The collapse

You've undoubtedly heard British philosopher Thomas Hobbes's famous quote that in the past, our forebears' lives were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  That's certainly true in my ancestors' case, given that just about all of them were poverty-stricken French and Scottish peasants who uprooted and came over to North America because they thought for some reason it would be lots better to be poverty-stricken peasants over here.

I've had at least some inkling about how difficult life was back then since my history classes in college, but it was always in a purely academic way.  While my parents weren't wealthy by any stretch, we never wanted for food on the table, and any struggles they had paying the bills were well hidden and not talked about.  As an adult, I went through a long period in my life when I was the sole member of the family with a paying job, and it was scary to think that if I'd lost it, we would have been screwed; but I never really was in any danger of that.  As long as I kept showing up to school every day and teaching my classes with a reasonable level of competence, I could count on being able to pay the mortgage.

Hundreds of years ago, though, that simply wasn't true for the vast majority of humanity.  I think what really brought home to me the precarious existence most people led was when I read the book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History by Brian Fagan (which I highly recommend).  For most of human history, people have literally been one bad harvest season from starvation and one sudden epidemic from being wiped out en masse.  All it took was a single prolonged drought, early frost, or extended period of cool, rainy weather spoiling the crops, and people had nothing to fall back on.

No wonder so many of them were superstitious.  It's easy to put your faith in magical thinking when your lives hinge on a set of conditions you don't understand, and couldn't control even if you did.

What is striking, though, is how insulated the leaders of countries have always felt from the effects of all of this -- often to the extent of ignoring them completely.  There's an argument to be made that it was a series of weather-related poor harvests that lit the tinder box in the French Revolution (and many of the leaders didn't find out their mistake until they were being led to the guillotine).  But to take a less well-known example, let's look at a paper that came out last week in the journal Science Advances about a different civilization, the fascinating Classical Mayan culture, which lasted over six hundred years -- from about 250 to 900 C. E. -- completely dominating the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico and northern Central America before collapsing with astonishing speed.  Cities were abandoned to the jungle, the elaborate building and carving stopped entirely, and the entire region went largely silent until the rise of the city of Mayapan in the twelfth century.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:PhilippN, Calakmul - Structure I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Scientists from the University of Cambridge did a study of the chemical composition of the oxygen isotope ratios in the limestone deposited on stalagmites in caves in the northern Yucatán, which can be read in layers like tree rings.  Oxygen isotope ratios are a good proxy for rainfall; oxygen-18:oxygen-16 ratios tend to drop during the rainy season, so an overall low 18:16 ratio is a strong signal of drought.

And what the scientists found was that during the time between 871 C.E. and 1021 C.E. there was a severe thirteen-year drought, and three shorter (five to six year) droughts.  Water supplies dried up, crops failed, trade stopped, and the inevitable happened -- the common people blamed their leaders.  Violent revolution ensued, and in the end, a civilization that had dominated the region for centuries collapsed completely.

It's easy to think something like this couldn't happen to us, but right now we're in the middle of one of the most dramatic climate shifts on record, with global average temperatures rising faster than they did during the terrifying Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago.  And you know what the Trump regime's response to this is?

Just last week they announced plans to deliberately destroy the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, one of our chief climate monitoring satellites.  Not because it's malfunctioning; it's working fine.  Not because it costs lots of money; it's already paid for.

No, the reason they want to destroy the satellite is the same as the reason they stopped keeping track of new COVID cases during the height of the pandemic.  If you don't measure something, you can pretend it's not happening.

Destroying the OCO won't stop the effects of anthropogenic climate change, of course.  It'll just prevent us from seeing them coming.

So I may have misspoken at the beginning, in leading you to believe that our ancestors were any different from us with regards to the fragility of our existence -- and the tendency to fall back on unscientific thinking.  But let us hope that the ignorance and greed of our current elected officials won't return us to another era of nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives, where the risk of starvation was never far away.  

This time, though, if it happens it won't be an unfortunate result of living in a world we don't understand.  It will be a self-inflicted wound caused by trusting power-hungry people who know perfectly well what they are doing, but value short-term expediency over the long-term habitability of the planet.

