Russia's Portentous Summer

Jeff Masters says, "one of the most remarkable weather events of my lifetime is unfolding this summer in Russia" where the current heat wave is pretty much entirely off the historical charts. For comparison, the 2003 heat wave across Western Europe killed more than 40,000 people - and the present heat wave in Russia is far more extreme than that:




Says Masters:

The past 25 days in a row have exceeded 30°C (86°F) in Moscow, and there is no relief in sight--the latest forecast for Moscow calls for high temperatures near 100°F (37.8°C) for the majority of the coming week. As I reported in yesterday's post, the number of deaths in Moscow in July 2010 was about 5,000 more than in July 2009, suggesting that the heat wave has been responsible for thousands of deaths in Moscow alone. I would expect that by the time the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 is over, the number of premature deaths caused by the heat wave will approach or exceed the 40,000 who died in the 2003 European Heat Wave. As seen in Figure 2, the Russian heat wave of this year is more intense and affects a wider region than the great 2003 heat wave, though the population affected by the two heat waves is probably similar.

Another commentator writes:

To put this in rough perspective -- and note this is not absolutely precise, it's purely ballpark to give you some feel for what the Russian people are enduring -- if this heat wave was hitting North America, it would be near 100°F in Fairbanks, Alaska. Most of Canada would be baking at 100° or higher, the northeast, from Maine to the Great Lakes region would be hitting upwards of 105° everyday, even the nightly low in the massive urban heat islands of New York and Chicago would be over 90°! The midwest grain belt and parts of the Pacific Northwest would not see a drop of rain for two months and pushing as high as 110° in places. The desert southwest, even some of the higher elevations of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas, would be as uninhabitable as Death Valley or the Sahara.

It would mean nation-wide massive power brownouts, unprecedented crop failures, water rationing like you have never seen, record wildfires raging in dozens of states, thousands of deaths [Correction: Dr. Jeff Masters at WeatherUnderground informs me it would probably more like tens of thousands of deaths] and life threatening heat related illness, roads and highways clogged with broken-down, over-heated cars, and emergency services stretched beyond the breaking point across the US and Canada. The conditions could be so severe in places, especially if the wave persisted for a couple of years, that it could produce mass migration, i.e., refugees, the likes of which haven't been seen since the Great Depression.

Tens of thousands of deaths from the sort of weather event that will become more common as global warming continues apace. The usual caveat applies about the fallacy of attributing individual weather events to long-term climate trends, but needless to say, a warming planet will experience more severe heat waves. As Masters notes:

Looking back at the past decade, which was the hottest decade in the historical record, Seventy-five countries set extreme hottest temperature records (33% of all countries.) For comparison, fifteen countries set extreme coldest temperature records over the past ten years (6% of all countries).

Weather events like these heat waves have proven their capacity to have death tolls in the five figures. But perhaps the most ominous portent of the Russian heat wave has been the government's move to ban grain exports - a response to the decimation of wheat crops due to the wildfires and drought that have attended the heat wave. Natural calamity leading to resource nationalism, causing food prices to spike across the globe: this story will be written again in the decades to come.

The Coming Heat Wave Wave

The weather where I live - a large East Coast metropolis somewhere between Bridgeport, CT and Trenton, NJ - was notably warm last week, as it was for much of the East Coast. At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin links to a study that predicts many more such heat waves in the future.



On the study:

"Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades," said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Diffenbaugh concluded that hot temperature extremes could become frequent events in the U.S. by 2039, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.

"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," said Diffenbaugh, a center fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. "Those kinds of severe heat events also put enormous stress on major crops like corn, soybean, cotton and wine grapes, causing a significant reduction in yields"...

In the study, Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq used two dozen climate models to project what could happen in the U.S. if increased carbon dioxide emissions raised the Earth's temperature by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) between 2010 and 2039 – a likely scenario, according to the International Panel on Climate Change.

In that scenario, the mean global temperature in 30 years would be about 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) hotter than in the preindustrial era of the 1850s. Many climate scientists and policymakers have targeted a 2-degree C temperature increase as the maximum threshold beyond which the planet is likely to experience serious environmental damage. For example, in the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Accord, the United States and more than 100 other countries agreed to consider action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions "so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius."

