Election in Ireland

Friends of mine around the world are talking about little but the US election this year, even though it’s several months away. There actually are 194 other countries in the world, though, and most of them have elections too – many of which are quite instructive, both in the way they parallel the US election and in ways they are very different.

Last Friday was Election Day here in Ireland – my first vote as a citizen -- and this election campaign, like that of the USA’s, is without precedent in recent memory. It’s a bit different here because we have a parliamentary system, vote for more than one person to represent our district, and have first and second choices that factor in when votes are tallied -- a system that allows for multiple parties that must work together in coalition. It has many advantages over the USA’s system, in which people choose between the least awful of two often-similar candidates, and one gains enormous power by some slim margin.

In our case, the two biggest parties are Fianna Fail (rhymes with fall, not fail) and Fine Gael (actually does rhyme with fail), and they each tend to get about 40 per cent of the vote, forming a majority coalition with one of the minor parties.

Still, the mood among the populace is similar – people are struggling and unhappy with the mainstream candidates. Fianna Fail governed during the crash of 2008, and most people think they did a terrible job – Ireland effectively went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the IMF and EU. The last election voters slammed Fianna Fail hard, and a coalition of Fine Gael and the Labour party took power. But they, too, have lost credibility with voters, trying to boost the government’s income with a series of extremely unpopular taxes.

Thus, just as in my native USA, dark-horse candidates are doing very well. Over there it means Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, independents running under the nominal banner of the major parties; here it means third parties and independents.

Sinn Fein has been the biggest beneficiary of this, the left-wing nationalist party is now garnering about half as many votes as the major parties – not able to control a government yet, but getting there. They have a lot of baggage, though – they were the political arm of the IRA during the terrorism of the 1970s and 80s, and remain the only party operating in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. They went legitimate a long time ago – it’s been almost two decades since the Good Friday accords effectively ended the “Troubles,” and former terrorist like Martin McGuinness even had dinner with Queen Elizabeth recently. Younger voters see them as the legitimate political party they are, but older voters have not forgotten Sinn Fein’s past, and the mainstream parties have refused to work with them.

Independents and minor parties like the Anti-Austerity Alliance or the Social Democrats – won more candidates than any party at all, meaning that a plurality of people now elected are local candidates promising to undo the recent actions of the major parties.

As I write this – with 34 of the 40 election counts complete and 146 of the Dail’s 158 seats filled -- the two “major” parties are major no longer, not only closely matched but both severely diminished in numbers. Ordinarily garnering 35 to 50 per cent of the vote, this time they won about 25 per cent each, with Sinn Fein taking 13 per cent, and independents and minor parties making up most of the rest.

Now comes the tricky part: all these candidates have to form a coalition government, and whatever agreement they managed to hammer out, it will be the strangest government in this country’s history. There are a few possibilities:

1.) the two main parties, rivals as long as the nation has existed and descended from the two sides of Ireland’s civil war, will be forced to go into coalition with each other; if you are American, picture all the mainstream Republicans forming a government with Hillary Clinton to stop Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

2.) Sinn Fein and all the minor parties will be forced to form a sweeping left-wing coalition; it’s possible, but seems quite fragile;

3.) One of the two major parties will have to join forces with Sinn Fein, which they have vowed never to do;

4.) There will be a hung parliament, and we’ll have another election soon.

I’ll have more to say on this later, but for the moment one thing is clear: here as in many countries, voters are overthrowing the political establishment in favour of radical change. What kind of change they get remains to be seen.  

 Photo: Streetcorner in Dublin.

Invasion of technology

Most readers of this blog know that I regularly read, and comment in, John Michael Greer's admirable blog The Archdruid Report. I almost never mention other web sites on this blog, but I thought some of the recent discussions there were worth mentioning, and I doubt he would mind if I reproduced my comments.

A few months ago JMG posted a fascinating essay, "The Shadows in the Cave," about our culture's obsession with everyone owning the latest technologies. It's almost taboo, he pointed out, for people not to have a television, mobile phone, microwave and many other gadgets, even though humans survived before these things were invented and many people get on quite well without them.

JMG also pointed out something I've often harped on here: that most people these days get all their experience of the world from screens and loudspeakers, which paints a certain picture of the outside world for them. Most people I know -- left or right, American or European, religious or not -- are different only in the brand of information provider they use, and all accept the information given to them as though it were real experience.

That led in turn to a productive debate in the comments, in which I said:

JMG,

I’ve been reading the last series of posts with great interest, and find they match my own experience. Rather than simply add my experiences to the long list here, I’d like to bring up a few related points.

