Catastrophic Climate Change Here, Now and Hurting Us All

Relish Now
Jun 06, 2006

American adults conveniently deny global warming and its likely impact on Mother Earth with statements like the one I heard from a friend only recently: "I'll be dead by the time things go bad. Let the kids worry about it."

That attitude is based on the concept, maybe flawed, that climate change from global warming will be a gradual process, that by 2050 the Outer Banks will be considerably smaller and by 2100 gone altogether. By 2025, some glacier will melt, and by 2125 there will be no penguins on Antarctica.

But what if climate change is not a gradual process? What if climate change is gradual only to some tipping point and then, as with that straw that so irritated the camel, it breaks dramatically in a matter of just a few short years?

Eugene Linden, a former science writer for Time, says that it has happened before and that it will happen again. Climate change has come swiftly, and it has caused enormous damage to civilizations and wreaked enormous death and destruction, he writes in The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations.

Using climate studies developed in the last 10 to 15 years, Linden has correlated major and dramatic climate changes with the destruction of important civilizations - the Akkadians of Mesopotamia, the Norse of Greenland and the Mayans of Central America, among others. Contrary to previous understanding of those cultures, scientists have now discovered that each suffered horribly from unexpected and dramatic shifts in climate.

In addition, climate change cost as many as 50 million lives in the late 19th century, when drought hit India and China. There, climate shifts related to El Ninos denied those lands traditional monsoon rains.

Civilized man has enjoyed a relatively pleasant stay on this planet. The Holocene Era, as current times are known on the geologic clock, has been one of the planet's calmest from a climate perspective. But even within this era there have been naturally occurring stages of dramatic shift: ice ages, droughts, enormous storms.

Could the modern world be facing significant climate change? Here's the scary part: It already is. Scientists have the ability to bore deep into the seabed and ice packs, and the cores they extract serve as a history book of weather patterns for as much as the last 400,000 years. They are finding that the planet is now warming faster than at any time in those 400,000 years, and that change is coming rapidly.

As much as modern science understands, however, it still does not understand crucial phenomena. For example, what will stop the oceans' currents from circulating as they do now? Are we on the brink of such a major change, and will just a little more heat in the oceans do this? Or, is there still a lot of room? Scientists are looking for the answers.

Linden does not hide his conclusion that man is both contributing to global warming and destroying the planet's natural defenses to its ramifications at the same time. Man is both heating the atmosphere, thus making massive hurricanes more likely, and destroying natural wetlands that would help mitigate flood damage.

This, therefore, is not an optimistic book. Nor is it an easy one to read at times. Linden tries to make all of the environmental and earth science understandable, but this can sometimes require the re-reading of the more complex pages.

In the end, however, he is as clear as can be. Man is taking this planet in the wrong direction, and the horrible change we instigate may occur sooner rather than later.