Re-activating the ‘Covid-19 Diary’ category to note that Kirstin and I got our boosters yesterday. We were given Moderna this time (it was Astra-Zeneca last time) and I felt this one in ways that normally I don’t. I suspect the nurse wasn’t quite as precise as others have been. My arm still aches and I’m feeling a bit out of it. In fairness, I’m still feeling out of sorts as a result of the switch to a low-carb diet, but I’m hoping that sorts itself out over the next couple of days. I slept for 9 hours last night and expect the same tonight. We have someone coming round to do some maintenance work in the garden tomorrow, so I’ll need to be up.
I have mixed views on the boosters. The dominant one, of course, is that I’m pleased to have had it, but I am acutely aware that there are several billion people in the world who haven’t had any vaccine at all. I don’t mean the ideological anti-vaxxers, for whom I have neither time nor tolerance – I mean all those who have never had any chance of being offered the vaccine in the first place. From my earliest posts under this category, I have said that I am aware of my privilege; that privilege is on a global scale, not just local.
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Doctor Who has hit a streak of form. It is the final set of episodes with Chris Chibnall in charge and Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. Frustratingly, it is only in this season that Whittaker’s potential is being realised. Reactions online are ‘mixed.’ There are a lot of people who don’t seem to get the idea that in a multi-part story, it isn’t going to get wrapped up in episode three. Social media is dominated by the furious shooting their mouths off in incoherent rage: the rest of us, who enjoyed it, just wait for the next episode in anticipation.
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COP26 ended with politicians saying that it was, on balance, a success, and scientists calling it a disaster. When push comes to shove, I’ll side with the scientists. I cannot see this ending well. All the troubles we currently have with flows of refugees are nothing to what is coming. Borders will either hold, or they won’t, but they’ll certainly be fortified. My guess is that, once the politicians finally wake up to what’s happening, we’ll see substantial erosion of what we consider to be social norms. It is going to get messy in the medium to long term.
After all the mentions I’ve made here of global heating in the last couple of years, I haven’t mentioned COP26, currently taking place in Glasgow. This is because I’ve found it hard to find much to write about. A bunch of politicians are making worthy and noble speeches for the international stage, articulating sentiments that are absent from their domestic policies, trying to find weasel words to allow them to do the opposite of what the world needs. At least the much-maligned Australians (‘screw you, mate, we’re happy with our droughts, wildfires and plagues of mice and what’s it got to do with you anyway?’) have the virtue of blunt honesty.
I may be wrong – I hope I am – and the technical material that will flow from the conference may have actual operational value, but I can’t see the COP26 making the slightest difference once the speeches have been made and the caravans have moved on to the next venue and the next photo-op and next worthy words; all the sound and fury signifying nothing.
There is an old science-fiction short-story – I think Brian Aldiss’s Last Orders – that has it’s protagonist calling in for a final pint before the starships evacuating the Earth leave for a new home. The protagonist gets chatting and having ‘just one more’ before he has to go, and is still drinking and chatting and ordering another drink as the last starship leaves. That’s where we are right now: drink up, ladies and gentlemen – time to go home.
Here’s a drookit Professor Jason Box, ice climatologist at Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, getting depressed by the Glasgow weather, and telling it how he sees it.
I know I’m returning to a well-worn theme here, but I found myself spending a surprising amount of time this week watching news reports on Hurricane Ida and it’s aftermath – the trail of destruction from Cuba to Louisiana to the Canadian Maritimes.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the US is broken: neither its physical nor political infrastructures are fit for purpose. In case you think I’m picking on the US, our country is pretty broken too – and David Cameron and George Osborne broke it – but it’s the US that’s becoming a paradigm case. I was reminded of something I wrote here in March last year. Commenting on an Ed Yong piece in the Atlantic that mentioned the US healthcare system, I wrote that the problem is that there isn’t a system.
I see lots of private healthcare providers, uncoordinated at county, state and federal level, forced to do the best they can while snagged in the gossamer web of health insurers and political stupidity. Vincanne Adams makes a similar point in passing in Disasters and Capitalism …and COVID-19. As I write, news continues to circulate of States forced by circumstance to compete against each other for vital clinical equipment.
Secondly, one of Yong’s possible outcomes is the one where America leads the way internationally on pandemics and climate change. I think that’s unlikely: it disregards the extent to which the US has squandered what authority it might once have had. Exceptionalism guides the assumption of a leadership role rather than co-operative participation. Leaders need followers, and who is left who would follow the US in this or climate change? Maybe under Obama, maybe under Elizabeth Warren, but both those ships have left the harbour.
I haven’t changed my mind since then.
