[D66] Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time

Thu Jul 30 06:39:22 CEST 2020

  Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time

By
David Wallace-Wells
nymag.com
14 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fintelligencer%2F2020%2F06%2Fglobal-warming-is-melting-our-sense-of-time.html>

Satellite image of smoke from active fires burning near the Eastern 
Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, on June 23, 2020.

On June 20, in the small Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, north of the 
Arctic Circle, a heat wave baking the region peaked 
<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/siberia-verkhoyansk-record-heat-wave-arctic-circle> 
at 38 degrees Celsius — just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the 
highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. In a world without 
climate change, this anomaly, one Danish meteorologist calculated 
<https://twitter.com/MartinStendel/status/1270382142049091584>, would be 
a 1-in-100,000-year event. Thanks to climate change, that year is now.

If you saw this news, last weekend, it was probably only a glimpse 
(primetime network news didn’t even cover it 
<https://twitter.com/EndClimtSilence/status/1274820687325167616>). But 
the overwhelming coverage of perhaps more immediately pressing events — 
global protests, global pandemic, economic calamity — is only one reason 
for that climate occlusion. The extreme weather of the last few summers 
has already inured us to temperature anomalies like these, though we are 
only just at the beginning of the livable planet’s transformation by 
climate change — a transformation whose end is not yet visible, if it 
will ever be, and in which departures from the historical record will 
grow only more dramatic and more disorienting and more lethal, almost by 
the year. At just 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming, where the planet is 
today, we have already evicted ourselves 
<https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/welcome-to-the-end-of-the-human-climate-niche.html> 
from the “human climate niche,” and brought ourselves outside the range 
of global temperatures that enclose the entire history of human 
civilization. That history is roughly 10,000 years long, which means 
that in a stable climate you would only expect to encounter an anomaly 
like this one if you ran the full lifespan of all recorded human history 
ten times over — and even then would only encounter it once.

You may register temperature records like these merely as the sign of a 
new normal, in which record-breaking heat waves fade out of 
newsworthiness and into routine. But the fact of those records doesn’t 
mean only that change has arrived, because the records are not being set 
only once; in many cases, they are being set annually. The city of 
Houston, for instance, has been hit by five “500-year storms” in the 
last five years 
<https://www.texasobserver.org/tropical-storm-imelda-will-likely-be-southeast-texas-fifth-500-year-flood-in-five-years/>, 
and while the term has obviously lost some of its descriptive precision 
in a time of climate change, it’s worth remembering what it was 
originally meant to convey: a storm that had a one-in-500 chance of 
arriving in any given year, and could therefore be expected once in five 
centuries. How long is that timespan, the natural historical context for 
a storm like that? Five hundred years ago, Europeans had not yet arrived 
on American shores, so we are talking about a storm that we would expect 
to hit just once in that entire history — the history of European 
settlement and genocide, of the war for independence and the building of 
a slave empire, of the end of that empire through civil war, of 
industrialization and Jim Crow and World War I and World War II, the 
cold war and the age of American empire, civil rights and women’s rights 
and gay rights, the end of the cold war and the “end of history,” 
September 11 and 2008. One storm of this scale in all that time, is what 
meteorological history tells us to expect. Houston has been hit by five 
of them in the last five years, and may yet be hit with another this 
summer — which is already predicted 
<https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/busy-atlantic-hurricane-season-predicted-for-2020> 
to be a hurricane season of unusual intensity. Of course, that won’t be 
the end of the transformations. Climate change will continue, and those 
records — high temperatures, historic rainfall, drought, and wind speed 
and all the rest — will continue to fall. From here, literally 
everything that follows, climate-wise, will be literally unprecedented.

The arctic numbers from June 20 are terrifying enough; with more context 
they become only more so. It was warmer there than it was that same day, 
in Miami, Florida. In fact, it was warmer north of the Arctic Circle 
than it has ever been, on any June day, in the entire recorded history 
of Miami, which has only once 
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arctic-hottest-temperature-ever/>, in the 
whole tropical century for which temperatures there have been 
registered, reached 100. It was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, in 
Verkhonaysk, than the average high temperature in the region for June, 
which means the arctic record was the equivalent, in terms of 
temperature anomaly, of a 110-degree June day in New York or a 
115-degree June day in Washington, D.C. According to preliminary 
satellite data 
<https://twitter.com/James_BG/status/1275349110661558280>, land surface 
temperature in parts of arctic Siberia reached that level last week, too 
— 45 Celsius, or 113 Fahrenheit. In terms of temperature anomaly, that’s 
the equivalent of a 130-degree day in D.C. On Capitol Hill, that would 
be, very comfortably, lethal heat.

