Six on History: Climate Crisis
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History (Summer Edition - coupla posts a week).
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
.JPG?part=0.8&view=1)
1) Climate change has gotten deadly. It will get worse, Washington Post
"PORTLAND, Ore. — The emergency department at Oregon Health & Science University had rarely been this busy, even during the worst stages of the covid-19 pandemic.
Physicians raced to provide fluids to patients who arrived breathless, dizzy and drenched in sweat. Others were brought in on stretchers, their body temperatures so high their central nervous systems had shut down. Those who could still speak told of stifling apartments and sun that made their skin sizzle. Some had tried to walk to county cooling shelters, only to collapse in the blistering heat.
“The system was overwhelmed,” said Mary Tanski, chair of OHSU’s department of emergency medicine, of the towering heat dome that toppled temperature records across the Northwest this week.
It will be months before experts know precisely how many of those deaths can be specifically attributed to climate change. But researchers who specialize in the science of attribution say they are “virtually certain” that warming from human greenhouse gas emissions played a pivotal role.
It is a sign of how dangerous the climate crisis has gotten — and how much worse it can still become.
The heat dome was just one of a barrage of climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks. Western wildfires are off to a scorching start, with firefighters actively battling 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres. Parts of Florida and the Caribbean are bracing for landfall of Hurricane Elsa, the Atlantic’s fifth named storm in what is one of the most active starts to hurricane season on record. Nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts and its worst drought in decades. In Verkhoyansk, Siberia — usually one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet — the land surface temperature was 118 degrees.
“Climate change has loaded the weather dice against us,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.
“These extremes are something we knew were coming,” she added. “The suffering that is here and now is because we have not heeded the warnings sufficiently.”
Humans burning fossil fuels have caused the globe to warm roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the preindustrial era. It’s a seemingly incremental change, but it has led to disproportionately frequent and severe natural disasters.
Think of the climate as a bell curve, Hayhoe said, with temperatures distributed according to how common they ought to be. The center of the bell curve may have shifted just a couple of degrees, but the area of the curve now in the “extreme” zone has increased significantly.
Within the next week, researchers expect to publish a “rapid attribution” study that determines how climate change made the Northwest heat wave more likely. Yet precisely quantifying the role of climate change in the event has been difficult because the heat was just so extreme, said Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who is contributing to the attribution effort.
“It’s well beyond what straightforward statistical analysis would suggest. It’s well beyond what climate models suggest,” he continued. “But it happened.”
Studies show the chance of a given tropical storm becoming a hurricane that is Category 3 or greater has grown 8 percent every decade. The acreage of the West burned by wildfire is twice what it would otherwise be. The heat wave that struck the Northwest this week brought temperatures that were as much as 11 degrees above the previous all-time high.
“But there are other, nonlinear, things going on,” Wehner adds.
For example, heat causes water to evaporate from vegetation and soil, which uses up energy and helps bring temperatures down — a phenomenon called evaporative cooling. But climate change has made the West both hotter and dryer. As the mercury ticks upward, the landscape becomes even more parched, which allows it to heat up even faster. Now, more than 93 percent of the American West is in moderate to severe drought, according to the U.S. drought monitor.
Scientists have been aware of these phenomena for decades, and have long warned about the potential for even moderate amounts of global warming to trigger catastrophic weather extremes.
The heat being so devastating should be a warning sign for all of us. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement calls for humanity to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. A subsequent report from United Nations scientists found that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius would trigger catastrophic sea level rise, near-total loss of coral reefs and a calamitous increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.
If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, studies suggest, the Earth could be 3 to 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century. The Arctic will be free of ice in summertime. Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from food shortages and extreme drought. Huge numbers of species will be driven to extinction. Some regions will become so hot and disaster-prone they are uninhabitable.
“It’s a very different planet at those levels,” Wehner said. “This is really serious. As a society, as a species, we’re going to have to learn to adapt to this. And some things are not going to be adaptable.”
Extreme heat is likely to be one of those things. Studies of heat waves suggest that a half a degree Celsius increase in summertime temperatures can lead to a 150 percent increase in the number of heat waves that kill 100 people or more. Research published last year in the journal Science found that the human body can’t tolerate temperatures higher than 95 degrees when combined with 100 percent humidity.
