She had just started as a producer at WNYC the year of the crash. She couldn’t afford to go home, but she did anyway. That was the Thanksgiving after the Big One, after the run on the banks and the deflation of prices. The suicide rate was at 39.3 per 100,000 people. Nearly one-third of American families qualified as “food insecure.” She never forgot going to the bank, putting in her card, and seeing it spat out. She called the bank and a cheerful artificial voice told her that the next available agent would take her call in thirty-seven hours. She remembered the scenes of chaos: the police managing the lines outside one of the failed banks with their guns drawn, the hand grenades thrown into Goldman Sachs. In Jimmy’s Corner, a boxer bar near Times Square, she listened to a pack of coked-up finance bros discuss the most effective and popular ways to commit suicide. (She remembers thinking suicide was a good option for them.) Overnight, the tech companies decamped to Amsterdam and the financial services industry to Connecticut compounds. The Producer’s husband found a better rate out of the Buffalo airport, so they drove up from the city at 3:30 in the morning. They landed in Iowa in the afternoon, exhausted.
The panic of the unfolding crisis had not so much cooled as normalized by Thanksgiving. Each crisis of confidence in the markets, staggering in just after the last, eroded a little further the security of the system as a whole. Her husband’s graphic design work had dried to a trickle, and looking for a job was harder than any job: the exhaustion of drifting into despair, then lugging himself out of it.
The cousins ran in a pack around the property. To her daughter, who had only ever known the cramped spaces of tiny Brooklyn apartments, the Big House was still a magical place. The idea that there could be houses with so many rooms that some of them were empty seemed like something from a show. The fields outside, ragged and bare as they were in November, lightly dusted with snow, seemed as good as infinity. The Producer’s nephew was unusually quiet, mostly sitting on his own and staring at the television in a kind of daze. Earlier that year he had been sent home from school with pink eye, or what everybody thought was pink eye. His mom kept putting in the drops like the pharmacist told her to. There wasn’t a lot of yellow gunk around the eye, so she thought the drops were working. She couldn’t take him to the local doctor anyway. She couldn’t afford the deductible. A few days later, because she didn’t want to take a day off work, she brought the boy to the emergency room. They took one look, rushed him past the waiting room, and attached him to intravenous antibiotics. It wasn’t pink eye. It was periorbital cellulitis. The poor boy went blind in his left eye. The bill came to $43,000. He might have had neurological damage, too, but her sister didn’t have the money to run the test.
The sisters didn’t talk about money. The subject was too tense. The Producer was hanging on in New York. The Ram dealership hadn’t fired her sister but they cut everybody’s wages.
That year, for something different, their mother roasted a couple of chickens from the yard, but they still had the tater crumble and the nutmeg mac and cheese, the mashed potatoes, with gravy, the bread stuffing, and beans and peas and beets and corn and carrots and shredded cabbage cooked with pork. Then after that there was the tusenbladstårta and also Jell-O because it was the boy’s favorite.
They had a lot to be grateful for. As they gathered around the table in the long dining room, the children were growing. Nobody was out on the streets. They had enough to eat. They were the lucky ones.
This book draws on all the best available models of the future—economic forecasts, agronomic projections, established battle plans, algorithms from political scientists, historical patterns from scholars of civil war, and so on. But the climate change models that follow are vastly more concrete and precise than anything else in this book. They don’t predict the future; they portray it. The first climate model appeared in 1967, created by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald, and it remains more or less completely accurate. They predicted that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise the temperature of the atmosphere by about 2°C. We have collectively increased CO2 in the atmosphere by 50 percent since the 1880s and the temperature has risen by nearly 1°C.
Knowing the general trend is not the same as knowing the outcome. Manabe himself described the limited power of his model: “Models have been very effective in predicting climate change, but have not been as effective in predicting its impact on ecosystems and human society.” That climate change exists and will produce higher temperatures and rising sea levels is not debatable. The consequences of warming temperatures and rising sea levels on people remain largely unknown because our reactions are not yet set: How will nations and states mitigate climate change? How will communities adapt? What are the limitations of adaptation?
