No Excuses on Climate Change

    At least where I was, in Champaign County Illinois, Spring 1970, the frontispiece or prolog to The Whole Earth Catalog for Earth Day (I) was Don Marquis's column on "what the ants are saying," delivered through his spokes-insect, archy the cockroach (from archy does his part, 1935). 

The lower-case letters are correct; archy types his messages and can't hold down the shift key, so of course it's all lower-case.

What the ants say is, basically, 

it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

 In the 1930s, they knew about making deserts: the Great American Dust Bowl and all. And some knew the Dust Bowl was nothing uniquely new. Here's from my old (and I mean old when I bought it in my youth) Thompson & Johnson Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 (NYC: Norton, 1937) — one attempt to explain the phenomenal conquests of the Arabs in the decades following the death of Mohammed (old spelling). After rejecting theories of Islamic fanaticism in the period, and noting the weakness of the Persian and Roman Empires, the first issue is the initial rapid movement out of Arabia: "The expansion of the Arabs is best understood in the light of previous movements out of the desert into the neighboring Fertile Crescent. These were constant phenomena, to be explained by the vicissitudes of climatic conditions, which always drove nomadic people outwards. [...] The peninsula itself was experiencing a periodic desiccation, which made life within it ever more unbearable and drove its inhabitants to seek relief elsewhere" (p. 166; ch. 7, "The Empire of the Arabs"). What was to be called "the desert pump" had pumped out one of its most historically significant armies. 

    James Westfall Thompson of the U of California and Edgar Nathaniel Johnson of the U of Nebraska over-simplified and may've over-stressed migrations and the role of "nomads," but they were writing in the 1930s, and were still ahead of those who today talk of the origin of medieval Europe in, figuratively speaking, "Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem" and then throw in the Germanic tribes. Medina and Mecca, as similar figures of speech, come in here, as well as the later great cities in "The Empire of the Arabs" — the lands of Islam — that kept high civilization going when it wasn't doing very well on the peninsula of Eurasia that for a long while there was "darkest Europe." And these two historians from the American west knew about marginally fertile land becoming deserts and deserts becoming uninhabitable by humans.  

The idea of climatic influence was around and went in and out of fashion.

In 1965, Hubert Lamb, one of the first paleoclimatologists, published research based on data from botany, historical document research, and meteorology, combined with records indicating prevailing temperature and rainfall in England around c. 1200 and around c. 1600. He proposed, "Evidence has been accumulating in many fields of investigation pointing to a notably warm climate in many parts of the world, that lasted a few centuries around c. 1000–c. 1200 AD, and was followed by a decline of temperature levels till between c. 1500 and c. 1700 the coldest phase since the last ice age occurred."

The warm period became known as the [Medieval Warm Period] MWP, and the cold period was called the Little Ice Age (LIA). However, the view that the MWP is a global event was challenged by other researchers.

And is currently challenged by more and is "out." The point here is that, if anything, earlier periods of warming and desiccation were overstated geographically, but it has been understood that they could have profound affects on humans. The full title of Brian Fagan's 2008 book is The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, and there are enough hot, dry places in danger in our world that we need to pay attention if they're getting hotter and drier and less able to support human habitation. 

    The scientific argument over earlier periods of warming, ocean-rise, and desiccation is intertwined with politics and the highly plausible idea that large-scale climate-change in preindustrial times is unlikely to have been caused by humans — plus the false conclusion in many places that people must accept the idea of "anthropogenic climate change" to take serious action to slow it down. 

    Which brings me to some of my long-delayed recent reading and a source I didn't expect: Carl Sagan's  Broca's Brain (essays and such, 1974-79), in a paperback copy I have from the Miami University Library, which means I had to have bought it on some duplicates sale when I was still at Miami U, i.e., before 2006-7. I don't recall why I bought the book, but one reason I should have is because it has significant discussions of Immanuel Velikovsky and (primarily), Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (1950). And I should have caught up on "the Velikovsky Affair," which I had once taught as a unit in a course at the U of Illinois in "The Rhetoric of the Life Sciences."

