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Bad Weather Ahead

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Moscow in the 1920s

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was a Soviet writer who, in his own words, was “known for being unknown.” Hopefully, that will no longer be true as New York Review Books releases more of his stories. I have just finished reading his Autobiography of a Corpse, which contains a prescient 1939 story titled “Yellow Coal.” Tell me if the first paragraph of the story, quoted below, reminds you of our present situation:

The economic barometer at Harvard University had continually pointed to bad weather. But even its exact readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its energies. Oil wells were running dry. The energy-producing effect of black, white and brown coal was diminishing yearly. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snow-caps, melted by the perennial summer, could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine-generators would stop.

The Little Ice Age in Holland

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Skating on the Ice in Holland

One of the exhibits I saw at the Getty Center last week was a collection of drawings depicting cold weather in Holland during the 17th century. According to the Getty website:

In the 17th century, frigid winters and unusually cool summers blanketed northern Europe in what became known as the Little Ice Age. Dutch artists depicted this persistent global cooling in scenes of daily activities like ice skating and fishing. Highlighting human vulnerability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, these works offer opportunities to reflect on our current environmental crises. This exhibition features works by Hendrick Avercamp and other Dutch artists of the 1600s.

It was during this Little Ice Age that the Greenland colony of Scandinavian and Icelandic colonists was abandoned at some point between 1350 and 1400.

Dutchmen Playing Ice Hockey

I have always been fond of Dutch art, and that was only reinforced when Martine and I visited Amsterdam more than twenty years ago. Uniquely, it seems, Dutch painting elevated the humdrum to the level of high art in the works of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, Bosch, and Bruegel.

As I looked at all the drawings of the Dutch enjoying themselves in what looked like wickedly cold weather, I wondered if the global warming that the news media talks about is a permanent feature, or just another of earth’s mysterious centuries-long cycles that we don’t understand. Not that we shouldn’t do everything in our power from making it worse than it is, but it does make one think.

Sanctuary

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Immigration: Becoming More of an Issue As Time Passes

When it comes to immigration, the United States has been lucky. That is mostly because most of the migrants to our country were not at odds with our civilization. I think of the problems with Pakistanis in Britain and Burmese Rohingya in Thailand, and I see the American prejudice against Mexicans and Central Americans as solvable over time. We were just plain lucky that the peoples of the North and South American continents are not substantially different from us, and that we are separated from Europe, Africa, and Asia by two large and formidable oceans.

Within historic times, there have been long periods of migration that contributed to the destruction of the Western Roman Empire. On my bookshelves is an eight-volume study by Thomas Hodgkin entitled The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. They tell a long tale of ravages wrought by the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and Franks. They are not the only reason for the fall of Rome, but they certainly contributed.

We may soon be seeing hordes of migrants that dwarf anything from the past. The reasons for this are two-fold:

  • Because of the acceleration of climate change, many island, equatorial, and desert regions are becoming uninhabitable
  • More and more countries are turning into failed states, the worst being Somalia, Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Mali, Libya, Albania, and DR Congo

In the years to come, the United States will be sen more and more as a sanctuary from the world’s climatic and political ills, even though we see ourselves as having climatic and political ills aplenty. It will be like the migrants of over a century ago who thought the streets of America were paved with gold. Even when they were not.

I don’t think that building a wall along our southern border will accomplish much: the Mexican cartels have discovered that fences could be climbed over or tunneled under. They are now in charge of the coyotes guiding most migrants over the border. In the end, controlling access to the border will probably be more profitable for them than smuggling drugs ever was.

Will the oceans still protect us when the pressure to migrate grows tenfold? I think not. Even now, many migrants crossing over from Mexico are from China and Africa.

Cherrapunji

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Photo by Manish Jaishree of the Wettest Place on Earth

Here I am, reading about massive rainstorms in India circa 1990 while living iat the edge of a desert—and one in an increasing cycle of drought. I imagine, someone in Cherrapunji, India, might have dreams of living in a dry country in which, for all intents and purposes, there is no rainfall for six months of the year.

For your information, Cherrapunji is considered the wettest place on earth. It holds the record for the most rainfall in a calendar month and in a year: it received 9,300 millimeters (370 inches; 30.5 feet) in July 1861 and 26,461 millimeters (1,041.8 inches; 86.814 feet) between 1 August 1860 and 31 July 1861. in Alexander Frater’s book Chasing the Monsoon, the author talks of a friend of his father experiencing rainfall for several consecutive days in which between 30 and 40 inches of precipitation fell.

I miss rain. In Los Angeles, we only had one day of persistent rain in the last twelve months. There have been numerous instances of what I call a dirty drizzle, in which the windshield of my car is muddy as the result of an insufficient drizzle. To form a raindrop, there must be a bit of dust in every drop. But when not enough rain falls to operate the windshield wiper, then the dust predominates.

California and the American Southwest looks to be one of the big losers in climate change. The Colorado River is drying up, the Sierra snowpack is insufficient to fill the reservoirs the state needs, and horrible wildfires are destroying our forests.

There is not too much one can do about it except wait it out. Climate change has happened before. Up until the 13th century, Greenland was actually a fairly prosperous place, but then a little ice age set in and the colonists appear to have vanished from the pages of history. The town of Garðar was actually a bishopric, but nothing remains of its past glory.

Actually, I wouldn’t mind another “little ice age,” but who knows what will happen in the years to come?

It’s Already Here

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Lone Fire Fighter in Midst of Rapidly Growing Brush Fire

We have become used to talking about climate change as something that’ll take place in the future. Sorry, but it’s here already. It’s not like the Cold War, when we were constantly afraid of a nuclear holocaust that never happened, because both sides acted fairly reasonably.

But this is not the same America any more. Half the voting population is cray-cray, thinking that Democrats eat babies in the nonexistent basements of pizza parlors (as qAnon believes). Yes, and water flows uphill; the earth is flat; and the sun revolves around the earth. Vladimir Putin looked and acted more reasonable than our last president, who sounds more and more demented every time he opens his mouth.

Who would ever have thought that we, as a country, could become a victim of Alzheimer’s? Yet, it appears that we have.

So what am I going to do about it? I will continue to vote reasonably even if the others won’t. They are accumulating very bad juju and will eventually pay the price for it. I have some faith that the world will eventually right itself even if we continue to make disastrous mistakes.

I guess that makes me an optimist. Who would have thunk it?

Florida … Going, Going, Gone!

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The Only Part of Florida I Really Like Are the Keys

Whatever you may think of Florida, and whatever you may think of global warming, Florida is sinking into the sea. Back when I was an infant, I used to live in Lake Worth, Florida, just south of West Palm Beach. My Dad didn’t like it much at all: With his delicate st0mach, he didn’t like to pick up the bodies of dead alligators, load them into a truck, and unload them at their final destination.

For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, my parents owned a condominium in Hollywood, at a place called Carriage Hills. I visited them from time to time, but had difficulties with the heat and humidity. Not that I saw much of the state, but I did go several times down to the Keys, which I loved. The first time was right after Hurricane Andrew struck. I was so amazed at miles of houses and apartments sans roofs that I kept accidentally exiting at all the offramps.

The highest point in the state is only 345 feet, and that’s near the Georgia border. Miami’s elevation is between six and seven feet. As glacial and polar ice continues to melt, Florida will assume a different shape in the years to come:

What Florida Will Look Like in the Not Too Distant Future

The left is Florida as it looks today. At the right, you can see what a five- and ten-meter rise in water level will do to the peninsula. You can kiss Miami goodbye.