Bernhard Schauberger, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, understands the oversimplification of most models of climate change. For one thing, “there is no such thing as a global temperature,” he points out. For convenience, everybody says that the global mean temperature rise will be between 4° and 6°C, but the rise is greater closer to the poles, and the rise in the temperate zones will be more rapid than in tropical zones. Higher temperatures lead to more heat waves, more droughts. But can you blame climate change when a fire consumes a small town in California? No one can say directly. It’s like smoking. No doctor can say that if you smoke you will certainly get cancer, that the cigarettes gave you cancer. But the doctors do know that if you smoke, the chances of cancer are much higher.
Extremity is on its way. Or, rather, “what is now extreme will be normal in fifty years,” Schauberger says. The Indian monsoon was very predictable forty or fifty years ago. It is no longer. The same movement into chaos is happening in the United States. The atmosphere becomes less predictable, producing long periods without precipitation, followed by torrential rains. The July 2012 drought is the most recent example of what extreme weather can do to agricultural systems. The losses due to drought that year were estimated at $30 billion. The direct cost was a 6 percent increase in the price of international food commodities. The price of corn rose 50 percent and that of soybeans 35 percent. That was a once-in-a-generation drought, although “once-in-a-generation” does not mean what it once meant. Already, the dramatic warming trend over the past four decades has led to devastating flash droughts in the high plains and the prairies.
Jerry Hatfield is the laboratory director of the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames, Iowa, and he has been with the USDA for thirty-five years. He has lived through the great realization about climate change: “When I graduated with my PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Davis, I was trying to figure out the impact of cooling temperatures on agriculture.” Back in the seventies, they were worried about the return of glaciers. “If you stay around long enough, you can work both sides of the issues,” he says.
At first, even as the rise in temperature began to register, it was unclear whether increases in heat would damage agriculture. In the 2000s, temperature increases offset the effect of CO2. (CO2 is good for plants, “weeds in particular.”) Since then, each subsequent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, has grown more and more grim. The most recent report from the IPCC is a plea for keeping the level of warming below 2°C and a warning that the worst impacts may be inevitable after 2030.
The rising heat poses a problem particularly for commodity crops like corn, rice, and soybeans. Organic enzymes don’t function beyond 40°C. The primary effect of heat is to deprive plants of water, lowering biomass and yields. Heat results in senescence of leaves—aging before they have reached their potential. High temperature levels affect germination and pollination. In 2012, during the drought year, western Kansas and Nebraska were so hot that even irrigated fields could not maintain enough water to keep the plants out of water stress. “They just could not physically pump enough water through the plant,” Hatfield says. “What we think is that if we continued on these trends of increased temperature, variability, and precipitation, past 2050 we’re going to have much more adaptation.”
Heat harms wheat, too. “On wheat, what we find is that there won’t be any grain on the ear,” Hatfield observes. High heat doesn’t hurt perennial crops like fruit. But the lack of lower temperatures does. Perennial crops in the Central Valley of California require a certain number of chilling hours. They have to be exposed to temperatures below 7°C before they will flower the next spring. These trees can no longer meet the number of hours required to get an effective “fruit set.” Hatfield notes that “if it takes thirty years to breed a perennial tree—say, a pear or a cherry—this could be quite catastrophic in terms of fruit production. The question is: Do you move perennial orchards? Or do you think about adaptation strategies? Can we chemically treat that tree to think it’s been chilled? What do we do with this process to understand the dynamics of what’s going on?”
Vegetables will survive: “They can be moved around. There are strategies that are there,” Hatfield says, but overall, climate change will wreak havoc across the world’s farms. When waters rise and fields flood, roots have difficulty getting oxygen. Fungi and pathogens like heat. Diseases that tend to die off in cold winters will persist year-round. Livestock suffer in heat. The milk production of cows decreases.
