Scientists Admit They Are "Shocked" By The Ferocity Of 2023's Unprecedented Weather Events And "Afraid" Of This Uncharted Territory
There is a growing consensus that a crucial tipping point has been passed.
Many years ago, my partner and I made the decision to not have children. We’ve never regretted it. However, we have eight nieces and nephews between us, ranging in age from 13 to 42, and I wonder about the state of the world when the youngest among them is my age. When I read about the climate emergency and see phrases like “by 2100, temperatures will be . . .” (or even “in 2050, if current trends . . .”), it sounds like a long way off. . . . It’s not.
Earlier this year, one of my nieces and her husband celebrated the birth of a daughter. In 2050, their daughter will be 27 years old, and it’s very possible that Phoenix, Arizona — currently the fifth-largest city in the US — will be unable to support human life, because of extreme heat and a lack of water. In January 2100, this great-niece will be 76 years old. What unimaginable disasters will have become commonplace by then? How many tens of millions of heat-related deaths will have occurred? How many wars will be waged (and where?) for essential resources? How many billions of climate refugees will live as permanent nomads? What cities currently bordering on the world’s oceans will no longer exist?
From “Climate Change May Make Phoenix Uninhabitable By 2050”:
A study by Climate Central finds that Phoenix will likely be three to five degrees hotter in the summer months by 2050. The average number of 100 degree days will increase from 40 a year today [in 2017] to more than 132 a year. To put that in some perspective, New York City currently experiences two 100 degree days a year. Climate Central expects that number to increase to 15 a year by 2050. . . .
Arizona State University climatologist David Hondula . . . warns that increasing temperatures will require Phoenix . . . to step up its game when it comes to “social service programs, homeless shelters, the opioid epidemic,” and other “intermediating factors”. . . .
Heat is not the only factor making the Phoenix area less hospitable to humans. Hondula says that lack of water could be more of a problem than rising temperatures. “As much as 20 percent of the river could dry up by 2050,” he says.
Contemplating the extensive data presented throughout David Wallace Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming was absolutely terrifying. It’s the most unnerving horror, and it’s non-fiction. I expected Jeff Goddell’s The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet to be a similar reading expeirence. It was not as unrelentingly disturbing, but parts of it — such as the heat-related deaths of a young, in-shape family on a day-hike in the southwestern US in 2018/2019 — still felt like science fiction set on an alien planet.
We are currently trapped — wholly without our consent — in a suicide pact with the relative handful of people possessing the extreme clout in positions of power to slow this trend (reversing or even stopping is crazy talk, I fear). The world’s elite are ready to play Russian Roulette knowing there’s a bullet in every chamber. Our lives are tied to theirs and they are rejecting all suggestions to remove even one bullet.
The 2023 State Of The Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory
Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity. . . .
The trends reveal new all-time climate-related records and deeply concerning patterns of climate-related disasters. At the same time, we report minimal progress by humanity in combating climate change. . . .
In 2023, we witnessed an extraordinary series of climate-related records being broken around the world. The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected. This year, exceptional heat waves have swept across the world, leading to record high temperatures. The oceans have been historically warm, with global and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures both breaking records and unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica. In addition, June through August of this year was the warmest period ever recorded, and in early July, we witnessed Earth’s highest global daily average surface temperature ever measured, possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years. It is a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability. . . .
As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered. Conditions are going to get very distressing and potentially unmanageable for large regions of the world, with the 2.6°C warming expected over the course of the century, even if the self-proposed national emissions reduction commitments of the Paris Agreement are met. We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems in such a world where we will face unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict. Massive suffering due to climate change is already here, and we have now exceeded many safe and just Earth system boundaries, imperiling stability and life-support systems.
(emphasis added)
All of Thom Hartmann’s writing is essential reading, including this from October 25, 2023 (“America Mysteriously Hit a Deadly Climate Tipping Point & No One Knows Why”):
Sometime in the past year, this tiny planet we live on in an obscure corner of our Milky Way galaxy went through some sort of tipping point, a “state change” of sorts, and now things are different from how they’ve been at any other time in the 300,000 year history of the human race. . . .
