Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
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If you find a stout enough man, you can give him a pretty hefty shove and not much happens (unless, with some justification, he gets mad). When the global warming era began, we did not know how stout the planet was—it was possible that its systems would tolerate a lot of pushing without much change. The earth seems, after all, like a robust place: its ice sheets are miles thick, its oceans miles deep. But the lesson of the last thirty years is unequivocal: the planet was actually finely balanced, and the shove we’ve given it has knocked it very much askew. Let’s look for a long minute at what has happened so far, remembering always that we’re still in the early stages of global warming and that things will proceed inevitably from worse to worse yet and then keep on going.
Consider something fairly simple: the planet’s hydrology, the way water moves around the earth. Water evaporates off the surface of the earth and the ocean, and then falls as rain and snow, an endless pump for keeping the earth’s essential fluid in constant motion. But if you increase the amount of heat (of energy) in the system, it’s like turning the dial on that machine to the right: it does more work. Evaporation increases when the temperature rises, and hence arid places grow drier. We call this phenomenon drought, and now we see it everywhere. Cape Town, among the most beautiful cities on earth, spent 2018 flirting with going completely dry. Its four million residents were rationed twenty-three gallons per person per day, enough for a shower, as long as you didn’t want to take a drink or flush the toilet. Why? Because of a three-year drought that scientists said, based on past history, should be expected about once a millennium.14 But of course the phrase “based on past history” no longer makes sense, because that history took place on what was essentially a different planet with a different atmospheric chemistry.
That’s why there are versions of the Cape Town story on every continent. A couple of years earlier it was São Paulo, home to twenty million Brazilians, that was turning off the taps. Bangalore may be the highest-tech city in the developing world, with nearly two million IT professionals, but it’s also faced drought every year since 2012.15 The Po River Valley is Italy’s agricultural heartland, supplying 35 percent of its crops, but its average temperature is almost four degrees Fahrenheit higher than it was in 1960, and its rainfall has fallen by a fifth. So, by the summer of 2017, an enormous drought forced mayors and governors there to start rationing water. “The Po Plain used to be extraordinarily water-rich, and hence we got used to a situation where water has always been available,” said one local official.16 Most of Italy was affected—Rome shut off its network of public drinking fountains, the largest in the world, and the Vatican turned off the water in the Baroque fountains of St. Peter’s Square. But none of it was enough—by September, the source of the Po, on Monviso, in the Cottian Alps, was dry.17 Petrarch talked about the source of the Po, and so did Chaucer and Dante. But they lived on a planet with 40 percent less carbon dioxide.
As land dries out, it often burns. Humans have converted more and more forest into farmland, which reduces the number of fires overall,18 but where there’s something to combust, fire has become a menace of a different kind. Jerry Williams, the former head firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, told a conference not long ago that “my first experience with a really unimaginable fire was in Northern California late in August in 1987,” when a thousand blazes broke out simultaneously. “I remember saying, ‘Jesus, we will never see anything like that again.’ And the next year we saw Yellowstone.” Now, he said, “it seems like every year we see a ‘worst’ one. And the next year we see a worse one yet. They’re unbounded.”19 As Michael Kodas reports in his recent book, Megafire, fire season is on average seventy-eight days longer across the American West than it was in 1970, and in some parts, it essentially never ends; since 2000, more than a dozen U.S. states have reported the largest wildfires in their recorded histories.20 We know about those fires because there are reporters nearby, and urban populations to smell the smoke, but there are also now much vaster blazes virtually every spring and summer across Siberia, which we can track only with satellite photos. In fact, by this point there’s an obvious rhythm to the global danger: prolonged drought, then a record heat wave, then a spark. Australia’s McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index used to top out at 100, but in 2009, after a month of record heat and the lowest rainfalls ever measured, the index reached 165, and 173 people died in a blaze that raced through the suburbs.21 In 2016, the city at the heart of Alberta’s tar sands complex, Fort McMurray, had to be entirely evacuated after a low snowpack gave way to a record spring heat wave and, soon, a May blaze that spread to a million and a half acres, chasing 88,000 people from their homes.22 In 2018, 80 people died in Attica, in the heart of classical Greece, when a firestorm took off amid record heat; those who survived did so only by diving into the Aegean Sea, even as “flames burned their backs.” Two dozen people who couldn’t make it to the beach just formed a circle and embraced one another as they died.23
Sometimes humans start the fires—sparks from golf clubs hitting rocks have set off several Southern California blazes, and in Utah, target shooters managed to ignite twenty blazes during the drought of 2012.24 But in a deeper sense, humans help start all of them: each degree Fahrenheit we warm the planet increases the number of lightning strikes by 7 percent,25 and once fires get going in our hot, dry new world, they are all but impossible to fight. These blazes “make up a new category of fire,” Kodas writes, “exhibiting behaviors rarely seen by foresters or firefighters. The infernos can launch fusillades of firebrands miles ahead of the conflagration to ignite new blazes in unburnt forests and communities. The flames create their own weather systems, spinning tornadoes of fire into the air, filling the sky with pyrocumulus clouds that blast the ground with lightning to start new fires, and driving back firefighting aircraft with their winds.” They “cannot be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world,” said one Australian researcher.26
And the devastation they leave behind—well, you’ve seen the rows of burned-out houses on your Facebook feed. But imagine all the other effects. In the spring of 2017, after the obligatory deep drought and record heat, Kansas saw the largest wildfire in its history. There weren’t many houses in the way, but there was lots and lots of barbed-wire fencing, and all those wooden posts burned to stumps. New fence costs ten thousand dollars a mile, and at many ranches, that alone meant two million dollars or more in uninsured losses. Far worse were the cattle: At a ranch outside Ashland, “dozens of Angus cows lay dead on the blackened ground, hooves jutting in the air. Others staggered around like broken toys, unable to see or breathe, their black fur and dark eyes burned, plastic identification tags melted to their ears,” the New York Times reported. A sixty-nine-year-old rancher walked among them with a rifle. “They’re gentle,” he said. “They know us. We know them. You just thought, ‘Wow, I am sorry.’ You think you’re done and the next day you got to go shoot more.”27
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That global pump I’ve described doesn’t just suck water up; it also spews it back out. An easy rule of thumb is that for every drought, a flood. Occasionally they’re in the same places a few months apart, but another rule of thumb: dry places get dryer, and wet places wetter.
