Chennai
Speaking of climate and emergency – Chennai (formerly Madras) has run out of water. That’s 11 million people.
The southern Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras) is in crisis after its four main water reservoirs ran completely dry.
The acute water shortage has forced the city to scramble for urgent solutions, including drilling new boreholes.
Residents have had to stand in line for hours to get water from government tanks, and restaurants have closed due to the lack of water.
In the Arctic the permafrost is melting, and in southern India the water supply is drying up.
The water crisis has also meant that most of the city has to depend solely on Chennai’s water department, which has been distributing water through government trucks across neighbourhoods.
“The destruction has just begun,” an official said. “If the rain fails us this year too, we are totally destroyed.”
A city of 11 million people.
(With apologies to The Band) There’s a drought out in southern India, and up north it’s thawing ice.
Against my better judgment I got into an argument yesterday with some Facebook friends of a friend. They were arguing that the seas aren’t really rising because when ice melts it contracts; they never did acknowledge that most of the ice that is melting is on land (Antarctica, Greenland, etc.) and flowing into the sea. (They said a lot of other things that were wrong, including that there’s something like a 1 in 4 billion chance that humans are responsible for global warming because that’s how old the earth is, and it’s narcissistic to claim that we’re responsible. And they claimed to be empiricists.)
Excuse my venting. I hope you have the windows open.
Only 11 million? Pfft. Just wait till the Himalayan glaciers at the headwaters of the Ganges and Yangtze are gone.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/18/arctic-permafrost-canada-science-climate-crisis
Re the “ice contracts when it melts” argument, I loved Jon Stewart’s bit on this from entirely too many years ago. See timestamp 7:35 in the video.
https://youtu.be/lPgZfhnCAdI
Omar, I did a post on that one shortly before this. Horrifying.
OB:
In 2013, my wife and I took a trip up to Alaska. In the renowned Glacier Bay their retreat is quite stark and obvious. As Bruce Coppola notes above, the rivers that supply a great part of humanity’s fresh water are glacier-fed, particularly those that come off the Himalayas: these include the Ganges, Indus, Lena, Mekong, Ob, Yangtze, and Yellow.
With climate change, we are largely in uncharted territory. The Paris Agreement will almost certainly be a case of too little, too late, thanks to the fossil carbon interests that duchess so many of the world’s political class. The party will continue on the Titanic even with the iceberg looming up ahead.
As I understand it, the fossil carbon will steadily make its way into the atmosphere, with God knows what short term effects, possibly including some beneficial (plant food) ones, but those longer term are likely to include increasing desertification of the vegetated areas and a rough time for agriculture.
Modern petroleum-dependent agriculture has been defined somewhere as ‘the process whereby land is used to turn petroleum into food.’ Petroleum is not just for driving machinery. The hydrogen used in the Haber Process for making synthetic ammonia and other compounds downstream from that, including other nitrogenous fertilisers like ammonium sulphate and synthetic urea, comes out of the ground as natural gas.
Slowly, over 1,000 years or so, the atmospheric carbon may make its way down into the biosphere to form vegetation. We are at around the peak of a C 12,000 year warming phase coming out of the last glaciation, and under ‘normal circumstances’ we would be faced with a long slow 90,000 year cooling to the lowest temperatures of the next one. The fossil carbon will possibly delay that by say 300 years. Then it will be back towards woolly mammoth country, likely with Laurentide-style glaciers eventually a mile or so deep down to and over Central Park in NYC.
I think it likely that by then those humans still around will be pushing all the carbon they can lay their hands on into the atmosphere in an effort to warm things up a bit.
Omar, that depends on whether we have passed the tipping point into runaway global warming territory, in which case – especially if the billions of tonnes of methane trapped in the permafrost and sea floors is released – the outlook for the planet will be more in line with that of Venus.
AoS – and the methane is already being released. I’m not sure there is a way to stop it. This is a nasty feedback cycle we have going on, and there is nothing in the Paris Climate Accord that will change that, even if we were in it.
This is a drastic time – which is going to call for drastic measures. Which aren’t going to happen, because the only conversations we can have seem to be around small, band-aid solutions that leave most of the big problems in place. I don’t know if the human psyche is unable to see the long term, as some suggest, or if we just don’t want to, as I suspect is at least part of the case.
I heard something on NPR (I think) a few weeks ago about the fact that it’s going to be just plain too hot in the most literal everyday mundane sense – too hot as in humans start to die within hours when it gets that hot. There are already places that are in that territory for x days per year, and there are going to be more of them more of the time.
And of course it will hit the poorest the hardest. Many people in my area have no air conditioning because they can’t afford it. As we start to heat up, they will be the first here to feel it, as the wealthier crank their air conditioning to top setting and stay inside (thereby increasing the greenhouse gas emissions and the warming). The sad thing is, most of those people (the wealthier and the poorer) don’t believe global warming is real. My students suggest people will start to believe it once it starts to affect us. They can’t see that it is already affecting us. Even the oldsters who remember what it used to be like just put it down to an ordinary fluctuation in the temperature caused by the sun putting out more heat (it isn’t).