Suddenly
Back in the old days, 40 years ago or so, scientists and journalists were cautious in talking about climate change. Didn’t want to be seen as cranks and alarmists doncha know. Those days are over.
More and more scientists are now admitting publicly that they are scared by the recent climate extremes, such as the floods in Pakistan and west Africa, the droughts and heatwaves in Europe and east Africa, and the rampant ice melt at the poles.
That is not because an increase in extremes was not predicted. It was always high on the list of concerns alongside longer-term issues such as sea level rise. It is the suddenness and ferocity of recent events that is alarming researchers, combined with the ill-defined threat of tipping points, by which aspects of heating would become unstoppable.
For real. It’s not that long ago that the orthodox take was don’t expect big dramatic changes right now, then suddenly the big dramatic changes were all up in our faces.
Climate computer models have typically projected a fairly consistent but smooth rise in temperatures. But recently the climate seems to have gone haywire.
That heat wave in the west last summer wasn’t smooth. The floods in Pakistan aren’t smooth. The drought that dried up Europe’s rivers this past summer wasn’t smooth. The wildfires in Australia and California weren’t smooth. The disappearance of the Colorado river isn’t smooth. The melting of the permafrost, the rapidly shrinking glaciers, the disappearance of the North Pole as a solid object…none of that is smooth.
But it is the threat of unstoppable long-term change that most worries Prof Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey. She has witnessed temperatures in the Antarctic of 40C above the seasonal norm, and 30C above in the Arctic.
Francis was most alarmed by a recent report warning that if the 1.5C threshold were exceeded, seen by most scientists as almost inevitable, it could trigger multiple climate tipping points – abrupt, irreversible and with dangerous impacts.
She said: “It’s really scary. It seems some of [these trends] are already under way.” She said she feared for the permafrost, the Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic sea ice, and Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier and western ice sheet.
The Arctic sea ice used to be a large solid thing that was a kind of continent. Now it isn’t.
During much of that 40 years, scientists were scared in private; they were warned in many cases not to scare the public or they would paralyze them for action. Of course, if you don’t scare the public, they have no reason to take action, but a lot of us did want to make sure the evidence was solidly on our side. It has been for some time now, but the media does tend to downplay it, and politics often outright ignores it, or just says things like “we only have eleven years” (as Biden said in the campaign). We don’t have eleven years. We don’t have eleven months. This needs to be dealt with now…in fact, it needed to be dealt with in the 1980s, when the changes were beginning to be evident. If not then, in the 1990s, when the changes were even more evident.
I’ve been predicting this for years; I and some of my colleagues were sure we would pass a tipping point when the Arctic began releasing methane. We can’t undo that. Well, guess what? That has been happening for several years.
Can we stop it? No, and I don’t know any scientists who think we can, unless they are cranks or totally lost in a technological utopia. Can we slow it down? Possibly…but we need to act now. We can maybe lessen the impact, but at this point, I suspect that isn’t going to happen.
If we started dealing with global warming when we were first alerted, we could have mitigated a lot of the worst effects for a lot less money than we’re going to have to cough up now.
As for not scaring the voters? I’m calling bullshit. The GOP has been getting huge traction for decades by scaring voters. The religious right built a lot of its base by scare tactics. The only ones NOT using scare tactics are the left…and only some of them. After all, look how effective scare tactics have been for the trans lobby.
Maybe not from 40 years ago, but much of the work about climate change that I’ve read for quite some time pointed out the disruption of “normal” weather patterns and, that until things settle down to a new normal, weather “patterns” are going to be hard to discern and even harder to rely on. So even though the overall heat in the system is “smoothly” going up, some places might have colder, or snowier winters. Rainfall moves unpredictably. And the unpredictability is unpredictable. Will meltwater from Greenland shut down the Gulf Stream, which would cause temperatures in Europe to plunge, in a reboot of the Younger Dryas (updated to include a cast of hundreds of millions)? Maybe. Its onset at the end of the last Ice Age was on the scale of decade(s), and the period lasted a millennium before warming in Europe resumed. So also not smooth.
This is the game of chance we now inhabit; this is the game of chance we’ve made. Good luck farming. Say hello to food wars, water wars, flooding wars, desertification wars… You know, Four Horsemen stuff.
I suspect many climate scientists have also fallen into the trap of – as Naomi Oreskes has put it – “erring on the side of least drama” to avoid feeding into the obligatory denialist accusations of “alarmism”, “hysteria” etc. But of course all that accomplishes is shifting the center further towards the denialist end.
It’s one hell of a catch-22: If climate scientists don’t say the situation is dire, it’s interpreted as meaning there’s nothing to worry about. But if they do say the situation is dire, it’s dismissed as “alarmism” and “hysteria” which means there’s nothing to worry about.
Oh well, the rest of the universe should be fine…
The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second best time is now.
It’s a quick-fix, geo-engineering Miracle Cure that makes things worse, that I’m afraid of. Mirrors! Dust!! Sunshades!!! I can see Musk trying to play hero by proposing something that just happens to use his rockets, to save us all. (That is if he decides Mars isn’t The Future after all. As Future Earth is knocking on the door right now, before Elon’s managed to get anything but a Tesla anywhere near Mars, he might feel the sudden need to lower his gaze to the planet he’s actually standing on.) I’m not interested in being a victim of yet more techno-hubris, thanks.
It depends on what you scare them with. The GOP was trying to maintain a status quo. They’re not asking voters to change their behaviour; they’re fighting a losing, rearguard action against scary, demographic change, among other things. They’re trying to keep things the same. Scaring the voters and telling them they have to stop doing…almost everything, isn’t going to be a big draw. It’s hard to sell wartime sacrifice when they’re at war with themselves. Give up or reduce their use of cars, meat, energy? They’ve earned the right to more than their fair share of Earth’s resources goddammit. It’s all a plot to destroy capitalism AND the US of A. Maybe if it were sold as a way to keep all those immigrants from coming to the US as climate refugees*, then it just might work….Otherwise, you might as well be asking people to surrender their guns.
*Of course, the US is going to start having its own internal climate refugees. Never mind sending “illegals” to Martha’s Vineyard; what happens when Las Vegas and Phoenix show up on the front porch? Yer gonna need a bigger pot of coffee. And maybe a few more clips of ammo.
I live on the Mighty Murray River which drains around 1/3 of Australia. We have had 3 La Nina effects this year, leading to flooding in NSW and Vic, with some now happening in the Riverland, where I live.
This map shows the possible flood levels for Waikerie, my town, and we are better off than most, but it’s getting close.
Of course, excess rain can’t be attributed to Global Warming, can it? ;-)
https://i.postimg.cc/2yn5bq8g/140-GL-Waikerie.png
Here’s an aerial view of some of the flooding to date. We are expecting the river flow to increase by 40-50% in December.
https://youtu.be/gQfBY4Aluv8
It’s real, it’s happening, and the costs are being pushed onto those who can least afford to bear them; the small orchardists and vignerons, the poorer, the working class, the young and the old.
YNnB, one of the things I see is too many people who don’t realize that the climate is not a linear system. Non-linear systems are difficult to predict, and a single wrong predication means the voters/consumers/ostriches can brush it off with “See? Science doesn’t know anything.”
And in the meantime the Mississippi, which some wanted to use to replenish Lakes Mead and Powell, is drying up. Barges can’t get through.
Yikes, I wasn’t aware of that. Now I’ll have to check on the Missouri.