So: ocean temperatures had risen about a degree Fahrenheit off the Texas coast in recent years, which means, on average, about 3 to 5 percent more water in the atmosphere.28 And when Hurricane Harvey wandered across the Gulf in August 2017, it crossed a particularly warm and deep eddy, intensifying “at near record pace” into a Category 4 storm. But it wasn’t its winds that tied it with Katrina as the most economically damaging storm in American history; it was the rain, which came down in buckets. Not in buckets—in football stadiums. Thirty-four trillion gallons, enough to fill 26,000 New Orleans Superdomes. That’s 127 billion tons, enough weight that Houston actually sank by a couple of centimeters. In places, the rainfall topped fifty-four inches, by far the largest rainstor
m in American history. “Harvey’s rainfall in Houston was ‘biblical’ in the sense that it likely occurred around once since the Old Testament was written,” one study concluded.29 Because we’ve warmed the atmosphere, the odds of a storm that could drop that much rain on Texas have gone up sixfold in the last twenty-five years.30 Three months after the storm, another study found that the rainfall was as much as 40 percent higher than it would have been from a similar storm before we’d spiked the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.31 When Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas in September 2018, it set a new record for East Coast rainfall—the storm dumped the equivalent of all the water in Chesapeake Bay.32
This isn’t something that happens just in Houston. In Calcutta, home to fourteen million people, none of whom is an oil baron and a third of whom reside in flood-prone slums, the number of “cloudburst days” has tripled in the last five decades. “This is what we say to God,” one pavement-dwelling mother of four explained. “If a storm comes, kill us and our children at once so no one will be left to suffer.”33 In the Northeast United States, where I live in landlocked Vermont, we’ve watched extreme precipitation (two inches or more of rain in twenty-four hours) grow 53 percent more common since 1996.34 (Since 1996, when the first flip phone was sold.) All that water cascades over all that we’ve built these last few centuries—a 2018 New York Times survey showed that 2,500 of America’s toxic chemical sites lie in flood-prone areas.35 Harvey, for instance, swamped a factory that spilled huge quantities of lye. In effect, we’ve put the planet on a treadmill, and we keep pushing up the speed. We’re used to the idea that geologic history unfolds over boundless eons at a glacial pace, but not when you’re changing the rules.
Actually, perhaps it is proceeding at a glacial pace; it’s just that “glacial” means something different now. All those Hiroshimas’ worth of heat are thawing ice at astonishing speed. Much of the sea ice that filled the Arctic in the early pictures from space is gone now—viewed from a distance, Earth looks strikingly different. Everything frozen is melting. A few years ago, the mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears took his camera into the Himalayas to retake the first images sent home from the roof of the world, during the Mallory expedition of 1924. He spent days climbing to the same crags, and catching the same glaciers from the same angles. Only, now they were hundreds of vertical feet smaller—a Statue of Liberty shorter. And once ice starts to thaw, it’s hard to slow down the process. A 2018 study concluded that even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, more than a third of the planet’s glacial ice would melt anyway in the coming decades.36
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For the moment, though, don’t think about the future. Just think about what we’ve done so far, in the early stages of this massive transformation. Climate change is currently costing the U.S. economy about $240 billion a year,37 and the world, $1.2 trillion annually, wiping 1.6 percent each year from the planet’s GDP.38 That’s not much yet—we’re rich enough as a planet that it doesn’t profoundly change the overall game—but look at particular places: Puerto Rico, say, after Hurricane Maria ripped it from stem to stern with Category 5 winds. It was the worst natural disaster in a century in America—in the spring of 2018, a Harvard study estimated it had killed nearly five thousand people, twice the number who died in Katrina39—and the economic toll guaranteed it would go on stunting lives for years: the total cost was north of $90 billion, for an island whose pre-storm GDP was $100 billion a year. Economists calculated that it would take twenty-six years for the island’s economy to get back to where it had been the day before the storm hit40—if, of course, another hurricane didn’t strike in the meantime.