Nobody knows for sure what that change or tipping point is. . . . But regardless of the why/how, something has definitely happened in the past year or so that has pushed our atmosphere’s state of equilibrium out of an older, stable range and into a newer, warmer, and apparently far less stable state. . . .
In just the past 24 hours, a tropical storm that nobody thought was a threat blew up into a full-on Category 5 hurricane and is, as you’re reading these words, devastating Acapulco. Not one weather agency predicted it: this is how unpredictable and violent our weather has become because we’re still burning fossil fuels.
While wind and solar power grew 17 percent worldwide between 2021 and 2022, and both are now cheaper that any unsubsidized fossil fuels, humanity is still using fossil fuels at a 15:1 ratio against renewables. . . .
Our forests worldwide are not only under assault from loggers and poachers; climate change has now altered their environment enough that hundreds of millions of acres of trees are suffering from beetle infestations, drought, dieback, and forest fires. . . .
All over the planet glaciers are in retreat, as are the ice shelves and glaciers covering Greenland and Antarctica. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying, and fish and marine mammal species are undergoing radical shifts in their habitat and range as waters warm, driving most ambulatory animals toward the north and south poles.
Deadly storms, derechos, flash flooding, bomb cyclones, rapidly-forming hurricanes, severe/damaging hail, tornadoes in areas that had never before seen them: all these are creating vast swaths of human misery and costing hundreds of billions worldwide.
New Scientist, June 7, 2023:
THIS time next year, you may be living in the same house, driving the same car and doing the same job. But in one fundamental way, life on Earth could have shifted irrevocably. Spiking worldwide temperatures, boosted by a transition to an El Niño climate pattern, could make 2024 the year that global warming exceeds 1.5°C for the first time. It may not sound like much, but scientists warn it will be a totemic moment for the planet.
Undoubtedly, breaching 1.5°C is a sign of political failure. Just eight years ago, almost every nation agreed to a binding treaty promising to hold the global temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Blowing past that threshold so soon will bring huge political fallout and unleash reactionary forces that could turbocharge — or cripple — the climate movement. “All hell will break loose,” says Jochem Marotzke at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany. “That is something I’m very sure of.”
The next paragraph of that article includes this sentence: “If we can get the temperature back down, this period may pass.” That “if’ is doing a shit-ton of work in that sentence. Considering that since the 2015 Paris Agreement — as it has become even more inescapably obvious to anyone willing to accept reality that “extraordinary actions” are required now — the countries causing the most damage to the climate have increased their emissions, I have zero hope for any positive change.
At COP28 in Dubai earlier this month, calls for a full fossil fuel phaseout “rattled the conference hosts” and “the idea was quickly scuttled”. The head of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) demanded that its group’s members reject any deal that would lessen the production and sales of oil, gas, and coal. “It seems that the undue and disproportionate pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences,” Haitham Al-Ghais, OPEC’s secretary general, said, while also denouncing “politically motivated campaigns” that would put OPEC’s “prosperity and future at risk”. (Of course, the “tipping point with irreversible consequences” to which he refers is not the 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — once a “holy shit danger line” not to be crossed and now considered inevitable — it’s OPEC’s financial revenue.)
Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International:
The absence of explicit “phase-out” language in the draft [agreement] is significant, as it is a more measurable and definitive term, sending a strong message globally about a total shift away from fossil fuels. The current terminology — “transitioning away” — is somewhat ambiguous and allows for varying interpretations. . . . The resolution is marred by loopholes that offer the fossil fuel industry numerous escape routes, relying on unproven, unsafe technologies.