Farmers will adapt to climate. That’s what farmers do. And do not underestimate the adaptive capacity of the American farmer. In the first third of the twentieth century, the average corn yield was 1.6 metric tons per hectare. Now it is approaching 9.5 metric tons per hectare. For many commodity crops, adaptation is already underway. The rice agronomists and producers started to notice that they were getting lower yields with higher temperatures, so they selected for rice varieties that pollinate during the early morning. They can do the same for wheat and barley. But corn doesn’t work that way. In corn, the pollen has to migrate from the tassel to the silks, a three foot distance. “The real impact is on the pollination phase,” Hatfield says. “You got these little pollen grains out there in the air as they travel from the male to the female part of the plant. If they’re exposed to high temperatures, that tends to destroy their viability.” In corn, temperatures above 30°C have a negative impact. So if they’re pollinating in the afternoon at 35°C, they will fail. Hatfield points out that, “sometimes, the high temperatures are coupled with extremely dry environments, so that pollen grain gets desiccated as well. That’s where you end up with bare spots on the corncob.” Corn is to food what plastic is to the material world: it’s used in sweeteners, food fillers, emulsifiers, preservatives, adhesives. Since the invention of high-fructose corn syrup in 1958, corn has dominated the American food system as a whole. Any substantial impact on corn production will affect the entire food supply chain.
Rising temperatures also cause droughts, or, in the agronomist’s phrase, the heat “increases atmospheric demand.” Water leaves the plant with a higher transpiration rate. In 2012, farmers had to access the water in the Ogallala Aquifer, which is not a sustainable resource. “There is a concern about how long the water will last,” Hatfield says. “The Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies the great plains from South Dakota all the way to Texas, has been shrinking over the past decades. That has forced producers to go to drip irrigation rather than full-scale sprinkler irrigation, but that water’s not replenished. That’s primordial water. It’s not even well understood how it ended up there in the first place.” Huge amounts of water currently used in American agriculture are nonrenewable: “Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” Hatfield says. It’s not possible to adapt to no water.
American farmers, in their brilliance, will probably be able to adapt to rising temperatures, and even to increases in variability of water. What scares Hatfield is the chart of May–June precipitation compared against July–August precipitation. “Those patterns are unlike anything we’ve seen in 125 years,” he says. “We’re kind of in uncharted territory.”
The great innovative splurge in agriculture since the end of the Second World War, the Green Revolution, resulted from increased genetic material, increased inputs from nitrogen, and refined pesticides. A stable climate made all of those innovations possible. With a stable climate, innovative farmers could breed for higher nitrogen uptake. “There seems to be a tradeoff between high yield and high stability,” says Hatfield, who is pessimistic. High-yield crops have higher sensitivity to drought and heat.
How can you adapt to inconsistency? How can you adapt to what you can’t imagine? Adaptation requires time and consistency. Designing new crop cycles takes thirty years or more. You can do them in ten or fifteen, Hatfield says, if you rush. “When Monsanto releases a new variety, it has been tested for quite a long time, and this is a fundamental problem with adaptation. The speed of climate change may be faster than breeding can cope with.” The crisis in American farming will be an innovation trap. “One of the key components of adaptation is that you need to know what to adapt to. So, is it to one degree of climate change? Is it two? Three? Four?” The best adaptation, and also the easiest, would be to stop climate change. The easiest adaptation is the least likely.
Stable yields have already started to move north. Heat-tolerant cultivars, drought-tolerant cultivars, and expanded irrigation are all in the works. But the larger part of agricultural land in the United States is rain-fed. “What are the degrees of freedom that we’re going to have? Is the environment going to be such that we won’t be able to cope?” Hatfield asks. The real danger is unpredictability itself. “Mother nature is a very fickle lady,” he says. “Producers ask me all the time, ‘What’s normal anymore?’ I tell them basically we’re out on the fringes. Producers say ‘Yeah, I already know that. What do I do? What do I do about this beast that’s staring me in the face whenever I plant a crop?’ ” Their current anxiety is all under the assumption that the predictive models stay within historical limits. The farther into the future you look, the higher the inconsistency, the greater the variability, the more intense the vulnerability.
The consequences of agricultural instability will reach far beyond America’s borders. American abundance spills out all over the rest of the world. The United States is, by far, the world’s largest exporter of food. The catastrophe of a drought on the world’s 800 million subsistence farmers would be extreme, a famine. The great gift of America’s agricultural ingenuity is reaching its apogee. “The rate at which we’re changing, that may be quicker than what we anticipated,” Hadfield suggests. “It’s tough to see where we go fifty or a hundred years from now.”