Thankfully, for Americans at least, that isn’t how global warming works 
— its punishing effects are distributed unequally around the globe, and, 
at the moment, the Arctic is being punished most vindictively, warming 
at three times 
<https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/1276603997915426816> the rate 
of the rest of the planet. In Siberia, in May, temperatures averaged 
<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/siberia-verkhoyansk-record-heat-wave-arctic-circle> 
as much as 10 degrees Celsius higher than normal. The arrival of the 
arctic summer reignited “zombie fires” that had, improbably, burned 
through the arctic winter, smoldering in peat rather than burning out. 
Those fires, like all fires, released carbon, which is stored in trees 
as surely as it is in coal, in this case releasing as much CO2 in the 
last 18 months as had been produced by Siberian wildfires in the last 16 
years 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/25/arctic-heatwave-38c-siberia-science>. 
In early June, an industrial-scale oil-storage facility there collapsed 
<https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/09/melting-permafrost-claims-its-first-major-victim-russias-oil-gas-network/> 
when the melting permafrost on which it had been built finally 
destabilized, releasing about 21,000 tons of oil and turning local 
rivers red. That spill was about two-thirds the scale of the Exxon 
Valdez spill, which horrified an entire generation; this one, we’ve 
hardly read about, though it befell a far more ecologically degraded 
planet, with more than half of all carbon emissions ever produced by the 
burning of fossil fuels in the entire history of humanity coming since 
the Valdez spill. Perhaps /though/ is a less precise word than 
/because/, the intervening generation of environmental calamity having 
quite thoroughly normalized horrors like these. Even Vladimir Putin — 
presiding over a petrostate which, so far north, actually stands to 
benefit from some amount of global warming — declared it an emergency. 
All told, the planet’s melting permafrost contains twice as much carbon 
as hangs in the planet’s atmosphere today, and it’s expected that over 
the course of the century, at least 100 billion tons of it will be 
released through melt, about three years worth of global emissions and 
functionally enough to close the window on the goals of the Paris accords.

That window was not open very far to begin with. One recent study 
<https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/even-climate-progressive-nations-fall-far-short-of-paris-agreement-targets/> 
suggested that even the decarbonization targets of Britain and Sweden, 
often hailed as global climate leaders, would produce emissions between 
two and three times the carbon budget required to meet the Paris goals. 
(And those are just their decarbonization /plans/, which are probably 
optimistic.) Another analysis 
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901119311165#!> 
suggested that, for all the talk of halving our emissions by 2030 — as 
the IPCC says is necessary to safely avoid 2 degrees of warming — the 
planet has only a 0.3 percent chance of doing so. If Donald Trump won 
reelection, the analysis suggested, those chances would fall to 0.1 
percent — one in a thousand.

If 2 degrees is now inevitable, that doesn’t make it comfortable. 
Indeed, it will be, for much of the world, a horror — and the space 
between those two things, inevitability and horror, is the one in which 
we will all be forced to learn to live. At 2 degrees, it’s expected that 
more than 150 million additional people would die from the effects of 
pollution 
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319145243.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,emissions%2C%20a%20new%20study%20finds.>, 
storms that used to arrive once every century would hit every single 
year 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/climate/climate-change-oceans-united-nations.html>, 
and that lands that are today home to 1.5 billion people would become 
literally uninhabitable, at least by the standards of human history 
<https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350>.

Those projections will invariably prove imprecise, or perhaps worse — 
that is both the nature of science, which proceeds by revision, and 
humanity, which will likely adapt to at least some measure of these 
impacts. But the Siberian heat wave reminds us just how large the scale 
of necessary adaptation will likely be — requiring us to respond not 
just by shoring up the proverbial shorelines of our civilizations but by 
preparing them in much more fundamental ways to endure conditions never 
seen before in the whole span of human history. It is also a reminder of 
just how much we miss when we regard the projections of any neat, linear 
model of future warming as a straightforward prediction of that future 
and of what level of adaptation will be require — especially when we 
reflexively discount the uncertainty warnings scientists invariably 
include, as any lay reader (including me) is likely to do. Perhaps the 
most important lesson of the freakish Siberian heatwave is: however 
terrifying you find projections of future warming, the actual experience 
of living on a heated planet will be considerably more unpredictable, 
and disorienting.