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Dry times

Okay, just yesterday I said that I was gonna try to keep it light and stop focusing on dismal developments like pandemics and climate catastrophe.  But a paper released just yesterday in the journal Science has forced my attention away from cheerful topics back into the more serious realm of how our short-sightedness is driving large parts of the planet toward being completely uninhabitable.

The paper, "Large Contribution from Anthropogenic Warming to an Emerging North American Megadrought," by a team led by A. Park Williams of Columbia University, has an alarming enough title, but when you read the paper itself, you find that "alarming" is kind of the understatement of the century.  Here's a sampler:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change.  We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought.  The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming.  Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

There's a lot to unpack here.  First, not only is the southwestern quarter of the United States heading toward a drought worse than any in recorded history, close to 50% of its severity is directly due to human activity.  On top of that is another thing the study uncovered -- that we were misled (as it were) by the fact that the twentieth century was unusually wet, encouraging widespread settlement by humans and huge investments into agriculture in the region.  "The twentieth century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available," said study co-author Benjamin Cook, also of Columbia University, in a press release.  "It goes to show that studies like this are not just about ancient history.  They’re about problems that are already here."

"Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future," added study lead author Williams. "We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now.  We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts."

[Image courtesy of Science, Williams et al.]

Drought always brings to mind the struggles faced by farmers confronted with the vagaries of weather, but in this case, the problem is orders of magnitude worse than that.  The press release from Columbia University (linked above) mentioned that Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- two of the largest reservoirs in the southwestern United States -- are already seeing a dramatic drop in the water levels.  These provide a significant proportion of the agricultural and drinking water to a broad swath of the Southwest.  What happens when these and others are functionally dry -- too low to allow for withdrawing water for any purpose?

A combination of short-sightedness, Pollyanna-style optimism, and a stretch of unusually wet years in the twentieth century led to coastal California and sun-belt cities like Phoenix and Tucson being some of the most heavily-settled areas in the United States, and now they're in the situation that if there's a true megadrought -- something far worse and longer-lasting than the piece of it we've already seen -- there could be millions of people without adequate drinking water.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the federal and state governments are simply not equipped to face a disaster on that scale.

I hate to focus on negative shit, I really do, but in this case it's too important to ignore.  I'm back to the James Burke quote I mentioned in the post two days ago -- about how we pay for insurance for other much less likely eventualities without batting an eyelash, but when it comes to insurance against climate collapse, for some reason this is considered ridiculous.  The media hasn't helped, especially disinformation specialists like Fox News who have been hammering on climate change being some kind of evil liberal hoax for at least twenty years.  Now, however, we're paying the price, which will only get steeper the longer we pretend it isn't happening.

Consider, for example, the impact of Donald Trump's firing the pandemic response team because he didn't want to spend money on something that hadn't happened yet.

So we need to sound the alarm.  Loudly.  Studies like this one should be on the desk of every lawmaker in the United States.  Yeah, some of them are likely to ignore it -- I don't think a two-by-four to the head would wake up someone as catastrophically dense as James "Snowball" Inhofe, for example -- but the tide has to turn.

Because if you think things are bad now, my sense is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Drought of the imagination

The observation that politicians tend to lie is so obvious as to hardly need comment.  As far back as 2,400 years ago, Plato observed, "Those who are too smart and honest to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are stupid and dishonest."

It's disheartening how little has changed in two millennia.  We are still electing liars and crooks, which means that we ourselves are falling for the lies.  After all, we keep voting for them despite the fact that just about everyone knows full well that most politicians will say and do damn near anything to get elected.

Which brings me once again to Donald Trump.

I had told myself I wouldn't do another post on Trump, that I'd said what I had to say.  Honestly, I hate talking politics anyhow.  I'm pretty non-partisan in the sense that I don't vote any party line, and that I can support a wide range of candidates as long as they approach holding office from the position of respecting facts, being open-minded, and telling the truth.

Unfortunately, this narrows the field pretty severely right from the get-go.

