Bouncing Onward: Climate, Consequences, Crops, Memes & Resilience

It is amazing what summer soaker can do. Three or four of such storms over the course of a few days can bring back the seemingly dead. For weeks I have given feeble garden hose life support to frying hosta lilies and parched grass, always making sure to water a spot near a robins’ nest so the parents would have a fighting chance of finding a few worms and grubs to feed their peeping young. Some days, the water in the hose would get so hot, I would spritz the sidewalks for few minutes to avoid scalding the already scorched.

Now it’s all green lawns, revived trees and perked up posies, reveling in gloriously normal temperatures that gently rise into mid-80s during the day and settle into the 60s for snugly cicada-serenaded sleep at night.

This is summer as it ought to be. Summer as it used to be, at least in my little sliver by Chicago. Yet even though the view out the window looks like the poster child of resilience, it is more a reminder that what was once reliably normal is fast becoming a rarity to be treasured.

Over 4,700 weather records have been broken in the US so far this year. The withered corn crop, once on track to be the largest in history will now be the largest loss in history. And with demand for all commodity crops increasing right along with global population, even little wiggles can amplify across world markets. The catastrophic floods in Pakistan a couple of years ago sent cotton prices soaring, even though Pakistan ranks a distant fourth as a supplier.

The Great American Corn Pop of 2012 is a much, much bigger deal and will translate into higher food prices, higher fuel prices (another ethanol promise broken), more hunger, more debt, more unrest and more misery in a cycle that will be tough to break.

The drought tipped the balance of a global food system already in a delicate state,   made vulnerable to petro chemical-dependent soils, fast-depleting aquifers, pesticide-impervious “superweeds,” an increasingly monopolistic agri-food supply chain, a resurgence of crop pests and rising fuel costs.

Extreme and unpredictable weather causes highways to buckle, concrete to crack, rail ties to kink, bridges to bend and rivers to become unnavigable. Even if you manage to grow a crop, there is still the challenge of getting it to market

A DANGEROUS MEME

How do you adapt to such a fast-moving target? Even if we were able turn off our collective car ignitions and switch instantly to renewable power sources, there are more than enough greenhouse gases swirling around the Earth’s atmosphere to cause mischief for decades to come. The disaster is so overwhelmingly obvious that now Koch-sponsored scientists have seen the grim light. Still, there are politicians who continue to bray for more mining and drilling.

In a tour de force numbers analysis in Rolling Stone magazine, Bill McKibben follows the money:

…We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically above ground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

—Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Sustainability, which implies a baseline stability—the very thing we are fast losing—is giving way to the meme of resilience: the idea that somehow we will be able to recover from the inevitable disaster looming and “bounce back.” It is the seductive promise of Dorothy waking up safe in her bed in Kansas, with Toto ready to resume his rightful place in her arms once more.

But the tornado that rocked Dorothy’s world is nothing compared to the tornadoes, direchoes, record monsoons, massive droughts and rapid ice melts rocking ours. Even the parched park lawn now showing signs of green grizzle isn’t bouncing back, but  evolving, bouncing onward. Weeds with better root systems are making the most of their competitive advantage. Unless someone rips up the sod and reseeds, that lawn has changed for good.

Resilience is also a neutral concept, a point that is often overlooked. What bounces onwards may not be to everyone’s liking, such as weeds, bunny rabbits, pathogens, drug cartels and oil companies.

So the question is not whether we can return to a comfortable status quo: We can’t. Rather it is Status quo vadis? Where are we going?

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED:

• Global Risks 2012 / World Economic Forum (pdf and additional web resources)

DATELINE SOUTHERN-CALI-CAGO: Speedy Spring

For years, I joked that Chicago would be one of the few climate change winners. My home city sits next to 20% of the world’s fresh water, surrounded by some the most fertile soil anywhere (thank you, Pleistocene glaciers). While a flooded New York City would be distributing buckets for citizen bail brigades, Texas would toast and the West Coast would crack, erupt, drown-by-tsunami and otherwise suffer the onslaughts of climate-triggered geological debacle. Meanwhile, my little weather-maligned speck on the planet would finally look like paradise. Take that (tornado-blasted) Hawaii.

Of course, I also said that below zero temps and window-high snows kept the riffraff from California at bay and that if the best thing you could say about a place was that the weather was good, run.

But now, after a week of record shattering pleasant weather (we no longer merely break records), watching the winter-that-never-was skip past spring and move straight to summer, suspicions nag that this can’t be good. Will June be August? With no snow pack and spotty rain, are we headed for a drought? What will this do to the Great (and I do mean great) Lakes?

