Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms, part III

How the land change leg of climate got, well, amputated

Welcome to the final installment of Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms. In part I we saw how Millan discovered the “two-legged” approach to climate (one leg for CO2 and another for land change) within the covers of one of the first international climate reports, Inadvertent Climate Modification: Study of Man’s Impact on Climate, published in 1971 by MIT. Then in part II we learned some of how the land-change leg works, and how Millan’s understanding of it helped him solve the puzzle of why the summer storm regime in the Western Mediterranean Basin is collapsing. Now we widen the lens to look at climate science as a whole, how it administratively split the two legs, bringing the CO2 leg forward as sole cause of climate change, while effectively amputating the land-change leg.

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After I first heard Millan speak in 2017, I immediately retrieved a copy of the MIT report he referred to and confirmed for myself the existence of a two-legged climate understanding within its covers. So what happened? How did the land change leg vanish from the narrative, with the CO2 leg treated as the sole human cause of climate change? Beginning with the MIT report, I began working my way forward in time, reading the texts of various climate reports, looking for clues. A discernable trail soon emerged showing just how land change got left out of the climate narrative.

The key year was 1979, when two very different climate reports came out.

The first report was produced by the World Meteorological Organization as part of its first World Climate Congress: A Conference of Experts on Climate and Mankind. Though employing some archaic language, the title shows a scientific attempt of broad scope and scale. From the forward: “this publication may safely be considered as the most profound and comprehensive review of climate in relation to mankind yet published.” It’s a reasonable claim for a report containing 28 Overview Papers and totaling over 700 pages, providing something of a textbook on scientific thinking about climate at that time.

As in the SMIC report, the two legs are seen side by side, with the conference’s keynote address neatly summing them up: “We now change the radiative processes of the atmosphere and perhaps its circulation by emission of the products of our industrial and agricultural society. We now change the boundary processes between earth and atmosphere by our use of the land.”

From there we encounter repeated references to land change as a human cause of climate change. The first paper, under a discussion of “the impacts that are of the most relevance to the subject of climate,” places “the transformation of the land surface of the planet by forest clearance, the ploughing up of the steppes and great plains, land reclamation, etc.” at the top of the list.

The report’s next section, Influences of Mankind on the Climate System, includes a paper coauthored by none other than Ted Munn, Millan’s mentor and friend. Munn’s paper, Human Activities that Affect Climate, begins: “Mankind has been modifying the environment for several thousand years, and some of these modifications affect climate. For example, whenever a forest is cleared or a road is built, the local heat and water budgets are changed.” He goes on to lay out, as in the MIT book eight years earlier, what is clearly a two-legged approach. “The subject of this paper is clearly of very wide scope and accordingly presented in two main parts as follows: Part I, By Munn, covers the main human impacts on climate, excluding mankind's interference in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) balance; and Part II by Machta (his coauthor,) deals comprehensively with those aspects of climatic change which are related to the carbon dioxide balance.”

There they are, the two legs of climate change, plain as day. He then makes a startling observation concerning the land’s role in climate: we have no baseline, no “reference state with which to compare current conditions.” In other words, we’ve so “changed” the earth’s surface we don’t even know how our climates are supposed to function, what their natural state would or should be. It’s a question with wide ranging implications depending on where you live.

For me here in the Pacific Northwest, it means comparing a climate regime in which the regional hydrology was once powered by 8-foot-thick, three-hundred-foot-tall giants spread sea to mountain, to the patchwork of clearcuts and tree plantations, cut on forty-year rotations, that currently masquerade as forests in this region, particularly in the hydrologically critical lowlands. It means acknowledging that most of the coastal marshes and estuaries, along with their hydrologic and climatic function, have been covered in highways, urban and suburban sprawl, and soil-killing industrial agriculture.

We are lucky, though. Despite what we’ve done to the landscape, our particular proximity to the Pacific Ocean means its steady supply of moisture continues anyways, keeping things green, at least by appearance. Other geographies face very different circumstances, particularly those that rely on their indigenous soils and vegetation to maintain their moisture. Those places, such as the Western Mediterranean Basin, or California’s Central Valley, or the Amazon, or a good bit of the world, face a more challenging situation.

One of the more intriguing papers in the report concerns climate change in the Sahara. Though climate change has been portrayed as a modern, oil-age phenomenon, the authors, Kenyan and Sudanese scientists Julius S. Oguntoyinbo and Richard S. Odingo, reach a bit farther back, to between 6000 and 4700 years ago, when “the Sahara experienced a moister climate.”  “Desiccation of the climate possibly began well before 4700 BP, but the impact was apparently delayed due to higher water tables and extensive oases. Such sites provided adequate habitats for wildlife, domesticated animals, human beings and their crops.”

Though some form of land change via farming and herding had already been present in the region, for perhaps thousands of years, the authors suggest that the region, by virtue of its extensive oases and aquifers, was ecologically resilient enough to tolerate it, but only up to a point. Eventually human modification of the landscape could have tipped the balance, which later research corroborates. “The period between 4700 and 3700 BP was arid” they note, with “the region becoming successively drier, particularly during the Roman occupation, and in more recent times.”

