Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Climate and Civilizations

One of the most-reported outcomes of last week's G8 talks in L'Aquila, Italy was the agreement reached by the rich and poor nations alike to attempt to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). There has always been a lot of disagreement among politicians and laypeople about whether our climate is actually changing, and if it is, whether the changes are part of a natural fluctuation or are due to human activity.* On the other hand, the scientific community is in overwhelming agreement that climate change is occurring, that it's dangerous, and that it's because of industry and other human endeavors. News from the G8 has got me thinking, just what would it mean for the world's climate to warm by 2 degrees Celsius, or more?

I'm no scientist, so to understand this set of questions better, I turned to Mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Lynas wanted to know what climate change could actually do to the Earth, so he read thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers reporting experiments that model future climate change and its effects. Six Degrees is essentially a literature review, reporting the results of all these studies in an intelligent narrative meant for non-scientists. There are six chapters, explaining what scientists think will happen with each successive degree (Celsius) of global warming, including its effects on coral reef ecosystems, changing ocean currents and weather patterns, monsoon failures, melting mountain glaciers, and many other horrors. This layperson's report on the science is excellent and valuable, but Lynas also examines how the effects of global warming might affect people, politics, and the societies of the world. Overall, it's a very sobering book, but valuable for anyone who wants a good, solid introduction to how the best scientific minds would answer the question, "What if?"

We are not the first culture to face the question of our own possible demise. Many societies have collapsed in the past, for a variety of reasons, and their stories might give us some ideas for what to avoid, and how we might best cope, if indeed, major changes are in our future. Archaeologist Brian Fagan has written many books about how climate has affected human history, and one of these, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, describes the worldwide changes during the "Medieval Warm Period," in the years 800 to 1300. Europe flourished during this period – Norse sailors established settlements as far away as Greenland and Newfoundland, wine was successfully produced in England. But other regions of the world suffered drought, which Fagan argues contributed, among other things, to the collapse of the classical Mayan civilization in North America. Fagan is a great writer, and he manages to make the most arcane scientific points both clear and interesting.

There are lots of other books about the collapse of past civilizations – two noted examples are Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World.  But Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World tackles a related but slightly different subject – the worldwide wave of famines that occurred in the late 19th century, in India, China and Brazil. Again, this is sometimes a challenging book to read, well, because it's difficult to read about starvation without empathizing with the people affected by it. But Davis's astute breakdown of how the worldwide economic system (and, more specifically, the economic interests of Britain) put pressure on social and practical dynamics that had been in place in these three countries to such a degree that when El Niño weather patterns struck, people were not able to adjust, and famines resulted. He further argues that famine relief was hampered by the same systems that helped create it – the world economic market was not flexible in this regard, and the British empire did not find it in its interests to help feed the hungry in Brazil, India, or China.

* I should note, for those who are interested, that the library has many books which argue that global warming is a myth, is a natural cycle not caused by a rise in human-produced carbon emissions, is caused by something outside the earth's atmosphere, or is otherwise not threatening the well being of the earth. Some examples are: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by S. Fred Singer, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels, and Global Warming: The Truth Behind the Myth, by Michael L. Parsons.

Students and anyone interested in reading both sides of the political debate at the same time might enjoy the essay collections Global Warming: Opposing Viewpoints, edited by Cynthia A. Bily, and Global Warming, edited by Debra A. Miller. For a wider variety of essays and opinion pieces about global warming (or indeed, about any controversial issue), you might want to take a look at the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (be sure to have your library card number and PIN handy; you'll need them to log in, since this is a library database!).