The lead news story on NBC Nightly News for Monday August 7, 2018 was the fires raging out of control in California. The entire newscast is here at this link, after a commercial. Good luck getting it to load — NBC has no trouble making the commercials run, but not the actual news. It took me several tries.
The images are horrendous — and continuing. Efforts to bring the fires under control are going to take days and weeks. Largest fire in California history; thousands of firefighters at work, thousands of acres in flames, and the structures on them being destroyed. The screen graphics give snapshots of the problem.
What was more remarkable was the NBC followed it with a report by Anne Thompson that specifically said Climate Change is why the fire situation in California is so bad. News organizations have been reluctant make the link given prior caution on the part of scientists. They are no longer hedging their answers. Climate change is here and it is happening. Thompson’s report begins at about 3:40 in the video.
There’s no longer a fire season in California — it’s year round now.
But wait — there’s more:
Matt McGrath at the BBC looks at the developing field of attribution studies — the business of determining how much of a weather event can be attributed to climate change. The heat wave that has been hitting Europe has been linked to climate change.
Climate change resulting from human activities made the current Europe-wide heatwave more than twice as likely to occur, say scientists.
Researchers compared the current high temperatures with historical records from seven weather stations, in different parts of Europe.
Their preliminary report found that the "signal of climate change is unambiguous," in this summer's heat.
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Have other extreme events been linked to climate change?
The list continues to grow.
The major European heatwave of 2003 was among the first events to be linked though it took scientists several years to do it - eventually they concluded that human induced climate change had made the event 500% more likely!
These days the attributions studies are much faster - just last year scientists concluded that the flooding in Houston, Texas was made 38% more likely by climate change while the so-called "Lucifer" heatwave in Eastern Europe was made 10 times more likely. This new study was completed in less than a week.
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The Threat Ahead
McGrath has another article warning that the Earth itself may start cranking up the heat as rising temperatures unlock global carbon sinks. The key phrase is “Hothouse Earth”.
Each year the Earth's forests, oceans and land soak up about 4.5 billion tonnes of carbon that would otherwise end up in our atmosphere adding to temperatures.
But as the world experiences warming, these carbon sinks could become sources of carbon and make the problems of climate change significantly worse.
So whether it is the permafrost in northern latitudes that now holds millions of tonnes of warming gases, or the Amazon rainforest, the fear is that the closer we get to 2 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, the greater the chances that these natural allies will spew out more carbon than they currently now take in.
A NY Times Magazine article on Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change reported that scientists and politicians knew that the lag in detecting the signal of climate change was going to be a problem. Waiting until climate change becomes too obvious to ignore is like hitting the brakes only after you are actually going over the cliff — you really need to slow down before reaching the precipice. How do you get people to do it when they don’t see the cliff’s edge approaching — and have a lot of reasons to not want to see it?
Kevin Drum has a rather unsettling take on How To Fight Climate Change. He observes that simply saying we know what to do is not the same as actually getting people to do it.
The problem itself is obvious enough: people generally don’t like to sacrifice now in order to avoid some kind of disaster later. The impulse that prompts us to eat a cookie even though it will eventually make us fat is the exact same one that prompts fossil-fuel companies to deny global warming even though it will eventually put all their refineries underwater. We call the former “hyperbolic discounting” and the latter “free market capitalism,” but it’s all the same thing.
There are other things that make it hard to fight climate change—it’s slow, it’s invisible, it’s global, it’s expensive, etc.—but it’s the bit about sacrificing for the future that’s the real killer. We humans just aren’t very good at that. So what strategy might work to get us all to give a damn?
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Drum looks at history for comparable problems and how they were solved. (A lot of human history shows that too many times they were NOT solved, as Drum notes.) He found two different ways of addressing them. One was to find a solution that was relatively cheap and easy. (The ozone layer and CFC’s.) The other was to go up against an enemy that everyone could see and was determined to resist for as long as it took. (The Cold War.)
Drum doesn’t see how either approach applies to fighting climate change. His best guess is this:
That leaves only one solution: make it cheap to fight. If we can make the sacrifice fairly small, everything changes. But how? A ban on plastic straws, for example, is certainly a small sacrifice, but it’s performative, not real. In fact, pretty much all sacrifices on a personal level—straws, Priuses, recycling, etc.—are fine, but add up to approximately zero. As long as we’re collectively committed to extracting and burning every last hydrocarbon molecule in the earth’s crust, everything we do is just for show.
And make no mistake: we are committed to burning every last hydrocarbon molecule in the earth’s crust. Norway is a lovely, green, socially conscious, Nordic-model democracy. But they are as rapacious as Saudi Arabia in making sure to extract every bit of oil they can from the North Sea. Or how about nice, socialist Canada? Ditto, and they even demand that we build pipelines across the Midwest to transport their oil. Poor, oppressed, earth-loving Africa? Ditto again. The only places on earth that aren’t busily extracting every bit of gas, coal, and oil they can are the places that don’t have any gas, coal, or oil.
In other words, we’re doomed—unless we can figure out a way to make fighting climate change free or cheap. That means renewable energy at scale that’s cheaper than fossil fuels. This is it. There is no other answer.
And that in turn means one thing: lots and lots of R&D and lots and lots of subsidized infrastructure buildout. Put it on the national credit card and it won’t cost much. Convince climate scientists to stop waffling constantly about the cause of increased wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and so forth, and people will be willing to pay for it. It will take a while, but so would any other solution, and this at least has a chance of working. The coming approach of high-level AI and robotic technology makes it even more feasible.
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I’d suggest one alternative would be to make fossil fuels less profitable than renewables for the people who now have their money invested in fossil fuels — which was the idea behind things like the carbon tax. Politically that’s a non-starter now, and we’re going to either pay to fix what we broke and clean up the mess, or pay whatever it takes to live in a world burning up — if we can keep on living.
To get back to the top of this diary, the fact that NBC News, the BBC, and others are finally coming out and saying this is climate change we’re looking at is at least a start in the right direction. Our situation is still too much like this for comfort, but disaster has a way of focusing attention...