Has the Age of Chaos Begun?

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Fri, 7 Oct 2005 02:20:20 EDT

Has the Age of Chaos Begun?

 

 

 

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Tomgram: Mike Davis, Has the Age of Chaos Begun?

 

Discussions of " tipping points " have, in recent times, largely been

relegated to the war in Iraq where such moments, regularly predicted

by the Bush administration, never arrive. In the meantime, an actual

tipping point may have been creeping up on us on another front

entirely, one that is anathema to this administration -- that of

climate change.

 

The latest news from scientists laboring in cold climes has been

startling. The expanse of Arctic sea ice has been shrinking in the

summer since the late 1970s, though usually rebounding to near normal

levels in the winter. Until recently. For the last few years, winter

ice cover has been shrinking as well. This will be the fourth

consecutive year of record, or near record, shrinkage of September sea

ice in the Arctic. Scientists speculate that a threshold has been

crossed.

 

" Experts at the U.S. National Snow and Data Center in Colorado, "

writes David Adam, environmental correspondent for the British

Guardian, " fear the [Arctic] region is locked into a destructive cycle

with warmer air melting more ice, which in turn warms the air further.

Satellite pictures show that the extent of Arctic sea ice this month

dipped some 20% below the long term average for September -- melting

an extra 500,000 square miles, or an area twice the size of Texas. If

current trends continue, the summertime Arctic Ocean will be

completely ice-free well before the end of this century. "

 

Maybe this is bad -- extinction-bad -- for the polar bear, but

otherwise doesn't it open new vistas for us all? For instance, the

fabled " Northwest Passage " from Europe to Asia, so energetically, if

fruitlessly, searched out by early European explorers, is now almost a

reality. This summer only 60 miles of scattered ice floes stood in the

path of a completely open passage across the Canadian northwest.

 

Unfortunately, as Mike Davis explains below, the vistas opening before

us are anything but pleasing. This is, in fact, a tipping point none

of us will want to see -- and none of us may be able to avoid. Let's

at least hope, as environmental writer Mark Hertsgaard recently

suggested, that some kind of threshold or tipping point is also

finally being crossed in American society. As he commented in the

Nation magazine recently:

 

" [G]lobal warming foot-draggers have succeeded in the past largely

because the public was confused about whether the problem really

existed. That confusion was encouraged by the mainstream media, which

in the name of journalistic ‘balance' gave equal treatment to global

warming skeptics and proponents alike, even though the skeptics

represented a tiny fringe of scientific opinion and often were funded

by companies with a financial interest in discrediting global warming.

Katrina, however, may mark a turning point for the media as well as

the public. "

 

If sales of gas-guzzling SUVs are any mark of an American awakening,

their recent plunge may indicate that things are indeed looking up a

bit. But I fear that, when it comes to the issue of climate change,

American denial extends well beyond the present obdurate

administration. We like to think that, as a can-do nation, when the

(ice) chips are down, when things really get tough, we can always, in

cavalry fashion, ride to the rescue just in the nick of time. As it

happens, as Mike Davis makes clear, climate change is unlikely to work

that way.

 

Davis tends to migrate in his writings (and sometimes in person) to

dangerous climes and tipping-point fronts almost by nature. He has

just returned from New Orleans where what may well be the

hurricane-version of global warming has created a potential

eco-disaster (just as the news of Katrina begins to fade). He spent

the previous year following the course of, and writing a must-read

book (Monster at Our Door) about, a potential avian flu pandemic for

which the United States is unbearably unprepared.

 

The President finally responded to the danger of avian flu at his news

conference Tuesday by suggesting, " If we had an outbreak somewhere in

the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country,

and how do you then enforce a quarantine?... And who best to be able

to effect quarantine? One option is the use of a military that's able

to plan and move. " There's no surprise in this. The Bush

administration, facing any crisis, automatically reaches for its guns

as if it were always poised at some eternal OK Corral. Think of the

President's response to a potential pandemic as public health as coup

d'état.

 

On Thursday, Bush gave his millionth speech on his Global War on

Terror (and his war in Iraq). This was a day when, on the front page

of the New York Times, reporter Gina Kolata broke a story about the

1918 flu virus that created a global pandemic, killing perhaps 50

million people. (Some historians believe that, even in that era before

air travel, the numbers may still have approached 100 million.)

