Fragilecologies Archives
18 November 2004
The title for this editorial came to me while I was playing tennis. The question I asked myself was the following: What is it that makes good climates go bad? That random question passing through my mind sparked another question: what does it mean to have a “good” climate. A Google search for “good climate” identified many websites with “good climate” in their weblines. However, the climate they were referring to almost totally was the atmosphere for carrying out a good business arrangement, a good climate for studying, working or carrying out a wide range of activities. In a way one might view the physical atmosphere in general and the climate more specifically as the appropriate environment that allows for the carrying out of favored activities.
I want to identify explicitly the suite of physical and societal factors that can affect climate at various geographic scales (from local to sub-national regional to national to supra-national regional to global) and time scales (months to millennia). In the midst of this effort it became clear to me that still missing (to my mind) is a better understanding of what one might mean by a “good climate”.
If there is such a thing as a good climate, then there must also be a “bad climate”. But, are these notions objectively or subjectively determined? Obviously both. Humans are usually egocentric, anthropocentric, genero-centric (focused on their generation). Most individuals have preferences for types of climate conditions they would like to see prevail. Societies and cultures and generations also have their preferences as well, and their varied preferences are not necessarily congruent. A place has a certain climate at a given point in time. If one does not like it, he or she has the option to move to a different, more preferred climate setting, assuming they have the economic wherewithal to do so. Even settlements try to alter the climate setting in which they exist through such climate modification practices as the use of heating or air conditioning, through irrigation practices (bringing abundant water to arid places), through attempts at climate modification (by forcing precipitation out of the atmosphere), and so forth.
The above paragraph suggests that there is a climate condition in-between good and bad. It has no official name but it could be referred to as a “tolerable climate”, that is, one to which adjustments have been made, psychologically, socially and technologically.
What does it mean for a good climate to “go bad”?
American longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in 1952 in his book “Ordeal of Change” about how people fear change. Our grandparents lived through harsh winters and hot summers, usually without the benefits of heat or air conditioning. They just did it. No real options. Today we have milder winters and no-so-bad summers. We also have all the accoutrements of an affluent industrialized society. We wouldn’t think of moving to Arizona to a home with no air conditioning or to Maine to a cabin with no heat. Anything that changes our respective climate would likely have caused or will cause a problem because it would mean we would eventually have to change our behavior in ways we don’t really know. So, one could argue that perceptible changes are in general examples of a climate “going bad”. Less rain or more rain for one’s crops, depending on one’s location, activities and crop type, could signal a climate going “bad”. Cloudier days, sunnier days, drier days or more humid days to someone or to some activity could be perceived as a climate going bad.
What then is a bad climate? It is one in which individuals and ecosystems as well as human settlements are unable to survive in a sustainable way over a long period of time. While some individuals may have the fortitude and economic well being to move to a more favorable climate, most people do not have that option. They have to live under the climate regime into which they were born. Bad climate can also be created for settlements when governments engage in forced migration. This has been done in many countries around the globe for a variety of reasons: British prisoners were exiled to Australia; American Indians put on inhospitable reservations; Ethiopian farmers resettled from their highlands to swampy lowlands, Somali’s desert nomads placed in coastal fishing villages, Tibetan refugees resettled in the Swiss Alps; and so on. Each of the communities relocated had to cope with new environmental and climatic conditions, whether they liked it or not. Little effort is given to identify similar environmental or climatic settings for the displaced people and settlements. They are forced to adapt and abruptly adjust to their new conditions.
What constitutes a good climate?
Eskimos live in cold climate conditions; desert nomads live in hot dry climates. People in tropical rainforests live in what many in other ecosystems would call oppressively sweltering humidity and heat. Each of these populations in these respective climate regimes may consider them as “good climate” but they are very different. Most likely, it would not be possible to encourage any one of them to move to the other’s climate setting. Even moving from a rural to urban setting can be troublesome for those who have been forced by circumstances to do so.
As an inhabitant of the middle latitudes, I look at polar, desert and tropical climates and consider them to be too extreme for me. In other words they are not what I would subjectively consider to be good climates. Technology can change that by using heat in the cold regions and air conditioning in the hot ones. People are adaptable to changing environmental conditions. Today we have adjusted unwittingly to slowly changing climatic conditions where we live. Our grandparents tell us that the winters of decades ago were much colder and snowier than they are today. The kids don’t know that as a fact because they have been brought up in the incrementally altered climate. Older people experience the cumulative affect of those changes. Nevertheless, there are still major climatic differences in regions around the globe and more specifically in North America .
