Climate Change And The Cargo Cult: A Geographic Perspective

By Chris Cunningham

Climate Change is a major threat to our way of life, and requires urgent political action to remedy its many threats, but is it a symptom rather than the disease? This book argues that the problem lies deep in our commitment to the quest for ever increasing economic growth. At some time in the 1970s the Western World passed a point of economic satiety beyond which further economic growth was of little benefit, and indeed was counter-productive, to living the good life. We must therefore seek a better understanding of our environment and of what constitutes genuine wealth. Life without the frenetic economic activity and culture of selfish possession that drives the modern economy can indeed be more humane, more pleasant and more meaningful than what we have today , but to reach it will require a major re-evaluation of what is important in business, politics and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781528944687

Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham is a retired Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia. Born in Tamworth, NSW, he grew up and completed his primary and secondary education in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. He studied architecture and town planning at the University of Sydney, and geography and economics at Macquarie University. He worked as a regional planner and policy adviser in Australia and the UK before taking up an academic position at the University of New England in 1981. He is the author of several books as well as numerous academic articles and broadcasts on topics related to town planning and community. His book about early European exploration in the Sydney Region, The Blue Mountains Rediscovered, won the inaugural NSW Premier's Prize for Regional and Community History in 1997. Chris is married to Anne, a retired GP. They have four adult children.

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About the Author

Chris Cunningham is a retired Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia. Born in Tamworth, NSW, he grew up and completed his primary and secondary education in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. He studied architecture and town planning at the University of Sydney, and geography and economics at Macquarie University.

He worked as a regional planner and policy adviser in Australia and the UK before taking up an academic position at the University of New England in 1981. He is the author of several books as well as numerous academic articles and broadcasts on topics related to town planning and community. His book about early European exploration in the Sydney Region, The Blue Mountains Rediscovered, won the inaugural NSW Premier’s Prize for Regional and Community History in 1997. Chris is married to Anne, a retired GP. They have four adult children.

Chris Cunningham

Climate Change And The Cargo Cult

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Foreword

This story is about geography in the broadest sense of the word. It deals with both natural phenomena and human activity distributed over the surface of the earth. It is initially focussed on weather and climate, these days no longer haunts of generalist geographers but a specialist discipline of physicists who have become the modern meteorologists and climatologists, but it also delves into those areas of thinking usually occupied by economics, human geography and political philosophy. It explores the issue of the impact of climate change – and more particularly the economic and political ideas that drive the industrialism that gives rise to human induced climate change – on global society, with particular reference to Australia as an example of a continent and society likely to be adversely affected by climate change.

As this is written, during January 2017, it can hardly be doubted that climates across the globe are indeed changing towards a warmer earth. Considerable doubt, however, can be expressed about some of the more extreme claims in popular media concerning inevitable disaster for the human race and all life as a result of climate change per se. I am not attempting to prove or disprove the role of human activities in the causes of climate change: those matters have been well dealt with by others. A great majority of climate scientists are totally convinced that artificial causes account for most of the global warming experienced in the past three decades, and the succession of ever hotter years globally since 2012 provides empirical evidence, rather than merely computer modelling, to support them. That in turn requires that governments of the world cooperate to hugely reduce, and preferably eliminate, human society’s reliance on fossil fuels.

In the discussion here, I am assuming that weather, and thus climate change as projected by those climate scientists, will indeed occur more or less in line with their projections, and that the average temperature of the globe will rise by the order of 3˚C over the next century or so, unless very significant action is taken by governments across the globe to reduce enhanced human emissions of greenhouse gases. Those advocating immediate and meaningful action on climate change might well see this as a pessimistic assumption. Given the ideas outlined in Chapters Seven to Nine, the reader might well see it as optimistic. That assumption is somewhat higher than the middle of the range of such temperature increase that is currently being projected with reasonable confidence by climate modellers. Adaptation of humans and their societies to changing climates is really the only sensible long-term policy that governments can hope to pursue to mitigate the impact of climate change. Optimistic ‘climate management’ scenarios, at present being debated on the world stage, attempt to constrain global temperature rise over the next century or so to less than 2˚C from pre-industrial levels (approximately 1.2˚ above current levels), or even more optimistically to confine such increase to 1.5˚C, just 0.7˚ above what we are currently experiencing. Even accommodating to the former will take immense civic effort from all nations of the globe. Indeed, it is doubtful if political action, even dramatic and draconian, can really do much to halt the progress of nature as it responds in very complex ways to a warming earth, for, to a large extent, the damage has already been done and industrial processes over the past half-century have already put into the atmosphere the mechanism, whereby warming of the surface of the earth is inevitable. Nevertheless, this is no argument for doing nothing about the problem, and certainly not a case for ‘business as usual’, as will soon become apparent.

Climate is the central idea that links economics and geography. These two disciplines, expressed in their broadest sense, embrace not only our concern about climate change but also that for our wealth and well-being. It is climate that determines the global production and distribution of the food supply – not just for people but for all life. It is climate that determines which regions of the earth are suitable for human forestry, agriculture and pastoral pursuits. Economics focuses on the behaviour of individuals and societies in winning wealth from nature, and in generating and distributing goods and services, but it is climate primarily, and geology secondarily, that locate the distribution of the natural resources that economics takes for granted. Adaptation of humanity to changing climates is not necessarily easy, but for most of human history it has been a painful fact of life. That the cause of current climate change is largely a result our own activities in no way eases the pain: not a small part of those activities results from our desire to insulate ourselves from the environment of the natural world. It is unlikely that human endeavour can do much to reverse current trends towards warming climates: as we have already noted, the most optimistic scenario that current advocates of best practice can promise is mitigation.

