The Long Hot Crisis

How it's going to end up is a guess. That it's going to keep getting worse until mid century at least no matter what we do is just about certain. So what might it be like?

Millions of people driven from their homes, thirsty, starving. Unknown numbers of deaths and diseases related to Climate Crisis phenomena--everything from frail elders dying in heat waves to even more babies with malaria. The IPCC says all this, though not that boldly.

But old people are old and the ones who will die will probably be poor. Money and/or a rich industrialized society will help insulate Americans--not so many starving here. But...let's remember the social equivalent of Gaia. We live in an increasingly dependent society--we're dependent on more and more outside our homes and communities, and at the same time, on fewer and fewer resources and institutions. Global GPS goes out and we're all literally lost. Our public health in particular is so shoddy now, our government so lax in protecting our food and water and medicines, that small crises can become big ones, and persistent problems can fray the fabric until it breaks.

War. That's what the military is worried about. Over water, probably. Darfur may already be largely about that. How about India and Pakistan, with nukes?

It's not only the climate crisis: the effects on the planet of industrial gases and chemicals, the destruction of forests and sealife and life in general--all combine with climate change to make the future very dicey. We're in the midst of a major wave of extinctions unlike any since the dinosaurs, even apart from the polar bears and penguins. That could well affect us in ways we can't predict and may not be able to control. Right now there's the mystery of the honeybees dying off. That may not seem like a big deal, but as Einstein once pointed out, if the bees disappear and pollination stops, the human race could die out in a few years. It's not just a matter of being kind to animals and hugging trees, though we might be more worth saving if we did that. Keeping life flourishing is about our survival.


But if we're speculating about the future, let's go to a futurist, and a science fiction writer as well. In his 202 nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling wrote that "The greenhouse effect is the dirty little sister of nuclear Armageddon." He writes that humans in poor places will suffer food shortages, but that the rest of life on the planet will bear the brunt. If we ignore the problem and just try to survive, we'll do so using more fossil fuels until the whole planet looks like Blade Runner.

But Sterling is more specific, more graphic and more apocalyptic on the Internet, on a site called the Viridian Design Movement. At the moment the post at the top is crowing victory. This year, he writes, we've turned the corner and we are going to confront the Climate Crisis. But for what that means for the future, you need to read further, and look at some back notes.

Even in victory he warns: The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))

In an earlier post: In the 2060s, damage from climate change is supposed to outpace the planet's entire GNP. That means ALL the funding and ALL the focus get used up by one issue: climate crisis.)))

Sterling's style in these "notes" is to add his interpolations to some other text. Perhaps his most provocative prediction is for the rise of what he calls the "khaki green" For example, responding to Bush's comment that crises like Katrina may require the Army taking charge, he agrees that the Climate Crisis future will overwhelm "the pretense of civilian capacity. It's not about Bush power versus government power. We don't yet have a society capable of responding to genuine Greenhouse enormities." The reason is: The organizational problem at hand would be much better understood as a train of Katrinas. It's not that a big storm comes and you pass the blame buck. It's that big storms come all the time.)))

In fact, according to Sterling, these weather-related crises (monster storms, forest fires) will require more than the Army. (((I'd be guessing we run out of soldiers well before the ocean runs out of storms.))) There's no cure for demolished cities that a contemporary army can give. A plethora of Katrinas doesn't mean Army control of evacuation. You can't park the populations of drowned cities somewhere off camera while Delta Force rebuilds their town. The only effective response to really savage and continuous weather violence has got to be vigorous civil defense and a paramilitarized general populace. Those millions of evacuees who were cluttering highways this week – they're the labor force. They and no one else are the ones who will have to do the heavy lifting, because it's their cities and their world that has been destabilized by climate change.)))

This is the "khaki green" concept--more than a little chilling in this formulation. While there's an image there of a total society working together, it also conjures images of local warlords and national dictators as well as paramilitary justice.

Sterling sees this as a result of fear--so very realistic in terms of what seems to motivate our politics now. But this is not the only way this would have to go. It could also be people helping people out of community and compassion, organized and directed by democratic government. More like what the National Guard is supposed to be. (Perhaps the real realism is a combination of these.)

But there are so many tasks ahead that the vision of a fully mobilized society, or at least a completely transformed culture, is a possibility worth pondering. Beyond responding to these spot crises, there are the other ongoing ones: building seawalls, dealing with epidemics, feeding people, monitoring during heat waves. So another model may be more of NGO relief agencies, only ones that don't leave their own country. Or the model of the volunteer militias of the states in American Revolutionary times, only with shovels and medicines instead of guns. A real domestic Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America. Or the ideals of dedication, service and selflessness, wedded with high degree of organization and training, and an ethic of watching out for each other: the kind of ideals that antimated Robert Heinlein's dream of the Space Patrol, or Gene Roddenberry's of Starfleet. Force as the last resort, not the reason for being. And not on the high frontier. Right here.

All that is pretty certain is that changing your lightbulbs is not going to be the extent of the changes required to confront the Climate Crisis. Understanding that, getting prepared for all the issues that could arise, is the reason to contemplate such extremes now.

In describing the despicable machinations of Senator Inhofe, who peddles his fossil fueled denialism relentlessly while his own state of Oklahoma suffers from extended drought, one recent commentator suggested that Inhofe doesn't care about the future consequences of his actions because he will soon be dead. That may be so. But these visions are about a future that I will not see much of either. I may live to see the American culture so transformed as to make today seem like a twisted fantasy--I believe that could happen in the next decade or two. But getting older can also make the present more precious, the past more real, and the future--the future we won't see--more important.

But I do understand the natural tendency, particularly of younger people, to resist such visions of doom, or alternatively, to wallow in them. Dealing with visions of doom has been a large and difficult task for my generation, and speaking for myself, with mixed results. The end of the world as we know it is pretty overwhelming. But there are reasons not to push away the possibility. First, because what people do now may prevent the worst of it. Second, because things are happening now, and are going to keep happening, that are part of this crisis, and if we are to cope with it at all, and deal with it intelligently, it's best to understand what's really going on.

However, it's not all happening at once. Unlike nuclear apocalypse, it will play out over many years, and probably centuries. That is both comforting and daunting. But it is very likely the truth.