Katrina, Wilma and me: learning to live with climate surprises?

Geoscience Canada, June, 2006 by Kurt Grimm

Is the sky falling? Jared Diamond's book, Collapse (Diamond 2005), may win another Pulitzer for his penetrating illumination of the linkages among environmental degradation, coevolving social processes and the collapse of human societies. Canadian Ronald Wright's book, A Short History of Progress (Wright 2004), delivers a darker and immensely readable account of these interwoven processes. In short, empires are a common phenomenon in human history and they are vulnerable to environmental changes and degradation, particularly with respect to water, soil health, and food production.

WHAT ARE OUR IMMEDIATE VULNERABILITIES?

At one extreme, is there an apocalyptic scenario? The convergence of cataclysmic climate change, nuclear terrorism, disease pandemics and economic/ societal collapse is certainly conceivable; however, the immediate and long-term outcomes of their interrelated dynamics are highly uncertain. Nonetheless, the immediate issue is not the robustness and survival of humanity itself; rather, it is about the robustness, responsiveness and adaptability of human organizations and institutions that enclose and support ouR familiar lifestyles.

Change requires adaptation. Adaptive capacity may be described as the ability to respond creatively and effectively to change. We, in affluent North America and Europe, (probably) have a substantial capacity to adapt to abrupt climate change. Comprehending and advancing Canadian adaptive capacity is an important theme for interdisciplinary research. For example, see www.c-ciarn.ca/indexe.asp to survey the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network (C-CIARN); similarly, http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/proposal_easp describes a federal research funding initiative that targets "research and activities that will contribute to a better understanding of Canada's vulnerabilities to climate change and provide information necessary for the development of adaptation strategies." These research programs are novel and important; however, they appear to focus (perhaps hopefully) upon more gradual and probable transitions, rather than the abrupt changes that may be more likely.

The challenges of climate change and human response (including adaptation) are complex and complicated. Complexity describes the natural systems and their interactive dynamics, including critical-point behaviour and surprise. Complicated describes some institutional components (societal, political, scientific and perhaps behavioural inertias) and the responses that can be readily imagined or forecast. Given these realities, it is prudent to assess and expand our individual, local and regional adaptive capacities.

One matter is clear: individually and collectively, we are active participants of a global-scale, socio-cultural and economic system that perpetuates, and is dependent upon, vast infrastructures. These infrastructures similarly require and perpetuate vast and continuous throughputs of material, energy and information. Sizable perturbations to these fluxes result in losses of functionality and complexity that are likewise subject to critical point thresholds. These realities shall prevail whether describing the stocks and flows of digital money through my local credit union, or the transfer of goods and services (and economic/political/military control) worldwide. In this respect, one inherent cost of "convenience", "choice" and global interconnectedness is vulnerability.