Our world is about to get weird, and nobody is ready. Not politicians. Not a hungry, thirsty third world. Certainly not the American political system. The coming 18 months will be a stress test for civilization as we know it.
I’m talking about the colossal El Niño taking shape in the Pacific as we speak, likely stronger than any El Niño in recorded history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) puts the odds of a ‘very strong event’ at greater than 90%, although many believe “very strong event” is a wild understatement.
If you hear “El Niño” and roll your eyes, you’re not alone.
El Niños are funny things, especially for Americans who have insulated ourselves – for the most part – from issues like crop failure, drought, floods, and so on, that El Niños tend to exacerbate or even trigger. We experience these problems, of course, but not like other regions around the world, where crop failure coupled with drought means catastrophic, enduring starvation events, or where unpredictable monsoon seasons collapse economies.
Most of us over here anticipate the coming El Niño like we would a strong Nor’Easter. How much snow we gonna get? Maybe we’ll get a snow day.
But the coming Super El Niño is different, and it’s different for a bunch of reasons. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about this El Niño, our changing climate, and how global society is not ready for what’s about to happen to us.
This is a political story in the broadest possible sense, like Mesopatamia or the advent of agriculture is a political story. This is a story about how we have organized ourselves based on a premise of stability. It’s a story about the last 11,000 years, and the last 125,000 years, and a strange new doorway we’re walking through at this very moment.