Heartsease

Critical Thinking

 2 in a 4 Part Series

Critics of climate change  often point out  our current environment is not the warmest period the earth has seen, which is true; the Eemian interglacial, which peaked 125,000 years ago, gave us the warmest period in the last 150,000 years. However, it’s important to note during the Eemain it was also cooler in some areas than now. What is new to the climate change scene, and what the critics fail to consider, is the greatly increased human population level we have, the marginal environments a large portion of the world’s population inhabits, and how much human activities have and continue to increase the rate of climate change as we enter into the earth’s newest warm episode. The “Blame Game” has no place in this discussion; it politicizes the issue further while it channels energy and resources away from solving the problems we face.

Two of the greatest misunderstandings, which fuel both our indifference to and the arguments about climate and environmental change are:

1)  We do not understand the difference between weather and climate nor do we realize climate change will not be uniform around the globe. Weather is a local occurrence while climate is regional and in the expansive sense of the word, global. If the current warming trend continues we will see regional and seasonal variations in climate. There will be warmer nights, fewer extremely cold days, and oddly enough, some regions will cool down while other areas of the world warm up; but the average global temperature will rise. Climate change is most evident at the higher latitudes where we see ice melting, changes in growing seasons, and migrations. It is ironic the ecosystems which are likely to suffer the most damage from a warmer climate are the tropics.  Tropical flora and fauna  are not required to adapt to seasonal changes. Research has revealed that a two degree temperature fluctuation is more than some tropical species are capable of adapt to.

2) The vastness of geological time.  Geological time is difficult for us to wrap our minds around yet, in spite of that difficulty, we couch climate change in broad, sweeping, geological terms, making “it” a thing distant from ourselves. Climate change, by and of itself, is not the problem, the rate at which current climate change is occurring however, is. We tend to think of climate change as a slow, insidious, creeping thing, which alters the world gradually. McKenzie Funk called climate change “incremental… it is an ocean that rises slowly, a glacier that melts gradually or a dry spell that lasts a little longer” in his 2009 book “Come Hell or High Water”. Like McKenzie, most of us think of typical climate change in a way similar to not realizing that someone you see every day is failing until an old acquaintance, who hasn’t seen them in a long time, stops in for a visit and takes you aside before they leave to ask you what is wrong with their friend. Paleoclimate records reveal a dramatically different version of climate change, one where drastic climate change can, and often has, occurred rapidly, in some cases taking only a few decades. There is little serious disagreement in the scientific community as to whether climate change is occurring, the disagreement is on the rate of change, the implications of those changes, and whether it is a completely natural occurrence, anthropogenic in nature or a combination of the two.

The old cliché “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it” contains a basic truth; we must learn from the experience and events of the past. Jared Diamond did a masterful job of illustrating how past societies either collapsed, dispersed, or did both when faced with major environmental change in his book “Collapse”. The climate and environmental related failures of the Anasazi and their neighboring cultures in the American Southwest, the Norse colonies in Greenland, the Haruppa, the Akkadians, and other ancient cultures is a clear signal to us from the past that climate change is a trigger event which disrupts the social, economic and political fabric of the civilizations affected. In hindsight it is easy for us to see that these ancestor societies did not understand the interconnectedness of the systems which composed their environment, the signal events taking place in their environment, or the consequences of those events. Humans tend to see themselves as extant and outside the environmental system as a whole; a conceptualization made possible because of the uniquely human ability to live in denial, something no other species is capable of doing.