New York Intelligencer - David Wallace-Wells
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Satellite image of smoke from active fires burning near the Eastern Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, on June 23, 2020. Photo: Handout/NASA Earth Observatory
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On June 20, in the small Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle, a heat wave baking the region
peaked
at 38 degrees Celsius — just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the
highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. In a world without
climate change, this anomaly, one Danish meteorologist
calculated, would be a 1-in-100,000-year event. Thanks to climate change, that year is now.
If you saw this news, last weekend, it was probably only a glimpse (primetime network news
didn’t even cover it).
But the overwhelming coverage of perhaps more immediately pressing
events — global protests, global pandemic, economic calamity — is only
one reason for that climate occlusion. The extreme weather of the last
few summers has already inured us to temperature anomalies like these,
though we are only just at the beginning of the livable planet’s
transformation by climate change — a transformation whose end is not yet
visible, if it will ever be, and in which departures from the
historical record will grow only more dramatic and more disorienting and
more lethal, almost by the year.
At just 1.1 degrees Celsius of
warming, where the planet is today, we have already
evicted ourselves
from the “human climate niche,” and brought ourselves outside the range
of global temperatures that enclose the entire history of human
civilization. That history is roughly 10,000 years long, which means
that in a stable climate you would only expect to encounter an anomaly
like this one if you ran the full lifespan of all recorded human history
ten times over — and even then would only encounter it once.
You may
register temperature records like these merely as the sign of a new
normal, in which record-breaking heat waves fade out of newsworthiness
and into routine. But the fact of those records doesn’t mean only that
change has arrived, because the records are not being set only once; in
many cases, they are being set annually. The city of Houston, for
instance, has been hit by
five “500-year storms” in the last five years,
and while the term has obviously lost some of its descriptive precision
in a time of climate change, it’s worth remembering what it was
originally meant to convey: a storm that had a one-in-500 chance of
arriving in any given year, and could therefore be expected once in five
centuries.
How long is that timespan, the natural historical context
for a storm like that? Five hundred years ago, Europeans had not yet
arrived on American shores, so we are talking about a storm that we
would expect to hit just once in that entire history — the history of
European settlement and genocide, of the war for independence and the
building of a slave empire, of the end of that empire through civil war,
of industrialization and Jim Crow and World War I and World War II, the
cold war and the age of American empire, civil rights and women’s
rights and gay rights, the end of the cold war and the “end of history,”
September 11 and 2008.
One storm of this scale in all that time, is
what meteorological history tells us to expect. Houston has been hit by
five of them in the last five years, and may yet be hit with another
this summer — which is already
predicted
to be a hurricane season of unusual intensity. Of course, that won’t be
the end of the transformations. Climate change will continue, and those
records — high temperatures, historic rainfall, drought, and wind speed
and all the rest — will continue to fall. From here, literally
everything that follows, climate-wise, will be literally unprecedented.
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Land surface temperature anomalies from March 19 to June 20 in Eastern Siberia. The reds mark areas that were hotter than average for the same period from 2003-2018. The blues mark areas that were colder. From the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Illustration: Handout/NASA Earth Observatory
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The
arctic numbers from June 20 are terrifying enough; with more context
they become only more so. It was warmer there than it was that same day,
in Miami, Florida. In fact, it was warmer north of the Arctic Circle
than it has ever been, on any June day, in the entire recorded history
of Miami, which has
only once,
in the whole tropical century for which temperatures there have been
registered, reached 100.
It was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, in
Verkhonaysk, than the average high temperature in the region for June,
which means the arctic record was the equivalent, in terms of
temperature anomaly, of a 110-degree June day in New York or a
115-degree June day in Washington, D.C. According to preliminary
satellite data,
land surface temperature in parts of arctic Siberia reached that level
last week, too — 45 Celsius, or 113 Fahrenheit. In terms of temperature
anomaly, that’s the equivalent of a 130-degree day in D.C. On Capitol
Hill, that would be, very comfortably, lethal heat.
