The moment when failures became apparent
Still racing toward the cliff.
The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.
As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”
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His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.
Limp and vague and wholly empty. They can’t do more even if they want to. If they try they won’t be world leaders any more.
Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.
He said these new developments indicated the Earth was in uncharted territory and under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be seeing a shift in Earth’s response to 250 years of escalated human pressures … to a situation of ‘payback’ where Earth starts sending invoices back to the thin layer on Earth where humans live, in the form of off the charts extremes.”
Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests could tilt the planet into a state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.
Check, check, check.
This is as good as it’s going to be.
Minnesota is heating at the fastest rate of the lower 48 states, and one can look out their window here in Minneapolis/St Paul to see that we are experiencing an extended autumn. We have had two snowfalls that have had snow lasting more than a day, but the melt has far outstripped the snowfall this year. In normal years, we would have had a layer of snow at the beginning of December at the latest, and it would be the one that covers the ground until late March or early May.
Our flora and fauna are having to adapt to this, or move north. We have been experiencing the attack on our ash trees by the emerald ash borer, a beetle, that has spread north because they now survive a winter that they would not have in the past. And the local ash trees don’t have natural defenses against them. And while I realize that few people like the fast-growing ash, they are native plants that need watching our for.
We’re seeing mosquitos in December in the Willamette Valley so I imagine it likely OB is too… Not… Great… *At all*…
I’m not seeing mosquitos but by god I’m finding their bites, the bastards. And there are mites constantly swarming the ivy just above my window, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in winter. They’re grossing me out.
Summers in Tokyo are always dreadful, including for those who were born and bred here, but last summer was particularly brutal & long, extending its tentacles even into late October.
We haven’t had any consistently below 0 C weather in Calgary this December.
For data on what could at least mitigate the problem see
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
It shows the grams of CO2 per kWh of electricity in regions they can get data.
Color coded from green for very low through shades of brown to black for very high.
You can click on a region to get details of what energy sources are used to generated electricity in the region.
Spoiler alert: The regions that are *consistently* green use some mix of hydroelectric, geothermal and nuclear for the majority of their electricity. The regions that try to use lots of solar and/or wind are sometimes green but often brown because they mostly use natural gas when there isn’t much sun or wind generation.
Electricity isn’t even the majority of energy use, but at least making that part of our energy low carbon would help.