Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial. - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
-
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
-
“And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
- ...55 more annotations...
-
Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.
-
The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
-
“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects
-
But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
-
Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.
-
The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
-
Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
-
Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
-
it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
-
“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
-
Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
-
“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”
-
Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life
-
how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.
-
It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change
-
The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
-
Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
-
For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”
-
“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
-
“we’re all in this together.”
-
Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
-
every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
-
It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels
-
Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
-
“Seriously, it is not reversible.”
-
First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
-
Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”
-
Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.
-
If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.
-
If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
-
The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.
-
“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt
-
“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”
-
So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.
-
“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”
-
“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”
-
adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one
-
Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.
-
“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”
-
It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”
-
And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.
-
Cascading Disasters
-
Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.
-
Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.
-
If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.
-
as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.
-
Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.
-
One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves
-
A Lifetime of Clues
-
For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.
-
As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,
-
“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”
-
ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.
-
“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”
-
“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”
