Green Book Club Runs AMOC Last Friday
There are quite a few different ways to come at what we often call the “climate crisis.” Thinking about it in terms of warming temperatures makes a start but also misses some important aspects of the breakdown in the human/Earth relationship. In recent weeks, the book club has explored three alternative starting points for thinking about the “crisis.” On Friday, September 5, we will set out on a different and maybe more hopeful journey as we begin to ponder Paul Hawken’s new book Carbon: the Book of Life. Can our entanglement with nature be a source of blessings as well as problems? Well, we’ll see!
Back on August 8, however, we discussed “The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable” an article by William E. Rees from World, an open access scholarly journal from MDPI based in Basil, Switzerland. As I noted in an earlier report, “Rees makes his main point early: ‘We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our existence.’ We are using up resources faster than they can be replenished and creating waste faster than it can be absorbed. Fossil fuels have enabled ‘an eight-fold increase in human numbers and a hundred-fold expansion of real gross world product in the past two centuries,’ and its more than can be sustained.” Focusing only on warming, Rees maintains, allows us to ignore a wide range of environmental stresses, human health impacts and potentially irreversible tipping points. For Rees, “business as usual” even if powered by alternative energy is not sustainable. We have “overshot” the carrying capacity of Planet Earth.
The following week, we continued our quest for really bad news with a look at “You Are Contaminated,” a New York Times article by David Wallace-Wells. As Wallace-Wells puts it “Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.” The result? We are all most likely carrying more plastic in our bodies than is good for us, with more on the way unless we are able to enact careful regulation of the relevant industries and make major changes in our patterns of consumption.
On the 22nd of August, we took a break from doom scrolling, to celebrate the benefits of spending time in nature, and they are many and profound. But then on August 28, we decided to run AMOC. We decided to ponder the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC is a current that flows from the southern to the northern part of the Atlantic. As it moves north it grows cooler and saltier and eventually sinks to the ocean floor and then reverses its direction.
According to an August 3 article from The Economist, “AMOC is something of a poster child for tipping points, which are notional thresholds beyond which systems that have been responding gradually and incrementally to global warming undergo sudden and dramatic changes. One reason for this is its sheer power and the scope of its influence.” The heat transferred by the current amounts to roughly “60 times the heat humans produce by burning fossil fuels in factories, furnaces, power stations, cars, aircraft and everything else.”
“Another reason is that its tipping-point nature is not open to question. Theory, modelling and reconstructions of prehistoric climate all support the idea that AMOC is ‘bi-stable.’ Rather than just gradually getting stronger or weaker, it can go suddenly from ‘on’ to ‘off if pushed too far, and does so in a way that makes it very hard to flip it back on again.”
“That would have dire effects,” The Economist continues. “Northern Europe would get both colder—bringing worse winters, more powerful storms inland and shorter growing seasons—and drier, making summers more prone to drought. The impact on agriculture would be far greater than that caused by warming alone, hitting poorer countries hardest. By slowing the transfer of heat to the north, such a state would push the ‘intertropical convergence zone’—the tropical belt where the weather systems of the two hemispheres meet—towards the south. This could lead to a drying out of the southern edge of the Sahara, and a spectacular desiccation of Central and northern South America, as well as other impacts around the globe.” The problem, of course, is that the current seems to be slowing and weakening, possibly as a result of global warming and the release of fresh water from the glaciers of Greenland which changes the salinity of the northern Atlantic. Less salty water, the hypothesis states, is lighter and less likely to plunge and turn and head south, strengthening the current. But whatever the cause or causes, the AMOC does seem to be slowing.
Carbon, our next reading, will lay out a strikingly different way of thinking about the “crisis.” It will argue that a careful study of “the flow of carbon provides better stories, other ways to see… different from the disjointed and chaotic narratives that engulf us.” It will challenge the “fiction of human exceptionalism” and assert our kinship with nature and all living things. It will remind us that “the task of modernity” is to recognize that “our very existence rests on our connection with the entirety of planetary life.”
Next meeting: Friday, September 5 at 9:00 AM on Zoom. Please join us if you are able. New members and drop ins always welcome!