According to two teams of scientists who have reconstructed that

virus, it was, to the surprise of all, a bird flu that jumped directly

to humans. A friend of mine, in a private e-letter he sends out, just

wrote: " One one-hundredth of the money we've spent on Iraq would help

prepare us against an avian flu pandemic. But now we will be told we

need to spend money on the war against terror cells in the

Philippines, Indonesia and, no doubt, Canada. Maybe Bush ought to

declare war against birds. "

 

If you want to know something more detailed about the nature of

government preparations for terrorist and military-related disasters

versus natural or non-military ones in this country, William M. Arkin

at his remarkable new Early Warning blog at the Washington Post has

done the math for you. He's carefully sifted through the Department of

Homeland Security's 36-month " exercise schedule, " covering the

department's " war-gaming " of disasters of every sort that might befall

our " homeland. " He found that the document " makes reference to 222

separate nationwide and local drills, ‘tabletop' exercises,

workshops and full-scale rehearsals. Of the 222, a total of two deal

with hurricanes. A whopping total of 179 deal with biological,

chemical, explosive, radiological and nuclear events. Seven national

exercises are listed in Louisiana and Mississippi during the 36-month

period: none deal with hurricanes. "

 

Below, Davis turns to the issue of whether various signs, especially

that disappearing Arctic sea ice, indicate that we are indeed

approaching, or have already passed, a climatic (as well as climactic)

tipping point that may catapult us out of the last 1,000,000 years of

weather patterns and right into the unknown. The only disaster that

seems to be missing from our collective plate these days is the Big

One, the earthquake that will sooner or later hit California. I have

no doubt that, when it does, Davis will be surfing the largest slab of

basalt in sight directly into the fault. Tom

 

The Other Hurricane

Has the Age of Chaos Begun?

By Mike Davis

 

The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in

a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling

occurrence. But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing

" storm of the decade " took place in March 2004. Hurricane Catarina --

so named because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of

Santa Catarina -- was the first recorded south Atlantic hurricane in

history.

 

Textbook orthodoxy had long excluded the possibility of such an

event; sea temperatures, experts claimed, were too low and wind shear

too powerful to allow tropical depressions to evolve into cyclones

south of the Atlantic Equator. Indeed, forecasters rubbed their eyes

in disbelief as weather satellites down-linked the first images of a

classical whirling disc with a well-formed eye in these forbidden

latitudes.

 

In a series of recent meetings and publications, researchers have

debated the origin and significance of Catarina. A crucial question is

this: Was Catarina simply a rare event at the outlying edge of the

normal bell curve of South Atlantic weather -- just as, for example,

Joe DiMaggio's incredible 56-game hitting streak in 1941 represented

an extreme probability in baseball (an analogy made famous by Stephen

Jay Gould) -- or was Catarina a " threshold " event, signaling some

fundamental and abrupt change of state in the planet's climate system?

 

Scientific discussions of environmental change and global warming

have long been haunted by the specter of nonlinearity. Climate models,

like econometric models, are easiest to build and understand when they

are simple linear extrapolations of well-quantified past behavior;

when causes maintain a consistent proportionality to their effects.

 

But all the major components of global climate -- air, water, ice,

and vegetation -- are actually nonlinear: At certain thresholds they

can switch from one state of organization to another, with

catastrophic consequences for species too finely-tuned to the old

norms. Until the early 1990s, however, it was generally believed that

these major climate transitions took centuries, if not millennia, to

accomplish. Now, thanks to the decoding of subtle signatures in ice

cores and sea-bottom sediments, we know that global temperatures and

ocean circulation can, under the right circumstances, change abruptly

-- in a decade or even less.

 

The paradigmatic example is the so-called " Younger Dryas " event,

12,800 years ago, when an ice dam collapsed, releasing an immense

volume of meltwater from the shrinking Laurentian ice-sheet into the

Atlantic Ocean via the instantly-created St. Lawrence River. This

" freshening " of the North Atlantic suppressed the northward conveyance

of warm water by the Gulf Current and plunged Europe back into a

thousand-year ice age.

