Depending on which part of the country you are in, this has been a hotter than normal year. Scientists credit the
larger El Nino effect, the ocean currents slowing and the warmer waters shifting, producing ever-larger hurricanes and typhoons and rains, while drying out other areas with heat and a lack of water (NOAA said it is the strongest El Nino effect since 1950). Here in the semi-west state of Utah (a desert land similar to Nevada), the high-pressure "heat domes" are keeping our temps near the 100F degree mark day after day, week after week. There is now little difference between our south and north as nights hover near 80F, and drop to 70F only in the wee hours of the morning for a half hour or so before heading back upwards. Air conditioning units and water-flowing "swamp" (evaporative) coolers seem to never shut off, that is until the utility bill arrives. And yet, residents seem willing to pay up and ignore the costs, overwatering and trying their best to pretend none of this will last long.
My conservative friends continue to say that this is just the natural order of things and nothing new. There is no such thing as climate change, they say, and certainly none caused by "man." But they are thinking in geologic time, as in millennia, and not in decades or centuries. Indeed, as a piece in
The London Review noted:
In the 127 years since the Yermak’s first journey,[considered by many as one of the first major ice-breaking ships, one built in 1899]
ice cover in the Baltic has contracted dramatically – in some estimates by almost 50 per cent. Across the Arctic it has shrunk by around 12 per cent a decade, and the ice that remains year-round is thinner and more brittle. A report issued in 2024 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that thicker ice which is more than four years old now forms only about 5 per cent of the total. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025, argued in that initiative that the NOAA’s work was ‘harmful to US prosperity’; last year, hundreds of its scientists were fired and the agency’s climate change reporting was terminated. This is a bit like Fox News delelting all the
booing Trump received at the World Cup...deny it long enough and it doesn't exist. Except that it does (an interesting view of how dire this situation has become, and why so many guides to Antarctica have quit their jobs, can be read in
The Conversation)...
But that sort of short-sighted thinking was a bit how economists think, wrote the then-doctoral student
Oliver Cussen in the LRB, as he attended a climate summit.
At the conference, representatives from other disciplines were invited to hold their own methodologies to account...I watched as academics in the humanities and social sciences lined up either to concede epistemological humility in the face of problems such as planetary systems and deep time, or to express excitement about the conceptual innovations (and who knows, maybe even research funding) they made possible. But my abiding memory is that of the economists. They were alone in being intellectually unmoved by environmental catastrophe. Protecting cost-benefit analysis at timescales large enough to account for different climate futures was simply too unwieldy, they argued: there were too many variables, too many systemic factors to fit into an equation or to plot on a graph. This wasn't a problem for economics, and so their models and methods could remain intact. Historians can't afford to be so sanguine. (skip these next few paragraphs if you wish because as you'll read in the later on, this post isn't really about climate change at all, even with my half-hearted apologies to those at the Heritage Foundation who want such wording removed from our vocabulary)
So let's shorten the timescale and bring it down to the end of this century, or maybe even shorter as at the end of these 2020s, that is, less than 4 years from now. Enter methane. Remember that story on CO2 a few posts ago, and how it nearly killed our planet and turned it into an ice ball -- twice? Not an ice age, mind you, but a planet entirely covered in ice (oceans and all) several miles thick. Turns out that methane is possibly far worse, said a
review of Into the Clear Blue Sky in NY Books.
Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide levels keep rising steadily, but their trajectories are more or less what scientists expect, based on observed rates of fossil fuel consumption, deforestation, and fertilizer use. Over the past five years, however, methane concentrations have been increasing at a rate that exceeds anything since record-keeping began, consistent with more dire modeling scenarios. Methane is the wild card...Though carbon dioxide has a longer life span and is far more abundant in the atmosphere, over a period of twenty years methane traps eighty-six times as much of the Earth’s outgoing infrared radiation. As the reviewer quoted
the author:
Essentially all of the three billion tons of extra methane in the atmosphere today were released over the last twenty years. The reviewer goes on: ...
