The Trouble With Normal

A Substack post by Mary Geddry last week hit a chord with me. In Gradually, Then Suddenly she looks at the effects that climate change is having on the world and the implications for our society. 

It starts like this.

There is a famous exchange in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which one character asks another how he went bankrupt.

“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

That line came up in one of the climate interviews I was watching this weekend, and it has been rattling around in my head ever since because it turns out to be a pretty good description of how complicated systems fail.

After a discussion of ocean warming, she gets to, what for me, was the key point of the essay.

 We frequently talk about adaptation as though the climate were moving from one stable setting to another. Build higher seawalls, install more air conditioning, enlarge the culverts, move the flood maps, plant different crops and then carry on.

Horton’s deliberately provocative formulation is that adapting to the climate of 2026 is “pointless” if we mean adapting once and declaring victory, because the climate of 2027, 2028 and 2029 will continue changing unless we stop adding greenhouse gases.

Adaptation itself is obviously not pointless. Horton spends considerable time explaining how urgently we need it.

The moving baseline is the problem. You cannot build resilience around yesterday’s definition of normal when normal itself is moving.

And a little later.

Climate change does not necessarily need to blow infrastructure apart to make it fail. It only needs to invalidate the assumptions under which it was designed, and do so faster than we can redesign the infrastructure. 

We're seeing this now, with sea level rise, the increase in wildfires, and the strengthening trends in tropical storms. 

On August 27th, she followed it up with another post on the same theme, tied to the disaster in the Himalayas. 

What failed was the mountain itself, its structural integrity, built up and eroded over a timescale that has nothing to do with news cycles, finally giving way in the time it takes to read this sentence. If “Gradually, Then Suddenly” was about systems reaching their breaking point, a river too shallow to cool a reactor, an insurance market too strained to underwrite a coastline, Rasuwa district is what happens when the system is the mountain, and the villages built beneath it never had a say.

Climate change happens gradually. Structural failure happens all at once. Nepal is the second half of that sentence.

She goes on to discuss the importance of monitoring.

Journalist Leela Jasinto pointed out that it is also a region under real development pressure; hydroelectric projects, infrastructure expansion, population growth pushed into terrain that is, by any geological measure, still geologically active. The same steep, unstable, glacially-fed valleys that make this terrain dangerous are also what make it valuable for trade routes, for hydropower, for the water itself. Nepal’s government now faces the same question in the aftermath that it faced before Wednesday, only louder: how do you develop a landscape that is actively, geologically alive, without eventually building directly in the path of what it’s going to do next.

That’s what the monitoring gap actually costs. It’s the difference between a government that can weigh economic development against geological risk honestly, and one that finds out the terms of that trade-off by accident.

This is Tendon, Not Fat applied to the physical world: the monitoring station that watches a glacier for twenty uneventful years looks like bureaucratic overhead until year twenty-one, when knowing that glacier is moving becomes the difference between a warning and a body count. Monitoring is a bit of an abstraction. It’s satellites, gauges, staffed research stations, the unglamorous infrastructure of simply knowing what a warming planet is doing before it does it to you. This is the boring stuff you fund during “gradually,” when it looks unnecessary, so that “suddenly” doesn’t catch you empty-handed.

And as she points out, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to disrupt or remove the systems that help us track the effects of climate change.

I'm going to post something I wrote here in 2020 in a post titled The Pandemic and a Fragile World that is still relevant and ties in perfectly to Geddry's posts.

I hadn't really thought much about our modern reliance on optimization and how it affects supply chains until reading Vernor Vinge's, A Deepness on the Sky, a couple of decades ago. In this novel, an interstellar trader visits a world that by most standards would be called a paradise. But it relied on a highly optimized system for food production. A hundred and fifty years later, when the trader returned, the planet had reverted to savagery because of a series of unanticipated catastrophes. That got me thinking. 

We've seen examples of problems caused by super-optimized supply chains before the pandemic hit. A cyberattack on the Maersk shipping company disrupted commerce across the world. A fire at a resin-producing factory knocked out 90 percent of the world's production of resin used to make vinyl records. Now our reliance on Chinese factories is causing shortages of everything from drugs to smartphones. 

Pandemic. Mideast war. Climate change. All of these are a threat to a stable world.

I'm going to end with a rather prescient song from the 1980s: Bruce Cockburn's "The Trouble With Normal".