Heading off the beaten track…
The picture above[1] shows the latest estimated volume of arctic sea ice in March, 2015. The red line is 2015, and it looks like it is heading below the 2010 maximum. This is a disturbing trend because 2014 had a very high minimum, but the March maximum may well be very low. We know that 2014 was the first or second hottest year on record, and January and February this year were very warm. Even a cursory look at the Polar Science Center website reveals the very real possibility that we are heading towards another year of very low arctic sea ice extent, which will mean more flooding in the UK and Europe, and another crazy winter in north east America.
Destructive beauty
At the same time as the sea ice is struggling to reach a decent maximum, and thinning out every year, the Pacific appears to be entering a new era of vicious storms. The picture above[2] shows four tropical storms or cyclones generating around Australia simultaneously. One is cyclone Pam, which subsequently laid waste to Vanuatu (the emergency response is underway as I write this).
Science is having trouble keeping up with the pace of change that global warming is forcing on the planet. There is no scientific consensus on the role of global warming in typhoons and hurricanes, no solid understanding of where the arctic is heading, no established climate models that can understand the huge drought that is slowly consuming California, and only suspicions about the relationship between Sao Paulo’s deep water problems and Amazonian deforestation, but the inherent conservatism of the scientific process is no reason for us lay observers not to draw the obvious conclusion: Global warming is here, and it is wreaking havoc on our planet as we stand by and watch. Where is our planet heading? Or more relevantly, where is our reckless disrespect for the planet taking us?
Ecooptimism
As these portents unfold, today I read an article at Lawyers, Guns and Money describing a new phenomenon of “ecooptimism.” Apparently Al Gore has written an article arguing that we may be turning the corner in our response to AGW, because lots of solar panels are being installed; apparently Andrew Revkin gave a talk last year where he said that everything was going to be okay. Apparently Naomi Klein thinks we are able to find a way out of the worst problems that our planet is heading towards. I guess people think that recent agreements between China and the USA, action in the USA on power station standards, and China’s independent decisions to limit its coal use, are signs that we have turned a corner.
Another strain of ecooptimism on the part of economists like Nicholas Stern, decision makers and some of the major international bodies (such as the IMF) holds that even though things are a bit ragged right now, we still have time to reverse the situation by implementing some basic policies, and we can prevent further warming above the 2C “guardrail” without causing major damage to world economic growth. Under this form of optimism, even though we have delayed up until now, moderate changes in the next few years will still be sufficient to prevent major harm to either the environment or the global economy and growth opportunities for poor countries. This view of the global warming challenge holds that it is a serious threat to human civilization, but we can avert the collapse of modern society by imposing a moderate tax regime.
Should I be an ecooptimist? I think not, because these people are deeply wrong. They are ignoring the damage we have already done, misunderstanding how we need to think about the causes, and ignoring the powerful momentum of the climate system.
Ignoring the damage done
What is happening now in the arctic is not a coincidence: global warming is already destroying our planet. The damage being done by the collapse of the arctic sea ice is profound and widespread, and goes well beyond the possibility of polar bear extinction. The ridiculously resilient ridge driving California’s drought is almost certainly related to the collapse of the ice, as are the crazy winters in the eastern USA and the extreme rains in the UK. But California’s drought is also exarcebated by higher surface temperatures, reductions in winter snowfall and the role of unseasonally warm rains in destroying the snowpack that supports summer water reserves. Further south, Sao Paulo’s extreme drought is a response to deforestation (which is also driving global warming) and increasing temperatures. These two droughts alone threaten something like 40 million people in two of the world’s biggest economies, but no one has a serious plan to reverse either. And in the case of Sao Paulo, adaptation is impossible – while Californians, if they act now, could build a desalination plant, Sao Paulo is inland and its choices have essentially already run out. Of course American politics is so stupid that California won’t build a desalination plant until its water levels are so low that it doesn’t have enough water to generate the power that the plant needs …
Optimism about our future ignores that our future has already been changed by the damage we have already done.
