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They have named this year’s “El Nino” the “Godzilla El Nino” and one publication used this illustration to emphasize how scary it is. But is it as scary as what’s really behind it?
When I was little, and got upset because the thunder was too loud or too close, my mother would reassure me by saying the noise was made by the gods bowling in their celestial floating bowling alley. I don’t know how this was supposed to reassure me. The idea of a bunch of drunks — I had watched people bowling — heaving cannonballs at enormous tenpins over my head was anything but reassuring. But by then I had tagged my mother as a congenital liar who had filled my head with nonsense about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and on and on practically my whole life. So I went to my Dad, who had studied meteorology, and asked him for the real story. He sat me down and for half an hour explained the whole thing to me. I didn’t understand a word. Something about electrons.
As long as we have been human we have been inventing ways to make the implacable forces of nature seem less threatening. We invented gods, put them in charge of the weather, and told each other all we had to do was please the gods, or their priests, and we would be safe and have good harvests. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it was better than taking on the thunderstorm by yourself.
Today we look down on such magical thinking as primitive. But we’re doing it again.
In the face of the worst threat to our civilization’s existence in modern times — climate change — we are, with the enthusiastic help of scientists and journalists, busily inventing ways to trivialize the threat, to make it easier to think about, because we are scared.
One example: It is often said that we are having the kind of winter we are having now, say in Chicago, because of El Nino. El Nino, apparently, is a thing, something like a god, that lives in the southern Pacific Ocean and causes bad weather all over the world. (Note the work that the word “causes” is doing.) So we can talk all day about what El Nino is doing without ever admitting that there is a thing called climate change.
The fact is that what we refer to as El Nino is an interaction between cold water and warm water masses in the southern Pacific Ocean off South America that results in periods of upwelling during which the surface waters are warmer than usual. It is known to meteorologists, and has always been known to modern science, as the Southern Oscillation. When the oscillation reverses, it is called La Nina and features colder surface-water temperatures. The water temperatures interact with and affect the circulation of the atmosphere.
They also affect the behavior and location of the fish populations of the area, which in turn affect the fortunes of the human populations of nearby South America. Noting that the disruptions tended to occur around Christmastime, the local people named the phenomenon with their slang term for the baby Jesus — “the Little One.”
The chattering class has created all kinds of intermediaries to deflect from the stark reality of global climate change. We are being attacked by “the polar vortex,” the new name for the cap of cold air that has always bestrode the polar areas, sending occasional lobes of ice-cold air southward; by “bomb cyclones,” the new term for bad storms; by “derechos,” what we traditionalists used to call a squall line of adjacent thunderstorms. Bad weather is “brought” to us by the jet stream. In the same way a hood ornament brings us a car. The jet stream is one of many phenomena triggered by the massive collision of air masses and the enormous quantities of energy released in various ways.
This whole thing — the weather, the climate — is driven by heat energy, and its objective is simple: to transfer excessive heat from the equatorial regions to the poles, cooling it in the process, from whence it makes its way back toward the tropics again. But the means by which this is accomplished are unimaginably complex. Vertical and lateral currents in air and ocean water, rising when warm, sinking when cold, temperature differences triggering lateral winds and currents, all on a spinning globe. No human minds, no computer yet imagined by human minds,is capable of fully grasping how it all works. And now it is coming for us.
So we invent intermediaries to talk about, little pieces of the action that let us chat about what’s happening without recognizing what is happening.
Why are there so many wildfires in California? Why, cause the Tooth Fairy out there is a careless smoker. Thanks, Mom. Good night.
Hi Tom, we hope you had a good Christmas and New Year. I would suggest that Western Civilization will decline with or without CC just because it is old, civilizations have never lasted indefinitely, at about a thousand years we are in our dotage. A vigorous young civilization with a creative elite would respond to AGW effectively. We have a senile elite trying to convince themselves and us that we can hang on to the lifestyles that have caused CC but still avoid CC if we just adopt the right technologies, or magic, one might say. While the climate is clearly changing I do think that elite (eg. WEF) focus on it is itself a distraction from crises that will hit sooner and harder: resource depletion, oil certainly, but also soil, ‘fossil’ and other water, and assorted minerals and ores. We can pretend to be doing things to slow, stall or reverse CC (most of which waste resources) but resource depletion is just brutal arithmetic.