It's interesting they note the Roman occupation. If the experience of the Western Mediterranean Basin is any guide, it would have been a time of intensified land use, with marshes drained, hills mined, forests cut. And as noted, it was a drier time.

The reference to “more recent times” is even more interesting. After noting that the traditional peoples of the area—the Tuareg nomads, the Haussaand farmers and Fulani pastoralists— “had developed social, economic, political, and land use systems which enabled their survival within the constraints imposed by the environment of the area,” they describe how “European colonization introduced and imposed a variety of social and economic changes, which...disrupted the symbiotic relationships which had developed between socio-economic groups of the region. Among the measures introduced were the encouragement of the pastoralists to lead sedentary lives and the introduction of the cash crop economy. The expansion of cultivated areas took place at the expense of the more southerly and thus better watered grazing lands; fallow land was reduced; while much of the bushland, which was traditionally part of the pastoralists grazing land, was incorporated into the agricultural area.”

Today’s climate narrative typically blames Saharan droughts on CO2 emissions, but these authors clearly had land-use in their sites, pointing to “overgrazing of the deserts and their margins,” and “the driving back of the nomads from parts of the steppes (leading) to degradation of the sparse vegetation cover in the surrounding semi-deserts on the one hand, and to disturbance of the ecological balance of the cultivated steppes on the other. Serious consequences also resulted from the ploughing of dry soils in particular.”

There’s much more that could be said about the WMO’s report, and it should be noted that it also devotes considerable attention to carbon emissions, including an overview paper on the Physical Science Basis, later adopted by the IPCC. But there is another report to consider, one that soon followed and which proved far more consequential to the trajectory of climate science. It’s called Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, otherwise known as the “Charney Report.”

Jules Charney was the brilliant mathematician credited with bringing weather forecasting into the computer age, working out the mathematics behind the computer modelling that revolutionized modern weather prediction. Number crunching that would’ve once required stadiums full of mathematicians could be done by increasingly sophisticated computers, and he was the matchmaker, vastly increasing the capability of weather forecasting and laying the groundwork for the flowing computer simulations we now take for granted on the nightly weather report.

In the mid 1970’s, rising CO2 emissions caught the attention of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which made a formal request of the National Research Council—the century-old, private non-partisan institution set up by congress to serve as “scientific advisor to the nation,”—to look into the matter. The NRC turned the request over to its in-house Climate Research Group, which put together an Ad Hock Study Group of scientists, led by Jules Charney. The Ad Hock Group sequestered in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and began reviewing all the modelling on CO2, reassessing weak spots and somewhat averaging the results. The outcome was a slim, 22-page report, with the closest thing yet to a definitive statement on CO2. Unlike the WMO report, which though comprehensive, offered no clear prediction regarding CO2, other than to say more research is needed, this report provided the closest thing yet to a firm prediction. If CO2 concentrations double, it said, global temperatures will increase 3 degrees centigrade.

It was a bombshell. Media had an attention-grabbing headline and grabbed it, with petroleum interests and environmentalists lining up on either side of its conclusion, one attacking, the other defending. As a result, a kind of social feedback loop developed. The more CO2 was denied as a cause of climate change, the more it was declared by its defenders, cementing in place the public sense that carbon gases were the sole matter of climate change. Suddenly the CO2 leg stood in the spotlight, with the land-change leg hidden in shadow, lost in the uproar.

Did Charney and his associates intend to portray CO2 as the only cause of climate change? Likely not. They point out in their Summary and Conclusions, “we have limited our considerations to the direct climatic effects of steadily rising concentrations of CO2.” Like most scientists, they understood there is more to climate than CO2, but felt confident, despite the complexity of the subject, to make their prediction, “all other things being equal.”

It's this “all other things being equal” where things get tricky. For within “all other things being equal” lies the land change leg and the living processes and landscapes it involves, far too complex at the time for modelling. To simply leave those processes out, which is what the Charney Report essentially did, seems artificial, yet an attempt to predict the possible effects of rising CO2 concentrations was clearly needed, and waiting until all uncertainties were resolved before confronting the CO2 problem would likely mean waiting until it was too late. Further, setting aside uncertainties is a common practice in computer modelling, and can run both ways. For instance, in trying to model land-change effects, a modeler might tune out CO2 effects to get a clearer picture. It’s part of the modeling process and shouldn’t be seen as underhanded. It does, however, require explanation, which the Charney Report failed to provide, and which hasn’t been provided since, by the IPPC or climate journalism.

In any case, you can imagine where this left the WMO and the other international organizations. The Americans had come out with a strong statement on CO2, while they were far from such scientific consensus. The wide scope of their analysis, which they were so proud of, was suddenly a leaden liability. The CO2 train had pulled out of the station and there they were still sorting through the luggage of various uncertainties, often related to land change. What to do?

In a series of workshops and conferences held between 1980 and 1988, leading international organizations, such as the WMO (World Meteorological Associate) UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program) and ICSU (International Society of Scientific Unions) attempted to resolve their uncertainties around the CO2 leg and articulate their own consensus. Meanwhile, an organizational structure for international climate cooperation was needed, out of which two organizations were created.

