As my son says, “Facts, I’m not gonna lie,” it was recently 121 degrees in British freaking Columbia, people. That’s 49.6 degrees Celsius, a new Canadian national record. Hundreds of people dropped dead, but that was nothing compared to the estimated one billion clams, mussels, and other sea creatures that were cooked alive on the Western Canadian coast.
The truth is that we’re all being cooked alive, much like the apocryphal frog who’s too dumb to jump out of a pot of slowly boiling water. That’s why we’re starting to see articles on things we’ve never heard of before like heat islands. Did you know that New Orleans is the worst heat island in the United States of America?
Yup, it’s true. The Big Easy is 8.94 degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside owing to the fact this it doesn’t reflect much sunlight. It’s all impermeable pavement and dark roof tops. Go figure.
Thoughtless city design creates its own kind of climate change and global warming, but at least there are some things we can do to mitigate this. We can stop using solid black asphalt, go for more reflective roof tiles and plant a lot more trees in our cities. It’s a bit harder to deal with snow dust.
Worsening drought in the West’s deserts contributed to a heavy dust season on Colorado’s Loveland Pass this year, and the tea-colored snow shows it. Soil intermingled with ice crystals fell here on four occasions this spring. Subsequent storms buried each layer of dust particles under new snow. As the air warmed and the days grew longer, the snow melted and by June, the layers had combined at the surface.
Snowfields covered in dust across the Rockies don’t just mar scenic views. The dirt acts like a blanket; the snowpack, no longer white, absorbs heat from the sun, melting more quickly and up to six weeks earlier than it would if there were no dust. Forty million people in the Colorado River Basin rely on sustained snowpack for drinking water and to irrigate 5.5 million acres of agricultural land through the hot, dry summer.
Evaporation from early runoff also robs the Colorado of 250 billion gallons of water each year—enough to supply the Los Angeles region for more than 12 months.
We’re all learning the lessons of reflectivity now. For example, the Sahara desert is hot as hell, but it’s also almost white. It reflects a tremendous amount of the sun’s heat, thereby cooling the planet. So, what would happen if we used all that uninhabitable land to build solar panels?
You might be shocked by the answer. A big enough project might potentially be “capable of meeting four times the world’s current energy demand” and still wind up making global warming worse. Here’s why:
While the black surfaces of solar panels absorb most of the sunlight that reaches them, only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity. The rest is returned to the environment as heat. The panels are usually much darker than the ground they cover, so a vast expanse of solar cells will absorb a lot of additional energy and emit it as heat, affecting the climate.
What a downer, right? We don’t want to be cooked alive so we make dirty carbon-emitting energy obsolete and wind up worse than we started.
If these effects were only local, they might not matter in a sparsely populated and barren desert. But the scale of the installations that would be needed to make a dent in the world’s fossil energy demand would be vast, covering thousands of square kilometres. Heat re-emitted from an area this size will be redistributed by the flow of air in the atmosphere, having regional and even global effects on the climate…
…Covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms raises local temperatures in the desert by 1.5°C according to our model. At 50% coverage, the temperature increase is 2.5°C. This warming is eventually spread around the globe by atmosphere and ocean movement, raising the world’s average temperature by 0.16°C for 20% coverage, and 0.39°C for 50% coverage. The global temperature shift is not uniform though – the polar regions would warm more than the tropics, increasing sea ice loss in the Arctic. This could further accelerate warming, as melting sea ice exposes dark water which absorbs much more solar energy.
You know what the good news is here?
We’re figuring this stuff out now. It’s all good. When the southwestern United States is an arid wasteland, all the greenery will die off and white sands will cool the planet.
I joke, not because that’s untrue but because the sea ice loss will more than counteract it. The Earth will be hot enough to slow-broil chicken.
One thing we have figured out is that we should plant more trees and paint shit white. That’s a start. Maybe right-wing media will accept this as useful information or maybe they’ll call it a hoax. Where do you place you money?
We moved to the Portland OR area last year. We had read about wildfire season of course, but it was something else to actually live through it. And now this summer, we lost quite a few plants in our garden to the heat a couple weeks ago. I have a remote thermometer out in our garden plot and it registered a high of 119.7 degrees. It’s crazy. And wildfire season is already kicking into high gear again.
I have some family near Portland. That recent heatwave was nuts. They were fortunate enough to have A/C. A lot of folks in the Pacific Northwest don’t, and for a long while there really was no need. I lived in the Seattle/Tacoma area for a couple years in the 1980s. I remember maybe one or two genuinely hot summer days (maybe close to 90 degrees) and that was it. Otherwise, usually was overcast, with light rain, and long sleeves were sensible during the summer. Those were the days.
We don’t have A/C, but our house is pretty well shaded. I think we got up to about 88 inside the house, which is still manageable with some fans going. Fortunately it was relatively cool at night, otherwise sleeping would have been rough.
It doesn’t really rain here at all during the summer. Last time we got any rain was June 16, a month ago. Last year, we moved here at the beginning of July and didn’t see any rain until mid September, and so far it’s looking like that again this year. It’s no wonder the wildfires run rampant.
Not just plants died.
We were already telling anyone who would listen that this was going to happen back when I worked for Greenpeace in 1992. At the time, climate scientists were saying we have about 10-25 years to figure it out before it was irreversible. Time’s been up for years. I don’t think there’s a damned thing we can do.
The climate crisis is just warming up, pardon the pun.
The problem is that there are limits to what we can do the longer we wait and put it off.
Just think, we’re not going to be decreasing any CO2 output for decades, best possible scenario. And, I mean, how do you tell 3 billion humans that they can’t have what we have, because that’d be bad for everyone? You can’t. So, we’re going to continue trying to increase GDP, while everyone else tries to increase GDP.
GDP is just a number that reflects how much of the planet’s finite resources we’ve dug up and burned in the past year. Negative GDP is a political loser, so don’t expect anyone to try to fix it any time soon.
The Limits to Growth was published back in 1972. We’ve had 50 years to figure out that we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing, but the rich who have the best shot of surviving collapse have made sure that we don’t change anything for the better, and in fact, speed up.
Carter put solar panels on the White House in 1979 and increased funding for renewable energy. Reagan decreased funding and took down the solar panels in 1986. The Thatcher/Reagan Revolution will be remembered by any future human societies capable of civilization as the beginning of the end of Western Civilization. Hell, the selection of Bush Jr. can be seen as the final nail in the coffin. Imagine if we had a serious President like Gore in office in 2001 attempting to tackle this problem.
Thanks, Republicans.
I live in western Washington state, just 20 minutes south of the Canadian border by car. The heat wave was scary. Our house is in the woods so the impact on us was less. Also, we have air conditioning that we never used before. Of course we wound up firing it up this time. We were grateful but clearly this situation is not sustainable.
The only thing that gives me hope is the long-standing habit humans have of ignoring intractable problems until they can’t be ignored anymore and then bringing enormous energy and enterprise to making things right. We’re clearly not there yet. We’re still standing by as the Amazon gets burned and logged. We’re doing almost nothing to address this crisis and it’s completely possible things will spin out of control and we’ll all be dead in 30 years. I’d give 50/50 odds that this is the end of civilization as we know it and perhaps we’ll be one of the species wiped out of existence by this. But I give us 50% chance of survival because people are so good at addressing a crisis when we finally get around to it.
Such is the state of the world today: “Did you know that New Orleans is the worst heat island in the United States of America?”
Yes as a matter of fact I did know that. Sad.