Unit 2 Notes

2/18

Enlightenment Theories about Climate

• the Enlightenment was a transatlantic intellectual movement in the 18th century

• new secular philosophies about human beings appeared that exalted reason & logic

• Sometimes Enlightenment thinkers could be opposed to existing political orders, but often they supported them

  • sometimes called the age of reason: not necessarily accurate, but sort of a “branding” term

Montesquieu was a French philosopher of the Enlightenment, who helped develop the idea of the separation of powers

• he faced censorship but also influenced politicians such as James Madison

• The Spirit of the Laws espoused a strong climate determinism

  • the basic idea was that climate conditions influenced general tendencies within people & among populations

  • climate determines what types of governments might appropriate

  • Montesquieu thought that cold climates created insensitive brutes, hot climates fostered emotional hotheaded people, and temperate climates were just right

  • Scholars now reject such climate determinism and stereotypical portrayals

Volcanoes & Climate:

• reminder that climate systems depend on the transfer of heat from the sun in the atmosphere and ocean

• Aerosols - solid or liquid particles suspended in a gas - can affect the amount of solar radiation that the earth receives & reflects

• volcanic eruptions can have a notable impact on climate for several years

  • volcanic eruptions emit large amounds of ash & sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere

  • ash can darken the surrounding area for weeks

  • during powerful eruptions, sulfur dioxide reaches the stratosphere - there it becomes sulfuric acid, spreads around the globe, and remains for monts to years

  • Sulfuric acid in the stratosphere captures both heat…

• The Eruption of Mount Tambora - largest known recorded in history

  • caused global climate effects that were unrecognized at the time & served as a possible final episode of the little ice age

  • the cooling from the eruption combined with the Dalton Minimum in sunspot activity caused the 1816 “year without a summer”

• during this period, the Napoleonic Wars had just finished

• since the French Revolution, global conflicts involving European countries had raged

• attempts to restore the “balance of power” in Europe

• The Dutch had ruled much of Indonesia since the 1600s (their frigid golden age)

  • the brief period of British rule occurred in 1811-1816

  • during this time most places were still not industrialized

The Eruption:

• erupted on April 10, 1815, in Indonesia

• around 10,000 people in the area died during the eruption and another 100,000 from famine in its aftermath

• tens of thousands became refugees and many of them slaves

• the event was not well-known at the time, in part because Sumbawa wasn’t fully under state authority

• vegetation on the island was totally destroyed

• known as the time of ash rain (zaman hujan au) locally

• Crop failure in 1816 caused by late freezes led to famine in many places & food riots

• the cooling was another catalyst for westward expansion in the US

• Famine in China spurred a turn to opium production

• Millions died and suffered from diseases such as typhus and cholera

• Tambora’s climate effects influence romantic literature, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

2/20

European Imperialism

Imperialism: the extension of a country’s influence over another region and people through military, diplomatic or economic means

• ex. rome, han, mongols, ottoman

• overseas Europeans begin the trans-Atlantic slave trade, making slavery race-based and hereditary

• during the first wave of decolonization in 1770-1830, former colonies in North and South America became independent

• Britain was the main power after the Napoleonic Wars

• Almost all of Africa was divided up into European colonies

• China was carved into spheres of influences

• c

• this was the world of the “late Victorian holocausts”

• WWI & WWII set the stage for the decolonization of Africa and Asia

• Anti-colonial struggles such as Gandhi’s India

• Independence throughout the Africa & Asia, especially in the 50s & 60s

• Many of these former colonies made up…

  ENSO

• it isn’t as simple as just linking an El Nino event directly to the failure of a monsoon and thus a drought

• other factors of the climate system need to be considered

• the concept of teleconnections involves establishing these relationships between ENSO oscillations and droughts, based on statistical probabilities

ENSO Teleconnections & Imperial Vulnerabilities in India

• in the late 19th century monsoon rains hitting India were especially susceptible to major ENSO changes

• Snow cover and rainfall oscillations also play a role in the monsoons

• over the past several decades the enso seems not to have had a major impact on Indian monsoons

• British economic modernization of India made it more impoverished

• a focus on cotton, wheat, enclosures and irrigation decreased access to food and water resulted

Vulnerabilities in China

• North China, the heartland of the country, is most affected by ENSO

• a strong influence of El Nino on drought and of La Nina on flooding of the Yellow River