Thankfully, for
Americans at least, that isn’t how global warming works — its punishing
effects are distributed unequally around the globe, and, at the moment,
the Arctic is being punished most vindictively, warming at
three times the rate of the rest of the planet. In Siberia, in May, temperatures
averaged
as much as 10 degrees Celsius higher than normal. The arrival of the
arctic summer reignited “zombie fires” that had, improbably, burned
through the arctic winter, smoldering in peat rather than burning out.
Those fires, like all fires, released carbon, which is stored in trees
as surely as it is in coal, in this case releasing
as much CO2 in the last 18 months as had been produced by Siberian wildfires in the last 16 years. In early June, an industrial-scale oil-storage facility there
collapsed
when the melting permafrost on which it had been built finally
destabilized, releasing about 21,000 tons of oil and turning local
rivers red. That spill was about two-thirds the scale of the Exxon
Valdez spill, which horrified an entire generation; this one, we’ve
hardly read about, though it befell a far more ecologically degraded
planet, with more than half of all carbon emissions ever produced by the
burning of fossil fuels in the entire history of humanity coming since
the Valdez spill.
Perhaps
though is a less precise word than
because,
the intervening generation of environmental calamity having quite
thoroughly normalized horrors like these. Even Vladimir Putin —
presiding over a petrostate which, so far north, actually stands to
benefit from some amount of global warming — declared it an emergency.
All told, the planet’s melting permafrost contains twice as much carbon
as hangs in the planet’s atmosphere today, and it’s expected that over
the course of the century, at least 100 billion tons of it will be
released through melt, about three years worth of global emissions and
functionally enough to close the window on the goals of the Paris
accords.
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A June 11 view of the site of a diesel fuel spill at Norilsk’s Combined Heat and Power Plant No 3 in Siberia. Photo: Denis Kozhevnikov/TASS via Getty Images
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That window was not open very far to begin with. One
recent study
suggested that even the decarbonization targets of Britain and Sweden,
often hailed as global climate leaders, would produce emissions between
two and three times the carbon budget required to meet the Paris goals.
(And those are just their decarbonization
plans, which are probably optimistic.) Another
analysis
suggested that, for all the talk of halving our emissions by 2030 — as
the IPCC says is necessary to safely avoid 2 degrees of warming — the
planet has only a 0.3 percent chance of doing so. If Donald Trump won
reelection, the analysis suggested, those chances would fall to 0.1
percent — one in a thousand.
If
2 degrees is now inevitable, that doesn’t make it comfortable. Indeed,
it will be, for much of the world, a horror — and the space between
those two things, inevitability and horror, is the one in which we will
all be forced to learn to live. At 2 degrees, it’s expected that
more than 150 million additional people would die from the effects of pollution,
storms that used to arrive once every century would hit every single year,
and
that lands that are today home to 1.5 billion people would become
literally uninhabitable, at least by the standards of human history.
Those
projections will invariably prove imprecise, or perhaps worse — that is
both the nature of science, which proceeds by revision, and humanity,
which will likely adapt to at least some measure of these impacts. But
the Siberian heat wave reminds us just how large the scale of necessary
adaptation will likely be — requiring us to respond not just by shoring
up the proverbial shorelines of our civilizations but by preparing them
in much more fundamental ways to endure conditions never seen before in
the whole span of human history.
It is also a reminder of just how much
we miss when we regard the projections of any neat, linear model of
future warming as a straightforward prediction of that future and of
what level of adaptation will be require — especially when we
reflexively discount the uncertainty warnings scientists invariably
include, as any lay reader (including me) is likely to do. Perhaps the
most important lesson of the freakish Siberian heatwave is: however
terrifying you find projections of future warming, the actual experience
of living on a heated planet will be considerably more unpredictable,
and disorienting.
