The Gathering Apocalypse---
As the weather gradually unmoors from its normal patterns, at some
point we'll have no choice but to realize that global warming is upon us.
by Eugene Linden
I've written a good deal about global warming over the years, but like
most people, I still have a hard time envisioning how we will know when the
apocalypse arrives. Nobody will ring a bell to announce that a
climate-change event has begun, and it's easy to ignore the signals that
climate is changing. After all, we've always had extreme weather, and it's
possible that what signifies the point of no return will not be in the realm
of weather anyway but rather a derivative effect such as a financial crisis
or crop failure.
That's not to say that some future dramatic event such as the
Greenland ice sheet sliding into the ocean won't happen, but it's more
likely that global warming will creep up on us as the weather gradually
unmoors from its normal patterns. Single events will be explained away. But
at some point, the frequency, severity and ubiquity of the unusual weather
will produce a sense of foreboding, a sense that something is happening
beyond our control.
What with killer heat waves, killer hurricanes and killer droughts,
it's arguable that we've already passed that point. Indeed, I had that
feeling of foreboding in the last week of June, as Washington, D.C.,
gradually surrendered ground and the routines of daily life to incessant
rain: Cars floated down ordinarily meek Rock Creek, government buildings
flooded, the Metro was disrupted and roads were closed. You may have had the
same feeling last week as the power dimmed and temperatures surged in
Southern California and beyond.
That said, the real, more insidious scenario might be that climate
change will intrude on our lives like an omnipresent and ever more
confiscatory taxman.
Where they can, insurers and banks will pass weather risks to
individuals and the government, making the costs of daily life more
expensive. In some areas, housing might become uninsurable and unsalable,
which in turn could cause a financial crisis. Municipal budgets and
government safety nets will gradually succumb to the ever-increasing burden
imposed by windstorms, floods, droughts and other weather extremes.
Infectious diseases will thrive. The middle class will slowly find its
savings and creature comforts stripped away, and the ordinary details of
living, such as eating fresh vegetables and traveling to see family and
friends, will become more expensive and uncertain. At some point it will
dawn on us that the weather is making us poorer and sicker.
Whether we are in Act 2 or Act 4 of a five-act climate drama, we are
not the first to live out this play. At some point, for instance, the Moche
elders, who lived in Peru 1,400 years ago, must have begun to wonder whether
torrential El Niño-related rains were going to spell the doom of their
civilization. Sometime during a 10-year stretch of intensely cold winters
and short, cool summers, the Norse living in Greenland in A.D. 1350 must
have begun to feel a sense of dread. In fact, that period was one harbinger
of the Little Ice Age, which persisted for several hundred years.
Now it's our turn. Like fugitives who must worry about every knock on
the door, we can no longer dismiss events such as the late June rains and
the July heat wave as just another instance of wacky weather. There's a
distinct difference, though, between us and the Moche and the Norse, not to
mention the Mayans, the Anasazi, the Akkadians and other players in previous
episodes of climate chaos. All of them were victims of natural cycles; the
evidence suggests that we wrote the script for this latest episode of
climate roulette.
It's easy to be condescending about past civilizations. They didn't
have the science and technology that have enabled us to understand how
climate works or to determine the role of climate in the collapse of their
cultures in South America, the American Southwest and the Middle East. If
only they knew what we now know about climate, maybe they would have adapted
and survived.
Then again, maybe not. We do know what we know, and still we do
nothing. That's going to have future historians scratching their heads.
Eugene Linden, the author of "The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather
and the Destruction of Civilizations," wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
© 2006 The Star-Tribune
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I would suppose Global Warming will be the least of our worries if Israel or
Goy George fire Nukes on Beirut or Syria.
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