Julie and I attended a lecture on climate change Friday evening, one of a series put on every summer by the Sawtooth Interpretive and Historical Association. We had already attended lectures on Nature and Community, Aboriginal Use of the Sawtooth Valley, and Central Idaho Earthquakes. Friday’s was on Climate Change in the Idaho Mountains, and it reminded us that in spite of the pandemic and its command on our attention, there are other ways that our world might end.
The speaker was Alejandro Flores, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State. You may know Boise State as a football team, but it really does have a university attached to it, and some good, smart people teach there.
Dr. Flores is one of them. He began his lecture by describing methods of measuring climate change. He described how destructive such change could be to worldwide food production. He didn’t come right out and say that people would starve because of climate change, but he did talk about Climate Induced Migration, which is the same thing.
He also talked about the creep of the snow line up our mountains, and how snow serves as a diffuse reservoir for water. Mountains that are rained on hold far less water for far less time than mountains that are snowed on. The rivers that run off them are smaller and warmer than snow-fed rivers, and salmon and trout disappear, to be replaced by warm-water species such as carp and tilapia and snakeheads.
The audience contained people who have been lobbying for the removal of Idaho’s Snake River dams, which were one of the factors in the destruction of the sockeye and chinook salmon runs that used to reach Sawtooth Valley. After the lecture, those people asked questions about how climate change would affect salmon restoration efforts.
It wouldn’t do them any good, Dr. Flores said. He was being kind.
Idaho’s salmon are a zombie species already, kept on life support by a hatchery industrial complex. But even zombie salmon need snowmelt to live. No snow, no cold water, no salmon.
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The SIHA lectures are held at the old Valley Creek Ranger Station, and due to anti-pandemic measures, the audience isn’t crowded together under a large sunshade as in previous years. Instead, a well-spaced grid of flags marks the lawn between the building and the highway, and people place their chairs next to the flags. Social distance is maintained. Because the audience usually consists of people who respect science, almost everyone wears a mask.
It’s hot on the lawn this time of year. Julie and I carry umbrellas as sunshades, and drink plenty of water, and try to arrive at the lectures having slept well the night before. I was worried that I might start nodding off while Dr. Flores was lecturing, because he was described on the SIHA brochure as “passionate about using advancing computational tools and techniques to understand integrated land systems where human activity is inextricably coupled to hydrologic, ecologic, and atmospheric processes across a range of spatiotemporal scales.”
Fortunately, Dr. Flores didn’t talk like that. He was, however, careful to disguise the tragic realities of climate change behind a bunch of numbers. It was up to his audience to think through what those numbers meant.
I needn’t have worried about sleeping. Dr. Flores let slip a number predicted by the newest models for global warming, assuming that humanity continues to operate a fossil-fueled economy. He stated that we could expect the climate to warm by 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s 7.74 degrees Fahrenheit, which doesn’t sound like much. On a lot of winter days in Sawtooth Valley, it sounds like an improvement, especially if you don’t feel like snow-blowing the driveway.
But that sort of global temperature rise, amplified by local variations in geography, humidity, and seasonal weather patterns, will make large areas of the planet uninhabitable, either from heat or sea-level rise. We have only just begun to see Climate Induced Migration.
Except for salmon. Dams or no dams, salmon won’t migrate anywhere after a worldwide temperature rise of 4.3 Celsius, except maybe to Antarctica.
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After sitting for an hour under an umbrella, with a mask on, in the hot sun, Julie and I might have considered migrating to Antarctica ourselves, but instead we went home, took off our masks, put our lawn chairs in the shade of the pines, poured a couple of glasses of iced sun tea, and watched the sunset. A cool breeze was coming down the valley. The year 2100 seemed comfortably distant. Barring sudden radical advances in life-extension science, we wouldn’t live to see our world get too hot for us.
It might get too crowded, however. Peaks of tourist traffic in the valley indicate a direct connection to hundred-degree days in Boise and Twin Falls. Our home turns into a refugee camp, because even on our hottest days, our altitude of 6500 feet means that the nights cool quickly. Instead of air conditioning, we open a few windows after dark and keep the blinds closed once the sun comes up.
Thousands of campers do the same, and don’t roast in their mummy bags. The sleep-robbing heat that comes with high nighttime temperatures doesn’t happen here.
