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To look at a map of the high temperatures recorded on July 21, 2018, is to get the impression that the world is on fire. The funny thing is, it is.
A wise old book editor taught me years ago that every long story needs, occasionally, what he called a “tour of the horizon” — a pause in the narrative during which the narrator reviews what is going on offstage, as it were, to make sure the reader keeps in mind the context of what is happening on stage, as it were. Let’s do it. Let’s put ourselves in the middle of America, and do a tour of the horizon.
Look west:
- Severe heat waves, in which many all-time high temperature records are being set, are afflicting the entire western tier of states.
- In the same area, wildfires have already charred nearly four million acres of forest, with much worse to come. The fire season, once a couple of months a year, now seems perpetual. One recent Colorado fire revived a seldom used term in the fire lexicon — a “fire tsunami,” a wall of flame so high (300 feet), moving so fast, that as one firefighting official put it, “a human response is ineffective.”
- Desperation caused by water shortages along the drought-starved Klamath and Colorado Rivers has reached such a fever pitch that fears of water wars are being openly expressed.
- Along the Pacific Ocean coast, massive die-offs of shellfish, seabirds, whales ns stock fish continue pretty much unabated from the last Daily Impact report on the subject two years ago (“Pacific Apocalypse: The Great Dying Continues”).
Look north:
- The global heat wave pushed north of the Arctic circle this year, further reducing the ice pack on the Arctic Sea. It’s not a straight line, year-to-year reduction, but this year the ice pack is the seventh smallest ever, and is nearly 400,000 square miles below average.
- The Arctic warming and the reduced ice pack, are releasing methane — a potent greenhouse gas — from the sea floor and from the permafrost, creating a feedback loop that is accelerating northern climate change.
- Polar bears, which rely on the sea ice for hunting, are being pushed farther south by the warming. The are slowly starving, and becoming more aggressive. Three weeks ago in northern Canada, a polar bear began to stalk two young children, and killed their father when he tried to protect them.
Look east:
- Sea level rise, coming much faster than predicted, is afflicting Florida beach communities, Norfolk city streets, Virginia farm fields, barrier-island beaches and offshore islands.
- With the new hurricane season a month old, Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico continue to struggle to recover from last year’s monster storms, which are becoming stronger, more intense and more numerous in the warmer, wetter climate.
- Although a late June-early July heat wave has broken, brutal heat is expected to return.
Look south:
- Texas and the deep South are suffering through one of their worst heat waves ever.
- Border agents are struggling to deal with the beginning of what could be a tsunami of migrants displaced from Middle and South America by climate change.
- The same problems of sea level rise and more frequent hurricanes bedevil the Gulf Coast states as well.
If we stand on a stepstool, or raise a periscope, to give our tour of the horizon global reach, we see fierce heat waves and wildfire outbreaks in Canada, Siberia, Europe, Africa, Japan, Australia, and many offshore regions around the world.
Personally, I make this tour from a place in West Virginia, where the spring has been wet, the summer mild, where in mid-July the days are warm (in the mid-80s) and the nights cool (low 60s). Streams and ponds are brimming, fields and gardens lush. It is easy to feel, in this favored enclave, that it is only y’all’s end of the Titanic that is burning.
Although the comments are closed for the story on Costa Rica, the readers should be made aware of a wise decision made by the government in the 1970s to preserve the country’s amazing natural history and develop ecotourism. To date, Costa Rica’s protected areas encompass over 25 percent of its total landmass – the highest in the world. The resulting income generated from ecotourism affords the citizens a healthy standard of living. As such, the problems associated with other Central American nations are non-existent in Costa Rica. Why do other countries not emulate the Costa Rican example?
Indeed. It would seem that good examples are not worth what they used to be worth.
Good to take that perspecive Tom, on fire from horizon to horizon or close to it.
Quick addition to the above. We are in the Northern parts of NSW Australia. Basically all of NSW and SE QLD and Northern Victoria through to SA and of course west of all the above are in the grip of what is shaping up to be a ‘death’ drought. 2 years of steadily declining rainfall, say 2 years ago we had about 70% of normal, last year 40% of normal this year .05% of normal (that’s right 0.5% of nothing is nothing). What is normal well what used to be normal was here about 900 mm per annum (wetter than London in the UK). We are now a month off from Spring, all the farms have no pastures, no crop plantings, no water and no prospects of rain. The last of our stock go this week. Then we shut the gate. Price of feed has tripled and cost of trucking in water is well so ridiculous we can only do it for us alone, no more animals. The garden is basically dying or dead and even the famously resilient and drought tolerant Australian gums are starting to show signs of death in their crowns.
