The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm
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then, ‘is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’; without ‘the idea of nature and the natural as some ultimate content or referent’ there can be no sense of time, and we are stranded in the mega-city where glass surfaces mirror each other, where images and simulacra rule over night and day, where the free play of masks and roles goes on and on without any real, material substance.4
But towards this city a storm is on the move.
The condition of Jameson’s postmodernity is recognisable in life in New York City as depicted in Ben Lerner’s fine novel 10:04. Fabrication and semblance seem to govern the protagonist’s every step. He is working to forge a correspondence with renowned authors. A friend asks him to become the father of her child, but not through sexual intercourse; instead he embarks on a laborious process of watching porn flicks, masturbating and handing over his semen to artificial insemination. His head spins from a twenty-four-hour installation called The Clock, a montage of clips from thousands of movies integrated in a rolling sequence, so that a scene of lightning staged at 10:04 in Back to the Future is replayed at exactly that moment in the real time of the audience, and so on throughout night and day, performing ‘the ultimate collapse of fictional time into real time’.5
Lerner’s New York, however, is under siege. The novel begins with the approach of ‘an unusually large cyclonic system’ and ends with the cataclysmic landfall of another. ‘Houses up and down the coast had been obliterated, flooded, soon a neighborhood in Queens would burn. Emergency workers were fishing out the bodies of those who had drowned during the surge; who knew how many of the homeless had perished?’ A point of irrefutable reality pierces the narrative. It submerges the protagonist in a flow of very palpable time: he looks back on ‘six years of these walks on a warming planet’. When Union Square turns ‘heavy with water in its gas phase, a tropical humidity that wasn’t native to New York, an ominous medium’, ordinary time is shut down, the air ‘like defeated time itself falling from the sky’.6 The protagonist sinks into obsession with temporality, as he ruminates over what he believes to be the source of all these storms: climate change.
Recent efforts in ‘event attribution’ corroborate the belief. Every particular storm is the unique outcome of a chaotic mix of weather components, but global warming alters the baseline where these are formed. ‘The climate is changing: we have a new normal’, one team of researchers submits: ‘The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different.’ Thus superstorm Sandy, which knocked out large parts of New York in October 2012, rode forth on sea levels elevated by some 19 centimetres; high sea surface temperatures sent extraordinary amounts of water vapour into the air as ammunition for the clouds.7 Similar factors beefed up supertyphoon Haiyan – the strongest recorded storm ever to strike land, up to that point – as it ripped through the Philippines in November 2013, killing more than 6,000 people and leaving bodies bobbing on the sea for weeks.8 ‘No single event can be attributed to climate change’, runs a popular media refrain, but a spurt of observation and modelling is now confirming the common intuition that all of this extreme weather would not have happened without it. Individual incidents may very well be pinned on the rise in temperatures, with a scientific accuracy improving by the year. Already when the earth had warmed as little as 0.85°C, three out of four recordings of extreme heat on land could be derived from the general trend, and as temperatures continue to climb, it will claim an even larger share of the causation.9 The experience is becoming well-nigh universal: a majority of the human population has been exposed to abnormally warm weather over the past decade.10 Such man-made weather, however, is never made in the present.
Global warming is a result of actions in the past. Every molecule of CO2 above the pre-industrial level resides in the atmosphere because humans have burnt trees and other plants and, preponderantly, fossil fuels over the course of time. In the beginning, the carbon in coal, oil and natural gas was locked into the crust of the earth; then at some point, those reserves were located and exploited and the fuels delivered to fireplaces, whence the carbon was released as CO2. At any given moment, the excess of heat in the earth system is the sum of all those historical fires, of the cumulative emissions, the pulses of CO2 stacked on top of each other: the storm of climate change draws its force from countless acts of combustion over, to be exact, the past two centuries. We can never be in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of this ongoing past. Insofar as extreme weather is shaped by basal warming, it is the legacy of what people have done, the latest leakage from a malign capsule – indeed, the air is heavy with time.11
When Walter Benjamin roamed the cities of interwar Europe, he jotted down a signpost for further investigation: ‘On the double meaning of the term temps in French’: temps as in weather and time.12 Most likely, the semantic overlap is rooted in the primordial experience of the seasonal cycle drawing the calendar of labour, the olden days when sun, cloud, rain and snow set the rhythm of hunting, sowing, reaping and all sorts of other activities. Then came an era when (some) people lived as though insulated from the weather – ‘our seasons’, Jameson notes, ‘are of the post-natural and post-astronomical television and media variety’ – but slowly or suddenly, the connotation is reinserting itself in everyday life.13 This time, however, the weather presents anything but a reliable clock. It tends to upset schedules and routines by dint of the weight it carries from the past. The tempest has a twisted, multiplex temporality, as registered by Lerner’s protagonist, who compulsively reports days of ‘unseasonable warmth’ when walking down October streets:
The unusual heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal, and the confusion of seasons was reflected in the clothing around them: some people were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, while others wore winter coats. It reminded him of a double exposed photograph or a matting effect in film: two temporalities collapsed into a single image.14
Even more apposite might be his sensation of ‘having travelled back in time, or of distinct times being overlaid, temporalities interleaved’, for every impact of climate change is, by physical definition, a communication with a human past.15
But the links do not only run backwards. The shadow of anthropogenic CO2 covers the foreseeable and extends into the unfathomable future. A team of the most prominent scientists working on this particular aspect point out that 2100, the year where most scenarios and projections abruptly end – there will be this or that much sea level rise until 2100, this or that much extreme heat – has no real terminal status. The widespread usage of the benchmark is an accident of computer technology, early models having been unable to carry scientists any further. Graspable and convenient, it creates, the team argues, the illusion that the future now in the balance is a relatively short one, a headache for the twenty-first century, when in fact the bulk of the rise in temperature and practically all sea level rise produced by any given amount of cumulative emissions will hang on – if it is left to the earth system to work out the consequences – for at least the next 10,000 years, the seas potentially peaking at a level around 50 metres higher than today. Much of this can still be avoided. That possibility supercharges our moment with time. ‘The next few decades’, the team concludes, ‘offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.’16 An eternity is determined now.
For every year that total decarbonisation of the world economy is postponed – not to speak of every year when emissions are stable or increasing – the shadow of committed warming extends further into the future.17 For every such year, more impacts become unavoidable. There have already been many years of that kind. Hence, a string of scientific papers coming out in 2014 and 2015 indicated that the main section of the West Antarctic ice sheet has been pushed over its tipping point and is destined to undergo irreversible meltdown, while, even more spectacularly, an equally large glacier on the eastern part of that continent – long believed to be safe from warming – may likewise be sliding towards the sea.18 ‘Whatever we do now’, popular magazine New Scientist announced, probably with some exaggeration, ‘the seas will rise at least 5 metres’.19 The motion