I live in a suburb near a nice public golf course that sits next to a quarry. The golf course is going under. Not enough people willing to pay the cost for a round of golf anymore. The quarry on the other hand, is doing good business. When the workers there use dynamite to break up more rock, my house shakes.
Guess who owns both properties. Now guess who intends to shut down the golf course and expand the quarry? Oh, the outrage among all the people who own homes nearby is really something to see. Up sprouted signs in their yards like mushrooms, all of them demanding we save “Shadow Pines” (the name of local course). But guess what? The town board imposed a one year moratorium on any further development of the property except as a golf course. But why only one year? Well, lots of people turn out to vote in Presidential elections. Next year, when the election will be less publicized, guess who I predict will get approval for converting that golf course into another quarry?
No big deal, right? You can’t fight City Hall, you can only hope to contain it. Too bad that same attitude on a national and global scale is leading us down the path to disaster.
Last year, the Paris Agreement set a target to keep the rise in global average mean temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Hurray!” said everyone who was so thrilled to see the nations of the world finally respond to the climate crisis. But did they? Did they really?
Here’s the thing. The odds of winning the lottery are better than meeting that 1.5 degree C target. because the status quo has no real interest in even attempting to do what it takes to even approach that goal:
The Paris deal requires no emissions reductions from countries before 2020. Steffen Kallbekken, Director of the Centre for International Climate and Energy Policy, explains that ‘by the time the pledges come into force in 2020, we will probably have used the entire carbon budget consistent with 1.5°C warming. If we stick with the INDCs we will have warming between 2.7°C and 3.7°C.’
In order to have a decent chance of reaching that 1.5° target, we need to keep at least 80 percent of known fossil fuels in the ground, and urgently halt the exploration and extraction of new sources. We need to stop deforestation and reduce other greenhouse gases such as methane, by tackling major drivers such as the growth of animal agriculture. But the Paris agreement contains no mention of the words ‘fossil fuel’ – no coal, no oil, no gas – and not a whisper about the livestock, palm oil and other industries driving deforestation either.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. And you know what’s even worse? Current climate models have been understating the rate of warming for quite some time.
As has occurred in the past, even the best climate models tend to be too cautious in their assumptions. Unfortunately, the more we learn about all the factors that influence global warming the more it often turns out that earlier predictions underestimated the rapidity of the increase in temperatures and the total amount of warming likely to occur.
Case in point, this new study published in the respected journal Science (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) indicates that current climate models may have failed to properly estimate the amount of atmospheric warming likely to occur because they overestimate the cooling effect of clouds.
The computer models that predict climate change may be overestimating the cooling power of clouds, new research suggests. If the findings are borne out by further research, it suggests that making progress against global warming will be even harder. […]
With less ice in the mix … however, there is less capacity for water to replace ice, said Ivy Tan, an author of the paper and a graduate student at the department of geology and geophysics at Yale University. The result, she said, is more warming.
How much more warming? Well, the study came up with a figure of 1.3 degrees Celsius more or less, or an increase of roughly 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit. Many scientists already expect the models will have to be adjusted to account for this increase. As one researcher put it: “The point is, it’s going to result in a significant amount of warming.” What she means is a significant amount more than is already projected to occur.
As it stands now, some current models are predicting a rise of up to 3 degrees Celsius, and not by the end of this century, but as soon as 2050, far in excess of the Paris Agreement’s target of “keeping temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over average temperatures in the preindustrial era.”
We are a mere 34 years away from 2050. And a three degree rise in the global mean temperature will result in catastrophic impacts on human civilization. Here’s the optimistic view of what that would look like:
A world 3 C warmer would see a significant drop in food production, an increase in urban heat waves akin to the one that killed thousands of people this year in India, and more droughts and wildfires, according to Ray Pierrehumbert, a physics professor at the University of Oxford. […]
“When talking about climate refugees … [t]he scale of climate migration could dwarf anything we’ve seen,” Pierrehumbert said. Many areas of the densely populated and mostly low-lying country could become uninhabitable within a century if warming continues, he added. […]
Jason Funk, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said a temperature increase of 3 C would seriously disrupt global economic systems and many people’s livelihoods.
“It could potentially lead to more conflicts because resources will be impacted, and people will be trying to capture access to those resources,” Funk said. “It’s not a pleasant scenario.”
