I wanted to walk my two miles this morning, but stepping outside, blasted by the double whammy of humidity and a temperature already at 83 F and rising fast, I thought better of it.
It’s like this virtually everywhere these days. Our children, vacationing in Palm Desert, CA, relayed it reached 118 F there yesterday.
2016 was the hottest year on record. This year is likely to be hotter still.
Some suffer grievously. There’s Phoenix, AZ, with its 27 straight days of 110 F plus temperatures, its denizens reliant on air conditioning to get them through. I ponder the city’s fate were the electric grid to give way. Fifteen percent of Phoenix’s population lives in poverty, many on the streets, exacerbating the heat’s impact. Last year’s heat waves killed 425 residents of Maricopa County, 56 percent of them homeless.
Duluth, MN, looks better everyday. It doesn’t surprise me that a growing number of families, sensing what’s likely to get a lot worse, are moving to this Lake Superior city known for its cool days even as the Twin Cities, to the South, bake. North Dakota, anyone?
Along with record-breaking heat, come the inevitable forest fires. Everyone’s holding their breath in California, despite its recent heavy downpours and filling of depleted reservoirs, as soaring temperatures eclipse records.
Canada has fared badly, many fires still burning as plumes of toxic fumes drift southward to the US. 4200 fires, a record number, have occurred this year in Canada.
You’ve heard about the raging heat and accompanying fires in Italy, Greece, Algeria, and Crete fueled by spiraling heat waves, with many killed, thousands displaced, livelihoods gone, and animal habitats decimated.
It’s so much worse among developing countries, climate change not only bringing higher temperatures, but change in rainfall patterns, resulting in widespread famine and malnutrition as crops wilt in parched fields and cattle perish for lack of feed and water. This is especially true of Africa’s Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger), where temperatures are rising 1.5 faster than in the rest of the world. Privileged Western nations in their addiction to fossil fuels bear heavy responsibility for their plight. Unless we mend our ways, their desperation may be tomorrow’s world for our children, our spiraling heat waves and droughts the preface of things to come.
All of this isn’t unanticipated, as our sophisticated attribution science has consistently confirmed the likelihood of a warming world. It’s just that it’s happening sooner and with greater intensity than projected.
But let’s not simply blame this year’s El Niño, which does make for hotter weather. We humans have been engaged in a reckless plundering of our planet’s resources since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century, accompanied by increasing reliance on fossil fuels, the consequence that we’re now 1.2 C warmer than in pre-industrial times.
75 percent of global greenhouse gases and 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels. They trap heat and with their exponential increase now pose humanity’s greatest challenge in their dire consequences for life on earth.
Under the 2015, Paris Agreement, we’ve pledged a concerted effort to hold at 1.5 C.
That’s unlikely. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) forecasts its breach as early as 2027, despite climatologists’ warning that any rise above that level would unleash irreversible catastrophic consequences.
Meanwhile, the fossil industry yesterday released its 2022 earnings report, announcing $200b in profits, surely an obscenity, given their primary contribution to the existential crisis that confronts us.
Shell says it will issue $3b to stock investors over the next three years through stock buybacks.
ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell not only boasted record profits, but gleefully announced they’ll be rolling back earlier plans to invest in low emissions ventures. It’s follow-the-money.
Concurrently, GOP congressional members lie-in-wait to ambush existing climate change mitigation efforts, should Trump—God help us—be reelected.
It’s urgent that Biden declare a climate emergency, joining the UK, New Zealand, and Japan. There’s much we could do under such a declaration to halt the fossil industry tycoons who prioritize profit over the welfare of the human community and our beleaguered earth, but don’t bet on it.
Unfortunately, he’s initiated policies contrary to his campaign pledge to fight fossil fuel emissions, pushing new pipelines, lifting taxes on gasoline and half-emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to cushion consumers at the pump, removed sanctions on American involvement in Venezuelan oil, obsequiously begged the Saudis to increase oil production, opened northern Alaska wilderness to massive oil drilling, sold oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. All of this from a candidate pursuing the presidency, pledging to young people, “no more drilling on federal lands, period, period!”
Climate expert Peter Kalmus sums up our dilemma bluntly: “Mark my words: it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses. And as a father, I grieve for my children.”
And I, along with many of you, grieve with him.
—rj
Brimmings: up from the well 