Multiple droughts in a row are not unknown to the Midwest. The 1930s had four. Those droughts were not the result of incompetent farming; rather, the opposite. The Dust Bowl was a direct result of the newly invented deep-plowing methods that allowed the Great Plains to produce the vast quantities of cheap food that enabled, among other triumphs, the American victory in the First World War. The innovative prosperity of deep-plowing methods had a catastrophic reckoning built into it. The topsoil blew away. There were food riots. Americans died of starvation. Food shortages produced elevated levels of murder, suicide, and robbery.
Americans have not forgotten the hunger of that period. It informs some of America’s deepest food trends. Country gravy, for example—powdered milk, flour, oleo—dates from the Depression, a cheap way to provide calories from the most basic available ingredients. “Aunt Sammy,” the government-mandated promoter from the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics, introduced the notion of whole wheat during the Dust Bowl, a healthier option but also a cheaper one. She taught ways of fancying up split-pea soup with a slice of lemon. Before the Depression, American families traditionally served a bevy of pies with Thanksgiving dinner: mincemeat, cranberry, huckleberry. There would be a chicken pie along with the turkey and vegetables of all kinds. Aunt Sammy, in her Thanksgiving menu, suggested tomato juice instead of oyster stew, and no turkey but a roast or an “old hen” or “mock duck”—flank steak spread with bread crumbs rolled up, seared, then baked.
The United States already eats a post-Depression diet. The Depression brought vitamins and calories to the American consciousness. There was a rush on canning and pickling. “Go back to the 1930s; the Dust Bowl was four or five drought years in a row. Look at West Texas, western Kansas, right now: they’ve had four years of low precipitation in a row,” Hatfield points out. “These things that are way below normal are happening. They’re not widespread, but they are occurring.”
Even slight spikes in the price of other commodities, like crude oil, has led to unrest the world over. The Yellow Vest movement in France, the country’s most pronounced political violence since 1968, exploded from a relatively small rise in the price of gasoline. For highly unequal societies, any commodity price increase creates a threat to stability.
For ordinary Americans, instability will mean hunger.
The Producer never knew hunger, not even after the third drought in five years. Nearly two-thirds of American families qualified as “food insecure” by then. The number of Americans using their savings to buy food was 28 million and growing. The first year, the drought had barely made the news, small items in the financial papers about the rise in food prices. Even her sister hadn’t worried much the first year. The second year of drought was when the anxieties drifted down, from the experts and the farmers, to ordinary people. The drought two years later was when the prices spiked.
One day, the Producer picked up a Napa cabbage that cost $28. It’s a beautiful cabbage but not that beautiful, she thought. Around that time, she realized that they were keeping almond milk behind the counter. Soldiers in full military gear moonlighted for Walmart. New York suddenly flourished with gardens, the Drought Gardens. In Brooklyn, every rooftop, every veranda—every bit of backyard—had tomatoes and lettuce and herbs. How best to grow your vegetables became one of those permanent topics of conversation, like real estate and school districts, and when her colleagues at WNYC or the parents of her daughter’s school friends found out she was from Iowa, they assumed she was more or less a farmer, asking for advice as if she knew. She did find herself dreaming of the garden in Iowa in the days leading up to the Drought Thanksgiving.
She had to take the bus back to Davenport. She justified it as a bonding opportunity with her teenage daughter, just the two of them riding cross-country. It was the only way they could afford to go. Her husband couldn’t stomach a thirty-two-hour bus ride. He stayed in New York that year.
The road trip was supposed to be educational, but not as educational as it turned out to be. Every town on the thirty-two-hour trip to Davenport was dying. The bus stations in the smaller places seemed to be placed there out of habit. The diners, which doubled as cleaning stations and brothels, weren’t safe even in daylight. In the fields, the corn was stunted, brownish yellow in the rows, the spaces too wide. Where once there was planned lushness, now there was simply empty space. Herds of feral hogs ravaged the landscape. A mound of clothes had been dumped beside a boarded-up school. They passed through a town where recently thirty-two people had died from drinking vodka that had been cut with ethyl alcohol. The Producer didn’t let her daughter leave the bus, even when she whined about her cramped legs. Mostly they just sat in the back watching movies on a phone with a split audio cable. The prairies were so ragged there wasn’t much to see.