No interest from the media, little interest from the politicians (yeah we always have droughts is the line) and complete denial from most people of the catastrophe that stretches from horizon to horizon in front of them.
Where do we go? What do we do? I have no idea now is the answer, 7 years of carefully planning and mitigation steps have basically come to nothing. There is no adaption and mitigation for this type of event that is why I call it a death drought. We are dying and nobody realises it.
Your story breaks my heart. I can only imagine what it has done to yours.
Common saying about here now for farmers is to take enough rounds to do the job and keep one for yourself when your finished. Us well we just sit it out. In the meantime I teach part time to earn an income and what do I teach meteorology – how is that for ironic!
So I get the Science etc – All I can say is I look at the various charts (synoptic, contour etc) and think almost daily or weekly – never seen contour lines like these before – says it all, weather is now becoming unpredictable.
Likewise, just down the road in East Tennessee, we feel favored this season. Although in 2016 we slipped into a catastrophic drought (USDA term). But, the rain we have had this year and last, happens all at once. In the past month we have received 3.25 inches in 45 minutes. And, just last week we had two different storms dump close to an inch and half in under 30 minutes both times. Certainly a deluge like that is not unheard of…but, that it is becoming the norm, is unusual.
Down here in Australia drought in many parts of the country are the major impact of the irreversible climate change. But the impact appears to be worse in Europe with the horrendous outcome (many deaths) of wild fires in Greece being one consequence. It is ironical that decade ago there were authoritative warnings of the impact of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. But most governments have only belatedly addressed this issue. Of course, controlling immigration, promoting fair trade, waste management are other issues for our unsustainable industrialized civilization
We have melted ice further North than the evidence of the last ice age! Hopefully the next will soon start? If not, picking a church of your choice may let you pick a destination as this era is wiped from the face of this earth as many have been before!
Arnie Allison
Thanks for sharing, Tom. People find it too easy to ignore; with all that is going on right now, you rarely hear anyone refer to global warming/climate change as a factor. Just heard of horrible flash fires around Athens, and a drought across Europe that is ruining harvests.
Thanks for publishing this Tom, the mainstream media, in fact most of the media is ignoring the climate story. It’s far too inconvenient for most Americans, and lowers ratings. The link below is to a pdf a paper written by Jem Bendell, a Professor of Social and Organizational Change in the UK. The paper, titled “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” addresses the imminent social upset driven by anthropomorphic climate change. The paper was too “realistic” to be printed in the scientific journal he submitted it to. Nonetheless, it’s a well-researched, well-documented “tour of the horizon,” and what happens next.
http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
In the wonderful 2011 motion picture ‘Melancholia’ the main character – a depressive named Justine (portrayed masterfully by Kirsten Dunst) – upon learning that the planet would soon be destroyed by a vagrant asteroid, plaintively mused, “the Earth is evil, no one will miss it.”
There is something to be said for this viewpoint – something oddly comforting. As an aside, I seem to remember that a ‘Justine’ was one of the innocent victims of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein monster. There’s some connection here, at least in my head.
Since Justine herself is a part of the Earth, she must be evil too.
But it’s not the earth that’s being destroyed, is it, it’s just another in a long line of human civilizations that succumbed to greed and growth. The earth will not miss us.
Two of the things that infuriate me with respect to the above are that (1) we never asked to be born into this whole sorry state of affairs, and that (2) we were never really given a choice all along regarding what to do to avert it. Over the decades the (thrice-damned) ‘Masters of the Universe’ repeatedly pulled the wool over our eyes regarding the truth of the matter, so that we imagined we could save our world just by planting a tree, recycling, using ‘green’ technology etc, not knowing that until you change the way money works, you change nothing.
I wish there’ll be a place in Dante’s Inferno specially reserved for the said Masters of the Universe.
Maybe, but how do you change the way money works? It’s always worked pretty much the same way.
Money is more than just a medium of exchange. It’s a form of communication – a language of it’s own. For a thousand years accounting (money) was the only form of written communication. It was really all that was needed, I guess. Accounting created the base upon which a controlled interchange of goods and services could occur; voila! civilization!
“In the beginning was the Word” is more than just a quaint, flowery clause in an old-timey text. It is factual, and it’s a double-edged sword.