Just how freakish and unpredicted is this heatwave? Over the last few 
years, a growing chorus of critics have argued against one climate model 
built on predictions of high-end carbon emissions in particular, called 
RCP8.5 —arguing that, though it had been endorsed by the U.N.’s IPCC and 
formed the basis of much recent science since that organization’s last 
major report, its projections were simply implausible, relying as they 
did on the dramatic growth of coal use over the course if the century. 
As I’ve written before 
<https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/climate-change-worst-case-scenario-now-looks-unrealistic.html>, 
that pathway does indeed look increasingly hard to credit as a model of 
our future, and is best understood, in terms of emissions, as an 
absolute worst-case scenario, which would require almost a global 
climate nihilism to achieve. But for those suggesting we should discard 
that model, or any other that charted a high-end course for warming, the 
arctic heatwave makes a very strong counterargument. Because even in 
that worst-case pathway, hundred-degree summer days in the Arctic do not 
become routine until the very end of the century 
<https://twitter.com/ClimateFlavors/status/1272538749763596290>. This 
heat wave is, today, an outlier, not a routine event. But that doesn’t 
make it irrelevant. Instead, it is giving us at least a brief preview of 
what the world would look like, more than a half-century from now, in a 
timeline we understand to be, at least in terms of emissions, impossibly 
pessimistic. But if our timeline could accommodate such extreme events 
from that worst-case one, and decades ahead of schedule, it is also a 
sign that “timeline” is probably a misguided way of thinking about the 
new swirling universe of extreme events we are plunging headlong into. 
Making sense of climate change requires more than trying to determine 
where on a particular linear plot we are and where on it we are likely 
to be in ten years, or in fifty. It may require more profoundly revising 
our sense of linearity itself. In this way, global warming isn’t just 
scrambling our sense of geography, with Verkhonaysk, at least briefly, 
playing the role of Miami. It is also scrambling our sense of time. You 
may feel, because of the pandemic, that you are living to some degree in 
1918. The arctic temperatures of the past week suggest that at least 
part of the world is living, simultaneously, in 2098.

But climate change isn’t just a brutal form of time travel, it is 
discombobulating to our very sense of time. When looking at projections 
for future warming, an event like the Siberian heat wave appears as an 
acceleration of history, but when looking at the paleoclimate record, it 
seems like a trip deep into the prehuman past, toward eras like those, 
lasting millions of years, when palm trees dotted the Arctic and 
crocodiles walked in their shade there. Especially at extreme levels, 
warming threatens the apparent march of progress on which the modern, 
Western “timeline” model of history was built. But at least until the 
arrival of large-scale carbon removal technologies, it also illustrates 
the fact that time — in the form of carbon emissions, which hang in the 
atmosphere for centuries — is irreversible. Because we are doing so much 
damage so quickly, destabilizing the entire planet’s climate in the 
space of a few decades, warming can seem like a phenomena of the 
present. But its effects will unfurl for millennia, with the climate 
stabilizing perhaps only millions of years from now. Climate change 
unwinds history, melting ice frozen for many millennia and pushing 
rainforests like the Amazon closer to their long-overgrown savannah 
states. It also makes new history, drawing new borders and new 
riverbeds, turning breadbaskets like the Mediterranean into deserts and 
opening up arctic shipping routes to be contested by a new generation of 
great power military rivalries. It compresses history — those Houston 
storms, for instance, represent more than a millennia of extreme 
weather, concentrated in a period of just five years. And it scrambles 
and scatters it, too, disrupting the cycle of seasons and relocating 
rain belts and monsoons, among many other distortions. At the same time 
temperatures in Verkhoyansk reached 100 degrees, in other parts of 
Siberia it was snowing. Was it winter or summer, a Russian catching the 
national weather forecast could have been forgiven for asking. They may 
have wondered, is this our hellish climate future or the return of the 
Little Ice Age?

Contemplating the impacts of climate change from this perspective can 
seem naïvely abstract — and it is, when compared to the storms and the 
wildfires and the droughts. (Not to mention the literal plague of 
locusts, 360 billion of them, which have devastated agriculture in East 
Africa and South Asia this year, descending in clouds so thick you 
couldn’t see through the insects and leaving millions hungry 
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/locusts-africa-hunger-famine-covid-19/>.) 
But in addition to its humanitarian cruelties, for instance making 
pandemics like COVID-19 much more likely 
<https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-infectious-diseases>, 
warming is already recalibrating much more hard-headed models of time, 
too. This is a sign that warming is truly the meta-narrative of our 
century, touching every aspect of our lives. Beyond the catastrophes and 
crises, the surreal and disorienting aspects of climate change are 
showing up even in the most numbingly pragmatic places. Like, for 
instance, mortgages 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/climate/climate-seas-30-year-mortgage.html>.

