Climate change: ‘Can you hear me now?’

 

Bill Knight column for 7-8, 9 or 10, 2021

 Seeing the recent catastrophic heat wave, with hundreds of deaths in the Pacific Northwest and desert heat in Canada, one recalls the old Verizon commercial: “Can you hear me now?”

The extreme heat, wildfires and drought from Texas through California mean power outages and water restrictions; flights are delayed because heated runways and thin air affect takeoffs, and electric lines sag, roads buckle, and transit gear melts.

“This is not the new normal,” said scientist Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia. “Normal is going to keep changing until we stop emitting greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Such damaging, deadly “weather weirding,” as researchers call it, is increasing. The last colder-than-average month worldwide was in February 1985, reports Axios; the 10 hottest years have all been since 2005.

The average number of heat waves in the largest U.S. cities have tripled since the 1960s, said environmental reporter Jeff Goodell, adding, “They are also becoming more deadly.”

Meanwhile, a leaked draft of a 4,000-page report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due out in February, reminds us that burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas has dire consequences. The report has 10 keys:

* Risks can be systemic and cascading,

* the world’s most vulnerable communities will suffer the most,

* species extinction are 1,000 times greater than just 70 years ago,

* impacts can become irreversible,

* food systems are profoundly threatened,

* every percentage point of every degree makes a difference,

* what’s required is immediate, sustained reforms,

* 2.5 billion coastal inhabitants will bear much of the burden by 2050,

* climate change is the biggest threat to humanity now, and

* “the worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own.”

 

The document says. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot.”

Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe summarized what’s at stake:

“After the polar bear, we’re next,” she told PBS reporter William Brangham. “It affects every aspect of our lives.”

 Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg commented, “We’re in a climate emergency that has never once been treated as an emergency,” said

News coverage is complicit in the relative lack of alarm, said Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop. He noted that the weekend when Portland set a record-high temperature on June 26, then the 27^th, then the 28^th, national newscasts aired 35 stories on the heat wave. but just 8 of them referred to climate change. Sunday-morning gabfests were worse, discussing infrastructure plans but never even mentioning the week’s heat crisis.

“We humans are really good at psychologically distancing ourselves from things that we think will matter in the future, but not now,” Hayhoe said.

It’s more and more obvious we all have to prepare – with different infrastructures (from buildings to water systems) and changes to our food supplies and even the concept of national security.

“The IPCC stresses that much can be done to avoid worst-case scenarios and prepare for impacts that can no longer be averted,” reported Agence France-Presse (the French Press Agency), the world's oldest news service. “But simply swapping a gas guzzler for a Tesla or planting billions of trees to offset business-as-usual isn’t going to cut it.”

Consider what happens to people’s bodies trying to maintain 98.6-degree temperatures. We sweat and its evaporation helps, but our bodies lose water. Our hearts beat faster to circulate more to skin surfaces, but if our temps reach 105 degrees, things go haywire: sweating stops, we convulse and hallucinate, and we’re in jeopardy of dying of heat stroke, dehydration or heart attacks.

In addition to the public-health crisis, rising temperatures are obviously a workplace safety issue, too. But the opposition to change is formidable, made clear in an expose’ this month revealing lobbyist Keith McCoy of ExxonMobil – one of Earth’s biggest producers of oil, natural gas and plastics – bragging about the corporation’s success in using front groups and lawmakers (Democrats and Republicans) to block reforms.

Meanwhile, temperatures go up, ice sheets melt, sea levels rise, hurricanes intensify, rainfall becomes erratic and drought and flooding cause colossal damage – all derived from the use of fossil fuels.

Michael Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said, “Human beings have literally never lived on a planet as hot as it is today.”