This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America

649 Pages·2018·3.08 MB·English

by  Jeff Nesbit

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About the Author
Copyright Page

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For Micah, who constantly reminds me of the infinite joy of learning
Introduction
Harbinger
Our world is in trouble.
While it may not appear that way in America quite yet, the signs are emerging
here and there if we’re willing to look closely enough. Spring planting seasons
start just a bit earlier and are slightly more chaotic. Extended droughts in Texas
and parts of the Southwest sometimes force cattle farmers to move entire herds
north for water. Tiny creatures like the American pika are running out of options
in the West because they’ve already moved higher up on their mountains. Police
cars in South Florida now have to be protected for the first time to keep salt
water from rusting them out below.
Each one is a small, barely perceptible change in an America with bigger
problems at the moment. More immediate questions stare us in the face when we
wake each day. Can I make the rent payment at the end of the month? What if
my car breaks down, and I can’t get to work? What if I get really sick and can’t
pay my health-care bills, or I can’t visit a free health clinic for advice and
treatment because it’s now hundreds of miles away? Will I ever be able to save
any money? Should I be worried that people who aren’t like me start taking jobs
where I work or move into my neighborhood? Should I limit places I visit
because I might be attacked? Are my kids getting the kind of education they
need?
These are real, immediate concerns. They crowd in on our day, pressing on us
from all sides. We don’t have time to wonder or even worry about Monarch
butterflies that need to keep moving north because their habitats are being
disrupted. We have no sympathy for wealthy patrons of exclusive ski resorts
whose favorite mountaintop playgrounds teeter on the edge of insolvency
because snowpacks are no longer predictable during the winter.
It isn’t our problem that serious water resource issues in California’s Central
Valley now cause tens of thousands of itinerant migrant workers to walk miles
just to get fresh water. That’s someone else’s problem and doesn’t affect us. If
almonds become too expensive because it takes so much water to grow them, we
can always buy peanuts. If alfalfa, which also fights for increasingly scarce
water resources in California’s Central Valley, doesn’t make sense as food for
cows, can’t they just find something else to grow for the source of the
McDonald’s hamburgers we buy at the end of the food chain?
These small changes in the American landscape hardly seem worth our time
right now. No one can say with absolute certainty what’s causing them. Earth is
made up of millions of local ecosystems, interconnected in ways that none of us
can fathom. It doesn’t seem quite logical that massive amounts of industrial air
pollution in a country like China halfway around the world would have any real
connection to our daily lives in America. Why would it? The terrible smog that
envelops Beijing or Shanghai more and more is their problem—not ours. If
China buys two-thirds of all the soybeans grown in the world now and may be
forced to buy all of them within a decade, what’s that to us?
The fact that hundreds of millions of people are forced to burn wood or fossil
fuels to heat their homes and cook their meals, and barely manage to live from
one day to the next is someone else’s problem. The growing haze from coal-fired
plants near big cities in dozens of developing nations that blackens the sky even
during the day is unfortunate, but not something we have the bandwidth to care
about. The fact that their lives are shadowed each day by a black sky seen
through the haze of smog, soot, and smoke is something other people will deal
with. After all, we can see blue, sunny skies in America anytime we feel like it.
We’ve forgotten that this blue sky was a freedom we fought for in America for
decades. What seems to matter is that we have it now—not what we had to do in
order to win the freedom to see that blue sky when we want.
Black carbon rises into the atmosphere from millions of homes, hut stoves,
forest fires, tailpipes from trucks burning diesel oil, brick kilns, and elsewhere as
soot. This black carbon is nearly as responsible for trapping heat on Earth as its
unseen, invisible cousin lingering overhead in the sky—carbon dioxide—that is
almost entirely a by-product of humankind’s efforts to find cheap energy sources
from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Black carbon from soot and
carbon dioxide from industrial activities have together created what is essentially
a black sky above us, trapping heat and causing critical changes in weather
patterns, ecosystems, and Earth systems.
While the black-sky effects in America are small and imperceptible right
now, that isn’t the case in other parts of the world. There are countries in
southern Africa where extended, crippling droughts have forever altered the way
families fight to live. Mothers in Madagascar are forced to boil cactus, the only
plant that will grow now, to feed their children. Since cactus has virtually no
nutritional value, those children regularly die of malnutrition. But it’s all
mothers have to give their offspring with deformed, extended bellies—that, and
the occasional soup from boiled soot and ashes. Yemen is paralyzed by the
world’s first true civil war over access to fresh water. All but two of the
country’s aquifers have run dry, prompting armed conflict to protect the sources
of water still there.
Farther north in Africa, across the Sahel region that is seeing its desert
expand, farmers are abandoning their land in the face of questionable growing
seasons and sources of water and becoming part of the flood of refugees fleeing
from conflict, violence, and economic uncertainty. These refugees don’t
distinguish between their existential problems. They simply know they can die
of environmental devastation, starvation, military conflicts, or economic
collapse. They’re all part of one very large, threatening landscape forcing them
from their homes into refugee camps or cities with no jobs.
A billion people in India and elsewhere who still don’t have access to basic
things like electricity are beginning to wonder if the monsoon season that