    Okay, Velikovsky's basic thesis, a Wikipedia entry nicely summarizes, was "that around the 15th century BC, the planet Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object and passed near Earth (an actual collision is not mentioned). The object allegedly changed Earth's orbit and axis, causing innumerable catastrophes that are mentioned in early mythologies and religions from around the world." So the "Affair" was primarily about astronomy and physics, but there was enough biology involved — a form of catastrophism is mainstream science for the extinction of the dinosaurs — enough biology was involved that the unit was almost legitimate: and the debate over Velikovsky's ideas was sufficiently vociferous to be irresistible for a topic in academic rhetoric of recent times (academics are much more polite nowadays than earlier centuries, at least in public). And I knew about Velikovsky because I'd taken an undergrad seminar on D. H. Lawrence and wrote a term paper on "Catastrophism and Coition: Cosmic and Individual Development in Women in Love."

Comic digression: I lightly revised the "Catatsrophism" essay and sent it to PMLA, the premiere journal in the LitCrit field at the time (my elders advised me to start at the top and work down). I did not have the usual complaint of authors' having to wait months for a response from a journal: my manuscript was returned to me in my nice, big, self-addressed stamped envelope within a couple weeks. I stomped down our steep stairs toward the letter-carrier, who was trying to get the returned manuscript into our mailbox; and I must have been muttering louder than I thought since the mailman, without looking up, raised his hand and said, "I only return them; I don't read them" — which cracked me up and put me into the right mood to read the first rejection letter, no less, of what was to become my rather impressive collection. Very few or no rejection slips: the editors wanted to make clear to me why my efforts, though much appreciated, "do not meet our needs at the present time" (or ever, or at least until the sun goes nova). In this case: "Very interesting opening paragraph," said the referee's comment the editor wished to share with me, "before the whole thing" — and a substantial-size essay it was — "falls flat." I immediately got back on my hobbyhorse, and sent the (unrevised? probably) essay to what I was told was the second choice for something on D. H. Lawrence, TSLL: Texas Studies in Literature and Language. It was accepted with one revision the editor would make with or without my permission (titles can fall under "Editor's Prerogative"): re-subtitling to "Universal and Individual Development [...]": I had the required alliteration and a colon, but three words alliterated exceeded the bag-limit. But I have digressed.

And so I had published an essay in a respectable journal with the word "Catastrophism" in the title, which even back then (1967) was quite enough to get me on at least one Looney-Tunes mailing list, Velikovsky division. And reading Sagan on Velikovsky brought me to this:

Velikovsky writes [...] that his claim of a high surface temperature [on Venus] was "in total disagreement with what was known in 1946." This turns out to be not quite the case. The dominant figure of Rupert Wildt again looms over the astronomical side of Velikovsky's hypothesis. Wildt [...] predicted correctly that Venus and not Mars would be "hot." In a 1940 [... "Note on the Surface Temperature of Venus"] in the Astrophysical Journal [91: 266-68], Wildt argued that the surface of Venus was much hotter than conventional astronomical opinion had held, because of a carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide had recently been discovered spectroscopically in the atmosphere of Venus, and Wildt correctly pointed out that the observed large quantity of CO2 would trap infrared radiation given off by the surface of the planet until the surface temperature would be almost 400º K, or around the normal boiling point of water. (p. 136; ch. 7, "Venus and Dr. Velikovsky," Problem VIII, "The Temperature of Venus")

 Later in Broca's Brain — again, from the 1970s — Sagan rather immodestly notes a now

fashionable suggestion, which I first proposed in 1960, [...] that the high temperatures on the surface of Venus are due to a runaway greenhouse effect in which water and carbon dioxide in a planetary atmosphere impede the emission of thermal infrared radiation from the surface to space; the surface temperature then rises to achieve equilibrium between the visible sunlight arriving at the surface and the infrared radiation leaving it; the higher surface temperature results in a higher vapor pressure of the greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide and water; and so on, until all the carbon dioxide and water vapor is in the vapor phase, producing a planet his high atmospheric pressure and high surface pressure.