Adaptation, however, does not let us off the hook and allow us otherwise to proceed as we have proceeded in the past. Climate change is itself but a symptom of a much greater social and environmental malaise that is, without any doubt at all, directly a result of human industry. This is the destruction, by an industrial system that produces far beyond the demands of human needs, of the natural and cultural wealth of the planet. This wealth includes the natural environment and its resources upon which we all, in common with all other life, depend. It also includes a vast heritage of human endeavour and culture.

Emphasis on economic growth – exponential increase in physical wealth per capita – as the main objective of society and government puts immense, indeed unbearable, pressure on natural ecosystems upon which humanity, and indeed all life, depends for its sustenance. These ecosystems and regions, created as they are by the natural climatic conditions of the earth, cannot be expanded to meet the demand that our economies will be placing on them in the future. In truth, they are already being degraded by current human industrial activity. As an example, we have witnessed very substantial losses in the stocks of the world’s commercial fisheries over the past half-century. In most cases the resource has diminished by something like a fifth and in some cases has more than halved. The measured output of the global fishing industry, therefore, is not an indication of additional wealth produced by that industry: much of it is attributable to (literally) eating of the capital that is required to sustain the longer-term viability of the industry. We can expect similar declines in the useful resources of croplands, forests and grasslands in the next half century, and yet the demands of industrial economies intent upon growth are ever more insistent. Few environmental economists would argue that the earth’s geosystems can sustain as much as double present-day production, and most would indeed aver that nature would be crippled by such a figure. Nevertheless, global economic growth, compounding even at 1%, a figure considered abysmally low by most macroeconomists, would double present production in 70 years – within the lifetime of most children being born today.

The earth’s accumulation of ‘stuff’ has to slow necessarily towards zero economic growth and probably, negative economic growth – as currently defined – within the lifetime of that generation. Therefore, I argue, it is indeed worthwhile pursuing policies such as curtailing or limiting, including taxing and rationing, fossil energy use even if implementation of these policies has comparatively little effect on climate outcomes. Limiting such use will help to stem the seemingly limitless aspirations of material production, limit economic growth, again as it is currently defined and used as an index of national and global prosperity, and turn our minds towards alternative personal and social lifestyles that are congruent with retention of the natural life of the planet that sustains us. We have to develop new ways of defining and husbanding wealth if human society is to continue to improve its lot in future.

Contrary to the story told by international business interests and conservative economists, such limitation is a worthwhile, indeed an essential, global social goal. Once we have enough, there is little real value in pursuing further material wealth, yet the most developed economies on the face of the planet are the most profligate in continuing to pursue physical production as though it were the only worthwhile economic objective. In this pursuit such societies are degrading other and even more important sources of wealth and well-being while at the same time preaching to the vastly more populous poorer societies on the planet that their (the richer societies, that is) way of living is the example for the globe. Since the late twentieth century, and I use the symbolic date 1976 (two centuries since the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, and also since publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) to mark the turning point, the continuing emphasis on economic efficiency and growth in western countries, and particularly those of the Anglo-west, has cost far more at the margin than the benefit conferred on those societies by the additional production. This calls for a wholesale rethink of what is our real wealth, what are our real goals as individuals and as societies, and what is the role of the economic system in achieving those goals? Clearly, the single-minded focus on physical production, economic growth and development that obsesses western governments is not the way forward. Politics must embrace a much broader understanding of what constitutes well-being, yet the politics of advanced economies is increasingly dominated by the plans and concerns of business corporations, so much so that business has virtually taken over many roles that used to be regarded as the functions of government.

However, it is highly unlikely that democratic governments will be given a mandate for remedial action unless their people as a whole deeply understand and support the cause. That understanding is going to come neither from superficial advertising campaigns nor from scare tactics from campaigners, for whom dire predictions derived from climate change modelling are akin to the scriptures of a new religion. The issues, as expressed so far, present the evidence in a way that the lay person is most unlikely to understand: modelling by supercomputers is so complex that it takes special skill to perform it and interpret the results. ‘Scientists’ – these days the word itself projects, for climate change activists if not for scientists themselves, the same connotations of awe and reverence as were demanded by, if not always accorded to, princes of the mediaeval church – being so much more intelligent and wise than us, we of the laity, simply have to take their conclusions as a given faith. It is hardly surprising that, as with mediaeval peoples witnessing the wealth that accompanied power, the faith is weakened by the thought that the individual might be the loser in any governmental, or especially commercial, action driven solely by ‘expertise’. Thus, the ‘laity’ has a strong inclination towards cynicism and this can easily be exploited by industrial interests and climate change deniers.