In the US, politicans from both parties have been unwilling or unable to do anything of consequence. James Hansen, the US scientist whose 1988 Congressional testimony first brought the climate crisis to public attention, co-authored a paper (published in Oxford Open Climate Change), which states that the planet is heating up at a much faster rate than previously predicted and is much more sensitive to climate change than previously understood. The paper concludes, in part:
Politicians from right (conservative) and left (progressive) parties are affected by fossil fuel interests. The right denies that fossil fuels cause climate change or says that the effect is exaggerated. The left takes up the climate cause but proposes actions with only modest effect, such as cap-and-trade with offsets, including giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. The left also points to work of Amory Lovins as showing that energy efficiency plus renewables (mainly wind and solar energy) are sufficient to phase out fossil fuels. Lovins says that nuclear power is not needed. It is no wonder that the President of Shell Oil would write a foreword with praise for Lovins’ book, Reinventing Fire [218], and that the oil executives in London did not see Lovins’ work as a threat to their business.
Opportunities for progress often occur in conjunction with crises. Today, the world faces a crisis—political polarization, especially in the United States—that threatens effective governance. . . . [As] the power of special interests in Washington grew, government became insular and inefficient, and Congress refused to police itself. Their first priority became reelection and maintenance of elite status, supported by special interests. Thousands of pages of giveaways to special interests lard every funding bill, including the climate bill titled “Inflation Reduction Act”—Orwellian double-speak—as the funding is borrowed from young people via deficit spending. The public is fed up with the Washington swamp but hamstrung by rigid two-party elections focused on a polarized cultural war.
A political party that takes no money from special interests is essential to address political polarization . . . It is asking a lot to expect young people to grasp the situation that they have been handed—but a lot is at stake. As they realize that they are being handed a planet in decline, the first reaction may be to stamp their feet and demand that governments do better, but that has little effect. Nor is it sufficient to parrot big environmental organizations, which are now part of the problem, as they are partly supported by the fossil fuel industry and wealthy donors who are comfortable with the status quo.
It would be (and is) impossible for any third party to refuse money from any special interests and make even a small dent in the US political scene. Multi-national corporations and media conglomerates maintain the status quo and direct the two-party system to act together in a theatrical good-cop-bad-cop scenario. The controlling interests do not allow anyone who will not play the game to attain any semblance of real power or influence. Those people get weeded out of the system, one way or the other.
Graphs from SBS News, here:
SBS (Australia), October 25, 2023:
Wildfires in Canada this year burned 16.6 million hectares and released more than a gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — greater than the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions for 2021. . . .
Fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas are the largest contributors to climate change, with emissions recently reaching an historic high in 2021. . . .
Despite this, global fossil fuel subsidies almost doubled between 2021 and 2022 — from $US531 billion ($835 billion) to just over $US1 trillion ($1.57 trillion), according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
William Ripple, one of the paper’s co-authors and a distinguished professor at Oregon State University in the United States, said the data showed life on Earth was “clearly under siege”.
“The statistical trends show deeply alarming patterns of climate-related variables and disasters,” he said. “We also found little progress to report as far as humanity combating climate change.”
It may already be too late.
Matthew Rozsa, Salon:
Imagine a future in which sea level rise is so severe that apocalyptic floods are a regular occurrence. Hundreds of millions are displaced as their coastal regions become uninhabitable, and as humanity struggles to survive, the map of the Earth’s southernmost region gets radically redrawn. According to a recent study by the British Antarctic Society, climate change has passed a crucial tipping point for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. There is simply no way for this massive natural wonder to avoid massive melting.
“We find that rapid ocean warming, at approximately triple the historical rate, is likely committed over the twenty-first century, with widespread increases in ice-shelf melting, including in regions crucial for ice-sheet stability,” the authors write. “These results suggest that mitigation of greenhouse gases now has limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
Even worse, all of the climate simulations produced by the United Kingdom’s national supercomputer arrive at the same conclusion: regardless of whether humanity reaches its most ambitious Paris Agreement targets or mid-range emission scenarios, we will continue to see an ever-accelerating increase in the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the 21st Century.