It’s possible that the systemic shock of Ida will provoke change in the US, and I hope it does, but I remain sceptical that the US is politically capable of taking co-ordinated and decisive action. There’s still three months of the hurricane season left, too. In the meantime, the west coast continues to burn.
In John Wyndham’s 1953 masterpiece The Kraken Wakes, maverick scientist Prof. Alastair Bocker figures out what’s going on, specifically the impact of polar melting perpetrated by the alien invaders of the deep oceans. Bocker’s opinions are derided and dismissed until far too late. In particular, he struggles to explain the urgency of sea-level rise because the terms he uses don’t give a clear picture to the layperson of cause and effect. An average sea level rise of two and a half inches in Newlyn sounds too trivial to take seriously.
He bent a thoughtful, disapproving look on her. ‘Just what do you mean, young woman, by coming here and telling me I “messed it up”?’
‘The anti-climax. First you sounded as if you were on the point of great revelations, but then that was followed by a rather vague suggestion that somebody or something must be causing the Arctic changes – and without any specific explanation of how it could be done. And then your grand finale was that the tide is two and a half inches higher.’
Bocker continued to regard her. ‘Well, so it is. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Two and a half inches is a colossal amount of water when it’s spread over a hundred and forty-one million square miles. If you reckon it up in tons – ’
‘I never do reckon water in tons – and that’s part of the point. To ordinary people two and a half inches just means a very slightly higher mark on a post. After your build-up it sounded so tiddly that everyone feels annoyed with you for alarming them – those that don’t just laugh, and say: “Ha! ha! These professors!”’
The same, in many respects, is true of the IPCC Report: the information is presented in dry, technically accurate language with charts and graphs, but what it doesn’t do is give clear explanations of what life would be like under the scenarios it describes. With this in mind, I wrote to an institute working in this field asking for some pointers to where a layperson-friendly outline of real-world scenarios might be found. They replied this morning, pointing me back to the IPCC report saying ‘it’s all in there.’
Tell me again, I need to know The forests had trees, the meadows were green The oceans were blue, and birds really flew Can you swear that was true? (Tom Paxton)
In a casual WhatsApp comment the other day, I wrote that I felt another blog post on the subject of global heating was bubbling, but it’s too big a subject. Of course, a blog post is meaningless scribbling in the face of what’s coming, but it at least records my thoughts in a diary-like format in case anyone should ever read this in time to come (assuming that there isn’t a great digital crash that will wipe it all out).
That said, it obviously is too big a subject for a single blog post, so it will probably become a running theme. Also, the impacts of global heating are part of the general background to my current writing-in-progress, which is set around 2050, so I’m trying to do the research to make that at least plausible – and that research will likely feed through to here too.
At the outset I have to say that I take it as axiomatic that nothing of significance will happen to mitigate global heating (short of a massive volcanic eruption, but that will be a temporary blip). We are currently on course for an average rise of 1.5° by 2030 or so, and the only question is how bad it’s going to get after that. ‘How bad’ is, of course, the key question, but it’s worth saying that, after eighteen months of pandemic, we ought to have a more visceral understanding of feedback loops, tipping points and the impact of exponential change. Also, not much picked up on, is that the IPCC discarded (for now) the really scary models because they thought the degree of climate sensitivity those models suggested was currently unsupported by historical evidence.
I am not given generally to catastrophism. History is full of people predicting the end of the world and finding themselves still here, embarrassed, the day after. And I’m not going there.
But.
Not only are we in an interstitial state regarding the way our daily lives are led (and still between phases of the current pandemic which is by no means over), we are also coming out of the two and a half centuries of industrialisation behaving in a way that means we will not reverse, or even mitigate, the damage we’ve done to the climate.
Predictive Failure
In any event, even without catastrophising, it’s bad enough. As I write, we have monstrous fires in Siberia, record temperatures in the Mediterranean with fires in Turkey and Greece, and we’ll soon be getting round to this year’s catastrophic fires in the southern hemisphere. We’ve had major floods in Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. Looking to the US, I would say the west coast and Pacific North-West are already on course to be uninhabitable at current population levels within twenty years, partly because of the direct effect of the heat and fires, and partly because of the water shortages that are already happening and certain to increase (the balance of probabilities globally is, broadly, that areas that are already dry will get drier while areas that are already wet will get wetter).
And that’s all before the impacts of sea-level rise, which is on course to become obvious after 2030. Anyway, I jotted down some headline areas to think about/worry about on a scrap of paper and came up with:
Water rights
Refugees
International travel
Transport
Infrastructure,
Food
Energy
Supply Chain/Logistics
Nationalism/Border skirmishes
Wealth inequalities
Housing
A sobering list, and some of them are already causing problems. In the big picture, there isn’t a lot we can do about them as individuals because the required changes to mitigate the problem are global and systemic – it’s an exceptionally complex, large-scale systems issue, in fact. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything, but it seems to me that what we can do as a country is to seek to mitigate what’s coming, and this requires some big decisions and preparations – the UK has, for example, outsourced the bulk of its food production, and a lot of what remains is vulnerable to intense weather events.
