Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Southern California is considered a desirable climate to live in only because technology maximizes its
benefits and minimizes its drawbacks. Technology enables us to live in practically any climate.
Consider that in the United States, a large country, we are home to every type of climate imaginable:
from polar Alaska to desert California to swampy Florida to scorching Texas. And yet in each state we
have a life expectancy of over seventy-five!
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There is no climate that man is ideally adapted to, in the sense that it will guarantee him a decent quality
of life. Nature does not want us to have a life expectancy of seventy-five or an infant mortality rate below
1 percent. Nature, the sum of all things on Earth, doesn't care about human beings one way or another and
attacks us with bacteria-filled water, excessive heat, lack of rainfall, too much rainfall, powerful storms,
decay, disease-carrying insects and other animals, and a large assortment of predators. Today we regard
death before age thirty as a tragedy; in more “natural” times, it was the expectation.
We are naturally
dependent on
climate, and naturally
endangered by
climate.
While today it does not make sense to obsess about climate changes, at one point in history it
did—because such changes controlled our lives more than we could control them.
The right climate conditions at the right time meant a good harvest—the wrong ones could lead to
food shortages; the right climate conditions meant the ability to build at least a primitive civilization—the
wrong ones could destroy that civilization in a few days.
To put it bluntly, in our “natural climate,” absent technology, human beings are as sick as dogs and drop
like flies. Notice that today, though we talk a lot about climate, and episodes of bad weather get huge me-
dia attention, we don't fear climate on a day-to-day basis.
There are two lessons here: First, weather, climate, and climate change matter—but not nearly as much
astheyusedto,thanksto
technology
.Climate livability isnotjustamatter ofthestate oftheglobal climate
system, but also of the technology (or lack thereof) that we have available to deal with any given climate.
Second, having that technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it.
We often talk about Mother Nature as if it is really our mother—a being that deliberately nurtures us
and has our best interests at heart. But it isn't, and doesn't. Nature, including the climate, is a wondrous
background that gives us the
potential
for an amazing life—if we transform it. To obsess over changes in
the background while ignoring the need for technology and transformation is a prescription for a worse
life.
The one thing we can't live without, climatologically, is technology. Which means we can't live without
the fuel of technology, energy. Which means we can't live without energy we (and potentially everyone)
can afford. Which means, for the foreseeable future—as in, most of the unrepeatable, irreplaceable years
of our lives—we can't live without fossil fuel energy.
Withit,wecanachieveastunning—andgrowing—amountofmasteryoveranyclimatehazards,natural
or man-made. We have been doing so for decades. And we can get even better.
Let's look at how climate mastery applies to perhaps the most hypothetically dangerous consequence of
hypothetically dramatic warming: significant sea level rises.
MASTERING THE SEA
The effect that seems to be most directly connected to the warming of the planet is the rise of sea level.
If the planet warms enough ice from the polar regions will melt, adding additional water to the oceans,
