I generally push back against “doomerism”, and agree with Michael Mann (below), and I think, most mainstream scientists, that worst case scenarios need not be inevitable.
But this summer, man…
“Very unusual”, “worrying”, “terrifying”, and “bonkers”; the reactions of veteran scientists to the sharp increase in north Atlantic surface temperatures over the past three months raises the question of whether the world’s climate has entered a more erratic and dangerous phase with the onset of an El Niño event on top of human-made global heating.
Since April, the warming appears to have entered a new trajectory. Meanwhile the area of global sea ice has dropped by more than 1 million sq km below the previous low.
“If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing our climate changing at a terrifying rate,” said Prof Peter Stott, who leads the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team. “As the El Niño builds through the rest of this year, adding an extra oomph to the damaging effects of human-induced global heating, many millions of people across the planet and many diverse ecosystems are going to face extraordinary challenges and unfortunately suffer great damage.”
The El Niño climate pattern emerges when normal easterly winds weaken and warm water spreads across the whole Pacific.
The immediate impact is on marine life which is unaccustomed to waters that have warmed by several degrees in some areas. More worrying still, the extra energy in the ocean, which is the world’s biggest heat absorber, may bring fiercer-than-usual storms, more destructive rain dumps and longer, hotter heatwaves.
When the extremes in the north Atlantic started to be registered in April, the hope was that this would prove a temporary blip. In May, however, the average temperature in the region was the highest since records began in 1850. On 12 June, the climatologist Brian McNoldy stirred up a Twitter storm by calculating that, based on past data, there was a one in 256,0000 chance of this happening.
This anomaly prompted some commentators to wonder if something unforeseen – a black swan event – was taking place in the climate system. Calmer heads explained that it was more likely the result of El Niño and other natural factors being amplified by the greenhouse gas emissions from cars, factories and forest clearance.
Michael Mann, the presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warned against “cherry picking” one set of data from one region over a relatively short period of time. It was more important, he said, to focus on the bigger picture: that burning fossil fuels was leading to more powerful and destructive hurricanes as well as providing the energy in the atmosphere to fuel extreme weather events, such as droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods. “We need to step back and look at the big picture. And it is alarming. The truth,” Mann said, “is bad enough.”
Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist with the Nature Conservancy and distinguished professor at Texas Tech University, said the north Atlantic temperature anomaly was the result of long-term loading of the climate system by 380 zeta joules of extra heat from human emissions of heat-trapping gases. “Nearly 90% of it has been going into the ocean; and it’s that gradual but inexorable increase in ocean heat content over time scales of decades rather than years that most worries climate scientists,” she said.
Around Ireland and the UK, coastal waters have been several degrees warmer than average for the time of year. Storms are now forming in the Atlantic earlier than normal, almost certainly as a result of the extra energy that is building up in the surface layer of the ocean. For the first time in June, there have been two simultaneous named tropical storms in the Atlantic, Bret and Cindy.
However, rather than seeing the north Atlantic spike as a one-off event, Richard Betts, the head of the climate impacts division at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter said: “We can expect this kind of event to happen more often – which of course is a major cause for concern For me, these graphs [of Atlantic surface temperature and Antarctic sea ice] are like yet another hammer blow driving home the urgency of the climate situation we are now in.”
While human emissions and El Niño are likely to be the two main drivers of the north Atlantic spike, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the Breakthrough Institute, said more time was needed to disentangle other possible contributing factors, such as this year’s unusual dearth in Saharan dust levels, the large amount of stratospheric water vapour, the slowing of ocean circulation and the increasing frequency of El Niño events.
More broadly, Hausfather said, the trends were in line with climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that showed warming would accelerate in coming decades unless emissions were reduced. “I’m reluctant to say that it’s worse than we expected, because what we expect in a world where we don’t reduce emissions is bad enough.”
How much worse things get depends on the intensity and duration of this El Niño. Carlos Nobre, who is one of Brazil’s top climate scientists, said there was a 60% chance that this year’s El Niño would be a strong one. This would be “very very worrying” for the Amazon rainforest, which sustained some of its worst degradation during 2015-16, when an El Niño event caused the dry season to become longer and left the vegetation more vulnerable to fire.
–But there is no doubt among scientists that things will continue to get worse as long as greenhouse gases continue to rise and natural climate stabilisers, such as the Amazon, continue to be cut down.
Hayhoe said the trends made her feel “even more concerned and even more motivated to ensure I’m doing everything I can to help people understand the profound risks climate change poses to them and how each of us can be a powerful advocate for climate action”.
“It makes me feel sad and anxious,” said Stott. “Sad for the level of environmental destruction going on around the world, including the continuing destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And anxious for how people are going to cope if this carries on much longer, not just in far-away places that are already very hot and dry, but here in the UK where fires, flash floods and droughts are getting more and more frequent and intense. It isn’t a secure and sustaining future to look forward to. I still hope a turning point can be reached such that greenhouse gas emissions do start to reduce rapidly. And I know that this can be done without devastating our quality of life, quite the opposite in fact.”