Whether or not the people at large fully understand the complexities of climate science and its explanations, democracy itself requires that they make judgements about the issues and vote, and act accordingly. One of the reasons for the gap between the cognoscenti and the laity in the case of climate change is the compartmentalisation and specialisation of knowledge. The Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul writes of expertise – of specialist groups in their own rooms, speaking in arcane languages devised to ensure that outsiders do not understand. Rarely do they join in discussion with colleagues next door, much less with those in rooms farther down the corridor¹. Facts, or more likely ideas and suppositions, from papers published in scientific journals are thrown at us, through the media, not so much with the intention of informing as of demonstrating, that it is too difficult for the laity to understand. We must, therefore, trust the judgement of the experts. Nonetheless, we somehow get the message that even the experts fail to agree with each other and are struggling to find appropriate solutions to the problems raised by climate change. In any case, it is the people as a body that has to make the political decisions and thus to implement solutions through democratic process: that is assuredly something we cannot leave to the experts. We need a framework of basic geography – physical and human – within which we can place the complex findings of climate science in order to exercise our judgement on the credibility of the scientific news or, indeed, of counter-cases put forward by climate deniers, filtered as it is by the popular media before it reaches us. During the course of this story, therefore, we will be visiting many of those rooms along the corridors, albeit briefly, in our quest to understand.

For many years now, geography has had a declining place in ever more crowded elementary and secondary school curricula, and geography as an academic discipline has also suffered a decline in its relative importance. This is not because the subject matter has become less interesting or less important but rather because it also, along with most other academic subjects, has become compartmentalised into many specialties and lost much of the power of synthesis, or overviewing, that the discipline once afforded. A similar phenomenon can also be seen in the decline of economic philosophy – theoretical economics – in favour of more specific economic fields such as, econometrics and business studies. Many, if not most, people in western society, over the past three or four decades have grown to adulthood as urban dwellers with a very poor understanding of the planet on which they live and carve out their livelihood, notwithstanding that we have actually seen much more of the planet than our forefathers, thanks to the huge increase in the speed, affordability and convenience of international air travel. The place of the earth in the solar system, the seemingly fickle forces of the weather, the changes of the seasons and the reasons why different parts of the world have different climates remain a profound mystery to most. Lack of basic understanding of how the planet’s natural systems work, leaves people vulnerable to sensationalist disaster prognoses and this is reinforced by popular entertainments where major natural disasters are the key feature of the plot.

In Part I, the first three chapters of this book, therefore, I outline some of the general principles of physical geography relevant to climate change and also to understanding the constraints placed on human economic activity by the physical environment. This is mostly uncontroversial material studied by geography undergraduates in the first year or two of their programmes, yet it is essential for understanding the phenomenon and impact of human industry and climate change, on the natural and cultural environment of the planet.

Notwithstanding our knowledge or otherwise about weather and climate, an even more pressing problem is waiting in the wings while climate change struts its stuff. This issue also requires at least a broad understanding of the way the physical geographic systems of the planet work. It is itself the root cause of whatever anthropogenic effects may be driving climate change, but even amelioration of the worst effects of climate change will not necessarily eliminate or even significantly reduce the underlying problem. Indeed, reduction of the rate of global warming (whether or not due to human politics) could even exacerbate it by giving us a false sense of security about our ability to manage and manipulate the natural environment.

This problem, in brief, is this: human industrial production is far greater in its volume and reach than we actually need to live healthy, sensible and interesting lives, yet it is also, in general, fast approaching and specifically in the developed western world, already greatly exceeding, limits set by earth’s biological resources. We live within an incredibly thin bubble of temperate atmosphere that provides the necessary conditions for life to flourish. The weather systems circulating within this bubble provide environments for plant life in its immense variety over the land surface of the earth, which in turn provides the ecosystems within which animal life, including us humans, thrives. Humanity, over less than ten millennia, has learned how to manipulate natural ecosystems for its own purposes, giving rise to nomadic, then sedentary, pastoralism and, subsequently, agriculture and trade from which villages, towns, cities and civilisation have emerged. For many centuries now the regions of those land surfaces of the earth suitable for these activities have been fully occupied and worked. Increased food supply for the increasing human population (currently expected to peak at about nine to ten billion by the middle of the present century and then slowly decline) must come from better use of these lands, since for all practical purposes the supply of agricultural land cannot be increased.

But the agricultural, forest and rangeland regions of the globe are also being asked to produce an ever increasing range and volume of industrial feedstock – textiles, paper, timber products, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and even motor fuels, to say nothing of mining which in some regions of the globe is actually pre-empting use of agriculturally valuable land. Necessary as these things might be, at least in adequate quantity, the mode of their production, use and ultimate disposal is hideously wasteful. We are producing them in far greater volume than due prudence says we need. We are despoiling our nest with the inevitable polluting by-products of our production and we are, most likely, even accelerating the long term natural warming of the global climate which will probably make human living less comfortable, more demanding of resources to relieve that discomfort and possibly make many agricultural regions of the earth less productive.

The goods we produce are like the contents of the Magic Rice Kettle (of which the consumer must ultimately tire) while the machines and industrial systems we use to fashion them are the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (which metamorphose from being our servants to being our masters). Many other stories from folklore, including that of King Midas with the golden touch, also appeal to us to apply the wisdom we have inherited from our ancestors to our strange and historically novel situation, where our wealth of possession is ruling us.

