I can’t remember when (or where) I first heard the expression, ‘herding cats.’ I don’t think this idiom was around when I was young. So far as I can tell, it was invented sometime in the 1980s and it took off. Soon everyone was using it. It’s a great little saying because we all know enough about cats to understand right away what it means. ‘I did my best, but it was like herding cats.’ At once we appreciate the futility, the complexity, and the sheer absence of co-operation from everyone concerned. You don’t get herds of cats. They are too bloody-minded.
My father had a saying that meant almost the same thing. But
not quite. He would say, ‘it was like trying to organise spaghetti.’
Somehow, for me, organising spaghetti feels like an enterprise even more doomed
to failure than herding cats. The cats may not want to be herded, but there is
at least the possibility that they might eventually succumb. Spaghetti on the other
hand will never submit to organisation. And unlike the cats this isn’t due to wilfulness
or contrariness. Disorganisation is a property of the spaghetti itself.
Efforts to resolve the climate-change crisis are often
compared to herding cats. In this metaphor the ‘cats’ are the 195 countries on the
planet, across 7 continents, where no two countries think alike, or act alike,
or have the same priorities, or enjoy similar political systems, or possess the
same resources, or have the same levels of understanding. How do we ever herd
these slippery belligerent cats into the same box? Even so, I worry that the problem is more like
organising spaghetti. There is no way to do this. We’ll never get everyone on
board. Perhaps we ought to accept this and find a different way.
There is, by the way, a rather clever online tool called ‘Google
NGram Viewer.’ It can help you to figure out when (but not necessarily where) a
word or an expression arose. It searches millions of books over the past two
centuries, and if the words you’ve entered appear in 40 books or more in any calendar
year, it counts them and plots a graph to show how the frequency has changed
with time. Forty books feels like quite
a high bar to me. If you enter ‘herding cats’ you won’t find any use of
this expression until 1938. In 1942 the phrase disappears, and it doesn’t
reappear until 1987. After that the frequency graph rises meteorically, like
the lift-off of a space rocket. It is as if there was something that happened
in the Eighties that made this expression useful.
If, by the way, you try ‘organised spaghetti’ in NGram
Viewer you don’t get any results at all. Maybe this expression was exclusively
my dad’s.
If I look up from my keyboard, and glance out of my window,
I can see a storm coming. The clouds gathering over the estuary look as grey and
heavy as gunmetal.
And now, in the time it has taken me to type that last
sentence, the storm is upon us. The rain is driving against my window. I no
longer have a view. Funny how the weather
can do that, and we all accept it. We look at the forecasts and we plan our
days around them. Let’s do the beach on Sunday when the rain stops. But
if we’re told the whole global climate is changing, we go into a complex form
of denial. We don’t really know how to plan.
We hope that tomorrow will be much the same as today, and on the whole it is,
and that gives us comfort. It makes us think this is nothing to worry about. Yet.
One metaphor I have heard used about climate change is ‘a
slow-motion car crash.’ I used this myself in a novel, ‘The Wager and
the Bear.’ The image I wanted was of
an impending catastrophe where the parts are all in motion, where no one is yet
hurt, but where terrible death and destruction await if no one acts to stop it.
A slow-motion car crash seems to tick all of those boxes. But all the
same, I’m not altogether happy with this metaphor. For a start it seems too
prosaic. (I’m using the word prosaic to mean lacking in poetry – but also
to mean lacking in purpose.) I’ve tried to think of a better image. A train
crash is better perhaps, because it involves more people. But slow-motion is
insufficient to describe the slow and gradual increments of change that the
climate crisis delivers. Sea levels are rising by around four and a half
millimetres a year. In ten years, at this rate, they will rise four and a half
centimetres. And the sea, as we know, moves up and down, sometimes quite
erratically so that doesn’t feel like a threat. Not really. In a century the
sea might rise forty five centimetres. About knee high. And none of us likes to
think forward more than a century. Do we?
Isn’t that odd? We don’t have this blind spot with history.
We’re fascinated by the lives of the Tudors (Henry VIII was on the throne 500
years ago). We love stories about the Romans (2,000 years ago). And yet we don’t
speculate much on where our descendants might be in 500 or 2,000 years – what kind
of world they will inhabit. Or what (since we chose this measurement) the sea
levels might be. So let’s speculate then. Assume that sea levels keep on rising
at 4.5mm a year (in reality the rate will almost certainly accelerate but let’s
ignore that for a moment.) Our descendants in 2000 years will inherit seas 9
metres higher than today. The map of the world will have been altered
irreversibly. Britain will have lost most of East and Central London, and great
swathes of the Thames Valley including towns like Dartford, and Kingston.
Hundreds of seaside towns will have been wholly lost to the rising waters -
places like Portsmouth, Southampton, Middlesborough and Blackpool, Cardiff and
Newport, and Gloucester. Lincoln (now 38 miles from the sea) will be a seaside
town. So will whatever remains of Cambridge. So will York. So will
Taunton. Across The Channel most of the
Netherlands and much of Belgium will be underwater. So will huge tracts of Northern Germany.
America will lose thousands of communities down the Eastern seaboard. China will lose Shanghai and Guangzhou. Bangkok and Kolkata and Ho Chi Minh City will be gone. And Basra, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
And here’s the thing. The water will still be rising. It
still has a way to go. If all the ice melts (and it probably will if global
temperature rises by 4 degrees) then sea levels rise seventy metres or so.
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| 9 metres of sea level rise puts the Netherlands underwater |
And sea level changes are, perhaps, the least of our
worries. A 4 degree rise would make most of the world between the tropics practically
uninhabitable. It would certainly make agriculture almost impossible. It will cause
catastrophic drought . And the Northern farmlands which will now be warmer will
not take up the slack. Celestial mechanics will still restrict sunlight in
winter, and the soils are anyway very unproductive. And anyway a weird side
effect of climate change might mean that as the world gets hotter (and sea
levels keep rising) Europe curiously will get colder as ocean currents slow
down.
Finally there is a terrifying threat. This is how it might be in, 'The Year of the Dugong.' If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm) (and they could) it could push the Earth’s climate over a tipping point. This would see clouds start to break up, and, a cloudless world will reflect away less sunlight. According to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience, this could trigger another 8°C rise in global average temperatures. Game Over.
So slow-motion train crash doesn’t work, does it? ‘Ultra-slow
motion asteroid-collision,’ might be better. A disaster movie that runs at
one frame a year. But the disaster is still going to happen. And it is inevitable
unless we can herd the unruly cats who govern us and get them to start
organising the spaghetti. Now.
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
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