A new book, “Nature’s Mutiny,” concerns the so-called Little Ice Age that plunged the world into a chillier environment from roughly 1300 to 1700. It seems to have been caused by a combination of factors — everything from sunspot activity to the unexpected effects of human activities.
For example, the arrival of Europeans in the New World bearing diseases to which native peoples had no immunity may have killed as many as 56 million. In the process, huge areas that had been cleared and cultivated returned to forest. This in turn is now thought to have changed the atmospheric concentration of CO2.
At the time no one had a notion about the causes of these climate changes which were attributed to everything from witchcraft to the wrath of God, but the effects were undeniable. Harvests as far away as Europe may have been affected by the drop in temperature partially caused by reforestation in the Americas.
When climate changed, so did age-old patterns of agriculture and society in the wake of famine and plague. Workers were in demand as the population dropped, and this created a new economic order as feudalism collapsed when labor could sell itself to the highest bidder.
Today we know climate change is occurring on a far larger scale than 300 years ago. We know some if not all of the causes and mechanisms far better than our less scientifically-minded ancestors did. Changing the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels is a root cause, though some people with medieval mindsets deny the science and label the notion a hoax.
What we don’t know for sure is how bad it’s going to get if we don’t mend our ways and adapt to what science is learning. Surely it will be worse than the world-altering Little Ice Age, but hopefully not as cataclysmic of the asteroid strike 66 million years ago thay caused the sky to go black, a continent-size firestorm, rain composed of sulphuric acid, and the extinction of seventy-five percent of the species on earth.
The consensus view is our time is for irreversible changes, unless we drastically limit carbon emission in the next ten years. Others are even less sanguine. James Lovelock, the ecologist and author who originated the Gaia Hypothesis that earth is a single, vast, interconnected system, suggested over a decade ago that instead of increasing from 8 billion to 12 billion people by the end of the 21st century, population would plummet to as few as a billion, if we’re lucky.
According to his notion, climate change will bring war, famine pestilence and death on a biblical scale. He now thinks his timeline may have been a bit off. It could take slightly longer, he argues, but it won’t matter because by then AI will have taken over and will be better adapted to survive climate change than mere flesh and blood.
The only hope for us is the mind of man. That organ allowed us to figure out how to create a carbon-based economy that changed life for the better while, unbeknownst to us, creating a threat to our continued existence. Unless we figure out a solution pretty damn quick, our kind and most of the other present species will go the way of the lifeforms made extinct at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.
An example of the sort of cleverness required can be found in “Forests Emerge as a Major Overlooked Climate Factor” in the online science journal “Quanta.” It describes the work of Prof. Abigail Swann of the University of Washington’s Ecoclimate Lab. Using “powerful computer models that can simulate how plants move water, carbon dioxide and other chemicals between ground and air, Swann has found that vegetation can control weather patterns across huge distances. The destruction or expansion of forests on one continent might boost rainfall or cause a drought halfway around the world.”
Once it was thought planting more forests would palliate increasing carbon in the atmosphere, but Swann’s work suggests the systemic effects of meddling with mother nature are much more complex and are global not local. Yes, forests and their plants take carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in tissue and the earth, but the cycle works in the other direction moving water from the ground through their tissues and into the atmosphere.
However, as carbon dioxide levels rise, the forests react to conserve water thereby emitting less water vapor and thus reducing rainfall. A faster increase in temperature and worsening of drought might be the paradoxical results. At first Swann’s alarming conclusions were ignored or dismissed because atmospheric physicists and life scientists operate in separate silos, but her views have prevailed and are “rewriting the maps of the drought severity outlook in the future.”
Humans have conspired unwittingly over the last several centuries to cause climate change. Then, we might have been forgiven because we knew not what we did. Now, however, and thanks to people like Swann, we begin to get a clearer and clearer picture of what we have wrought and what ruinous effects it is going to have. What we lack is any way to get eight billion of us to agree to take the steps needed to avert our own extinction.