• role of the opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion in weakening China in the middle of the 19th century

• the Qing government lost the ability to provide food

• less investment in river conservancy

• shifting path of the Yellow River in the 1850s

• The massive famine of the Great Leap Forward occurred during an El Nino drought, but government policy made it a famine

Vulnerabilities in Brazil

• during the ENSO devent the northeast of Brazil gets less rainfall than expected

• it also has extreme fluctuations between dry and wet years

• ENSO is clearly teleconnection to these fluctuations and explains much of rainfall variability

• due to unequal trade with the British, the northeast became peripheral

• official racism in Brazil toward people of African and Amerindian descent. Slavery was only abolished there in 1888

• cattle grazing depleted the environment

The Great Drought

• in 1876-77 a strong ENSO led to a severe drought in India

• British policies under Lord Lytton allowed wheat exports to double as the population starved

• the only relief offered to famine victims were work camps that required more labor than food in terms of calories

China

ENSO event caused flooding in some regions but severe drought in the northeast

• up to 95% of the Shansi province perished

• In brazil, the drought cause by El Nino began 6 months later

• here as well there were attempts to militarize and centralize famine relief

• in areas in the northeast

• after the 1876 famines, there was an agricultural boom

• the period of 1888 to 1892 experienced a dramatic shift of El Nino and La Nina, instead of a particularly intense El Nino

• In Russia, peasants faced widespread hunger in 1891-2 as the government sought to increase grain exports

• in Ethiopia, a rinderpest outbreak killed 90% of cattle. emperor menelik II responded by releasing grain to the hungry population

• poor flooding of the Nile River contributed to the defeat of the Madhists establishment of British control over Egypt and Sudan-

• two strong droughts occured in 1896-7 & 1899-1901 that were related to El Nino events

• In British India, in 1896 Lord Elgin resisted efforts to limit grain exports and set up poorhouses that gave out inadequate food

• another horrible famine hit India in 1899 when was under Lord Curzon

• Curzon overtly embraced an imperialist ideology and sought to minimize relief costs

• in China, the suffering from flooding, droughts, and famine helped lead to the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901

• In Brazil, religious Antonio Conselheiro established a breakaway city of Canudos that welcomed famine victims

• both boxers and canudos were defeated

• Mike Davis argues that these famines of the late 19th century helped create the “Third World” - a term for the “developing world” or the “global South”

• the incorporation of India, China, and Brazil into the world market undermined food security of traditional agriculture and irrigation infrastructure, deteriorated previous policies of famine relief, worsened the “terms of trade” for people in the tropics, and weakened fiscal autonomy and possibilities for state-led development

• meanwhile, the imposition of the gold standard devalued currencies in the tropics and created debt, while the use or threat of military force ensured the economic dominance of imperial Britain

• ENSO events struck tropical humanity at a moment when imperial economic policies rendered these places more vulnerable, thereby creating the Third World

2/25

Energy & the Industrial Revolution

• The development of industrial economies has often been seen as just as significant as the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago

• The Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th century at the same time as the political revolutions in the US, France & Haiti

• Industrialization was revolutionary in its economic, social, and The Industrial Revolution environmental effects

The two main technological developments set off the Industrial Revolution in Britain

1. Machine manufacturing of cotton textiles in factories

2. the use of coal as a fuel in steam engines

• the turn to fossil fuels most decisively allowed for the scale of economic activity to grow dramatically

• Industrialization started to spread around the globe

• by the late 1880s major industrial development had occured in Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States

• Railroad transportation expanded even further in the 19th century, also reaching Mexico, Brazil, India, China and elsewhere

• Meanwhile, the use of coal increased continually as industrialization spread

• Industrialization uprooted social and economic orders

• It had different short-term, medium-term, and long-term effects (worse conditions for workers, increased abundance, environmental precarity

• It ushered in a dependence on fossil fuels to support continual economic growth

Fordism and Globalization

• Several additional factors drove further industrial development even more rampant industrialization in the 20th century

  • technological innovations

  • demand from militaries fighting wars

  • oil joining coal as a dominant fossil fuel

  • Fordism

  • globalization

Fordism

• a system in which mass production and mass consumption formed something of a feedback loop

• workers earned enough to eventually purchase the items that they manufactured

• began at henry ford’s factories in michigan, this model of industrial organization spread globally

• globalization

Globalization

• took root starting in the 1970s

• it involved much greater international integration and flows of resources across boarders that helped fund further industrialization in more parts of the world