But even from my admittedly cynical standpoint, Donald Trump raises dishonest bullshit to unprecedented heights.  He's not the stupidest person in politics; that dubious honor would go either to Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas (who asked if the Mars Pathfinder mission had seen the flag that Neil Armstrong had planted yet) or Republican Louie Gohmert, also of Texas (who said that cutting food stamps was a benefit to poor people because it would keep them from becoming obese).

Trump, however, may well be the biggest liar of the bunch.  And I don't think he lies because he's shooting from the hip; I think he lies with complete forethought and understanding of what he's saying and why.  He is a brilliant strategist -- and, I believe, entirely amoral.

Let's consider his statements last week to a rally in Fresno, California.  It's hard to give a political speech in California in the last couple of years without at least addressing the catastrophic drought they've been facing.  It's first and foremost on many people's minds, given the threat to drinking water and agriculture as the rivers run dry and the aquifers disappear.  And what did Trump say?  I'll give you the direct quote, because you won't believe me otherwise:

We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.  They [the farmers] don’t understand — nobody understands it.  There is no drought. 

If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.

I beg your pardon?  There is no drought?  All Trump had to do, all along, is wave his hand and say, "The drought does not exist," and it would just acquiesce and move on to trouble another nation, possibly Mexico, assuming it can cross the wall he's planning to build?

And all we have to do, apparently, is to elect Trump, and he will "open up the water."  Environment be damned.  The water will do what Donald commands.  Otherwise, it will be fired.

To a lot of Trump's naysayers, these are just gaffes, slips of the tongue, speaking without thinking things through first.  I think it's more insidious than that.  Trump knows full well what he's doing, what sort of message plays well with the crowds he's attracting.  He's well-loved among people who distrust science, disbelieve that the climate is changing because of human activities, and think that our leader should be able to bully nature into doing whatever he wants. 

As such, he's wildly popular among the pro-fossil fuel contingent, and his talking points reflect that.  A couple of days ago, he promised that if he is elected, he would "cancel the Paris Climate Plan" that has made some motion toward addressing runaway fossil fuel use and anthropogenic carbon dioxide.   The move was no accident; it was calculated to win support (financial and otherwise) from the fossil fuel industry.  Don't believe me?  Consider his statement to a meeting of oil industry representatives in Bismarck, North Dakota three days ago:

Regulations that shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants and block the construction of new ones — how stupid is that?... We’re going to deal with real environmental challenges, not the phony ones we’ve been hearing about.

Which reminds me of another quote, this one by George Bernard Shaw: "A government with the policy of robbing Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul."

So it's no surprise that the petroleum industry loves the guy.  But what gets me most is the fact that Trump can lie outright to the crowds who attend his rallies, and they continue to cheer.  At least the other candidates are subtle about it; Trump, evidently, has the approach of "go big or go home:"

And you know I should say this, I’ve received many, many environmental rewards. You know, really.  Rewards and awards. I  have done really well environmentally and I’m all for it.  You know we want jobs.  We have to bring jobs back.  And if we can bring this part of the world water, that we have, that we have, but it’s true, I’ve gotten so many of the awards.

Do you know what "environmental rewards and awards" he's received?  I did some digging and I found...

... one.  In 2007, a golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, owned by Trump, received an award for "environmental stewardship through golf course maintenance, construction, education and research."  And that's it.  One golf course, apparently, constitutes "many, many environmental rewards... so many of the awards."

So Trump keeps bullshitting, and the people keep cheering.  More ironic still, many of the same people loudly complain about the dishonesty of the government -- while this man stands in front of them, uttering outright lies, and none of them bat an eye.

The whole thing is profoundly discouraging, not least because I'm not particularly enamored of the other option I'm likely to be offered in November.  I hate being put in a position of voting not to support a good candidate, but in an attempt to prevent a horrible candidate from winning.  That, however, appears to be what I'm going to have to do.  Unless I can simply wave my hand, unleash my Jedi mind tricks, and say, "These are not the candidates you're looking for," and have the whole lot of them go away.

Dry times

Telling an outright, bald-faced lie on a major issue should exclude you from running for public office.