But that target may be too high to avoid dangerous climate change, Diffenbaugh said, noting that millions of Americans could see a sharp rise in the number of extreme temperature events before 2039, when the 2-degree threshold is expected to be reached.

"Our results suggest that limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial conditions may not be sufficient to avoid serious increases in severely hot conditions," Diffenbaugh said.

The study predicts that "an intense heat wave – equal to the longest on record from 1951 to 1999 – is likely to occur as many as five times between 2020 and 2029 over areas of the western and central United States." In other words, imagine you are 60 years old or so, and think of the absolute most extreme heat wave you've experienced in your entire life.

Twenty years from now, such heat waves will be occurring once every year or two.

And needless to say, there is zero evidence that we are prepared to seriously address the problem of global warming sufficiently enough to actually achieve the 2-degree goal. This is because we are a short-sighted, greedy, and not-quite-intelligent-enough species, and the world we bequeath to future generations will be severely damaged as a result. Very likely we will go down in history as a generation of obnoxious assholes who were too enthralled with our SUVs and plastic tchotchkes to make even the most minimally adequate moral calculations about our actions.

And if you think things might change once the effects of global warming actually start showing up in earnest... well, I have my doubts. Here is Revkin quoting social scientist Robert Brulle:

I’m up in New Hampshire, and the signs of climate change are everywhere, should you choose to see them. The strawberry season has already passed (it usually comes in late July), and you can now get fresh blueberries (3 weeks ahead of normal). The lake I am staying at has lost a lot of water clarity due to an excessive amount of tannic acid. The lake had its earliest ice out this year in memory, and so the leaves had had a longer time to decompose, thus releasing more tannic acid to the water. The water looks more like what you see in the Pine Barrens than in New Hampshire. These changes are all just taken in stride. Climate change remains something abstract and far away, both in time and space. In short, these changes are being normalized.

Cloudier lakes in New Hampshire today, an inundated Bangladesh tomorrow, and everything changing at the rate of one very slowly boiling frog. This is just a very difficult sort of calamity for our species to respond to.

Yet More on the Fate of the Planet

Via The Map Room and mapperz, here's another nice visualization of the calamity coming down the pike.



The image on the left anticipates increasing greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the century, which leads to a rise of just over 4C; the one on the right shows what'll happen if emissions gradually decrease - a rise of only 2C.

But obviously the warming, in either scenario, won't be uniform. The images really show how much more dramatic warming is forecast to be over land than over the ocean. Bear that in mind when you hear forecasts of like 4C warming by the end of this century: that's a global average, but it'll be considerably higher over land, which of course is where humans and cute baby elephants and things tend to live.

Meanwhile, talks in Copenhagen are hitting various sorts of predictable roadblocks:

China and the United States were at an impasse on Monday at the United Nations climate change conference here over how compliance with any treaty could be monitored and verified.

China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal.

If there's reason for optimism about the world's ability to do anything useful to slow our eminently foreseeable slide into global environmental devastation, it is this: if the US and China can just work out a framework for tackling the problem in a meaningful way, then Europe and Japan would surely follow; and just like that the countries producing a substantial majority of emissions will be on board. The rest of the world would not stand in the way (though OPEC would surely throw a fit).

If there's reason to be pessimistic about same, however, it's that the US and China would both have to agree to do something to meaningfully thwart global warming. For China, that would mean altering the model of industrialization that has brought them unprecedented and almost miraculous wealth in the last couple of decades, not to mention a growing role as a global power. For the US, it would mean overcoming the ossification of decline, including the extensive corruption of the political process and Versaillization of the political media, that appears to have compromised our ability to achieve any significant reforms on any front. In other words...

Sigh.

UPDATE: But here is some good news:

Negotiators have all but completed a sweeping deal that would compensate countries for preserving forests and in some cases other natural landscapes like peat soils, swamps and fields that play a crucial role in curbing climate change.

Environmental groups have long advocated such a compensation program because forests are efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. Rain forest destruction, which releases the carbon dioxide stored in trees, is estimated to account for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The agreement for the program, once signed, may turn out to be the most significant achievement to come out of the Copenhagen climate talks, providing a system through which countries can be paid for conserving disappearing natural assets based on their contribution to reducing emissions.