• it also involved a greater focus on finance, service, and technology in the wealthy countries and an outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries

• thus, globalizations has been associated with “de-industrialization” even as it spread industrialization around the world

Acceleration and Dependencies

• the pace of both social-economic trends and Earth system trends increased dramatically after 1945. Scholars have called this the “Great Acceleration”

• Many factors involved in the trajectories, but the acceleration could not have happened without a reliance on fossil fuels

• everyone living today depends on burning fossil fuels just to get by, despite widespread recognition that carbon emissions are destabilizing the climate

  • size of the global economy in GDP

  • World populaition

  • energy use

2/27

The Greenhouse Effect: a fundamental element of the climate system is how certain gasas in the atmosphere hold in heat that comes from the sun, similar to a greenhouse

• nitrous oxide, methane, and carbon dioxide are important greenhouse gases, though all only make up a tiny amount of the atmosphere

  • natural v. human advanced ?

The Global Warming Trend

• scientists have shown that carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere have increased from 280 parts per million (PPM) at the beginning of industrialization to over 420 today. While much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, enough stays in the atmosphere to cause this increase

• current average temperatures on the globe are already about 1.5 degrees Celcius higher than the late 1800s

• computer models have evaluated all sorts of scenarios and show there is no way to explain the temperature rise without the CO2 increase

• finally, there is no plausible explanation for the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere without emissions from fossil fuels

• taken together, this is why it is clear that human activities have been warming the climate

Effects of Global Warming on Natural Systems

• The arctic regions of the planet are warming more quickly than most other places

• sea ice disappearing and tundra biome changing

• thawing permafrost in Siberia and Canada

Effect of Global Warming on Natural Systems

• further retreat of glaciers from mountain ranges around the world

• vanishing source of freshwater

• melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica

Effects of Global Warming on Natural Systems

• increasingly severe storms and shifts in precipitation

• rare droughts and flooding are becoming more common

• most weather events can only be connected to climate change probabilistically

Effects of Global Warming on Natural Systems

• increasingly severe wildfires in places like California, Canada, Siberia, and Australia

• Effects of smoke, the feedback loop of carbon emissions, and the destruction of forests

• Life cycle of fire and time horizon

Effects of Global Warming on Natural Systems

• the species living in certain areas are changing

• trees, insects, and animals that used to thrive in some places no longer can

• other critters have moved into new zones and compete with lifeforms that have long lived there

• in general, these changes tend to deplete historic biodiversity and foster conditions for new pathogens

• melting ice sheets are causing sea levels to rise

• sea levels are already 8 inches higher than 1880

• small island nations and low-elevation costal areas are especially vulnerable to being submerged

• the warming of ocean waters is disrupting sea life

• dead zones in parts of the oceans

• changing acidity of the water

• potential disruption of ocean currents

3/4

Disasters from Melting Glaciers in Peru

• starting in the 1940s, a series of global warming disasters have occurred in the Cordillera Blanca range of the Andes Mountains in Peru

• Melting glaciers there have caused two types of disasters

  1. glacial avalanches - snow & ice attached to a glacier suddenly lose their structural integrity and fall, often destroying anything in its path

  2. glacial lake outburst floods - lakes form as glaciers melt that are held in place by ice and other landscape features until sudden events cause them to overflow and inundate a region below

• beginning in the 1960s, glacial avalanches became a bigger problem

• in 1962 a glacial avalanche destroyed Ranrachira and killed 4000 people

• a massive earthquake hit Peru on May 31, 1970

• well over 70,000 died, including over 15,000 from a glacial avalanche that destroyed Yungay

• throughout these disasters, Peruvian authorities invested in engineering solutions that only partially worked

• Glacial melt disasters have recently become less acute in part because there are fewer glaciers left to melt

• one distinctive aspect of this history is that the poorest and most marginalized populations were not the most vulnerable

Global Warming Inequalities

• Climate extremes have long tended to most severely affect populations with the fewest resources. This is happening again with global warming.