The scene in emergency departments across the Northwest this week underscores that science. Wait times at the OHSU emergency department were 5 to 7 hours, Tanski said. At Swedish Health Services — Cherry Hill in Seattle, doctors were seeing patients in hallways because all the rooms were full.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Markel, an emergency physician at the Seattle hospital. During an overnight shift on Monday, he treated 12 patients for heat illness. Some were so sick their kidneys and livers were failing, their muscles starting to break down.
Jeff Duchin, Seattle and King County’s chief public health officer, put it more bluntly: “Climate change is a health emergency,” he said in a statement this weekend. “And reducing greenhouse gas emissions is literally a matter of life and death.”
The intensity of recent weather extremes — and the certainty of still worse events to come — weighs on scientists.
Speaking over the phone, Wehner’s tone was somber as he discussed the wildfire smoke that choked California last summer, people whose homes burned down, a friend whose 90-year-old mother was killed when the town of Paradise was consumed by flames. Haltingly, he recalled watching a newscaster interview a Pakistani man whose two children had died in a 2015 heat wave. When Wehner later investigated the event, he found that climate change had made the event 1,000 times more likely.
“It did not have to be this way,” he said. “We have known enough to take action for 20 years. And if we had taken action 20 years ago, it would be a lot easier.”
“But there’s no ‘I told you so,’ ” he continued. “I just feel bad. Just bad. I really wish we had been wrong. But we weren’t.”
The only comfort, said Hayhoe, is in knowing that action can still be taken. Though the world could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming within this decade, scientists say we can avoid crossing that threshold if we cut global greenhouse gas emissions by about 7.6 percent per year.
Such cuts would require an unprecedented transformation of human society. But look at the alternative, Hayhoe said.
"MANY PEOPLE HERE think they are safe from climate change, the journalist from a German newspaper explained to me. They don’t see it as an immediate threat, like Covid-19. They see the Greens as scolds who want to take away their cheap holidays. “What do you have to say to them?”
The question came via video call in late June, and I was, at that very moment, pickled in my non-air-conditioned home, gripped by a heatwave that would, before the week was done, kill about 500 people in British Columbia, Canada, and cook perhaps a billion marine creatures on scorching shorelines. Over the years, I have faced many such “why should I care” questions, and I usually try to reach for some kind of moral argument about our responsibility to fellow humans even when we aren’t immediately impacted. But because I was far too hot and angry for high-mindedness, what I had to say instead was “Give it a minute.”
What I meant was that when it comes to making a political calculus about what people will and will not accept by way of climate policy, it’s never wise to count out the Earth as a key actor. Our planet has a way of inserting itself into these calculations, rapidly changing the views of those who imagined themselves to be safe.
That has certainly been the case in Germany ahead of federal elections coming up in September. In June, the Green Party was sliding in the polls, under heavy attack as killjoys for carbon-pricing plans that would threaten beloved vacations in Mallorca (in response to the backlash, the party backed off those tough policies). Less than a month later, the political landscape looks very different. German officials expect the death toll from July’s floods to climb to well over 200 people, with many more injured and core infrastructure swept away. Climate change is now at the center of the German election debate, and the Greens are under attack from the climate left for going soft.
When I published “This Changes Everything” way back in 2014, I included a quote from Sivan Kartha, senior scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute: “What’s politically realistic today may have very little to do with what’s politically realistic after another few Hurricane Katrinas and another few Superstorm Sandys and another few Typhoon Bophas hit us.”
Sure enough, we have experienced another few of those storms, and then a few more. Recent flooding in Henan, China, is being described as the heaviest in 1,000 years, displacing some 200,000 people. It’s a good bet that it won’t be another thousand years before this kind of disaster strikes again. And then there is the fire and smoke, summer after suffocating summer. California. Oregon. British Columbia. Siberia. Little wonder, then, that a new Economist/YouGov poll finds that for the first time since it began the survey in 2009, U.S. respondents now rank climate change as their second most important political issue — topped only by health care. Climate even beat out “the economy,” while crime, gun control, abortion, and education all trailed far behind.
This kind of issue ranking is, of course, absurd. The fact that anyone thinks the stability of the planetary systems that support all life can be pried apart from “the economy” or “health” — or much of anything at all — is a symptom of the mechanistic hubris that got us into this mess. If our climate collapses, so does everything else, and that should be the beginning of all discussions on the topic. Still, the poll reflects the reality that something dramatic is changing in public perception: a dropping away of the fantasy of safety in the wealthier parts of the world, as well as the beginnings of cracks in the faith that money and technology will find solutions just in the nick of time.