        Now, the reason that Venus has such an atmosphere and Earth does not seems to be a relatively small increment of sunlight. Were the sun to grow brighter or Earth's surface and clouds to grow darker, could Earth become a replica of the classical vision of Hell? Venus may be a cautionary tale for our technical civilization, which has the capability to alter profoundly the environment of Earth. (pp. 180-81; ch. 10, "The Sun's Family")                        

Sagan repeats the point in "The Climates of Planets," from 1975, ch. 14 in Broca's Brain. The upside of climate change for humans:

We may owe our [...] existence to climatic changes that on the average amount to only a few degrees. Such changes have brought some species into being and extinguished others. The character of life on our planet has been powerfully influenced by such variations, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the climate is continuing to change today. (pp. 222-23)

By 1975 there had been "almost a hundred different theory of climatic change on Earth," of which  Sagan selects three for closer consideration. 

The first involves a change in celestial mechanical variable: the shape of the Earth's orboit, the tilt of its axis of rotation, and the precession of that axis [...]. Detailed calculations of the extent of such variations show that they can be responsible for at least a few degrees of temperature variation, and with the possibility of positive feedbacks this might, by itself, be adequate to explain major climatic variation. 

 A second class of theories involves albedo variations. One of the more striking causes for such variations is the injection into the Earth's atmosphere of massive amounts for dust — for example, from a volcanic explosion such as Krakatoa's in 1883. While there has been some debate on whether such dust heats or cools the Earth, the bulk of present calculations show that the fine particulates [...] increase the Earth's albedo and therefore cool it. [...]

                    Finally, there is the possibility of variations in the brightness of the Sun. (pp. 226-27) [...]

 Some evidence on the trend of global temperature seems to show a very slow increase from the beginning of the industrial revolution to about 1940, and an alarmingly steep decline in global temperatures thereafter, This pattern has been attributed to the burning of fossil fuels, which has two consequences — the liberation of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, and the simultaneous injection into the atmosphere of fine particles, from the incomplete burning of the fuel. The carbon dioxide heats the earth; the fine particles, through their higher albedo, cool it. It may be that until 1940 the greenhouse effect was winning, and then the increased albedo is winning.

    The ominous possibility that human activities may cause inadvertent climate modification makes the increasing interest in planetary climatology rather important [...].   (pp. 227-28)

And whatever might be the main driver of climate change manifested as global warming, makes knowledge of the greenhouse effect crucial. The tilt of the Earth or energy production of the sun is beyond human power to affect; greenhouse gasses we can do something about, and should. And, clearly, I think, should have by the 1980s.

 

Young people coming to age in the next couple of decades will have good reason to be angry with their elders. 

 

 

<https://history.aip.org/climate/Venus.htm#N_4_>

 

 

 

Climate Change / Political Changes: The Need for Historical Background

We need more books like Brian Fagan's 2008 The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations: history books, mostly, that help us understand that climate change isn't just  about changes in some abstract "the environment," but about great changes in human politics.

This book is about "the Medieval Warm Period," ca. 800-1300 C.E. and its generally positive effects in, e.g., northern Europe and utterly devastating effects elsewhere, e.g., in already warm, dry places such as long-term droughts in what's now the U.S. southwest.

These Medieval data can cut different ways, as a warning to try to reduce the speed of global warming and try to mitigate its effects — or to say that climate change ca. 900 obviously wasn't caused by human industrial activity, so we needn't reduce current economic activity with its benefits and irrelevant, or even beneficial greenhouse gas emissions. 

To quote for background one on-line pundit, "Climate scientists now understand that the Medieval Warm Period was caused by an increase in solar radiation and a decrease in volcanic activity, which both promote warming. Other evidence suggests ocean circulation patterns shifted to bring warmer seawater into the North Atlantic." So why should we try to reduce greenhouse gasses?