Firstly, it’s not just that more people are increasingly adopting technology in their private lives – it’s that technology has invaded public spaces until it’s almost impossible to escape their influence. For example, I find it increasingly difficult to ride the bus, eat at a restaurant, work in an office, or relax in a coffee shop, without loud music blaring over loudspeakers, interfering with normal reading or conversation.

In our office there is a daily battle to get the pop music turned down, and the idea offends many people – “What would we listen to?” they ask. I invested in my own headphones to listen to something else, but this also makes conversation more difficult, and it takes away my right to silence.

The same is true of television screens. Just in the time we’ve lived in Ireland, it seems, more and more pubs have abandoned the conversation or sing-a-longs for which they were traditionally known; many have purchased wide-screen televisions, and more patrons just sit there staring at it. More and more restaurants too have a television on the wall, playing television while people are trying to eat. I have even seen offices that set up televisions on every wall – showing company propaganda rather than actual programming, but programming all the same.

Secondly, I notice that many people – especially in my native USA – regard adopting the latest technology not just as a fashion, but as a patriotic or religious duty. I hear many people talk about “supporting the economy” – meaning the money economy, a coalition of international corporations, beholden to no one -- as though they are tithing in church. I can’t tell you how often I hear people stare at their glowing rectangles and make announcements about how “the economy” is doing, as though they have sworn loyalty to it rather than to their family or community, and as though they have some control over it.

Finally – while I largely agree with you and everyone here about the dangers of technology, and have argued as much in my own life – I would argue that just using technology sparingly makes a big difference.

For example, I know many people who only watch one television programme, and gather at friends’ homes to watch it 12 times a year or however often it is on, and live the rest of their lives largely media-free. They find their television gatherings a powerful experience, partly because they are seeing it with others, but partly because they are not surrounded by such things all the time. For my part, I watch old black-and-white films with my daughter, and have written about their value in envisioning a low-tech future.

When our ancestors saw plays or operas, or my grandparents saw cinema in the 1930s, I suspect they felt a power and catharsis that few of us will ever know, precisely because what they experienced was so different from their daily life. Just as loudspeakers playing the same songs over and over prevent me from ever enjoying those songs again, so does constant exposure to television or media rob us of the ability to savour them.

Thank you for your posts,

Brian Kaller

 

Bonds of community

I take every chance I get to chat with people at the bus stop, at the shops in my village, and on the bus to work in Dublin; people don’t socialise as much these days, and our lives are the worse for it.

We become moral animals when we care about others as we do ourselves, and in most eras that wasn’t a problem. Whether in Stone Age tribes or bucolic villages, we lived in the constant presence of people like ourselves, with whom we shared a lifetime of memories and on whom we depend. You might have had conflicts with your neighbour, but after sharing three sacraments, a football championship, the rights to the nearby pasture and two great-grandmothers, you learn to get along. Relationships like this civilise us, and thousands of such threadlike connections, layer upon layer, cushion the weight of the world.

Today, though, we spend much of our lives alone even in a crowd, often insulated by headphones and absorbed in a screen of some kind, whether a lap-top, television or phone. In this protective bubble we find it easy to treat the icons on Facebook like the icons on a video game, or the cars on the road like moving images on a screen. We can fill online comment boxes or the space between our cars with language we would never use over a cup of tea, because we can now live in a world free of identity and consequences. As individuals we default to being self-absorbed, and now we have technology that allows us to stay that way.

People had drifted apart long before the digital revolution, though; 16 years ago sociologist Robert Putnam, in his seminal book Bowling Alone, compared survey data from across the decades, exploring how often people ate together, joined clubs, talked to neighbours and so on. Putnam looked at the USA, but his conclusions apply here as well, and they were dramatic and sweeping: Most traditional forms of human interaction have declined, and some have almost vanished.

Read that again: Most traditional forms of human interaction have declined, and some have almost vanished. 

“Human interaction” covers quite a bit of ground, of course, and Putnam goes through hundreds of pages of examples – any of which might seem tiny in isolation, but fit like mosaic pieces to portray a crisis. Over two decades, for example, the number of times people entertained friends at home had fallen by half. “Time diary” studies show that people spent a third less time socializing in 1995 than in 1965. Instances of family members vacationing together, going to church together, or “just sitting and talking,” as one poll put it, have all declined. Gradually and silently, hundreds of millions of neighbours became strangers.

Putnam’s 2000 work spawned a decade of journal papers and studies looking at various kinds of “social capital” and hot academic debates over its definition. Most of us, though, know it when we see it, and when we have it we live longer, feel better, are stronger, healthier, and have more meaningful lives when we are part of a close family or a loyal group of friends.

