Saturday, August 15, 2020

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.










5 comments:

  1. I don't think that the urgency of the problems will take hold until we have level six hurricanes flattening Miami and Huston and rising seas overwhelm New York, London and Shanghai. Even then an awful lot of people won't believe it. The politicians, past, present and future will deny ever being warned and the very wealthy will retire to their hidey holes. It doesn't look good. Does the word dystopia ring any bells?

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  2. Hey, I saw yet another item on Siberian fires, grateful we've had a low fire season here this year. Then I thought, Mound may be commenting on this and of course it was the top post atm. ;-)


    Sigh.
    Gaia is busy clearing out the older ecosystems that can't survive in a hotter world. (The same ecosystems humans are part of and rely on.)


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  3. There's a pretty good chance that you're right, Toby.

    I'm not sure how much of this is the fault of our elected leaders. How many of we 'average joes' would support the sorts of action required by the climate emergency while we're trying to cope with the pandemic and the associated economic meltdown? Having to cope as best we can was never part of our curriculum. Ours was supposed to be a life of comfort and ease - get an education, work hard at a good job, live in middle class splendor.

    The world we're entering will be increasingly challenging. For some, those living in parts of South America, the people of Central America, those in the Middle East and South Asia - who inhabit some of the most heavily populated regions on Earth, it may be murderous.

    There is no way to neatly confine something of this magnitude. I'm sure Europe wishes there was some way to insulate itself from migrants seeking refuge from wars and chaos and famine in the Middle East and Africa. That brings to mind a cover of The Economist magazine from many years ago. It depicted Europe behind a giant, medieval wall with a moat, drawbridges and portcullis through which trade with the neighbouring regions was conducted.

    I do these posts with some reluctance, knowing that they won't be well received even among our own. Many people, those who are politically engaged, don't want to know. For those with strong party affinities this reality does not reflect well on their chosen leader or their party. Who wants to feel vulnerable in times of great uncertainty, "on their own"?

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  4. NPoV, I sometimes find it hard to accept that we dropped the ball and allowed nature to take the wheel on global heating and climate change generally.

    We forget that the UN climate change framework was created to see that this genie remained in its bottle. We set "never exceed" temperatures, first 2 degrees Celsius and then, in 2015, 1.5 C as limits that would give us a reasonable chance at a livable environment for future generations. Just so long as we didn't awaken the sleeping giant - nature and the massive volumes of carbon it safely sequestered. Carbon in the form of coal, oil and gas; permafrost, the tundra, seabed and lakebed frozen clathrates; carbon in soils, carbon in forests.

    Now those clathrates are melting, releasing streams of bubbles of methane to the surface and on into the atmosphere. We're still burning coal, oil and gas, the remnants of hundreds of millions of years of prehistoric animal and plant life and the solar energy that enabled them to live. We yard that stuff out of the ground and put it straight back into the atmosphere. As the atmosphere warms it heats and dries the tundra, polar peat, the same stuff we learned to burn to sustain life in our own pre-history. As it dries it becomes tinder for wildfires. More carbon into the atmosphere. Then, beneath the tundra, the permafrost thaws and it's loaded with trapped CO2 and methane. Around the world we've got wildfires burning as never before. The oceans still absorb a good share of that atmospheric carbon but it's turning them acidic, something it's probably best not to dwell on.

    We were never playing to win. The goal was always to achieve a somewhat survivable crash landing. If we did chose to win, it would mean accepting that mankind - our species, our culture, our economy - would have to be reshaped to be in harmony with nature. We would have to recognize the finite limits of our one and only biosphere, Spaceship Earth. Only we're way past those finite limits. We're not living with our biosphere, we're consuming it faster with each passing year. Year upon year there are more of us, we're living longer on average, and our per capita consumption rates increase. We're heading in the wrong direction, faster and faster.

    That's not playing to win. That's betting the farm on a perfectly lousy hand. The worst part is that we know it. We're just in denial at every level right up to the top.

    Oh well.

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  5. Weather ,not climate, but you have to wonder!!


    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/14/iowa-derecho-attention-aid/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/08/16/california-fire-tornado-warning/?hpid=hp_national1-8-12_fire-tornado-945am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

    Some odd stuff happening.

    TB

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