economic system and the biophysical Earth System. We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability. We are now living in a no-analogue world.
Let’s repeat that: We are now in a no-analogue world. That means we’re somewhere that we’ve never been before as a human species. We have pushed all of Earth’s key systems up to and maybe beyond the safe operating boundaries that defined the Holocene. “A no-analogue world” … I am definitely going to add that to my climate-speak dictionary.
This is what the graphs look like:
Source: Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., and Ludwig, C., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” Anthropocene Review (vol. 2, no. 1), pp. 81–98. Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.
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