Funny how so many of us are unaware of Earth history. Take the recent and continuing droughty conditions in the American Southwest. Lake Mead stands at 40% capacity in 2018, and that’s an obvious indicator that a persistent dryness has affected the area from California to Colorado. Unfortunately, there’s not much people can do about the lack of precipitation. But drought in the American Southwest has been a characteristic of the area for a very long time. There was, for example, a significant drought between 1130 and 1164, according to Toby R. Ault and others working under the auspices of The Goddard Institute for Space Studies.*
Do the numbers. Thirty-four years of drought. The recent dryness in the region drained by the Colorado River isn’t close to a record. Then consider the opening statement in Ault’s abstract: “The western United States was affected by several megadroughts during the last 1200 years, most prominently during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; 800 to 1300 CE).” Ault and colleagues then note, “similar events are possible today….”
As I write this, the American East is experiencing flooding, mostly from a tropical storm that entered the country through the Gulf of Mexico. And more rain is on the way via a hurricane that will enter the country from the Atlantic. Too much rain vs. too little rain. Why can’t we just build a pipeline?
That suggestion is absurd for various reasons, including expense and lack of technology to control excessive runoff. But the main reason might be that humans have very, very short memories when it comes to natural events. And short memories reduce the will to act when there is no crisis. Anticipation isn't our strongest characteristic.
The East has been flooded before, and the West has been flooded, too. And both have experienced droughts. But weather is a daily phenomenon. We appear to suffer through the heat waves and the floods, do what we have to do to survive, and then acclimatize to the next weather. Seasons have seasoned us to change.
So, what’s a human race to do? After 5,000 years of civilization and untold efforts to control Nature, we’re seemingly still at the mercy of the weather. We started trying to tame the Tigris and Euphrates, progressed to taming the Nile (Not a bad job there), managed many of the rivers in Europe, only now started to control massive amounts of water with the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze, and worked for generations to make the Mississippi obey us. Yes, and then there’s the Hoover across the Colorado. Still, we can’t make the sky produce rain at our beckoning (unless you count local cloud seeding) and can’t stop a hurricane’s downpours.
There are limits to artificial controls that societies impose, but often fail to enforce. Those “thousand-year-” and “five-hundred-floods” will continue to inundate us. Those dry spells will exacerbate climates that have existed for millennia. But in our short-term memories, none of that matters. We will attempt to control what we cannot ultimately control.
Unfortunately, the same lack of control occurs on a purely human climate. As population increases, there will be times when behaviors and ideas inundate the most carefully planned societies. There will be times when, as Robert Burns famously wrote in “To a Mouse”:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Is there some lesson in its famous line adapted by William Faulkner for a title? Is there some pessimism in speaking "of mice and men" in the context of this poem and the droughts and floods of the past and present? “What are you saying?” you ask.
It’s good to plan, to scheme. Societies couldn’t sustain themselves without some planning. But individuals have little choice but to adapt. Droughts and floods, social and economic systems, and behavioral norms will change. In that famous poem, Burns notes that the mouse lives only in the present, but humans have both the past and future to keep in mind. His last stanza:
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
We know, thanks to people like Ault and colleagues and many other researchers that droughts have occurred, and others have informed us of widespread flooding that happened long before civilization established itself. We know from recent history that both drought and flood can overwhelm our infrastructure.
Consider this. The red rocks of Sedona and the Grand Canyon indicate that in the distant past desert conditions existed, that the American Southwest was very much like today’s environment, a land in a rain shadow, moisture blocked by mountains back then just as mountains block moisture from moving from ocean to land today. Then take a trip into the American Northeast, where you will see other red rocks, an indication that droughty conditions prevailed millions of years ago. Through all the good times and bad, extant life had little choice but to adapt the best it could. And you seem to have no choice other than to adapt, both to the fickleness of Mother Nature and to the inevitable change that new generations bring to their predecessor generations.
Yes, there are cycles. Yes, there are changes. If you can recognize what part of a either a social or natural cycle dominates your time, you have a better chance of survival. You don’t necessarily have to “guess an’ fear!” as Burns writes, but you certainly can anticipate. Of course, I would be naïve to suggest we can anticipate 500-year floods or 30-year droughts or on-the-spot political changes that sweep through a new generation unaware of the past, but I still hold to my oft-repeated statement: “What you anticipate is rarely a problem.”