It’s more than your best mates, however – our lives are made up of thousands of tiny gestures like this every day, and ninety-nine out of a hundred fly right by us. We don’t think much about the pedestrian who shifts to one side to let us pass, the clerk who smiles at us, or the kids who walk around our property instead of through, but we coast on a sea of such courtesies, and where such moments disappear – say, in a violent inner-city neighbourhood – we immediately feel their absence.

 “Members of a community that follows the principle of generalized reciprocity – raking your leaves before they blow onto your neighbours' yard, lending a dime to a stranger for a parking meter, buying a round of drinks the week you earn overtime, keeping an eye on a friend's house, taking turns bringing snacks to Sunday school … find that their self-interest is served,” Putnam wrote.

That’s why I like to chat with people I meet; I’m putting pennies in a bank of social trust, from which we can all withdraw someday. When we do that we help regrow an older and real social network, the one that you don’t leave when you die.

Brassicas

Originally published in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper. 

Brassicas – the cruciferous vegetables of the cabbage family – made a long and fruitful journey from the scraggly sea kale of their ancestors; today they provide us with some of our healthiest, easiest and most versatile crops, bred for their leaves (cabbage, kale, bok choi), roots (kohlrabi), flowers (broccoli, cauliflower) seeds (mustard) and buds (Brussels sprouts).

Such crops particularly suit Ireland, as they like lots of sun and water but not too much warmth – our summers, in other words. Moreover, many of them continue to produce throughout the year, as our kale does. Thus, in our garden cabbages comprise about a third of our crop, and we’ve been gathering them in and using or preserving them for the last month.

One of the easiest ways of making cabbage, of course, is in colcannon: all you need is a cabbage, an onion, and a potato. Boil some potatoes until soft in the middle, and while they’re boiling dice some onions and chop up a cabbage – I dice my onions about a centimetre on the side and my cabbage about three centimetre chunks, so that the onions will cook faster, but it’s up to you.

Once the potatoes are boiled and out of the water you take a pan, coat the bottom with a thin layer of oil, put on medium heat and throw in the onions. Cook about a minute and then throw in the cabbage, and cook for a few minutes or until the onions are golden-brown and the cabbages cooked through. In the few minutes that they will take to cook, mash the potatoes.

Next, chop up about 20 grams of parsley, wash and chop finely, and throw into the pan to cook for a moment. Finally, add the mash and mix it all together for a meal rich in vitamins, mostly vegetables but with some potato to hold it together.

One of the best brassicas this time of year, of course, are Brussels sprouts, which in our garden have been less vulnerable to pests than other cabbages -- perhaps because they are raised above mud-level. We are just harvesting the last of ours, but you can harvest them any time from autumn to spring, making them ideal for keeping your family in fresh vegetables during the winter months.

Many people boil the goodness out of Brussels sprouts, so one of the best ways to cook them is to cut the larger ones in half, boil some water, set them in for exactly three minutes, and then add to the rest of the meal separately.

If you want a new way to cook Brussels sprouts that allows the best flavour and avoids overcooking, try this recipe I used on my own. You will need:
300g Brussels sprouts
200g leeks
50g beetroot
One strip of bacon
Five cloves of garlic
10g butter
Chinese five-spice powder
Vegetable stock cube

Boil some water, cut the large Brussels sprouts in half, and put them in for three minutes – you want to flash-boil them, take the boiling water out and put in a bit of cold water to stop the cooking process. Then you take a strip of rashers (bacon), cut it into pieces about a centimetre across, and fry them in a pan.

While that is frying, chop the leeks into one-centimetre pieces (make sure to wash them well first!) and slice some mushrooms half a centimetre across. Take 20g of beetroot and cut into cubes half a centimetre across. Finally, mince some garlic or chop it very finely. When the rasher pieces are cooked just enough to be edible but not yet firm, put in the mushrooms, leeks and beetroot. Sautee these together for a few minutes, then add the minced garlic and sautee for another minute or so.

Dissolve a vegetable stock cube in about 20 ml of boiling water, and mix well. Add that to the mix with about 10 ml of lemon juice, so the mixture begins to sautee for a minute. Add a dash of five-spice powder; it’s available at most supermarkets, a mix of star anise, cloves, cinnamon, pepper and fennel seeds. Finally, add the Brussels sprouts and mix it all together. The result should be savoury, garlicky, tangy and just a bit spicy.

The cabbage you don’t use, of course, you should preserve through the winter, and the classic way of preserving cabbage, though, is by pickling it, either through the European method of sauerkraut, or through its spicier Asian version of kim chee.