So it's good to hear some concrete good will come out of this meeting. And of course preserving ecosystems carries all sorts of environmental benefits along with it, beyond the increased absorption of greenhouse gases. But on the other hand:

A final agreement on the program may not be announced until the end of the week, when President Obama and other world leaders arrive — in part because there has been so little progress on other issues at the climate summit, sponsored by the United Nations.

Baby steps... Who knows. we may yet manage to cobble together a decent approach to global warming by the end of the century or so.

Global Warming is Gonna Be Bad for the Midwest

While bureaucrats from around the world are in Copenhagen haggling over an arcane agreement that may have profound effects on the state of the entire planet a century from now, you can enjoy this interactive map, which projects temperature rise across the the lower 48 states by the 2080s:



It's based on a "medium" projection of greenhouse gas emissions. It shows at least a 4F temperature rise relative to a 1961-1990 baseline pretty much everywhere and 6-8F in much of the Interior West and Midwest (a.k.a. where our food comes from). In fact the seven states that are expected to heat up the most are all in the Midwest or thereabouts: Nebraska and Iowa (9.4F according to the moderate scenario), South Dakota (9.3), Missouri (9.2), Illinois (9.1), Kansas (9.1), and North Dakota (9.0).

The maps are based on a report (pdf) from The Nature Conservancy:

To help average Americans, policy makers and other local stakeholders better understand how climate change will directly impact their states, The Nature Conservancy has analyzed the latest and most comprehensive scientific data available to calculate specific temperature projections for each of the 50 US states over the next 100 years.

The Nature Conservancy also worked with the University of Washington and the University of Southern Mississippi to develop a new on-line tool that combines the latest scientific data and climate models with geographic information systems (GIS), statistical analysis and web-based mapping services. This tool, Climate Wizard (www.climatewizard.org), represents the first time ever that the full range of climate history and future projections for specific landscapes and time frames have been brought together in a user-friendly format that is available to a mass audience.

It also predicts rainfall:



Bad news for California and Texas. Oh well, at least they're not the two most populous states in the country or anything.

Via Huffington Post.

Parag Khanna's Crystal Ball is a Globe

Fantastic. Just came across this at the atlas(t) blog. It's the mappiest TED talk ever:



It's Parag Khanna, who has the very important-sounding title of Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, talking about political geography. He uses lots of maps to illustrate the most salient changes that are going on in the global order today. One focus is on the expanding profile of China, which is touched with perhaps just a tinge of Sinophobia - Khanna suggests that Siberia may be a remote region of China, rather than Russia, before too long, and raises the specter of a sort of fifth column of ethnic Chinese working their way up the ladders of economic power in various foreign countries throughout East Asia.

Khanna also discusses Iraq - he's keen to let Kurdistan go indie, claiming that Iraq would still be the second largest oil producer in the world (though I think he might be forgetting about Russia, and the US as well, for that matter). He also suggests the Palestinians' problems could be solved by infrastructure development. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, and assume that he would make a more nuanced argument if time permitted.

Looking eastward, he sees the development of the energy resources in Central Asia and the Caucasus as leading towards a new, decidedly more carbon-oriented, Silk Road for the 21st Century. Most intriguing is his discussion of the future of Europe. He sees it as growing (which the EU has been, of course, for decades); in particular, he sees further regions of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East moving increasingly into the orbit of what he variously calls the European "zone of peace" or the "Euro-Turkish superpower."

Khanna also raises the prospect of several new countries coming into the world in the next few years. All very interesting stuff.

Because I Haven't Gotten Extremely Depressed About Global Warming in the Last Couple of Weeks...

The British government recently came out with a new interactive map, posted by The Guardian here, that shows the likely impacts of global warming, assuming our species continues our sit-on-our-asses-till-we're-all-fried approach to this looming catastrophe:



Says The Guardian:

The map was launched to coincide with the London Science Museum's new Prove it climate change exhibition by David Miliband, foreign secretary and his brother Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary. It comes in advance of key political talks on climate change in December in Copenhagen, where British officials will push for a new global deal to curb emissions.

The Miliband brothers said a new deal needed to be strong enough to limit global temperature rise to 2C, although many involved in the negotiations privately believe this to be impossible. A joint press release from the government and the Met Office released to promote the map says the government is aiming for an agreement that limits climate change "as far as possible to 2C".