For example, in the United States, people who live in the arid southwest look down on the cold wet climate of the Northeastern United States during winter. People in Florida may consider the climate of the southwest as too dry and from their perceived needs, not a good climate to live in during summer. People do migrate voluntarily from one climate regime to another, based solely on the desire to live in a good climate while escaping from what they consider to be a bad one. Most people cannot escape from the climate regimes into which they had been born. To them the idea or a “good climate” or a “bad climate” is irrelevant. They live in a tolerable climate, one to which their expectations and their behavior have become accustomed. Climate just is what it is where they live with little hope of escaping or changing it. So, there may be climate regimes under which we would like to live — the ideal climate to suit our personalities and needs — and those under which we do live and tolerate. Eco-tourism, which could be construed as escaping to the desired climate even if only for a few days or weeks, is one way we expose our preferences toward the climate regime we might like. Visiting a perceived “ideal” climate is one thing. Living in it forever is another. American novelist John Steinbeck once wrote, “I’ve lived in good climate and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”
There has been considerable talk in the past two and a half decades about global warming (and before then a decade of talk about global cooling). At first discussions centered at the international level on prevention of those factors that are enhancing the naturally occurring greenhouse effect. Later talk shifted to adaptation, given the apparent inability of the international community to work together to freeze the global climate regime the way it is today (which by the way is favorable to some, unfavorable to others, and only tolerable to yet others). Prevention vs. adaptation frames societal responses as being only black-white, positive-negative, all or nothing. There are other types of societal responses, the ones that individuals and societies engage in all the time (so simple as to be overlooked): adjustment, acclimatization, become accustomed to.
One way to look at what might be a “good climate” is to define it as one where there is no change in the climatic parameters from what the current (living) generations expect that are perceived by a society to be central to its collective notion of “good”. Expectations change slowly because changes in climate are so incremental and slowly occurring that their expectations are being adjusted often unwittingly at a similar incremental and slow pace (climate is changing all the time and on all time and space scales). Clearly, what constitutes a good climate can be determined objectively, e.g., in that climate has a real geophysical component as well as societal and psychological (e.g., subjective) components. For example, ten percent more precipitation in an arid area may not be beneficial depending on when and where it fell. Good climate, then, from a societal and psychological perspective can be viewed as being in the eyes of the beholder. Also we can view the “goodness” or “badness” of climate either from an individual’s perspective or from a societal perspective, keeping in mind that individuals or groups of them make decisions for society as a whole. So, individual perceptions of what a good climate might be or of a bad climate to avoid still have an influence on decisions that affect an entire society, regardless of their personal climate preferences.
While we can question what it means to have a good, bad or tolerable climate, there are real characteristics of a climate that can be measured — temperature, precipitation, humidity, etc. — and matched to appropriate human activities. Those characteristics can change at different rates of speed in different locations. Whether humans can adjust to those rates and changes without disruption will vary from place to place and from time to time even in the same place.
It is also possible to identify human activities that can alter the chemistry and the behavior of the atmosphere. Human activities have done so on a local scale and on a global scale. Thus, some of the reasons that good climate go bad are natural and others are anthropocentric. Each is briefly discussed in the following sections.
Geophysical reasons why good climates go bad
There are many geophysical reasons why good climates go bad. Such reasons seem to get the lion’s share of the public’s attention. For example, eons ago, continental drift also affected the circulation of the atmosphere and the climate of the continents. A series of volcanic eruptions could alter climate for extended periods of time long enough to disrupt human activities and ecosystems. There are other theories related to natural geophysical changes in the Earth’s climate and environment. These are just some of the reasons that can make a good climate go bad.
For the woolly mammoths a good climate was one to which they had become accustomed to but one which changed on them because of natural factors. It was the end of the Ice Age. The Earth’s orbit shifted in ways that affected the Earth’s climate, as suggested by Serbian astronomer Milankovitch many decades ago. Changes in solar activity are also among the natural processes that can affect the Earth’s atmosphere, such as changes in the Solar Constant or in the number of sunspots on the surface of the sun (the latter has been associated with changes in climate on the Earth’s surface).
In the last millennium the Earth’s inhabitants witnessed a centuries-long warming called the Little Optimum from about 1000 to 1350 AD or so. They also witnessed the Little Ice Age that lasted a few centuries from the 1500s until about 1850. These were natural changes in the global atmosphere and climate regime. Also, of great importance is the fact that hu man activities in the past thousand years began to affect climate, at first on local levels and increasingly, by the end of this time period, on a global scale.
How humans make good climates go bad
We tend to blame the climate system for its anomalies and outlying extremes or even rare events. But perhaps societies and their leaders are all too eager to blame something or someone else for the damages (death, sickness and destruction) caused by those anomalies. Human activities from local to national can affect the climate regimes under which they operate.
