Stoic Reflections On The Collapse of the Gulf Stream
Can philosophy help us live well facing this degree of uncertainty?
“The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025,” reports the Guardian and others. “The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts.”
“The new analysis estimates a timescale for the collapse of between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050, if global carbon emissions are not reduced. Evidence from past collapses indicates changes of temperature of 10C in a few decades, although these occurred during ice ages.”
The AMOC has not been shut off for 12,000 years. Its collapse would have consequences around the world, lessening the rain that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and Africa, increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe, and leading to rising sea levels on the eastern coast of North America, as well as endangering the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets. And more, I’m sure.
I was reading about this yesterday, less than 24 hours after reading about the failure of the Antarctic to regain its ice during its winter season, an event scientists say is so rare it’s predicted to happen once every 7.5 million years. Yet of course we are concerned it will happen next winter as well.
The collapse of AMOC by 2050 would place it when my young son is 38 years old. Sooner—as early as 2025, for instance—would place it as part of a cascading series of global crises which would explode before he enters High School. So far the Climate Crises has been unfolding faster than most scientists predicted, closer to the more extreme models. So 2025 doesn’t seem out of the question.
The wizards may save the day, but tech solutions are still in the infancy of their development and rife with uncertainties. They will probably be employed, probably in a rushed and questionable manner, and who knows how well they will work or what the side effects will be. All of this bodes chaos.
So how do we respond? I began exploring this question in my piece Epictetus On The Climate Crisis: A Rational Animal On The Vulnerable Earth, but I think I’ll be thinking and writing a lot more about this in the years to come. Before I continue I want to be clear that the prescriptions I offer are for cultivating peace of mind and resilience, but not political inaction or nihilism. Each of us should respond with what integrity and resources we have to live like responsible, ecologically mindful, rational animals on the vulnerable earth.
Catastrophes Ahead
These are not academic matters. Even if we abandon our current trajectory—not an easy task logistically or politically—and rapidly reduce our use of fossil fuels, the changes we’ve already set in motion will bring calamity to millions.
How do we face the possibility of future catastrophe, of the fear of likely loss and pain? How do we face the possibility that our own lives will be shortened, that the lives of our children will be shortened?
Here is the first of three thoughts from the great Stoics I find helpful. The next two I will share in a follow up essay next week.
The Good Life
The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca himself (4 BCE-65 CE) lived through tyranny and political chaos and ended his life when he was ordered to commit suicide by his former pupil, the Emperor Nero, whose tutor he had been for several years. There is enough wisdom in the letters that he wrote towards the end of his life to his friend Lucilius to last a lifetime.
In one essay, On The Shortness of Life, Seneca writes:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Further, Seneca says, “you must not think a person has lived long because they have white hair and wrinkles: they have not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a person had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as they left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? They did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.”
Here as elsewhere Seneca repeats a key insight: it is not the length of life, but rather the quality, that matters.
As he writes in a letter, “As it is with a play, so it is with life — what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.”
Seneca has some advise on how to put this perspective into practice:
“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
“You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow… Just as travelers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace — the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.”
We should seek to live well, then, and not waste what time we have. In truth the time any of us has in this life is uncertain—we could be hit by a bus tomorrow—but remembering Seneca’s words may bring us a measure of both peace and vitality to live well, both for ourselves and for others, as we face uncertainty about the future of not just ourselves but humanity itself.