It's not going to abate absent sustained globally cooperative human countermeasures.
See my 2021 post "anthropocene adversities advance." And my 2019 posts "covering climate now—or just last month?"
TWO NEW READS
THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST
…You probably think of heat on a temperature scale, either Fahrenheit or Celsius. You think of it as a gradual, linear thing, a quality of the air around you that moves up and down in increments, or that can be controlled by a thermostat. Seventy degrees is a little hotter than 68 degrees, which is a little hotter than 65 degrees. The change of seasons also plays into this incremental perception of heat—winter gradually warms into spring, spring into summer. Yes, there are some days that are noticeably hotter or colder than others, but we crank up the air-conditioning or throw on a sweater. We trust it will pass and things will return to normal. Temperature is a merry-go-round that we are used to riding.
This sense of incrementalism also holds true with the climate crisis. The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get.
Right now we’re more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of warming from preindustrial temperatures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change. The reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-killing drought. But to nonscientists—which is to say, most humans on the planet—3.6 degrees of warming does not sound dangerous at all. Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day? Then there are folks who argue that extreme cold kills people and causes all kinds of weather-related problems too so maybe a hotter world isn’t such a bad thing after all.2 Even the phrase “global warming” sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather.
The difficulty of understanding the consequences of heat is amplified by conventional notions of what it means to be hot. In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new. Websites publish “hot lists” of the latest books, movies, TV shows, and actors. Facebook started in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm as a hot-or-not website called FaceMash, which ranked the attractiveness of Harvard women. Heat is an expression of passion—you feel hot for the guy at the bar or engage him in a heated debate. A person who is quick to anger is hot-blooded. Near the house where I live in Austin is a gym called Heat Bootcamp. Here, sweat is purifying, a sign of inner strength (a throwback to medieval times, perhaps, when heat was linked to masculinity through what philosopher Thomas Aquinas called “the elemental heat of the semen”). In Miami, one of the hottest cities in the US, where heat is a lethal threat to outdoor workers and where the city regularly floods due to rising seas caused by the melting ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, the basketball team is named, without irony, the Miami Heat.
Goodell, Jeff (2023-07-10). The Heat Will Kill You First (loc 196-222). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO
IN 1956, Time magazine and the New York Times had addressed science and the possibilities. That spring, Roger Revelle gave Time his first climate change interview—in an issue that documented the unnerving Soviet policy of smiles and an America that no longer had enough animal-act enthusiasm to support two circuses. (Since then, the remaining outfit has also folded its tent. Trained bears and top hats we’ve decided belong to our entertainment past.)
“In fifty years or so,” Time reported, summarizing Revelle’s research into the carbon exhalations of our machines, “this process may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.”
They had known even then about the tightness of terrestrial margins. You’d need only a one- or two-degree rise to start the ice melting, the climate changing. “When all the data have been studied,” Time explained, scientists “may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”
Five months later—cement sky, pavement leaves—the New York Times had speculated about “striking changes in climate.” A human-caused warmth that could “convert the polar regions into tropical deserts and jungles, with tigers roaming about and gaudy parrots squawking in the trees.”
A spicy thing to visualize, as light and weather thinned toward Christmas: the former frozen regions being lorded over by a mouthy bird.
And now it was here. Time magazine’s half-century waiting period elapsed. And a great international apparatus had sprung up to capture and examine the data. The IPCC, of course. Two hundred science organizations on record; from the Academy of Athens to the Zimbabwean Academy of Science. Climate change was human-caused, and real.
With three great repositories of the world’s temperature. One in Manhattan—Jim Hansen’s NASA office, six stories up from the Seinfeld coffee shop. Another amidst the Washington gridlock and founding-father statuary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. The third in Britain: the Jack Bauer-sounding Climatic Research Unit, at the University of East Anglia.
The Unit had amassed four million separate temperature readings, from four thousand sites on the planet, reaching back 150 years.
This was weather’s week-by-week episode guide—the sun-and-rain version of Ulysses. No characters, no Dublin, just sky. It had become the largest story in science.
It was 2009. To scientists, with their research accepted and agreed to, the climate fight now looked “winnable.” They weren’t following the politics. They had their eyes on their opponents, who they believed were done.
Relief can be misleading. Especially when it is anticipatory. That just-before moment then becomes the most hazardous. When you envision the glass of water so thoroughly you wonder if you’ve already drunk it. When you feel yourself breaking the tape so clearly you cease to run. When actually finishing the race begins to seem like a formality.
