I'm tapping my way through a manuscript about the future of climate change here in North America.
Yes, polar bears are dying, but it's not a book about the Arctic.
With a confirmed global average of +4 degrees C warming, we now know there will be devastating consequences. The past months have given us only a taste of what's to come...
More droughts, heatwaves and megafires will sere the southwest. There will be twisters, and massive spring flooding across the south and midwest. Cities will relocate. The breadbasket and southeast will become drier than melba toast. Water shortages that now trouble 13 states will shrink America's agricultural production and carrying capacity. Heatwaves will increase until our major cities become unliveable for three months of the year.
Finally, conservative estimates of coastal flooding from rising sea levels have recently been revised. Assisted by the storm surges of north Atlantic hurricanes, from 1 to 1 1/2 meters of seawater will redraw the map of the eastern seaboard where 164 million Americans currently live.
Within the next 40 years, there will be climate migrations right here in America.
We are at a terrible turning point and I am trying to document how slow we are to recognize the danger. It's like Katrina on a national scale. I watch the media carefully for news about these things. Sometimes I see books about these subjects that provide me with fascinating new facts. At the very least they convince me I'm not crazy for looking at humanity's future on our continent with some trepidation.
Here are the best books I've found:
· Wallace Broecker's Fixing Climate
· Sing Chew's Ecological Futures
· Jared Diamond's Collapse
· Gwyne Dyer's Climate Wars
· Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers
· Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded
Antony Gidden's Politics of Climate Change
James Hoggen's Climate Cover Up (forthcoming)
· Jane Jacob's The Coming Dark Age
· Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe
· James Kunstler's The Long Emergency
· Mark Lynas' Six Degrees
· Cormac McCarthy's The Road
David McCay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air
· George Monbiot's Heat
· Joseph Romm's Hell and High Water
· Joseph Gustave Speth's Red Sky At Morning
Nicholas Stern's The Global Deal
· Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies
· Mike Tidwell's Ravaging Tide
· Andrew Weaver's Keeping Our Cool
· Alan Weisman's The World Without Us
· Chris Wood's Dry Spring
Okay.
Usually I learn something from any new book, and in this way -piece by tiny piece-- I deepen my understanding of the near future. When I noticed a new book called The Next 100 Years: A Forecast For the 21st Century I imagined I might learn quite a bit. For one thing, I thought its author, George Friedman, might be connected to New York Times' columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, a favorite writer whose excellent book Hot, Flat and Crowded is included above.
That was my first disappointment.
The Next 100 Years is proof that -despite what my agent* says-- there's nothing special about writing a book. Anyone can publish anything and still ask $25.95 for it. The Next 100 Years is a dark fantasy about America's future presented as non-fiction, but since it eschews the annoying inconveniences of research and documented sources, it might just as easily be classed as apocalyptic fiction with Cormac McCarthy's The Road except that Mr. McCarthy's book is beautifully written.
Throughout The Next 100 Years there isn't a single mention of 'climate', 'climate change' or 'global warming'. Nonetheless predictions of wars with many of America's current allies -- Mexico, Turkey, Poland and Japan -- are confidently featured by this latter day Nostradamus from Texas who -- without too much effort -- might have noticed that his home state is currently troubled by several climate change extremities including massive spring floods, increasing desertification, hurricane strikes and greatly reduced freshwater levels.
Well, 'nature abhors a moron' as H. L. Mencken once wrote. I can't think of anything bad enough to say about the Next 100 Years except don't waste your money (or that of your local library) on it. I'm old-fashioned, I guess. I still believe that non-fiction writers have a duty to use whatever rostrum their writing affords to inform readers responsibly. Good writers are required to do a bit of research: so, this one's on me...
If you want to know the real shape of North America's future and of the environment's impact on the domestic security of the United States, download a .pdf document called The Age of Consquences from the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) website.
This free ebook describes three scenarios -- mild, middling, extreme -- that outline the potential impacts of climate change in U.S.
Unfortunately, since we're already reached +4°C of warming, the 'mild' scenario is no longer relevant: consequently you only have to read 'middling' and 'extreme' scenarios. It's a mercifully short document about what we're really facing in the next 100 years. And, like George Friedman's execrable book, the outlook is not good.
Not good at all.
* Chris Bucci; Anne McDermid and Associates.