This is a very recent problem for humanity. A century ago, about the time of World War I, the vast majority of the world’s population eked out an impoverished living as best they could. All of the world’s societies, even including those of Western Europe and North America, were predominantly poor. The idea that a society where nearly everybody was rich or, since we mainly avoid claiming to be rich these days, ‘comfortably off’, might have deep problems because of that wealth would then have been seen, except by the most percipient of philosophers, as exceedingly peculiar. A century later that is the world we humans either already live in or aspire to do so.

Human beings have become trapped by their own success in avoiding the worst consequences that nature – not cruelly but merely indifferently – throws in the way of all other creatures and plants as they compete in the endless Darwinian struggle for existence. In that 100 years, give or take a war or three, in the nations that comprise the so-called advanced economies of the globe, most people have been able to insulate themselves from nature. Whether in cities or rural regions, we live ‘urban’ lifestyles where demand for food, clothing, mobility and shelter has transcended necessity. They, food clothing and shelter that is, have become fashion items where people actually compete for the dubious prestige of having, wearing, displaying or eating more than they need. Now this has always been the way of the wealthy caste in any human society, but the situation where the wealthy caste embraces a majority of the population is something new. So much is this so that even the majority of this wealthy group continues to deny its membership, as it aspires to accumulate more. In most of the world’s societies, however, food and shelter security has, to date, been achieved for some, in some cases for many, but not yet for most citizens but it is a universal desire across the globe and the experience of the west has demonstrated that such security is, indeed, possible. Most people of the world, therefore understandably, have an aspiration to the lifestyle of affluence that they see in Western countries. The ability to achieve this has strict limits.

Nations now measure their economic and social success in terms of ever-increasing industrial production per capita, so the demand for products is growing at a faster rate than even the growth in population. This nearly universal obsession is at the very heart of the threat, not only to stability of climate and, therefore, to people and their deeper cultures but also to the biosphere. It also acts reflexively on human lifestyles. For example, going on current trends we can expect, over the next century, that 45 million people will die prematurely and more than 200 million will be seriously incapacitated across the globe, not from the adverse effects of climate change but from the everyday operations of motor vehicles: that is simply a projection of the rate of casualties already experienced in the western world. Presented in this way, such figures look terrifying, but we routinely accept them as part of the cost of ‘convenience’ provided by our industrial system. Other examples might well include the cost of crime and the costs of lifestyle diseases, excessive consumption of fats, sugar and high energy density foods, and costs of drugs of addiction such as tobacco and alcohol. We do, indeed, recognise all of these as creating problems within our society but with our emphasis on economic growth per capita as our principal social goal, we find it very difficult, indeed, to deal systematically with these problems: they are seen as, to use the disgraceful American military euphemism, ‘collateral damage’ from what we see as the legitimate pursuit of economic growth, which we regard as an unequivocal good.

The most likely outcome of the present global emphasis on production will probably not destroy life on our planet altogether, but will lead, apart from the lifestyle ‘catastrophes’ mentioned above and no doubt many others, to increasing loss of natural ecosystems, loss of millennia of cultural heritage, declining quality of life and loss of true democracy as nations increasingly become governed by plutocrats and their underling technocrats². All this is likely to be accompanied by a series of wars, fought over industrial resources, and on a scale of destruction and terror, far greater and more horrible than the horrific wars of the twentieth century. The past three decades of conflict in the Middle East are the clue that the age of total war did not end in 1945. Taking all of this together, this is an even more worrying prospect than the sorts of disasters projected to occur as a result of climate change.

Let me make a point clearly here: the earth, given sane and appropriate management, can, indeed, securely support its present population and its projected human population over the next century or so, in civilised societies where widespread poverty has been eliminated. The limits to increasing wealth are not imposed by population, per se and thus, too easily written off as the fault of the poorer people of the planet’s most populous nations. They are set by the degree of unnecessary production and waste ensuing in societies that believe that advancing welfare depends upon ever increasing gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We are already, almost certainly, beyond those limits in the West and unless we understand that there are limits to material growth, the consequences for humanity and possibly, the entire biosphere, will be far more severe than any adverse consequences currently foreseen from climate change.

Thus, to a brief preview of the journey we have now started. In Part I, Chapters 1 to 3, we commence by looking at the natural forces that produce weather events across the globe. We will then see how the sum of these events eventuates over the long term as different climates within broad regions across the world’s land surfaces. Climate determines the extent to which plant life, through photosynthesis, can produce enough biomass, not only to allow the plants themselves to grow but also to sustain all plant and animal life, so each climate region and, particularly, those with warm or temperate moist climates, plays its part in the ability of life to thrive on the planet’s surface. Human settlement patterns are just as much subject to natural processes and, particularly, the constraints imposed by climate, as any other ecosystem. In poorer countries, this fact is painfully obvious. In the air-conditioned affluent west on the other hand, we falsely believe that we are waging war against nature and even more falsely that we are winning that war.

The greenhouse effect – a totally beneficial phenomenon and indispensable for life – is then distinguished from the enhanced greenhouse effect which is the outcome of emission of particular gases as a result of human industry and the most likely source of warming climates. We will see how nature herself limits the extent of regions suitable for agriculture and how humans had fully occupied the most productive regions well before the industrial revolution, and how industrial agriculture had extended by the late nineteenth century to even include all those regions that are, at best, marginal for agriculture and only workable by capital-intensive methods.