In his memoir of these years, climate scientist Michael Mann quotes an observation by General Douglas MacArthur: “It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
Mann’s pasting this in tells the whole story: by 2009, the climate scientists believed they’d entered the wind-up phase, their long conflict behind them. Also, that Mann believed they had lost their killer instinct. The desire—sometimes salutary—to hear an enemy skeleton crunch beneath the boot. “By early 2009,” Mann writes in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, “a troubling complacency had emerged among the scientists.”
Lipsky, David. The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial (pp. 407-409). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
David Lipsky is killin' me. What a writer! And, the Snark... geez.
"Because the climate doesn’t care about politics, or experts, or warnings, and isn’t even aware there are people. We have our days and lists and hours, our schedules and emergencies; but the climate keeps its own time." [David Lipsky, pp. 471-72]
________NPR WHILE IN THE CAR TODAY FETCHING MY GRANDSON CALVIN
apropos, see my recent post "Baltimore Code Red."
NY TIMES' DAVID WALLACE-WELLS:
Global warming is accelerating, with temperatures not just rising but rising faster than ever. Every day, it seems, we get better at normalizing extreme weather. But it is simultaneously proving harder to compartmentalize — even in places such as New York City that once looked to residents like concrete fortresses against nature.
A month ago, when orange skies blanketed New York, it was a sign to many that this particular climate horror could no longer be conceptually quarantined as a local phenomenon of the American West, where tens of millions had already acclimated to living in the path of fire and every year breathing in some amount of its toxic smoke. That was normal for them, we New Yorkers thought, even though San Francisco had turned a sunless dark amber for the first time only in 2020. It wasn’t normal for us, we told ourselves. Then, when the air quality index dropped from 405 back into the 100s again, in the weeks after, the joggers hit the pavement at their routine times, glad the sky was merely unhealthily smoggy...
Yeah...
Other relevant random stuff of mine: "Global warming: the ultimate health issue?" "Climate science speaks: Act now."
THE MORAL CASE FOR GLOBAL WARMING MITIGATION
I read this a number of months back. Good read. Sound argument.
This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time.
If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.
Drawing on over a decade of research,The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.
An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. [Amazon blurb]
Well worth your time.
…There’s a rally planned for mid-September in New York City, when the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called a Climate Ambition Summit, to make a case that Biden, who may address the General Assembly, should meet Guterres’s demands to end fossil-fuel expansion, particularly because this country still leads the world in oil and gas production. But this moment feels as if it calls for something larger—comparable to the Earth Day demonstrations of a half century ago, which brought ten per cent of the American population into the streets. It’s eruptions on that scale that change the political reality. And those eruptions are usually rooted not just in fear and anger but also in love and resolve.Yeah. Below, a long-time rant of mine.
The massive Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, which was caused by a rig six miles off the California coast, was one of the sparks for the first Earth Day, in April, 1970. People were raging over the sight of dead seabirds soaked in oil, but they were also fighting for things that they loved: the ocean, the beach, the chance to sit peacefully on the sand. The incredible warming of these current weeks should strike fear, but it should also remind us how valuable a breeze is, how remarkable a deep-blue winter day, or how precious the cool that comes when night falls. The crazily raging river a quarter mile from my door scares me, but it also makes me think how stunning it is in its usual form. This planet remains stirringly beautiful, and that beauty must be one of the things that moves us to act. And so must the beauty that people can produce: we can take the deadly power of the sun and, with a panel, convert it into the electrons that help cool our homes in a heat wave. If all of that sounds overblown, scientists say that this past week broke records for the hottest days in about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, which takes us back to the bare edge of the human story. We’re at a hinge point in that story if ever there was one.
And, yeah, I realize that solar voltage / amperage / wattage capture is but one component. Storage, conversion, practical & equitable distribution (incl. integration w/currrent electrical grids, etc).—None of those are free or effortless to scale up. But deniers can spare me the endless "yes, but" Perfectionism Fallacy line dance.
Moreover, the "consumption unsustainability" / "degrowth" argument is a separate issue (and a gnarly one in its own right). Conflation is not Our Friend.
PERSONAL ERRATUM
We went to Deep Creek Lake in far western Maryland on July 1st for a big family vacation. This is what we hit just west of Cumberland MD on I-68.
That was Cheryl and I, in a rental SUV, with our now-3 yr old great-grandson Kai in the car seat in the back. More excitement than I needed.
SUNDAY JULY 16TH UPDATE
DAVID LIPSKY INTERVIEW
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