methane is emitted by pretty much everything humans do, from producing energy to growing food to mining to storing waste. It streams out of rice paddies and livestock and manure pits and coal seams and reservoirs and landfills and 4.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells around the world. Methane escapes from century-old cast-iron pipes snaking under the streets of East Coast cities and from the gas furnaces and kitchen stoves that those disintegrating pipes supply. In the past couple of years, clues from carbon isotopes and other evidence have led most experts to conclude that the primary contributor to the spike is likely tropical wetlands. (All told, human activities account for two thirds of global methane emissions, while natural sources like wetlands, lakes, wildfires, and termites—which give off methane in a similar way to cows, through microbial activity in their guts—make up the balance.) As more land gets inundated thanks to wetter weather patterns, more organic matter gets trapped underwater, creating ideal low-oxygen conditions for methane-spewing microbes. And as it gets warmer, the metabolism of those methanogens gets cranked up. This has unsettling implications. It means that humans have—through our fossil fuel burning, agriculture, and deforestation—warmed the climate to the point that some natural feedback mechanisms are kicking into overdrive. "The most important science question we face now is the question of carbon-climate feedbacks,” a NOAA methane expert told me in 2019. “The question that’s really important is, what’s coming down the road?”...The dieback of the Amazon forest and the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could become inevitable at just above 1.5 degrees of warming—which the world will likely reach by 2030...The steep slope of the line representing global methane concentrations on the charts compiled monthly by scientists at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (the very scientists vilified by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Trump apparatchiks as “drivers of the climate alarm industry”), climbing up and up with no peak in sight, thus serves as a kind of climate memento mori. We are closer to these civilizational cliffs than we thought, even just a few years ago. These are scenarios we should be scrambling to avoid because, as Jackson notes, “you can turn a wrench to quench methane emissions in an oil field, but there is no wrench to turn for the Amazon.” (the author notes that natural gas, including that which we use to cook and heat our homes, is 90% methane, and thus far from the "cleanest" fuel)
Conservative and economic views aside, there were a few more interesting points in the review of the book,
The Burning Earth:
Armies sweep through continents. Empires expand across oceans. People, money, and disease are on the move. The pulse of human life quickened. This is the way global history has typically been written in the last few decades, with an emphasis on mobility, connection, and large-scale comparisons...This is the kind of Olympian perspective demanded by the planetary crisis and, it seems, by current historiographical tastes...This was, somewhat paradoxically, the objective of all the frantic mobility of archaic globalization: to fix people to the land so that they could be governed more easily and more profitably. But our planet tried to tell us earlier that no matter what we think at the time, disturbing the climate was short-sided folly. As Cussen noted:
Benign climate conditions didn't last. The beginning of the 14th century brought disaster to China: earthquakes caused an estimated 270,000 deaths, and snowstorms displaced nearly a million households. In 1319 'half of the cows in England died' of plague. A couple of decades later, the demographic gains of the Medieval Warm Period were wiped out entirely by Yersinia pestis
, a bacterium endemic to wild rodents on the Central Asian steppe, who carried plague from China to the cities of the Golden Horde and from there to Crimea and the Mediterranean. The Black Death took the lives or between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe and the Middle East. It also accelerated the collapse of the Mongol Empire, closing down the overland route between Europe and Asia.
Overall, this isn't meant as an alternative view of humanity, or yet another post on our changing climate, but rather a reflection of all of us almost viewing the world as economists: not meaning to take the short view of things but on the other hand, facing the difficulty of trying to take in the long view when most of us are simply trying to get by, especially those who remain pretty much unseen by society: trash collectors, lettuce and peach harvesters, checkout clerks, those cutting your hair at the franchised chain, servers at fast food places, all-night truck drivers, yellow-vested workers pulling fiber-optic cable on 100-degree days. Each of them are making our lives work, but are generally getting paid less than $20 an hour. Even worse, they often vanish from our thoughts the minute we pass them by. Here's how author Ann Larson put it in her book,
Clean Up On Aisle Five, as she worked for a grocery store chain, and explained the lack of flexibility or empathy for employees, all while advertising their drive for "loyal" customers:
At the end of each opening shift at the Grocery Store supermarket, I walked six blocks home of legs that felt like jelly after standing walking, bending and lifting for eight hours. I curled into a fetal position on the sofa in my studio apartment overlooking the park. By the time I woke up from a fitful sleep, and sometimes a nightmare where I was drowning in groceries, it was almost time for dinner. I might throw some black beans and cheese into a tortilla and watch whatever the Netflix algorithm recommended. I didn't have the energy to do more. At 11:00 p.m. bedtime was critical if I was opening the store again the next morning at 7:00. Quite likely, more than a few of you relate to this Groundhog Day scenario of work: long commutes, kids waiting to be picked up/fed/played with, sore backs and tired minds. But she throws in a few more grocery store stats: --grocery store cashiers have one of the highest rates of joint injuries as companies demand faster and faster scanning, the repetitive motion of their arm and body moving the same way over and over; --a 2022 report "showed that about three-quarters of workers at Kroger, the second-largest grocery company in the country, struggled to afford regular meals" (Walmart alone took in $26 billion from its customers' SNAP benefits in 2024, while Kroger's own internal study revealed hundreds of thousands of its employees needed food and other public benefits just to get by; --23% of theft happens at the self-checkout lane, wrote one 2022 study (checkers at the self-checkout lane also tend to have more injuries due to the back and forth on a hard surface). She also noted that 2 beer companies make 70% of the beers on the shelves, and just 3 companies make 93% of all the sodas. Want more? 4 companies make 75% of all the yogurts in stores, and 3 companies make 80% of the pasta brands. Talk about billing consumers with "choices"...