provides all of their fresh water might be in trouble. If it is, where will they get
their water? Likewise, in China and parts of Asia where thousands of
disappearing glaciers at the top of the Third Pole feed into nearly a dozen
massive rivers that also provide fresh water for hundreds of millions of people,
leaders in those countries are now fully prepared to defend their right to stop,
alter, or steer those sources of water to assure that their people can live.
It isn’t only people who are affected. Tens of thousands of species who can’t
tell us about their lives or their habitats are under severe pressure. Routine
snapshots of hundreds of species in studies by biodiversity experts are starting to
show “local extinctions”—when a certain kind of species can’t move fast
enough to adapt to its changing environment and so simply disappears for good
at that place on Earth. One recent snapshot of a thousand species found that half
of them were already experiencing local extinctions. Big, iconic species like
giraffes and elephants are in trouble as well. They’re hunted ruthlessly even as
their natural habitats are threatened through environmental changes and
development. They don’t know why they’re in trouble. But we do. Some of the
creatures that every child in America has heard of could be gone from their
natural homes in just ten or fifteen years. Extinction rates for all manner of
species on Earth are a hundred times higher than normal.
Twenty years ago, only a very small percentage of the earth experienced
extreme conditions—like a hot spell that could literally kill us if we tried to stay
outside for an extended period of time. Back then, only half of 1 percent of the
earth experienced such extreme events that made our place on the planet
dangerous or deadly. Today, 10 percent of the Northern Hemisphere is
experiencing such extreme heat events. The years of 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017
were the hottest in the history of recorded civilization. Cities in the Middle East
saw spikes of temperatures during the summer that reached almost 130 degrees
Fahrenheit during the day—the sort of temperatures that make a place
uninhabitable for humans if they last too long and occur too often. The central
part of Australia now becomes so hot during the summer that weather forecasters
had to add a new category to describe it. That region is now essentially unfit for
human living during the summer.
Ecosystems in oceans around the world are under severe duress from a shift
in the chemistry of the water that both depletes oxygen and makes it more acidic.
Heat is killing vast swaths of living coral reefs off the coasts of nations and
islands, threatening the livelihoods of fishermen who make their living from
these places and countless species that also make their homes in and around
these dying reefs. A big section of the Great Barrier Reef may now be lost
forever.
But none of these cataclysmic changes are happening in America. We don’t
see children dying in southern Africa because extended droughts mean that their
only food source is boiled cactus, a plant not nutritious enough to keep them
alive. We don’t see China building a three thousand–mile railroad through the
Amazon to make sure they can import soybeans from Brazil and other countries
in South America because they need them to feed their people. We can safely
keep refugees fleeing the Sahel region in Africa from ever coming into America
because it’s much easier to make that issue Europe’s refugee problem.
Only small changes are occurring in America—not big enough to cause
anyone to even wonder why they’re happening or what they might mean in the
near future. Most of the Western world, specifically the United States and all of
Europe, fall within the “temperate” zones of Earth and are less prone to the
immediate impacts from climate change that other parts of the world are
experiencing presently. Only dry regions in the American Southwest—
specifically where the Colorado River provides much of the fresh water to
several states—are seeing larger impacts occurring now.
Sure, for fishermen in North Carolina who have to travel hours north to fill
their allotment because their catch is migrating farther and farther north, it is an
inconvenience and a waste of fuel—not a catastrophe. New England lobstermen
who plan to give up a way of life that has been in their families for generations
because the sea is changing is a small thing, hardly worthy of the nation’s
attention. Farmers in the Midwest deal with more uncertainty during the planting
season, but the situation isn’t a crisis by any means. Bird-watchers in all fifty
states know that dozens of species are at risk because their habitats are changing,
but that small concern is only part of a passionate hobby. There are other bigger
problems currently facing America.
But here’s the thing. All of these seemingly random events are connected.
The small changes happening are harbingers for something bigger. More
consequential changes are coming much sooner than we know. Impacts to
ecosystems great and small are occurring in every corner of the planet right now.
Tens of thousands of scientists have devoted their lives to studying and
chronicling these changes as specifically and carefully as they can. They might
not always tell the rest of us what the harbingers truly mean at the moment, but
their studies are done for the best of reasons and with the purest of motives.
Those scientists are seeking the truth about what is happening to a world that is
clearly in trouble. Their most sincere hope is that other people understand what
they’ve discovered.
We are living under a black sky, in a time of uncertainty. Important changes,
great and small, are happening all around us now. Those at our doorstep, or
outside our window, may seem small and inconsequential to us at present. They
may seem invisible to us, like the carbon dioxide that is accumulating in the
black sky above us, but they will grow year by year until we’ve reached the limit
of what our atmosphere can hold to sustain life as we know it.
We do indeed have a defined limit of what our black sky can hold in its
carbon budget. Once we reach that limit, which could happen in just twenty
years or so, those same tens of thousands of scientists, who have meticulously
studied the chemical, biological, geologic, agricultural, and atmospheric effects
we’ve imposed on Earth’s system for decades, have collectively told us one very