To make sauerkraut, find a cylindrical container and a lid slightly smaller across than the container, to that it can slide down the interior with little air in-between – the cabbage has to be squashed down in salt water away from oxygen, but air still has to escape. Alternately, you could use a mayonnaise or other glass jar, stuff with sauerkraut to the rim and leave the lid on, securely but not tightly. Finely shred a cabbage and put a few handfuls of the shredded cabbage in the container, and pound it down with something heavy like a rolling pin.

Then sprinkle some salt onto the cabbage – about 50 g to the kilo – and repeat the process with another few handfuls until your container is full. Then fill the container with water until it just covers the top of the cabbage/salt mix. Put the lid on and place the container someplace warm to ferment. The cabbage should begin to ferment right away, and gradually fill with water that escapes from the cabbage. It will gradually turn from cabbage to sauerkraut over about a month, but you can dig in at any point, eat some and put the rest back. Just make sure to keep the cabbage away from oxygen.

Kim chee works in much the same way, but soaking the cabbage overnight in a salt brine – I use 50g of salt per kilo of cabbage – and the next morning draining it.

Then you rinse it and mix in a spicy paste, often with slivers of carrots or radishes, before pounding it into jars and leaving a lid on loosely.
My paste contained 10g ginger, 50g garlic, 20g hot pepper flakes, and 20g fish sauce for two kilos of cabbage.

With no electricity or technology, sauerkraut and kim chee allow you to have vitamin-rich vegetables all through the winter, straight from the pantry, until next year’s garden comes alive again.

Top photo: Red cabbage from our garden

Bottom photo: My kim chee.

Weather that reminds us to give thanks

As many times as I’ve seen the wind whistle across our land in the Bog of Allen, I’ve never before felt as nervous as I have today, as the giant trees around our property are bending alarmingly in the gale. Our cement house has actually groaned in the intense wind, which blew down a tree across our driveway recently and ripped our greenhouse door apart.

Our heat pump gave out and the house is cold, the road to our house has patches of water so wide it is almost impassable, and our chickens are barely able to step out of the coop without being blown down. We do have a shed-full of wood for the fire, along with a pile of turf from the bog -- but there’s been nothing but rain, and that soaks the turf and slows down the chopping. I’m supposed to be at work in Dublin right now, but our car broke down and the bus never showed up. Thankfully, our internet and phone works, so I could post this. Basically, though, it’s not my best morning.

Then again, I’m thankful we don’t live on the streets of Kilkenny yesterday, as the swelling river burst through the streets, smashing open the doors to pubs and businesses. I’m pleased that we have electricity, as thousands of people here in Ireland were left without it after recent storms. I’m thankful we did not have to abandon our homes over Christmas, or come home to a devastated neighbourhood. I’m thankful we were not on one of the flights that had to be cancelled, or on the roads that were completely impassable.

I have friends in the UK, where 2,000-year-old towns – founded by Romans – have seen their roads become canals. This has been the wettest December on record there, in a country where records tend to go back a ways – 341 millimetres of rain in one single day in Cumbria. More than 5,000 homes were flooded in Cumbria and Lancashire counties alone, and tens of thousands of homes lost electricity, and many local buildings looked like they had been bombed by the Blitz – including a 200-year-old pub whose interior was hollowed out by the rushing waters. Thankfully, local people are pitching in heroically to save as many homes and businesses as they can --- including many Syrian refugees, repaying the favour done to them when they were allowed to settle nearby.

I grew up where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, two of the largest rivers in the world, come together, and those rivers are wide and dangerous at the best of times. In 1993, though, I remember an unprecedented flood that eliminated entire towns and put large areas underwater. I interviewed former residents holding their mayoral elections in what were essentially refugee camps, to be mayor of a community rather than a physical town. I remember driving down a road until it stopped, seeing nothing but water all around and a church steeple poking out of the water in the distance.

It was called the 500-year-flood, as it was only supposed to happen that often. Then they saw a similar flood in 2008 and again this year. I have family who live along the rivers, patrolling the levees and preparing for the worst. I’m seeing images of homes ripped from their foundations, wild brown waters rushing through neighbourhoods, and towns along the river that survived previous floods fear they might have to abandon their homes for the last time.

A freak storm in the North Pole – which after all, only a thousand miles or so from us in Ireland – has pushed the temperature above freezing. The North Pole, which is supposed to remain below freezing all summer, is above freezing on New Year’s Eve.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how we are seeing more and more changes in the weather, but that it’s difficult to prove it’s connected to climate change. What we do know is that scientists predicted this sort of thing – unusual weather, going to extremes, at odd times of year – more and more often, and it’s happening all over the world.

