What comes after climate change? – Part 3
Those who say that climate change has always existed on Earth and that people have had to adapt to changing climatic conditions for as long as they have existed mean a very slow process that is hardly noticeable to the individual person. Change can be so gradual that in retrospect of each life lived, the climate in one place appears stable. We do not want to talk about the fact that people remember more extreme events than the average, normal weather of most years and therefore think that winters used to be colder and summers warmer and sunnier.
The climate change that is happening all the time
Nature and human culture can automatically adapt to the normal, quite natural climate change. This is due to the fact that both the animal and plant world, as well as the human community, are to a certain extent constantly adapting to climate change "experiment"Animals and plants "dare" spread to other areas, people grow foreign grains and fruits, change their preferences for certain clothing and building styles, and so on. Some of it has success and remains, other fails and disappears again. This is how people and the environment react to gradual changes without realizing it.
Part 1: Climate change: Preventing the catastrophe is hardly imaginable Part 2: What is changing in climate change?
Such changes are not really changes, but very gradual, hardly noticeable shifts. In the course of the experiences of a lifetime, of a generation, the climate has not changed at all, which can be seen from the fact that, for example, where you did not learn to skate as a child, your grandchildren will not learn to skate either, and where you bathed in the sea in summer as a child, your grandchildren will still be able to jump into the waves in summer. Adaptation to climate changes is possible when the time frames of shifts in normal weather events and expected unpleasant exceptions are longer than the periods of renewal of our cultural endowments, from the clothes we wear to agricultural practices to technological infrastructures. But in order to consciously shape such an adaptation process, a society first had to understand the direction and the specifics of climate change. We needed to know what the new normal is. And this is connected with enormous difficulties. With every hot summer and even every single extreme heavy rainfall event, we can ask ourselves: Is this the new normal or will it remain the exception in the future??
Today, we are gradually moving towards a way of thinking in which we are prepared to consider many things that were previously considered extreme to be the new normal. What’s more, climate science is becoming more precise, giving more specifics about the kinds of changes we should expect to see. For certain regions, it is predicted that heavier and drier summers will be more frequent. Communities and cities are already responding by, for example, planting trees that can cope with drought for longer in the summer. In agriculture, too, we are beginning to look for varieties that are adapted to such conditions.
Before we take a closer look at the mechanisms and risks of such adaptation processes, we should take a look at a scenario of climatic changes that has hardly been considered in the discussion so far. We had said that there can only be talk of a climate if it has a certain range "normal" weather events and weather patterns that we can adapt to with our cultural habits and our technical infrastructures. These also include expected exceptions, such as cold winters and hot summers every few years. Furthermore, even with a stable climate, there are rare extreme events that cause damage because we are not prepared for them. In a normal climate, however, we always have enough time to repair this damage. In general, we keep such extreme events in our collective memory as exceptional situations that have shown how quickly our everyday lives can be repaired.
Three years for the determination of normality
What "normal" and what "the exception" we always see only in retrospect. The climate research has set as a typical time interval for the determination of the climate in one place once thirty years. In the synopsis of three decades we can say, which May "average" was which summer "rainy" and which January "too mild". Whether, under the conditions of a climate that is changing, this summer was "normal" is or "too hot and too dry" – that is, strictly speaking, a question that no one can answer. Only by looking at the past it is possible to give an answer, but it is a basic principle of a change that what was normal in the past is no longer valid today.
That the time scale for determining the climate of a place is three years is a determination of science that seems arbitrary at first, but it fits very well with the time scales of development, use, and renewal of cultural practices and technological structures. Anyone planning investments, be it in recreational facilities, roads and other transportation projects, buildings or energy supply networks, thinks in terms of such timeframes. The decision-making processes in the society are also based on these time frames. And even though agriculture is thought of in terms of annual cycles of sowing and harvesting, the time horizons for which new decisions must be made are several decades. New cereal varieties need experience, years to prove their suitability for local conditions, methods and techniques developed on the basis of previous years’ results – not to mention that fruit trees and grapevines, for example, take years to develop their yield potential and that the time needed to develop and test new plant varieties is also measured in years and decades.
Climate chaos: world without climate
But what if the climate change accelerates in such a way that there is no longer any question of a normal climate, which shifts gradually or more or less tensely??