Or look at people living so close to the margin that small changes make a huge difference. I noted earlier that we’ve seen a steady decline in extreme poverty and hunger. “Our problem is not too few calories but too many,” Steven Pinker wrote smugly.41 But late in 2017, a UN agency announced that after a decade of decline, the number of chronically malnourished human beings had started growing again, by 38 million, to a total of 815 million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.”42 In June 2018, researchers said the same sad thing about child labor: after years of decrease, it, too, was on the rise, with 152 million kids at work, “driven by an increase in conflicts and climate induced disasters.”43
Those “conflicts,” too, are ever more closely linked to the damage we’ve done to the climate. By now, it’s a commonplace that record drought helped destabilize Syria, sparking the conflict that sent a million refugees sprawling across Europe and helped poison the politics of the West. (And a 2018 World Bank study predicted that further climate change would displace as many as 143 million people from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America by 2050. The authors whimsically urged cities to “prepare infrastructure, social services, and employment opportunities ahead of the influx.”)44 But there are a hundred smaller examples. On top of Mount Kenya, two-thirds of the ice cover has disappeared; ten of the eighteen glaciers that once watered the surrounding region are gone altogether. Herders, whose pastures are turning to dust, have started driving their cattle into the farmland nearer the mountain. “Our cows had nothing to eat,” explained one man. “Would you let your cow die if there is grass somewhere near?” The farmers who till that land (traditionally from different ethnic groups) have fought back hard, and people have died. “I have not slept for two days,” one farmer said. “If I do, they will bring their cows and let them loose in our farms. They are lurking, waiting for us to sleep, then bring their cows and goats to eat our cabbages and maize.”45 There are studies that try to quantify these changes—one standard deviation increase in temperature supposedly increases conflicts between groups by 14 percent46—but you hardly need them. Common sense will do. The planet is crowded. As we begin to change it, people are pushed closer together. We know what happens next.
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There was hope, thirty years ago, that global warming might somehow limit itself, that raising the temperature might trigger some other change that would cool the planet. Clouds, perhaps: as the atmosphere grew moister with increased evaporation, more clouds might form, blocking some of the incoming sunlight. No such luck; if anything, the kinds of clouds we’re producing on a hotter planet seem to be trapping more heat and making it hotter still.47
Such feedback loops, it turns out, lie buried in all kinds of earth systems, and so far, they’re all making the problem worse, not better. When the white ice melts in the Arctic, it stops reflecting the sun’s rays back out to space: a shiny mirror is replaced with dull blue seawater, which absorbs the sun’s heat. The sea surface temperature has gone up by seven degrees Fahrenheit in recent years in parts of the Arctic.48 Hidden ice, locked beneath the soils of the Arctic, is now starting to melt fast, too, and as that permafrost thaws, microbes convert some of the frozen organic material into methane and carbon dioxide, which cause yet more warming—perhaps, say scientists, enough to add a degree and a half Fahrenheit or more to the eventual warming.49
New studies also show that degradation of tropical woodlands, from wildfire, drought, and selective logging, has turned them from sinks for carbon into sources of more carbon dioxide. This transition is important. When economists scoffed at books such as Limits to Growth, insisting that scarcity, and the resulting higher prices, would spur the search for new sources, they had a point: we haven’t run out of copper; and oil obviously keeps flowing. But places to put our waste? Those are ever harder to come by, as the increasing temperature weakens the ability of forests and oceans to soak up carbon. Should this weakening continue, the New York Times noted, “the result would be something akin to garbage workers going on strike, but on a grand scale: The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would rise faster, speeding global warming even beyond its present rate.”50 And that’s what seems to be happening. Even as our emissions rise more slowly, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere keeps spiking faster.
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sp; But, again, we’re getting ahead of the story. Right now, just focus on what we’ve already done, how much we’ve already changed our world. Consider California, the Golden State, long the idyllic picture of the human future. It endured a horrific five-year drought at the start of this decade, the deepest in thousands of years—so deep that the state was tapping into groundwater that was twenty thousand years old, rain that fell during the last Ice Age;51 so deep that the state’s Sierra Nevada range rose an inch just because sixty-three trillion gallons of water had evaporated;52 so deep that it killed 102 million trees, a blight “unprecedented in our modern history,” in the words of the Los Angeles Times. (Sugar pines should live five hundred years, but “everywhere you walk, through certain parts of the forest, half these big guys are dead,” said one forester.53) The drought ended in the winter of 2017, when the rains finally came, an endless atmospheric river that poured off the hot Pacific into the high mountains. Everyone breathed a sigh. California’s authorities said, of course, that they understood the reprieve was only temporary, but they could be forgiven for relaxing a little as the hills turned lush and green. (Anyway, they were having enough trouble with the floods that the record rainfall produced: the deluge caused almost a billion dollars in damage, for instance, to the nation’s highest dam.)