Living in Bomb Time — Ep. 04
Understanding Climate Change and its implications
My personal book recommendations
Bomb Time — The hyper accelerated rate of warming and climate change that will compress 1,000 years of normal inter-glacial warming into the next 50 years of human time as the thermal pulse from our “climate bomb” hits the planet.
When you have been a climate change awareness advocate for most of your adult life, one of the things you get asked frequently is, “what’s the best book to read if I want to understand climate change?” This is an impossible question, because climate change isn’t a “one book and done” kind of thing, but I understand the desire to make it one. Climate change is a background issue for most people. Even if you are having to evacuate your home because of a wildfire, or a hurricane you aren’t necessarily thinking, “wow, I really need to read up on climate change so that I can understand how it relates to the disaster that’s happening to me”. Most people aren’t interested in doing a deep dive and reading a few thousand pages to get up to speed on any topic, much less climate change. So, if you only want to read only one book here is my recommendation. Read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells.
Published in 2019, the book was denounced by many Climate Activists as counterproductive “climate porn”. This attitude has become increasingly prevalent among Climate Activists and Climate warriors, who argue that if you make climate change seem “too scary and apocalyptic” it doesn’t mobilize people, it paralyzes them with fatalism. Mr. Wallace-Wells speaking about his book disagreed, saying “that we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair”. What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.” Personally, I have always felt that knowledge is power and, while his language can be ponderous and a little pretentious, his information and analysis is excellent. If you are going to read just one book on climate change and what it is doing to the world, this should be the book.
Ok, with that out of the way, here is my personal list of the books that have shaped my understanding of how climate change is going to affect our societies and the world we are about to live in. To keep things simple, I have pared the list down to my top six:
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper (2017)
The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life and Death by Richardson B Gill (2001)
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850 by Brian Fagan (2001)
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis (2000)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond (2005)
Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future by Peter Ward (2007)
Reviews:
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper (2017)
If you are like me, you were taught that Rome collapsed because of social decay and barbarian invasions. Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, written in 1776, framed the narrative for how we viewed Rome’s collapse for over 200 years. Harper’s book, written in the age of climate change and pandemic diseases, completely reevaluates what happened to Rome and is chillingly relevant to our world today.
Consider this, in AD 150 the Roman project was at its peak. The population of the Mediterranean basin and Europe is believed to have been around 75 million people. Five hundred years later by 650 AD that population had declined by 50% and Rome had collapsed.
The old story was that this was the result of social decay, warfare, and governmental collapse. Harper, using new studies and data tells a completely different story. One of changing climate and multiple pandemics. Starting in 150 AD the weather in the Roman world started getting worse, going from warmer to colder. It got progressively worse for the next 500 years causing multiple droughts, falling agricultural output, and famines. This climate change was a disaster in and of itself, but it didn’t happen by itself. One of the points that Harper makes is that the Romans created a world where a pandemic could happen.
Cities with dense populations connected by highly trafficked trade links bringing in goods and people from all over the world made the Mediterranean a vast petri dish waiting for something deadly to fall into (sound familiar?). In 165 AD something did. Starting in 165 AD the Antonine plague is estimated to have killed 7,000,000 in the first years that it hit the empire (165–180 AD) killing as many as 40% in many of the major cities.
After 165 AD plague was always happening in the Roman world and some of the “flareups” had fatality rates of up to 50% in places. Harper’s point, is that while Rome may have had problems with governance; overshadowing everything was an increasingly hostile climate making it difficult to feed the population and, vicious plagues that depleted the pool of manpower available to do anything. The parallels to the world we are facing today are obvious and compelling.
The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life and Death by Richardson B Gill (2001)
One of the advantages in living in an age of cultural fluorescence, when there is an abundance of wealth and clever minds, is that research gets done and mysteries get solved. One of those mysteries that got solved in my lifetime, was the question of “what happened to the ancient Maya?”
