You Can Ignore It, For Now, But There's No Denying It

It is increasingly hard to believe how we ignore the climate breakdown even when it's on our own doorstep.

Our federal government has proclaimed a climate state of emergency but judging by its indifference to this looming catastrophe it's obvious they're not treating it as an emergency.

This pandemic that has scythed through our economy and reshaped our very lives is the result of man-made behaviours, notably our relentless intrusion on the Earth's dwindling amount of wilderness that exposes us to viruses of which we've had no previous exposure, contagions that leave us scrambling for solutions that are often elusive.

Sea level rise is picking up steam. Some of it comes from thermal expansion. Disappearing glaciers and ice sheets add to the rise even as the loss of all that once reflective snow and ice causes the oceans and the atmosphere to warm even faster.

The Washington Post has a feature piece today on Arctic wildfires until recently considered a fluke but no longer.

The Arctic summer of 2019 was supposed to be an outlier. Featuring massive blazes in Siberia, including what scientists strongly suspected were smoldering fires beneath the peat in the carbon-rich soils of the transition zone between the tundra and Arctic taiga, last year set records for emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases via wildfires. Many scientists thought it might be a one-off, considering that computer model projections tend to show that the emergence of such extreme fire years won’t happen until mid-century. 

However, this year is proving those scientists wrong. And it raises the unsettling possibility that fire seasons that begin much earlier than average and end later — and affect delicate Arctic ecosystems — could soon be the new normal. Wildfires continue to burn unimpeded across Siberia, as they have since May, after getting an unusually early start to the fire season. A thick blanket of smoke has turned the sky a milky gray in Siberia’s cities, with some smoke making it across the Pacific into Alaska and Canada’s Hudson Bay.

The Post interviewed Mark Parrington of the EU's Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service that has been keeping tabs on what is going on across Siberia.

Looking at carbon emissions from fires in the Arctic Circle, Parrington says 2020 is already the top year even when the Jan. 1 to Aug. 11 period is considered, vs. the full 365 days for each of the other years. Last year had set a record for such emissions, with 180 megatons of carbon dioxide emitted by Arctic fires, but 2020 has eclipsed it so far, with about 240 megaton through Aug. 11. Parrington said Arctic wildfire emissions rose significantly from June into July, particularly in the northern Russia Sakha Republic, a pattern also observed last year.

Jessica McCarty, a wildfire expert at Miami University of Ohio with experience working in the Siberian Arctic, said Parrington’s emissions estimates are probably underestimates, since satellites don’t detect the heat signatures from Arctic peat fires. Such blazes smolder without open flames above the surface, consuming ancient organic matter and freeing up planet-warming gases such as methane and carbon dioxide that had been locked away. This, along with permafrost melt, acts to speed up global warming as part of a self-reinforcing cycle.

A "self-reinforcing cycle" sounds like what climate scientists in previous decades called 'positive feedback loops.'  That was the basic justification for early global warming theory. The emissions targets that were set aimed to prevent triggering natural or runaway global warming that would be entirely beyond human control.

Two decades ago the experts were warning us what might occur by 2100 if we didn't mend our ways.  Some of those dire consequences are already happening some 80 years earlier than predicted. They're here now. And we don't have a clue how we might put that genie back in its bottle.

The 2020s are shaping up to be a decade of extremely high temperatures.  The journal Nature last month published research by Berkley Earth that found some regions are in line to be savaged.

Heatwave duration (Fig. 1d), although increasing, has significant trends restricted to South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. Significant heatwave intensity trends (Fig. 1f) are non-existent for most of the globe, the exception being southern Australia and small areas of Africa and South America. On the other hand, significant cumulative heat trends (Fig. 1h) are comparable in space to heatwave frequency (Fig. 1b), with mainly positive magnitudes. The largest trends are seen over the Middle East and parts of Africa and South America, where the extra heat produced by heatwaves is increasing by 10 °C/decade−1. For most other areas with significant trends, cumulative heat increases by 2−6 °C decade−1.

There's a massive wildfire down in California. Los Angeles and environs are under an "excessive heat warning" that currently extends into Wednesday with daytime temperatures ranging from 102 to 111 F.  Overnight temperatures, that many poor and vulnerable rely on for respite, "will be very warm with temperatures only lowering into the 70s." The lethality of heatwaves is a function not only of heat but duration. The longer a population is exposed to excessive heat the greater the number of victims, especially the elderly and the poor.

NPR reports that the area is experiencing "rolling power outages" due to excessive electrical usage for air conditioning. Parts of the area lose their power in 2 hour stretches to keep the grid functioning.  The situation is dire enough that Los Angeles is opening cooling centers despite concerns about Covid-19 spreading.