"Autumn temperatures are at a record 5º C above normal, due to the major loss of sea ice in recent years which allows more solar heating of the ocean. Winter and springtime temperatures remain relatively warm over the entire Arctic, in contrast to the 20th century and consistent with an emerging global warming influence."
"The year 2007 was the warmest on record for the Arctic, continuing a general, Arctic-wide warming trend that began in the mid-1960s (Fig. A1)."
"The summers of 2005 through 2007 all ended with extensive areas of open water (see sea ice section). This allowed extra heat to be absorbed by the ocean from solar radiation. As a result ice freeze-up occurred later than usual in these years. Surface air temperature (SAT) remained high into the following autumns, with warm anomalies above an unprecedented +5° C during October and November across the central Arctic "
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/atmosphere.html
The average temperature for April 2009, for the contiguous U.S., was lower than the average for the entire 20th Century, and and lower than the average for the period 1895 to 2009, per the NCDC data.
According to NASA, "Except for the relatively cool Pacific Ocean, most of the world was either near normal or unusually warm in 2008. The temperature in the United States in 2008 was not much different than the 1951-1980 mean, which makes 2008 cooler than all of the previous years this decade. As shown by the right side of Fig. 3, most of the United States averaged between 0.5 and 1°C warmer than the long-term mean during 2001-2007. "
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
According to NCDC, "About 28 percent of the contiguous U.S. fell in the moderate to extreme drought categories (based on the Palmer Drought Index) at the end of June 2008."
"Drought expanded in the West during June, with USDM statistics showing moderate to extreme drought growing to 35% of the region by the end of the month compared to 26% a month ago. California had the fourth driest June and driest March-June in the 1895-2008 record.."
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/jun/us-drought.html
Chris Wood (whose book is listed alphabetically and last in the good reads above) told me about an article in New Scientist from Feb 25th of this year by Gaia Vince called
"how to survive the coming century".
It describes +4degrees of warming and has an interactive map that shows desertification encroaching on the American Southwest.
Ms Vince is a former editor of 'Nature'. Her excellent piece can be retrieved online here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971.700-how-to-survive-the-coming-century.html?page=1
Concerning the destruction of arctic ice, a good, recent news item called 'Global Warming is Especially Evident in the Arctic' appears here:
http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/opinion-global-warming-is-especially-evident-in-the-arctic
Of course, information about the break-up of the Wilkin's Ice Shelf in the Antartic is very recent news and has been covered by most print media on and after April 29th...
The cryosphere is crumbling before our eyes. We can achieve temporary relief, of course, by squeezing them tightly shut, but for those of us who have children, this is not a viable option.
Did you spend years selflessly raising kids only to realize how bad their future will be when you're gone? --That is a scary one.
David Foster Wallace --may he rest in peace-- has a beautiful new --but very small-- book about bitterness called
"THIS IS WATER".
You can buy it (and it will make a terrific gift) OR you can read the entire (very short) text here, online:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
Thank you for surfing in.
“In The Big Thaw Ed Struzik describes at first hand the most alarming environmental crisis of our times. It's a land that Struzik is passionate about, and he writes of its frozen beauty with an elegance of prose not seen since Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams.”
Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers
Sorry for hijacking your blog...
There was, as you say, more or less 1 degree of warming during the past century.
The poles are heating more quickly than the rest of the earth. Currently, the Barents Sea isexperiencing plus 4 degrees Celsius of warming annually (Not kidding!) Described here:
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/yournews/38741
New work from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research now projects the absolute minimum amount of warming possible in the coming century at +4 degrees Celsius, if we begin cutting carbon emission today. This puts to rest the debate over whether or not we can limit warming to +2 degrees Celsius if we begin cutting emission by 2020.
This disturbing paper, by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and is available online here:
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/yournews/38741
George Monbiot --who (enviably) has a full-time researcher to keep these figures straight for him-- published an account of the implications of the Tyndall Center's research in the Guardian on March 17th. It is available here:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/17/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy/
One of the main results of this rapid warming will be the disappearance of year round ice cover by 2013 NOT by 2030 as was previously predicted.
Thank you for writing in. Please continue to tell me if and when I screw up.
From my perspective, there's nothing wrong with telling the world you're working on something exciting and doing a good job of it when that is what is happening in your life.
It's a very unCanadian attitude, of course, but that's why I write for a North American audience through HuffPo, an outstanding American blog site.
In this imperfect world there are no points for humility...best to take a risk and say that you believe strongly in something you're quite proud of.
All the best.