Misunderstanding the causes
Somewhat ironically, economists are very good at confusing budgets and flows. When discussing national debts and tax burdens, mainstream economists have a tendency to think about the total national debt and current interest rates, rather than the amount of the debt coming due at any time, and the rate of change of interest payments. When thinking about global warming, they seem to focus on the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon rather than the total amount we are allowed to emit and have emitted. Under this way of thinking, it’s sufficient to reduce the rate of increase of carbon dioxide emissions – you just need to get them lower, but not necessarily to zero or negative. But this is completely wrong: when we make any policy about mitigating future global warming, we need to think about the total allowable carbon emissions, historical and future, and the rate of emissions is only relevant in as much as it determines how quickly we need to go carbon negative. When one thinks about the carbon budget, rather than carbon emission rates, then a carbon tax is simply a temporary policy to reduce emission rates so that we can buy time to achieve our real goal, which is hitting zero carbon emissions before we hit the budget. If a policy has a limit to how much it can reduce rates of emission – as most carbon taxes have been shown to have – then they are necessarily temporary policies. But most mainstream economists think that we can achieve our goals through only a carbon tax and a bit of minor regulation. They see reducing the rate of emission as the end goal, rather than staying within a carbon budget. They never go that extra step to ask – once we have dealt with the low-hanging fruit (coal-fired power emissions) how are we going to clean up the rest of the emissions?
How are we going to clean up the rest of the emissions? Cement-making, international air travel and shipping will probably be carbon-intensive for the foreseeable future. So what are we going to do? If your response is “carbon capture and storage,” you don’t have a solution.
Ignoring the momentum in the system
We already have a certain amount of warming built into the system. Due to feedbacks and the dynamics of the climate system, warming and its effects will continue to propagate after carbon dioxide emissions stop. This means that even if we could wave a magic wand that stopped all emissions tomorrow, the effects of those emissions on the biosphere through phenomena such as glacier melt, desertification, sea ice melt and storm intensity will continue to worsen for some time to come, and the planet will continue to warm a little more. Whatever effects we are seeing now from warming are going to get worse and then linger even if we stop emissions tomorrow. What we are seeing happening now is not the worst possible outcome of our best possible policy response – it is only the beginning. Practically, even if US and Chinese policy-makers have an epiphany tomorrow it will be 10 years before we get a really effective climate policy in place, 20 years before we can get carbon zero. That means we have 20 years of worsening warming, and beyond that an unspecified period of further warming, and beyond that period a further unspecified period of time when the effects of that warming propagate. Sea level rise may lag warming by years, which means that even if we act fast to get carbon zero in 20 years, sea level rise may worsen for 10 or 20 years after that. Arctic sea ice melt is obviously very responsive to warming, but we are only seeing the start of it – the effects of warming will continue to worsen the ice melt for years after the warming stops.
The practical effects of our stupidity
What this means in practice is that the arctic ecosystem is doomed. If anyone believes that another 20 years of warming are going to leave any appreciable ice in the arctic then they are very foolish. A collapse in this system means the near-extinction of a wide range of animals including polar bears, major changes to the jet stream with potentially catastrophic effects on northern Europe and America (including possible widespread cooling), the worsening of drought in California and massive changes in the Siberian ecosystem. Even putting aside potentially fatal methane releases from the sub-arctic, this is going to lead to a world we alive today do not recognize. It may also lead to the collapse of fisheries across the Pacific and Atlantic, depending on how major fish species respond to the loss of plankton and apex predators. The Pacific islands are doomed, of course, because they will run out of fresh water long before they sink beneath the waves, and low-lying Bangladesh is going to see widespread inundation with huge human movements. Pacific storm seasons will get far worse and much of the currently-inhabited coastal property of the eastern USA will have to be abandoned. The cost in flood defense and storm protection for cities like New York will be staggering. Water and food security in the Himalayan catchments, North Africa and Australia will become precarious, and cycles of flooding and drought in places as diverse as the UK and Australia will become much more extreme.
All of this is locked in, even under the best possible policy future.
Ecofascism?
