The End of Nature

                                              "The End of Nature" by Bill McKibben (1989)

In 1989 Bill McKibben wrote an important book entitled "The End of Nature." The premise of this book is that human-caused global warming is affecting a wide range of natural processes on our planet to the point that the weather and many other natural processes on earth aren't strictly "natural" anymore.

As Global Warming progresses this will become more self-apparent, but it's already true. The temperature everywhere on earth is slightly different then it would be if human use of fossil fuels hadn't increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere by 40%. The weather is also no longer entirely "natural", so that every single rainstorm and every sunny day is different then it would have been without human influence on the climate. Sea level is higher then it would be "naturally", so every single wave that comes into the shore is slightly different then it would naturally be.

This is a dramatically different way of looking at climate change then that adopted by most scientists. Scientists generally soft-pedal the idea that any particular storm or snowstorm or heatwave or drought is "caused" by global warming.

But that shouldn't be the question----its clearly impossible to show direct casuality between increasing CO2 in the atmosphere and any individual weather event. The question should actually be whether or not an extreme weather event is affected by global warming. And the answer to that question should be a resounding yes.

For example, Cyclone Pam in March 2015 in Vanuatu or Hurricane Sandy that hit the east coast of the US in the fall of 2012---you can't prove that either storm was "caused" by global warming. But there is no doubt that huge size of these storms reflects global warming. Warmer temperatures in the atmosphere and the oceans driven by Global Warming provide more energy to power large storms, and these storms were unusually large because of the very warm conditions created by global warming. The Atlantic Ocean was unusually warm during the creation of Superstorm Sandy off the eastern coast of the US in the fall of 2012, and Cyclone Pam's large size and intense energy are products of the warm conditions produced by global warming in the western Pacific Ocean during March 2015.

McKibben explained this idea very clearly 25 years ago in his book:

"If the waves crash up against the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of Mother Nature as altered by the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born."

We can't say that global warming is "causing" individual hurricanes and cyclones, but we can say that global warming is producing oceanic and atmospheric conditions that make hurricanes and cyclones bigger and more powerful then they would otherwise be.