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<h1 class="css-twhgrd">Global Warming Is Melting Our
Sense of Time</h1>
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<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-fgeroe">David
Wallace-Wells</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">nymag.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">14 min</div>
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<div> Satellite image of smoke from active
fires burning near the Eastern Siberian
town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, on June 23,
2020. </div>
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<p>On June 20, in the small Siberian town of
Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle, a
heat wave baking the region <a
href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/siberia-verkhoyansk-record-heat-wave-arctic-circle">peaked</a>
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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/MartinStendel/status/1270382142049091584">calculated</a>,
would be a 1-in-100,000-year event. Thanks
to climate change, that year is now.</p>
<p>If you saw this news, last weekend, it was
probably only a glimpse (primetime network
news <a
href="https://twitter.com/EndClimtSilence/status/1274820687325167616">didn’t
even cover it</a>). 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 <a
href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/welcome-to-the-end-of-the-human-climate-niche.html">evicted
ourselves</a> 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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.texasobserver.org/tropical-storm-imelda-will-likely-be-southeast-texas-fifth-500-year-flood-in-five-years/">five
“500-year storms” in the last five years</a>,
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 <a
href="https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/busy-atlantic-hurricane-season-predicted-for-2020">predicted</a>
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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arctic-hottest-temperature-ever/">only
once</a>, 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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/James_BG/status/1275349110661558280">satellite
data</a>, 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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/1276603997915426816">three
times</a> the rate of the rest of the
planet. In Siberia, in May, temperatures <a
href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/siberia-verkhoyansk-record-heat-wave-arctic-circle">averaged</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/25/arctic-heatwave-38c-siberia-science">as
much CO2 in the last 18 months as had been
produced by Siberian wildfires in the last
16 years</a>. In early June, an
industrial-scale oil-storage facility there
<a
href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/09/melting-permafrost-claims-its-first-major-victim-russias-oil-gas-network/">collapsed</a>
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 <em>though</em>
is a less precise word than <em>because</em>,
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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>That window was not open very far to begin
with. One <a
href="https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/even-climate-progressive-nations-fall-far-short-of-paris-agreement-targets/">recent
study</a> 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 <em>plans</em>, which
are probably optimistic.) Another <a
href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901119311165#!">analysis</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319145243.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,emissions%2C%20a%20new%20study%20finds.">more
than 150 million additional people would
die from the effects of pollution</a>, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/climate/climate-change-oceans-united-nations.html">storms
that used to arrive once every century
would hit every single year</a>, <a
href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350">and
that lands that are today home to 1.5
billion people would become literally
uninhabitable, at least by the standards
of human history</a>.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<p>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
<a
href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/climate-change-worst-case-scenario-now-looks-unrealistic.html">written
before</a>, 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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/ClimateFlavors/status/1272538749763596290">until
the very end of the century</a>. 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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>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?</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/locusts-africa-hunger-famine-covid-19/">leaving
millions hungry</a>.) But in addition to
its humanitarian cruelties, for instance <a
href="https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-infectious-diseases">making
pandemics like COVID-19 much more likely</a>,
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, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/climate/climate-seas-30-year-mortgage.html">mortgages</a>.</p>
<p>“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 <em>Times</em>
reported June 19. (As it happens, the day
before the record-setting temperatures in
the Arctic.) As Kate Mackenzie has <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AUg5ERUOVA4/kate-mackenzie">relentlessly
chronicled</a> 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.</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<p>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 <em>Times</em>
reports, both sides of that bargain are
already, now, beginning to look very
different.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<aside></aside>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-26/lenders-with-the-best-climate-data-will-be-in-a-position-to-discriminate?sref=63ZrW3mM">writes</a>,
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.</p>
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