Letter From the Desert: Dogs and the IPCC

Aug 15, 2021

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The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was out and a gigantic German Shepherd was running toward me as fast as it could. The second part of that sentence is not an ineptly clunky metaphor, or at least it’s not intended as one. It was literally true. There were no surprises in the IPCC6 report aside from the relative lack of weasel wording. The next 30 years are going to suck, and hard, and if we radically change society in the very short term so that our global species-wide carbon emissions drop to nothing in the next 30 years, we stand a good and hopeful chance of keeping things from getting worse than they will be in the 2050s, which will nonetheless be far more dangerous and uncomfortable than the summer of 2021 has been so far.

Though this was nothing I have not heard since about 1987, the IPCC’s willingness to be blunt and uncompromising in their language metaphorically knocked me flat. The dog nearly did so literally. I was out getting my daily 12,000 or more steps, or trying to, and thinking about what a rock solid guarantee of 1.5°C increase in global temperature meant for the places and people I love, and perhaps a mile from home a small dark dot on the horizon became an animal which became a fast-moving animal which became a large dog which became an extremely large dog of a stereotypically scary breed heading straight for me at a startling speed with laser-focused intention of one kind or another.

It may seem like anticlimax to reveal that his intention was to place paws the size of grapefruits on my shoulders and wet every cubic inch of my beard with his kisses. But hold on. The story doesn’t end there.

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1.5°C increase in global average temperature is merely the best-case scenario. Even if we do manage to decarbonize our global society by the time my dog Heart is old enough to run for president, certain tough changes will be locked in for the foreseeable future. Foreseeable as in the next 2,000 years or so. The optimistic scenario for sea level rise, for instance, assuming the fervid fantasies of the most Luddite among us come true by 2035 and we start growing our own food and clothes and oil pipelines go the way of the landline and air travel becomes a dimly remembered legend that most people doubt ever really existed, like Bigfoot or moderate Republicans, the level of the oceans will continue to rise for centuries afterward. It’s just that it might take several hundred years to lose all of Bangladesh and the Netherlands and Stockton, California. So that’s a relief.

The dog had a collar but no tags. He was extremely clean: it seemed unlikely he’d been loose for more than a few minutes. Despite his size, easily 75 pounds or more, it was clear he was only months old. Those feet! I aborted my walk, postponing about 9,000 steps, and tried to get him to follow me home so I could leash him and go find the neighbor who had lost him.

That didn’t take much coaxing. Within 15 minutes he was inside our fence and drinking water, and I had noticed with concern the tendency for the tops of his rear toenails to scrape the pavement. Within four hours we had determined that he didn’t belong to any of our close neighbors, nor any second-degree-of-separation neighbors our first-degree neighbors knew. On the bright side: 11,000 extra steps. He and Heart got along well with one major relationship problem area: he was an intact male possessing at least 150% of her body weight, with a puppy’s cluelessness about details such as heat and receptivity. She preferred him well inside the friendzone. A scuffle resulted, minor except that the tooth scrape Heart accrued in the process was uncomfortably close to her eye. If he was going to stay with us for long, I realized, those testicles would have to go. (Feminist Ally cookies can be sent to the usual address. Gluten-free only, please.)

Turns out it was a good call to wait before fixing the door screens....

Heart forgave him within minutes after the tussle. Me not so much. He slept outside. At 6 the next morning I went outside to look for him. He saw me from across the yard and reprised that high speed freight train approach, this time nearly leaping into my arms. My feelings about him became thoroughly mixed.

What the advent of global temperatures 1.5°C higher means for the desert is far better known now than it was a decade ago. Droughts will be deeper and longer lasting, as they will across the breadth of Western North America. At the same time, rainstorms will become more violent. I understand if this seems contradictory. It is not. Both are bad news. There will be less water but what there is will increasingly fall all at once. More of a typical year’s storms will come in summer, potentially messing with which plants are able to survive and reproduce in the desert. (Drier winters and wetter summers may spell particular trouble for Joshua trees, for instance.)

If warming continues past 1.5°C, which is a fairly safe bet, monsoonal storms will become the dominant source of water in the Sonoran Desert, and perhaps farther north into the Mojave. Monsoonal storms are lovely things worthy of reverence. Too much of those lovely storms could make the desert literally uninhabitable several days out of the year, as heat and humidity combine to thwart our ability to cool ourselves by evaporating sweat. The process is already beginning in the desert, reports the Washington Post:

On the coast of the Gulf of California, in the Mexican state of Sonora, scientists are also seeing a “very significant” increase in wet-bulb and air temperatures, said Tereza Cavazos, a senior researcher in the department of physical oceanography at the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education.

