Climate: What a summer of disaster tells us - The-Week - July 31, 2021

 "Apocalypse Right Now" would be an apt title, said Maureen Dowd at The New York Times,
or maybe "The Day After Tomorrow Was Yesterday."
Either way, this summer of climate horror feels like the "first, vertiginous 15 minutes of a disaster movie."

 
After the hottest June in recorded history obliterated temperature records not only in Death Valley (130 degrees) but also in usually mild locales like Seattle (108) and British Columbia (121), supercharged rainstorms created massive flooding in central Europe and China, turning streets into raging rivers and killing hundreds. Forest fires are now ravaging Siberia (Siberia!), Canada, and the Pacific Northwest, where Oregon's historic Bootleg Fire has so far consumed a staggering 400,000 acres of woodland, in a blaze so intense it has its own weather system — including lightning storms that start more fires.

The inferno has also created a continent-wide plume of smoke now reddening sunsets and making it hard to breathe as far away as New York. If there's any consolation for this "catastrophic summer," said Sofia Andrade at Slate, it's that "more and more people are becoming concerned with the existential threat that the climate crisis poses."

The dire scenarios climate scientists have projected for 2030 or 2040
are "already here."

In fact, said Andrew Freedman at Axios, scientists are now wondering if their computer models of climate change were too conservative by an order of magnitude. The Pacific Northwest heat wave in particular, which killed at least 200 and melted power lines in Portland, Oregon, with mind-blowing temperatures of 116 degrees, was "so far from the norm" that it's "causing experts to re-evaluate what's possible."

One phenomenon climate models didn't foresee is a "stuck" jet stream, which instead of moving weather around, locks in rainstorms, hurricanes, heat waves, and droughts for extended periods.

Ironically, the Pacific Northwest is where Silicon Valley's millionaires have been buying up property, said Naomi Klein at The Intercept. They figured a warming climate would turn Oregon into something "like California in its glory days," while California itself became an arid inferno. Let's hope this summer's horrors shatter that "fantasy of safety" for all the world's complacent elites.

Climate change is here, and nowhere and no one on this planet will be unaffected.

With extreme weather events now the norm, said Ilan Kelman at The Washington Post, we need to start adapting. Housing should no longer be built in woodsy fire zones, and we need both natural fires and prescribed burns to cleanse forests of dry timber. To limit damage from surging rivers and rising seas, cities must build walls and new drainage tunnels. Places like Portland need to set up cooling shelters to protect the elderly and vulnerable in heat waves. This summer's disasters have added "urgency for action."

"Adaptation" has long been a "dirty word" among eco-activists, said David Wallace-Wells at New York Magazine. They've seen it as surrender in the fight to decarbonize society and stop the planet from warming. But this summer's "freakish showcases of climate horror" should expose that as a false choice.

Efforts to replace fossil fuels must accelerate dramatically, but it would be "criminal to fail to focus on managing climate change," now that summer has already become a mass-casualty event. We need to help people already suffering and dying in 117-degree heat, biblical floods, and decades-long droughts.

The "permanent emergency" has begun.

TheWeek.com - July 31, 2021