The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

‘Nature does not make leaps.’ The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not leap. The geological record bears witness to many fractures in time, some of which led to mass extinctions and the like: it was one such, in the form of the Chicxulub asteroid, that probably killed the dinosaurs. It is indisputable, in any event, that catastrophes waylay both the earth and its individual inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways. Which, then, has primacy in the real world—predictable processes or unlikely events? Gould’s response is ‘the only possible answer can be “both and neither”’. Or, as the National Research Council of the United States puts it: ‘It is not known whether the relocation of materials on the surface of the Earth is dominated by the slower but continuous fluxes operating all the time or by the spectacular large fluxes that operate during short-lived cataclysmic events.’