Hoping to avoid a Blade Runner Society
When we think of climate change the worst most of us think about is uncomfortable times outside of air conditioning and avoiding injury from violent weather, like hurricanes, tornados and thunder storms. For many, however, those developments are minor inconveniences compared to the breakdown of what we’ve known to be “civilization” which, while it existed at least, included a separation from and domination over the natural environment.
In a world changed by a dramatically different climate, however, human beings will likely be required to constantly adapt to a fickle environment. Life may become very much like this scene from Blade Runner when an environmentally exhausted and bankrupt society required humans to migrate to extraterrestrial or “off-world” colonies for their safety. The change may have already begun.
In the 1990’s there was little the poor countries of East Africa could have done to mitigate climate change by themselves. Their only choice was adaptation and even that choice was extremely limited. Other than transforming their relationship to nature by defending themselves against it’s ravages or transforming their relationships to each other which often involved escalating violence like turning to piracy and hijacking cargo ships on the high seas their choices were limited.
In research entitled “Climate and Conflict” Marshall Burke, Solomon M. Hsiang, and Edward Miguel find “that deviations from moderate temperatures and precipitation patterns systematically increase the risk of conflict, often substantially, with average effects that are highly, statistically significant.”
These two maps illustrate how temperatures are likely to change in the United States between the first decade of the 21st century (above) and the beginning of the 22nd (below). If changes are anything close to these illustrations Americans need to concern themselves with the violence that’s likely to arise as reported in the Climate and Conflict report.
The researchers report that high temperatures elevate the risk of many forms of intergroup conflict, both political violence and other forms of collective violence. In addition, econometric literature suggests that different classes of conflict, in different contexts and at different scales of analysis, share the general feature that their likelihood of occurring is influenced by climatic events.
What people sort of experience isn’t really surface temperature, unless you’re walking barefoot. “Air temperature plays a more important role in determining a person’s thermal comfort.” The issues are particularly pronounced in the Southwest’s largest metropolitan areas, like Phoenix Az and El Paso TX, given the “heat island” effect caused by pavement and construction, which reflect heat instead of allowing it to be absorbed into the ground. As a result, temperatures are often several degrees warmer than those outside the city — and sometimes more than 20 degrees warmer at night.
Blade Runner was clearly a dystopian view of American society in the future but it may not have been that dystopian a view of America’s environment in the future. In 2013, Los Angeles became the first major U.S. city to require new and remodeled homes to install what is called cool roofing, made from materials of lighter shades like white, pale gray or tan. “L.A. is way out in front,” said George Ban-Weiss, an environmental engineer at the University of Southern California, who calculates that temperatures in the L.A. basin would drop by up to two degrees Fahrenheit if all buildings and households adopted cool roofs. That’s the type of adaptation we all may want to consider instead of deciding to migrate to an extraterrestrial or “off-world” colony to beat the heat.
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Originally published at neutec.wordpress.com on August 31, 2018.