If the time periods of climate change become shorter than those of the renewal of cultural and technical institutions, a problem arises: Strictly speaking, there is no longer any climate at all on the basis of which one could plan and make decisions for this renewal. This problem intensifies, the more the climate change grows into a climate catastrophe, in which by an overturning of the whole climatic system one can no longer speak of a shift, but only of a chaotic reorientation of the whole system to a possible new, completely unknown state. Such a phase can be described as a climate chaos in which there was no normality and no exceptions, but only deviations from the former normal state, even over a period of three years.
Climate chaos is also the right term for such a time, because the different elements of the Earth’s climate system – atmosphere, oceans, glaciers, Arctic ice, continental ice sheets, forests and forests – react differently to the changes. The changes in one subsystem always affect the other subsystems in a new and complex way, changes in the vegetation or in the increase of the sea level influence the warmth storage and the warmth radiation of the area concerned, which again has repercussions on the coarse current patterns in the atmosphere.
Therefore, there will be no new climate stability for a certain time. The weather pattern will not only change in a normal range of fluctuation that could be relied upon, rather the weather pattern will keep changing in surprising and unexpected ways over decades. It will take decades for the whole system to settle into a new, somewhat stable state, so that we can once again speak of a climate with normality, deviations and drifts.
Climate models, which could simulate and thus predict all this on the basis of scientific understanding, will always lag behind the actual changes, if the processes continue to accelerate. Of course, computers are fast enough to make these predictions, but they are based on what scientists have already understood and incorporated into the model calculations. However, many effects will not be studied and understood until they have occurred. As a result, models – especially when it comes to predicting medium- and small-scale changes in people’s living conditions – will always lag behind rapid, dramatic changes.
Uncertainty factor humans
Even if it were possible to predict the physical, chemical, biological and ecological changes with sufficient accuracy on the basis of scientific computer models, there would still be a gross uncertainty: no one can predict how people will act. When will they stop increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?? Will they try to counteract through geoengineering technologies?? Will this have other, unforeseen, serious side effects?? Will they make relevant climatic changes through agricultural tampering?? What happens when migratory movements cause land to desertify and other areas to be used too intensively?? Will wars for the remaining habitats and resources cause further damage to the climate?? Everything that is caused by the future actions of humans in the climate change can be played out in scenarios and calculated in models, but it cannot be predicted, because the actual actions of humans are largely unpredictable.
Part 4: Life in climate change: the time of destruction
Climate change will therefore be a period of extremely high uncertainty with regard to actual weather patterns. This means that we can ame that it will be warmer overall, but whether summers in a particular region will be hot and dry, whether torrential rain is to be expected in the spring months or in the fall, whether there will be frequent extreme snowfalls in the Alps in early summer, when the first snow is to be expected, and when it will be expected "Spring will", how the typical tracks of low-prere systems will shift, whether certain regions will dry out and others will suffer from storms. – all this is not only uncertain and difficult to predict, it may also change again and again as climate change progresses. To the normal variability of the climate, as we know it, comes not only a fundamental shift in the "Normal" and the "Exceptions" In fact, normality may not return for decades because the whole system is in a state of flux and the individual components are always interacting with each other "out of the rhythm" .
This has serious consequences for the possibilities of planning long-term investments in technologies, infrastructures and agriculture. One simply does not know what "work" becomes. Of course, today we are able to cope with unexpected drought, heavy precipitation and hot spells. Even if they lead to disruptions, we have the possibility to recover from each of them, and we know that these are exceptions. In the chaotic climate, however, we will not know whether the extreme event is an exception or the new normal – and what appears to be the new normal may become a different normal in just a few years "Normality" soft.
A new normality
Provided that in this phase the influence of humans on the system will eventually decrease, the chaotic climate system will eventually calm down again and settle down to a new reliable state, in which there will be a normal climate again, with normal weather events, expected exceptions and extreme expulsions. This time is meant when we ask here: "What comes after climate change?" Of course, the climate will change gradually in this future, as it has always changed gradually in fact. We do not mean these gradual changes when we speak of change. It is like a person who changes gradually: When we talk about a change, for example, in political attitudes or interests or character, we mean a rather abrupt, sudden and deep process of change. So it is with the climate change we are facing: there was a time before this change, there is the phase of rather rapid, rather fundamental change, and there is a time that is after it.
We do not know what this world will be like afterwards. Will there still be humans? This is the most important question for us humans. If yes: how will they live? Will they have learned anything from the change they have caused?? These questions will be discussed later. But first we will look at how this change could have taken place.