Guest post: There is no “normal” to stabilize to
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on We left “normal” behind years ago.
We left “normal” behind years ago, and the worst we have ever seen so far may soon be as good as it ever gets.
To quote a Bruce Cockburn song, “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”*
I’m no climatologist, but my understanding is that one of the effects of anthropogenic climate change is instability. So things won’t just change or shift, they’ll keep changing and shifting. So long as we keep pumping out more CO2, there is no “normal” to stabilize to. After Titanic struck the iceberg, it did not reach its “new normal” until it hit the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Right now, we’re just starting to go down by the bow, the decks are no longer quite level. This is the point where the analogy breaks down**, because there are no lifeboats, there is nowhere else to go and nobody else to save us. We’re committed to the planet we’re on, and we don’t know how things will end up (though we know it’s unlikely to be anywhere good), because we have yet to stop breaking it. It would be great if we could do that before we reach the bottom. Not choosing to act is itself an action. The longer we delay, the less freedom to act we have, the less of a difference our choices can make, and the less say we will have in where we end up. Earth will do what it’s going to do; we’re along for the ride, wherever that takes us.
[Updated to add]
If there’s one thing that agriculture absolutely depends upon, it’s reliable growing conditions, with the required, just right, mama-bear conditions for whatever crops farmers are growing. Without some degree of predictability, how would they even know what to plant? What worked last year may not work this year. How many growers can survive more than a few failed seasons in a row? There’s not a lot of margin for error when you’re trying to keep eight billion humans alive. It won’t be long before there will be a lot of people who won’t know where their next meal is coming from because there’s not as much being succesfully grown.
So many of the impacts of what we’ve done are bad. Sea level rise? Bad; millions of people displaced. Floods? Droughts? Also bad. Scorching heatwaves that stop being waves and just stay? Hellish. All of these things have direct, immediate impacts on the populations that are subjected to them. But climate instability that results in decreases in food production has an impact that can reach even those who don’t live on a coastline, who escape too much or too little rain, and record temperatures. Wherever we are, we have to eat. Most urban areas rely on outside sources of food. If food becomes precarious for the people growing the food that cities depend upon, they might not be willing to sell it if they need it themselves. Cities, being more populous and wealthier, might just decide to take it. That might work. Once. Then who will grow their food?
* It’s been a while since I’ve listened to it, but this song was written forty years ago! It could have been written yesterday.
**A better analogy would have been a ship being holed by those onboard rather than hitting an iceberg, but apart from scuttling in wartime, most ships are not deliberately destroyed by those sailing in them.
Something I’d meant to mention before hitting “Submit Comment” was how disruptive this climate instability is for agriculture. If there’s one thing that agriculture absolutely depends upon, it’s reliable growing conditions, with the required, just right, mama-bear conditions for whatever crops farmers are growing. Without some degree of predictability, how would they even know what to plant? What worked last year may not work this year. How many growers can survive more than a few failed seasons in a row? There’s not a lot of margin for error when you’re trying to keep eight million humans alive. It won’t be long before there will be a lot of people who won’t know where their next meal is coming from because there’s not as much being succesfully grown.
So many of the impacts of what we’ve done are bad. Sea level rise? Bad; millions of people displaced. Floods? Droughts? Also bad. Scorching heatwaves that stop being waves and just stay? Hellish. All of these things have direct, immediate impacts on the populations that are subjected to them. But climate instability that results in decreases in food production has an impact that can reach even those who don’t live on a coastline, who escape too much or too little rain, and record temperatures. Wherever we are, we have to eat. Most urban areas rely on outside sources of food. If food becomes precarious for the people growing the food that cities depend upon, they might not be willing to sell it if they need it themselves. Cities, being more populous and wealthier, might just decide to take it. That might work. Once. Then who will grow their food?
With a very huge very complex system changing rapidly, instability pretty much guaranteed. I’ve forgotten much of what I learned about complex systems waaayyyy back in my undergraduate days. But that’s one of the things I remember.
Back around 1992 or 1993, I saw a graph (probably in the Boston Globe) of global temperature going back in geological time. (Data like this comes from things like isotope ratios in rock cores.) For most of that time, the temperature was all over the place: constant wild and apparently random variation. About 10,000 years ago, it leveled out to the 20C average that we know today.
Looking at the graph, it was clear that this plateau is an historical anomaly, with no reason to think that it will continue for any length of time, and no reason to think that it will ever return should we leave it.
I couldn’t help but notice that the 20C plateau began shortly before agriculture started. Plausibly, civilization exists today because 10,000 years ago the temperature stabilized long enough for humans to invent agriculture.
There’s not a lot of margin for error when you’re trying to keep eight million humans alive.
Eight million? What about the other 8 billion people?
They should have thought of that before.
So what happens when lots of humans die? Do you reach some point of equilibrium where there aren’t enough people putting that extra carbon in to the air?
There’s a hypothesis that human activity has postponed the end of the current interglacial period, and that this effect coincides with the beginnings of agriculture.
Ooops. I meant billion!