Not a pleasant scenario is an understatement. Here is a more pessimistic view of what we could be facing in less than forty years, assuming we make the status quo regarding use of fossil fuels does not change dramatically from current trends:
Beyond two degrees … preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon. First millions, then billions, of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive.
A three-degree increase in global temperature – possible as early as 2050 – would throw the carbon cycle into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million by 2100, boosting global warming by another 1.5C.
With new “super-hurricanes” growing from the warming sea, Houston could be destroyed by 2045, and Australia will be a death trap. “Farming and food production will tip into irreversible decline. Salt water will creep up the stricken rivers, poisoning ground water. Higher temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation and soils, and causing huge losses from reservoirs. In state capitals, heat every year is likely to kill between 8,000 and 15,000 mainly elderly people.
It is all too easy to visualise what will happen in Africa. In Central America, too, tens of millions will have little to put on their tables. Even a moderate drought there in 2001 meant hundreds of thousands had to rely on food aid. This won’t be an option when world supplies are stretched to breaking point (grain yields decline by 10% for every degree of heat above 30C, and at 40C they are zero). Nobody need look to the US, which will have problems of its own. As the mountains lose their snow, so cities and farms in the west will lose their water and dried-out forests and grasslands will perish at the first spark.
In short, prepare for something on the scale of a Mad Max doomsday scenario for much of the planet.
Experts agree that if the onslaught of climate change continues unabated, water will be a highly-prized commodity. “The twenty-first-century projections make the [previous] mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden,” says Jason Smerdon, a Columbia University climate scientist.
Still, we don’t have to project into the future to see the impact of climate change on our water supply. “[I]t doesn’t really require much exposition for the audience to buy a degraded world, because we already see evidence of it happening all around us,” Miller said. He’s right, and evidence can be seen all around the globe. Obama noted in his speech Wednesday that “severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram.” Meanwhile, California is in the midst of a four-year mega-drought that has led the state to try out rationing policies, and officials in Sao Paolo, Brazil are scrambling to come up with a solution to the city’s water crisis that may leave the city absolutely dry in just a few months. As policy experts work to come up with a solution, city officials are bracing for riots due to unrest. Conflict between states is also a distinct possibility, as many national security experts have predicted an era of “water wars.”
The world is poised on the brink of severe food shortages, more wars, more refugees, plagues, mega-droughts, floods, extreme storms and heat waves the likes of which humanity has never seen before. It’s coming at us faster than a speeding bullet. Those who currently hold political power in much of the world, and certainly here in the United States, have no great incentive to do what is necessary to ameliorate the harm we have already caused. Most politicians of both parties are willfully ignoring or downplaying this threat, because so many of are in thrall to large multi-national corporations that make commodities of human beings.
The same corporations that are owned and controlled by an infinitesimally small group of individuals who have accumulated wealth at a rate, in in amounts, so massive that to properly convey in a single blog post is impossible. Unfortunately, we know that the richer one becomes, the lower one’s feeling of compassion and empathy for others. The welfare of other human beings, much less the survival of the humanity doesn’t consume them much, if they think of these matters at all.
The people at the top of the global economic food chain have no interest in seeing these disasters averted. If anything, many of them will profit mightily from exploiting the crises that are coming our way. And all that many of them care about is their current net worth and how to maintain it. This short-sighted attitude is best exemplified in George W. Bush’s famous response to the question of how he thought history would view his legacy. Here it is for those for you who don’t remember his clueless and callous remarks:
“History,” he replied. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
I don’t expect to live all that much longer, and I’ll certainly be dead by 2050, but my children have a good chance of living long enough to see this catastrophe unfold over the course of the next 40 years. So will many of you and your children.
And if we continue to support, and give our votes to, politicians who, will do nothing to significantly alter the “status quo” when it comes to the environment, we will be effectively imposing a death sentence on millions of our fellow human beings, not to mention all the other species of life that runaway global warming is driving to extinction. Something to consider when you cast your vote this election cycle and in the ones to follow over the next decade.
The warning in the TV series, “Game of Thrones,” ominously proclaims “Winter is coming.” But that’s merely fiction. In reality, unless we collectively act now to address this crisis (and I don’t mean through more rallies, protests, climate accords, or the adoption by our political leaders of half-measures, or worse, the mere payment of lip service to this impending climate disaster, the truth is that We’ll All Be Royally Fucked.”
