For the past seven summers, I’ve wandered through Montana, Idaho, and Oregon in Scarlett Jovansson, my red Sprinter van. Bumping along remote logging roads that wind along clear, cold streams through forests, breathing in the piney breeze, it’s easy to feel like I’m reconnecting to some earlier, purer incarnation of Mother Nature, pristine and in perfect balance.
But that’s just comforting bullshit.
Those streams are clear alright, and pretty much devoid of life as well. After a century or two of repeated logging, the topsoil runoff has long since suffocated most of the fish, frogs, and other creatures that once lived in those waters. Look closely, and you’ll start to notice more of what isn’t there: birds, underbrush, any species of tree other than Douglass fir and Ponderosa pine. Not much diversity of any kind. The towering “forests” are actually plantations: as much a mono-crop as the endless, uniform cornfields of Iowa.
And even these fake forests aren’t what they seem, as most roads have a strip of undisturbed trees a hundred or so meters deep on either side, to block the view of the clear-cut devastation beyond. Nature, it seems, isn’t all that natural these days.
I’ve had similar thoughts concerning the native people who lived on this continent a few centuries ago. The story we’ve all heard is that they were in harmony with the natural world until we showed up and everything went to hell. It’s true that the steady invasion of Europeans was a huge disaster for the people they encountered. But “harmony” wasn’t exactly what was disrupted.
Turns out, the Comanche, Lakota, Cheyenne and other plains Indians who famously relied on horses to hunt buffalo had never seen a horse until, at the earliest, the 1600s. All the horses in the Americas were descended from a few that ran off from Cortes and his band of merry murderers as they were busy decimating the Aztecs in the mid-sixteenth century. Smallpox, also brought across the Atlantic by the Spanish, swept through native populations, killing millions of people who’d had no direct contact with Europeans or any idea what was happening to them or why. By the time Europeans were actually exploring the Americas, they found vast abandoned settlements and fallow fields that had been under cultivation until recent decades. There was no balance to disrupt. Things were already well off the rails.
I don’t write this to excuse any of the horrors of colonialism, and of course, those two examples are both attributable to the arrival of Europeans. But go back before any European contact and you’ll find overwhelming evidence of severe drought and disruption in the southwest US, civilizational collapse in the Mayan world of central America, the rise of the literally bloodthirsty Aztec empire, expansionist slave-holding tribes of the Pacific northwest, a spreading Inca empire in the Andes, and countless other examples of rapid, radical, disruptive changes happening all over the place. No balance. No stasis. Everything was changing.
Everything we know, all of human history, has occurred in a highly unusual period of literally “extra-ordinary” climatic calm.
I’ve been thinking about the wider implications of our habitual assumption of antediluvian equilibrium. I interviewed a climate scientist for my podcast recently, and one of the things that arose in our conversation is the fact that the Earth’s climate is constantly moving through cyclic changes in response to changes in the angle of our planet’s tilted axis and permutations in its orbital path around the Sun. Ice ages come and go and come again. (The next glaciation is overdue — quite possibly delayed by the carbon we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere.) The sea level rises and falls hundreds of feet. Oceanic currents speed, slow, reverse, and start over. The entire planet and all its various systems are, in effect, constantly breathing, changing, adjusting.
It strikes me that much of my own anxiety about climate change is based on the assumption that the planet would glide along smoothly if we weren’t messing it up. But things are rarely “fine,” and when they are, it’s just for a while.
Here’s a partial list of things that would at least cripple civilization, if not destroy it entirely, and roughly how frequently they occur:
— coronal mass ejections from the Sun or CME:
Research has indicated that phenomena such as the Carrington Event [when a burst of solar radiation melted telegraph lines in the western US in 1859] may not be as rare as once thought. A much weaker magnetic storm brought down the Canadian Hydro‐Québec system in 1989. Such an event would knock out power distribution systems, GPS signaling networks, personal computers, phones, navigational systems in aircraft, and so on.
In July 2012, NASA and European spacecraft watched an extreme solar storm erupt from the sun and narrowly miss Earth. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” said Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado at a NOAA Space Weather Workshop. “It might have been stronger than the Carrington Event itself."1
— Glaciers regularly spread over Europe/Canada (Last one lasted from about 22,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago.)
Over the past million years, Earth’s globally averaged surface temperature has risen and fallen by about 5˚C in ice-age cycles, roughly every 100,000 years or so. In the coldest period of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, sea level was at least 120 meters lower than today because more water was locked up on land in polar ice sheets. The last 8,000 years, which includes most recorded human history, have been relatively stable at the warmer end of this temperature range. This stability enabled agriculture, permanent settlements and population growth.2
— Massive asteroid strikes, which happen every few million years, according to NASA, set the entire planet ablaze.
— Supervolcano eruptions. In terms of geological time, they happen pretty often, too. The Youngest Toba eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ago may well be recorded in our DNA. Many scientists who study such things believe this event caused a global volcanic winter of six to ten years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, as well as the near-extinction of our ancestors (and many other mammals. Genetic evidence suggests that we are all descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.3
— Let’s not even talk about viruses, neither those that result from some idiot having sex with a chimp nor those that escape from a lab because some other idiot forgot to change the filters on the HEPA system.
— Let’s not talk about nuclear accidents either — or our increasingly fragile agricultural/shipping/energy/water systems, all of which can grind to a halt at any moment, as we’ve all learned all too well.
There’s a wonderful book called, The Long Summer, by Brian Fagan that shows how everything we know, all of human history, has occurred in a highly unusual period of literally “extra-ordinary” climatic calm. The “long summer” of the title is the Holocene warming trend of the last 15,000 years, which has coddled humanity in unusually stable warmth throughout recorded history. But this is not normal. Normal is a shitstorm. Normal is massive floods and crazy storms and ices sheets a mile thick covering France and Canada and tidal waves and volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes. That’s normal. What we think of as normal is, in fact, anything but.