Just
how freakish and unpredicted is this heatwave? Over the last few years,
a growing chorus of critics have argued against one climate model built
on predictions of high-end carbon emissions in particular, called
RCP8.5 —arguing that, though it had been endorsed by the U.N.’s IPCC and
formed the basis of much recent science since that organization’s last
major report, its projections were simply implausible, relying as they
did on the dramatic growth of coal use over the course if the century.
As I’ve
written before,
that pathway does indeed look increasingly hard to credit as a model of
our future, and is best understood, in terms of emissions, as an
absolute worst-case scenario, which would require almost a global
climate nihilism to achieve. But for those suggesting we should discard
that model, or any other that charted a high-end course for warming, the
arctic heatwave makes a very strong counterargument. Because even in
that worst-case pathway, hundred-degree summer days in the Arctic do not
become routine
until the very end of the century.
This heat wave is, today, an outlier, not a routine event. But that
doesn’t make it irrelevant. Instead, it is giving us at least a brief
preview of what the world would look like, more than a half-century from
now, in a timeline we understand to be, at least in terms of emissions,
impossibly pessimistic. But if our timeline could accommodate such
extreme events from that worst-case one, and decades ahead of schedule,
it is also a sign that “timeline” is probably a misguided way of
thinking about the new swirling universe of extreme events we are
plunging headlong into.
Making sense of climate change requires more
than trying to determine where on a particular linear plot we are and
where on it we are likely to be in ten years, or in fifty. It may
require more profoundly revising our sense of linearity itself. In this
way, global warming isn’t just scrambling our sense of geography, with
Verkhonaysk, at least briefly, playing the role of Miami. It is also
scrambling our sense of time. You may feel, because of the pandemic,
that you are living to some degree in 1918. The arctic temperatures of
the past week suggest that at least part of the world is living,
simultaneously, in 2098.
But
climate change isn’t just a brutal form of time travel, it is
discombobulating to our very sense of time. When looking at projections
for future warming, an event like the Siberian heat wave appears as an
acceleration of history, but when looking at the paleoclimate record, it
seems like a trip deep into the prehuman past, toward eras like those,
lasting millions of years, when palm trees dotted the Arctic and
crocodiles walked in their shade there. Especially at extreme levels,
warming threatens the apparent march of progress on which the modern,
Western “timeline” model of history was built. But at least until the
arrival of large-scale carbon removal technologies, it also illustrates
the fact that time — in the form of carbon emissions, which hang in the
atmosphere for centuries — is irreversible.
Because we are doing so much
damage so quickly, destabilizing the entire planet’s climate in the
space of a few decades, warming can seem like a phenomena of the
present. But its effects will unfurl for millennia, with the climate
stabilizing perhaps only millions of years from now. Climate change
unwinds history, melting ice frozen for many millennia and pushing
rainforests like the Amazon closer to their long-overgrown savannah
states. It also makes new history, drawing new borders and new
riverbeds, turning breadbaskets like the Mediterranean into deserts and
opening up arctic shipping routes to be contested by a new generation of
great power military rivalries.
It compresses history — those Houston
storms, for instance, represent more than a millennia of extreme
weather, concentrated in a period of just five years. And it scrambles
and scatters it, too, disrupting the cycle of seasons and relocating
rain belts and monsoons, among many other distortions. At the same time
temperatures in Verkhoyansk reached 100 degrees, in other parts of
Siberia it was snowing. Was it winter or summer, a Russian catching the
national weather forecast could have been forgiven for asking. They may
have wondered, is this our hellish climate future or the return of the
Little Ice Age?
Contemplating
the impacts of climate change from this perspective can seem naïvely
abstract — and it is, when compared to the storms and the wildfires and
the droughts. (Not to mention the literal plague of locusts, 360 billion
of them, which have devastated agriculture in East Africa and South
Asia this year, descending in clouds so thick you couldn’t see through
the insects and
leaving millions hungry.)
