Dry without a Sense of Humor

Climate change has hardly achieved the priority it deserves. Ignore the increasing frequency and intensity of cyclones/hurricanes, storm surges, coastal erosion, serious forest fires, drought fomenting conflict which in turn forces mass migration to unwelcoming lands, floods elsewhere, migrating disease-carrying insects, agricultural disaster and reconfiguration, unpredictable weather patterns, and temperatures rising in some areas projecting near-term uninhabitability. The world’s focus has been on the pandemic; no nation on earth has done remotely enough to reverse global warming for the foreseeable future, a reality that projects a life-expectancy, quality of life diminution and mortality rates that will make our COVID-19 losses pale by comparison, perhaps even creating a fertile future for new pandemics.

The primary arguments against taking appropriate steps have been the costs, disruption of long-standing patterns of human behavior, the obsolescence of industries with billions of dollars of past investments and the concomitant political pressure by such wealthy incumbents to preserve the continued miscreant greenhouse gas emissions, unwilling to pay the hard costs of their folly, with campaign money and lobbyists to spare. Effectively, expensive inconvenience. False programs such allowing emitting corporation to pay for “carbon credits” just have not worked. See my April 17th Laughing All the Way to the Carbon Bank blog for more details.

Poorer nations blame industrial growth that made first world nations rich, suggesting that the economic costs of containing global warming should be borne accordingly. They have done little or nothing to end carbon emissions. For those millennials and younger, educationally exposed to the climate change realities that will materially impact their entire lives and the lives of generations to come, there is a primal political shift against those selfish incumbents into a world that simply recognizes the harsh realities they face. Can they make a difference in time?

As I read reports here in California – where wildfires constantly rage (fire season is no longer a limited time of the year), where there is now a serious new danger of Lyme Disease from ticks that have migrated to our beaches and that the entire West faces a level of drought that last impacted this region well over a millennium ago – I wonder why there is any continued resistance to adopting severe containment and warming reversal policies. But there is. 

“Trees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history [pictured above], and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain… Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72 percent of the region is in ‘severe’ drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming.

“Insufficient monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer season don't show promise… This year's aridity is happening against the backdrop of a 20-year-long drought. The past two decades have been the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the West, posing existential questions about how to secure a livable future in the region… It's time to ask, ‘Is this a drought, or is it just the way the hydrology of the Colorado River is going to be?’ said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.” NBCNews.com, June 11th. The facts offer no genuine alternatives to emergency action. NOW!

Precipitation has fallen precipitously. Snow-capped mountains not only have significantly less snow, but they are melting earlier, with insufficient runoff to replenish streams, lakes, aquifers and reservoirs. Millions of acres of once productive agricultural lands lay fallow as farmers demand that city consumption of water be cut to the bone to restore their food-producing livelihoods. Economic growth in many cities and towns in the West, particularly places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, may shudder to a standstill for lack of water. The prospects of water rationing and water wars all over the globe are clearly within the realm of near-term probability.

When the Polar Vortex drops temperatures here in the United States to unprecedented lows, ignorant voices tell us that this is clear evidence that the describing nature’s heat-rising climate realities as seriously dangerous is a “hoax.” But what they do not realize is that warming air in the Arctic, melting polar ice, is expanding (as warmer air tends to do) to push that colder Alaskan and Canadian winter air southwards into our northern and eastern regions. Rejection of science is the beginning of a failure to respond to our reality accordingly.

The big question is whether we have already passed the point of no return, a tipping point where global warming will increase on its own, even without human contributions of greenhouse gasses. Simply, dark earthly patches (typical of oceans and a large masses of land) absorb and retain heat while light patches (typical of snow and ice, particularly in polar regions and mountain ranges) reflect heat away. 

Thus, as snow and ice melt permanently, that once reflective surface area is replaced by darker heat absorbing underlying sea and land. Global warming simply accelerates. This phenomenon is further exacerbated when it comes to frozen tundra (permafrost) that traditionally did not melt away even in summer months. Since tundra is simply the accumulation of millennia of organic material, as it melts, it releases massive amounts of methane gas, which is over 23 times heavier (and hence thicker) than the carbon dioxide generated from burning of fossil fuels. A horrible super-contributor to the greenhouse effect. We need far more than to slow or even stop carbon-based emissions; we need to find ways to remove existing carbon gasses from the atmosphere. Technologies exist. See my May 23rd Carbon-Based Emissions Suck blog. They just need to be massively deployed. Time’s up!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the fat lady has sung, so many canaries in so many coal mines have died, the point of no return is upon us… so red alert, planet earth, red alert!