It’s Russia, Jim, But Not As We Know It

As many commentators have observed, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine smacks of civilizational conflict: Russian autocracy versus Western democracy; Russian supra-nationalism against Western pluralism.  Indeed, Putin himself has framed it in these terms.  “The drama of my homeland,” writes Mikhail Shishkin in The Guardian, is that “a small number of my compatriots are ready for life in a democratic society, but the overwhelming majority still bow before power and accept [a] patrimonial way of life.”  Seedlings of democracy sprouting in 1917 and again in the 1990s were stamped out both times by the boot of authoritarianism.  Shishkin wonders whether it is enough to show Russians the “destroyed Ukrainian cities and the corpses of children” to convince them to “openly and courageously acknowledge our guilt and ask for forgiveness.”  In this, one feels, he refers not only to the present crisis but to all the imperial escapades that came before.

It remains an open question whether Russians can be guilt-tripped into overthrowing Tsarevich Putin, let alone replacing him with something resembling a representative democracy—as opposed to just another form of patrimony.  Old habits die hard, after all.  Even young Russians, connected to global social media as they are—at least those who got out and are now filling internet cafés in Yerevan and Istanbul—are unaccustomed to what it means to actually practice democracy.

But any impending clash of civilizations will not merely be about autocracy versus democracy.  It will equally, if not more likely, be a clash of north versus south.  In the coming century, Russia’s civilizational confrontation will be a climate-driven demographic transformation rendering the country virtually unrecognizable from the one the world has known and we know today.  In a matter of decades, Putin’s tin-pot shambles of a war—historically significant though it may currently seem, and unforgettably tragic though it is for today’s Ukranians—could become a footnote in the grander scheme of things.

In 2010, Steven Sherwood and Matthew Huber published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailing the likely physiological effects of being exposed to extreme heat events under high global warming scenarios.  They asked how hot it would have to be for the human body to become unable to effectively dissipate heat, running the risk of death from heatstroke.  The theoretical maximum ambient temperature a human being can endure for extended periods is one maintaining skin temperature below 35°C, the maximum temperature at which the skin can dissipate heat from the body—provided that the person were, in Sherwood and Huber’s telling, “out of the sun, in gale-force winds, doused with water, wearing no clothing, and not working.”  This is known as the maximum wet-bulb temperature.  An ambient temperature of 35°C at 100 percent humidity, with no wind, would be sufficient to induce hyperthermia, which can be fatal within hours.  A dry, windy environment, on the other hand, would have to be significantly hotter.

Of course, the maximum tolerable temperature for any practical purpose would be several degrees lower than the maximum wet-bulb temperature because those theoretical conditions likely would never be replicated outside a laboratory.  Furthermore, as Sherwood and Huber point out, nowhere on Earth has yet recorded a maximum wet-blub temperature above 31°C.  Typical values, found mostly in the tropics and subtropics, are in the range of 26°C to 27°C.  Computed as a function of ambient temperature, humidity and air flow, the wet-bulb temperature is always lower than the actual ambient temperature itself.

So how much hotter, the authors ask, would it have to become for some parts of the world to become physiologically uninhabitable?  The answer, it turns out, is about 7°C.  This increase “would create small zones [mostly in the tropics and subtropics] where metabolic heat dissipation would for the first time become impossible, calling into question their suitability for human habitation.”  How likely is that?  Well, it is within the range of increases predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under its ‘high’ (3°C to 7°C) and ‘very high’ (5°C to 8.5°C) scenarios.  In these scenarios, greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions would increase to double (high) and triple (very high) their 2015 amounts by the end of the century.  In other words, if we “drill, baby, drill” then there’s a good chance we can hit 7°C.

But I ask a different question: how much hotter would it have to become to induce mass migrations, rather than physiological uninhabitability?  After all, few people would wait until it was too late, unlike the apocryphal frog in a pot of water on the stove.  People do not make decisions based on averages: they make decisions based on the the most extreme thing that recently happened to them.

The IPCC scenarios themselves offer a clue.  In addition to the ‘high’ and ‘very high’ scenarios, there is a ‘very low’ scenario, where global mean temperature rises between 1°C and 1.9°C above the 1850 to 1900 preindustrial average by the end of the 21st century.  To achieve this scenario requires an immediate and aggressive reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to allow the world to reach ‘net-zero’ a little after the middle of the century, thereafter becoming a net absorber of CO2.  On present form, it is unlikely.  At the same time, the ‘very high’ scenario also is unlikely, if only for the reason that technological and societal changes already in train are beginning to flatten the emissions curve, irrespective of whether governments do anything to encourage them. 

