They are here now, faster and more furious than ever. The increasing intensity and frequency of “extreme weather events” is blatently apparent and associated with ‘global warming.’ Yet, television “meteorologists,” as they call themselves, can muster no more concern than to remark as to how many new high-temperature records were broken today, or what a terrible “natural disaster” that was in Maui or Florida. There is nothing ‘natural’ about it except for the predictable reaction of Nature to our outrageous effluents from the fossil-fueled global industrial-consumer political economy, which has dominated Nature for over a couple hundred years, but is about to lose its war of plunder on the Earth System.
Not Normal
Lahaina is gone, if not the courage of its people; so are countless acres of old growth forest as so much of Canada and elsewhere burns. Already the “disaster capitalists” have swooped into Lahaina, attempting to take ownership of the remains for new tourist development and capital accumulation, just like the sugar developers who overthrew Hawaiian sovereignty in the nineteenth century, leading it to eventually become a state run be plunder capital.
Greece was underwater las week. Parts of Greece got 30 inches of rain in 24 hours, producing incredble floods across the Thessaly Plains, with entire villages “wiped out.” (Bill McKibben) Events like this, never before seen in living memory of the oldest elders have become commonplace, but ever changing and certainly not normal, new or not.
The new hurricane Lee accelerated its winds to Category 5 more quickly than any other has, and it has a lot of energy-laden heated Atlantic Ocean water to further energize it before it gets close to the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. It has veered north as of 4 hours before this writing, with winds of 115 miles per hour, threatening New England later this week. The only thing normal is that its winds are likely to weaken some as it passes over cooler waters of the North Atlantic. We are used to the ‘normal’ hurricane season, but not to the increased intensity and frequency.
I have never been comfortable with that term, “the new normal.” The idea smacks of techno-futurist naiveté. There is nothing normal about it, really, unless you feel it meaningful to call rapidly changing abnormal conditions ‘normal.’ The problem with the ‘new normal’ trope is that nothing is likely to be stable enough in the next unknown number of centuries to be called ‘normal’ again, simply because “normal” refers to something that is stable over a period of time.
The very words, ‘new normal’ tend to ‘normalize’ in our minds what has nothing normal about it. Okay, you might want to take it to another level and say that ‘abnormality is the new normal.’ But why? Such talk, it seems to me, is little more than a vain attempt to recharacterize in abstractions what we are having such a difficult time facing on its own real world terms. And therein lies the much deeper human problem in facing the greatest destabilization of the climate and biosphere ever experienced in human history.
Normal, Unfortunately
We do not think of ‘normal’ as something that calls for extreme action. And there is no new normal, just very abnormally extreme changes occuring in the living Earth systems we call habitats. What was ‘normal’ for about 11,000 years during the fast-ending Holocene geological era were relatively stable climate conditions that allowed predictable agricultural abundance along with the ecosystems that supported farming as well as providing other conditions conducive to human life.
The favorable conditions for human societal development that characterized those 11,000 years of human expansion and even domination and damage of Nature, are fast disappeaing. Unfortunately, this abnormal trend is rapidly approaching a range of dangerous ‘tipping points‘ the passing of which will severely restrict humanity’s ability to survive, certainly for a large segment of the 7.8 billion persons who now inhabit the planet. Something has to give, and it will.
We can mitigate some of the damage, but we have not even begun to take the extreme measures that will require. Think about all the produces and services that rely on abundant use of fossil fuels to energize their production and deployment. Almost every element of modern societies is fossil-fuel energized. Then, think about what it will take, organizationally, to constrain that overuse of petrochemical energy to near zero. What we take for granted as the energy input for the production of all the products and services of the industrial-consumer economy will be radically reduced in a post-fossil-fuel world.
We have lots of good information from the scientific studies of climate, ecosystems, the overall biosphere, and the Earth System itself to understand exactly what carbon-emitting and ecologially destructive processes must be stopped. Now, we even have detailed location data on specific emissions sources all over the world, thanks to the combination of multiple data sources into an integrated geophysical database developed by the Climate TRACE project.
Unfortunately, almost nobody is talking about the actual institutional, cultural, and organizational changes that will be necessary for societies to operate on vastly reduced energy inputs–inputs from different sources, such as human and animal power organized around very different production processes. That will require a massive New Great Transformation of human social organization. It is way past time to start talking about that, and taking the necessary actions to transform the global industrial political economy into local/regional ecologial civilizations.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 