There are people born today who are going to come of age in a world where the environment is unrecognizable compared to that which most of the human species has become used to. Some 20 – 40 years from now our children and their children will grow up into a world that recognizes our generation as the greatest criminals in the history of the human species. They will look on the devastation we have wrought and their anger will be deep and powerful, especially when they see the way that so many of our generation deliberately and wilfully ignored what was coming, or even made policy decisions that would worsen it. They will look on politicians like Australia’s Tony Abbott, who abolished a carbon price while bleating about “intergenerational debt” with deep scorn, and they will look on people who voted for these criminals as selfish clowns. This generation will also face a future far more precarious than anything we can imagine, because the world will still be warming and they will have to make not only deep cuts to their carbon emissions, but difficult and dangerous decisions about how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while dealing with food insecurity and natural disasters on a scale we can’t imagine. Our generation thinks that debates about carbon pricing are difficult; our children’s children will be arguing about whether to ban air travel and the steel industry.
This generation will respond to these challenges with political movements that live up to all the worst claims that conservatives make about the modern environmental movement. For example, because of the corruption and stupidity of current politicians in America, our children’s children will face a world without effective antibiotics. They will also need to reduce carbon emissions radically. The simple solution to both of these problems will be to ban meat eating or to allow only free range organic meat, making the worst nightmare vision of conservative critics of environmentalists and hippies into a reality. Maybe by then there will be new antibiotics that aren’t affected by the stupidity of the meat industry, but it’s highly unlikely that there will be a solution to the industry’s carbon emissions, and our children’s children will not be in a position where half solutions are acceptable.
Unless we act now, this is the world we will grow old in. I see no reason for ecooptimism, and I think that the people expressing optimism on the basis of partial technological solutions, or the comfort of easy first steps like a carbon tax, are fooling themselves if they think that we as a species are going to pull through this problem with such a simple and easy response. This is no time for optimism, but for a society-wide effort, at the same level as was required in world war 2 to eliminate fascism. If we don’t make that effort now, we will all be ecofascists 20 years from now.
There will be no denialists and no ecooptimists in that future.
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fn1: Taken from the Polar Science Center
fn2: Taken from the hotwhopper blog
Compromise and Conceit 
March 17, 2015 at 6:56 pm
We are a little ray of sunshine, aren’t we? The professional optimists think we’ll muddle through. I myself doubt it, but I’m not sure that corporate fascism is the outcome – more like a breakdown of management structures. Quite simply, the resources to support really large government (by whomever) won’t be there.
But I won’t take bets on it – I won’t be around to collect (or pay).
March 17, 2015 at 10:48 pm
Yes, a little ray of sunshine. On the bright side, today I read that growth in CO2 emissions decoupled from economic growth for the first time last year – although global economic growth in 2014 was something like 3%, CO2 emission growth was zero, suggesting that emissions may have peaked. On the other hand, I also read that the Totten glacier in East Antarctica is at risk of collapse, which will lock in about 3m of sea level rise (the part sticking out over the ocean is apparently 90 x 22 miles, and blocking a huge ice sheet). This is depressing stuff – we probably can’t stop this kind of thing from happening, and by the time we get to zero emissions the world won’t be recognizable.
This is no time for professional optimism.
March 18, 2015 at 7:10 pm
If it were just climate change. But it’s also topsoil, fisheries, invasive species, nitrogen overload…
I have an intuition, informed by eclectic reading in history but otherwise amateur, that social structures have something like an ecology. And, just as when an ecology gets stressed, it’s the big consumers (elephants, tigers) that go first, so when social structures get really stressed, it’s the top that goes. Not that the peasants have a happy time….
March 19, 2015 at 10:24 am
A while back I wrote a post about mathematical models of civilization collapse which model the dynamics of production, consumption and wealth inequality. Those models suggest that the elite can hold out a little longer than the poor, with the strange effect that the richest parts of society can keep consuming while things are falling apart at the bottom. Looking at what’s happening in the middle east at the moment, where there are a lot of poor and vulnerable people, makes me think that maybe the first stage of those models is beginning to happen. But whether that’s the case or not depends on the extent to which phenomena like “ISIS”[1] are due to environmental problems (like food shortages and harvest failures) vs. political problems.
