Are Climate Change Marginalizers Cooking their Own Goose… and Ours?

 South Florida’s new reality: malaria and routine flooding

South Florida’s new reality: malaria and routine flooding

“But not knowing about climate change doesn’t mean people aren’t keenly aware of changes in their local climates. They are.” 

Anthony Leiserowitz, founder and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

July 3rd broke global temperature records from the beginning of the time where such temperatures are measured, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer project, which uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s weather conditions. Based on research from earlier times, most experts believe that these temperatures are the highest since the end of the Ice Age. July 4th was even higher… and record temperatures continue to mount. To climate change skeptics, normal cyclical patterns are at fault. The recurring movement of El Niño and La Niña.

Indeed, “Part of the reason for the higher temperatures is the return of El Niño, a climate pattern associated with hotter, more volatile weather. Human-caused climate change can amplify normal climate patterns and turn them into extreme weather events. There have always been heat waves and floods and wildfires — but climate change is fueling unprecedented heat waves that stretch over days and weeks, frequent flooding and megafires.” Los Angeles Times, July 7th.

We have an entire major political party that attempted to remove all climate change allocations in recent Biden-passed legislation as a condition to approving the rise in the federal budgetary debt ceiling. Republicans are increasingly prioritizing cutting expenditures that address climate change over efforts to stem that obvious reality. The private sector seems to be addressing these issues far more than governments, and many red states (like oil-producer Texas) are officially hostile to alternative energy.

Part of the Earth, already extreme deserts, are rapidly reaching sustained searing temperatures that they may soon become completely uninhabitable. The impact on polar ice is rather frightening, since sea rise could easily swamp most coastal communities around the world. Miami, with constant street flooding, is our local example. The evidence is startling, “‘Temperatures have been unusual over the ocean and especially around the Antarctic this week, because wind fronts over the Southern Ocean are strong pushing warm air deeper south,’ said Raghu Murtugudde, professor of atmospheric, oceanic and earth system science at the University of Maryland and visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

“Chari Vijayaraghavan, a polar explorer and educator who has visited the Arctic and Antarctic regularly for the past 10 years, said global warming is obvious at both poles and threatens the region's wildlife as well as driving ice melt that raises sea levels… ‘Warming climates might lead to increasing risks of diseases such as the avian flu spreading in the Antarctic that will have devastating consequences for penguins and other fauna in the region,’ Vijayaraghavan said.” Seth Borenstein and Isabella O'Malley, writing for the Associated Press, July 6th. Add reports of strains of malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes in Texas and Florida, not seen since 1951, and you know it is already happening here too. Infections are spreading daily.

Texas is facing an acceleration of heat-related deaths, a condition that is reaching across the globe: “It’s frightening to see how fast the planet is warming and what that portends for countries across the globe that are feeling the effects of extreme weather, including intense heat waves, wildfires and drought. In China this week, 15 people have died and some 20,000 have been displaced by monsoonal flooding that has been especially severe. Last month, the eastern U.S. was cloaked in smoke from wildfires in Canada. And powerful heat waves in recent weeks claimed lives in Texas, Mexico and the Southwest, and across the globe in India.

“The time for incremental steps has passed. World leaders can’t ignore or hope to avoid the pain of global warming now that it’s here. They have an obligation to act. More than a century of burning coal, oil and gas has caught up to us. To slow rising global temperatures and prevent greater harm that would come with hotter days, sea level rise and extreme weather, the major economies of the world have to immediately switch to renewable energy and slash planet-warming pollution in half by 2030.

“Each record broken and new extreme is a warning that the planet is in distress. We are not doing enough to slow climate change and avoid greater suffering. But the human occupants of Earth are not powerless. The course forward is clear, though not easy or cheap. It requires dismantling the machinery of fossil fuels and replacing it with clean, renewable energy, electric vehicles and zero-emission technology.” Los Angeles Times, July 7th. But we know we are not doing remotely enough. For some, it is based on what they believe are Biblical assurances that a global disaster will never happen… and that, they believe, includes the ravages of climate change. Others think future technology will solve the problem, but in the meantime they do not want to rock the global economic boat and… lose money. If only they knew how much money… and comfort… they will lose by continued insufficient action.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder what we have left for rising generations in terms of their quality of life.