So let’s say we accept that the earth is getting warmer. So what? The change sounds so small, and maybe that increase even seems welcome come mid-winter in, say, Minnesota. It is a mistake to think that way as:
So let’s look again at the key reports from the US government and UN that details the effects being seen, and some predictions.
From highlights from the executive summary of US governments NCA4 Vol1 [3] :
Vol II of that same report looked specifically at the impact & risks for the US. selections from the summary of findings [4] . Expected impacts include:
The breadth of impacts explains why the term “climate change” is now more generally used rather than “global warming”. The world is warming overall, disrupting the global climate, and one region might experience longer and more severe droughts, whilst another experiences 100 year floods on a regular basis. Some regions might even cool, due to shifts in the normal patterns of ocean currents.
This is not the only government agency warning of threats to the US, From the 2014 Homeland Security Review [5] (by law this should be updated every 4 years, but there seems to be nothing from 2018):
Weather events present a significant and growing challenge. The risk of these disasters is increased by the vulnerability of aging infrastructure, increasing population density in high-risk areas, and—in the case of droughts, floods, and hurricanes—by trends associated with climate change.
Climate change and associated trends may also indirectly act as “threat multipliers.” They aggravate stressors abroad that can enable terrorist activity and violence, such as poverty, environmental degradation, and social tensions. More severe droughts and tropical storms, especially in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, could also increase population movements, both legal and illegal, across the U.S. border.
Certainly the international consensus is that a warming planet is very bad - that is why every country in the world, including the US, adopted the Paris Agreement in 2016. This agreement brings all nations together into a common cause to address climate change, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions so as to limit global warming to well below 2 °C by the end of the century, and to pursue efforts to limit further to 1.5 °C. (remember - we are already at 1°C) Each country sets it’s targets to meet that goal.
Since the Paris Agreement, there has been a subsequent IPCC report [6] that looked specifically at the likely effects of a rise of 2.0 °C, as opposed to 1.5 °C. I find this report less readable than others - it can be somewhat summarized as “1.5 °C is bad - 2 °C is much worse”. The chart below conveys the reports assessment of the level of risk of different kinds of impact, for varying temperature rise. So for example, whilst for warm-water corals even the existing 1 °C starts to move us into the “severe/widespread impact” (as we already see in corals around the world), it is somewhere between 1.5 °C & 2 °C that there will be severe/widespread impact on crop yields.
Of course, we can also see things with our own eyes. Close to home, fires raging each year in California (with the town of Paradise being erased in the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 - do we need more of a sign than “Paradise” burning down?). This year power had to be shut off to 1000s of people in parts of LA to reduce the risks of fires - we are the world’s leading nation and we can’t even keep the lights on! Here in my hometown, the last few years have seen Seattle clouded in smoke from fires burning up in Canada. This is not about forest management - we are seeing the same worldwide. Last year Sweden had their most serious forest fires in history, due to the long drought. As I write this, Sydney is blanketed in smoke as fires burn around New South Wales, with the fire chief making it clear that the issue is ever narrower windows when controlled burns can safely be carried out, due to rising temperatures and drought. Meanwhile, Venice is experiencing its worst floods in 50 years, and India had its worst monsoon in 25 years with the resulting floods displacing 1 million people. This is following on from the 2017 Mumbai floods, with 18 inches of rain in 12 hours. Hurricane Sandy, the largest diameter Atlantic storm on record, is estimated to have killed 117 people, and left 8.5m without power.
And we see natural wonders like the Great Barrier Reef fading before our eyes.
At this point, climate change deniers will be screaming that you cannot put down single events, like a devastating, fire, flood or a hurricane, to climate change. Quite right, you can’t. But let’s not get confused:
So as we look at any one awful event, we can’t say “that was because of climate change”. But we certainly can reflect on whether we want to be increasing the frequency and magnitude of such things. And bad as the recent fires, floods and hurricanes have been, the scale of human misery, and the breadth of impact across the world, will only worsen if/when food supplies become severely impacted, and mass migration occurs from regions that are increasingly uninhabitable.
To fully understand the threat, we should also consider this in tandem with the environmental damage globally as a result of changing land use. For example, as I write this the Amazon is on fire, not because of climate change but because those fires are being deliberately set to clear land. However, they certainly contribute to climate change, as well as bringing other negative impacts in their own right. Two recent reports covering this are the IPCC special report “Climate Change & Land” (less readable than other IPCC reports, I found) [17] , and the UN report “Global Assessment on Biodiversity” [18] (from the UN group IPBES [19] ), released in May 2019. The latter report has a good summary from the BBC here and National Geographic here, and warns that we are facing huge loss in biodiversity, with 1m species threatening extinction within decades, with 1 in 4 species of animals and plants. Whilst climate change is a driver, the effect of land use has an even greater effect.
Finally, we have the potential for hitting a tipping point, beyond which we won’t be able to stop it. There are certain physical effects of warming that lead to positive feedback loops:
So this is not something that we should start thinking about soon - this is something we need to be acting on across the board now.
Of course, the other way of making this clear is simply to examine what leaders in the US and worldwide have said (avoiding Democratic leaders like Obama and Gore who seem to stir up bile among some!) When you encounter someone arguing against urgent action on climate change - your uncle saying it’s all due to solar flares, your neighbor saying it’s all ok because more people are buying electric cars now (and would you like to see his new Tesla?), or some nutjob on the internet claiming it’s all part of a conspiracy for the government to seize more control - imagine the three of them in a roomful of the following people and decide who you are going to bet your kids future on!
It is the last quote from Desmond Tutu that most resonates with me - we have no excuse for not knowing - no one in the US today can claim they were misled, or not told. So what’s our excuse for not acting? Our kids (or grandkids, if you have them) might well be facing dire consequences themselves, or helplessly watching them unfold elsewhere in the world, and they will reasonably ask our generation why we didn’t act. I want to be able to get to sleep with my answer to that question.