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fn1: At the gym the other day I noticed that the Japanese TV news puts “ISIS” in scare quotes like this: 「イスラム国」. They don’t show them the respect of allowing them to name themselves. I think I am going to adopt this little conceit for my blog, as a mark of their impernanence and scumbagginess.
March 19, 2015 at 3:18 pm
There are problems with modelling human political interactions like predator-prey or competition for resource models. Elites are fundamentally political: the resources they draw on are generated by the “working classes”. Wealth is not a thing in itself (as an animals store of nuts might be) but a claim on current income: again something founded in and sustained by a political arrangement. Social structures enable production as much as they draw on it, so there is a three-way interaction between resources, production and political structures.
My intuition is that resource shortages impact the ability of higher-level elites to tap into current (reduced) income. Lower level elites have an advantage. In the Maya case, villages do ok, while cities lose (actually, a few survived until the Spanish arrived). In the Roman case, the high aristocracy – families like the Anicii – lose, while the local gentry hang on. In our case, Wall St loses, but Tokyo does ok, for a time.
Climate change not a resource issue? It is for humans, if it impacts agriculture.
March 19, 2015 at 3:24 pm
Yes the models seem very simple, but I was only scratching the surface when I looked at them. I think Paul previously said on this blog that he thinks elites will do badly in an agricultural collapse because they lack the necessary resources, but I am not convinced either way. Let’s hope we never get to find out. And yes, I agree global warming is a resource issue. The first is water, which is not fungible and can be rendered unusable even when not depleted. We are seeing this now in São Paulo and California.
March 20, 2015 at 12:00 pm
“Wealth is not a thing in itself (as an animals store of nuts might be) but a claim on current income”
Wealth is usually ownership of a resource that human’s have assigned value to. If I’m sitting on a mountain of gold or own a castle then I’m wealthy. It’s also possible that this wealth is held in a form that grants access to recurrent income (e.g. shares, bonds).
The issue I’d expect to see is that the values assigned during resource shortages can radically change in a tiny period. If I have a mountain of gold and you have a two meals when we both need to eat then you’re setting the price. It’ll probably be something like “Get stuff, I’ll have the second meal later. And take the mountain of gold once you starve to death.”
That’s why I’d expect applicability of the term “elite” to shift rapidly during a resource crisis (or really any crisis). The elite are the guys on top of the heap, and if your claim to the term rests on your wizardry with financial derivatives [2] then it’s only going to last while those are worth more than food or medical care. After that, farmers producing a surplus (or more likely people controlling access to that surplus) are going to be back on top just as they’ve been for the vast majority of human history.
The only way this would be averted would be 1) a slow enough collapse that the current elites become the farmers (i.e. they buy food producing land or other means of critical production [1]) or 2) the elites find some way of convincing people to ascribe ownership of the food to the elites (e.g. they buy the farms but don’t work them) – this second one is basically elites becoming the people who control access to the surplus food.
As for how complex a society you can sustain in crisis situations, I’m not sure historical trends are a valid comparison because of the wildly different starting point. The historical decline of central power may apply for a gradual, disordered, widespread collapse as that’d be a decline where the capabilities are lost across a range of industries at a similar rate. But for a brutal collapse I’d expect the availability of technology to change the game.
If food production was halved across the world tomorrow, a bunch of governments would collapse as people starved/rioted (Africa/Europe), a couple would attack others to secure their food supplies (China, the US, Russia), some would be invaded or do deals to retain some degree of control (Australia, New Zealand, other net food producers). The death rate would be more stark because of open violence and the immediate (rather than gradual) starvation.
If the collapse in food production was also matched with a collapse in general production (e.g. all the mines in Africa stopped producing raw materials, or transport links were cut) then the short term availability of high tech goods could result in a new societal make-up. For example, a bunch of guys with guns could still use security cams to run a large prison farm. That sort of structure (regardless of who runs it, e.g. army, gang, whatever) may result in more of a “government” hanging on. It’d just be a vastly different government to what we’re used to. North Koreans would probably feel right at home though.