In Part II, Chapters 4 to 6, we will briefly review the way that humans use energy and emit waste energy, and compare this activity to the energy received directly from the sun, and in the process, discover a paradox: the direct human contribution to the total energy flow around the planet is minuscule – for all practical purposes negligible – yet human industrial processes do, indeed, have the potential to affect the weather and climate in a way that is not, as yet, particularly dramatic but is, nevertheless, measurable and important.

Accepting the reasonable forecasts of global warming by most climate scientists and modellers, we will look at the principles which govern the way that climate change will impact on the globe as a whole and on the continent of Australia as a particular example. We will look at these impacts without the atmosphere of hysteria and panic that many journalistic accounts of the climate future engender and evaluate the way that society can, and, indeed, must adapt to warming climates.

In Part III, Chapters 7 and 8, we then turn our attention to the root cause of excessive anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and discuss whether climate change is really likely to be the most damaging outcome of that cause. We will find that beyond a certain point – termed and defined here as the limit of material satiety – increased physical production, as measured by GDP per capita, leads to deterioration in human contentedness and social cohesion: as the ‘quantity of life’ increases, the ‘quality of life’ decreases. As that point approaches, management of society increasingly passes from government to industry, particularly, to large corporate firms and it becomes increasingly difficult to question or challenge such management. Affluent nations have already passed this limit of material satiety. Others, including India and China, are fast approaching it. We discuss the nature of wealth and well-being that is threatened by continuing growth in production, beyond genuine human needs, to try and satisfy infinite human wants.

In Part IV, Chapters 9 and 10, we look in a very general way, at potential ways of making our wants congruent with our needs within the auspices of a genuinely democratic society. In meeting our needs while limiting our wants, we can create a saner and healthier society. In doing so, we might even mitigate the effects of climate change, but that is by no means certain.

Many people have helped me in the course of this project by providing ideas, advice and commenting on drafts of the manuscript. I recognise that I am far from alone in developing the ideas presented here and, therefore, express my gratitude to all the authors and scholars referenced in the notes, and also the many others who have contributed to the growing literature of steady-state economics over the past several decades. I thank the many students I have taught in geography and planning at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, and Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, USA, where many of the ideas presented here were discussed. In particular, I acknowledge the encouragement of my Colleague, Professor Emeritus Cliff Ollier, who commented on embryonic ideas and drafts of chapters. While I am sure that Cliff will not agree with many of my conclusions, I am equally sure that in the true traditions of academe to which he holds fast, he will continue to encourage me to express them. I am grateful also to Emeritus Professor Graham Maddox whose book, Stepping Up to the Plate², which I partly read in manuscript, was a strong influence; Friends and colleagues, Anne and Richard Gates, and Karin von Strokirch helped me with some very useful insights; Professor Douglas Wion and Professor Tom Farley, formerly colleagues at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, with whom I have been in constant electronic correspondence swapping ideas on the subject of politics and economics; Elizabeth and David Teather have contributed valuable ideas and suggested important references. Many discussions with my immensely well-read sister, Clare Cunningham, helped to clarify some of the issues in my mind. Adrian Clementz was a most patient listener to the ideas here and a perceptive Socratic questioner. I thank Terry Cooke for permission to use the author photograph.

Finally, I wish to thank Austin Macauley Publishers, and particularly Vinh Tran, Kim Cook and the team of editors, typesetters and illustrators, for the considerable and detailed work involved in bringing this work to fruition.

To my family, my dear wife, Anne, and children, Margaret, Michael, Mary and Bernard, I owe a debt of thanks for their forbearance during the time I have spent working on this project. I dedicate it to them.

Chris Cunningham. Armidale, NSW, Australia. January 2017

Notes:

John Ralston Saul. Voltaire’s Bastards. Penguin 1993. Chapter 5 ‘Voltaire’s Children’ pp 117-154

Graham Maddox. Stepping Up to the Plate. 2016 Melbourne University Press

Part I: Weather, Climate and Human Habitats

We should now clearly recognise the fact, that the wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not constitute civilization, and do not of themselves advance us towards the ‘perfect social state’. Our vast manufacturing system, our gigantic commerce, our crowded towns and cities, support and continually renew a mass of human misery and crime absolutely greater than has ever existed before. They create and maintain in life-long labour an ever-increasing army, whose lot is the more hard to bear, by contrast with the pleasures, the comforts, and the luxury which they see everywhere around them, but which they can never hope to enjoy; and who, in this respect, are worse off than the savage in the midst of his tribe.

Alfred Russel Wallace: The Malay Archipelago. 1869

Chapter One: Introducing the Problem

Weather determines the way in which the gifts of nature are transformed by all life for its own benefit, so weather is also where we start to explore the problems of global human production. Sunlight, water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the atmosphere, as well as numerous minerals from the rocks of the earth are the building blocks of all life. The sun provides the energy that drives the growth and development of life. In its heating of the earth’s surface, it also provides the driving force for clouds, rain, snow, winds and ocean currents, which in their complex mixture of regular and irregular cycles affect all parts of the planet’s surface but in different ways. This is the weather. As we observe the seemingly random incidents that comprise the weather over a long enough time, we notice that many of them recur in reasonably regular patterns. These long term averaged-out patterns of weather cycles are climate.

