I ran into a friend at a party a short while ago who I hadn’t seen in quite a while. He gets this newsletter and remarked to me that he appreciated getting the info and my passion for the subject matter. And then he asked me if we were really in any big trouble.
Of course I answered with a very affirmative YES. And followed up by indicated that I personally believe that the climate is unravelling even faster and more dramatically than I am and have been reporting.
I know it is hard to accept this. Even I don’t want to. It is almost toooo scary to contemplate. And I try to be optimistic and believe that we can find the solutions to climate change before we irreversibly destroy the web of life upon which our civilization has been built and, our social fabric comes apart at the seams.
I have been writing this blog for over two decades, since the mid 90’s. And many of you who have been getting it for that long can attest to the fact that my prognostications have not only been highly accurate but also as I’ve been predicting, events have occurred faster than anyone thought possible in both a negative and positive sense.
So I hope that as you read what I send you you will take this seriously and spread the word.
My message today is to again reiterate and emphasize that we are in a climate crisis, it is real and the pace is accelerating and in ways that should be hard to ignore or deny even if you don’t see them happening right outside your own house. At least you’re seeing it on the nightly news now as the Amazon in Brazil and the Arctic in Russia and Alaska are burning up and heat records are being annihilated around the globe on a very consistent basis.
“On Monday, officials in Britain confirmed the country experienced its hottest day on record last Thursday. July 25 also broke national records in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. In Paris, the temperature reached 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit (42.6 Celsius), smashing the French capital’s 72-year-old record by a staggering four degrees. Over the weekend, records fell across Scandinavia, with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute even reporting that 20 places in southern Norway experienced “tropical nights.””
“Conditions are all the more terrifying elsewhere. Epic heat waves racked South Asia and the Middle East earlier this summer; glaciers in the Himalayas are now melting at double the rate since the turn of the century. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization projected that the period between the beginning of 2015 and the end of this year will mark the Earth’s five warmest years on record.”
““The weather system responsible for the heat wave is now parked on top of Greenland, where it is expected to significantly speed up the pace and extent of ice melt for the next week. It could also help to drive Arctic sea ice to a record low by September, beating a record set in 2012.””
“the stunning margins by which many of the previous record highs were eclipsed over the last week point to an inescapable reality: man-made climate change.”
I hope you get this now. The consequences are enormous. Imagine what is going to happen when the glaciers in the Himalayas disappear and water to that whole region disappears…
The World’s Climate Emergency is Getting Harder to Ignore
We’re still coming to grips with how hot the recent heat wave that scorched through Europe actually was. On Monday, officials in Britain confirmed the country experienced its hottest day on record last Thursday. July 25 also broke national records in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. In Paris, the temperature reached 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit (42.6 Celsius), smashing the French capital’s 72-year-old record by a staggering four degrees. Over the weekend, records fell across Scandinavia, with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute even reporting that 20 places in southern Norway experienced “tropical nights.”
What happened? An intense area of high pressure, known as a “heat dome,” settled over Western Europe. As The Washington Post’s deputy weather editor Andrew Freedman explained, the stunning margins by which many of the previous record highs were eclipsed over the last week point to an inescapable reality: man-made climate change.
“Pending detailed analyses, climate scientists say it’s unlikely that this event would have occurred without the influence of human-caused global warming,” Freedman wrote in a memo to Today’s WorldView. “The weather system responsible for the heat wave is now parked on top of Greenland, where it is expected to significantly speed up the pace and extent of ice melt for the next week. It could also help to drive Arctic sea ice to a record low by September, beating a record set in 2012.”
Conditions are all the more terrifying elsewhere. Epic heat waves racked South Asia and the Middle East earlier this summer; glaciers in the Himalayas are now melting at double the rate since the turn of the century. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization projected that the period between the beginning of 2015 and the end of this year will mark the Earth’s five warmest years on record.
In an email to Freedman and his colleagues at The Post’s Capital Weather Gang, Radley Horton, a climate researcher at Columbia University, put it bluntly. “The verdict is in: Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity — by raising average temperatures — have loaded the dice toward more frequent record breaking heat extremes,” wrote Horton. “But the magnitude with which all-time records are being broken . . . suggests an accomplice. Specifically, human-driven increases in the variability of our day-to-day weather.”
Last year, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decreed that the world would have to reduce total carbon emissions by 45 percent before 2030 if it hoped to prevent a rise in global temperatures below a likely ruinous 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Now, experts and advocates insist the real action needs to happen by the end of next year.
“Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit,” wrote BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath. “Right now, we are heading towards 3 [degrees Celsius] of heating by 2100 not 1.5. As countries usually scope out their plans over five and 10 year time frames, if the 45 percent carbon cut target by 2030 is to be met then the plans really need to be on the table by the end of 2020.”
To that end, advocates point to a series of crucial international meetings: A major U.N. conference on climate action in New York this September and the COP25 climate change conference in Chile this December, which will build on previous rounds of international diplomacy, including the landmark 2016 Paris climate agreement. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has dubbed climate change “the battle of our lives” and has asked leaders attending the U.N. summit in September to come “ready to announce the plans that they will set next year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for 2030 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.”
One prominent attendee will be Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who has captured the global imagination as an outspoken advocate for climate action. She will make the trip across the Atlantic aboard an emission-neutral high-speed yacht. Though she eschews jet travel for its high carbon footprint, Thunberg wrote on social media in June that she had to attend both conferences because, “this is pretty much where our future will be decided.
For right-wing opponents or skeptics of the climate change crowd, the cost of bending to the scientific consensus is not worth it — either for their election chances or the bottom lines of the fossil fuel industries they favor. Climate change activists are exasperated with such short-termism. And even major fossil fuel companies pay more lip service to reckoning with climate change than Trump and his ilk.
“Either we radically transform human collective life by abandoning the use of fossil fuels or, more likely, climate change will bring about the end of global fossil-fueled capitalist civilization,” wrote Roy Scranton in an April essay in MIT Technology Review. “Revolution or collapse — in either case, the good life as we know it is no longer viable.”
