During the last month, I have received emails from secular and religious people alike asking why I chose to quote from The Bible in my Science review article on drought:
The Old Testament vividly describes drought as a punishment from God that left “Judah wailing, her cities languishing, the land cracked, and wild donkeys standing on barren heights, panting like jackals.” Adding, “Even the doe in the field deserts her newborn fawn because there is no grass” (Jeremiah 14).
If you are reading this post in hopes of finding a satisfying explanation for this choice, you will be disappointed: the truth is that I don’t really know. It seemed right. Nevertheless, I thought I would expand upon some of the thoughts that were on my mind while working on my review assignment.
Setting aside any particular religious thoughts, feelings, or identities you might have, consider how many individual people have contributed to The Bible. It has been transcribed, translated, rewritten, published, re-worded, and re-published countless times. Because of their contributions, we have a physical document that sheds light on what life was like thousands and thousands of years ago. At the same time, the very existence of The Bible speaks to our uniquely human intellect, language, and potential to collaborate with complete strangers across multitudes of generations. To have spent your life as a 12th-century monk transcribing ancient scrolls is to have devoted yourself to preserving information you believed was vital to humankind.
The passage I quoted from the Old Testament is vivid, gripping, and terrifying. It describes the horror and hopelessness of being unable to find water to drink, to grow crops, to survive. It depicts the desperation of even the wild animals during a drought (e.g., [T]he doe abandons her fawn). However, you don’t need to look back at biblical times to find people who are desperate, vulnerable, and suffering from drought.
As a climate scientist, you have these moments of despair when you think about what the projections really would mean if they really do happen, then you back away from those feelings as quickly as possible and try to just stay focused on being objective and doing your job. The IPCC and most research papers do an adequate job of explaining the state of climate science, but their very design strips them of emotional resonance. They are almost entirely devoid of voice, imagery, or humanity––which is ironic since these pieces are born out of a deep concern for humanity.
At the end of the article, I tried to imagine the horrors of drought in a place like the Caribbean in a changing climate, given what we know from state-of-the-art climate projections and existing challenges to water resources in that area. Describing a scientifically accurate, yet fictional, future was actually much harder than I thought it would be. I am grateful for the help that ECRL’s Dimitris Herrera gave me. He is from a farming family in the Dominican Republic, so, naturally, he assisted me in thinking through the details: Reservoirs dry up, crops fail, and you don’t even have electricity to run pumps for wells. Making things even worse, rising seas, and shrinking aquifers (from overpumping) would mean that groundwater would be difficult, if not impossible, to access. Unlike in California, there is no possibility of moving water resources around over vast distances.
I heard somewhere, probably NPR, that people are more likely to take action against a threat if you can connect it to their physical sensations. With this in mind, I wanted to try and make sure there was enough detail in the final section that you could imagine yourself in a very difficult future drought, then walk back to the present day and ask what we need to be doing to improve resilience in the future. At the same time, it was imperative to keep the science accurate and representative of the broader literature. It took me a long time to get that balance just right for my sensibilities.
Recently, I have started to suspect that I might not be very skilled at separating the work I do (study the emergent risks of climate change) from how it makes me feel (scared). I also feel optimistic because we really do know what’s causing the current changes (increases in CO2), and we really do have some solid constraints on what the future will look like if we stay on our current path (hot). It is that knowledge that makes me optimistic: it means we also know what we need to do to fix it (reduce emissions ASAP). I would feel much more despair if we had no idea what was causing our summers to become hotter, our floods to become more extreme, our springs to arrive earlier, our glaciers to melt, and our oceans to rise.
Cover image from IPCC Special Report on Global Warming 1.5 deg C.
To understand the Earth’s climate is a humbling endeavor. I am not personally involved in the IPCC process, other than as a volunteer reviewer, but any individual contributor knows that he or she is just adding a mote of information to the vast landscape of climate science. The process entails thousands of hours of collaborative human effort just to produce the final document, which itself comprises references to thousands of papers. I know from first-hand experience that each individual paper requires hundreds of hours more just to do the analysis, write the first few drafts, submit the final manuscript for review, process reviewer comments, and revise and resubmit the paper (sometimes many times over!) There are also the many hours of time spent by the reviewers who read (sometimes carefully) each research paper and try to determine how and if it fits with the existing body of knowledge about the climate system.
The considerations above only refer to the sheer number of human hours required every few years for the IPCC process to function. However, it takes any individual climate scientist about a decade to develop the requisite skills for contributing meaningfully to WG I of the IPCC (The Physical Science Basis). A Ph. D. student in climate science will typically already hold a college degree in math, computer science, physics, environmental science, atmospheric science, geography, or some other related field. During the first few years of her doctoral training, she will enroll in several semesters of graduate-level math, physics, and statistics. She will also need to master computer programming, data science, and data visualization to make sense of the terabytes upon terabytes of information she will encounter in her research. She will then need to present her work and improve it with feedback from the broader community. She will need to develop and refine her scientific writing skills so that her research findings can be formally documented in peer-reviewed journals. For every one paper that she publishes there will really be somewhere between five and twenty-five interesting, but flawed, directions of inquiry she initially pursued.
Journalists also play a critical role in disseminating climate science to the public, and they too must devote years of their lives to mastering this craft. Scientific journalism is especially challenging because the writer must grasp the depth, complexity, and nuance of new research, while at the same time decide how to translate its significance to the public. We who inhabit the realm of research often forget just how difficult this process can be (although trying to explain what we do to our own families can remind us). Journalists must also learn how to frame and pitch stories about new research to their editors. For every news article you read on climate science, there were probably dozens of failed pitches about equally compelling research. And any climate science article that makes headlines must compete for the public’s attention with news about the economy, politics, sports, entertainment, and an infinitude of other human interests.
Our collective response to COVID-19 provides a spectacular example of how people can take abrupt, large-scale, and effective action when needed. (Although, perhaps it would be more appropriate to paraphrase Churchill: we can be relied upon to take action when all other options have run out). This crisis has required people, businesses, and governments to respond quickly and adapt to an unprecedented challenge. However, it doesn’t really take global pandemic to see that people are resourceful, creative, and exceptionally good at working together to solve hard problems. That’s one of the things that makes us human, and it has allowed civilizations to grow and flourish over millennia. I guess I see both the challenge of combating climate change, and our potential to rise to that challenge, as being deeply human.