A Revolution in Weather

As a connoisseur of crackpot theories, as well as a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal of white European extraction, I pride myself on being behind the times. I'm a late-adopter of technology, would prefer a 1961 Austin Healy to a contemporary Porsche, and even though I love e mail and the internet, I'd happily move to an island with a load of books and a sack of postage stamps to send missives to my friends.

So when I have an idea, the instantaneous internet interface allows me to see how many people have already thought of it. Thus it was that I began to wonder how much evidence I could find in a five minute internet search that a significant number of people thought the Great Flood of Noah was caused by climate change. My research was not in vain. But I hardly expected to find legitimate scientists promoting the idea. Of course weather "caused" the Great Flood--what else? I wasn't that surprised to find more claims that climate change has caused everything from the bubonic plague to the persecution of witches (quick, prove you're not controlling the weather!), to the Dust Bowl in 1930s America. Now one must admit that these and other cataclysmic events weren't really "caused" by climate change, but by many factors including, in the Dust Bowl case, a shift in the Gulf Stream and, of course, no rain, or more scientifically, the supply of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico was reduced.

Weather happens. Growing up on the Gulf Coast I was impressed and fascinated with the extreme weather that brought hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, booming thunderstorms sometimes lasting three days, as well as amazing golden sunsets and crystal clear blue skies. Of course I just supposed that weather happened. Just as I supposed that oil, the stuff that turned the Gulf Coast from a swampy backwater to an industrial powerhouse, was a wondrous substance coaxed from the ground by rugged wildcatters who by dint of imagination, hard work, and daring, had powered the industrial rise of America.

You may gauge how benighted I was. For even long before oil, even in the age of whale oil and coal-powered sailing ships (think The Great White Fleet), man's industrial activities were altering the weather, so we now know. Of course, this would have been quite a stretch to imagine then, since the number of industrialized countries amounted to about five, if you count the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Japan, maybe throwing in a bit of Russia or adding a province or two in France. Yet the earth's weather, known for its booming, crashing, fickle, changeable ways, was on its way to even more extreme patterns. And despite half the Balkans being washed away in the Great Flood, despite the population displacements due to constant, localized changes in weather for ages, despite the harshest punishments inflicted on humankind by weather, we now apparently peer over the edge to the abyss.

We are no longer nomads with the ability to take our goats and head on down the road at the first sign of lack of moisture from the Gulf. We have settled by the hundreds of millions in fragile zones, coastal marshlands, earthquake zones, flood zones, and even in Manhattan. We are now more than ever exposed to the effects of extreme weather, a fact that must keep many insurance company executives awake at night. If we could only stop climate change we could all just go about building our beach houses and be done with it. Snow would return to the ski resorts (not noticeably absent this year, I'm told by ardent skiers), the arid plains would be watered again and made safe for GM corn and wheat crops, we wouldn't need to build roads in Bangladesh because people there wouldn't dream of disrupting the climate for the sake of plowing with tractors or taking a drive to the grocery store, and and we could go on developing Caribbean resorts, eco-friendly naturally, scudding about the planet in jets (burning ethanol based fuel), and consuming at an even greater rate while putting bad Mr. Extreme Weather in the dunce corner.

That human history has been bound up with extreme weather is apparent to any schoolchild. But now we have unlocked the key to human-designed weather alteration. It is not a revolutionary invention or an innovation in technology. It is carbon based fossil fuel, and if we can get rid of it we can re-engineer the weather back to its good old, pre-industrial extremes, and we won't have ourselves to blame for another Hurricane Katrina. If one happens, hey, we didn't do it. Don't blame us, we cycle to work. In the paradise of clean technology, which is not to be dismissed lightly as a desirable goal, carbon offsets will be as quaint as the telegraph. Our descendants will chuckle approvingly at our crude, as it were, attempts to cope with climate change, just as an internet-savvy teenager is agog at the idea of the telegraph. But the will admire our daring vision that extreme weather could be acted upon by humankind and brought to heel.

When we're told that past cataclysmic events were brought about by extreme weather, the message is conveyed that things are bound to get even worse now if we don't act. Impatience is one of the great tools of the revolutionary who wishes to move on as quickly as possible to the post-revolutionary vision of paradise. After all, if we can clearly see paradise and we know how to get there, why wait? Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis may still be with us (I'm sure somewhere there is a link to climate change if only I would search the internet sufficiently) but through our heroic efforts to eliminate the burning of carbon-based resources we can otherwise be about destroying the environment through other human activity just as we've always done. But we are told we must move more hastily to reach post-revolutionary nirvana and save humankind, along with the rest of the planet. What more noble goal than to be a planetary hero and join the revolution?

As H. Michael Mogil writes in his beautifully-produced book, Extreme Weather, "Although we can work to stop global warming and climate change, the question to ask is 'should we?' We may prefer a specific climate or we may dislike another. But do we have the right to decide which climates stay and which ones go?" The IPCC states that we know with 95 percent certainty that humans are the cause of our current global warming period and that global warming is the cause of the apparent increase in extreme weather.

Humans have done plenty to screw up the planet, and we have caused every species of plant or creature to suffer. There are many things to which we can devote our energies and resources to improve the environment--land conservation, limits on the built environment, drastic reduction in water and air pollution, species conservation, and stricter regulation on chemicals commonly used in everything from computers to household cleaning products. The list could go on. Since it is highly unlikely that we will see the elimination of carbon-based fuels in this century, we might as well be about engineering cleaner-burning fuels and regulating and taxing emissions that pollute the air and water, causing ripple effects throughout the ecosystem. Using climate change as a club with which to beat us over the head while demanding immediate change becomes a useful tool to draw attention to environmental problems which are most probably emergencies. But we must realize that it is a crude instrument of policy which has other, ahem, knock-on effects when seen through the prism of many centuries of extreme weather.