As a first example, scientists have identified human influences on the climate and weather of metropolitan areas. They have labeled the results of this influence as the “urban heat island” effect. It works this way: the concrete and asphalt surfaces that dominate metropolitan areas along with the widespread use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and because of innumerable heating and cooling systems in high concentration has led to the heating up of an invisible bubble of warm air that encompasses the urban area. This is an example of humans altering the climate in the place where they have chosen to settle. In addition, the influence of the heat island on precipitation within the bubble can be great with storms, for example, dropping more moisture on the metropolitan areas. The heat island also has impacts downwind in suburban and rural areas, apparently by increasing precipitation in those areas.
On a regional scale, human activities have been identified that have led to major changes in regional climate regimes. One example of the foreseeability of such an impact can be found in the Amazon basin of South America. This basin is of major interest to people and governments worldwide for a variety of physical, biological and social factors. Deforestation rates in the basin are quite high, and there is considerable fear that not only will the soils in the basin be negatively affected, but so too will the atmosphere above it.
Some writers have, correctly or incorrectly, referred to the Amazon rainforest, the largest in the world, as being “the lungs of the Earth”; it stores carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas of concern, and is a major source of oxygen. Cutting down the forest reduces, at an admittedly incremental but cumulative pace, the rainforest’s effectiveness as a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide. With the burning of the rainforest, it becomes a source of CO2 as well. Of more immediate concern though, is that researchers have found that about half of the rain that falls in the Amazon basin comes from evaporation and transpiration from the rainforest itself in a self-perpetuating water recycling process. To cut down trees in the forest is to chip away at the amount of precipitation that can be expected to fall within the basin. This would eventually reduce soil moisture, river flow quantity and quality, and even human habitability in the region in ways that can not only be imagined but can already be seen around the globe on small scales.
For another example of regional climate change induced as a result of human activities, one can look at the Aral Sea in Central Asia. The Aral Sea was the fourth largest inland sea in the world as of 1960. Today, it has dropped over 22 meters and has separated into two parts. Its demise is directly attributed to political decisions to divert water from the basin’s two major rivers feeding the sea and to put that river water on dry but potentially fertile desert soils. Studies now show that, as a result of the desiccation of the Aral Sea and the resulting increase in exposure of large expanses of the sandy seabed (a change in land surface albedo [reflectivity]), the winters have gotten colder, and the summers hotter.
Books have been written about how civilizations have misused their land by deforesting, over-cultivating or overgrazing vulnerable ecosystems. North Africa, for example, was once considered to have been the granary of the Roman Empire. Some historians blame the now-existing desert landscape along the southern Mediterranean on deforestation and on poor land use practices for cultivation. Others blame it on a major natural change to the region’s climate regime. Most likely both were contributing factors — but in what proportion?
There is also a general belief — some say blind faith — that what humans have done that is bad for the environment or climate, it can un-do. All it will take is engineering know-how and technological innovation. As a result, throughout history there have been attempts to restore changed climate conditions to their original state. Climate modification schemes have been proposed to bring rainfall, for example, back to arid lands where it had once been. The planting of trees has been a popular idea fostered by European foresters to bring rain back. Others have hypothesized that “rainfall” tends to follow the plow, e.g., cultivation practices.
That brings us to the topic of the day — global warming. I do believe that the by-product of human activities can alter the chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere in ways that will slowly but profoundly affect societies worldwide. The emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in ever increasing amounts since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s (i.e., the emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and various types of CFCs) has enhanced the naturally occurring greenhouse effect. The consequence has been the warming up of the global climate average by 0.7 deg C since the beginning of the 1900s. While there is controversy over various scientific aspects of the global warming phenomenon (is it human-induced or is it a natural occurrence?), evidence has been mounting over the past several decades that it is foreseeable that human activities are at play in heating up the planet.
Concluding thoughts
Societies, and especially those leaders in charge of political and economic decision making, are always on a slippery slope (so to speak), as far as living with the climates they have inherited from their predecessors is concerned. Those decision makers have to make decisions about the future as well as present-day use of and need for water, energy, food, public health and safety in the absence of full knowledge of future climate conditions. We know that climate varies naturally on a range of time scales from weeks and months to years, decades, centuries and millennia. Societal activities need to match those extremes (highs and lows) in variability; they need to juggle their activities against recurrent but aperiodic droughts and floods and against quasi-periodic episodes of El Niño and La Niña. However, with only crude insights into the future, they ride that variability imperfectly. That allows for the entrance of activities that can harm the land surface and the atmosphere above it. Societies need a better idea about what it means to have a good, bad or tolerable climate, as their leaders sit around a table pondering whether, if not what, to do about the global warming (climate change) that is on-going today. An ever-increasing number of researchers accept the possibility that human activities (industrial and agricultural) can alter the chemical composition of the air which will change our climate.