After the discovery and documentation of “lost cities” in the jungle by the explorers John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840’s, that was one of the big questions that hung over the field of Maya archeology. After a lifetime of interest in this question and personal research, Mr. Gill wrote this book articulating his theory on why the Classic Maya civilization collapsed.
Although it was derided as “overly simplistic” and “reductively unicausal” by academic archeologists at the time (perhaps because Mr. Gill was an amateur archeologist without a doctorate), subsequent research has validated Mr. Gill’s theory. The Classic Maya civilization collapsed between 800 and 1000 AD due to a series of brutal 50-year long drought cycles.
In proving his case Doctor Gill (he got a PhD in archeology after he wrote this book) spends a significant portion of the book examining what constitutes a “drought” and the gruesome effects of drought on a population. He informs you for example. That UN studies have found in areas of intense famine, caused by drought, only 3–5% of a starving population will resort to consumption of the dead, and only an estimated 1–2% to predatory cannibalism. Which means, that even in the event of a “starvation level” food shortage in your area, almost none of your neighbors will try to kill you in order to eat you. I find that oddly comforting as we transition into a future where there are going to be massive food shortages on a regular basis.
Part of why Dr. Gill does this, is to make the reader, viscerally feel how devastating a severe drought can be. He makes the point, which I have never forgotten, that in a severe drought event you cannot walk out of it. We need water to live, a constant supply of it. We die without it in three days. If you were living in a “premodern” city like Copan or Tikal and you had a year when almost no rain fell, all the wells ran dry, and all the rivers stop running; then you were dead. All of you, everyone in the city, including your pets and domestic animals.
There was no way to bring water to a city to save anyone. If you fled with the 5 or 6 gallons of water you could carry on your back, the furthest you would be able to go would be about 100 miles. If the affected area was larger than that, if the drought was regional, then you were dead. What Gill makes really, painfully clear is that droughts don’t just cause people to abandon cities. Drought has the power to kill cities and their whole populations. A bad series of droughts, or just one megadrought” has the power to kill a civilization.
If you live in Los Angeles, or Phoenix, or Las Vegas, or El Paso, or Dallas, or any one of dozens of cities that are almost certainly going to run out of water later in this century, this should concern you. What will you do if suddenly the taps run dry, the shower doesn’t work, and the toilet stops flushing? When there just isn’t any more water to be had, for any price? In our age, under those circumstances, how long will it take for a city to die, and where will all the people go? Gill’s book reminds us that when this has happened before, it doesn’t end well.
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850 by Brian Fagan (2001)
Brian Fagan is a great researcher and writer on the historical effects of climate on human prehistory and history. He has written dozens of books and I personally have read at least ten of them. This one, like Gill’s book on the Maya, stuck with me. For much the same reason. It describes what happens in societies when the climate takes a drastic turn for the worse.
Only in the last few decades have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap, “The Little Ice Age” that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. Fagan’s book tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today’s global warming. I highly recommend it, it’s a good read.
The part that struck me though, was his description of what happened to England in the 1300’s. At the beginning of the century, after 400 years of good weather (the Medieval “Long Summer”) England’s population reached a peak that Fagan estimates at just over 6 million people. By 1400, after a century of deadly climate change (it got a lot cooler and wetter) the population was around 3 million. A population decline of 50% in one devastating century.
With the Maya it was lack of water, in England it was lack of food. The weather turned nasty at different times and different places over the century, and when it did whole villages and regions would starve to death. Fagan makes the same point Gill does, in a premodern society there just wasn’t any way to move enough supplies around to relieve the starving areas. Even if there were supplies to send in the first place. Climate Action Resisters (CARS) love to repeat the line that, “climate constantly changes”, Fagan’s book reminds us that these changes are often disastrous.
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis (2000)
This book explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism during the El Niño-Southern Oscillation related famines of 1876–1878, 1896–1897, and 1899–1902, in India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and New Caledonia. It focuses on how colonialism and capitalism in British India and elsewhere increased rural poverty and hunger while economic policies exacerbated famine. The book’s main conclusion is that the deaths of an estimated 60 million people (about 6% of the world’s population) killed in famines all over the world during the latter part of the 19th century were caused by the laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideologies of colonial governments.