The question isn't rhetorical. For one thing, the article linked last paragraph notes that there's no evidence for a recent increase of solar radiation, nor, in our times, significant decrease of volcanic activity;, and I'll note that currently there's not a damn thing the human species can do about either. We can reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses, which will slow the rate of warming, and we should reduce those emissions anyway to save some easily extractable hydrocarbons for our descendants. They might find safe and efficient ways to use petrochemicals and need some — and be very pissed off at earlier generations who went and burned them. 

They may also be pissed off at a re-run, but worse, of, especially, long-term, catastrophic droughts. 

In addition to the obvious, some of the effects of climate changes indeed include the geo-political. William Grimes's New York Times review of The Great Warming has an arresting sentence indicating that what was so good for much of Europe may have had negative effects: "Although data remain sketchy, it seems probable that extended droughts dried up pastureland on the Central Asian steppe, propelling the armies of Genghis Khan westward." The career of the Great Khan (1206-1227 C.E.) achieved some impressive empire building that, in Europe, arguably set the stage for what was once called the Renaissance, but unarguably resulted in an extraordinarily high body-count. Matthew White tallies up Genghis Khan's "multicide" score at 40 million, which puts the Mongol invasions just behind World War II (1939-1945) for destruction of human life. 

And destruction of the great Muslim civilizations at the center of Eurasia — which in a twisted way brings me to where I started thinking about this post. 

I had typed out on Facebook a quotation from Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 by James Westfall Thompson and Edgar Nathaniel Johnson (New York: Norton: 1937). In an early chapter on "The Empire of the Arabs," Thompson and Johnson give Mohammed and the early leaders of the Umma credit for organizational genius and make the point that medieval Europe was a side-show as civilizations of the time went. They are far from "climatic determinists," with an Index innocent of such references. And they fully recognized the arrogance and stupidity of the remaining Roman Empire and Persia in their continuing wars and machinations. Still, Thompson and Johnson asserted (in 1937!) that "The expansion of the Arabs is best understood in the light of previous movements out of the desert [...]. These were constant phenomena, to be explained by the vicissitudes of climatic conditions, which always drove nomadic peoples outwards. [...] The [Arabian] peninsula itself was experiencing a periodic desiccation, which made life within it ever more unbearable and drove its inhabitants to seek relief elsewhere. It seems, accordingly, highly probably that what occurred would have happened even without Mohammed and Islam" (p. 166). 

"What occurred" was the end of Late Antiquity, with the final end of the Roman Empire, and the Persian — and Rome in the East (the Byzantine Empire), reduced to a regional power. T & J and those with similar theories may be wrong, but it's a point to consider, along with the possibility that the following round of "desiccation" in the Medieval Warm Period led to that drying out of parts of the Eurasian steppe leading to the western thrust of the Mongol invasions and, let's say, a figurative arrow from a powerful bow through the figurative heart of "The Empire of the Arabs."

It's possible that two major changes in the course of human history had as one basic cause the long-term droughts — the "desiccation" — brought on by global warming. Mohammed and Genghis Khan count, and their decisions are important. Still, one thing Karl Marx got right was that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please [...], but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." And those circumstances include a physical environment that is both beyond human control and influenced by our actions.

Unless we want some really bad circumstances for the next generation, we'd better get right some important decisions — and soon. 

Climate and the World Turned Upside Down (A.D. 7th Century, 1st Century and a Bit A.H.)

         One of my favorite quotations is usually attributed to Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, and it'd be appropriate for either of them, though it's probable neither said it. I'll pass it along, though: "War is God's way of teaching American geography" — and suggest a variation: «Planning for war is a pressing invitation to learn some history.»

         Unlike many in their civilian leadership — Donald J. Trump for one — U.S. war planners and others represented in the figure of speech "the Pentagon" are looking very seriously at climate change as "a national security threat," and some quick history lessons can help drive home the point that they have good reason to do so.

         The major history lesson is in a book like The Great Warming (2008), which has as its subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. But Brian Fagan's book was researched and written recently, and he relates "The Great Warming" — the Medieval Climate Anomaly of ca. 800-1300 C.E. — very specifically to global warming nowadays, and stresses its threat of extended droughts. What might be more persuasive is some historical work done a good while before our time and therefore innocent of our current political debates — and on a topic very directly relevant for one national security issue.

