“The North Atlantic is record-shatteringly warm right now… There has never been any day in observed history where the entire North Atlantic has been nearly as warm as it is right now, at any time of year.”
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA
I have nothing but sympathy for those living in the scalding heat east of the Mississippi. Record temperatures are searing from the South up and into New England, with the promise of more heat records across our entire summer and beyond. Temperatures seem to be rising everywhere, and even with record rainfalls, projections show that water accessibility is becoming one of the most imposing barriers to growth in so many water impaired communities. As the Southwest deals with water allocations from the Colorado River basin, the largest state capital (population-wise), Phoenix and its surrounding Maricopa County, came to the realization that continued growth in the suburbs is no longer sustainable.
With half the population of New York City, Maricopa County still consumes more than double the amount of water as does NYC. So as suburban Phoenix housing tracts were in the middle of construction, the county shut them down. Framed structures stand without workers, waiting for some sort of resolution… But that might not happen. Coping with containing global climate change is expensive, but many fundamentalist-evangelicals believe God won’t let this continue. These factors have combined to put pressure on GOP elected representatives to do the opposite of what is needed: instead of fixing the problem, they wish to curtail efforts to reverse climate change. They want to undo past congressional allocations toward this goal to keep taxes for the rich low. That rightwing faction that succeeded in getting Kevin McCarthy elected as House Speaker is demanding those cutbacks in current budget talks.
With the effluents and heat generated by the maze of firestorms in Canada creating an on-again, off-again envelope of chemical toxicity in our Northeast, exacerbated by record-breaking heat, those climate change vultures are coming home to roost. Hayley Smith, writing for the June 16th Los Angeles Times, focuses on those record-breaking changes in the North Atlantic, an indicator of what we can continue to expect: “In a world of worsening climate extremes, a single red line has caught many people’s attention.
“The line, which charts sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean, went viral over the weekend for its startling display of unprecedented warming — nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit above the mean dating back to 1982, the earliest year with comparable data.
“Ocean temperatures are so anomalously high that Eliot Jacobson, a retired mathematics professor who created the graph using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had to “increase the upper bound on the Y-axis,” he said… ‘I’ve been doing this for a long time, but this one was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this,’ ‘ Jacobson said of the graph. ‘What is going on here?’
“He and other researchers said there are several factors that may be contributing to the off-the-charts warming, which is occurring alongside other climate woes including record-shattering wildfires in Canada, rapidly declining sea ice in Antarctica and unusually warm temperatures in many parts of the world, not including Southern California… Underlying everything is human-caused climate change, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
“But atop that are a handful of other potential factors, including the early arrival of El Niño; the recent eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano; new regulations around sulfur aerosol emissions; and even a dearth of Saharan dust…
“Nearly all of the Atlantic basin is experiencing anomalous warmth, including the Irminger Sea southeast of Greenland, the western Mediterranean Sea and the tropics ‘all the way from Africa to at least the Caribbean,’ said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory… ‘We are definitely in record territory,’ Johnson said.
“And it’s not just the Atlantic, as global sea surface temperatures are also climbing to new highs, NOAA data show… Such warming events can have considerable consequences, including triggering algal blooms, bleaching coral and negatively affecting fisheries and other ecosystems, Johnson said… Marine heat waves can also provide more energy for tropical cyclones and more moisture for atmospheric rivers and flooding events. And a warmer ocean tends to expand, which can lead to sea level rise along with melting ice sheets.”
In short, by letting this continue without strong countermeasures, bad becomes worse becomes horrible becomes irreversible and unsustainable. Add the heat-rising El Niño effect to the other variables, and we are definitely in for a rough ride, a battle against heat and aridification.
That so many Americans have abandoned common sense in favor of conspiracy theory driven palliatives – denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that this is not just a routine climate cycle – effectively means that the vast majority of remaining Americans (and citizens of the world) must suffer the consequences of insufficient remedial action motivated by false premises. That the heat cycle is close to reaching exponential increases in global temperature averages even without man’s continued contribution of greenhouse gasses – as heat reflective ice melts to be replace by heat absorbing darker water and land – a veritable point-of-no-return tipping point.
We’re in this federal deficit mess for simple and obvious reasons. We either spend less to keep taxes for the rich low, or we tax wealth the way other economic powers tax their rich. When you remember that 1% of Americans own more than half the aggregate wealth in the United States, the answer is clear. Y and Z generations are the most terrified of the consequences of following the current court of inaction. They’re not wrong!
I’m Peter Dekom, and when it comes to choosing between allowing the rich to become unfathomly richer and survivability, the choice should be simple.
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