Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's debonair Belgian detective with the incisive mind and epicurean tastes, is aboard an ocean liner sailing between Southampton, England and New York City. It's a luxurious ship, and the passengers, for the most part, are glittering examples of the upper class. Among them are stock characters of any Christie mystery. The vaguely dissolute aristocrat, maybe (maybe not) a peer of the realm; the ingenue of a wealthy background on her way to America for some vague reason, perhaps involving escape from a man; the loud, brassy and unattached floozy looking for gold to dig; a sinister man (who seems like the perfect suspect but of course isn't) with a pencil-thin mustache and a shadowy past; an American imbecile saying obvious, stupid things all the time, but loaded with money, probably from oil or timber businesses. Numerous others, including the ultimate victim.
During the voyage, someone gets murdered in a stateroom. Many clues point to many people. Hercule, who just wanted to get away and relax, is of course called upon to investigate. There follows the usual procedure of figuring out (a) the time and place of the murder, (2) where everyone was at the time of the murder, (note the Oxford comma - un hommage) and (c) why the murder was committed. At some point Hercule will, of course, gather everyone in the grand saloon of the ship and delineate his solution. As he does so, a hard jolt shudders through the ship. The collision feels as though the liner's starboard bow has struck something huge.
Yes, the liner is the Titanic, and it is 1912 aboard the White Star Line ship's maiden and only voyage. As the ship fills with icy North Atlantic water, as the bow begins its ominous pitch downward, Hercule Poirot decides to forget about the whole thing and goes looking for a lifeboat.
I think that's about where we are because of climate change and overpopulation. None of this other stuff matters. The political intrigues, whether America will remain the Exceptional country and keep fighting endless wars around the world to ensure its hegemony, whether we use Keynesian or Austrian economics to get us through this "slowdown," whether we'll elect a woman President, whether anything is ever going to work again - none of it matters very much.
I think we're on the cusp of what you could call, euphemistically, fundamental dislocation. We are now seeing some of the very earliest signs of where we're going. We've hit the iceberg, and no one wants to pay any attention to it. Or at least no one has ever really wanted to do anything about it. The reasons are many, none of them very complimentary where Homo sapiens is concerned, but apparently implacable. Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental studies and philosophy (nice combo) at NYU, has written a whole book about it, entitled Reason In A Dark Time. That's the question he asks: why didn't we ever do anything about it when there was still time? Why didn't we listen to Paul Erlich or Charles David Keeling, who established the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory 60 years ago? Jamieson surmises that in evolutionary terms, humans evolved to detect danger in the form of medium-sized objects moving in the middle distance. That's about all we can react to. We never had a chance with something as abstract as climate change.
Naomi Klein's book on global warming, This Changes Everything, has many of the same elegiac overtones, but Naomi's a reformer and a hopeless optimist (there's an oxymoron). She sees this "Melancholia" type threat as a kumbaya moment for all of mankind. Sure, whatever.
The current levels of CO2 concentration (around 400 parts per million) correspond to much higher global mean average temperatures in the geologic record. Because of the thermal inertia of Earth's great oceans, air temperature has only slightly increased.
But the physical world is one of complex trip-points, of phase changes. We like to think we have all the time in the world when we don't. The Buddha: "Your mistake was in thinking you had time." Everything should happen on a human schedule, but it doesn't. It happens according to the laws of physics.
Consider the old physics/chemistry experiment where a kilogram of ice cubes is placed in a pan of cold water and set on a burner. Turn on the gas and stir the cubes with a lab thermometer. When will the water begin to heat up, to climb above 0 degrees C? The somewhat surprising answer is that the water will remain at freezing temperature until all the ice is melted. It takes about 80 calories of heat energy to melt one gram of ice, so that 80,000 calories of heat from the burner will be expended first to melt all of the ice. Then the temperature of the water will rise rapidly until it all boils away. This is an example of the phenomenon of "latent heat," and it has given us a false sense of security for a long time. We are not far now from a completely ice-free Arctic at the end of the melt season. At that point all of the solar energy entering the Arctic Ocean will go into heating water instead of melting ice, and the water temperature, and the air above it, will rise precipitously. And all Hell will break loose.
Humans have never lived on an Earth without an Arctic ice cap. It's as simple as that. We evolved under conditions where the North Pole provided a massive cooling effect, where the temperature gradient between the Equator and the Arctic kept the jet stream in reliable formation, and weather was tamed and moderated for the Northern Hemisphere, where most of the land mass is, and most of the people live. That great epoch is ending.
There is no need to dwell in disaster porn, or to exaggerate the problem. The problem is plenty dire all by itself. It needs no promotion from me or anyone else. The Problem is there, whether we care to talk about it or not. I think that's the essence of the best definition of Reality I've ever heard: that thing that is still there after you get through arguing about it.
Unlike Hercule Poirot, there's no lifeboat for any of us. We're on Spaceship Earth, and we're going to have to ride this one out. The rest of our arguing and bickering about this and that will go on, but the function of all of it will change, will "phase shift." It will all simply be a means of distraction. There will come a time when we are nostalgic for the days when we argued about so much that didn't matter.
Another top post.
ReplyDelete