Climate Distortion

Update: Nine days after this post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes, and the temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August. The world is boiling, said the UN Secretary-General.

The current heatwave in the US south and southwest (as well as northern Mexico) is expanding.  The National Weather Service predicts that this weekend about 80 million people will experience temperatures or heat indexes above 105F.  And the heat is likely to continue into next week.

When you add up everyone in the world dealing with excessive heat for weeks at a time, and then factor in those dealing with torrential rain and flood, firestorms and smoke, and all the associated problems, that number must be in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

This is the summer that climate distortion comes home.  The heat is no longer a temporary inconvenience, nor are the floods and fires.  They are much harder to ignore, and for many they are fatal to ignore. Their reality changes everyone's daily reality: how they think, plan, act and feel.  It should be motivation for institutions to make more than temporary fixes.  Gaps in public services become more apparent and must be addressed.  Even when the weather changes.

Climate distortion--though not necessarily this summer's weather--is here to stay, for a very long time.  It seems important to me to understand what's happening.  Some people call it climate change (a name invented by a Republican consultant so it wouldn't sound so "negative").  But the climate hasn't changed.  It has been distorted.  From a different point of view, some call it climate derangement.  It's colorful, but it isn't any more accurate.  The climate has not changed nor has it gone insane.  The climate is doing what it has always done in these geophysical circumstances.  But something is distorting the climate--usually making it more extreme and violent.  Something is interacting with ordinary climate phenomena, like El Nino and various other cycles.  That something is excessive CO2 and other identified gases spewn into the atmosphere by industrial age human societies, and the global heating they have caused.  

The effects of these distortions can be predicted in a general way, but not in a weather forecasting kind of way.  More days of higher temperatures in the summer, for instance, has been widely predicted for decades as an effect of global heating caused by greenhouse gases.  But distortions are inherently volatile.  Nobody knows how they will manifest in a given year.  A distorted climate is full of shocks and surprises.  There may be baseline changes within all this, but those probably won't be known until some time has passed.  But because of time lag effects, a distorted climate is here to stay.

The distortions in turn can distort various major ocean currents and atmospheric currents that play a huge role in determining weather patterns.   Then we're in the area of feedbacks and tipping points.  That's climate distortion.  They can eventually alter key features of the planetscape that affect climate, like polar ice.  They can affect life directly as well as indirectly, with cascading consequences.

Some people won't care much why this is happening, but they may face the fact that it is happening. Maybe some other people will finally listen to the basic findings of climate science.  I am not one of those who make a  rigid slogan out of "trust the science."  First of all, there is no such thing as "the science." Scientists, for any number of reasons on a scale from benign to corrupt, sometimes sell conclusions derived from bad science.  Science is not pure.  Human knowledge is much weaker than we like to pretend it is, and that's really true of western science.  You usually have to use your judgment in which "science" to believe.  

But climate science--which is really a name for those studying chemistry, biology, physics and various more complex hybrids of inquiry applied to climate--has come at its conclusions in a variety of ways, from measuring aspects of today's world to measuring aspects of the deep past, to modeling various possibilities.  Some requires sophisticated computation; but some is based on quite elementary physics and chemistry.  All of this should be clear to anyone who has read or seen An Inconvenient Truth since 2006, and there are more sciences involved now. 

For decades now, thousands of scientists of various kinds from every nation on the planet have come together to share their findings and put together a consensus in UN climate reports.  No subject has been studied more thoroughly by more people over a longer time in a cooperative way, and come to the same conclusions.  In comparison, your doctor's diagnosis is the equivalent of a coin toss.  

There are a number of practical lessons to be derived from this, including that the resistance to climate crisis conclusions is largely in the murky realm of the psychological (though it is excused and made easier and therefore more cynical and corrupt by politics.)  That should tell us that in order to address climate distortion, its effects and its causes, means exploring our inner distortions--fears, needs, desires as well as such unconscious drivers as denial and projection.  It means exploring the inner distortions related to social media, algorithms, group dynamics and so on.

Finally it means finding again the core of our beliefs in ourselves, what we're all about, our operating principles, our deep commitments and ideals, all of which may have been distorted by the rush of complexities around us.  It's not going to be easy, navigating the increasing number of hotheads around us (is it coincidence that mass shootings have gone up recently along with the temperature?) but in the end society and the individuals within societies will rise and fall on whether "you'd do the same for me" remains a transcendent impulse of what used to be called decency.