  • cities have faced acute problems

  • slums of Mumbai, manila, Dhaka and elsewhere have suffered increased flooding

  • drought has limited access to water in places like chennai and bangalore

• heat waves are most severe among marginalized communities in the tropics. many of these places also suffer from worsening air quality

• minority groups in wealthier countries often lack access to air condition and engage in agricultural work outside, which expose people to warming risks

• indigenous peoples in many parts of the globe have been experiencing climate disruption

• peoples of northern eurasia, australia, the amazon, alaska, southeast asia, africa and elsewhere

• in these instances, climate change is interacting with historic inequalities

Climate Conflicts and Migrations

• global warming has also enabled competition over resources in the arctic (russian flag at north pole

• warming ocean waters have turned into conflicts about access to fish in places ranging from iceland to the south china sea

• pre-existing and new dams and water diversions schemes have caused controversy in regions with increased aridity in western united states, brazil, northeast africa and southeast asia

• droughts connected to the warming trend also have played a role in some recent conflicts such as the syrican civil war

• both the aral sea and lake chad have involved over-irrigation and climate change

• the disapperance of the aral sea has created tensions among central asian countries

• the shrinking of lake chad in western africa decreased access to water and aided the conditions for the violence of boko haram rebels in nigeria

overall, climate migrants and refugees are on the rise in an age of warming

• about one third of the 68.5 milion people displaced in 2017 were due to weather^.l0

3/6 Climate Politics, Projections & Uncertainties

Brief Climate History Politics

• The severity of global warming only became understood after the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1960s

• fossil fuel industries have spent many years opposing aggressive policies to address carbon emissions

• the politics of skepticism and uncertainty have followed patterns of questioning science in other matters such as the health effects of cigarette smoking

• attempts to form international agreements to address global warming often pitted countries of the Global North and Global South against each other

• The Kyoto Protocol (1997) aimed to reduce CO2 emissions of most countries to 1990 levels, but this hasn’t happened

• the Paris agreement (2015) aims to keep temperature rise below 2 degrees celcius

Projections & Uncertainties

• the most important concerns about global warming deal with future

• prediction is at best an inherently probalistic endeavor

• using computer similations called Global Climate Models (GMCs), scientists at the intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have analyzed various pathways that make different assumptions about changing conditions

• the IPCC initially used representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for scenarios but later added shared socioeconomic pathway (SSPs)

• Both provide a range of outcomes for each senario and summarize them as a mean

• these various scenarios try to account for uncertainties, including the potentials for feedback loop and tipping points, in the climate system and human behavior

• the biggest uncertainty regarding behavior in the models in about energy use

• both demand for it and the pace of replacing fossil fuels with enerrgy sources that emit less greenhouse gases is uncertain

• up to the Paris Agreement of 2015, predictions for warming kept getting more severe. Over the last decade as solar and wind have become much cheaper, the warmest scenarios have started to seem less likely even as the Paris commitments for emissions cuts haven’t been met.

3/11 Responses to Global Warming

• While climate politics have often been caught up in questions of skepticism or negotiating international agreements, there have also emerged many possible avenues to respond to global warming

• some of these responses focus on mitigation through personal consumption, activism, policy or technology

• other responses stress adaptation to the warming that is coming

Individual Action

• lots of attention to global warming has focused how one might change their consumption habits to reduce their carbon footprint

  • drive or fly less

  • eat less meat

  • buy offsets

  • consume less energy

  • energy efficient appliances

  • reuse and recycle materials

• education is urged to make these actions more widespread

• a problem with this approach to mitigation is that many participate must participate for it to be effective

Political Movements

• Environmental protests have increasingly galvanized around climate issues

• the idea is to build a social movement to force action by politicians, government and corporations

• climate protests range from peaceful rallies to disruptive actions with calls both to stop fossil fuel projects and enact policies like a Green New Deal

Decarbonization

• decarbonization policies have attempt to mitigate global warming by decreasing emissions from sources of energy

  • increased energy efficiency, reduction in emissions, planting forests, investment in renewable energy, etc.

Geoengineering

• involves a set of technological responses to intervene in the climate system to offset warming

• possibilities for geoengineering include removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, blocking solar radiation, increasing oceans’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide

• the methods for doing so are either risky because they involve experimenting on the earth’s systems with unknown consequences

Adaptation

• in contrast to mitigation, adaptation seeks to adjust to the shifts toward new climate conditions rather than making them less severe

• drought mitigation through water conservation and resistance crops

• seawalls, wetland restoration, and other infrastructure to stave off rising seas and storm surges

• migrations and new buildings in more temperate areas

• insurance schemes to disincentivize living in places prone to wildfires, flooding, or drought