The map presumes a global average rise of 4 degrees Celsius, a disastrous scenario which is nonetheless where we are very probably headed (as the UK Met Office says itself). That is, again, assuming that we don't take significant action to thwart such a catastrophe.

I personally consider such action highly unlikely for a number of reasons, which is really too bad, because this forecast is a terrible one. It calls for temperatures to be 6-7C warmer across most of the continental US, for instance. That's about 10-13 degrees Fahrenheit; that's like the difference between spring and summer. The "hottest days of the year could become as much as 10-12C (18-22F) warmer [!] over eastern North America," says the map; it's even worse for the Arctic, where a rise of 15C is so off-the-charts huge that's it's just impossible to predict what sort of effects it will have; beyond the prospect of a positive feedback from Arctic methane release, it's really not much fun to think about it anymore.

I will just stand up on my little digital soapbox here and make the point, not for the first time, that this dystopic future is the price we're paying for our cheeseburgers and our SUVs. It is really a profoundly, spectacularly, stupidly high price to pay for a lifestyle that, frankly, is not all that great to begin with. But no doubt this lesson will sink in... oh, right about the time that Bangladesh does.

Via The Map Room.

The Coming European Crack-Up?

Coming Anarchy imagines a future Europe where the continent's various semi-latent separatist movements have achieved their goals:



The cartographer lists two conditions as necessary for a successful devolutionary/secessionist movement:

First, the state must be well off economically and able to hold it’s own, i.e. it must have more to gain than lose. Hence, states like Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria are the two richest in Germany, essentially subsidizing the rest would have more motivation than the poor underdeveloped east German states which feed off the rest. The second condition is that the region must have a well developed and unique identity which comes in the form of a strong dialect or different language, history of independence or autonomy and other characteristics that go into defining a culture. Thus, Bavaria (which is actually what most people think about when they think of Germany) is both rich and has a long cultural past and different identity. It has its own dialect, a history of independence and a host of other unique traits including traditional song, dance, clothes etc that other regions lack.

I was recently reading an article about World War II. Specifically, I was reading an article about the horrific paroxysms of ghoulish violence that constituted World War II, something about which it's good, if unpleasant, to be reminded from time to time. That violence is epitomized by the Holocaust, of course, but there was far more to it than that: fire-bombings, mass starvation, death marches through the countryside, castration, rape, torture... For all intents and purposes, Armageddon came to Europe in the 1940s.

That was less than 70 years ago; it's still within living memory. But since that time Western Europe has become the most stable, peaceful, and prosperous region in the world. The European Union is developing into a real trans-national sovereignty, something I don't believed has ever happened in a non-colonialist context in the history of the world. But all of this stability and prosperity has been so world-historically anomalous; if, in 70 years, we've gone from the Warsaw Ghetto to dickering over farm subsidies in Brussels, would an inverse movement - away from peace, away from cultural and economic integration - be just as possible?

The map above actually represents a benign vision of the future; European stability is a precondition for the success of the separatist movements this map highlights. But it makes me wonder if the stability and current shape of Europe is something we take too much for granted. There's one sure bet, at any rate: if you try to predict the future simply by extrapolating current trends, you're bound to be wrong.

By the way: Brittany has a separatist movement??

(Via The Map Room via Andrew Sullivan.)

Agricultural Production in a Warming World

More on global warming, this time from Conor Clarke, who links to William Cline's study Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country. Clarke reproduces two maps from that study; this one shows "the change in agricultural productivity (by 2080) taking into account the potential benefits of 'carbon fertilization' (the increase in yield that occurs in a carbon rich environment"):



And this one shows the same without projecting carbon fertilization benefits:



Says Clarke:

The basic points of Cline's book are that, by the end of the 21st century, (1) climate change will lead to a slight decline in global agricultural productivity; and (2) climate change will lead to a giant decline in agricultural productivity in Africa, South America and India...

As a sidenote, I think it's important to recognize that deep brick color falling over most of Africa, South Asia and Latin America -- all places where agricultural productivity will fall by more than 25% -- actually hides big differences. For example, Cline reports that the southern regions of India would experience potential output declines of 30-35%, while northern regions would experience declines of 60%.