When I see references to climate change on my social media feed, though, they tend to fall into the language of many activists and reporters --- the language of Hollywood catastrophes. Climate change becomes something imminent, perhaps happening The Day After Tomorrow. It becomes global, something that everyone pays attention to. It becomes total and dramatic, even exciting, as in a thousand disaster movies. Most of all, when this hypothetical thing hits, it will be undeniable. And this thing called “climate change,” we’re told, will “hit” – a word that implies something sudden and dramatic – very soon, so we have only a short time left to “stop it.” The clock is ticking. It’s all up to us now.

 I’m going to be harsh here: I suspect that we talk about climate change this way because we’re social primates with instincts primarily focused on our own status and not global abstract problems. Our better angels – our logical analysis of problems, our compassionate desire to help others – are forever warped by the gravitational pull of our primate drive to make ourselves look good within our social group.

Let's say you anticipate an imminent disaster, whether climate change or anything else. Of course you would feel a bond with other believers, and feel like an elite blessed with special knowledge. You would feel frustrated by the majority that don't seem to care about the disaster about to befall them. You have a reason for getting up in the morning, because we have become one of the heroes of the greatest story ever told. The urgency of the ticking clock allows us to ignore many smaller needs and considerations, perhaps including other people.

In short, it's tempting to become just like any number of other political groups these days -- angry, insular, and impotent. It's easy to be sucked into the trap of complaining about the "sheeple" that have been Brainwashed by the Mainstream Media -- something I hear from ecological friends, gun owners, conspiracy theorists and many other groups. It's seductive to simply read posts online or "like" them on social media, becoming the ecological equivalent of armchair generals or Monday-morning coaches. Finally, it's tempting to continue to anticipate the day everything will "hit," and people were forced to acknowledge you were right. 

But climate change isn’t a global tragedy happening someday; it’s a million small tragedies now, and more tomorrow. There is no turning it around at this point – only coping with what is to come. No clock is ticking, and there will never be a starting point, any more than the Industrial Revolution or the Decline of Rome had a starting point.

What we can do is anticipate the crises that are likely to occur in your local area in the next few decades, and prepare. You can help make sure the buses run on time, no matter the weather, and perhaps create your own unofficial bus / carpool service with a neighbour’s SUV or van. You can stock up supplies for the next emergency, and prepare for when your power goes out. You can make sure all your elderly neighbours are well, and keep visiting them. You can make sure that your office remains flexible with people who are stranded or unable to get to work, and that those people are not deprived of their livelihood.

You can set up child-minding arrangements in your neighbourhood, creating a “tree” of people who can watch children on short notice when the need arises. If you have access to land, you can cover it with fast-growing trees that will keep supplying your neighbours with firewood. You can gather with neighbours to help them rebuild, even if you don’t like them. You can let cousins or friends stay with you, and always have spare food and supplies ready and a plan to put into effect as soon as the need arises.

You can think of it as being a Londoner during the Blitz or a movie hero preparing the townspeople for a disaster, if that helps you. You need to actually help, though, and not expect to be thanked – and understand that, unlike most movie disasters, this one won’t build to a climax and be “all over,” but will crop up again frequently in our lifetimes. Your neighbours might not know about your service, but they don’t need to – they will be warm, dry and fed.

And we can realise how great things are right now. I just came in from chopping wood and wrote this by the fire. I have a day filled with small problems that need to be dealt with eventually, but for the moment, I’m in a warm and dry home with electricity and broadband, a pantry full of food and a family. We leave troubled days like these better people and feeling blessed.

The latest chapter

Six years ago, I wrote about an unusual series of floods across Ireland; rivers that ordinarily crept gently under towns began crawling up the high stone walls that bind them, and spreading over the fields of many farmers. Other floods damaged towns across the Irish Sea in England – wiping out bridges that had stood for hundreds of years, creating a state of emergency as rural communities were isolated by floodwaters.

I remember riding my daily bus to Dublin that day, crossing a town where a stone bridge crosses a deep rift through the middle of town. At the bottom of the trench lies the River Liffey, surrounded by thickets of trees and brush on either side; in rainy seasons, though, the river expands to the town walls on either side. During the 2009 floods, however, the river did not just reach the stone walls – they climbed them, higher and higher each day, until the raging waters lapped dangerously close to the roads at the top of the wall. It was Ireland’s worst flood in 800 years.

In the end, of course, it passed, after killing several people, cutting off water supplies (ironically) for up to ten days in places, and straining the national budget already hit hard by the 2008 crash and a year away from pleading for a bailout.