While weather has always been one of the most popular of conversation topics, climate used to be deemed a fit subject only for climate geographers – the original climatologists – and for obsessives, such as Michael Palin’s hilarious Lancastrian Ripping Yarns character, Eric Olthwaite, whose life obsessions were (apologies for not writing in Lancastrian regional accent) ‘shovels, black pudding and rainfall’. Lately though, we have heard quite a lot about climate. In the early 1970s, some scientists concerned about increasing atmospheric pollution and the then seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war became concerned that the Earth’s climates were cooling towards another ice age. From the mid-1980s or so, these concerns reversed and the lively topic was global warming. When the globe’s relentless progress on warming slackened off just a little since 1998, (though the decades 1992–2012 were still the warmest for at least a thousand years) and then started to advance again from 2012, the definition of the problem broadened to climate change, embracing wider concerns about the impact of human activities on the natural environment and, particularly, on the atmosphere. Since 2012, the process of warming seems to have resumed, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were successive record warm years for the earth. It is most unusual in nature, as we shall see in Chapter Three, for such climatic records to follow each other in successive years.

From the 1980s onward, weather scientists, particularly in the USA, had available to them high powered computers combined with theoretical ideas that mathematicians, physicists and theoretical climatologists had been experimenting with from two decades earlier. The buzz words at the time were chaos and chaotic systems which include the fluid circulations of the atmosphere and oceans that lead to weather and climate. Their project was to model climate by creating a virtual three dimensional grid network, representing the atmosphere, around a mathematically simulated earth, feeding all sorts of climate-related data into the grid cubes and powering them with the findings of theoretical physics on fluid dynamics. These models could be run continuously to simulate the behaviour of the atmosphere, rainfall, snowfall, glaciation, ecosystems in response to these and, importantly, what happened when human beings through their industry put all sorts of gunk and, particularly, surplus carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) into the atmosphere.

We shall understand later that one of several problems with such models is what to leave out, since the array of data that could potentially be fed into the system is immense and much of it is ephemeral. The principles involved in climate modelling include known physical laws as well as observed behaviour of weather systems over time. While modellers are trying to match the behaviour of weather systems in the real world as accurately as possible, they are also looking for short cuts – distillation of complex systems down to a limited number of working principles that explain most of the workings of those systems – for the whole point of modelling (like that of mapping) is to simplify the real world so we can understand what makes it work. A map at a scale of 1:1 which includes every detail we see in the real world would be useless for its purpose as a map and, similarly, a model that incorporated every aspect of the system it was simulating, even if that were possible, would be just as bewildering and complex as the real world phenomena it was trying to explain.

The way the system of global circulation of energy is described here in later chapters is itself a ‘mental model’: much detail and many side issues are pruned away so that the reader can more easily visualise the system overall and understand how the world’s climate regions have evolved. The model is far from perfect. It does not incorporate the numerous fine details of findings of scientific papers published on a daily basis, and some of the ideas expressed here, such as the ‘temperate bubble’ and ‘temperate membrane’, introduced in Chapter Three and referred to frequently thereafter, are but rough and ready approximations: they are intended to stimulate the imagination rather than express detailed and invariable scientific findings. Nevertheless, these and many other ideas used to construct the model are sufficiently valid for their purpose. They allow us, as lay people, to get the gist of the framework from which climate scientists build their far more elaborate mathematical models.

One of the revelations of mathematical chaos theory, however, is that small matters can and do count: they are not simply random variations on either side of a trajectory in time that cancel each other out as had been assumed when climate modellers first embarked on their task. Hence, we have a rhetorical question, originating from an epigrammatic statement in one of the original papers on the subject by theoretical atmospheric physicist and meteorologist, Edward N. Lorenz: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?¹ It is as well to understand that this hypothetical butterfly’s flapping affects the distribution of energy and, thus, weather systems across the globe, but it does not, of itself, inject any new energy into the system. If the process it sets off concentrates enough energy in Texas to form tornadoes (that would not otherwise have formed there), then the energy in some other place will be diminished. Maybe that butterfly also saves Florida from a hurricane!

It is very difficult indeed to model tiny and ephemeral characteristics of weather yet those characteristics may be very important. Thus, among other things, models do not handle the dynamics and impacts of the phenomenon of cloudiness very well, and cloudiness is very important in determining the amount of solar radiation (sunshine) that reaches the surface of the earth and also how much energy in the form of long wave radiation is reflected from clouds back to the surface. On the other hand, we also have phenomena that operate over very long periods of time, such as the circulation of the Deep Ocean Current – the ‘Great Conveyor’ – to be discussed in later chapters, about which we have comparatively little information compared with our understanding of atmospheric circulation. As both ephemeral and long term atmospheric and oceanic phenomena, therefore, potentially have very important effects on climate, and over long periods of time it is hard to assess with any degree of assurance that the modelled process truly reflects what happens in the real world.