Between the two extremes lie a whole range of possible intermediate scenarios.  The IPCC details two in particular: one in which emissions continue to rise gently until the middle of the century and then decline toward net-zero by the end of the century, and the other in which they continue to rise throughout the century, roughly doubling by 2100, where they level off.

The lower of these predicts that the global mean temperature will rise by 2°C to 4.5°C above the preindustrial average.  The higher one predicts a 3°C to 7°C increase by the end of the century—just up to Sherwood and Huber’s physiologically uninhabitable threshold.

The IPCC goes on to estimate how many additional days, compared to today, would exceed 35°C under the very low and very high scenarios in different regions of the world.  Under the very low scenario, regions between 30°N and 30°S would experience about 30 such additional days per year by the end of the century.  Because this is an average, we can expect that they would also experience more days when the temperature, on an extremely hot day, rose close to the wet-bulb limit of physiological tolerance.  Under the very high scenario, the same regions would experience two to three additional months of daily maxima above 35°C and, if Sherwood and Huber are correct, they would experience certain periods when the daily maximum actually exceeded the wet-bulb limit.  In between these extremes, the medium scenarios can reasonably be expected to add perhaps up to two months of hot days, some of which would approach or possibly exceed physiological tolerance. 

Yet heatwaves of this kind, occurring year after year, would not have to exceed the physiological limit to prompt mass migrations.  Both the IPCC and Sherwood and Huber’s analysis identify the tropics and subtropics, between 30°N and 30°S, as being most susceptible to intolerable heat.  The most populous of these regions is the band of territory encompassing North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia, home to about half of the world’s people.  Just this year, in fact, India and Pakistan have experienced record heatwaves.  Even before the old, the young and the weak began dying of heatstroke in large numbers, tens of millions would seek refuge.  Where would they go?  Not south, faced as they would be with either inhospitable desert or the Indian Ocean.  They would, of course, head north, into Russia.  If the scenarios are even in the right ballpark then only a moderate amount of global warming would set in motion a chain of events rendering both southern and northern Eurasia utterly unrecognizable by the end of the century.

Russia itself also would be affected by heat stress.  Already, Siberia has experienced summer temperatures touching 100°F (38°C).  Under a high warming scenario, where global mean temperatures increased by 7°C, some summer days in Siberia would approach the limit of physiological habitability, according to Sherwood and Huber.

The truly arresting conclusion of their study is that “if warmings of 10°C were really to occur in the next three centuries, the area of land likely rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level.”  There would be virtually no land on which people could hide from the summer heat.  Any land that offered respite, such as Antarctica or the high Arctic, would provide nothing useful for survival.  Three centuries is barely enough time for ecological succession to gain a foothold on rock recently exposed by melting ice.  And even though the summers near the poles might be tolerable, the winters still would be brutal.  Under a 10°C warming scenario, the only reasonable conclusion is that the human population would, at best, crash or, at worst, go extinct altogether.

If tens of millions of people began migrating from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia into Eurasia, what would happen?  Would Russia be able to stop them at its borders?  The Russian government might succeed in using its tried and trusted methods of violent repression against the first few hundred thousand trying to cross in, but once the wave swelled into the millions, it could not hold them back.  For their part, the migrants would be on a march of survival: they would have nothing to lose and only their lives to gain.  They, not the Russian government, would have the desire, and with it, the power.  This future is not some far-off fantasy but actually a very real possibility by mid-century.  It would not be surprising to witness the first trickles of climate-refuge migration within ten years.

That is soon enough to assume that the present Russian regime may still be in power.  For centuries, Russians have been accustomed to going about their daily lives under a dictatorship, albeit one which will usually not bother someone if one does not bother it.  No tradition of radical individualism exists, unlike in the Anglophone countries.  Such an individualism demands democracy, and defends it. 