These maps, besides being delightfully Mondrianesque, illustrate beautifully (if that's the right word) the extent to which the business end of the global warming Howitzer is aimed squarely at the developing world (though the souther half of the UScould have some tough times ahead as well. The forecast for South Asia, which has enormous populations and is not that far removed from historically experiencing famine, and which could be among the most catastrophically inundated by rising seas starting near the end of the century, is especially distressing.

By contrast, under a favorable 'carbon fertilization' scenario much of the developed world actually comes out ahead (again, with the exception of the southern US, as well as much of Australia). China - around which the future track of global warming increasing hinges - also does rather well in the favorable scenario, and only somewhat poorly in the non-fertilization scenario. (By the way, as Clarke notes, "The effects of carbon fertilization are very uncertain, and depend crucially on the availability of other resources -- water for irrigation, say -- that will also be affected by global warming... [But] even if carbon fertilization yields large benefits, Cline estimates a decline in global agricultural productivity.)

As always with climate projections, there is a lot of uncertainty involved here. Things might not turn out so bad in a given region, or they might turn out far worse; but it's worth noting that the consequences of global warming so far have tended to meet or exceed climate scientists' most pessimistic forecasts.

The Slow Melt of Antarctica

A little while ago the New York Times' Andrew Revkin had a post about a study by David Pollard and Robert DeCanto that found that even in the worst case, global warming would lead to a collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet much more slowly than was previously thought. That process is illustrated in this video:



Says Revkin:

The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process — at its fastest — takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn’t go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said in an interview, a far cry from what was thought possible a couple of decades ago. He, Dr. DeConto and other experts on climate and polar ice stressed that when Greenland’s possible contribution to the sea level is added, there’s plenty for coastal cities to consider. But for Greenland, too, some influential recent studies have cut against the idea that momentous coastal retreats are likely anytime soon.

Over all, the loss of the West Antarctic ice from warming is appearing “more likely a definite thing to worry about on a thousand-year time scale but not a hundred years,” Dr. Pollard said.

Well, that's good. I have to say, though, that rising sea levels have never seemed like the scariest threat from global warming. Terrible for Bangladesh, yes, and a few other places around the world; but something that, even on the scale of hundreds of years, let alone thousands, is something to which we could adapt. The collapse of ecosystems, the desertification or aridification of productive agricultural land, and the resultant famine, mass migrations, and political instability, though - those processes will play out in a much faster, unpredictable, and destructive way.

Global Warming as Mephistophelean Challenge

Ezra Klein points to a study on global warming (pdf) from the Lancet and University College London. As Ezra notes, one of the many complications involved in global warming is that the countries most affected by it will be those that are least responsible for it. Look at these two maps, which Klein posts:



The top map is a cartogram with countries scaled to represent their cumulative CO2 emissions from 1950-2000; the bottom map shows the distribution of mortality as a result of global warming health consequences (in particular, malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, and flood-related deaths). What's immediately obvious is that those who are most responsible for global warming - the US, Europe, Japan and, increasingly, China - will pay only a small fraction of the price; whereas the countries that makes the most negligible contributions to global warming, especially in Africa, will bear by far the largest burden.

Here's a thought experiment: see if you can imagine a problem that more exquisitely exploits the weaknesses of our nature as human beings than global warming. It's as if the problem were cooked up in the devil's own lab. Consider:

• It is our nature to look after ourselves. But as you can see here, the countries that will be least affected by global warming are those that are most responsible. They (we) have the least incentive to worry about the consequences.
• It is our nature to discount benefits that will only accrue in the future. That is, if we are offered $10 right now, we value that $10 more than ten bucks promised to us six months from now. (This is why pretty much everyone procrastinates: we value the present satisfaction of goofing off before working more than the future satisfaction of goofing off after working.) But global warming's greatest effects won't even be felt 6 months from now - they'll be felt more like a century from now.
• It is in our nature to care about problems that affect us directly, rather than those that affect us indirectly or not at all. But we'll all be dead before the greatest effects of global warming hit. And to the extent that the problems will arrive while we're still alive, they'll manifest in mostly indirect ways: as somewhat higher food prices, say, rather than actual illness or death.
• It is in our nature to want to accumulate wealth. But the way we've gone about accumulating wealth over the past century or two is causing global warming; and it's not at all clear that the continued accumulation of wealth - a.k.a. economic growth - is compatible with seriously confronting global warming.
• It is in our nature to respond to sudden and drastic change, rather than incremental change; frogs and boiling water and all that. Global warming is the ultimate boiling frog.
• It's in our nature to be able to comprehend tangible and local problems, rather than abstract and global problems. The level of conceptual analysis that's required simply to comprehend the problem of global warming goes beyond what most people employ in their daily lives. And mustering the intellectual will to actually weigh the consequences of ignoring or responding to the crisis, let alone actually taking action in response, is a whole order of magnitude more complex.
• It's in our nature to worry first about our physiological concerns, then about our safety, then about our material satisfaction, and only much later about our needs for things like living in a sustainable society, or having moral concerns for people not yet born. For any given person at any particular point in time, their physical and material needs are likely, in general, to lead to actions that contradict the actions that are called for by their abstract ethical concerns about future generations or people in distant lands; and since the physiological and material needs are more fundamental, there is every reason to expect them to win out.
• It's in our nature to have difficulty working together in large organizations. Yet global warming requires that we work together with an unprecedented degree of global cooperation.

That's just a partial list of the really fundamental aspects of human nature - a nature that has evolved over millions of years to deal with a very different set of problems - which seem almost perfectly unequipped to deal with a problem like global warming. This is why I'm not especially optimistic about our ability to come to grips with this problem before widespread calamity is ensured, and why I expect the people of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries will go down in history as the people who traded a healthy world for a pile of Big Macs and SUVs.

On the other hand, if we are able to meet the challenge, think of what that would mean: that we were able to overcome everything innately self-interested and short-sighted and stupid in our nature to retain a livable home for future generations. That, to me, seems like enough reason to keep trying.

Visualizing Global Warming

Andrew C. Revkin talks about the need to use visualizations to make the rather abstract problems of global warming comprehensible. He links to Global Warming Art, which has a bunch of maps and images depicting global warming in one way or another, including this map of temperature anomalies over the past decade:



And this nice map of average annual temperatures:



And this map predicting global warming for the latter part of this century:



And this map of glacier thinning:



And this map of areas at risk from rising sea levels:



And this map of areas affected by tropical storms:



And this topographic map of what an ice-free Antarctica would look like:



Lots of graphs there, too.

Mapping the Future of Gay Marriage

Yesterday, same-sex marriage in Iowa was rendered legal by that state's Supreme Court (two days after it was made legal in Sweden). The United States seems inexorably headed towards marriage rights for gay couples - but how long will it take to get there across the board? Nate Silver has an answer. Based entirely on his hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of gay marriage in the US:



The years indicated are those by which a gay marriage ban would be defeated by voters in a given state, according to a regression model designed by Silver. (Again, all the math and hard work is Silver's; I just made the map.)

How did Silver come up with these results? Here's the explanation:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.

The more religious a state is, and the more white evangelicals it has, the higher the percentage of voters who would be likely to support a gay marriage ban. However, according to Silver marriage bans "are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year." So it's possible to extrapolate, given the current religious demographics of a state and the trend of decreasing support for bans, when a gay marriage ban would fail.

There are 11 states where a marriage ban would already be expected to fail: all of New England and New York, plus several states in the West (all of which are among the least religious states in the country). California wouldn't be likely to reject a ban until next year. (Side note: despite California's status as a sort of poster boy for social liberalism, most of the Northeast tends to be more liberal on these kinds of social indicators.)

Over the next couple of years, majority opposition to gay marriage bans will spread quickly through the Northeastern and Western states, then through the Midwest - claiming a majority of all states by 2013 - and finally through the South, with Mississippi bringing up the rear in 2024.

Of course, history rarely moves in a straight line, and there's a big element of speculation in simply extrapolating from current trends. As Silver notes, a backlash against gay marriage might mount, delaying or reversing the trends that have been evident over the past few years; or by a sudden gestalt shift gay marriage might find broad acceptance. What seems much more likely than the precise dates given here, though, is the chronology of the geographical spread of acceptance. Same-sex marriages are already legal in the New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, with the Vermont legislature recently voting overwhelmingly to allow it (though the Governor may veto the bill [UPDATE: the legislature overrode the veto, so Vermont is the fourth state to make gay marriage legal, and the first to do so legislatively rather than judicially]). And even among states where gay marriage bans have passed, some of the most narrow margins were in Western states like Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and, of course, California. Meanwhile, it is certain that the South will be the last region in the country to become amenable to gay marriage.