Modellers work to account for such problems and, therefore, test their ideas by running their models in reverse and observing how known outcomes for, say, the past fifty years have been affected by the data and assumptions that drive the model. This process of testing is known as calibration of the model. The data inputs and more particularly, the assumptions that go with them are adjusted, until they yield the correct outcomes over a known period from the known starting premises. The modellers can then be reasonably confident that projection of the modelled conditions into the near-to-intermediate future will produce reliably close approximations of real world conditions at that time.

Notwithstanding the problems posed for modellers by ephemeral data and the as yet unknowns, we are all now well aware of the interim results of this continuing experiment with modelling of the weather. The globe is warming. It has already warmed by more than 2˚C from the depths of the so-called Little Ice Age (around the turn of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries), about 1˚C over the past century, and is likely to warm by between 2˚C and 4˚C or, if extreme estimates are accepted, even more over the next century. A significant cause of this warming, at least since 1950, is with little doubt, the gases that human industry puts into the atmosphere. Leave the anthropogenic factors out of the models and the projected warming stabilises, put them back in and it continues inexorably.

Popular responses to these findings and speculative interpretations of the projections of climate models are, generally, more dramatic and less reliable than scientific projections of conditions from the models. The primary source of the problem is the additional carbon dioxide (chemical symbol CO2) emitted into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and petroleum products, and also methane (CH4) from industrial, agricultural and pastoral activity. Coal, oil and much of the gas come from organic matter that has been buried for hundreds of millions of years. Now we are mining and burning it, and that gas, the carbon of which was long buried or sequestered within the earth and over tens of millions of years, is now adding significantly, and in a very short period of time, to the tiny quantum of CO2 occurring naturally in the atmosphere. In Chapters Two and Four, we will see how this delays the escape of heat from the earth’s surface and, thus, helps to warm the planet. However, accompanying the explanation of the cause is a considerable volume of popular rhetoric which we should wisely discount: we are approaching a climatic ‘tipping point’, we are assured in popular articles. Once this is reached, the globe will continue to warm irreversibly, mountain glaciers and polar ice caps will melt away putting much of the globe’s inhabited areas under water, and the outcomes will be, if not the total extinction of life, then very much impoverished world for both nature and humanity.

Politically, we are not really sure of how to deal with the problem. Clearly, if emissions from human activity are the prime cause of global warming and climate change, then we can expect the process to ameliorate as we stop or slow down the rate of human emissions, particularly, of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, into the atmosphere. As, across the globe, the energy that drives industry is about 87% derived from fossil fuels, it is pretty well impossible to halt precipitately all use of fossil fuel. Even to reduce such use by a significant amount will slow the progress of economic growth and development (as economic growth and development are defined by economists, as we shall see in Chapters Seven and Eight), and especially in countries where that growth and development is seen as the means of pulling whole societies out of grinding poverty, until such time as alternative sources of energy are freely available.

As we shall discover in Chapter Four, the natural sources of energy – from the sun especially, from the wind, the tides, and even from the internal heat of the earth – are immense. Human energy demands are now, and always will be, the minutest fraction of the natural energy that is, at least potentially, available. Our problem is not with finding alternative sources of energy to substitute for our fossil fuels – they are ubiquitous – but, not so simply, with the techniques of tapping into those sources. A promising start has already been made in the effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels but it will take many decades, even with political regimes sympathetic to the cause, to get anywhere near eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels. Resistance by industry to such change of energy sources is extremely strong and in Chapters Seven to Nine we shall see why. Nevertheless, the idea that we can ‘have it all’ in terms of industrial and economic growth while meeting all our energy needs from natural carbon-neutral sources is, for the present time, simply a fantasy.

The United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), consisting of experts in the field, regularly reviews published scientific literature, updates and reports on findings on the progress of climate change and provides a summary report for policy makers each seven years, the latest of which was in 2014². Governments are becoming at least half serious about the issue. I make that statement quite deliberately because the call to action on climate change by governments, especially in the Anglo-western world has been sluggish and tokenistic compared with the way that the nations of the globe very quickly united to suppress the threat industrial activities using chlorofluorocarbon compounds posed to the earth’s ozone layer in the early 1990s. Australia, for example, between 2007 and 2013 had a Minister for Climate Change – a rather ironic title that 140 years ago William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan might well have used as an inspirational source of considerable merriment. The minister’s ostensible job was to try to stop climate from changing. From 2013 we have not even had, in Australia, the pretence from government that it is taking climate change seriously.

The politic of climate change has stalled in the face of opposition from conservative forces and, especially, the mining and electricity generating industries heavily dependent upon coal. Despite a constant stream of media reports and calls to action from scientists and environmental activists, some of the latter bordering on hysterical, the cause for precipitate action to reduce the impact of industrial activities on climate has not gained the overwhelming public support needed to force governments to act in the face of this industrial opposition. As discussed in Chapters Nine and Ten democratic consensus is essential if climate change is to be effectively and squarely addressed by government. In Australia, currently, the issue is politically split along traditional liberal-conservative and radical-progressive lines, and even the mainstream progressives are demonstrating considerable propensity towards inaction. But what is the likely impact of climate change on our society? Is it really the worst consequence we face as a result of human industrial activity and the drive for economic growth that dominates western politics? Can our aspiration for ever increasing material wealth be reconciled with the need for action to ameliorate the impact of climate change?