Hmm, I don’t think my societal outcomes there look 100% thought out, but I stand by the proposition that war gaming societal collapse should work from first principals and account for modern tech (at least in the short term) rather than simply assume that old patterns would be repeated. I suspect that any of us could quickly list a priority order for stuff to seize to avert that collapse for ourselves and a small group. The ability to do that coupled with tech that would allow a small group [4] to actually succeed at the idea may result in a new pattern.
[1] I think I keep saying food is critical, but farm machinery production, medicines & medical treatment, water, transport and energy production are basically all just as critical.
[2] I keep using bankers as the example of a group that fails to produce a basic commodity [3] but it’s basically anyone who doesn’t actually produce a physical output. Movie stars, athletes, politicians, university lecturers in health, anyone associated with the army (they’d fall into the robber/ruler category), etc.
[3] I also don’t define what I regard as a basic commodity. So lets say anythin critical to keeping people alive and nothing else. No TVs, art, etc.
[4] I’d expect that a couple of hundred or few thousand people could sustain a modern-ish society for a couple of decades at least. You’d need farming, light industry, medicine and some education (depending on how long you’re looking for it to last for). Failure would be driven by inaccessible resources (e.g. petrol, metals) but workarounds may avert some of it (e.g. I don’t need a mining industry for metal, I just need to drag cars from a deserted city to where I can melt then down). Access to a university’s science staff and equipment would probably be really useful too (No social scientists! And the maths guys are assigned to shoving fertilizer! Project managers in banking are probably right out too!).
March 20, 2015 at 7:52 pm
“Wealth is usually ownership of a resource that human’s have assigned value to.”
Yes. But “value” is “ability to buy stuff” – either from stocks or current production. And stocks are always very limited. It’s income share that counts. Your castle being a case in point: without the ability to levy tolls or tax peasants it’s just a pile of rocks.
I don’t expect any modern decline to follow ancient ones. for one thing, it’s much easier to move people and stuff around, and to communicate. So the structures are more resilient, not being confined to local production. But my point is that resource stress intensifies intra-elite competition, and the elites closest to the actual production have the advantage. They starve the top, and then the absence of the coordinating top mechanisms lower production, and then…
So the bankers in New York have a tougher time extracting rents from say, China, put the screws on elites in LA to keep up their income….
Or: as the drought bites, peasants in north Syria ask Alawis in Damascus and Latakia to share their pain. Alawis refuse, peasants revolt, others see their chance, 4 years later and 100,000 dead there is no central government and much of the infrastructure has gone. If anyone puts Syria back together it will not be as an efficient state. It will be several local statelets (Druze, Alawi, Kurd, Sunni…) under some nominal umbrella.
March 21, 2015 at 5:38 pm
Hey Peter T,
I think we’re on the same page. I think I’m splitting income versus wealth more finely, but that doesn’t really impact analysis of elites.
Your point about bankers in NY screwing more accessible targets is a good one, but I suspect that all the accessible targets will be worthless in an emergency (e.g. movie starlets in Hollywood) or tell them to get stuffed (e.g. manufacturers in China or rustbelt states). At that point the only question is can they round up enough people with guns and poor appreciation of what consistutes value in a disaster (e.g. money doesn’t hold value, food does. If you’re an army, don’t follow the guy waving around what was value yesterday).
Comparing failed states to environmental disaster is also a good point. AGW is more likely to result in a Syria-like situation rather than Rome-like one. The difference between Syria and AGW would be that USD still is a known value in Syria where as I’d use them for toilet paper if AGW hits hard enough.
March 21, 2015 at 6:52 pm
Well, there will always be a market for starlets..
Adam Smith is said to have remarked that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. I read Chris Wickham’s The Legacy of Rome a while back, and was surprised how long it took even the Western Roman Empire to disappear – at least 300 years after its formal demise the memory and a good number of the institutions were still a force.
March 22, 2015 at 12:58 pm
I think this is part of the appeal of the Flood books and the campaign world I based on them … trying to understand how human society could keep hold of its modernity when it loses access to basic resources that we assume underpin that modernity. It’s hard to imagine we could lose everything we know, even if we lost the ability to build the things our knowledge informs us of. But what would we become like, living as squatters in the remnants of our society? This is also part of the appeal of zombie stuff …