         So here is an excerpt from James W. Thomson and Edgar N. Johnson's An Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 (New York: Norton, 1937) — again 1937 — from Chapter 7, "The Empire of the Arabs" (I have marked but left unchanged locutions neutral in 1937 but probably discourteous today). The topic is the Muslim conquests of what Christians call the 7^th century and a bit thereafter, usually explained by both Muslims and historians from Christendom in religious terms. Thompson and Johnson have a different take.

          From these small beginnings at Medina the Arab church-state [sic] spread with prodigious rapidity. Within fifty years after Mohammed's death [in 632 C.E., 11 A.H.] it had conquered Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Within one hundred years it had spread to the frontiers of India to the east, and to the west had swept across North Africa through Spain and beyond the Pyrenees. [Usual explanation for such success (an act of God for the faithful; for secular historians) political cohesion combined with, and mutually reinforcing, religious fanaticism. …]

          The facts are quite otherwise. In the first place, it is impossible at this early date to speak of Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity against paganism characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been marked in practice by its tolerance. […]

          In the second place, it is impossible to speak of Mohammed's creating any such thing as Arab unity, nor can it be supposed that in any substantial way the nomadic Arab tribes suddenly consolidated into a unified state after his death. […] [163-64]

         The expansion of the Arabs is best understood in the light of previous movements out of the desert into the neighboring Fertile Crescent. These were constant phenomena, to be explained by the vicissitudes of climactic conditions, which always drove nomadic peoples onwards. It is now known that for a long time previous to Mohammed there had been a gradual movement of Arabs into the adjoining Byzantine and Persian empires. […] The [Arabian] peninsula itself was experiencing a periodic desiccation, which made life within it ever more unbearable and drove its inhabitants to seek relief elsewhere. It seems, accordingly, highly probably that what occurred would have happened [given the weakness of Persia and Byzantium after prolonged war (and plague)] even without Mohammed and Islam. (166).

         A couple things here. First, when you hear people talk about "Islam vs. the West," tell them that to say nothing of geography — Islam has been or remains the dominant religion in regions clearly in the western part of the Old World — there is the commonplace in European history that Islam joins the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic streams in the making of Medieval Europe. Second,  whether you accept the theory in Thompson and Johnson or not, note that in 1937 historians could find plausible that at least local long-term weather — "a periodic desiccation" — was a key factor in one of the most important political/military events in world history: the Islamic conquests and expansion leading to "The Empire of the Arabs" and, arguably, the final push taking western Europe from Late Antiquity into the early Medieval.

         Two common figures of speech for the countries on and around the Arabian Peninsula are "the Middle East" — how you'd see things if you're looking out from the British Isles toward your "Far East" — and "tinderbox": from a literal "box containing tinder, flint, a steel, and other items for kindling fires," and having as its tenor, "a potentially explosive place or situation."

         "Tinder" refers to dry slips of wood that you use for starting fires; "desiccation" means a drying out; in the Middle East and large areas in Africa, desiccation could get to desertification: taking dry areas to outright desert.

         And people will yet again move out, and there are few places to go nearby that (1) can support them and (2) do not have a lot of people already. Now add to that a large number of small-arms in the world and a fair number of people willing and able to sell not-so-small arms or teach how to make IEDs, and add to that the fairly recent and still vigorous development of Fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam, and fanatical varieties of the big three monotheisms and even in such fanaticism-resistant traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism.

         Take a tinderbox, add heat, wait for a spark. Or, change the figure of speech and let ISIS evolve into something more sophisticated, add a charismatic leader (a modern Saladin), oppose it to a Christendom relearning fanaticism, tell them all "God wills it!" (Deus vult!), and be prepared to learn geography.

         If very unlucky, you'll become and expert in geography and in the history of downright fascinating times parallel to the transition from Late Antiquity to early Medieval, known some places in Europe as "the Dark Ages."