*Ault, Toby R., et al. A Robust Null Hypothesis for the Potential Causes of Megadrought in Western North America, AMS, September 11, 2017. Online at https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0154.1
See also, Ault and St. George. The magnitude of Decadal and Multidecadal Variability in North American Precipitation. AMS. February 2010 (Vol. 23, No. 4).
Do the numbers. Thirty-four years of drought. The recent dryness in the region drained by the Colorado River isn’t close to a record. Then consider the opening statement in Ault’s abstract: “The western United States was affected by several megadroughts during the last 1200 years, most prominently during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; 800 to 1300 CE).” Ault and colleagues then note, “similar events are possible today….”
As I write this, the American East is experiencing flooding, mostly from a tropical storm that entered the country through the Gulf of Mexico. And more rain is on the way via a hurricane that will enter the country from the Atlantic. Too much rain vs. too little rain. Why can’t we just build a pipeline?
That suggestion is absurd for various reasons, including expense and lack of technology to control excessive runoff. But the main reason might be that humans have very, very short memories when it comes to natural events. And short memories reduce the will to act when there is no crisis. Anticipation isn't our strongest characteristic.
The East has been flooded before, and the West has been flooded, too. And both have experienced droughts. But weather is a daily phenomenon. We appear to suffer through the heat waves and the floods, do what we have to do to survive, and then acclimatize to the next weather. Seasons have seasoned us to change.
So, what’s a human race to do? After 5,000 years of civilization and untold efforts to control Nature, we’re seemingly still at the mercy of the weather. We started trying to tame the Tigris and Euphrates, progressed to taming the Nile (Not a bad job there), managed many of the rivers in Europe, only now started to control massive amounts of water with the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze, and worked for generations to make the Mississippi obey us. Yes, and then there’s the Hoover across the Colorado. Still, we can’t make the sky produce rain at our beckoning (unless you count local cloud seeding) and can’t stop a hurricane’s downpours.
There are limits to artificial controls that societies impose, but often fail to enforce. Those “thousand-year-” and “five-hundred-floods” will continue to inundate us. Those dry spells will exacerbate climates that have existed for millennia. But in our short-term memories, none of that matters. We will attempt to control what we cannot ultimately control.
Unfortunately, the same lack of control occurs on a purely human climate. As population increases, there will be times when behaviors and ideas inundate the most carefully planned societies. There will be times when, as Robert Burns famously wrote in “To a Mouse”:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Is there some lesson in its famous line adapted by William Faulkner for a title? Is there some pessimism in speaking "of mice and men" in the context of this poem and the droughts and floods of the past and present? “What are you saying?” you ask.
It’s good to plan, to scheme. Societies couldn’t sustain themselves without some planning. But individuals have little choice but to adapt. Droughts and floods, social and economic systems, and behavioral norms will change. In that famous poem, Burns notes that the mouse lives only in the present, but humans have both the past and future to keep in mind. His last stanza:
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
We know, thanks to people like Ault and colleagues and many other researchers that droughts have occurred, and others have informed us of widespread flooding that happened long before civilization established itself. We know from recent history that both drought and flood can overwhelm our infrastructure.
Consider this. The red rocks of Sedona and the Grand Canyon indicate that in the distant past desert conditions existed, that the American Southwest was very much like today’s environment, a land in a rain shadow, moisture blocked by mountains back then just as mountains block moisture from moving from ocean to land today. Then take a trip into the American Northeast, where you will see other red rocks, an indication that droughty conditions prevailed millions of years ago. Through all the good times and bad, extant life had little choice but to adapt the best it could. And you seem to have no choice other than to adapt, both to the fickleness of Mother Nature and to the inevitable change that new generations bring to their predecessor generations.
Yes, there are cycles. Yes, there are changes. If you can recognize what part of a either a social or natural cycle dominates your time, you have a better chance of survival. You don’t necessarily have to “guess an’ fear!” as Burns writes, but you certainly can anticipate. Of course, I would be naïve to suggest we can anticipate 500-year floods or 30-year droughts or on-the-spot political changes that sweep through a new generation unaware of the past, but I still hold to my oft-repeated statement: “What you anticipate is rarely a problem.”
*Ault, Toby R., et al. A Robust Null Hypothesis for the Potential Causes of Megadrought in Western North America, AMS, September 11, 2017. Online at https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0154.1
See also, Ault and St. George. The magnitude of Decadal and Multidecadal Variability in North American Precipitation. AMS. February 2010 (Vol. 23, No. 4).
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