arnabocean

News Juxtaposition: Climate Change

Here are some news snippets from the last few weeks.

As China’s most important river, the Yangtze provides water to more than 400 million Chinese people. This summer, with rainfall in the Yangtze basin around 45% lower than normal, it reached record-low water levels with entire sections and dozens of tributaries drying up. The loss of water flow to China’s extensive hydropower system has created problems in Sichuan, which receives more than 80% of its energy from hydropower.

Nearly a half million people crowded into camps after losing their homes in widespread flooding and the climate minister warned Monday that Pakistan is on the “front line” of the world’s climate crisis after unprecedented monsoon rains wracked the country since mid-June, killing more than 1,130 people.

The drama is just the latest problem as the state experiences its biggest insurance crisis since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. […] In the last two years, more than 400,000 Floridians have had their policies dropped or nonrenewed. Fourteen companies have stopped writing new policies in Florida. Five have gone belly-up in 2022 alone. The record, set after Hurricane Andrew’s devastation, is eight in one year.

The latest casualty was Coral Gables-based Weston Property & Casualty, which leaves 22,000 policyholders — about 9,400 in South Florida — scrambling to find new insurance companies.

Costs also have skyrocketed. In 2019, when DeSantis was sworn in, Floridians paid an average premium of $1,988. This year, it’s now $4,231, triple the national average, according to an Insurance Information Institute analysis.

[T]he study published in the journal Nature Climate Change used satellite measurements of ice losses from Greenland and the shape of the ice cap from 2000-19. This data enabled the scientists to calculate how far global heating to date has pushed the ice sheet from an equilibrium where snowfall matches the ice lost. This allowed the calculation of how much more ice must be lost in order to regain stability.

The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.

“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

Climate change is happening, our civilization as it currently stands will be upended because of it, and we as a global society have done (next to) nothing to mitigate it. The best time to take measures to decelerate climate change was decades ago; the next best time is right now. Either we grit our teeth and hold our breath through a couple of decades of accelerated, painful, transition to sustainable energy use, or… we will be forced to hold our breath under water as our coastal life submerges.

By the way, 40% of the world’s population lives within 100km (60mi) the coast.

➶ The climate change that helped the dinosaurs

The Atlantic has an excellent piece on a drastic climate change event about 230 million years ago, when vast quantities of carbon dioxide gas erupted from undersea volcanoes. We’ve all heard the story of how the dinosaurs disappeared; well, this one is a different story.

But perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Carnian Pluvial Episode was not the crisis itself, but the world that came after. Until then, dinosaurs had been a puny and obscure lineage confined to the furthest southern reaches of Pangaea. But by the time the crisis was over, they had spread all over the world—perhaps using the oddly humid pulse to hopscotch across the previously arid wastelands of Pangaea—and rapidly diversified, using the extinction of their competitors to experiment with new lifestyles. The planet would never be the same.

Speaking of climate change, living in the US makes it pretty clear that some of us haven’t yet gotten our head around the whys, the hows, and really, the necessity, of caring about climate change. This is the part that we must keep reminding ourselves: it’s not that climate change destroys the Earth; far from it. The Earth was, is and will be fine. It’s just that the species that inhabit the Earth has and will change with drastic climate change.

If we, humankind, as a species are destined to have the same fate as the dinosaurs, well, so be it. But hey, if there’s one thing us humans have done better than any other species, that’s to change our environment to suit ourselves. Let’s use that to keep Earth’s climate as we like it! A huge chunk of our civilization is based on proximity to water, including oceans; a huge chunk of us are used to certain weather patterns. We won’t like it if either of those factors change. We won’t; the Earth won’t care.

(Hopefully we won’t end up like the dinosaurs. Hopefully, we will (a) keep Earth’s climate under control, and (b) inhabit other planets, at least, by the time the Sun makes Earth uninhabitable.)

Anyway, go read this great article. This kind of story about the paths of life and evolution on Earth is always fascinating to read.

∞

It doesn’t matter if global warming is man-made

Earth’s climate is changing. If you’re not wearing blinkers, and usually follow the news, this should no longer be a controversial statement to you. (Of course, climate change is a better descriptor than global warming. Earth’s temperatures will not literally rise everywhere all the time. Instead, extremes of climates will become more extreme, and the overall nature of Earth’s climate will shift dramatically.)

For example, from this great New York Times piece:

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”

The question, then, apparently shifts to: ‘Is this climate shift man-made? Or at the least, is the climate shift exacerbated by human contribution?’ People who are ‘skeptics’ on this matter hold forth on how Earth’s climate has changed many times before. On the one hand, they doubt claims made by climate scientists—that the Earth is becoming hotter—based on their research, and on the other hand cite the very same scientists’ results on how temperatures on Earth have varied over the millenia.

A crude example—in the New York Times article cited above, a commenter writes:

Hasn’t “extreme weather” raged world wide since time began.? I think the dinosaurs might have something to say about that. It is time to put your words in the proper respective in regards to how long the Earth has existed………Solve our current pressing problems, then worry about how to pay for “climate control”. If you can.

So very true. The question is—where did said climate change, so naturally occuring on Earth over millenia, leave species that existed in those times? Thriving and healthy? Or as dust covered fossils scattered around the world? About 90-99% of all species of life to have existed on Earth are now extinct. Yes, that many.

What many people don’t realize is—it doesn’t matter if the climate shift is man-made. The Earth does not need humankind; we need the Earth to maintain a certain kind of climate for us to thrive, and, indeed, survive. If the Earth’s climate changes to an extreme, and we are not able to adapt to the new conditions quickly enough, we will run a very real risk of joining those 99% of extinct species. The Earth will happily continue to exist, and a new burst of evolution will spring forth a new dominant species to rule the Earth, just like homo sapiens now, and the dinosaurs before us.

Let’s stop fighting over whether we are the reason climate change is accelerating. (Most likely, we are, but as I said, that’s besides the point.) There’s absolutely no doubt human activities at least contribute to global warming (via burning fossil fuels, for example), and there’s no doubt a drastic change in climate is not good at all for the overall health of the human species. We already know what a runaway global warming process leads to: just look at Venus! It’s currently so toxic that we have a hard time even getting our space craft to operate on its surface. We will be extinct long before Earth’s global warming reaches even a percentage point of that of Venus. Not in 10 years, not in 100, not even in 1000, but the seeds of the far future are being planted now.

So let’s do something about it! I can understand the influence exerted by industries that would suffer if we changed our energy usage, but seriously, the health of the human species should take precedence over the relatively shorter term goals and ambitions of interested parties. Let’s stop being tone deaf; let’s take our collective hands off of our ears and eyes and start believing our own data. And please, let’s not selectively trust our scientists. They are experts in their field, and know what they’re talking about.

And no, climate science is not the same as economics and statistics.

The Earth is the only home we have; let’s not burn it down. Even if we are not the primary cause of the fire, we have to make our best effort to contain it, and if possible, put it out. Our survival depends on it.

P.S.: While looking for a suitable link for global warming on Venus, I found more links disputing the comparison than affirming it. Interestingly, most of such articles, with analyses, are written by, for example, Economists, and medical doctors; articles by climate scientists seem to be curiously missing. I will address this “dispute”, since I brought up the comparison with Venus, but in a separate post—let’s only focus on Earth for now.