Climate Change

PRESS RELEASE
TIME-SENSITIVE

CLIMATE POLICY-MAKERS IN COPENHAGEN ARE IGNORING THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WE’VE LEARNED FROM CLIMATE CHANGE DATA

by Dawn Adrian, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist, Tapestry Institute

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 10, 2009

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The single most important thing scientists have learned about climate change isn’t even on the table at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week.

It’s widely understood that droughts come and go, sea temperatures rise and fall, and pine forests advance across land masses and retreat again.  The focus of the climate debate is therefore on whether recent rises in sea and air temperature are simply part of that normal variation pattern or something anomalous.  Groups who want to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions see current warming as anomalous, dangerous, and requiring an emergency response.  But groups who see the trend as normal climate fluctuation argue that any attempts to control it are not only unnecessary but destructive to global business and economy.

Both groups are missing the point.  Their arguments are based on an unspoken but crucial assumption that isn’t about present or past climate either one.  It’s about future climate instead — that it should normally be expected to stay roughly the same as it is now.

The people who think current warming simply reflects normal variation, who argue that we don’t need to do anything about climate except “weather” its variable extremes, imagine a future in which things still don’t change very much.  They certainly aren’t arguing that normal climate variation includes things like mega-droughts that impact global food production seriously enough to cause economic collapse, for instance.  Their idea of “normal climate change” is today’s climate with minor variation.

And those who argue that humans are changing the climate, with potentially disastrous consequences, imagine much the same unchanging future if humans weren’t around burning fossil fuels.  That’s why they talk about “fixing” the climate.  They’re thinking about returning it to a baseline normal that’s very much like it’s been for the last hundred years or so.

This assumption that a baseline normal for climate exists at all is so seriously flawed that it poses a more dangerous threat to humanity than any change in climate itself. Because the fact is that past climate data do tell us what we can expect from the future, and “baseline normal” isn’t any part of it.

No matter what data you look at, the pattern of past climate is the same:  it’s a graph that goes up and down in a jerky zig-zag pattern that looks like an EKG reading.  Drought records for the last 500 years and sea level records for 550 million years ago show the identical pattern.  And that pattern tells us one thing about future climate with 100% certainty:  it will not stay the same as it is right now.  If it did, the graph would look like this:

Yet we’ve built coastal highways, calculated urban water needs, genetically engineered crops, and budgeted energy costs as if sea level, rainfall, frost dates, and temperatures are going to be about the same fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, and a thousand years from now as they are this year.  We know that the winter of 1976 was particularly nasty in the Northeast and that the drought of 1939 was devastating to the Plains, but we see those patterns as aberrations — glitches in what is otherwise a normal, regular pattern of weather we can count on to produce the same amount of rainfall, the same snowfall, the same temperatures year after year after year.

What we’re missing, that climate data show us, is that these “glitches” we see as “aberrations”, that we wait on to end so that things will go back to “normal”, are actually the definition of normal climate.  And when it comes to climate change, recent experience doesn’t begin to show us what can and will happen.  The 1939 American drought famously called “The Dust Bowl”, for instance, is eclipsed by mega-droughts that peaked in the years 1150 and 1253.  The centimeters of sea level rise we’re facing right now, that threaten to flood the half of the world’s population that lives on coastal floodplains and the oil refineries, shipping ports, and highways that serve as the support infrastructure for the rest of the world’s population inland, are nothing compared to past normal sea level changes of up to 200 meters — enough to flood the entire state of Florida, most of Texas, and every port megalopolis worldwide, from London to Hong Kong.

When, not if, things like sea level and rainfall change in the ways they’ve changed normally for all of Earth’s history, we will pay a high price in money, inconvenience, privation, and even human life to accommodate a natural phenomenon that won’t listen to, and doesn’t care about, our reasons for thinking climate should remain constant.

Heiko Pälike, lead author of the paper on past fluctuations of equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures, titled that paper “The Heartbeat of the Oligocene Climate System.”  With that title, he and his coauthors overtly compared the rhythmic rise and fall of sea temperatures 35 million years ago to a human pulse — the tracing of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram or EKG.  Every graph of climate change over time shows the same pattern, the same rhythmic fluctuation that marks natural life processes in humans and other animals.  This kind of rhythmic change is not only normal but healthy.