I have no expectation of anything of significance happening in the USA, which will have its own internal problems to deal with soon enough as the west coast becomes near-uninhabitable and the east coast floods (and the midwest had extreme flooding in 2019, and severe floods in 2020 and 2021). The UK will bluster until it’s too late, then try to find a foreigner to blame. The EU will issue lots of fine words but do the square root of fuck all. In the big picture, we are reliant on China to drive at least some positive change.
Several times, while I kept my Covid-19 diary here, I wrote that the pandemic was small fry compared to climate change. A month ago, more or less, I wrote:
Covid continues, and builds momentum, while politicians flounder in their own ineptitude, but it is the change in climate that’s the big picture, a process of change that I think is now irreversible. I keep up to date with news and views on climate change in the popular science press, and I know the view continues to be expressed that there’s still time to change course. But all the things that are said to be essential to do rely for their implementation on co-ordinated, decisive action by politicians and on the majority of humans ‘doing the right thing’.
The thing is, I have no faith that politicians in particular or humans in general will do anything at all of significance. Short of some volcanic cataclysm, the future is here and it’s already too late. The Moon is getting in on the act, too, sleekit wee bastard that it is.
What else is there to do but to sit here writing dystopian fiction?
The tendency towards catastrophism is, on the whole, something to be avoided, because it becomes so dominant an interpretive framework as to distort deeper awareness of the world about us. But, given the new IPCC report published yesterday, the urge to catastrophise is strong today. And for good reason. I found myself this morning drinking green tea and scanning the key points of the IPCC Report (New Scientist Summary here) while listening to an 8 1/2 Spotify playlist I put together of different versions of Dark Star: it formed the perfect accompaniment, particularly the earlier, primal versions. A link to the playlist is down below for the (very) few of you who might be interested.
More useful, and more difficult, than catastrophising is figuring out consequences and mitigations. Some examples:
(1) We live in a house built in 1933. While the Scottish weather is variable, a shift to extremes of heat and wetness is likely to be problematic. Most of July was very pleasant here, but the last few days have seen heavy, and at times torrential, rain. Heavy rain isn’t uncommon in Edinburgh at Festival time any more than it is at Wimbledon. Occasional floods aren’t unknown either, and a lot of money was spent on flood defences after the Water of Leith burst its banks several years ago. What has changed is frequency: we’ve had floods at the foot of our hill every year for the past three. This is partly because of sudden quantities of water falling in a short time but also because the old drains can’t cope with the amount of water coming off the hill. And with no natural drainage, the road and shops become a giant concrete culvert.
Our back garden is much more prone to saturation than previously, and I think changes in the water table are implicated in that (and in the dampness of the soil in the void beneath our floorboards). Will this lead to structural problems with the house? I don’t know.
(2) One of our daughters lives in the USA and, of course, we like to see her in person rather than over a video call. However, that, currently, means flying and the airline industry is going to have to change quickly and dramatically, particularly in its reliance on fossil fuels. I know alternative engines are being in tested, but scaling up to retrofit every fleet? That’s quite a task. So how easy will it be to get a flight? And will we be able to afford it? Or perhaps ocean liners will come back into fashion, with all their problems. And I’m not sure I’d fancy being at sea in the North Atlantic in years to come anyway, because—
(3) The UK relies on the gulfstream (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC to its friends) for its climate, and it is also part of the broader global system. It has been threatened with disruption for years, but now looks to be on the brink. What will that mean? I don’t know, but I doubt it will be good.
(4) Fire, flood, drought and plague lead to conflict, population movement, resource shortages and more disease. Where will all the displaced people go? And how will they be fed and watered?
There’s more, of course, such as global logistics and food supplies, but that’s off the top of my head.
All of the causes for (relative) optimism rely on concerted political will, and I don’t expect that to happen until it is much too late. Oddly, the response to the pandemic, at least in the West, suggests a positive in that, on the whole, populations responded to the bigger picture, notwithstanding the dingbats who make the news headlines. A more permanent shift to working from home may well bring benefits, too. (I’m still sceptical that, worldwide, there will be sufficient change, though). The bad news is that an appropriate response by governments to climate change will require an awful lot more than mask mandates. Expect to see more protests which, given point 4 above, may well turn nasty.
No doubt I’ll write more about this here when I think it through some more. Until then, back to dystopian fiction and dark stars crashing it is.
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