But in addition to its humanitarian cruelties, for instance
making pandemics like COVID-19 much more likely,
warming is already recalibrating much more hard-headed models of time,
too. This is a sign that warming is truly the meta-narrative of our
century, touching every aspect of our lives. Beyond the catastrophes and
crises, the surreal and disorienting aspects of climate change are
showing up even in the most numbingly pragmatic places. Like, for
instance,
mortgages.
“Up
and down the coastline, rising seas and climate change are transforming
a fixture of American homeownership that dates back generations: the
classic 30-year mortgage,” Christopher Flavelle of the New York
Times reported June 19. (As it happens, the day before the record-setting temperatures in the Arctic.) As Kate Mackenzie has
relentlessly chronicled
for Bloomberg, mortgages aren’t the first or only financial instrument
to feel the intrusion of a new climate reality much less forgiving, and
less stable, than the one on which not just the financialization of the
global economy but indeed all of human civilization has been erected.
Insurance and reinsurance, municipal bonds and sovereign wealth funds,
boutique hedge funds and massive asset-management operations are all
beginning to reckon with a future made, at least, much rockier by
climate change. How much rockier? Well, according to a Climate Central
estimate, at least half a million American homes are on land expected,
30 years from now, to flood every single year. Altogether, those homes
are today worth $241 billion.
This is just homes, just in America, and
annual flooding isn’t the only flood risk a homeowner or a bank might
want to consider, which means, even looking only at flooding, many, many
more homes are vulnerable than that. Of course, flooding is not, by any
stretch, the only climate risk those homes and homeowners would face.
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Residents with a dog sit in the back of a truck while waiting to be rescued from rising floodwaters due to Hurricane Harvey in Spring, Texas on August 28, 2017. Photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Like
many of those other financial instruments, a mortgage isn’t just an
instrument but also a theory of time — a bet on future value built on
the proposition that three decades is a long enough period to absorb the
short-term turbulence of real-estate markets and a short-enough period
that larger systemic shocks would not have time to develop and
reverberate. That is, at least, how the mortgage looks from the bank
side. From the consumer side, a mortgage represents a related, but
slightly different, theory of time.
For most of postwar American
history, it has represented “adulthood,” as defined in mostly white and
middle-class-and-up terms. For all those distortions and delusions
embedded in it — ideas about housing and the real-estate market but also
race and class and urbanization and family structure — the 30-year
mortgage also embedded an idea about the stability of society through
time, that one could expect to arrive at the end of adulthood in a world
recognizable to the person who began it, and indeed that whatever
changes had transpired would be, on net, of value to the homeowner, who
by virtue of his or her property had become a small-scale stakeholder in
the prospects of the community, the region, the nation and indeed the
world as a whole. As the
Times reports, both sides of that bargain are already, now, beginning to look very different:
Home buyers are increasingly using mortgages that make it easier for them to stop making their monthly payments and walk away from the loan if the home floods or becomes unsellable or unlivable.
More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk.
And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans fail.
One academic quoted in the story, Jesse Kennan of Tulane, painted the picture even more starkly: “Conventional mortgages have survived many financial crises,” he said, “but they may not survive the climate crisis.”
As
a divining rod of the future, the mortgage market is a crude tool,
focused only on a narrow set of values, when we know warming will affect
many more, registering only a small set of changes, and registering
them only according to a purposefully blinkered set of metrics: what the
value of a property is, how it is likely to change, and what amount of
risk is involved in making a bet on its worth and the reliability of
mortgage-holders to pay. Already, the terms are shifting to reflect new
realities — a doubling of the required down payment reflecting a much
higher sense of risk.
But, as Mackenzie
writes,
more precise financial tools won’t necessarily protect us from climate
risks — only allow those utilizing them to profit from them, perhaps
even in discriminatory ways. Presumably, in the years ahead, banks will
continue to modify their calculations, so that the mortgage will
survive, at least in some modified form, reflective of some additional
climate risk — perhaps, depending on the place, quite a lot more risk.
But surviving in what form, exactly, and making what claim about the
stability of the near future and how comfortably we may all live in it?
Time will tell.
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