We’re making our home into a gallowsDuring the Ice Ages, measured over hundreds of thousands of years, the levels of CO2 fluctuated in our atmosphere from 170-280 parts per million. In 2005, the warmest year on record at the time, the Earth’s CO2 levels stood at 370. This represented the top of an anomalous near vertical line on the graph, and since 2005, this figure has continued to increase at an alarming rate.
If the ten warmest years on record mean one thing it is this: the next ten years will also be the ten warmest, with each subsequent year likely to be somewhat warmer than the last. The alarm bells begin to chime when we consider the possibility of a second decade of continuous increases in global warming, possibly even a third and fourth and fifth. In such a scenario, the weather will be an adversary capable of substantially altering the number and quality of the human population around the planet.
One factor provides a measure – albeit an indirect one – of the impact of climate change. This is through the impact of food prices. Crops have become more difficult to sustain. Large numbers of livestock and poultry are kept alive at greater cost, and with greater and greater difficulty. And right now, we’re at the beginning of an inflationary trend (based on food prices) not just in your country, but throughout the world. We’re also seeing the prices of many other inputs rising: from commodities to energy. Everything is going to be more expensive in the future, with climate change driving many of our costs. We will experience what is called a supply crunch in many aspects of our lives. The reason for this is simple: too many people, too many users straining the capacity of a finite system.
When that system breaks, we will see all our innovative efficiencies bounce back as gross inefficiencies. We experience this whenever our car breaks down, or our phone doesn’t work, or the lights go out. Our level of helplessness can be quite chronic. And so the casualties will be untold numbers of those users that caused the systemic failure. The crash will be similar to the conventional use of the word to describe motor vehicle accidents and the sudden failure of a computer program to respond. It will manifest essentially as a sudden and unexpected Disconnect – but from major systems, from food, to energy, to money.
A crash implies the immediate ceasing of a system to function. Few, if any people, anticipate an abrupt change, not for the climate, or for a stock market slaughter, or anything else. But then few people even ponder the world beyond the pursuit of a job, a salary, or the next entertainment. Our economies are based to a large extent on stock markets, but stock markets – while somewhat delusional and disconnected from actual value – are tethered to some bottom line realities, even if it is just sentiment. When the market has an epiphany about the world, when it realizes what is already self-evident, the bubble that is sustainable growth will simply burst: massive quantities of wealth will be wiped out, as is the natural order of things, and will portend similar systemic crashes in other areas.
It is a terrible realization to wake up in the morning and discover that the vague impulses of disaster flitting through one’s brain are not a dream. That yesterday’s reality is real for today, and will remain with us for the rest of our lives.
But we do not awaken in the morning, wherever we are in the world, wary of a second 9/11, wary that every Northern Hemisphere summer may bring about the destruction of another major city by a Category 5 Storm. We have absorbed the horrors of AIDS, the threat of H5N1, and the symptoms of already chronic climate change, and continued about our daily business. We have breakfast and go out to our jobs as though we expect the world we live in to be there – a pleasant home for human beings – for the next 10 years. If you think about it, you probably expect the planet to sustain us at least for the course of your lifetime. You believe you will see your children going to school, and graduating. Do you know that that is no longer a certainty we can take for granted.
If we consider chronic climate change, and look at what Al Gore touched upon in his excellent presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, we have to acknowledge that we are already very very deep, and very very far, into unchartered territory. CO2 levels are currently far beyond record levels. There’s no surprise there, but the record goes further than 10 000 years, beyond the last ice age and the ice age before that, beyond 100 000 years ago, beyond 400 000 years ago. As far back as we can see based on ice core samples, we are not merely double these extreme levels, but treble them, and if we could continue the way we are to 2050 we would see CO2 levels ascend vertically on a graph to around 5 times the highest levels ever recorded.
From far away the graph resembles the letter T lying on its head, with the right hand side chopped away. The average is maintained, is stable, for hundreds of thousands of years, but when we reach our time, and our generation, this millennium, the spike breaks away from the average and rockets into a vertical ascent. It is not irrational to look at such a graph that is collated from a timeline of data that is at least 50 000 times longer than the lifecycle of that creature –the creature responsible for these chronic changes – (a human being), and be humbled, reduced and even frightened by what we have achieved. We are now experiencing the rapid adjustment of the Earth’s temperature to record CO2 levels, and year after year the averages are going up, new records are set, so that each year becomes the warmest on record. If one extrapolates that data, it should be already obvious that conditions will continue on their trend through 2008, 2009, 2010… What can we expect the weather to be like 10 years from now, in 2017, or five years after that, in 2022?
In just these 3 years that lie ahead of us, we need to brace ourselves for extreme natural events. We cannot predict what they will be, but we can be sure they will be catastrophic. We know to expect more powerful city destroying hurricanes all over the world. We know we can expect more of the kind of heat waves and floods we have seen, and pestilences and insect plagues in our immediate future. And we know while the world population climbs towards 7 billion, food shortages and water scarcity will begin to manifest in a major way. Food shortages will become normal in our lifetime. But all of this will be exacerbated by the reversal of a condition that has allowed us to live so comfortably for little more than a 100 years. It has been in the era of cheap oil that we have been able to redistribute so much CO2 into the atmosphere. In fact, it is courtesy of oil and other fossil fuels that took millions of years to create, that man was able to unbind that energy in just 2 generations. Our efficiency at doing so has jolted our atmosphere, and we have yet to see what electric responses from the sky are in store for us. But it is abundantly clear that a Reckoning is imminent – the response of the world to our burning already half of an entire planet’s fossil fuels – resources of carbon that took millennia of living creatures on Earth to deposit - in a blink of geological time, we have sparked these liquid-petrified forests into smoke. The anomaly that allowed this to happen on such a grand scale is us, and many of us holding the keys to machines that burn barrels of the stuff every single day.