“Wet bulb temperatures” are essentially a way of combining heat and humidity to account for their synergistic effects on the human body. Rather than get into the details of what the term means, let’s just say that at 95°F and 100% humidity, even fit, heat-adapted people who are lying naked and still in the shade in front of a fan are likely to die within three hours or so. Add exertion or health conditions and the temperature and humidity can be lower and still fatal. Add temperature and the humidity can be lower. Right now, hiking in the desert in summer is dangerous if you overexert and don’t hydrate enough. If the prognoses in IPCC6 come to pass for global warming above 2°C, there will be days each summer where sitting in the breezy shade in the desert is likely fatal, no matter how much electrolyte replacement drink you have to hand.

What this portends for the desert’s poor is easy to imagine: farmworkers and the urban poor and people living remote on Native reservations already see more than their share of deaths from heat. When it becomes a matter of “AC or die,” it’s only going to be the relatively affluent who can expect to survive until November. If the power doesn’t go out. You’d better pray the power doesn’t go out.

I’ve been thinking about the “Altithermal Abandonment,” a period somewhere around 6,000 BCE in which the Southwest became so hot and dry that it was largely abandoned. This abandonment is one of those historical events that may never have happened. It was a hypothesis advanced by Ernst Antevs to account for a scarcity of archaeological sites corresponding with that period. His idea (it’s often called “Antevs’ Altithermal” in the littachur) has been roundly criticized, then somewhat supported, then criticized more, especially by the descendants of the people who lived in the southwest 8,000 years ago. It’s been suggested that Antevs and his successors have just been looking in the wrong places, or looking for the wrong kinds of evidence, or that people may have lived in the nearby mountains but frequented the deserts on a regular basis to travel and gather food and other resources. It’s widely accepted that the Altithermal Abandonment idea should be widely rejected.

But just because it may not have happened before doesn’t mean it won’t happen again.

Of the waking dreams I have nurtured my entire adult life, two stand out to me this week. One, that I would spend my last years becoming ever more intimate with the landscapes of the southwest, spending the vast majority of my time outside and the vast majority of my nights sleeping on the ground, in only occasional contact with those outside other than the reptiles and birds and conifers and cacti I happen to be visiting at the moment.

The other is that I will be out in the desert and a dog will appear out of nowhere, present himself to me and say “I will go with you from now on,” and we will conduct our lives onward together as we see fit.

That second dream came true in a sense with Heart, depending on how you define “out in the desert” and “appear” and “present herself” and, for that matter, “dog.” And I would not trade her for anything. I would sooner live in a refrigerator box than give her up.

But to have a dream come true in a literal sense is startling. And we could not cope, not this week. On Thursday I asked the dog to hop in the car. We drove together to the local shelter. He will stay there for eight more days while the staff attempt to find the owner of record. I’ve already talked to one family who thinks he may be theirs. If not, after that waiting period elapses, he will be up for adoption. That should happen quickly. He is charming, beautiful, and sweet as pie. And, for those who pay attention to such things, he is also a full German Shepherd, complete with massive head and dysfunctionally underslung hips. (The German Shepherd Dog genome being yet another ecosystem we could not resist making catastrophically worse.)

And if he has no luck, as unlikely as that may be, he will sit and wait while the shelter calls us to come get him. He will not be euthanized for being unwanted.

Dreams that remain static are worth little: mere bucket list bullet points. Both dreams that have haunted me this week have come true, after a fashion. Just because the southwestern landscapes I dreamed of living in were essentially what I first saw there in 1966, having lasted from 6,000 BC to around 2005, and will never come back nor even be long remembered, doesn’t mean the new fenced-in, burned-over, cheat-grassed, off-roaded, overgrazed, megadammed, jet-skied, corporate-sponsored, resource-extracted, clear-cut, visitor-managed, social-mediated, climate-changed, fragmented, dessicated, gentrified and colonized and poisoned (but I repeat myself) southwestern landscape that is increasingly what we have instead doesn’t deserve love. Just because we bred a giant metaphorical hip dysplasia into the land doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for caring about it.

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Letters From the Desert

Letter From the Desert: Dogs and the IPCC

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