Tag: Climate change

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating.

At the beginning of the decade we are about to leave behind – the decade of Trump, the alt right, and post-truth politics – the 2010s were described as the last decade in which the human species still had a realistic chance of keeping global warming below 2 °C. Of course we didn’t seize this realistic chance while we had it, but kept running as fast as we could in the wrong direction, which means that any lingering hope must be sought in the more or less unrealistic realm. We already know where such hope will definitely not be found: It will not come from our elected politicians. That’s the option that has already failed for 30 years and can safely be ruled out. (If we ask why this is so, the answer doesn’t put the electorate in a very flattering light either). Nor is there any real hope that each of us (i.e. the same people who have consistently been opting for increased consumption at every turn and voting for politicians spouting “Drill, Baby, Drill!” and “All of the Above”) is individually going to cut his/her emissions to the degree required by the laws of physics, especially not within the context of a world order that capitalism has turned into a global version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma with permanent defection as the only viable strategy.

A slightly more hopeful route (advocated years ago by James Hansen) might be taking the guilty parties to court. This is currently happening in my country where an alliance of environmentalist organizations is suing the state to prevent drilling for oil in the Arctic. The environmentalists lost the first round, however, and although I fully support the ongoing appeal (including putting my money where my mouth is), I can’t honestly say that I’m optimistic. If the Trump-era has taught us one thing, it’s that the division of power is largely fictional, that foxes are guarding all the hen-houses, and that power and money tend to prevail regardless of what the law might say.

The least unrealistic hope as I see it is to get a minority of people sufficiently riled up to engage in massive acts of civil disobedience and physically block the extraction, transportation and burning of fossil fuels at every turn with their bodies. This is already happening to some extent of course, and we have already seen some partial victories, but not on a large enough scale to make a serious dent. Every government, as well as every major political party, in the industrial world has made it abundantly clear that they are definitely going to take us over the edge if we let them. My last desperate hope at this stage is that enough people will decide to not let them. Of course in a world of collective ego-centrism, instant gratification, short-term thinking, and even shorter attention spans, a world of alternative facts and rampant anti-intellectualism, a world where the only ideology more powerful than both neo-liberalism and the alt-right is a bland, indifferent centrism that would rather see the Earth turned to a desert than take a strong, bold stance on anything, this is a very faint hope indeed.

It’s not going to be fun.

The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.

“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”

There is no time to lose, the scientists say: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

The statement is published in the journal BioScience on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate conference, which was held in Geneva in 1979. The statement was a collaboration of dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction, and slashing meat eating.

Also stop building on vulnerable coasts and stop rebuilding on flooded coasts. Also stop draining rivers and lakes and aquifers.

Other “profoundly troubling signs from human activities” selected by the scientists include booming air passenger numbers and world GDP growth. “The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle,” they said.

As a result of these human activities, there are “especially disturbing” trends of increasing land and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, the scientists said: “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have have largely failed to address this predicament. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

Look at California right now, then multiply that by a big number. Then try to figure out where the food will come from – keeping in mind that the coral reefs will all be dead.

The new normal:

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is under threat from a new blaze near Los Angeles – one of several wildfires burning across California.

The region is under a rare “extreme red-flag warning” from weather officials as gusts approach hurricane-level speeds, over 70mph (113km/h).

There is concern that the winds will also fan the nearby Getty fire, which has burned through 745 acres.

Wildfires across California have led to mass evacuations and power cuts.

Here’s the thing about California: much of it is desert, actual dry-as-tinder desert, some of which has been irrigated into hugely productive farmland by taking water out of rivers all over the west, and from the aquifer. California has used up much of that water and it’s not coming back: the aquifer can’t be refilled, and the rivers aren’t being refilled because there is less and less snow melt all the time. Most of inhabited California is brown most of the year, because that’s how dry it is. These fires are the new normal and it’s only going to get worse.