One we’re all familiar with: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The other hardly any of us has heard of: the International Geosphere Biosphere Program, or IGBP. The pesky land leg, with all its complex, difficult-to-model processes, was filed there, but in the context of different language. Rather than dealing with “climate change,” this group’s work was placed under the moniker “global change.”  Largely ignored by the climate press, it received one tenth the funding of the IPCC and in 2015 was shuttered, turned into a private organization called Future Earth.

What happened to the two-legged approach to climate? It’s really kind of simple. The land leg proved “incommodious,” as Millan puts. Not only were the living processes difficult to model, they stood directly in path of the industrial “green” energy solution being promoted. If land destruction is recognized as a driver of climate change, the notion of a hugely land-intensive, industrial solution becomes problematic indeed. So the two were split. The CO2 leg, championed by the IPCC, strode into the climate spotlight to save humanity, while the land-change leg, housed under the IGBP, remained behind for further research having to do with “global change,” a term largely unrecognizable to the general public. And then it was quietly dissolved.

While these machinations were occurring, Millan was apart. He had his hands full dealing with severe pollution in the Mediterranean’s coastal cities and valleys, and then the collapsing summer storms. Of such goings-on in climate science, he was largely unaware. His encounter was instead at the two opposite ends of the process. He was there at the beginning, when modern science began its first broad inquiries into the human impact on climate, exemplified by the MIT/Swedish Academy of Sciences report, where he picked up the two-legged concept which served him so well in the Mediterranean. Then, in 1995, when he began to share his results, he encountered the other end of the process, after the two legs had been administratively split, and CO2 had risen as the official cause of climate change, with land and vegetation demoted to carbon-sink and mitigation-agent.

It didn’t really matter how convincing or important his observations were. The narrative was already established. CO2 as cause. Global Circulation Models as the ocular. Physics (math) as the basis. He had occasional backers high in the EC, and I’m sure he had many people nodding in agreement at his presentations, but the scientific and political architecture could no longer fit his insights. It was like he brought a round answer to a square question.

Not surprisingly, it was a long and frustrating battle for Millan. And dispiriting. He knows well the implications of his work around the globe, the amount of good it could do, but feels it most acutely in his homeland. For Millan, the satisfaction that came with solving the summer storm mystery came along with the sadness of knowing the true state of his surroundings, what they should be, could be, and where they’re headed. What Millan fears most are the feedbacks. Every unrealized summer storm, every failure of the system to eject its heat and release its water to the life below, not only dehydrates that life, but leads to more powerful storms in fall, winter and spring. Those storms then further erode what’s left of the land, deepening the cycle, as the land drifts ever closer to the critical threshold at which it collapses to desert.

I sometimes try to imagine how different things might be had the two two-legged conception of climate not been split. It’s hard to imagine CO2 emissions being any higher. Despite the laser-focus on the CO2 problem, emissions have risen almost 20 percent since the formation of the IPCC in 1988. In that time how many midwives have gone under the saw that might have been saved had they been seen for their full hydrological importance? How much soil womb has been covered in concrete or eroded by land abuse without anyone realizing the climatic consequences? How much land would have been protected, and how much restored, if the public had known just how critical their local and regional landscapes are to their own, lived-in climates? At one point Millan had 100 million Euro of EC funding for land restoration efforts but could find no takers.

Now the boy, whose father literally pointed to his destiny, and as we’ve seen, met it with such scientific elan, feels defeated. Once, when we were communicating about Ted Munn’s 2013 death, he wrote, “I just realized I may be the last living representative of the two-legged theory of climate.” But the story isn’t over. The scientific understanding of Earth’s climate is moving toward Millan’s understanding, not away. Already the term biophysical (the two-legged concept in a single word) is becoming commonplace in climate literature. And more and more scientists are openly expressing impatience with the CO2-only framework. The World Resources Institute, for example, recently published a report titled Not Just Carbon, Capturing All the Benefits of Forests for Stabilizing the Climate from Local to Global Scales.” Emphasis theirs.

Meanwhile, scientists and citizens are joining forces and charting paths beyond the CO2 mono-view. Organizations such as Climate Landscapes are convening conferences to bring scientists, citizens and journalists together around the hydrological, landscape perspective. Citizen organizations, like Biodiversity for a Livable Climate, are compiling and synthesizing the scientific literature and providing courses for the general public, who are learning the science for themselves.

Just to be clear, nothing in this series take us off the hook for drastically reducing carbon emissions. It just puts the CO2 crisis in the context of another crisis: human destruction of the biosphere. The two legs don’t oppose each other but are connected to a single body, which is Earth. And the most important thing about this Earth—and the reason for food, clean water, breathable air, a livable climate and just about everything we hold dear—is that it’s alive.

Millan may have failed to alter the course of the scientific bureaucracy, but he succeeded in inspiring a new, still-emerging climate narrative. Speaking personally, it was the elegance of his two-legged concept and the poetry of water begets water, soil is the womb, vegetation the midwife, that drew me into this exploration. It’s not too late to take Millan’s insights to heart, and in my more hopeful moments I think we may well be at the edge of a new climate movement, which, if I had to saddle with a name, I would call a living climate movement.