Mankind has maintained a fairly stable population on the planet for a long period, and just as the graph for human population spikes upward in the last 200 years to reach a figure several times the average (from less than 1 to around 6 billion), so CO2 has followed the same trend, as each human being has become a user of resources, but also a fire starter, a user and converter whose life is based on accelerating this process of conversion – of sun stored energy fired into the atmosphere as a warm gas.
In plain language then, if the summertime in conditions in countries as far apart as South Africa and South Korea are equally sweltering, and frankly, unbearable, what can we expect year upon year upon year? The reason I ask these questions is because I found myself in both these countries thinking: “If it gets just a few degrees warmer than this, people are going to start dying here.”
Naturally, those devices we might want to rely on to defend ourselves against the weather (air conditioners for summer, any heating devices for winter) simply produce additional heat, and consume additional energy resources when we simply cannot afford to be consuming any more than we are.
Can we realistically imagine the Earth as a place for our children 10 years from now? No. Climate change is one argument, but the use of nuclear weapons in our lifetimes is virtually certain. The odds favour the likelihood of a nuclear event in the not too distant future. Now it becomes clear the level of insanity that has taken over our species. When people everywhere should be making radical changes to their lives, in fact they are not. In the back of our minds we are aware of side issues, but perhaps we put it in a box marked ‘To Do’, but we continue ‘To Do Something Else’ in the moments we have available to ourselves. Perhaps we feel that nuclear weapons don’t exist in the real world, only in Hollywood movies, and we’ll always have a James Bond to save us at the last minute. No.
If you are reading this, you should be aware that just weather conditions alone will become very uncomfortable for you and those around you in your lifetime. It has already started, and 2008 will see hotter summers wherever you are, hotter than we’ll see this year, and 2009 will be even hotter still. We’ll report on the changes happening, rather as commentators report on a football match. Our dismay and discomfort will turn to horror. We can do an analysis after various spectacular moves, having seen breathtaking demos of this planet’s atmospheric power. We can make predictions, but essentially, we will be bracing ourselves for a score. In the same way that we score the number of hurricanes in a year, or note record temperatures or levels of rainfall, so we will get into the habit of watching a scorecard.
What we will experience though is no half time whistle, no end time whistle, in fact no reprieve at all. Probably, conditions will be worsening even into third and fourth and fifth generations. If you imagine the world will be something like it is today, wake up. The world will be entirely altered – ice caps will have disappeared, ski-resorts will be abandoned on mountains, massive relocations will have taken place. And dislocated crowds, unused to inconvenience, will test the tolerance of local communities, as we saw with the exculpated residents of New Orleans. It is when this dislocation leads to competition of limited resources – and weather chaos will eventually cause massive crop failures – that wars will erupt.
In the near future we will experience such a chaos of converging catastrophe that having a war – humans fighting humans – will be particularly ludicrous. Also, in our lifetimes, we will see the end of religion: Either a savior of the world will pluck the saved in a rapture of souls, or gravity will continue to exert itself on all people equally (whatever they believe), and we will all remain here to deal with the consequences of our actions. But we will see religion finally tested on the rock and fire of a furious planet and our own desire to live will be weathered and broken and beaten back. A fraction of the people alive today will survive, and in conditions of spiraling austerity.
We are on a road, whether we like it or not, to the new home we have fashioned for ourselves.
It is completely rational to suggest that there is nothing people can do now; irrevocable damage has already been perpetrated on the planet’s weather systems. These still need to be completely borne out. So we have these options:
Either party like there is no tomorrow, or change your life completely, and immediately.
Choosing the latter will mean quitting your job for something more meaningful and practical, not having children, no longer buying or driving in cars (or flying), eating a fraction of meat (based on human dental and digestive design) and no longer participating in the buying or building of houses. What is insanity is to continue living the way we do, as though we anticipate another 5 years of the same, perhaps 10, or even 20. It’s not going to happen.
We will soon see the global weather anomaly turning to calamity, and then:
The End of Entertainment. Nuclear War. The End of Religion. There will be hunger and starvation, and fire in the sky. The sun will burn the Earth, then flood it, then freeze it in a combination that will test the resilience of all living things to breaking (extinction) point.
In the trilogy the Lord of the Rings, darkness had to be faced. But they had the assurance at least that they could face their fate in a world that had, at least, reasonably fair weather. We won’t have that. Against the backdrop of ever worsening weather chaos, floods, droughts and storms, we will have to find a way to live in the world. Our lives, already unstable, from here on out will become even more unbalanced. What remains is a slippery road and at the end of it a home underwater with its roof on fire. And somewhere on that road we will have to find the ring. We’ll need to cast the ring into Mount Doom; it is the ring that binds us all. A ring of voracious greed. Before that step though, we will reap the whirlwind; we will be consumed as a natural balancing consequence of our mad consumption, and the men of the world will be chopped down like wheat.
And tomorrow morning, whether we do something or nothing, the same slippery road to the sunken, burning house, will beckon once again. The light over our road is fading. And yet, it is a journey we must take. The more we delay taking the road to a home, and a home worth having, the fewer choices we will have at the end of the day.