This book attempts, at least in a general way, to come to grips with these questions and thus provide, along with many works cited here and others, a basis for political debate and action. To foreshadow its main conclusions: climate is changing and the causes of this change are probably some combination of artificial and natural causes in which human activities are, indeed, very significant and, highly probably, dominant. There are actions we can take to redress damage caused by factors that are within human control, but if some causes of climate change are indeed natural, those actions will have little impact on the way that climate change, and particularly, warming of the atmosphere and oceans will affect the natural world and bio-systems upon which everything depends for its livelihood. More pertinently, nevertheless, we will discover that even if the challenges posed by climate change can indeed be successfully addressed, it is not the main threat to the welfare of humans, and possibly to life in general, posed by our industrial future but merely a symptom of a much larger problem. The striving of the human race for ever increasing economic production, wealth, and control over nature itself, poses a much greater threat to the integrity of the earth and also to human society. That threat may not be diminished even if the global warming problem is solved, though many of the measures that need to be taken to address climate change are also similar to steps that need to be taken to address this larger problem.

Old-fashioned geographers and accumulation of information about weather

It is little wonder that humanity, taken as a whole, has developed a pretty finely honed instinct for understanding the extremely complex phenomena of weather and their general expression as climate. Human beings, as with other life forms, are totally dependent for their nutrition, growth and good health from the growth and continuous renewal of the earth’s biomass – the sum total of all of its living organisms. This biomass in its turn is dependent on fluctuations in sunlight, temperature and precipitation, as well as materials derived from erosion of the rocks as a consequence of weather events. According to British biological scientist, James Lovelock, the biosphere acts in many ways as if it were itself a living organism to create and maintain conditions over the surface of the earth that allows life to continue to grow in health and complexity ³.

In all of the fuss currently being made about climate change and global warming, it seems that not very much emphasis is being put on what we have already learned from centuries, even millennia, of living with and trying to understand the weather, the better to prosper in our diverse human endeavours. The electronic age has given us the illusion that knowledge held by humanity before the advent of computers and advanced electronic instrumentation is of little consequence. Comments, speculations and observations about weather and climate, date back to the earliest civilisations with written records. There is a collective popular wisdom about climate – including the idea that humans cannot really do anything to control it and must instead try to understand it, work with it and adapt to it. Now this popular understanding is being challenged by the findings of atmospheric science. The science itself is mind-bogglingly complex. There are many thousands of scientists around the world working on climate and climate-related issues, each of them, each year, issuing multiple papers in peer-reviewed journals that report their findings. They do not always agree with each other, indeed, they often enough do not even understand each other or the way in which their multifarious tasks relate. There is nothing alarming about this: it is the way that science properly works. Usually all that lay-people, including their political representatives, get from a rich comprehensive, and often enough contradictory, flow of technical scientific papers, are a handful of dramatic predictions and warnings. The people are, therefore, urged to put their faith and trust in the science and its gurus, much as medieval folk were urged to put their faith and trust in the Church and its authority.

But the science of weather was not always so far removed from the common folk. From the so-called ‘great age of discovery’ in the late 1400s, weather conditions have been continually recorded by mariners and land explorers. Even more so, beginning from the age of scientific enlightenment, the mid 1600s onward, phenomena such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, wind direction and speed, atmospheric composition as well as degree of cloudiness and hours of sunshine have been recorded across the globe – in many inhabited places we have reliable records for more than two centuries of careful observation and in most, for upwards of a century. These records were initially established following pioneering groundwork by people who came, in a general sense, to be called navigators, explorers, geographers, or simply ‘scientists’ – adventurous souls like Marco Polo, Zheng He, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake, Captain James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Wallace, Alfred Wegener, Charles Darwin, John Herschel, William Davis, Wladimir Köppen, Australia’s own Douglas Mawson and Thomas Griffith Taylor, and many others of their ilk. What they all had in common is that they were travellers and acute observers, and asked questions about what they observed in their travels. What they wrote was not just intended for a coterie of fellow scientific specialists but for the whole world, and their writing style and language was for the most part accessible to the well-educated lay person. They took considerable risks in their quest for scientific knowledge. Wegener, for example, died on the Greenland ice cap in 1930 while on an expedition seeking climatic data. One of many outcomes from dissemination of their often revolutionary scientific ideas was a diverse set of carefully kept geographic records, including records of climate.

Study of these records and field observation in the days before weather satellites, computer modelling, and even before the advent of sophisticated aircraft and aerial photography, had enabled humanity not only to build up a pretty reasonable picture of the global range of climates but also to understand, at least partly, many of the reasons they have come to be so. Weather and climate were phenomena to be carefully recorded and studied. Geography was a core part of the educational syllabus, and weather and climate were studied by most school students and many undergraduate students at university.

Geography – the word is derived from Ancient Greek words ‘to write about (or describe) the earth’ – was an unusual discipline in that it was primarily concerned with synthesis of information – putting things together to paint the bigger picture – rather than with analysis, the taking apart of detail to see how things worked. Geographers drew their ideas and information from many different areas of study, much as did the geographer in Antoine de St Exupery’s The Little Prince, who gathered all of his information from passing explorers and catalogued it, keeping his records in pencil until other explorers confirmed it. Geographers believed that they were recording the earth and its multifarious phenomena as it