The extreme weather alert covers Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

Winds are expected pick up early on Wednesday and continue into Thursday, with forecasters warning that they could hit their highest speeds of the season.

“This Santa Ana wind event will likely be the strongest we have seen so far this season,” the weather service said.

“These strong winds… will likely bring very critical fire weather conditions, making this an extreme red-flag warning event.”

This isn’t the future, it’s now.

This isn’t what global warming will be like, it’s what it is like. This is global warming.

Californian authorities have issued new evacuation orders as wildfires that led to mass power cuts continue to sweep through the state.

The orders, covering large parts of Santa Rosa city, markedly increases the number of residents told to evacuate.

Some 90,000 people had already been ordered to leave towns in northern California.

“Anyone left in this mandatory evacuation areas need to leave now,” the sheriff’s office said in a warning.

The new evacuation order encompasses a huge area of Sonoma County, including Santa Rosa, where an estimated 175,000 people live.

Sonoma County is just north of San Francisco and Marin County; the whole area can be seen as a giant conurbation. This is climate change, not tomorrow but now.

The National Weather Service said a powerful windstorm was expected to create “potentially historic fire weather conditions” in the region.

By Sunday morning, gusts reached 90mph (144km/h) in the hills north of Santa Rosa and up to 50mph across San Francisco’s East Bay, the forecaster said.

Forecasts predict the high winds will continue into Monday morning.

The National Weather Service issued a “red flag” warning for areas around the Kincade Fire.

The new normal.

From the News from Siberia file:

Scientists in Siberia have discovered an area of sea that is “boiling” with methane, with bubbles that can be scooped from the water with buckets. Researchers on an expedition to the East Siberian Sea said the “methane fountain” was unlike anything they had seen before, with concentrations of the gas in the region to be six to seven times higher than the global average.

The team is doing research on the environmental consequences of permafrost thawing. You know the drill – permafrost melting, methane being released, permafrost melting faster, more methane being released, permafrost melting even faster, continue until everything dies.

And it’s not just the tundra, it’s also the ocean.

In 2017, scientists announced they had discovered hundreds of craters at the bottom of the Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia. The craters had formed from methane building up then exploding suddenly when the pressure got too high.

And now they’ve found these methane fountains, around which the methane levels are nine times higher than average global concentrations.

There’s the Greenland ice shelf melting, which means much bigger rises in sea level happening much faster; there are the permanently dying forests which will become grasslands; there are the shrinking water tables…

And there is the little matter of the food supply.

As the planet warms, parts of the world face new risks of food and water shortages, expanding deserts, and land degradation, warns a major new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those effects are already underway, and some of them could soon become irreversible.

The changing climate has already likely contributed to drier climates in South and East Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, reducing the food and water supply. In 2015, about 500 million people lived in dry areas that experienced desertification in recent decades as a result of human activities. Those problems are only going to get worse as climate change continues to take its toll.

…

Last year, the same body issued the alarming finding that we have roughly a dozen years left before the world misses its window for averting runaway global warming. It wouldn’t be enough, the IPCC warned, to cut our fossil fuel dependency; the world will also need to prioritize drawing out carbon from the atmosphere.

But we can’t, because we’re too busy cutting down trees and driving 100 miles to work.

The way we eat, farm, and cut down forests contributes in a major way to the climate problem. Deforestation, agriculture, and other land use are already responsible for 23 percent of the rise in human-caused greenhouse gases, and agriculture is responsible for 44 percent of methane emissions. Those numbers will certainly grow without changes in land management—changes like growing forests and improving soil’s carbon capture with more native plants and crops.

When land is degraded, it becomes less productive, restricting what can be grown and reducing the soil’s ability to absorb carbon. This exacerbates climate change, which in turn worsens land degradation.

Which in turn makes it less productive, restricting what can be grown and reducing the soil’s ability to absorb carbon. This exacerbates climate change, which in turn worsens land degradation, which in turn makes it less productive, restricting what can be grown and reducing the soil’s ability to absorb carbon, which in turn makes it less productive, restricting what can be grown and reducing the soil’s ability to absorb carbon…∞

Updating to add the link to the IPCC press release.

Forests. Forests and climate change. It’s not just in Siberia and Alberta and California that they’re in danger of disappearing altogether. Germany too is losing forests.

Germany’s parched forests are nearing ecological collapse, foresters and researchers warn. More than 1 million established trees have died since 2018 as a result of drought, winter storms and bark beetle plagues.

Germany’s forests are undoubtedly suffering as a result of climate change, with millions of seedlings planted in the hope of diversifying and restoring forests dying, warns Ulrich Dohle, chairman of the 10,000-member Bunds Deutscher Forstleute (BDF) forestry trade union.

“It’s a catastrophe. German forests are close to collapsing,” Dohle added in an interview with t-online, a online news portal of Germany’s Ströer media group.

Meanwhile Bolsinaro is destroying Brazil’s on purpose.

Also, the fires that destroy forests that could have absorbed some of the CO2 also fill the air with soot which…raises temperatures further.

Russia has declared a state of emergency in five Siberian regions after wildfires engulfed an area of forest almost the size of Belgium amid record high temperatures as a result of climate change.

Officials said 2.7 million hectares of forest (about 10,400 square miles) were ablaze on Tuesday as soaring temperatures, lightning storms and strong winds combined, sending smoke hundreds of miles to reach some of Russia’s biggest regional cities.

…

Environmental groups worry that in addition to the destruction of carbon-absorbing forest, the carbon dioxide, smoke and soot released will accelerate temperature increases that are already melting permafrost in northern Russia. An estimated 12 million hectares of Russian forest has burned this year.

It will keep getting worse and it will keep getting worse faster.

What happens when there’s nothing left to melt?

In years past, when it rained near Greenlander Toennes Berthelsen’s family camp, water would flood down as the mountain top ice melted, creating rivers where there usually are none.

Last week, when it rained there, there was no river at all.

“It was heavy raining, but we couldn’t see any flood coming down,” Berthelsen said. The ice cap at the top of the mountain was completely gone.

It’s been exceptionally warm in Greenland this year.

Now, the same heat dome that cooked Europe is forecast to raise temperatures in Greenland into the 70s Fahrenheit on parts of the coast, and the ice sheet is in the midst of one of its most extreme melts on record, said Xavier Fettweis, a climate researcher at the University of Liège. On July 30 and 31, more than half of the ice sheet had at least some melting at the surface, Denmark’s research institutions reported on Polar Portal.

“The current melt rate is equivalent to what the model projects for 2070, using the most pessimistic model,” Fettweis said. That melting has global implications—if Greenland’s ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would result in about 20 feet of global sea level rise.

Again, it looks as if it’s all going to happen a lot faster than was predicted.

Both Fettweis and Mottram said the extreme melt happening now is something that climate models have not done a good job accounting for.

“By mid to end of the century is when we should be seeing these melt levels—not right now,” Mottram said. “[The models] are clearly not able to capture some of these important processes.”

Keep a packed bag by the door.

Maybe it will help if we rake the forest floors?

The CBC reports a forestry professor has found that:

certain tree species are having a tough time growing back in areas that have been affected by wildfires due to warming temperatures — a discovery that could have major implications for both the forestry sector and long-term climate change targets.

Among Stevens-Rumann,’s work was a 2017 study of nearly 1,500 sites charred by 52 wildfires in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Her research found that lower elevation trees had a tough time naturally regenerating in areas that burned between 2000 and 2015 compared with sites affected between 1985 and 1999, largely due to drier weather conditions.

More recently, a 2019 study written by her colleague Kerry Kemp found that both Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine seedlings in the Idaho’s Rocky Mountains — just south of B.C. — were also struggling in low-lying burned areas due to warmer temperatures, leading to lower tree densities.

One thing trees do is capture CO2, so if they’re not coming back well from fires, that’s one more item in the cascade.

In some places what was forest may become grasslands.

The concerns were echoed by University of British Columbia forestry professor and associate dean Sally Aitken, who co-authored a study that mapped out how landscapes in B.C. are changing in the face of changing climate.

Aitken said many areas in the province that were burned during the record-breaking 2017-2018 wildfire seasons were also recovering from previous wildfires.

When juvenile or seedlings burn before they’re mature enough to drop seeds, forest may experience what’s known as seed source shortfall.

Result: again, more forest lost to grassland.

While some areas at higher elevations are experiencing regrowth, both Aitken and Stevens-Rumann say some ecosystems will no longer be able to support tree species that have historically stood tall over the landscape.

With more grasslands dispersed through the province, the forests’ ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere is hampered, they said.

No mention of raking.

The Beeb on the burning of the Arctic:

Wildfires are ravaging the Arctic, with areas of northern Siberia, northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Greenland engulfed in flames.

Lightning frequently triggers fires in the region but this year they have been worsened by summer temperatures that are higher than average because of climate change.

Plumes of smoke from the fires can be seen from space.

Climate change is making the summer temps higher and the resulting fires will make climate change worse, aka hello feedback loop.

In June, the fires released an estimated 50 megatonnes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of Sweden’s annual carbon output, according to Cams.

Jonathan Amos offers some analysis:

The fires are releasing copious volumes of previously stored carbon dioxide and methane – carbon stocks that have in some cases been held in the ground for thousands of years.

Scientists say what we’re seeing is evidence of the kind of feedbacks we should expect in a warmer world, where increased concentrations of greenhouse gases drive more warming, which then begets the conditions that release yet more carbon into the atmosphere.

A lot of the particulate matter from these fires will eventually come to settle on ice surfaces further north, darkening them and thus accelerating melting.

It’s going to get worse and worse faster and faster.

There will be more and worse.

Oppressively hot weather has broken records across Europe this week as a heat wave bakes the continent. Monthly and all-time temperature records were broken Wednesday in parts of Germany, Poland, France, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Clermont-Ferrand, France reported a record high of 105.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And forecasters expect parts of France could see temperatures rise to 110 degrees Fahrenheit by Friday.

“The whole government is mobilized,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters on Monday. Public health warnings for heat have also been issued in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland.

Temperatures like that can kill, especially if you’re not used to them or have to work in them or both. (The utility of being used to them is very limited though. There are hard borders on how much heat the human body can handle.)

WMO regional climate centre for Europe @DWD_presse issued Climate Watch for #heatwave for the next week. Temperatures 3°C-6°C above average over central Europe and 1°C to 3°C elsewhere. Widespread daily maximum above 30°C. Follow advice from national met services. Map @eu_Echo pic.twitter.com/OSufYG4vW4

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) June 26, 2019

Europe’s hot weather this follows some unusually warm temperatures in other parts of the world this month, including the Arctic. Temperatures in Greenland surged up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit above what’s normal this time of year, leading to the largest ice melt this early in the season on record. A heat wave in India this month has already killed dozens.

The high temperatures in Europe also stand to harm millions of people. And as average temperatures rise due to climate change, these spans of extreme heat are poised to get longer, more intense, more frequent, and deadlier.

But the good news is

No, there isn’t any.

What was that about melting again? From the tundra to the Himalayas:

Over the last several years, on Mt. Everest, veteran alpine guides have reported seeing an increasing number of human skeletons and frozen corpses. One guide named Gelje Sherpa told the Times that when he first summited, in 2008, he found three bodies, and during a recent season he found six.

Seems to be a sign that the glaciers are melting.

A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, added a significant layer of proof, finding that, over the past forty years, the average rate that the Himalayas have lost ice has doubled. While the paper’s findings have dire consequences for the millions of people who live just below Himalayan glaciers, they are also vitally important in aiding officials and engineers tasked with planning for the region’s entire population of 1.6 billion people, all of whom rely on the rivers that these glaciers feed.

You know, little rivers like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and the Yellow and the Indus…

Scientists were hoping that it would be more complicated than warmer temperatures—>melting glaciers, but the evidence is indicating that it’s not.

Based on many other studies, the suspicion already had been that temperature is the main climate driver melting glaciers. “Of course, if it gets warmer, ice melts, we knew that,” Schaefer said. But he would have been happy if the study showed that melting is much more variable, and more strongly impacted by other factors. “We were obviously hoping that for the environment, and the livelihood of society, that it would be a more local pattern,” he said. “Instead, this means that just everywhere these glaciers will follow the temperature curve.” Schaefer added, “Of all the possibilities, that’s the worst result.”

So good-bye glaciers hello mass famines.

Schaefer told me that people often ask him when the Himalayas are going to be ice-free. “It’s a little bit like asking, When are the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets gonna be gone?” he said. (Greenland’s summer heat is already weeks ahead of average, breaking the record for such extensive melting of its ice sheet at an early date.) “They are interesting questions, but they are not that relevant for us. If the ice sheets are gone, we are toast anyway. We will be gone way before.”

And it appears that there is no way the ice sheets won’t be gone.

Speaking of climate and emergency – Chennai (formerly Madras) has run out of water. That’s 11 million people.

The southern Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras) is in crisis after its four main water reservoirs ran completely dry.

The acute water shortage has forced the city to scramble for urgent solutions, including drilling new boreholes.

Residents have had to stand in line for hours to get water from government tanks, and restaurants have closed due to the lack of water.

In the Arctic the permafrost is melting, and in southern India the water supply is drying up.

The water crisis has also meant that most of the city has to depend solely on Chennai’s water department, which has been distributing water through government trucks across neighbourhoods.

“The destruction has just begun,” an official said. “If the rain fails us this year too, we are totally destroyed.”

A city of 11 million people.

Turns out permafrost isn’t perma.

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

They flew an old prop plane to extremely remote areas up there.

Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.

The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.

People in the Trump administration are no doubt composing a press release saying hooray more land for farming plus shipping in the Arctic at last hooray hooray.

Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.

It’s already going much faster than predicted.

Even if current commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris agreement are implemented, the world is still far from averting the risk that these kinds of feedback loops will trigger runaway warming, according to models used by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

With scientists warning that sharply higher temperatures would devastate the global south and threaten the viability of industrial civilisation in the northern hemisphere, campaigners said the new paper reinforced the imperative to cut emissions.

“Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “This premature thawing is another clear signal that we must decarbonise our economies, and immediately.”

And we’re not going to.

Greta Thunberg is getting some attention.

So now it’s time for the right-wing adults to unload on her – Brendan O’Neill out in front as usual.

Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.

Well, by the same token one can imagine Brendan O’Neill in a crowd laughing and jeering while a “witch” is drowned.

The article as a whole is quite remarkably stupid, because it’s all about the style with not a word to say about the substance. The campaign to do something about climate change is anti-progress, ignore it!

O’Neill’s conclusion:

Young people, Ms Thunberg isn’t your leader. She’s a patsy for scared and elitist adults. Don’t do as she says. Instead, refuse to panic, mock the blather about hellfire, and appreciate that mankind’s transformation of the planet has been a glorious thing that has expanded life expectancy, allowed billions to live in cities, and made it possible for even the less well-off to travel the globe. Sin against St Greta.

Yes, industrialization and technology have been glorious things (with plenty of glitches along the way – Bhopal can stand for the kind of thing I mean) for those of us who were in time to enjoy them before things got too bad…but that’s a bit like setting a house on fire to keep warm. Yes for awhile the result is what you wanted, you’re cozy and warm, but then the fire gets closer to the room you’re in. Some of the fire getting too close is already happening: Paradise, California can stand for the rest the way Bhopal did.

So O’Neill’s “forget about climate change because we have a pleasant life right now” is utterly stupid, but his sneers at Thunberg are cruel. The reporting is that she’s on the autism spectrum, so an adult writing in public about her “monotone voice” is just being a goddam bully, which is nothing new for Brendan O’Neill.

And then there’s Helen Dale, who’s always reminding us that she’s a “classical liberal.”

Can the Beeb arrange for Andrew Neil to interview this Greta Thunberg character? Because afterwards I guarantee we’ll never hear from her again. She may even have a meltdown on national telly into the bargain.

— Helen Dale (not on your team, but always fair) (@_HelenDale) April 23, 2019

Why? Because she’s campaigning for the idea that we should do something about climate change? Therefore she should be bullied into a meltdown on national television? I’m not seeing the chain of reasoning there.

David Wallace-Wells used to shrug off climate change as just the price of economic growth, and then he didn’t any more.

A few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, many of them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their research centre on an island also populated by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass that had been trapped in permafrost for many decades. At first, it seemed the news was inventing a new genre of allegory. But of course climate change is not an allegory. Beginning in 2011, about a million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought; in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the west is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants.

And that’s very alarming, because it’s not as if the trend is going to reverse itself. If we get racism and Trumps now what will it be like as the mass migrations get ever more mass?

The likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create 10 times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further destabilised by climate chaos – and, one suspects, less receptive the browner those in need. And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the rest of south Asia – 140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, more than 10 times the Syrian crisis.

It wouldn’t go smoothly even if every single refugee were rich and lily-white.

Because these numbers are so small, we tend to trivialise the differences between them – one, two, four, five. But, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one. At 2C, the ice sheets will begin their collapse, bringing, over centuries, 50 metres of sea-level rise. An additional 400 million people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heatwaves will kill thousands each summer. There would be 32 times as many extreme heatwaves in India, and each would last five times as long, exposing 93 times more people. This is our best-case scenario. At 3C, southern Europe would be in permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last 19 months longer. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months longer: five years. At 4C, there would be 8m more cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone and close to annual global food crises. Damages from river flooding would grow thirtyfold in Bangladesh, twentyfold in India, and as much as sixtyfold in the UK. Globally, damages from climate-driven natural disasters could pass $600tn – more than twice the wealth that exists in the world today. Conflict and warfare could double.

But it’s all in the future…except when it’s not.

The California fires of 2017 burned the state’s wine crop, blowtorched million-dollar vacation properties, and threatened both the Getty Museum and Rupert Murdoch’s Bel-Air estate. There may not be two better symbols of the imperiousness of American money than those two structures. Nearby Disneyland was quickly canopied by an eerily apocalyptic orange sky. On local golf courses, the west coast’s wealthy swung their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy. Last year, Americans watched the Kardashians evacuate via Instagram stories, then read about the private firefighting forces they employed, the rest of the state reliant on a public force full of conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a day.

And the fires are not only the effects of warming, they also add to it.

When trees die – by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans – they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them, sometimes for as long as centuries. In this way, they are like coal. This is why the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops – that the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, would become carbon sources, unleashing all that stored gas. The impact can be especially dramatic when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997, for instance, released up to 2.6 gigatons (Gt) of carbon – 40% of the average annual global emissions level. And more burning only means more warming only means more burning. Wildfires make a mockery of the technocratic approach to emissions reduction.

In the Amazon, 100,000 fires were found to be burning in 2017. At present, its trees take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, promising to open the rainforest to development – which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 Gt of carbon. In 2017, the US, with all of its aeroplanes and automobiles and coal plants, emitted about 5 Gt.

Tick tick tick tick

This year’s climate report will be reality for the next climate report.

More and more of the predicted impacts of global warming are now becoming a reality.

For instance, the 2014 assessment forecast that coastal cities would see more flooding in the coming years as sea levels rose. That’s no longer theoretical: Scientists have now documented a record number of “nuisance flooding” events during high tides in cities like Miami and Charleston, S.C.

“High tide flooding is now posing daily risks to businesses, neighborhoods, infrastructure, transportation, and ecosystems in the Southeast,” the report says.

Can they all move to Oklahoma? Would that work?

The United States military has long taken climate change seriously, both for its potential impacts on troops and infrastructure around the world and for its potential to cause political instability in other countries.

Hmm. Isn’t that unpatriotic, unTrumpian, anti-MAGA? Shouldn’t the military be ignoring climate change on the grounds that it’s Fake News?

The previous assessment warned that few states and cities were taking steps to adapt to the impacts of climate change. That’s slowly changing, the new report finds. More and more communities are taking measures such as preserving wetlands along the coasts to act as buffers against storms.

But outside of a few places in Louisiana and Alaska, few coastal communities are rethinking their development patterns in order to avoid the impacts from rising seas and severe weather that the report says are surely coming.

Not building new houses and condo buildings at the edge of the rising sea would seem to be quite a basic step, but apparently it’s beyond us.

The report warns that the country is particularly unprepared for the upheavals that will come as rising sea levels swamp coastal cities: “The potential need for millions of people and billions of dollars of coastal infrastructure to be relocated in the future creates challenging legal, financial, and equity issues that have not yet been addressed.”

And, at this rate, never will be.

The Times on that climate change report:

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.

The report is issued every four years, as required by law.

The previous report, issued in May 2014, concluded with nearly as much scientific certainty, but not as much precision on the economic costs, that the tangible impacts of climate change had already started to cause damage across the country. It cited increasing water scarcity in dry regions, torrential downpours in wet regions and more severe heat waves and wildfires.

The results of the 2014 report helped inform the Obama administration as it wrote a set of landmark climate change regulations. The following year, the E.P.A. finalized President Barack Obama’s signature climate change policy, known as the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to slash planet-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants. At the end of the 2015, Mr. Obama played a lead role in brokering the Paris Agreement.

He didn’t do it because he’s some touchy-feely hippy, you know. He did it because it’s already bad and it’s going to get horrendous, so a responsible president ought to work hard to mitigate it.

But in 2016, Republicans in general and Mr. Trump in particular campaigned against those regulations. In rallies before cheering coal miners, Mr. Trump vowed to end what he called Mr. Obama’s “war on coal” and to withdraw from the Paris deal. Since winning the election, his administration has move decisively to roll back environmental regulations.

Make America a dust bowl again.

A new report on climate change – released by the Trump administration on a day when apparently 93% of the population is shopping. Hoping we’ll ignore it much?

The report says it’s going to be bad. Really bad.

The costs of climate change could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, according to the report. The Southeast alone will probably lose over a half a billion labor hours by 2100 due to extreme heat.

Farmers will face extremely tough times. The quality and quantity of their crops will decline across the country due to higher temperatures, drought and flooding. In parts of the Midwest, farms will be able to produce less than 75% of the corn they produce today, and the southern part of the region could lose more than 25% of its soybean yield.

Heat stress could cause average dairy production to fall between 0.60% and 1.35% over the next 12 years — having already cost the industry $1.2 billion from heat stress in 2010.

Shellfish, killed off by ocean acidification. People, killed by heat. More mosquito- and tickborne diseases like Zika, dengue and chikungunya; more West Nile virus. More wildfires. Less safe water. Rising sea levels, flooding and storm surges. More blackouts and power failures.

Sea levels have already gone up 7 to 8 inches since 1900. Almost half that rise has been since 1993, a rate of rise greater than during any century in the past 2,800 years. Some countries are already seeing land underwater.

Don’t let the sales drown this out.