Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, July 27, 2018

It's already happening

The Guardian environmental reporter Damian Carrington interviews Michael Mann, and some of his colleagues. Maybe you heard about the unprecedented heat wave in Japan, and if you caught the Open Championship on TV last weekend you know about the European drought and heat wave that's threatening crops across the continent, and caused wildfires from Greece to the arctic. And there's a lot more, including a particularly bad fire season in the U.S. Oh, this is fun: the weather forecast for Basra, Iraq. I would say that qualifies as uninhabitable.

The Mueller witch hunt has already caught a lot of witches -- 5 guilty pleas and the indictment of an additional 26 people on more than a hundred charges. And the climate change hoax has evidently fooled the weather Gods. As Mann told Carrington:

The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We are seeing them play out in real time and what is happening this summer is a perfect example of that. We are seeing our predictions come true. As a scientist that is reassuring, but as a citizen of planet Earth, it is very distressing to see that as it means we have not taken the necessary action.
Indeed. The sirens are screaming. There are plenty of urgent issues, but this is at the top. Nothing else matters if we don't act, forcefully and immediately.

5 comments:

Don Quixote said...

I agree with the gist of your post, as I have agreed with similar posts before. I will say, however, that the projected high temperatures in Basra are not in the uninhabitable range; those are routine temperatures for Phoenix, AZ, as well.

I had a tenant when I was leasing apartments who told me that temperatures did, however, get higher than that in some other countries in the Mideast ... can't recall if it was Kuwait.

That said, I have endured temperatures in the high teens and it is very, very different when it's in a dry climate. It's impossible to explain but once you've experienced it, you can see why 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Tucson, AZ, is very different from the same temperature in the Midwest, South or Northeast.

And THAT said, I do recall climate forecast models in the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, ON, that I saw as a child. And those models made it dramatically clear that global temperatures were, on the whole, rising. And it was 1973! We knew. And Exxon, of course, knew, and reversed its stand as the 1980s rolled around and they decided it would be bad for business if the general populace knew what their scientists knew. That's all been documented.

Don Quixote said...

Oh ... forgot to leave this apropos link in support of your post from today's paper:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/britain-heatwave-climate-change.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

Cervantes said...

I dunno, a whole week with temps above 120 is apparently quite unusual there. Unlike AZ, they don't have air conditioning. Much of the time they don't even have electricity. They've been rioting.

The highest low temperature ever recorded on earth happened recently in the UAE, BTW. The nighttime lows are actually more important because the body doesn't get a chance to recover.

Don Quixote said...

Good points. A/C makes a huge difference ... while making the problem worse :-(

Anonymous said...


Have you sent this to the Chinese? If true, nothing is possible without their cooperation since they produce about twice the CO2 as the US annually.

And no one is mentioning the beef, pork and poultry industry which many in scientific circles estimate might be responsible for a third of any warming effects attributed to human activity.

The rich AlGOREs of the world invest in wind and solar and then scream that we need to move to those alternatives. But they're not saying anything about the meat production. They don't have investments that would benefit.