El Niño, Famines, Lost Cities, Mass-Migrations, and Brittle Achievers
What decades of climate foresight, well, foresaw is now the news.
A few stories worth tracking together this week. A potential “Super” El Niño bearing down on a planet already past 1.5°C. A fertilizer chokepoint tightening at the Strait of Hormuz just as planting decisions are getting locked in and drought looms. Coastal Louisiana being swallowed by the Gulf in slow motion. None of these is, by itself, the planetary crisis. Taken together, they're a foretaste of the compounding discontinuity climate foresight has been describing for decades. It’s here, now.
Lots of folks are ringing the alarm bells about the increasing likelihood that we are now entering a strong, possibly “Super” El Niño — with potentially profound, persistent (and perhaps permanent) consequences.
“The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over.
“Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts.
“In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.
“Climate scientists also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño events can trigger what they called ‘climate regime shifts,’ meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall, and drought patterns.”
Daniel Swain did a fantastic job unpacking what a strong El Niño is (and means) in this lecture. (Even if you know all about them, this is a model of informal explanatory clarity and worth the watch.)
Those of us in California could see extreme (perhaps unprecedented) heavy rainfall events. (I wrote about my own close encounters with the phenomenon of atmospheric rivers earlier.)
This Super El Niño will have its greatest impacts on the world’s poor, of course.
The defining environmental history of the most devastating Super El Niño is the late Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. A paper Davis later co-authored pulls no punches about what happened:
“During the late nineteenth century, a series of famines affected vast parts of Asia, causing mortality on a scale that would be unthinkable today. Of these, the so-called Global Famine lasting from 1876 to 1878 was the most severe and widespread in at least the past 150 years... Historical documentation indicates famine-related mortality between 12.2 and 29.3 million in India, between 19.5 and 30 million in China, and ~2 million in Brazil, amounting to ~3% of the global population at the time. It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity…”
Davis’ core argument (repeated in the paper) is that Victorian-era imperialism weakened traditional systems in order to strengthen imperial control and wrest away greater resource profits from conquered nations. That weakening (combined with oppression, heavy taxation, and relief failures) made catastrophic droughts into mass-death famines.
“The triggers for the famine were acute droughts, but political and economic factors, especially the neglect or destruction of traditional systems of water and grain storage, were responsible for translating crop failure into unprecedented mass mortality (Davis 2001).”
Many climate foresight experts are arguing that for the world’s poor, baseline conditions going into this El Niño are dangerous. The NYT covers the core argument here:
[E]xperts say an El Niño would add pressure to an already precarious global system. Fertilizer shortages caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz are straining farmers. Rising energy prices resulting from war in Ukraine and Iran are eating into countries’ budgets. And a longstanding safety net has been weakened by cuts in foreign aid to poorer countries by the United States and other nations.
This may be a foreshadowing of deeper, more persistent and more continuous food insecurity in coming decades. Indeed, recent work suggests that global heating and inequitable systems could combine to “expose more than 1.1 billion people—mostly in Africa and Asia—to at least one severe food crisis by century’s end.”
In a sane world, a massive global effort to do everything possible to avoid famine and reduce future losses among climate-precarious communities would already be underway. In a sane world.
In this world, we’d all do well to remember that wealth buffers us from this instability, but it definitely doesn’t make us invulnerable. Upheaval is most dangerous, most obvious and most unjust in the lives of the very poor. But brittleness is reshaping all our lives as well. Losing affordable home insurance is not the same as facing starvation, but it’s still an extreme event for those who experience it — and a sign that discontinuity is spreading throughout the whole system.
Indeed, this foretaste of the future planet will likely give many well-off people their first real understanding of the scale of the brittleness bubble our inaction and denial have left us facing.
There’s a lot of false confidence in wealthier communities. We’ve been talking a lot recently about brittle achievers (people whose current success blinds them to the extent of their own vulnerability). A strong El Niño could tip many people over into awareness of their personal precarity.
Indeed, I think it’s likely that the next two years will bring us strong evidence of rising economic pressures in relatively safe places — homes costing more, jobs being more competitive to get, rising prices for scarce services (from good renovation contractors to private schools).
Unless we see parallel acceleration of housing construction, economic development, and social supports, relocation will increasingly become a zero-sum game, with a growing number of people fighting for residency in a limited supply of safer communities, with money usually being the deciding factor. The climate relocation bottleneck may already be beginning to close.
This is not a future problem.
These immediate crises, though, do not render our larger crisis any less urgent. We’re still only at the beginning. Just ask New Orleans.
We’re beginning to see evidence-based, peer-reviewed work demonstrating what climate foresight has been anticipating for years: a coming series of pulses of out-migration from extremely brittle communities — with a high probability that those left behind find themselves in deepening brittleness traps.
Managed retreat and supported mass-relocation would be better for the hundreds of thousands of Louisiana citizens soon to be displaced than would denial and chaotic flight. That’s the conclusion of a recent perspective paper, Climate-driven depopulation and adaptation realities in America’s coastal ground zero.
“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return. A possible silver lining herein is the fact that the timing of multi-metre RSL rise is uncertain. Therefore, slowing coastal degradation by means of targeted coastal restoration remains a viable adaptation strategy. This could expand the time window to enable managed relocation, rather than inviting chaos.”
New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.” CNN coverage notes that “The exceptional vulnerability of the Gulf Coast offers a window into what may await other coastal communities this century. The sea may claim the land earlier here than elsewhere, [co-author] Törnqvist said, ‘but what happens here now is what’s going to happen in other places.’”
Of course, even wealthy countries are nothing like prepared to deliver the kind of supported mass-relocation millions and millions of people now need. The simple truth for most of us is, as climate adaptation professor Jesse Keenan put it, “You’re on your own.”
What’s going to happen as more and more people experience this collision with the reality of their own unreadiness for a world none of us have ever experienced? We’re about to get a preview of that.
It’s worth remembering what I’ve said before, that direct and visible climate change impacts are overshadowed by the costs of brittleness and unacknowledged risk, which is itself overshadowed by the economic upheaval that repricings and reallocations of resources could cause (with deep social implications), which is in turn overshadowed by the potential scale of disruption that conflicts over remaining (and newly available) opportunities could bring. The planetary crisis is not just the reality of climate chaos, but the deep, systemic discontinuity it has set in motion.
Understanding that discontinuity and learning to make smart decisions in volatile and uncertain circumstances is fast becoming the critical skill of the 21st century.
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