Two-and-a-half years later, though, we got a summer that never was – months of incessant rain, until the locals gathered in the local pub had to speak up over the hammering on the roof. “I can’t remember a year like this. Ever,” one old man in our pub told me, in the tweed jacket and flat cap. He had lived all his 67 years in our village, and was born into an era before electricity and cars appeared here. “I talked to my neighbour down the road today – he’s 85 years old, and he said he’d never seen a year like this. He thought 1947 was a bad year, but it was nothing like this.”

Everyone here said the same: farmers, neighbours, bus drivers and shop ladies. As useful as it is to read the record-breaking weather numbers, it also helps to talk to people who have spent much of their time outdoors for decades and ask them how the air feels. In the end, of course, it passed, and we sighed in relief – we cut the grass that had grown higher than our heads, to wet to be mown, gleaned what we could from the garden, and life went back to normal.

Now, in 2015, water levels on the Shannon are expected to reach 2009 levels, according to the Irish Independent. In the town of Athlone, the river burst its banks and flooded through homes, bringing raw sewage with it – I’m told people got around town by rowboat. On Irish television, our weather lady’s apocalyptic report has gone viral. 

The canal along our home has not done the same, but the lashing rain has been near-constant here. Our power went off a few times, and our heat pump is not working, meaning that we need to burn a lot more firewood and peat – but that too is wet, and must dry over the fire before it can burn in it. In other words, it’s an interesting Christmas again.

It will end, of course, and some people will have to move, other people will have to rebuild, and most people will forget, and go back to imagining themselves to be in control.

I remember well living in Missouri during the Flood of '93, when hundreds of people worked to build a wall of sandbags between the river and Jefferson City. I remember driving with a friend through wooded country and having to stop the car suddenly when the trees ended -- there was water almost to the horizon, with telephone poles and electrical towers poking through here and there.

I visited my old state in 2008, when highways across the floodplain were closed, covered either by the second 500-year flood in 15 years or by animals driven out of their habitat by the waters. In Missouri the river settlements and levees may only have been a few decades old, and people could chalk up a flood like that of '93 to the chaotic river's cycle. Here, though, towns date to the Middle Ages, if not to Roman or Celtic times, and the walls lining the rivers were set at their heights long ago and for a reason.

When modern people try to gauge whether climate change is real, they run into several problems. We no longer live with a sense of our surroundings as our ancestors did, but spend much of our time in a bubble of regulated temperature and lighting. Even when we allow ourselves to feel the elements, we do so for a narrow sliver of time; until recently most people only lived to forty years or so, and while we have almost doubled that figure lately, our lives still flicker on and off quickly compared to those trees or turtles.

We have been able to stretch our understanding far beyond our own lives, though, thanks to a million or so un-thanked researchers each testing bits of the past: pockets of prehistoric air trapped in ice, pollen grains in lake mud, bones and branches and beetle wings, and bits of carbon left behind when an errant subatomic particle jumped its atomic ship. In short, experts of all kinds, of dozens of faiths and countries, have come up with a story of the past – and in broad strokes it all fits like a particularly horrific jigsaw.

The story they tell us is not that carbon dioxide traps the heat of the sun like greenhouse panes – that was known around the time of the US Civil War. Nor is it the fact that our industry and modern machines are flooding the air with carbon dioxide and will change the climate – that has been predicted for more than a century.

 Such information even entered into pop culture long ago. I have on my shelf a book that once came free with Life magazine in 1955 called The World We Live In – it was to promote science among young Americans in an age when both Life and science education were commonplace and uncontroversial. (1) It casually states that pollution from cars and factories had boosted CO2 levels by 10 per cent -- those were the days! -- and that the world would get much hotter in the years ahead. At the time, saying that humans would someday walk on the moon would have been more contentious.

While it did not appear the most urgent issue at the time, references to carbon emissions remained in the mainstream; in 1965, for example, President Lyndon Johnson said in a presidential speech that “this generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” (2)

In the 1980s, when a growing body of data caused scientists to escalate their warnings, Time magazine devoted cover stories to the issue, and in 1990 George Bush – the first one – said that “we all know that human activities are changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in unprecedented ways,” although he balked at most changes to deal with the problem. (3) Such pronouncements stood on a small but sufficient body of evidence – enough to convict, as it were. The world’s experts had the ice-core and balloon-test equivalents of witnesses, motive and fingerprints, and world authorities listened, from the United Nations to Pope John Paul II.

Over the next twenty years, though, three things happened. First, the evidence multiplied to many times what it was before, both because we got better studies, clearer samples and so on, and because the phenomenon itself continued, offering more looming tragedy to study. Instead of just the witnesses, motive and confession, we now also had the equivalent of DNA evidence, forensics evidence, a signed confession and video footage of the crime. You had the accused changing their plea to “guilty.” You had the ghost of the murder victim rising from the dead to point a finger at the accused. You had the accused killer holding press conferences announcing exactly how they committed the murder. In short, we went from 99 per cent certain to 100 per cent.

