NOAA “announced Friday that July was the hottest month since record-keeping began 142 years ago,” NBC News reported on Sunday, August 15, 2021 (read story here).
NOAA, if you don’t know, is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency under the Department of Commerce. It “forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charts the seas, conducts deep sea exploration, and manages fishing and protection of marine mammals and endangered species in the U.S. exclusive economic zone,” according to Wikipedia (details here).
Droughts, wildfires, torrential rains and flash floods, intense storms — “to many experts, these events offer just a glimpse of what lies ahead in future summers because of climate change,” the NBC News story says.
Climate change is not only real, it’s here. Now. The IPCC, a U.N. scientific body (details here), has “found that severe heat waves that previously occurred once every 50 years will now likely happen once per decade.” And a separate study published last month “determined that record-shattering heat events are up to seven times more likely to occur between now and 2050, and more than 21 times more likely to occur from 2051 to 2080.”
“The heat event that we had in the Pacific Northwest in June — it’s not that we’re suddenly going to see that every summer, but the recent extremes are certainly a preview of what we’ll see more frequently in the future,” a University of Washington scientist says. Heat waves are a natural weather phenomenon that have existed forever, but heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere makes them more intense.
Not only that, but global warming “can also create feedback loops that then make other extreme events more likely to occur. Droughts, for instance, can intensify heat waves because the sun can more easily heat the ground when there is less moisture in the soil to evaporate.”
This summer’s major news about global warming is that it’s happening faster than scientists expected.
“I’ve been involved with climate research for 23 years, and I honestly didn’t think it would get this bad this fast,” one said. “This isn’t really news to anyone who have been studying this for a while, but it’s depressing to see it coming true.”
Animal species, including ours, can adapt to climate change, and have before, but this is happening much faster than natural evolution can keep up with. It takes centuries or millennia to adapt. We don’t have that kind of time. Our only chance is to slow down the pace of change.
We can’t, if we keep doing what we’re doing. Scientists have spelled out what it will take, and our responses to date aren’t even close. In the latest IPCC report, they warned we have to stop using fossil fuels very soon. We won’t.
I think governments will do something about climate change, but not enough nor soon enough. Economic considerations and political resistance will get in the way. Air conditioning gets you only so far; what will we do when overtaxed power grids fail, municipal water supplies dry up, coastal cities and entire countries are under water, and intense heat spawns storms like we’ve never seen before?
There will be wars for livable space and shrinking food supplies as agricultural output withers.
I think humanity’s goose is cooked.