Climate inaction in the rich world was never really about denial. Belgians and Germans knew climate change was real; they just thought poorer countries would bear the brunt of it. And up until recently, they were right. A few years ago, a well-known meteorologist in Belgium told me that her biggest challenge in communicating the urgency of the climate crisis was that her viewers actively looked forward to having a warmer climate, which they imagined as something closer to the Burgundy region of France. Similarly, Oregon and Washington state, just a couple of years ago, were coping with skyrocketing housing costs as throngs of Californians moved north. Many believed the predictions that the Pacific Northwest would be a big climate winner, with some mapping suggesting that the region would be protected from the drought, heat waves, and fires that were tormenting the southwestern U.S. — while a little more heat and a little less rain would make Washington’s and Oregon’s chilly, wet climates more like California in its glory days. It seemed not just safer but, to many flush with tech cash, also like a smart real estate move.
Well, it turns out that a planet going haywire doesn’t behave in linear ways that are easy for real estate agents or ultrarich doomsday preppers to predict. Yes, a warmer world means California’s temperatures become more like Mexico’s, and Oregon’s a little more like California’s. But it’s also true that everywhere turns upside down. The Pacific Northwest isn’t adapted to the kind of heat that is commonplace in Southern California and Nevada, and the lack of air conditioning is the least of it. Salmon — our region’s keystone species — need cool water to survive, and young salmon grow up in bodies of fresh water that this summer have warmed up like hot tubs. Scientists fear that many of the young fish will not make it.
If salmon populations collapse, that will trigger a cascade of loss reaching well beyond the commercial fishery. These animals are sacred to every Indigenous culture in the region; they are critical food to iconic (and vulnerable) marine mammals including orcas and Steller sea lions; and they are integral to the health of temperate rainforests, not only to the bears and eagles who feed on them but also to the carbon-sequestering trees they fertilize.
As for the idea that Californians should move north to escape fire, that dream has obviously gone up in flames. Last summer, deadly wildfires forced evacuations just east of Portland, Oregon, and as I write, smoke from the state’s Bootleg fire is contributing to the plume that blotted out the sun as far away as New York City. So, no, Oregon is not safe. New York is not safe. Germany is not safe. Nowhere that imagined itself safe is safe.
That was the message from a coalition of nations on the front lines of climate disruption. Responding to the German floods, the Climate Vulnerable Forum issued a statement, signed by Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives.
On behalf of the climate vulnerable countries I would like to express solidarity and offer my support and prayers to the people of Germany as they suffer the impacts of these catastrophic floods. While not all are affected equally, this tragic event is a reminder that in the climate emergency no-one is safe, whether they live on a small island nation like mine or a developed Western European state.
The subtext, of course, was that safety has long been a distant dream for people living in low-lying Pacific islands like the Maldives, and that record-breaking heat and floods have been stealing lives, from Pakistan to Mozambique to Haiti, for a good while now.
Why? It comes back to those stories so many of us in the rich world have been telling ourselves about our relative safety. That when the climate crisis hit, it would be others (read: Black, brown, Indigenous, foreign) who would bear the risks. And if that turned out to be a bad bet, and the crisis came to our communities, then we would simply move somewhere more protected. To Oregon or British Columbia or the Great Lakes or maybe, if things get really dire, Alaska or the Yukon. In other words, we would do precisely what North American, European, and Australian governments ruthlessly punish and vilify migrants on our borders (including climate migrants) for doing: attempting to get to safety. As water scientist Peter Gleick recently wrote, we are seeing the emergence of “two classes of refugees: those with the freedom and financial resources to try, for a while at least, to flee from growing threats in advance, and those who will be left behind to suffer the consequences in the form of illness, death and destruction.”
In this summer of fires and floods, it appears to be dawning on many that even this sinister form of climate apartheid is likely an illusion for all but the ultrarich. As Nasheed said, and as the New York Times echoed in an ominous headline overlaid on a photograph of a burning building: “No one is safe.” We are all trapped in this crisis — whether under that relentless pall of smoke, or in a heat that hits like a physical wall, or under rains and winds that will not stop. Even in the United States, built on the foundational lie of the frontier, the climate crisis can no longer be fobbed off on some faraway place or to some far-off future time. We are fresh out of “out theres” — whether spatially or temporally.