This is not an easy book to make it through. It’s heartbreaking and horrific in some places. Infuriating in others. Long sections are incredibly dense, dry, and loaded with charts and statistics. Despite these problems this is a book worth reading. These climate fluctuations, the droughts they caused, and the famines that followed were almost certainly the first signals of global warming due to increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The earths overall climate had been in a cooling trend for almost 6,000 years, after reaching its warmest point since the end of the last Ice Age around 4,500 BC. Despite short warm intervals like the Medieval Warm Period of 900–1300 AD the overall trendline was one of cooling. Then suddenly, in the mid-19th century it started warming up about 0.07 C per decade.
By 1990, 5,000 years of cooling had been wiped away in one short century. The world was once again as warm as it had been in 4,500 BC. All the warming since then, has built on top of that. One of the recent arguments of the CARS is that global warming has actually been a good thing. That it has reversed the cooling trend of the Little Ice Age and given us a more pleasant, more fruitful, and more productive world.
While that may have been true between 1960 and 1990 things have gotten warmer since then. The reality is that we are now moving into a global climate that hasn’t existed for millions of years. Whatever “gains” were made as a result of a warming climate all accrued to the 20th century. This book highlights that those gains came at a terrible price.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond (2005)
This was Diamond’s follow up book to his brilliant “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies”. Expectations were impossibly high for this book and predictably it disappointed most of Diamond’s fans and the reviewers. That doesn’t mean it is a “bad book”. It’s actually pretty good, but it is uneven. There is one chapter, though, that makes the book as far as I am concerned. The chapter on the collapse of the Norse colony in Greenland.
The fate of that “lost colony” has fascinated people for over a century. By the year 2000 enough archeology and analysis had been done to allow Diamond to compellingly tell the story of what happened to these people. It’s a story that has relevance because it describes a societies failure to adapt in the face of a changing climate. A failure that resulted in their society’s collapse and extinction.
The Norse colony in Greenland was founded during the Medieval Warm Period between 900–1300 AD when the climate was about as warm there as it is now. It flourished for several hundred years and was poised to become the staging ground for Norse colonization of North America. Then the climate shifted, and it suddenly got colder, a lot colder. What Diamond describes is how this climate change made the agricultural system that the Norse had carried with them from Europe progressively more impossible to sustain.
Year after year, every winter there was less food to go around and the population got smaller and smaller as people died from the effects of malnutrition and starvation. Until the last desperate survivors probably built a boat, out of wood salvaged from abandoned houses, and tried to sail back to Europe. A trip they never completed.
What makes Diamond’s recounting of this story so compelling is that he shows these people didn’t have to die. The Greenland colony didn’t have to fail. What everyone focuses on is how the changing climate made their way of life progressively more impossible to continue, until everyone starved to death and died. Diamond points out that they were not the only people in Greenland at the time and, that the “other people”, the Inuit, did just fine in the cooling climate.
What killed the Norse wasn’t the changing climate, it was their unwillingness to change and adapt to it. They were willing to literally die, before they would give up their European way of life and adopt the lifestyle of the indigenous people who they seem to have despised. It’s a cautionary tale that has implications for the world today. As the majority of Americans seem unwilling to entertain even modest changes in their lifestyle in order to slow the progression of the climate disaster about to engulf the world.
Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future by Peter Ward (2007)
There have been five major “Mass Extinction Events” when over 75% of all life on the planet perished.
· Ordovician-silurian Extinction: 440 million years ago.
· Devonian Extinction: 365 million years ago.
· Permian-triassic Extinction: 250 million years ago.
· Triassic-jurassic Extinction: 210 million years ago.
· Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction: 65 Million Years Ago.
Unfortunately, the only one that most of the public knows about is the last one. Because it was the one that killed the dinosaurs.
