I live in Calgary, Alberta, which you’d think should avoid some of the worst effects of climate change (eg. rising sea levels, deadly heat, etc.). But as someone who grew up here over the past 35+ years, the change in climate over the past decade has been very noticeable to me. Severe weather is more intense and variable than it was in the past - hailstorms and flooding have gotten significantly worse and property insurance premiums have risen noticeably in response. I feel like there have been more days with the city obscured in forest-fire smoke and air quality health warnings in the last 5 years than the previous 30 years combined.
Indeed, it can really lead to both droughts AND floods, even for the same place. Glaciers are shrinking, meaning that one of the steadiest supplies of fresh river water is declining, while rain storms may be less frequent but significantly more intense when they do happen and the sudden surge in high amounts of rain leads to flooding (anecdotally, that seems to be the case where I live). Regulating this feast/famine dynamic for water flows is going to be a huge challenge for a lot of places. We probably have a lot to learn from places which are fairly arid but have monsoon seasons.
The third article is particularly noteworthy. Mexico’s water problems will eventually become our problem as well. Climate change is going to push populations northward out of desperation, and they’ll do whatever they can to get here, wall or no wall.
Regardless, I predict that within 10 years, we’re going to be paying a lot more for food and water, and if you’re a minimum wage earner, you’re going to be fighting the urge to beat people up for the cash in their wallet.
The big problem they are facing is the nights don’t cool down. That’s when they open up their pores and breath. There was an amazing and highly unusual Saguaro bloom this year. They usually bloom on the tips of their arms, this year the blooms ran down the arms. Botanists are theorizing that this is because they “know” they are dying and are trying to spread all the seeds they can in their end days.
Here in central Arizona, the last week has seemed like a normal monsoon season. It’s helping with the ever growing fires and has cooled it down somewhat.
Today I heard a store clerk say that she was happy the drought was finally over. I was very proud of myself, I didn’t beat her with my cane.
It cannot be reversed without negative carbon technology, so we’re already there, even if we don’t know it yet. But the other reality is that there’s a human tendency to avoid responding until we’re actually experiencing the crisis.
With a credit crisis, for example, we can add central bank stimulus to correct and pay for our excesses.
Even with smaller scale environmental problems, whether it’s deforestation, overhunting, toxic dumping, or something else, we can implement policy and these policies tend to have an impact within a decade or two.
Man-made climate change is a radically different problem, in part because the inputs to our economic growth, which is what sustains societal equilibrium and prevents massive warfare and/or total population collapse, are contributing to environmental catastrophe in ways that are cumulatively fatal, but not particularly disruptive in an observable way. Thus, what you have is a slow-motion disaster that, once there is a consensus that emergency action must be taken, it’s too late - we’re dead.
If you want a clear example of how our brain falls into this trap, look no further than the morons who refuse vaccination and end up begging for a vaccine on their deathbed, only to be told, “Sorry, it’s too late.” That’s exactly what is going to happen with humanity and climate change, most likely within the next 10-20 years. We will probably end up killing more than half our global population as a result.
Our planet is 5 billion years old. Our records of local temperatures go back maybe 200 years. Id say the sample size is too small to make any sweeping generalizations.
The records also show that drastic temp changes have caused the end of entire species. When were you last able to get mammoth in the supermarket? How about troglodytes? I agree that the earth will abide, but will life remain comfortable for billions of humans?
The ocean is warming, fish are disappearing, food crops are dying due to lack of water.
As I have said several times, I hoped that maybe I would be dead before the really bad shit started happening. I now have my serious doubts about my timing.
But thats the way the planet works. There is nothing sacrosanct about humans unless you are religious. As a human Im not to crazy about it but the universe works in its own way. The only response to this global catastrophe is universal mandatory action. Does anyone really believe that the developing world will curtail development?
When you cut down a forest and kill all the animals that call it home, is that “the way the planet works?” If you emit so much CFCs that you rip a hole in the ozone layer that you allow dangerous amounts of ultraviolent sunlight into the atmosphere, is that the way the planet works?
Or is that the way humans work and we decide to stop the fucking problem?
Nope, not me. Hubs and I have no stake in the future, so I’m not worried about grands or anything. I just want to finish out my life in relative comfort, which is what the rest of the world also wants. I will still make my futile efforts to change the world for the better, but I know its wasted time.
Supposedly God killed lots of humans in a big flood, so even he doesn’t think that humans are sacrosanct. I seriously think that humans are fucked, but at least I won’t be around to say “I told you so!”
The study of past climate change also helps us understand how humans influence the Earth’s climate system. The climatic record over the last thousand years clearly shows that global temperatures increased significantly in the 20th century, and that this warming was likely to have been unprecedented in the last 1,200 years. The paleoclimatic record also allows us to examine the causes of past climate change and to help unravel how much of the 20th century warming may be explained by natural causes, such as solar variability, and how much may be explained by human influences.
Previous climates can be explained by natural causes, while current climate change can only be explained by an excess of CO2 released by human fossil fuel burning. Records of past climates indicate that change happened on time scales of thousands to millions of years. The global rise in temperature that has occurred over the past 150 years is unprecedented and has our fingerprints all over it.
Ice cores provide climate records going back up to 800,000 years. Tree rings provide information up to a couple of thousands years. Pollen and coral can also be used to get climate data going back thousands of years. This called proxy data.
Chemical proxy records, such as isotope ratios, elemental analyses, biomarkers and biogenic silica, and also fossils and ocean sediments allow us to get information even further back.
All this data from many different sources and places is analyzed together, and gives us a picture going back millions, and even hundreds of millions and billions of years.
We have the greatest level of detail for the past few thousand years, and less detail the further we go back.
The bit that the deniers miss is that, yes, there’s a big gap between “everything’s fine” and “all the humans are dead”, but on the continuum in between, the “civilization breaks down” point is a lot closer to the “everything’s fine” side than they realize.
Tree rings, ice cores, and other sampling methods actually give us weather data going back hundreds, thousands, even millions of years.
Even if you just limit it to written records we still have data, such as the River Thames frost fairs, which haven’t been held since 1814 because the Thames no longer freezes over. People have talked about the weather ever since writing became a thing. We have plenty of evidence of what the weather was, even if we don’t have precise numbers.
But like I said - keep telling yourself it’s alright, our house isn’t burning, the basement is flooding, that noise you hear is a train and not a tornado. Keep telling yourself whatever keeps you comfortable.
The massive historically anomalous forest fires being seen in the US are not temporary things that will be prevented by being more careful about not starting them.
Assuming that the relevant areas are drying out and getting hotter, over time the forests will change or disappear and be replaced by a landscape that burns regularly with lower fuel loads and greater fire adaptation.
There’s other data.