The Climate Has Changed Before, So Don't Worry?

Nearly everyone now knows that climate change is real, and that humans are either causing it or making it worse. So I don’t discuss it with anyone anymore. I had a contract to write Encyclopedia of Global Warming for Facts on File but they discontinued the project. Fortunately I got paid an advance for just writing a headword list.

Now the fossil fuel protagonist argument is, “The climate has changed before, so don’t worry about it. Just keep buying our oil and gas, and let us make our money, and quit whining.” This is a really bad argument. The reason is that, yes, the climate has changed, even within the past millennium, but it has had disastrous effects on societies. So the argument that we don’t need to take any action to prevent climate change is like saying, “The Black Death didn’t kill everyone, therefore we do not need medicine and public health.”

About 800 years ago, a great civilization collapsed. It was the Misssissippian culture, which covered most of eastern North America, centered in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Never heard of it? That’s because most pre-contact Native American history has been erased from our national consciousness.

Cahokia was one of the biggest cities in the world at that time. The only way it could support the number of people that it did was because of intensive agriculture, mostly corn, squash, and beans. This civilization collapsed because of political unrest but also because of a drought. If the Natives had lived off of hunting and gathering, the way most people think they did, then the drought would have had little effect. But the drought caused the collapse of their intensive agriculture. This is an example of how climate disruption (in this case, a natural one) caused the collapse of a civilization, as explained in this Scientific American article. I will also write about this in Chapter 2 of my upcoming book.

Society enables a stability that allows humans to survive natural disasters. But sometimes these disasters can exceed the capacity of society to rescue the humans. The Mississippian civilization is an example. Most of the people survived, and they continued planting fields (just not as many), and the trade networks survived.

This is all that remains of Cahokia. We can only hope that our modern civilization does not disappear the way theirs did.

Thanks for the Disturbances, Humans: Eighth Message from Fluff the Cottonwood

It has been almost two years since message number 7 from Fluff, the female cottonwood tree that lives very near our house along the ditch in Tulsa. When my wife and I go walking along the ditch, I usually say hi to Fluff. (She gets this name from the fluffy seeds she produces in the spring.) But until just recently, she has had no new messages for me. I will let her speak now.

“Hi, Stan. Thanks for remembering me. I have been keeping an eye, or a phytochrome in my case, on your world news. It has been, from your viewpoint, pretty horrific.

“But not from mine.

“Stan, you used to write in your books and blogs about the future effects of global warming. This year, it has become apparent that the future is now. There have been heat waves and wildfires all over the northern hemisphere. Alternating with those, there have been catastrophic floods, including in places that seldom get them, such as the American Southwest desert. Hurricanes are normal, but you have been getting much more powerful ones. One after another, temperature and drought and flood records have been broken. And already, insurance companies are refusing to provide coverage for new homes in California and Florida.

“I wouldn’t want to be one of you humans right now. Your survival depends on your economy, which depends on the stability of conditions. To use the insurance example above, home buyers cannot get mortgages unless they have flood and fire insurance in the danger zones, which are now as big as whole states. The economic effects are that only very rich people, who do not need mortgages, can buy property, and rent it out at exorbitant rates to middle-class workers who have no choice but to pay them. Hurricanes disturb trade routes, industry, and everything else.

“And many of my fellow plants are suffering too. That is, the rare ones who grow only in a narrow range of conditions. But us cottonwoods can grow in almost any disturbance that you humans cause—in our case, anywhere that has enough water. Us cottonwoods can grow anyplace except a desert. We can even grow along rivers in deserts.

“From where I stand, I can look at the ditch, which you dignify by calling a creek. It is lined with big limestone boulders, trucked in decades ago. In between the boulders there is soil that has eroded from other places, and garbage that has piled up. My seedlings grow abundantly in such places—I see them every day with a feeling of matronly satisfaction. If it gets hot enough to endanger the health of you humans, my seedlings and I just transpire more water vapor to cool our leaves off. Our wood is very light, which means it consists of xylem pipes that conduct a lot of water. And we can tolerate cold conditions far beyond any that occur in Tulsa. Even the extra carbon dioxide that you put into the air—we can such that carbon right out of the air and turn it into new growth and, later, new seeds. When you Tulsans had the big blackout in June, your streets were crowded, because everyone was driving around so they could use their car or big truck air conditioning. The vehicles were pouring carbon into the air, which was good for me but not for you.

“Because my seedlings grow so fast, we can take almost immediate advantage of any disruptions you cause, whether it is fire, or soil erosion, or pollution. Your self-inflicted bad luck is our good fortune. And then, when we get old, and the wind blows, we fall over on your houses and destroy your roofs—I can see, from where I stand, several examples from the recent windstorm.

“So I will just stand here and photosynthesize, storing up for next spring’s crop of seeds, while you humans continue to deny the truth to yourselves. You humans—even you, Stan—find solace in alcohol from the liquor store just around the corner from me.”

Fluff the Cottonwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, September, 2023