Yes, I know that would exclude three-quarters of the politicians we now have in office.  But consider: why do we tolerate this sort of behavior?  Instead of saying, "You are lying," we just roll our eyes and say, 'Oh, you know politicians."  As if this is somehow on the same level as a tall tale from a five-year-old, and not an utterance that might not only hoodwink naïve members of the citizenry, but potentially fuck up smart policymaking in the process.

Take, for example, California corporate leader and likely 2016 presidential contender Carly Fiorina, who just a couple of days ago blamed the unprecedented West Coast drought on "liberal environmentalists:"

That's the tragedy of California, because of liberal environmentalists' insistence - despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California's population has doubled.  There is a man-made lack of water in California - and Washington manages the water for the farmers.  President Obama goes out to California a little over a year ago, calls it a tragedy of global warming and hands out money to a food bank.  This is all about politics and policy, and it is liberal environmentalists who have brought us this tragedy.

First, let's start with the obvious.  Since I don't work as a state employee in Wisconsin or Florida, I'm allowed to utter the words "climate change," so I will.  According to a paper released three months ago in Geophysical Research Letters, authors Daniel Griffin and Kevin J. Anchukaitis state their conclusion bluntly:

(T)he current event is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years, with single year (2014) and accumulated moisture deficits worse than any previous continuous span of dry years.  Tree ring chronologies extended through the 2014 growing season reveal that precipitation during the drought has been anomalously low but not outside the range of natural variability.  The current California drought is exceptionally severe in the context of at least the last millennium and is driven by reduced though not unprecedented precipitation and record high temperatures.

But of course, accepting climate change would be right up there with accepting evolution for anyone hoping for the Republican nomination.  So it's unsurprising that Ms. Fiorina won't come right out and say that the climatic side of the drought was triggered by anthropogenic global warming.

[image courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

Because there is another side of the drought, and that's water usage.  California Governor Jerry Brown at least gave lip service to this aspect of it last week, with an order to cut back on water use by homeowners -- making it illegal to use potable water to irrigate lawns, for example, something that in my opinion should have been done thirty years ago.  Urban water districts have been ordered to reduce water consumption by 25%, although they're not giving any particular details on how to get to that target other than the lawn sprinkler ban.

What is less well-known, though, is that the water use restriction didn't touch two of California's industries: agriculture and petroleum.  Agriculture uses 80% of the state's water supply.  A full 10% goes for almonds alone.  Another 15% goes to producing alfalfa hay, a lot of which is consumed by the dairy industry.  But a study has shown that just the portion of the hay crop that is exported to land-poor countries like Japan represents a water use of 100 billion gallons per year -- enough to supply a million families with drinking water for a year.

Explain to me again, Ms. Fiorina, how liberal environmentalists caused all of this?

Then there's the petroleum industry, that according to a recent estimate uses two million gallons of fresh water a day for oil and gas production.  Included in that are the 70 million gallons of water the state used in 2014 for hydrofracking alone, water that after use is so laden with salt and toxins that it is unsuitable for use for anything else, and is often disposed of by deep-well injection, which in 2014 was demonstrated to have contaminated agricultural and drinking water aquifers in the Central Valley with arsenic, thallium, nitrates, and salt.

Find me a liberal environmentalist who had anything to do with making this practice legal.

Go on, I'm waiting.

Look, it's not like I have solutions for this problem.  The California drought is a tangled skein of climate effects (both natural and anthropogenic), mismanagement, greed, overuse, and poor planning.    Any possible answer will require some serious rethinking of how water is used and how agriculture is managed in arid climates.  Governor Brown's lawn-watering restrictions are going to have exactly zero effect, given that the vast majority of water use in California isn't by homeowners.

And Carly Fiorina's statement that the whole thing wouldn't have happened if only the damn tree-huggers had allowed the building of a couple more reservoirs is an outright lie.

But such smokescreens feed political expediency.  Simple causes imply simple solutions, and it's in the interest of Ms. Fiorina's presidential aspirations to claim that the whole thing can be fixed if only we have a business-first, environment-last leader.  So it's unsurprising, I suspect.