As for Iowa? According to Silver, an amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage in that state would require passage in two consecutive sessions of the state legislature, and then would have to be ratified by the voters. So it couldn't come up for a vote at the ballot box until at least 2012. According to Silver's regression model, such a ban might pass in Iowa until 2013 - but who knows; maybe 3 years of being neighbors with happily married gay couples without having their social fabric torn asunder will cause Iowans' tolerance clock to speed up just a bit.

5/19/09 UPDATE: This map was never intended as a prediction of when gay marriage would actually become legal. But it is interesting that, as of a month and a half later, gay marriage is now legal in 4 states (MA, CT, VT, ME), will soon be legal in a 5th (NH; just waiting for a technicality in the bill to be worked out), and is making progress in a 6th state (NY) which, according to Nate S., would vote against a hypothetical gay marriage ban as of this year. In other words, gay marriage may actually be legal in at least half of these 11 states by the time the year is out, and will definitely be legal in at least 5 - plus Iowa, of course. Again, the point was never that these would be the dates by which gay marriage would actually be legal - but it almost seems to be turning out that way, to some extent.

Survival Map for the Apocalypse

New Scientist maps the global warming apocalypse.



The accompanying article, by the aptly named Gaia Vince, depicts a scenario in which Earth warms by 4C by the end of this century. The future she foretells is a grim one: most of the world between about 40 degrees north and 40 degrees south will have become a vast desert, uninhabitable by humans, rendering most of the world's food-producing regions barren wastelands. The Sahara will spread into central Europe, and Japan and eastern China will become Gobified. South Asia will suffer from a fiercer but briefer monsoon, producing both more floods and more drought; much of Bangladesh will disappear altogether under rising seas. Rivers in Europe and Asia will wither. The Amazon might simply go up in a vast inferno. Vince suggests that 90% of the human population won't make it through these calamities.

Interestingly, there's a precedent for this kind of scenario:

The last time the world experienced temperature rises of this magnitude was 55 million years ago, after the so-called Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event. Then, the culprits were clathrates - large areas of frozen, chemically caged methane - which were released from the deep ocean in explosive belches that filled the atmosphere with around 5 gigatonnes of carbon. The already warm planet rocketed by 5 or 6 °C, tropical forests sprang up in ice-free polar regions, and the oceans turned so acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide that there was a vast die-off of sea life. Sea levels rose to 100 metres higher than today's and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.

But of course, human civilization wasn't around back then to be shepherded through the bottleneck of dramatic ecological change. (Nor, presumably, did it happen as quickly as our present blitzkrieg against climatic stability.) How humans might adapt to a recapitulation of such changes will be, Vince suggests, the story of humanity over the next few centuries. The key to it will be an unprecedentedly massive migration. Even as the mid-latitudes wither into desiccated husks, storm systems will wander closer to the poles. With rising temperatures and greater precipitation, Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia will become the most habitable places on the planet. They'll be our breadbaskets - vast agricultural areas peppered by dense, high-rise cities where most people will live.

Some of these predictions are a bit... horologically aggressive, let's say. Sky-rise cities popping up throughout a verdant West Antarctica? Not in this millennium. And even with a 10C rise, is it really reasonable to envision Siberia as the breadbasket of the world? A Siberia that's 10C warmer is still pretty damn cold. It's also unclear to me why there'd be total desertification near the equator; why would the tropical rain belt shut down? Nonetheless, it's worth noting that the 4 degree rise in global temperatures out of which this scenario is built is actually on the conservative side of current climate change predictions; a rise of 5 or 6C might be more likely. In any event, wake me when it is no longer conventional wisdom that the destruction of the planet is necessary to support a healthy global economy. Until then, I'll continue to assume that something like this apocalyptic scenario is pretty much destined to occur.

Incidentally, for some reason the article also has an interactive google map, which is mostly redundant.