Greg, this seems to me an unfortunate modern gloss on the sociology of money. If one extends one’s view further back into human prehistory (10K+ years ago, before the Agrarian Revolution), today’s ubiquity of money as a medium of exchange dissolves into nothingness. Furthermore, the worst effects of capitalism were delayed until just the last few centuries, catalyzed by the fossil fuels energy binge, population explosion, and massive wealth creation that incentivize corruptions warned against for millennia. That a human-created institution has so thoroughly transformed the world and become the figurative tail wagging the dog is a bitter irony, but it was clearly foreseen and is not something to be waived away idly.
Tom,, good post above. Also, thanks for the profusion of links. My time investigating such evidence has long since passed. Now I can only bear witness.
I don’t disagree, Brutus; the industrial revolution has definitely helped push us to a tipping point. I’m only stating that the problems inherent in money – as in all forms of abstract communication vehicles – are not new…except, of course in scale.
Once the material and technological underpinnings of a society begin diminishing (as they always do) the associated cultural motifs of said society become distorted. I’m talking here about ideologies, religions, histories, laws, art forms and outright myths. A national currency is a form of myth. All of this distortion – usually rosy in nature – helps the ruling class stay in power a bit longer. I’m not going to delve into the coinage debasements of failing Rome, or the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, or even the outlandish debt of the West – you know the drill. All outrageous, desperate distortions.
We see odd abstractions in our national vernacular as well; “Ask not what America can do for you, ask….” was an early warning of the terminal materialism then beginning to stalk the land. And “Make America Great Again!” a tacit admission that we are already toast. And “Build bridges, not walls” utter babble. Obviously a nation that has given up on defining its own borders is no nation at all.
Money is but a link between a society’s very real economy and its more ephemeral culture. When an economy fails the culture inevitably follows, taking with it the relevancy of its money.
Money today works on the premise of endless growth. I’d like to know which premodern civilization ever employed a means of exchange based on this premise. (Well, maybe the Romans with their attempt at an endlessly expanding empire.)
The said premise makes all the difference in the world. Previous civilizations never brought about any of the environmental enormities facing us all — at least not on the scale we now see — because their means of exchange wasn’t based on that godforsaken premise. And some of them were nevertheless able to do quite well.
And don’t tell me they didn’t know about things like fossil fuels and would otherwise have happily engaged in the pursuit of endless growth as well. The Chinese and Japanese emphatically didn’t like what they saw when the West came seeking to impose its ways of trade. Their eventual adoption of the whole modern economic system was accompanied with the deepest reluctance.
It’s always easier to direct the blame for the whole mess we face today on ‘human nature’ rather than on what certain people said and did at certain times in history. I don’t think this is right.
My two cents. Take or leave them.
In “Deep Adaptation” it does say humans could mitigate the effects by growing trees, sea weed, and sea grass and managing pastures. Combined with reduction in fossil fuel use, living more modestly, etc, the CO2 could be absorbed & humanity saved. There’s no short term profit in any of that. The 2500 or so billionaires are too busy keeping their end of the Titanic up to see any long term solutions for everyone.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for taking the time to write this essay. Some of the commenters refer to the state of New South Wales which is the state to the north of me. Apparently 99% of that state is now drought declared.
For some reason, things are different down here (for now anyway) in the southern half of the state of Victoria, and it is raining heavily right now. But as they say, there but for the grace of God go I. I remember the last drought down here and the dams for Melbourne’s drinking water got pretty low – about 15% from memory. Water under about 12% is pretty nasty stuff due to the low oxygen levels. Anyway, they’ve added an additional million people to the city of Melbourne since those days. What could possibly go wrong?
I’m in a rural area and am pretty self sufficient for water which I capture and store, and we can get by on very little during droughts (even with the vegetables and a very large orchard), but I don’t keep livestock other than chickens and bees as the land won’t support it. The native animals have soft pads and don’t compact the soil, and they also do a good job keeping the grass down for most (but not all) of the year. Livestock – not so much.
On the other hand the wildfires are a major risk down here and again I watch the stories of the folks in Greece (or California for that matter) and think to myself: There but for the grace of God, go I.
I volunteered for a few years with the local fire brigade and you know, when a serious out of control wildfire strikes hard and is driven ahead by high temperatures and high winds, well there ain’t much anyone can do about that.
We muck around with the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land at our peril.
Chris