But expedient doesn't mean "true," and it'd be nice if some of our political leaders would acknowledge the fact.

UPDATE:  Apparently Fiorina's statement is a lie even in a more fundamental way; there have been 21 million acre-feet of reservoirs and storage added to California's water management system in the last fifty years.  See this source for details.  Thanks for a sharp-eyed and knowledgeable reader for catching this.

Who'll stop the rain?

In Umberto Eco's brilliant novel Foucault's Pendulum, three worldly and skeptical book editors whose company specializes in publishing woo-woo nonsense decide to skip the middle-man.  Enough with trying to lure in writers with manuscripts about astrology, psychic phenomena, secret societies, and conspiracy theories; given the amount of time the three editors have spent reading all of this stuff, they have the background to out-woo-woo the woo-woos, and write a book themselves that will trump all the rest.

So they do.  Their manuscript ties together the Templars, the Masons, ley lines, the Holy Grail, black magic, Atlantis, and psychic super-energy.  Their tale is left open-ended, though; the final resting place of the Object of High Magic that has been sought by every secret society in the history of humanity is still being researched, and the Object itself is yet to be found.  After all, everyone knows how irresistible a mystery is!  When their book is printed, the editors congratulate themselves on having taken advantage of the gullible and credulous, and laugh up their sleeves at how anyone could be foolish enough to buy it.

But then, one of them is kidnapped by the very people they've catered to.  A ransom note is delivered to the other two, demanding to know what the solution to the puzzle is.  There is no way, the kidnappers say, that you got that far with putting the clues together, and didn't actually figure out where the Holy Grail is.  Tell us -- or we'll kill your friend.

And, of course, the more the kidnapped man and his two friends insist that there is no mystery, there is no Holy Grail, no Super-Powerful Magical Device hidden in some sacred spot in the world, that they made the whole thing up, the more convinced the kidnappers are that they're lying.  Why would they argue so hard if they didn't have something, something big, to hide?

It's the problem with conspiracy theorists, isn't it?  No power on Earth can convince them they're wrong; facts can be spun or made up, and the people arguing against them are either deluded, stupid, or else part of the conspiracy themselves.  And the trouble -- like with our skeptical book editors in Foucault's Pendulum -- is that sometimes, you end up convincing someone you wish you hadn't.

Which brings us to the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Ahmedinejad has long belonged to that unfortunately extensive list of world leaders who have a rather tentative grip on reality.  He's a hard-line Muslim, is (by all accounts) extremely superstitious, and is a raving Holocaust denier.  Now, however,  he's made statements that indicate that he's also spent too much time reading websites like AboveTopSecret.

Iran is currently suffering through one of the worst droughts in thirty years, and last week Ahmedinejad issued a statement claiming that hostile countries have used their technology to change the weather and cause the drought.  (Source)

"The enemy destroys the clouds that are headed towards our country and this is a war Iran will win," Ahmedinejad said on Monday of last week.  The West, he says, is "using special equipment" to "prevent rain clouds from reaching regional countries, including Iran."

Well, well.  I hope you HAARP conspiracists are proud of yourselves.  You have spent the last ten years blathering on about how the US military now can control the weather (and, according to some, cause earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic eruptions), and now you've convinced a hostile world leader that you were right.  And not just any hostile world leader; a hostile world leader who (1) hates the United States, (2) is currently trying to develop nuclear weapons, and (3) already showed signs of being a delusional whackjob.

Nicely played, gentlemen.  Nicely played.  But what are you going to do now?

Of course, saying, "Ha-ha, we made it all up," like the editors in Foucault's Pendulum, isn't really an option, because you still believe it's all true, don't you?  So now we have to wait and watch while a nutcase threatens us with war because he believes an elaborate lie concocted by a bunch of other nutcases.

The whole thing is absurd enough that it almost does sound like the plot of a novel.  It makes me think that when the aliens from the planet Nibiru actually do arrive here on December 21, 2012, they're just going to destroy the planet on the basis of there being no intelligent life present.