Our winter temperatures, which used to hit 40 and sometimes 50 below in December and January, don’t go there anymore. Last winter we saw one night of 25 below, but a warm front came in the next night and we had a warm, wet storm. We do get heavy snowfalls, but sometimes we get rain instead. The valley floor loses its snow in late March or April now, when it used to lose it in May. Every summer the patches of old snow in the Sawtooths get smaller. A tiny blue-ice glacier used to reside in the northern shadow of Williams Peak—the only one in the Sawtooths, as far as I know—and it’s gone. It no longer frosts most summer nights. Some people are actually planting gardens and nurturing them intact all the way to harvest.
These changes have turned a valley that used to require a tolerance for cold and loneliness into a place where a lot of people want to live. If they can’t afford to live here, they want to visit. As Idaho’s snow cover shrinks, its deserts expand, and a place that used to require grit to live in now appeals to those who like their comfort.
Thus far, our population explosion is a local and seasonal phenomenon. But what happens when hundreds of millions of people start fleeing India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, and the dust-covered ruins of Phoenix, Arizona? Where do you put people who no longer have a job or a place to live? How do you tell people to expect a few million new neighbors? How do you stop countries from going to war over shrinking supplies of food, water, and living space? How do you keep countries with nuclear weapons from using them the first summer their homeland becomes unlivable?
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Of late, I’ve been giving readings from A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, as part of a virtual book tour. We’ve set up a corner of Julie’s office for PBS-style interviews, with good lighting and a chair and desk and a bookcase behind them. The bookcase contains a wide variety of novels—Moby Dick, Lolita, The Bell Jar, Great Expectations, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, among others more obscure—and they indicate that ours is a household that reads widely and occasionally deeply.
The readings have been set up by bookstores where I intended to read on my pandemic-cancelled book tour. Southwest readings in bookstores and universities were to be followed by northwest readings in colleges and libraries. I was expecting large audiences lured in by complimentary glasses of chardonnay. I was expecting dinner in nice restaurants after I read and answered questions. I was expecting difficult and occasionally hostile queries about my contention that industrial civilization won’t maintain its rising trajectory much longer. I was expecting to sign a lot of books, because while A Hundred Little Pieces discusses many of the ways the world could end, it also finds love and community in the small moments we have left.
My Zoom audiences have been intense but friendly. Very few people have asked me end-of-the-world questions, probably because they’ve seen more than enough worlds end in the past six months. Their questions center on love and community, which is what you have left when everything else is gone. I didn’t think that was the most important part of the book when I wrote it. Now it is.
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You’ll be happy to know I don’t pretend to know the future. Having seen computer models fail in the past, I don’t assume their predictions will come true either. Dr. Flores’s 4.3 degrees Celsius could be an exaggeration of what the earth’s temperature rise will be in eighty years, or it may be an underestimate. As I put it in A Hundred Little Pieces, “In a world where cause and effect has abdicated, you can’t predict the future. It’s hard enough to predict the present.”
But there are certainties in this world, and one of them is that the current pandemic is not the biggest problem humanity faces. Climate change is bigger. Nuclear weapons are bigger. (I write this on the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations.) A brand-new pandemic with a 30% fatality rate is bigger. Worldwide economic collapse is bigger, especially if you’ve got children to feed.
I’m also certain that if the pandemic is a kind of practice catastrophe, we’re in terrible trouble. We’ve flunked the preliminary test, sunk the ship on our shakedown cruise, and punctured the trial balloon. Our leaders have proven to be good at denial and lousy at everything else, including decent human behavior. We’ve dismantled public health institutions that might have given us public health and safety this summer. We’ll never know for sure until we get the numbers, and they’re not available on any spatiotemporal scale that I know of.
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One of this summer’s remaining SIHA lectures is again on Central Idaho earthquakes. It concerns the hazards of the Sawtooth Fault, a crack in the world that runs along the base of the Sawtooths. It goes through the middle of Redfish Lake, which means that if the fault cuts loose with a magnitude 7+ quake (it does this every few thousand years, and no one knows if it’s overdue or not), we’ll have a tsunami in the middle of Idaho. As it is, the tops of various Sawtooth peaks keep collapsing due to aftershocks from the March earthquake.
Julie and I will probably attend the lecture, even though it won’t reinforce our faith in the stability or permanence of our world. Not much does these days, except our presence in each other’s lives, and a delight in each other’s presence. Most days, that’s enough.