Except, of course, for Jeff Bezos, the man who just in case we missed his cartoonish pluri-planetary frontier fantasy, wore a cowboy hat and boots for the joyride and came back gushing about how he had seen the future, and it was toxic space dumps.
This, right there, is the crux of our crisis: the persistent fantasy, despite all reason and evidence, that there are no hard limits to capital’s capacity to keep turning life into profit, that there will always be a new frontier to keep the lucrative game going. As Justine Calma wrote in The Verge, “Sticking unwanted stuff in a place that’s seemingly out of sight, out of mind is a tired idea. It’s the same old mindset that has dumped industrial waste on colonized peoples and neighborhoods of color for centuries.” And it’s the same old mindset that convinced residents of Germany and the United States that climate breakdown wasn’t an urgent crisis — until it broke all over them.
If it were only Bezos who thought like this, we could ground him, tax him, and be done with it. But he is only the crassest manifestation of a logic that pervades our ruling class: from Sen. Ted Cruz jetting off to the five-star Ritz-Carlton in Cancún, Mexico, while Texas froze to Peter Thiel planning his luxury bunker in New Zealand. And so long as the rich and powerful continue to believe that there is an “out there” to absorb their messes, they are going to fiercely protect the business-as-usual machine that will keep the rest of us burning down here."
"Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.
Only days before in the Northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave, as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.
The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
"The broad parameters of the climate change fight are clear.
We need to reduce dramatically our dependence on fossil fuels in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and increase our use of alternative energy sources that do not expel carbon dioxide, methane and the like into the atmosphere.
That has led to other sharp delineations, which end up being a little more complex.
Oil, coal and natural gas are bad; solar and wind are good. So goes the premise now gaining acceptance as climate change wreaks escalating damage, and as people experience its effects ever closer to home.
So a shift is taking place. Governments are increasing commitments to reducing emissions, even if actual actions lag. Corporations are making similar pledges or being forced to by restive shareholders. Automakers are promising fleets of electric vehicles in the near future. Individuals are making their own contributions. It's nowhere near universal, but it's enough to signal a shift.
And the implications are interesting, especially for those who see the climate change fight in those stark good vs. evil terms.
Because the shift we seek for the planet's survival will require multitudes of batteries to power our electric vehicles, and really large batteries to store the power the sun and wind produce for delivery during times of peak usage and when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Production of those batteries, and of the component parts of the envisioned massive arrays of wind turbines and solar panels, will require immense amounts of rare-earth elements, graphite, and metals like lithium, cobalt, copper and manganese.
That's where the clean narrative of what's desirable and what's not begins to break down.
In China, which produces 60% of the world's rare-earth element output, mining them has poisoned water and soil, killed crops and animals, and created clusters of abnormal diseases in nearby poor communities. Rare-earth mining in Malaysia by the Australian company Lynas, another major rare-earth producer, has created low-level radioactive waste.
In the Congo, which produces more than 70% of the world's cobalt, human rights issues like inhumane child labor practices and fatal workplace accidents have been documented in some mining operations for years. Lithium mining around the world contaminates soil and water.
Now comes the prospect of mining the ocean 15,000 feet below sea level where nodules rich in cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese rest on the ocean floor. But the deep-sea environment of unique organisms and little-understood biodiversity is still being explored. We don't know yet its potential as a source of medicines or other materials, and it's unclear what impact mining and the plumes of sediment it creates will have on that ecosystem.
The energy transition we seek inevitably means we need more of these materials, even if we diligently recycle what already exists. The International Energy Agency recently found that hitting net-zero emissions worldwide by 2050 would require six times the current production by 2040. The United States is looking to ramp up its production of critical elements to meet demand and reduce its dependence on other, sometimes rival, nations. That's smart. But it must be done right.
Producing these metals and minerals ethically and cleanly is not impossible, just difficult.
The break with fossil fuels might not be as clean as we'd like, but break with them we must. The consequences of unfettered global warming are far worse. The transition might be messier than we'd like, and the decisions more difficult than we'd prefer.
Sometimes solutions to problems bring problems of their own."