While proving the “killer asteroid” theory of the dinosaur extinction was a major triumph of scientific research it did have an unintended side effect. It cemented in the public mind the idea that extinction events were caused by “external” events like asteroids, or radiation from nearby supernovae, or killer solar flares. As Ward puts it “was there ever a more news-friendly science story? Dinosaurs, death, asteroids, everything but alien sex.” This book is his desperate attempt to make it clear that Climate Change, specifically high CO2 levels and the warming that causes, are what has almost killed all life on the planet more than once.
Ward is a paleontologist and the book is a deep dive into paleontology, particularly the field of paleoclimate research. While it is dense in places Ward does his best to make it as accessible as possible to the average reader. He wants people to read this book and understand what the world will be like in a few hundred years if we trigger a runaway greenhouse climate shift. Ward writes, “I’m scared as hell, and I’m not going to be silent anymore! This book is my scream, …Is [mass extinction] happening again? Most of us think so….Thus this book, words tumbling out powered by rage and sorrow, but mostly fear, not for me, but for my children and their descendants.”
Here is Ward’s description of what “life” was like during the Triassic greenhouse mass extinction to give you an idea of where Earth could be headed in the event we get a runaway greenhouse effect going and temperatures rise 10–12 degrees Celsius. Which, while it is an extreme worst case, could actually happen. Perhaps more easily than we think. Here is what paleontology tells us that world would be like:
“No wind in the 120-degree morning heat, and no trees for shade. There is some vegetation, but it is low, stunted, parched. Of other life, there seems little. A scorpion, a spider, winged flies, and among the roots of the desert vegetation we see the burrows of some sort of small animals — the first mammals, perhaps.
The largest creatures anywhere in the landscape are slim, bipedal dinosaurs, of a man’s height at most, but they are almost vanishingly rare, and scrawny, obviously starving. The land is a desert in its heat and aridity, but a dune less desert, for there is no wind. The land is hot barrenness. Yet as sepulchral as the land is, it is the sea itself that is most frightening.
Waves slowly lap on the quiet shore, slow-motion waves with the consistency of gelatin. Most of the shoreline is encrusted with rotting organic matter, silk-like swaths of bacterial slick now putrefying under the blazing sun. We look out on the surface of the great sea itself, and as far as the eye can see there is a mirrored flatness, an ocean without whitecaps.
Yet that is not the biggest surprise.
From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color — a vast, flat, oily purple, not looking at all like water, not looking like anything of our world. No fish break its surface, no birds or any other kind of flying creatures dip down looking for food. The purple color comes from vast concentrations of floating bacteria, for the oceans of Earth have all become covered with a hundred-foot-thick veneer of purple and green bacterial soup.
At last there is motion on the sea, yet it is not life, but anti-life. Not far from the fetid shore, a large bubble of gas belches from the viscous, oil slick-like surface, and then several more of varying sizes bubble up and noisily pop. The gas emanating from the bubbles is not air, or even methane, the gas that bubbles up from the bottom of swamps. It is hydrogen sulfide, produced by green sulfur bacteria growing amid their purple cousins.
There is one final surprise.
We look upward, to the sky. High, vastly high, overhead there are thin clouds, clouds existing at an altitude far in excess of the highest clouds found on our Earth. They exist in a place that changes the very color of the sky. We are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison. We have gone to the Nevada of 200 million years ago only to arrive under the transparent atmospheric glass of a greenhouse extinction event, and it is poison, heat, and mass extinction that are found in this greenhouse.”
Anyone who ever says that we do not have to worry about CO2 levels in the atmosphere because they fluctuate naturally all the time and it has worked out “just fine”, should be forced to read this book. CO2 keeps the planet warm enough for life to flourish on our planet but when it gets too high it causes mass extinction events. We need to pull back before we trigger the next one.
End Note:
These are my top 6 climate books. I have read dozens of others over the years but these are these are the ones that have stuck in my mind. Like I said at the start, if you want to read just one book then read “The Uninhabitable Earth”. It is the one that is most focused on pure climate change and the one most applicable to what is happening to the world today. If you have the time and interest though, any of these others will be an excellent addition to your mental library.