The second was that, as evidence of the crisis increased, support for fixing it decreased, until elites and media pundits – a minority in Europe, a majority in the USA – claimed the massive changes around them were a hoax, a secret conspiracy of scientists of many nations and faiths, their own eyes, and in some cases, themselves from a few years earlier. The argument usually ran like this:
1.) the weather was not changing,
2.) the cause of the change was unknown,
3.) we had nothing to do with the change,
4.) the change would turn out better for us, and
5.) the weather was not changing.

For the last two decades most environmental activists have continued fighting the good fight, although usually claiming – as with most issues -- that “we” have only x number of years to stop climate change “or it will be too late.” The number of years seemed to vary, for every new season and study seemed to force a re-evaluation, and the “too late” part rang hollow, for climate change has no starting point and nowhere to put a countdown.

A third thing changed, though – more people realised that global warming wouldn’t necessarily bring warmth, but chaos. Not a steady progression in a single, if sometimes inconvenient direction, nor a Hollywood apocalypse to which we could count down. It would mean sudden swings to extremes that we could not predict and for which we could never prepare. Even more disturbingly, this might be a return to the normal state of climate.

To understand this, it helps to understand that ice ages were not, as some people imagine, a planet covered in ice. The world probably did see something like that 700 million years ago, a Snowball Earth that might have forced the then-planet of germs to organise into bodies as fortresses against the elements. Since then, though, the planet has been what we would consider tropical, as in every dinosaur illustration you’ve ever seen. Only a few million years ago did the world begin to see ice, and even then it has swung between two moderate states. Every ten thousand years or so the planet gets cooler and the ice caps expand down to Spain and Kentucky – the ice age part -- and then they retreat to the small caps we know today.

The cooler stretches sound extreme to us because they covered today’s Western and prosperous nations where so many of us live, but remember that even now, most humans live elsewhere, and we didn’t just lose potential land. Places like Chihuahua or the Sudan might have been more habitable than today, and the Caribbean and Indonesia would turn from island chains to vast rainforests; in terms of habitable space, we might gain as much in an Ice Age as we would lose.

It also helps to understand that humans did not merely endure weather, as we once thought, but changed it long before we discovered the fuel potential of fossils. US histories once imagined Native Americans wandering sparsely around a virgin wilderness in loincloths, while European histories rarely mentioned the hot and cold periods that had such power over European culture for hundreds of years. A detailed history of Britain, for example, might have mentioned the “frost fairs” on the River Thames, without explaining why the Thames no longer freezes.

Over the last couple of decades, though, researchers began to fit various pieces together --as chronicled in books like William Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues and Petroleum and Charles Mann’s 1493 – and concluded that humans have been changing the climate since the end of the last ice age. We imagine humans doing this in modern farming nations like Britain and China, but ancient humans farmed almost everywhere they settled; in what is now Arkansas and Nigeria, New Guinea and the Amazon. By cutting down most of the world’s trees, humans sent a constant trickle of carbon dioxide into the sky and prevented it from coming back, and that subtle shift, say some researchers put off the ice age that would otherwise have been coming back right about now.

When large numbers of farmers suddenly stop farming and the forests return, the effects can be seen in global weather. After Genghis Khan killed tens of millions of farmers, the climate noticeably cooled, as it did after the Black Death cut the European population by a third. When Europeans first reached the Americas, they brought ten thousand years’ worth of diseases to which Natives had no exposure, and an estimated 95 per cent of the population died, turning what had been a densely populated landscape into an empty land. And once again, the forests grew back, and the resulting Little Ice Age iced over the Thames – and much of Europe – for the next 300 years.

The fact that we started changing the climate long ago, though, shouldn’t make us take the current crisis less seriously; rather, it should serve as a cautionary tale. If medieval farmers could do this much by burning trees, releasing the sunlight and carbon drawn down from the last century, how much more are we doing by unleashing hundreds of millions of years? What we are doing, in fact, is flooding the air with the atmosphere of forests that existed before dinosaurs, from when a dimmer sun shone over a thicker atmosphere and giant insects under a fern-tree canopy. When we drive, fly, and use engines of any kind, mixing our own air with that of an alien planet.

This brings us to an additional problem, one that we are only slowly beginning to realise. When the climate changed in the past – say, at the end of the ice age – it did so far more quickly than we realised, perhaps in a few generations. Climate change does not creep along slowly over generations, but swings from one state to another wildly, and the last several thousand years have been comparatively mild and moderate. We have lived in a stretch of green and pleasant land not just as long as any individual can remember, but as long as there was recorded history.

