WILL THE 21ST CENTURY BECOME THE CLIMATE CENTURY?

Climate issues are here to stay. By climate I am referring to climate variability from season to season and year-to-year, climate fluctuations on the decade scale, climate change on the order of centuries, “deep” climate change to a new climate state not yet witnessed by post-Industrial Revolution societies, and extreme weather and climate events such as droughts, floods and frosts. Seasonality can be singled out for special attention.

I contend that climate issues will in many ways dominate the attention of policy makers throughout the 21st century. While there will surely be issues of conflict and peace, they will be interspersed with stories of deadly extreme events, record setting weather and climate extremes, costly climate-related recovery activities and so forth. For example, the media and scientists from various academic disciplines have reported that the Colorado River is at its lowest level in the past 500 years, that there has been an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events that are being labeled as “superstorms,” and that the cost of climate-related damages has sharply increased since 1990.

In addition, there is heightened concern as well about global warming and its potential impacts on local and regional climate systems and on human activities dependent on those systems as societies have come to know them. Food production, water resources, energy needs, infectious disease outbreaks, forest fires and natural hazards appearing in places where they had not occurred in recent times will be altered to varying degrees and in unknown, even surprising, ways not only by natural climate changes but by climate changes induced by human activities.

For these reasons, among others, it is extremely important for individuals as well as corporate and governmental decision makers to better understand the climate settings in which they must operate. While climate factors may or may not to prove to have been important in any given situation, they must be taken into consideration in an explicit way. I also believe that the 21st century has a good chance to become the climate century, in the same way that historians have designated earlier centuries as having been dominated by the influence of one empire or country, as opposed to another.