“Nature by itself changes rapidly. It is a very unstable system.”
So yes, climate change is a problem. A big one. But life on this planet is all about big problems. And the inconvenient truth is that there is no getting away from climate change. The climate on this planet changes, constantly, whether we’re messing with it or not. Sometimes it changes surprisingly quickly.
In his fantastic book, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth, Craig Childs quotes Jose Rial, a chaos researcher and climate scientist he visits on an ice sheet in west Greenland: “By its very nature, change is highly unpredictable,” Jose tells Craig, “and nature by itself changes rapidly. It is a very unstable system.” Indeed, the evidence is clear that previous “long summers” like our own have ended in the duration of a human lifespan, shifting from temperate comfort into full-on ice age in as little as a century.
The word “apocalypse,” coming from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, means revelation. That which is uncovered, shown, suddenly obvious. It comes from the Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis), which literally means to remove the lid. So apocalypse isn’t primarily about destruction of what’s here at the moment, it’s about the revelation of what always was and will underlie our desperate delusion of safety and stability. Apocalypse reveals the fundamental truth that no summer lasts forever.
This video is worth a watch, if you’d like to know more about the climatic cycles of the Earth.
tp://www.arrl.org/news/a-perfect-coronal-mass-ejection-could-be-a-nightmare
https://www.science.org.au/learning/general-audience/science-climate-change/2-how-has-climate-changed#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20million%20years,so%20(Figure%202.1a).
As is the case with most such theories, this one is disputed. The eruption occurred for sure, and spread a layer of distinctive ash all over the planet, but whether this caused near-extinction of humans and other mammals and/or triggered a 1,000 year cooling event is up for debate. See, for example, this article summarizing the argument against the Toba bottleneck theory.
Chris, so appreciate your making this post as it coincided with me having a week or so to really drill down on this climate change issue. I listened to your podcast with Charlie Zender first. Terrific.
I've listened to many others and done a lot of reading. Suffice to say I'm significantly less anxious about climate change than I was two weeks ago.
A few additional resources you might find interesting: Steve Koonan speech to the GWPF in November of 2021. A data-rich presentation. I think you'd like it. Around minute 25 he addresses SW US droughts and specifically mentions the impact on the Anasazi Indians circa 1100.
You might also like the 4-hour climate conversation between Lex Fridman, Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin. It's episode #339. Absolutely worth the 4 hours.
Useful to contemplate how we are allocating our resources versus building resilience, and how the west is allocating resources, toward CO2 reduction specifically, that are unlikely to have a meaningful long-term impact. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other immediate impact problems that we can solve with significantly less money. E. G. Tuberculosis.
As you note, we live in a ever-changing world. We also live in a world of limited resources. Over focusing on one issue by definition means under focusing on others. Thanks for all you do!
To me parts of town where the paint is chipping, sidewalks are cracked, fences are saggy, and grass is abundantly tall appear to be islands of change in a sea of stability. But when you look at the rich parts of town you realize that the trimmed grass, fancy fencing, recoated buildings, and smooth sidewalks are really just the illusion of stability that requires huge amounts of energy to maintain.
This is true and yet the way change is framed is as important as the change itself. I find myself in the very awkward position of disagreeing with Chris on a couple of points. Most natural climatic cycles don't cause chaos everywhere without a moment’s notice. Much of what paleoanthropology is coming to grips with is the fact that using ice core samples in Greenland, for example, allows us to understand an average state of climate but that it shouldn't be used as a proxy for every ecosystem. As they gather more samples, anthropologists are realizing that entire regions were often unaffected by seemingly large climatic events. This is causing evolutionary anthropologists to reconsider certain assumptions about human evolution.
My point is just because glacial sheets expand doesn't mean its mass chaos everywhere. One reason is the rate of change. If you look at the glacier/interglacial figure, the high interglacial peaks to low glacial peaks are usually 50k to 25k years apart. There's no doubt this causes massive change, but the consequences exponentially amplify if these peaks and valleys were to occur in 2k or 5k year increments. I've been thinking about how we perceive time on geological and evolutionary scales and how creating narrative around scales results in the discounting of time (I think it will be the first episode topic of my podcast).
Really the biggest point I have to make is when it comes to the Toba eruption and its effect on humans. I'm surprised that this hypothesis is still so popular. I know the likes of Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock continue to push it but in 2022 none of the evidence supports it. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has a great blog discussing this topic https://johnhawks.net/weblog/the-so-called-toba-bottleneck-didnt-happen/
I won't go on about it too much other than to say that the cooling event that Toba supposedly triggered appears to have already begun before the eruption, the supposed population crash is now closer to 50 kya and is due to the out of Africa migration bottleneck rather than a population crash. The foundation of the hypothesis is based on early models that were constructed in 1992. With more current data the impact of the Toba eruption, on humans and most other ecosystems, appears to be minimal.
When I think about the Toba eruption one thing that always comes to mind is Sumatran orangutans. These apes have called this region home for millions of years. When evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer compared the metabolisms of all the great apes, he found that orangutans had, by far, the lowest metabolism (with humans having the highest.) In fact, the orangutan metabolism is so low that its closest comparison is to that of the sloth. I find it hard to believe that if Sumatran orangutans (or Bornean orangutans for that matter) survived the wrath of Toba, and right on its doorstep, it would still somehow devastate Homo sapiens over 3,400 miles away in Africa. Yes, a layer of ash from the Toba eruption exists across much of the earth but that doesn't say anything about the effect, or lack thereof.