While the birds are in full competitive song, daffodils daffing and forsythia sything, tens of thousands of street pot holes are not being born, a generation blighted by the lack of freeze/thaw cycle.

So as I trade in my snow boots for Birkenstocks, grab some sun-block cream and head to the beach, it is with a certain “enjoy it while it lasts” trepidation. Although the skies above my head are blue and the air soft and fragrant, record shattering tornadoes fueled by the same record shattering heat have torn up more than a dozen states, chewing up land, annihilating whole towns and irreversibly changing the course of survivors’ lives.

A few weeks ago, a group of insurance industry representatives gave a few members of Congress who were willing to listen an earful:

“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.”

Property and casualty insurers in the United States experienced an estimated $44 billion in losses last year when hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes and other natural disasters were more severe, longer, more frequent and less predictable than in the past.

According to Swiss Re, the average weather-related insurance industry loss in the U.S. was about $3 billion a year in the 1980s compared to approximately $20 billion annually by the end of the past decade.

“As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re’s sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.”

— Pat Speer, Insurance Networking News (HT ClimateAdaption)

The average cost of weather-related insurance pay-outs is up seven-fold in the US?! Even for those who don’t “believe” in climate change (honestly, this is not a matter of faith but fact), insurance bills never lie.

Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank, another hotbed of bean-counting realists, just issued a report connecting the dots between climate shifts and mass human migrations. In just the past two years, 42 million people have been displaced by climate-driven weather disasters in Asia. That’s the equivalent of the population of 5+ Chicago metro areas collectively getting up and moving. They can’t go home again.

In Canada, it is ticks that are on the move, exponentially expanding the range of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Pine beetles, which have been chewing through billions of trees over the last 20 years, turning the country’s famous forests into net carbon emitters, are in their salad days, churning out multiple generations of little nibblers in an ever-lengthening warm season.

On the flip side, Europe, clobbered by a newly minted snow machine fueled by arctic melt-water, will be digging out for some time.

FLUKE OR FUTURE?

According to phenologists, those tireless, mostly volunteer record-keepers of daily change who meticulously chart the annual emergence of plants, migrations of animals and other seasonal markers, 2012’s headline-grabbing weather fits neatly into long range trends.

We are seeing strong trends almost wherever we look. In the last decade, we’re actually now starting to be able to say OK, well, we see patterns of plants and animals coming earlier. And we have better and better climatological records, temperature records, and we can start to link those together. And there’s a paper coming out it seems every week now that’s saying OK, here’s a trend in bees coming out 10 days earlier over the last 130 years, and we can attribute that to warming temperatures.

— Jake Weltzin, ecologist and the executive director of the USA National Phenology Network / NPR Interview  (HT ClimateAdaptation)

TECH FORECAST

Lost in the din of overhyped apps and endless debate on the merits of aggregation at SxSW (re the latter: sharing is good—and so is giving credit where it is due) was an annoucement of yet another SxSW conference: ECO, slated for October.

As worthy and wonderful as it no doubt will be, it seems like a missed opportunity not to have had at least a mini-ECO conference overlapping the Interactive party.

Imagine if the critical mass of digitally adept entrepreneurial thinkers had actually been presented with a worthy challenge, rather than left to literally twiddle thumbs keeping creepy tabs on alleged “friends” because it’s fun (yes, looking at you Highlight).

Instead of “situational awareness” of the stalker kind, we actually need Situational Awareness writ large to help navigate a dangerously shifted and still shifting climate. This is about food supplies, water resources, migrations of man, beast, plant and microbe. This is about the future.

Clean energy, carbon footprints and conservation, yes, but also sturdier materials (see Neri Oxman’s video at the end of this post: “And You Can Print That, Too”), savvier  supply chain logistics and speedier humanitarian response.

If problems present opportunities, techies, this is your moment to shine.

The World Bank is sponsoring a first-ever competition called Apps for Climate. Submissions will be posted online for public review in early April, but already the discussion on how best to crunch big data has proved valuable.

Over at the UN, the Global Pulse group is mining data for early signals to slow crises—humanitarian disasters that can take years to make the news. “Finding out today what was happening two years ago is an exercise in history,” noted GP’s director Robert Kirkpatrick, in an presentation at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference last year. “There must be a better way.”

At this point we are talking about triage: how to keep bad from getting worse. But the real goal is resilience.

As I sit here looking out my screened window at a specular June day in mid-March, smelling the fresh scent of new growth, reveling in the haze of maple tree blossoms and red buds a’bursting, it is hard to believe that this isn’t the way things are meant to be.The birds and bugs and bulbs seem to be adapting just fine. Whether the rest of us can catch up is anybody’s guess.

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED:

• Nina Leopold Bradley on Phenology: