The whole town
More on Lytton:
Like those videos from Paradise when it burned to the ground.
Lytton mayor Jan Polderman tells CBC that "the whole town is on fire" #Lytton #BCwildfires #BC https://t.co/VugLfDNAkQ
— Georgia Straight (@georgiastraight) July 1, 2021
"We're hearing many reports and confirmations that the village of Lytton, there's a lot of structural damage. We've heard of the hospital, Main Street, the ambulance location as well. The core of the village has been devastated."https://t.co/WdRSASy8kf
— Global BC (@GlobalBC) July 1, 2021
Wildfire service says Lytton, B.C. blaze ‘out of control’ as residents flee https://t.co/UvPpCdW8OE
— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) July 1, 2021
LATEST: The majority of #LyttonBC has been destroyed by a fast-moving wildfire, the area's MP says. He's urging everyone who was displaced to check in with emergency operations, adding officials are working to determine how many people are unaccounted for https://t.co/YM9uIMj6X5 pic.twitter.com/DAO9vDJpPY
— NEWS 1130 (@NEWS1130) July 1, 2021
This is especially frightening because it’s up north in Canada, the land where we down south all thought we would take refuge when climate change made the southern climes unliveable.
There is no real refuge. The INTERSTATES in Chicago and Detroit are under feet of water this week. Climate Change means extremes at both ends. Those fleeing California for Texas may need to realize that Houston may be washed away!
My selfish hope had been that at age 58 I would be gone before things really start biting down. That may not be the case.
Can the heat dome/polar vortex events really be pinned down to *this event* -> climate change though? It’s a weather event, not a trend the way say, Antarctica is disintegrating. I just worry that this knee jerk pattern seeking is just another “snowball in Congress” sort of thing.
The heat dome is a freak event; climate change makes the likelihood of freak events increase as I understand it, but there just isn’t a simple causal chain. Weather != climate should still apply.
BKiSA, no one event can be attributed to global warming overall; it’s a pattern that we see going on over the years. This event could possibly have happened without global warming; with global warming the odds are increased. So to say this single event, or even pattern of events, is caused by global warming, we can’t. But when we start seeing patterns…and we’ve seen extreme weather events increasing for the past couple of decades.
This is not the first heat dome this summer, there was one over the upper midwest in early June (technically spring.)
I’m not sure the answer you’re looking for, but I am sure that there is a way to say that climate change is not a cause of a weather event, or weather events; but that CC is a trend towards more extreme weather events due to increased energy trapped in the atmosphere and the oceans due to a larger carbon and greenhouse gas load than there was in the very recent past.
So, it’s an indicator of the trend, but not caused by the trend.
I dunno, I just worry that precision is being lost. I used to hang out with a bunch of people who *believed* in climate change, like basically religiously (and transgenderism, speech = violence), etc but had no understanding of its complexities or workings. If the scientific consensus flipped (no reason why it would) they wouldn’t accept it.
Just something I’m growing increasingly worried about… What’s tribal, what’s real? Maybe it’s just a personal problem.
BKiSA, that isn’t surprising; I’ve been bristling at the framing “Do you believe in climate change?” for more than a decade.
But humans seem prone to fall into apocalypse cults, and when the cult can be formed around something reasonably resembling an apocalypse, the line between concerned action to mitigate and adapt on the one hand, and simply giving in to despair on the other, can be razor-thin even for the most well-meaning of people.
In some ways, I’d say in most ways, the question “Does climate change cause X weather event?” is perfectly inverted; we measure climate change by…well, how the climate is changing; i.e., by the change in frequency and intensity of weather patterns change over long-ish (in human terms) periods. So no, we cannot blame the “heat dome” on climate change; we can say that this once-in-a-millennium event has happened twice this year, and similar once-in-a-long-time events have happened with more frequency and/or more intensity in the last sixty years, and from there we can infer climate change.
The correctly-formed question, of course, is “Can X weather event be blamed on the underlying mechanisms driving the observed climate change?” And, though this question is well-formed, it is pretty useless even in rebuttal; the weather is so chaotic that it is impossible to tie event X to an increase in emissions in year Y.
More cogent questions are: How do we encourage humans to pull back from nature and into large cities in geologically-stable areas, use only enough of the Earth’s resources to produce just barely more than enough food for us and leave the rest of the planet alone, and stop trying to rebuild when outposts of civilization get removed from the map by natural events?
Well stated, Seth.
Thanks, GW.
I should also reiterate that, the pedantic point about the valence and directionality of the “Does climate change cause X phenomenon?” aside, it *is* a matter of public concern to investigate the contours of tribalism and just how tempting it can be to turn from a climate-science-aware person into an environmental apocalypse cultist. This is a similar, if not the very same, meta-question of how to keep from slipping from a socially-aware skeptic into a completely batshit woke TRA anti-racist nutjob, or how to maintain a healthy skepticism of wokeism etc. without finding yourself one day surrounded by the Charlie Kirks and Ben Shapiros and ultimately the Richard Spencers and Alex Joneses out there.
I don’t have an answer to this, except to try and keep some perspective. Except for perhaps the last two or three generations, every single generation of humanity has faced a more-or-less extinction-level threat of one type or another (either globally or locally), including well before the advent of agriculture. That means that something like ninety billion people have lived and died under some kind of apocalyptic anxiety, and we have somehow managed to endure, to find worth in their lives, to live and tell and hear meaningful stories.
That doesn’t mean the problems we face aren’t urgent, but it means that we have thousands of generations of history of facing urgent situations, enduring, and even, occasionally, thriving. In a sense, that is what it *means* to be human, to be aware of the absurdity and tragedy of existence and nevertheless to be compelled to wrangle and coax and guide some kind of meaning out of the chaos and danger and anguish.
Do not lose hope.
Seth #9
As (almost certainly) an example of what you call an “environmental apocalypse cultist”, I sincerely hope you’re right. There’s nothing that would please me more than being able to look back in 30 years and laugh at my own silliness and say “Boy was I delusional!” (and I promise to do so – in public! – if things turn out that way). Still from my understanding of the science (hardly expert-level, but I do consider myself reasonably well informed on the issue) I only see reasons for hopelessness and despair, and I don’t think our species has ever faced an even remotely comparable existential threat before, certainly not on a global level. This is closer in kind to the events that wiped out the trilobites and dinosaurs.