As you pointed out in a recent article, humans have managed on earth in hotter climates than our decendants can expect, but they are going to have to get by on a very depleted one as well. Those who figure out how will be the new creative elite. Meanwhile I am building soil.
Thanks for the good thoughts, and the same to you. I appreciate your loyalty to this tired old blog.
Extraordinary post, Tom – really top shelf!
When I was a mere tad, my family lived in Augsburg, Germany. As an Army officer, my father was a party to the post-WW2 Allied occupation forces. One Christmas (’49 I believe) dad hired an elderly, bearded townsman to dress-up in a traditional German Santa Claus costume and show up at our house at dinnertime on Christmas eve. This weird Santa came bearing two large stockings; one stuffed with toys, the other with chunks of coal and long switches – the latter to be employed in case we had been naughty that year. This particular Santa was lean and sullen, and spoke with the accent of a Nazi movie villain as he asked my brother and I whether we had been bad or good… Gotta’ love them Germans!
Needless to say, I was dumbfounded by these bizarre theatrics, and to this day wonder if the whole damn affair might rather have been some Gothic nightmare.
According to Karen Armstrong, humans are mythmakers by nature. This attribute is beyond transient cultural affectation; it’s part of our genetic makeup. Myth is necessary; it makes huge realities digestible to most folks. It’s part of this odd construct we call ‘truth’. However, truth can be a bit fuzzy. The trick is to distill ‘fact’ from myth – if that is even possible on any meaningful scale. Who knows?
Thanks. I’m not sure I agree that we are “hard-wired” to make up myths, I suspect it’s a fear response, one that we can’t shed once its usefulness is past.
I agree that it’s a fear response (so is running) but that’s not all it is. And while fear and its excruciating sibling, anxiety, are necessary to survival, if they become extreme or extend over a great period of time, they act to burn excessive amounts of calories, exhaust protein-based tissues, cloud decision making, interfere with gastro-intestinal and circulatory functions, and inhibit reproductive activities. I needn’t remind you of what Natural Selection’s ultimate response to such chronic conditions would most likely be.
Can we outgrow this myth-making nonsense? Well, if religion is really the opiate of the people – and religion is as popular as ever – then I guess the answer is no. [Only 15% of the world’s population identifies as religiously ‘non-aligned’ and even many of these folks are agnostic rather than atheistic.]
But as your post points out, religion isn’t the exclusive ‘opiate of the people’. What about Batman, the dark Mars of our era, or Superman in all his Herculean splendor? Or did the ‘King of the Wild Frontier’, Davy Crocket, really resemble the handsome, well-coifed Fess Parker? Did he actually “kill him a bar when he was only three”, or leap across the Mississippi River in a single bound? More recently, was Robert Oppenheimer – the mysterious anti-hero of the atomic age – really as pretty as actor, Cillian Murphy?
And don’t get me started on the weekly gladiatorial contests in which a few dozen beefy, colorfully bedecked supermen beat one another about a rectangular field in front of tens of thousands of cheering in-person spectators while tens of millions more look on via the miracle of television. The spectators – especially the males – enjoying a shadenfreudesque satisfaction in the spilt blood and broken bones of the whole event, while at the same time, worshipping their home team heroes in an odd paradigm that John Michael Greer would likely call a ‘secular religion’. The irony that such spectacles are typically staged on Sunday – the Lord’s Day – cannot be ignored.
Mythmaking is complicated. But we are steeped in it neck deep, as it servers a multiplicity of purposes – not the least of which is to bind cultures together, perhaps in the same way that a common language functions. And just as the toddler babbles in the music of speech long before he knows the meaning of words, so he glories in the bright colored toys, dolls and TV cartoons of his immediate space, oblivious to their functions. He is, in essence, an artist before he is a scientist.
Primarily, myth takes a universe of bewildering and often threatening circumstances and organizes them into a reasonably palatable narrative, in much the same way that music organizes random noises into patterns that are pleasing to the senses. As ‘music sooths the savage breast’ so too does myth. Bottom line, if the desire to maintain some sense of sanity and serenity is innate both for the individual and the group, it would seem that the tendance to make myths would follow. Is there a culture, anywhere in space or time that has been without its mythic background?