The heart isn’t the only thing to pulse rhythmically, though it’s the one we’re most familiar with.  We breathe in rhythmic pulses, our body temperatures fluctuate daily as well as monthly, and the levels of hormones that regulate everything from reproduction to bone formation follow the same pattern.  It is safe to say that the hallmark of life is rhythm: a slightly irregular, somewhat unpredictable pulse of processes that varies around an average but seldom remains there.  Life is threatened in one of two ways.  One is when the process passes the limits of its normal bounds for “high” or “low” ends of variation.  If body temperature goes too high because of fever or too low because of hypothermia, for example, death can result because the range of temperatures within which the body can function is limited. The other threat to life is for the rhythm to stop.  We all know what it means if the EKG reading “flatlines.”

People who insist that present global warming trends are simply “normal” are essentially insisting that a body temperature of 104 degrees isn’t really a fever that needs treatment, but part of the normal daily variation of body temperature.  It’s not.  But, on the other hand, treating the earth’s “fever” doesn’t mean returning sea and air temperatures to a constant that’s somehow “normal”.  Normal air and sea temperatures vary naturally, as do the physical phenomena that depend on them such as sea level and rainfall.

That means that if we get through the present climate-change crisis, we still have to face the elephant sitting in our global living room:  that we know now the conditions of 1962 or 1984 are not “norms” we can count on to remain constant, but that instead it is change of sea level, temperature, and rainfall that is normal.  The “Dust Bowl” was not an aberration, nor was the “Little Ice Age“.  They are part of the normal range of climate variation we refuse to acknowledge or plan for.

We need to look beyond the present climate crisis to a greater and more important future task: learning to live in balance with the earth’s normal rhythms of temperature, rainfall, and sea level.  That’s not as easy as “fixing” global warming because it doesn’t involve regulating things outside ourselves like auto emissions or coal-fired generating plants.  Instead, it calls upon us, as human beings, to “fix” ourselves — our understanding of natural processes, of our place in natural ecosystems, and of how far we think we can rightfully go to protect the status quo we’ve established for ourselves over the past few hundred years.

We know that climate change wiped out whole civilizations in the past, from the Akkadians of ancient Mesopotamia to the Anasazi of what is now Arizona and New Mexico.  But we figure we, meaning contemporary culture, can avoid such unpleasantness by learning to control climate — starting with the climate change “fixes” we’re implementing right now.  But if we do that, if we succeed in using the current climate change crisis to master technology that will permit humans to regulate climate enough to hold sea level, temperature, and rainfall at predetermined “norms” so they never change any more, then we will succeed in making the climate graph I showed you earlier come true.

If so, the Earth literally flatlines.  And us with it.

Changing business and industry is hard, but for most of us it involves poorly-understood regulations that impact a distant and very corporate “Them”.  Changing individual habits of transportation and home heating is harder.  It’s something each of us has to do, that impacts us daily and personally, and that changes the landscape we face when we wake up and go to work or drop the kids off at school.  But changing how we think about our relationship to the natural, rhythmic earth is in a different category of hard.  It means understanding that our children and grandchildren will not experience the same quality of life we’ve known unless we realize that the physical world they experience will be different.  We cannot give them security by bequeathing a non-changing world to them.  The only security we can really give them is the wisdom of knowing how to balance in a world where the only thing normal is change.

It’s time to include talks about change and balance in our climate conferences.  It’s time to start talking not just about how to keep the environmental edge where it is now so that no one falls off it, but how we, as a culture and a people, can back away from that edge and give it room to shift without destroying us.  And it’s time to understand that, global warming or not, emissions or not, the environmental edge is going to shift.  Just exactly the same way that our right ventricle is eventually, sooner rather than later, going to contract.  It’s part of being alive.

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Dawn Adrian, Ph.D. holds a doctorate in Paleobiology from the University of California at Berkeley, taught at the college and university level for 15 years, and has been awarded five research grants by the National Science Foundation.  She is an enrolled member of the Choctaw [Indian] Nation of Oklahoma.

Tapestry Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that helps reconnect people to the earth by integrating different ways of knowing, learning about, and responding to the natural world.