Putin’s Russia, like the Russia of all its past autocrats, is culturally fairly homogeneous.  While it accommodates a degree of ethnic and religious diversity—Chechen, Tatar, Tuvan and Mongol, to name a few—it does not tolerate alternatives to the idea of Russian empire.  It is brittle to the kinds of systemic changes destined to sweep the globe over the next few decades—or at least more brittle than Europe’s democratic nations, which have already been adapting, however grudgingly, to years of immigration from their former colonies.

Russia at the end of the 21st century might well not be majority Slavic, or white.  By then, its most common last name could conceivably be Patel.  Its leader might be ethnically Middle-Eastern or South Asian, or a mix of these with Slavic.  Most people with Russian passports might be brown- or sallow-skinned.  This vast country might also have the world’s largest population, a diversity of religions, and a polyglot cuisine.  Meanwhile, Delhi could be a ghost town.

Is the Russian regime expecting this?  Anticipating it?  Even thinking about it?  Doubtful; but it’s probably coming.  Paraphrasing Mr Spock from Star Trek (the original one), it’s Russia, Jim, but not as we know it.

It’s impossible to say whether such a Russia would be democratic or still authoritarian.  In a way, that’s another story, because it really boils down to whether societies faced with challenges to their very existence, not to mention their loss of homeland, are more likely to embrace authoritarian rule as a survival mechanism than democratic governance.  I like to think that a 22nd-century Russia, home to perhaps two billion people or more—if indeed it remained a single polity—could be a vast, culturally diverse, vibrant democracy.  Some political leader, somewhere along the way, might have rejected Putin’s recidivist Soviet nationalism and embraced this inevitable demographic transformation.  But such a rejection by no means ensures a flowering of democracy.  Under conditions of climate stress and geographical displacement, people just as easily could choose a new form of autocrat: the eco-dictator.

As Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times, “the erosion of democracy is now self-evidently a global phenomenon,” one that we are trying to understand “as it envelops the world in real time.”  It is a product, he writes—quoting from Tom Gerald Daly of the London School of Economics—of “economic inequality; political polarization; cultural backlash against rapid social, moral and demographic change; the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities…; the profound—often negative—effects of technology on society and the political system; and the rise of non-liberal alternative governance models.”

People are, of course, afraid of losing their sense of place.  In fact, the whole idea of a certain place in the world is under threat.  People will instinctively defend their sense of place against any radical uncertainty.  But radical uncertainty is coming, if indeed it’s not already here, so we would be well advised to undertake a psychological recalibration. 

That recalibration is about our sense of place itself: no longer somewhere on Earth but Earth as a whole.  If tens or hundreds of millions of people are going to be uprooted by heat stress over the coming decades then the 21st century will, from the vantage-point of the farther future, be seen as the century of mass rootlessness.  Geopolitics is going to be seriously tested and ultimately transformed over the coming decades.  The sooner everyone recognizes and accepts this, the earlier governments and people can prepare for it. 

Perhaps by the 22nd century, a new kind of ‘rootedness’ will have taken root in society: a planetarian one.  This, one hopes, would be a more tolerant, forgiving, co-operative kind of mindset.  In the face of radical climate upheaval, it seems the only realistic option for long-term survival.

Works cited

Andrews, M. (2022)  India and Pakistan heatwaves likely to become more severe, say scientists.  The Guardian (Met Desk), 29 April 2022.  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/apr/29/heatwaves-india-pakistan-likely-to-become-more-severe-say-scientists

Daly, T.G. (2019)  Democratic decay: the threat with a thousand names.  London School of Economics Phelan US Centre for American Politics and Policy, 9 March 2019.  http://bit.ly/2Up3HAg

Edsall, T. (2022)  Trump poses a test democracy is failing.  New York Times (Opinion) April 13, 2022.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/trump-democracy-decline-fall.html

IPCC (2021) Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.  Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Cambridge University Press.  https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Sherwood, S.C. and M. Huber (2010)  An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(21): 9552–9555.  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0913352107

Shishkin, M. (2022)  Neither Nato nor Ukraine can de-Putinise Russia. We Russians must do it ourselves.  The Guardian (Opinion), 1 April 2022.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/28/nato-ukraine-vladimir-putin-russia-democratic-national-guilt

Táíwò, O.O. and B. Cibralic (2022)  If the west can harbor Ukrainians, it can accept the many climate refugees to come.  The Guardian (Opinion), 1 April 2022.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/01/ukraine-war-west-immigration-climate-refugees