The climate crisis means destabilization, not doom
Whether we will survive is not in doubt, but to thrive in the future we need to adapt
As 2022 begins, there is a lot of bad news about climate change, and many reasons to be worried. Sometimes people take this reality, strip out the nuance and specifics, and conclude, “we’re doomed.” This is wrong. Don’t mistake me, millions of people will suffer greatly because of the climate crisis. But we are not doomed.
Being doomed would be simpler, wouldn’t it? If earth were going to be obliterated by a huge asteroid if we didn’t knock it off course immediately,1 things would be worse, but simple. The climate crisis doesn’t offer the cognitive ease of a clean binary.
For more than 37 years, from July 1967 through August 2004, the most rain that ever fell in a single hour in New York City’s Central Park was 1.58 inches. Then in September 2004, 1.76 inches fell in an hour. This record stood until August 21, 2021, when 1.94 inches of rain came down in sixty minutes. The two previous New York City records for rainfall in an hour had lasted for 37 and 17 years, respectively, but this one would last just 11 days. On September 1, 2021, over the course of one hour, Hurricane Ida dropped 3.15 inches of rain on the city. A record broken twice by 0.18 inches was obliterated by 1.21 inches. The deluge caused widespread flooding, in which eighteen New Yorkers died.
At the beginning of June 2021, the hottest it had ever been in Portland, Oregon was 107 degrees Fahrenheit. The record was set in 1965 and matched in 1981. On Saturday, June 26, 2021, it reached 108, setting a new record. The next day it hit 112. On Monday, June 28, it reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit, a level climate models didn’t think was realistic in Portland for decades. At least 107 Oregonians died in the heat wave.
On June 30, 2021, in the same Pacific Northwest heatwave that crushed Oregon, it reached 121 degrees in British Columbia, the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. The next day five-hundred wildfires were burning in the province.
Several months later, on November 17th, British Columbia was hit by a weather system called an “atmospheric river.” Torrential rain landed on hillsides burned bare by the summer wildfires, where root-less soil was unable to absorb much water. Rivers swelled to record levels, washing out all three major highways in the province, as well as the railroad tracks, cutting off Canada’s biggest port, Vancouver, from the rest of the country. (Trucks were able to use alternate routes through Washington State.) Several hundred people in British Columbia died in the two weather events. The damaged infrastructure is expected to take months or years to rebuild.
Before 2021, the *least* amount of rain that had ever fallen in the Denver-Boulder area between July 1st and December 29th was 2.09 inches in 1962. The next lowest readings were 2.15 and 2.29 inches in 1939 and 2003. In 2021, over the same 6-month window, just 1.08 inches of rain fell. If that weren’t enough, in an average year Boulder gets about 30 inches of snow between September and December; in 2021, only 1.46 inches fell. In the resulting crispy-dry conditions, a fire ignited in the Boulder suburbs on December 30, 2021. Despite the largely manmade environment, the fire spread rapidly in high winds. The unprecedented winter blaze burned 6,200 acres and destroyed 991 homes. One person died.
One of the two crucial takeaways from these unprecedented weather events is familiar: it is ever more screamingly urgent that we cut greenhouse gas emissions and build a zero-carbon economy.
The second takeaway has gotten far less attention but is similarly important: our infrastructure and systems are increasingly inadequate and dangerously vulnerable to climate change-intensified extreme weather.
We live within a web of human systems and a built environment that enables the functioning of human civilization. Every day we rely on drinking water systems, food systems, electric grids, drainage systems, building codes/zoning rules/housing, internet networks, supply chains, trash disposal systems, transportation infrastructure, sewage systems, and more for nearly all aspects of our lives.
The vast majority of this infrastructure was built when the patterns of earth’s natural systems, including the outer limits of weather extremes, were fairly stable. Global warming has knocked those natural systems out of equilibrium, causing a steady stream of destructive weather events outside of historic ranges.2 The frequency and extremes of these storms, fires, and droughts will increase further in the near future.
In other words, the human systems and infrastructure we depend on were built for a world that no longer exists.
On a practical level this means to keep people safe, especially those in lower-income communities, we will need to reassess, redesign, and rebuild or reinforce most infrastructure and human systems on earth. It isn’t yet, but this has to be a top priority in the years and decades ahead.
But the full implications of the growing impacts of climate change are even more profound and far-reaching. Climate writer Alex Steffens describes climate change as a “discontinuity”:
“[A] “discontinuity” is a watershed moment, one where past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future… The planetary crisis is a discontinuity. This is the most important thing about it. Failing to understand the climate/ecological emergency as an all-encompassing discontinuity in human societies is failing to understand it, full stop.
In part because so much climate attention has been (appropriately) focused on reducing emissions to mitigate global warming, we have failed to recognize the immense scope and scale of the planetary changes underway. This perception failure has led us to invest far too little time, energy, and money in adapting to what’s ahead. As a result, we’re already more vulnerable than we were even a couple decades ago. There are potential vulnerabilities around us that we don’t notice because the systems have been dependable up to now. We need to start noticing.
Again, climate change is bringing destabilization, not doom. Destabilization is certainly no picnic, but this distinction is critical. It’s the difference between a future rich with aspirations, hope, failure, accomplishment, broken hearts, meaning, and love, and having a degraded future, if any at all. As a parent, it means I can help my kids make sense of the weather disasters, political turbulence, and upheaval around us in a way that leaves space for them to dream, try, stumble, flirt, and flourish.
The changing climate raises important questions for every family, community, and organization in the world. I’ll come back to the specific questions the climate transformation raises for families and organizations in future posts.
For those in more climate-vulnerable places, these questions have been urgent for years. For more fortunate others, they will be sooner than we realize, if they aren’t already.
The clock is ticking, and those who act swiftly to adapt to climate impacts will fare better than those who wait.
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Notes:
https://www.statista.com/chart/25690/new-york-city-hourly-rainfall-records/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/climate-change-deaths-2021
https://www.oregonlive.com/weather/2021/06/portlands-record-breaking-heat-wave-by-the-numbers.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_British_Columbia_wildfires
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/gallery-in-photos-bc-declares-third-state-of-emergency-in-2021-from/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/you-can-t-get-to-vancouver-by-car-or-train-after-epic-storm
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/12/31/marshall-fire-boulder-county-friday/
https://boulderreportinglab.org/2022/01/03/marshall-fire-the-face-of-climate-change-manipulating-from-the-margins/
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/a-major-contributor-to-the-syrian-conflict-climate-change
The plot of Netflix’s hit movie Don’t Look Up.
On a geologic timescale temperatures on earth have fluctuated quite a bit. On a human timescale, however, and especially a modern human timescale, things have been relatively stable.