Climate Change

Having enjoyed the book The Future Eaters, I decided to read another by Tim Flannery: The Weather Makers. It's a terrifying read about how much damage earth has already suffered from global climate change due to human energy use. It's an object lesson in the type of collapse that Jared Diamond wrote about in Collapse -- but it's the whole world.

Flannery's native Australia (about which he said such interesting things in The Future Eaters) is on the front lines. The Great Barrier Reef was just beginning to suffer from coral bleaching when I was there in the 1990s. Birds on Heron Island were having trouble finding food when they went out to sea, and therefore having trouble feeding their young. I had no idea how much worse it had become, nor how fast the damage was accelerating.

The Weather Makers' publication date was just a couple of years ago. The author provides many specific pieces of evidence of changes, many irreversible. The fog on a mountain top somewhere in the South Pacific lifts slightly, leaving the area too dry; forest fires then wipe out the forest. Frog species are disappearing. Eskimo hunters see drowned polar bears. Some events point more definitively to climate change than others, but the story adds up inexorably. Flannery also documents how special interests and their government supporters commission studies to contradict scientific findings that might jeopardize profits. About all of this, he is very convincing.

Every day I seem to learn new clues about creeping changes in the global environment beyond what was in the book. My tree service told me that my area of Michigan was being re-zoned: that is, different plants would be classified as comfortable here. Birch trees, which once grew happily here, are now endangered by pests that couldn't survive the slightly colder winters of the past. In southern Italy, we read last summer, a new disease from Africa has emerged.

Specific facts, one by one, are always challenged: maybe there's another explanation, not climate change. An article this week in Slate Magazine summarized:

While they readily accept the associations between climate and infectious agents, scientists balk at stating exactly what a change in climate might cause. This reluctance lies both in the complexity of disease and in the nature of science, in the need to build a case incrementally, fact by fact. Asking a scientist to predict the spread of disease is like asking him or her, while standing in the midst of a tornado, to predict how the landscape will change by measuring the direction and amount of debris flying by.

However, the article continues:

What is the alternative to endless discussion? Recent editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet call for accepting, even without 100 percent certainty, the accumulating body of evidence that climate change will affect infectious diseases. ... We may not know precisely what causes what. But we don't have to sit back and wait to see what the weather will do.

Now I know much more than I bargained for, and feel much more helpless than I did before. Any attempt to envision the future in, say, a hundred years presents me with a terrible distopia. Well, maybe only genre writers of sci-fi or fantasy try to envision the future that far out anyway. I can't do it.