Some places are already doomed and people should act like it. We have to be responsible grown-ups and talk about triage.
There’s often a conflation of the global data with regional situations. Some places will get sea level rise faster than the global average and others will be lower. Some, by dint of the characteristics of their locations, will have more catastrophic events than others. While we want to save as much as we can, we shouldn’t pretend that a lot of places can still “adapt”.
Every year of insufficient reductions in GHGs we strike more communities or cities off the list.
“The idea that we’re going to act when we traditionally haven’t is, to me, pure hokum.” That resonates with me.
Perhaps the messaging should be less about how bad it will be for those poor nobodies in distant lands and more about the self-interest of the Haves. Who here hasn’t grown up with perpetual news of horrible events (wars, floods, famine, social collapse, etc.) somewhere else. Ho-hum, more of Those People on TV are having a hard time. Isn’tthatashame!
Or maybe we should go all Unabomber and target and physically remove the people who are still riding the profit motive to our doom (though I’m starting to realize the convenience motive might be almost as damaging).
Go back to just before the invasion of Ukraine, when the Russians were massing tanks and troops at the border. Some people sent their children elsewhere. Some people kept a pretense of “normal” while they stocked up and made plans. Others seemed to think of it as a bluff and went about their daily lives. And remember that all of this was in 2022, well after Russians had taken Crimea.
On doomerism, here’s the thing – this is just the beginning. This year is the effect of ocean warming from the emissions of several decades ago. The lag effect in global warming ensures that even if we capped emissions today (and we won’t), it’s guaranteed the El Nino years in the next few decades will be even worse than we’re seeing in the news every night this summer.
We have to face this. It’s denial to not do so.
I’m of the opinion that yes, we are indeed screwed, but that is hardly a reason to not do anything about it. It’s monstrous to do that future generations. But, pretending like this year is a fluke or the future will be better isn’t going to motivate humanity into more urgent action, instead, it will keep us collectively asleep at the wheel, and make the future even rougher than it needs to be.
Climate change is far from the only crisis civilization faces. We have gone from facing problems to facing dilemmas.
In a massively over populated world we are facing a population implosion. South Korea has a reproduction rate of 0.78 children per woman, most of the Western World is under 2. Immigration is providing a solution in the short term but even in Africa reproduction rates are coming down fast and as it stabilises fewer will move to new countries. How can you afford children, when two jobs barely covers rent? And even if you own the house, a job and a half doesn’t cover land tax and insurance (in Florida).
In Aotearoa/NZ we are now openly talking about managed retreat after a so-called “summer” of relentlessly steady rain punctuated with a couple of serious storms. One tore up some expensive real estate in Auckland, killing 4, and cyclone Gabrielle ripped through our East Coast region, dumping millions of tonnes of silt from cleared, and clear-felled landscapes into overflowing rivers carrying vast amounts of “forestry” slash that knocked out bridges and deleted many roads, cut off power and communications and destroyed swathes of expensive horticulture.
But we have also noticed more insidious issues. The clouds that carried the rain cut insolation for solar PV, and for plants, by around 60% over the summer in some places (mine as well), reducing yields and triggering plants to put more into leaf to try and capture what light there was rather than fruits and tubers. Beans, kumara and onions (those that survived the floods) and olive oil down >10% around me.
And just this week on my local FB groups, concerns about the lack of fungi, no field mushrooms, some areas of bush fungi, all MIA, possibly opening niches in the soil for phytophera and other tree-killers.
We are in a polycrisis, and still our political leadership, including the Greens, plus media, are laser-focused on trivia, scandal and irrelevance.
There is no El Nino yet. So the present very high temperatures of the western part of the North Atlantic must have other reasons. Which I do not know.
The areas the IPCC has been most consistently wrong has been in its gross underestimations of how severe and how quickly severe things can go downhill.
“something unforeseen – a black swan event”
Yes. Who could have guessed it would get hot & the weather would be bad after just 40 years of denial & refusing to do anything about the dire climate crisis?
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As people may have noticed, large parts of the far right are psychotically out of touch with reality, & the more it forces itself on them, the more rigid, fanatical, & bizarre their refusal to allow it in gets. This year may convince another 4% of the US public that something’s goin on; then it will only take 7 or 10 more years for them to decide a carbon tax of 2¢/ton should be set up, rising 1¢/year. Or we could remove the lunatics from power by whatever peaceful means are necessary.
I have a hard time understanding how limiting warming to 1.5C (as unlikely as that would be) is somehow safe when we are dealing with all the issues we currently have, while still not yet at that point. I get why doomerism is dangerous but it feels like the more rational thing than to believe that it will somehow all get fixed when I consider how it has been handled so far.