The Big House was full up then. Her sister and the kids had moved in after the Ram dealership closed. The only work her sister could find was temporary room cleaning on a contract basis with the local Red Roof. It offered no benefits or security. Her niece had the grades to go to college but she would have had to borrow nearly half a million dollars to attend. In the meantime, she found herself working beside her mother on the carts. Any little bit of money helped. As for the boy, he was still in school, but after the austerity program had been put in place, classroom sizes swelled to sixty kids. There was no help for kids with learning difficulties. He was almost a young man then. He had developed an obsession with the military, making models of panzers and Hamilton bombers in his room. Bright red Nazi and Allied propaganda screamed from the walls. The army would never take him because of his eye. He brought the fact up in nearly every conversation. They had all started to fear her nephew, with his menacing silences and the angry hopelessness flaring up in bursts.
Her mother’s garden had expanded. Even in drought, she could eke out beets and carrots and a row of lettuce. The Producer wondered if she could make a show out of her mother’s garden: the simple prosperity of abundant greens. It was what everyone was talking about in New York, anyway. The Garden. Might work.
Thanksgiving dinner had changed with the drought. They used to eat turkey, but turkeys are corn-fed and so, much too expensive. The tater crumble, the nutmeg mac and cheese, the tusenbladstårta with its cream filling—they’re mostly corn and therefore quite expensive. They skipped the mac and cheese and tater crumble but they had to have the tusenbladstårta. The year of the drought, her mother experimented with soy turkey, which was tasty enough, though it had a slight chemical tinge. They had potato pancakes instead of mashed potatoes. The garden, even in drought, had given them enough greens and carrots and beans and beets to feel like a feast. That year the tusenbladstårta had no cover of strawberries. Strawberries were too expensive in November.
Farmers have been dealing with climate change since the invention of farming. That’s what farming is: making as much food as possible with the weather you’ve been given. But cities, vastly more complex, do not adapt nearly as well to climate change. The world is full of history’s once-great cities, abandoned to desert, subsumed by jungle, visited only by tourists.
Peter Sousounis is the director of climate change research at AIR Worldwide, where he works on catastrophe model development for large-scale clients, including insurance companies and reinsurers. He combines physics with actuarial data to provide the people who have the most at stake with the best answers on the climate future. The best estimate of the worldwide property damage due to sea level rise alone in the immediate future totals $1 trillion. But that only takes into account slow, steady rises in the sea level. The increase in unpredictability of extreme weather events means that much more than a mere $1 trillion is at risk. Over forty years, Category 5 hurricanes have increased by 300 percent globally. The direction is the same in all models, but the scale varies. “People have this ideal perception that climate change is happening slowly and steadily. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not. It has fits and starts. It might even change direction temporarily,” Sousounis says. “But I wholeheartedly believe that it will manifest itself nonlinearly rather than linearly. And that’s what we have to be careful of. We need to account for nonlinearity.” (“Nonlinearity” means that everything goes along as it always has until suddenly it doesn’t.)
The models of the United Nations and the insurance companies are hedged bets. There are hundreds of climate models and they take the mean. But that conclusion is not the same as the result. In Vegas, if you’re playing baccarat, in theory you should always come out even. It’s a 50-50 bet. But you don’t play baccarat to get your money back. The destructive total of climate change, for Sousounis, “could be, not to scare you, but 200 percent on the high side”—that is to say, 200 percent worse than the current standard model. If massive pieces of glaciers collapse, sudden sea level rise will follow, and with sudden sea level rise, the complex cascading system will spiral out of control. For Sousounis’s clients, the increase in risk has one obvious consequence: “Definitely parts of the shoreline will be uninsurable.”
We are inside a climate bubble. Bubbles pop. “The one thing there is reasonable consensus on, at least for hurricane activity, for the US, is overall an increase in the frequency and intensity of Category 4 or Category 5 hurricanes,” Sousounis says. That fact alone is going to change America.