“Up and down the coastline, rising seas and climate change are 
transforming a fixture of American homeownership that dates back 
generations: the classic 30-year mortgage,” Christopher Flavelle of the 
New York /Times/ reported June 19. (As it happens, the day before the 
record-setting temperatures in the Arctic.) As Kate Mackenzie has 
relentlessly chronicled 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AUg5ERUOVA4/kate-mackenzie> for 
Bloomberg, mortgages aren’t the first or only financial instrument to 
feel the intrusion of a new climate reality much less forgiving, and 
less stable, than the one on which not just the financialization of the 
global economy but indeed all of human civilization has been erected. 
Insurance and reinsurance, municipal bonds and sovereign wealth funds, 
boutique hedge funds and massive asset-management operations are all 
beginning to reckon with a future made, at least, much rockier by 
climate change. How much rockier? Well, according to a Climate Central 
estimate, at least half a million American homes are on land expected, 
30 years from now, to flood every single year. Altogether, those homes 
are today worth $241 billion. This is just homes, just in America, and 
annual flooding isn’t the only flood risk a homeowner or a bank might 
want to consider, which means, even looking only at flooding, many, many 
more homes are vulnerable than that. Of course, flooding is not, by any 
stretch, the only climate risk those homes and homeowners would face.

Like many of those other financial instruments, a mortgage isn’t just an 
instrument but also a theory of time — a bet on future value built on 
the proposition that three decades is a long enough period to absorb the 
short-term turbulence of real-estate markets and a short-enough period 
that larger systemic shocks would not have time to develop and 
reverberate. That is, at least, how the mortgage looks from the bank 
side. From the consumer side, a mortgage represents a related, but 
slightly different, theory of time. For most of postwar American 
history, it has represented “adulthood,” as defined in mostly white and 
middle-class-and-up terms. For all those distortions and delusions 
embedded in it — ideas about housing and the real-estate market but also 
race and class and urbanization and family structure — the 30-year 
mortgage also embedded an idea about the stability of society through 
time, that one could expect to arrive at the end of adulthood in a world 
recognizable to the person who began it, and indeed that whatever 
changes had transpired would be, on net, of value to the homeowner, who 
by virtue of his or her property had become a small-scale stakeholder in 
the prospects of the community, the region, the nation and indeed the 
world as a whole. As the /Times/ reports, both sides of that bargain are 
already, now, beginning to look very different.

    Home buyers are increasingly using mortgages that make it easier for
    them to stop making their monthly payments and walk away from the
    loan if the home floods or becomes unsellable or unlivable. More
    banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down
    payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up
    from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened
    to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk.

    And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global
    warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own
    books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae,
    where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans
    fail.

One academic quoted in the story, Jesse Keenan of Tulane, painted the 
picture even more starkly: “Conventional mortgages have survived many 
financial crises,” he said, “but they may not survive the climate crisis.”

As a divining rod of the future, the mortgage market is a crude tool, 
focused only on a narrow set of values, when we know warming will affect 
many more, registering only a small set of changes, and registering them 
only according to a purposefully blinkered set of metrics: what the 
value of a property is, how it is likely to change, and what amount of 
risk is involved in making a bet on its worth and the reliability of 
mortgage-holders to pay. Already, the terms are shifting to reflect new 
realities — a doubling of the required down payment reflecting a much 
higher sense of risk. But, as Mackenzie writes 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-26/lenders-with-the-best-climate-data-will-be-in-a-position-to-discriminate?sref=63ZrW3mM>, 
more precise financial tools won’t necessarily protect us from climate 
risks — only allow those utilizing them to profit from them, perhaps 
even in discriminatory ways. Presumably, in the years ahead, banks will 
continue to modify their calculations, so that the mortgage will 
survive, at least in some modified form, reflective of some additional 
climate risk — perhaps, depending on the place, quite a lot more risk. 
But surviving in what form, exactly, and making what claim about the 
stability of the near future and how comfortably we may all live in it? 
Time will tell.

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