 

Abrupt switching mechanisms in the climate system †" such as

relatively small changes in ocean salinity -- are augmented by causal

loops that act as amplifiers. Perhaps the most famous example is

sea-ice albedo: The vast expanses of white, frozen Arctic Ocean ice

reflect heat back into space, thus providing positive feedback for

cooling trends; alternatively, shrinking sea-ice increases heat

absorption, accelerating both its own further melting and planetary

warming.

 

Thresholds, switches, amplifiers, chaos -- contemporary geophysics

assumes that earth history is inherently revolutionary. This is why

many prominent researchers -- especially those who study topics like

ice-sheet stability and North Atlantic circulation -- have always had

qualms about the consensus projections of the Intergovernmental Panel

on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on global warming.

 

In contrast to Bushite flat-Earthers and shills for the oil

industry, their skepticism has been founded on fears that the IPCC

models fail to adequately allow for catastrophic nonlinearities like

the Younger Dryas. Where other researchers model the late 21st-century

climate that our children will live with upon the precedents of the

Altithermal (the hottest phase of the current Holocene period, 8000

years ago) or the Eemian (the previous, even warmer interglacial

episode, 120,000 years ago), growing numbers of geophysicists toy with

the possibilities of runaway warming returning the earth to the torrid

chaos of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM: 55 million years

ago) when the extreme and rapid heating of the oceans led to massive

extinctions.

 

Dramatic new evidence has emerged recently that we may be headed,

if not back to the dread, almost inconceivable PETM, then to a much

harder landing than envisioned by the IPCC.

 

As I flew toward Louisiana and the carnage of Katrina three weeks

ago, I found myself reading the August 23rd issue of EOS, the

newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. I was pole-axed by an

article entitled " Arctic System on Trajectory to New, Seasonally

Ice-Free State, " co-authored by 21 scientists from almost as many

universities and research institutes. Even two days later, walking

among the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, I found myself worrying more

about the EOS article than the disaster surrounding me.

 

The article begins with a recounting of trends familiar to any

reader of the Tuesday science section of the New York Times: For

almost 30 years, Arctic sea ice has been thinning and shrinking so

dramatically that " a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean within a century is

a real possibility. " The scientists, however, add a new observation --

that this process is probably irreversible. " Surprisingly, it is

difficult to identify a single feedback mechanism within the Arctic

that has the potency or speed to alter the system's present course. "

 

An ice-free Arctic Ocean has not existed for at least one million

years and the authors warn that the Earth is inexorably headed toward

a " super-interglacial " state " outside the envelope of

glacial-interglacial fluctuations that prevailed during recent Earth

history. " They emphasize that within a century global warming will

probably exceed the Eemian temperature maximum and thus obviate all

the models that have made this their essential scenario. They also

suggest that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet

is a real possibility -- an event that would definitely throw a

Younger Dryas wrench into the Gulf Current.

 

If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of

a runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations

marked " Altithermal " and " Eemian. " " Outside the envelope, " moreover,

means that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic

parameters of the Holocene -- the last 10,000 years of mild, warm

weather that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and

urban civilization -- but also those of the late Pleistocene that

fostered the evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa.

 

Other researchers undoubtedly will contest the extraordinary

conclusions of the EOS article and -- we must hope -- suggest the

existence of countervailing forces to this scenario of an Arctic

albedo catastrophe. But for the time being, at least, research on

global change is pointing toward worst-case scenarios.

 

All of this, of course, is a perverse tribute to industrial

capitalism and extractive imperialism as geological forces so

formidable that they have succeeded in scarcely more than two

centuries -- indeed, mainly in the last fifty years -- in knocking the

earth off its climatic pedestal and propelling it toward the nonlinear

unknown.

 

The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to

worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much

toilet paper, when, soon enough, we'll be debating how many

hunter-gathers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or

the tropical forests of the Yukon.

 

The good parent in me, however, screams: How is it possible that

we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our

children's children will themselves have children? Let Exxon answer

that in one of their sanctimonious ads.

 

Mike Davis is the author of many books including City of Quartz,

Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the just published Monster at Our

Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) as well as the

forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).

 

Copyright 2005 Mike Davis