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You can hardly turn on the TV news or go online these days without seeing...well, Donald Trump, of course, and his extreme version of American politics. Every indictment of him only seems to add to his strength in what's no longer the Republican but the Trumpublican Party. Still, speaking of extremism (and disasters), I wouldn't put him at the top of the list. This summer has offered us a scorchingly extreme version of climate change and a planet being burned, flooded, and melted in ever more unexpected and previously unimagined ways. Records are being set regularly with the year itself all too likely to take its place as the hottest ever until, that is, next year on a planet where the last eight years have been the warmest in recorded history.
Oh, and if you happen to live on an island, here's a little advice: get off it fast! Islands are going up in flames. Sardinia and Cyprus in the Mediterranean are now scorching messes and Hawaii's Maui only recently became a first-class nightmare in which some residents had to plunge into the ocean to escape the flames. And if southern Europe, seemingly in an almost endless heatwave, continues to burn, northern Europe has been experiencing startlingly torrential rains and flooding.
Meanwhile, it's not just Phoenix, Arizona, with those 31 straight days of 110 degrees Fahrenheit (or above), or even Chile, which recently passed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in what's still known as... yes!... "winter" there. Temperatures have, in fact, been breaking records in an extreme fashion across the planet. It is, or should be, daunting, and yet, according to the latest polls, barely half of Americans (and only 23% of Republicans) consider the climate emergency a major threat and the leadership of one of our two parties you know just which one I mean is still into climate denialism (or simply the promotion of fossil-fuel use) in a remarkable fashion.
Were they to win power again in 2024, you could, I suspect, essentially kiss this planet goodbye. Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare suggests today, you just might be able to do that no matter what happens in our politics. Tom
Collapse 2.0
What a 2005 Bestseller Tells Us About Climate Change and Human Survival
In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland. Such societies, having achieved great success, imploded when their governing elites failed to adopt new survival mechanisms to face radically changing climate conditions.
Bear in mind that, for their time and place, the societies Diamond studied supported large, sophisticated populations. Pueblo Bonito, a six-story structure in Chaco Canyon, contained up to 600 rooms, making it the largest building in North America until the first skyscrapers rose in New York some 800 years later. Mayan civilization is believed to have supported a population of more than 10 million people at its peak between 250 and 900 A.D., while the Norse Greenlanders established a distinctively European society around 1000 A.D. in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Still, in the end, each collapsed utterly and their inhabitants either died of starvation, slaughtered each other, or migrated elsewhere, leaving nothing but ruins behind.
The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?
As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland's case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.
These historical examples of social disintegration spurred lively discussion among my students when, as a professor at Hampshire College, I regularly assigned Collapse as a required text. Even then, a decade ago, many of them suggested that we were beginning to face severe climate challenges akin to those encountered by earlier societies and that our contemporary civilization also risked collapse if we failed to take adequate measures to slow global warming and adapt to its inescapable consequences.
But in those discussions (which continued until I retired from teaching in 2018), our analyses seemed entirely theoretical: Yes, contemporary civilization might collapse, but if so, not any time soon. Five years later, it's increasingly difficult to support such a relatively optimistic outlook. Not only does the collapse of modern industrial civilization appear ever more likely, but the process already seems underway.
Precursors of Collapse
When do we know that a civilization is on the verge of collapse? In his now almost 20-year-old classic, Diamond identified three key indicators or precursors of imminent dissolution: a persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse like long-lasting droughts; signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis; and an elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production. At some point, a critical threshold is crossed and collapse invariably follows.
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