Dahr Jamail reports on climate disruption

Dahr Jamail was intervewed by Guy McPherson on NBL today. He described the situation as being worse and changing more quickly than even he had thought

Greenland Is Burning: Wildfires and Floods Surge Worldwide

By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

 

A firefighter climbs a burning hillside after having fallen into a hole while fighting the La Tuna Fire on September 2, 2017, near Burbank, California. (Photo: David McNew / Getty Images)

Truth-Out,

5 September, 2017

On Sunday, August 27, I went mountain climbing in Olympic National Park, near my home. I noted how warm the day was -- far warmer, even in early morning, than the norm for this time of year. I would learn that evening that across Puget Sound in Seattle, the city had seen temperatures an average of nearly 10 degrees above normal that day.

When I reached the top of the peak and looked to the northeast, a massive smoke plume from wildfires to the south clouded the horizon nearly all the way to the Canadian border. The Pacific Northwest has spent much of the summer covered in smoke from wildfires raging across British Columbia, but now the smoke is coming from the south as fires rage across the American West.

Wildfire smoke over Puget Sound in Washington State. The smoke is from massive fires in Oregon. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)

The day was warm enough that drinking three and a half liters of water felt like barely enough to get me back down to the trailhead. While driving home, I listened to NPR, the only radio station I could pick up. The news focused on Tropical Storm Harvey and the epic flooding in Houston. That Sunday, the area flooded in Texas was, staggeringly, the size of Lake Michigan. Several people had died, and 450,000 Texans were expected to seek disaster aid, as more than half a million homes have flooded in Houston.

The flooding there has been and continues to be catastrophic, as the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico fuel greater and greater storms, and the warmer atmosphere becomes that much more capable of holding moisture.

On NPR, anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) was not mentioned in connection with this epic storm until a reporter from the Texas Tribune brought it up. And we wonder why ACD denial is as rampant as ever, including in a place like Houston, where some people are literally drowning from ACD.

Listening to this news, I drove home under the thickening cloud of wildfire smoke while worrying about my family members in Houston. This is life amidst abrupt, runaway ACD.

The Pacific Northwest is far from alone in grappling with unprecedented wildfires. You know rapid, dramatic changes are afoot when there are wildfires in Greenland, of all places.

The European Earth Observation Programme called the fires "rare," and admitted to Wildfire Today that it actually had "no data on previous wildland fire activity in this region." Hence, the fires are unprecedented.

Several leading climate scientists have come out with a statement that underscores the fact that the Paris Agreement goal -- limiting planetary warming to 1.5-2°C -- is too little, too late, given that this goal would already be well above any temperatures experienced during the period of human settlement since agriculture began.

Former NASA climate chief James Hansen, along with co-authors cryosphere expert Eric Rignot, paleoclimatologist Shaun Marcott and oceanographer Eelco Rohling, concluded in a paper that, "the world has overshot the appropriate target for global temperature" because there are large risks in "pushing the climate system far out of its Holocene range." (The Holocene is the epoch that began approximately 11,700 years ago.)

They said the fact that our current temperature has surpassed 1°C of warming indicates that we're already half a degree warmer than the previous Holocene maximum. Our current temperature is as hot as it ever was during Earth's previous warm period, the Eemian (130,000-115,000 years ago) when the "sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today." The scientists warned of feedback loops kicking in that will raise sea levels by several meters, thawing of global permafrost, and significant loss of the polar ice sheets. Yet, while their warning was obviously meant to be in the future tense, we are already seeing each of these effects now.

Despite lacking the warming influence of an active El Niño, thus far, 2017 is on track to be the second-hottest year on record, with 2016 being the hottest, and 15 of the 16 hottest years recorded happening since just 2000. July was a record warm month for Utkiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska, along with three other interior Alaskan cities: Bettles, Tanana and McGrath.

A recently published study predicted a death toll of 152,000 every year between 2071 and 2100 as a direct result of extreme weather events (heat waves, wildfires, floods, etc.), in Europe alone, if no serious action is taken globally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or protect people. The study, by the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy, urged governments to focus now on designing adaptation measures.

Underscoring the rapidity of the changes we are already in, the leading British global investment firm, Schroders, with assets worth more than half a trillion dollars, released a warning to its clients that, if we continue consuming oil and gas at current rates, Earth is on course to experience temperature increases of nearly 8°C (14°F) by 2100. The firm's head of sustainable research noted, "Climate change will be a defining driver of the global economy."

To read the article GO HERE