With the subsidies of the Affordable Care Act gone, over
3 million more people decided they couldn't afford health insurance. And with
SNAP benefits sharply reduced, another 4,5 million had to curtail what they could afford --IF they could afford-- to eat. In a few months (but
after the midterms)
new Medicaid eligibility rules will force many folks off of that as well, making "getting by" a polite way of saying "soon to be homeless or in the hospital." None of this is to complain or point fingers, because some of you work at much more tiring jobs, or work multiple jobs; and some of you sit at a desk or stare at a screen and yet feel equally tired. The point was that as much as we try to take the long view --to recycle our trash, and water our lawns less, and to not waste food, and to pay more attention to our animals-- we really are more like the economists, too tired or too broke to care about what may happen centuries after we are gone. We are struggling to just make it through today. Sure, it's hot, or muggy, or about to flood, but won't it eventually pass and be somewhat back to "normal," even if that means a changed "normal." But that heat...even
AARP got into the topic when it tried to explain the difference between heat exhaustion and heat stroke. The former has you grumbling and saying it's hot outside; but the latter --heat stroke-- can reach the point of being unstoppable unless caught quickly. Said the article:
When an older person overheats, their blood pressure drops and core temperature rises. If they don't find a way to cool down, what starts as heat exhaustion --with symptoms such as dizziness and nausea-- can progress to heatstroke, an urgent condition that can cause irreversible organ damage or death...Meanwhile, retirees in the US are still moving south. That combination increased the number of people over 65 living in some of our hottest places --Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina-- by more than 50 percent between 2010 and 2020. Well just turn on the air conditioning, you say (if you can pay the bill). Sounds simple enough but with data centers getting so many tax breaks and yet taxing the grid, older electrical systems may fail. Continued the article:
In fact, research in 2023 determined that such a tragic scenario over a period of five days in Phoenix could send half of the city's 1.6 million residents to the ER. The projected number of deaths: about 13,000.
Our 20-year old air conditioner gave out as our temps climbed past the 100-degree mark and stayed there, the poor guy working far ponder hours than it did in prior years. There was no let up, no time for the system to shut off, even during the night. So it just quit. While we waited for the replacement, we plugged in our portable swamp cooler (similar to those easy-breezy mini-evaporative cooler ads interrupting your movie all the time), and felt our living room get muggier and muggier as moisture mixed with heat. The new one arrived, and once installed, we waited patiently for the new a/c unit to bring down the 80-degree temp now resting in our house (we tried our best to let the cool 75-degree morning air drop the temp a little, but that only lasted for a half hour or so). Now to be clear, I am not whining or complaining but trying to show that this is just what happens in everyday life...the unexpected. Yes, we were hotter for a bit, but we weren't involved in a major accident, or passed out from working in the yard at noon, or slowly waking up in an emergency room (for your dog owners, and those who had read of the hiker whose dog died from heat stroke as he took it hiking in the middle of the day, the basic rule of thumb is to place the back of your hand onto the sidewalk or ground. If you can't leave your hand there for five seconds, it is too hot for your dog's paws and thus perhaps too hot for a walk or hike). We were lucky enough to have air conditioning, and to be able to get a replacement when our old one died.
All of that tied together, and with the cool air flowing (although we haven't seem our electric bill yet, but all three of those council member who voted for building the data center proposed by a Canadian billionaire, one which would use
double the electricity of our
entire state --and which was approved without public input-- were voted out in the last primary election), it was nice to relax in a different way, and that was to stop reading all the negative news and pick up the 2023 book,
Good News, Planet Earth by British podcaster, Sam Bentley. As he wrote, he wanted "to put a smile on your face, and give you hope for the future." In his book, you read about people determined to overcome their own struggles: to pull water out of dry air with a Warka Water Tower; for only about $1000 people can easily construct the bamboo structure (construction plans are free) and literally pull about 26 gallons of water daily out of dry air (such towers are already being used in Ethiopia, Haiti and Brazil). Or engineers working to recycle wind-turbine blades (nearly 100% of such blades head to landfills) by using them as supports to build pedestrian bridges, as is being done in both Poland and Ireland (engineers estimate the new bridge structure could last over 100 years). Or requiring bee "bricks" to be used in new construction, giving solitary bees (which incorporate 80% of bee species in the UK) a home during cold weather (a husband-wife team created the concrete bricks using 75% waste material). Or a team working to create a convincing robot dolphin to entertain and swim with guests at sea parks, sparing both the capture and captivity of wild species (created by the special effects company that created the robot whale used in Free Willy, the newer models can operate independently using AI). The only drawback to the book was that it seemed to reflect the ongoing "brain drain" happening here in the states as nearly 95% of the creative projects featured came from outside the US (the Trump administration has drastically reduced or eliminated research and environmental funding entirely).
So some economists, as with many of my friends, can deny climate change, or other world changes, is happening, or at least not because of humankind or the decisions of insecure world leaders. But in the long run, it is the worker bees, the many people hidden or getting little publicity that are making incremental differences behind the scenes. Wrote The Dalai Lama: It is, therefore, time for world leaders to learn to transcend the differences of race, culture, and ideology and to regard one another through eyes that see the common human situation...i feel it is necessary to develop a sense of universal responsibility, a deep concern for all, irrespective of creed, color, sex, or nationality...when people fight each other for petty ends, losing sight of the basic humanity that binds us all together as a single human family [we] must not lose sight of this fundamental goal...at no time should we place means above ends. Life is as dear to the mute animal as it is to any human being; even the simplest insect strives for protection from dangers that threaten its life. Just as each one of us wants to live and does not wish to die, so it is with all other creatures in the universe.
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