It seems a long time to us, but it’s a blink in geological time, merely a summer in the ice-age oscillation. Humans have had modern brains for perhaps ten times longer than that, and have walked upright perhaps 400 times longer. In this ten-millennia stretch of warm and stable temperatures, though, we have gone from our normal foraging to fields of crops, to cities, world wars and plastics, and multiplied our numbers perhaps 7,000 times above normal. Now that we have manipulated carbon dioxide levels as much as any ice age – just in the opposite direction – we might return to a wildly oscillating climate.

In Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent 2002 article “Ice Memory,” climatologist J. P. Steffens -- who studies ice cores from his base on the frozen wastes of Greenland-- says our frenzied growth in this one era could only happen because we have been fortunate enough to have a period of calm in the storm.

“Why didn't human beings make civilisation fifty thousand years ago?" he asked. "You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, 'Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial — ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilisations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started then. But they had no chance.'” (4)

Climatologist James Hansen echoed the same sentiment a few years later. “… civilization developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12 000 years in duration,” he said. “That period is about to end.” (5)

Of course, all these statements were made before the most potentially serious sign of the future -- bubbles of methane released from melting ice -- were seen frothing up from under the Arctic at an alarming rate. Most of the change so far has been from carbon dioxide; methane is dozens of times worse. It’s a realisation with breath-taking implications for the whole idea of climate change. Rather than a steady climb upwards, easy to predict, track and prove, we could face a chaotic series of extremes in all directions, depending on where we are.

Convincing people that the climate is changing presents an obvious difficulty; since climate is simply the average of thousands of days of weather, any of which is unpredictable in itself, change is difficult to see except by careful noticing over time. Even then such changes could be determined if the change was steady and predictable; if the temperatures, wherever you are, were to rise one degree per decade, then after a decade or two the world could have taken readings and had an answer before televisions were invented. When the change means wilder swings, though, predicting the effects of climate change becomes even more difficult, as does convincing people.

No one could ever blame climate change for any one weather event, any more than one could ever blame tobacco companies for any one smoker’s lung cancer. You could, however, look broadly at the number of smokers who die of lung cancer, and compare them with the number of non-smokers, and you can calculate a certain per cent increase in the risk of cancer. In the same way, we can look at a typical climate and calculate what we are seeing that is unusual, as groups of experts occasionally do at NASA and other places – and show that, yes, the baseline normal of the planet is changing.

As our towns and fields here flood, the world has signed a new climate agreement, and while I can praise the people who worked so hard for this, I don’t assume it will change human nature, or reverse what has been done so far. Part of the problem might be our expectations -- when activists push for agreements like this, too often they invoke visions of a Hollywood apocalypse familiar from generations of bad movies. Then, they say, we have only X number of years to “stop” climate change before it “hits” – all language that evokes Hollywood disasters.

The reality might look more like what we are seeing -- a few houses flooded that were never before. Towns slowly retreating from some rivers and most seashores. Christmas season a bit "worse" and more traditional than they used to be. I would venture that the Long Emergency might take lifetimes, long stretches of normal life punctuated by moments of crisis.

I'm not that concerned about Manhattan flooding, a fear that Al Gore brought up in his Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Powerpoint presentation – Manhattan is not more important than a hundred other towns and cities in my native USA. I’m more concerned that crop failure would become commonplace, until even fewer young men want to become farmers, or that farms become too great a risk for financiers, or that even homesteaders don't know what to plant this year.

It’s entirely possible that, a hundred years from now, in the relocated population centres and capitals, one political faction might still be insisting that nothing has changed, while the other keeps insisting we have only ten years left.

If I had to hazard a bet, I would bet that the next few decades will look like the last few years here – a minor disaster that destroys a few people’s lives, raises insurance rates, releases and spreads various kinds of waste, passes the problem onto Team Taxpayer. And everyone will go back to their lives, believing themselves to be in control.

1 - The World We Live In, Page 71.

2 – Lyndon Johnson, Feb. 8.1965

3 – George H.W. Bush’s address to the IPCC, Feb. 5, 1990.

4 – Steffens quoted in Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “Ice Memory” in New Yorker magazine, January 6, 2002.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/07/020107fa_FACT

5 - “Climate change and trace gases,” James Hansen et al, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1856/1925.full

6 - Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, and R. Ruedy, 2012: Perception of climate change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.

Parts of this article were taken from my articles "Days of Future Past" and "And the Waters Prevailed," the first two times this happened.