The almost incomprehensible disaster of the floods, hunger, homelessness and disease of Pakistan present a tableau of tragedy that overwhelms us. The flood of waters have generated a flood of photographs of suffering humans.
Almost like the results of a terrible traffic accident, it is difficult to view, pulling at our heartstrings and other more visceral parts of our makeup. Yet the knowledge that this horror is only the leading edge of suffering on a colossal global scale, resulting from our inaction, makes it even more tragic...
It was a small thing, really, on the global scale of weather: a not-unusual 'kink' in the jet stream, a high-altitude band of winds that circle the Earth in the mid-latitudes. Normally, such waves and oscillations are short-lived, and advance toward the east, leading the surface weather patterns with them. In this summer of extreme weather, however, the jet stream kink didn't move. Winds shot over the top of a huge ridge which locked itself into place over western Asia. Below that high-pressure ridge, air was forced downward toward the surface. Temperatures soared, clouds evaporated, and the great capital of Moscow and its surroundings were broiled in unprecedented heat. Fires raged out of control, and thousands died.
Meanwhile, after passing over the top of that blocking ridge, known as an 'omega block' for its distinctive shape, the jet stream dipped far to the south before resuming a northeasterly flow, pulling up millions of tons of warm, very moist air from the heated Indian Ocean. Drawn northward by the flow, that moisture-burdened mass of air began to pile into the foothills of the Hindu Kush Mountains.
As warm air is forced up and over the mountains, it expands and cools, and its burden of water vapor condenses and falls upon the land. In this summer of extremes, the flow of warm, moist air simply didn't stop.
Unsuspecting Pakistanis, along with neighboring Indian and Chinese citizens, had no way of knowing that unimaginable amounts of rain were falling high in the mountains, where the waters were swelling thousands of tributaries beyond their banks. When the waters came crashing down upon them, the result was complete, utter devastation.
The despair of the victims has been so sharp that some have preferred death to their lives of hopelessness.
In the aftermath of this, most of the agricultural regions of Pakistan have been submerged, cutting the production of food. In Russia, too, crops were destroyed by extreme weather, but in the form of 100+ degree Farenheit temperatures.
Human suffering normally brings a huge outpouring of aid and sustenance to affected areas, but as extreme events proliferate and the swollen population of the Earth stretches the supplies of food, reactions are becoming more muted.
With a population rapidly approaching seven billion, the entire Earth is an enormous store-house of future suffering and starvation. For generations we have stretched our food production to try to cope with the vast numbers of mouths, and the world has responded by producing yet more people. Now those trends are highly extended and on increasingly fragile ground.
Two enormous roadblocks lie directly in our path: Peak Oil, and Climate Change.
Peak Oil merely reflects that there is a point in time at which the global production of oil, while continuing at a furious pace, will no longer rise, but begin a fairly steady decline. Already, the cheap and easy oil is mostly gone. New supplies are increasingly difficult to obtain, as in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, increasingly dirty and inefficient, as in the calamitous use of tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada. In either case, they are sharply more expensive and unreliable.
As the global climate warms in reaction to the industrious activities of the billions of humans, extreme weather events are becoming more common. Floods in western Tennessee, New England, Arkansas, and the Dakotas were a few examples just in the U.S. this year.
Changing ocean surface temperatures are expected to have increasingly impact on the strength and direction of prevailing winds, causing sharp changes in 'normal' weather. As the global temperature rises a little, feed-back mechanisms like declining global albedo and increasing methane released from melting permafrost are tipping us into further heating. Now the carbon-absorbing forests have begun to decline, adding their stored carbon back into the ecosystem.
Catastrophic collapse of the biosphere due to the rapidly-increasing effects of climate change are now almost inevitable. With that reality comes the grim news that disasters on the scale of Pakistan's floods will become ever more common. Yet even without these abrupt events, the looming further sharp decline of agriculture due to floods and droughts promises a future of mass starvation. Humans seem unwilling to face the obvious facts of climate change. Prepare to become numb.