The average surface temperature of the US this past winter was 37.6°, which is 5.4° F. above the norm. A winter that is 5 degrees warmer than normal ought to be horrifying. This is not normal. And we are only at the beginning of this heating.

One way you could tell it was hot was that Wisconsin had its first February tornado on record. Wisconsin.

Another way you could tell that it was a hot, hot winter was that Texas experienced the largest and most destructive wildfires in the past 20 years, and likely in the state’s recorded history. The Smokehouse Creek Fire merged with another huge conflagration and burned 1,075,000 acres in Texas and Oklahoma, making it the second largest fire in US history. It is still only 75% contained. In the Texas Panhandle, at least 10,000 cattle have been killed or so badly injured they’ll have to be euthanized, while many grain production companies reported “total losses,” according to CBS News. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and two people killed.

Wildfires are common in Texas in the summer, and occur as early as March in the Panhandle, but to have so much of the state aflame in February is, let us say, unusual.

KFOR OKlahoma News 4 Video from Thursday: “Texas/ Oklahoma wildfires burn more than 1.3 million acres in a week”

But it isn’t just Texas. The United States of America was lit up like a Christmas tree in February, with unusually high temperatures. Consider this temperature map for February:

H/t NOAA

Then there were a series of atmospheric rivers that inundated California, causing widespread flooding and destruction. Phys.org notes, “At one point, weather agencies posted flood watches for nearly the entirety of California’s coast.” As we heat up the earth, we cause more water to evaporate from the oceans, making the atmosphere denser with moisture. Ribbons of moisture move from the equator up to the temperate zones and dump their water. Climate change increases the rainfall released and also changes the patterns of the atmospheric rivers.

In 2023, the US had twenty-eight disasters costing a billion dollars or more. During the past 40 years, the average number of billion-dollar climate disasters per annum was only 8.5. But in the past 5 years the average has been about 20 such very costly catastrophes. The rate of catastrophe is sky-rocketing.

This finding is yet another indication that global heating is proceeding at least as fast as climate scientists projected at the beginning of our century, and in many cases much faster. Climate risks becoming chaotic if we heat up the earth’s surface more than 2.7° F. (1.5° C.) above the preindustrial average. We’ve already heated it up to around 2.1° F. higher than that 18th century average, by spewing billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere. We’re wrecking the earth by burning coal for heat and electricity, or fossil gas, or by burning petroleum in automobiles and trucks. We still aren’t reducing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere annually, though its increase has leveled off. We have to cut it out. Now.

Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.

While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?

Twenty years after the movie’s release, we know a lot more about the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.

In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.

The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.

We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.

The ocean’s conveyor belt

Ocean currents are driven by winds, tides and water density differences.

In the Atlantic Ocean circulation, the relatively warm and salty surface water near the equator flows toward Greenland. During its journey it crosses the Caribbean Sea, loops up into the Gulf of Mexico, and then flows along the U.S. East Coast before crossing the Atlantic.

This current, also known as the Gulf Stream, brings heat to Europe. As it flows northward and cools, the water mass becomes heavier. By the time it reaches Greenland, it starts to sink and flow southward. The sinking of water near Greenland pulls water from elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and the cycle repeats, like a conveyor belt.

Too much fresh water from melting glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet can dilute the saltiness of the water, preventing it from sinking, and weaken this ocean conveyor belt. A weaker conveyor belt transports less heat northward and also enables less heavy water to reach Greenland, which further weakens the conveyor belt’s strength. Once it reaches the tipping point, it shuts down quickly.

What happens to the climate at the tipping point?

The existence of a tipping point was first noticed in an overly simplified model of the Atlantic Ocean circulation in the early 1960s. Today’s more detailed climate models indicate a continued slowing of the conveyor belt’s strength under climate change. However, an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation appeared to be absent in these climate models.

Ted-Ed Video: “How do ocean currents work? – Jennifer Verduin”

This is where our study comes in. We performed an experiment with a detailed climate model to find the tipping point for an abrupt shutdown by slowly increasing the input of fresh water.

We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years. The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.

The result: Dangerous cold in the North

Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.

The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36 F (20 C). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.

These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.

The conveyor belt shutting down would also affect sea level and precipitation patterns, which can push other ecosystems closer to their tipping points. For example, the Amazon rainforest is vulnerable to declining precipitation. If its forest ecosystem turned to grassland, the transition would release carbon to the atmosphere and result in the loss of a valuable carbon sink, further accelerating climate change.

The Atlantic circulation has slowed significantly in the distant past. During glacial periods when ice sheets that covered large parts of the planet were melting, the influx of fresh water slowed the Atlantic circulation, triggering huge climate fluctuations.

So, when will we see this tipping point?

The big question – when will the Atlantic circulation reach a tipping point – remains unanswered. Observations don’t go back far enough to provide a clear result. While a recent study suggested that the conveyor belt is rapidly approaching its tipping point, possibly within a few years, these statistical analyses made several assumptions that give rise to uncertainty.

Instead, we were able to develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal involving the salinity transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic Ocean. Once a threshold is reached, the tipping point is likely to follow in one to four decades.

The climate impacts from our study underline the severity of such an abrupt conveyor belt collapse. The temperature, sea level and precipitation changes will severely affect society, and the climate shifts are unstoppable on human time scales.

It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that’s the risk ahead.

This article was updated on Feb. 11, 2024, to fix a typo: The experiment found temperatures in parts of Europe changed by more than 5 F per decade.

René van Westen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Physics, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Professor of Physics, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Climate Model Specialist, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

National weather analysts released their 2023 billion-dollar disasters list on Jan. 9, just as 2024 was getting off to a ferocious start. A blizzard was sweeping across across the Plains and Midwest, and the South and East faced flood risks from extreme downpours.

The U.S. set an unwelcome record for weather and climate disasters in 2023, with 28 disasters that exceeded more than US$1 billion in damage each.

While it wasn’t the most expensive year overall – the costliest years included multiple hurricane strikes – it had the highest number of billion-dollar storms, floods, droughts and fires of any year since counting began in 1980, with six more than any other year, accounting for inflation.

The year’s most expensive disaster started with an unprecedented heat wave that sat over Texas for weeks over the summer and then spread into the South and Midwest, helping fuel a destructive drought. The extreme heat and lack of rain dried up fields, forced ranchers to sell off livestock and restricted commerce on the Mississippi River, causing about US$14.5 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s conservative estimates.

Extreme dryness in Hawaii contributed to another multi-billion-dollar disaster as it fueled devastating wildfires that destroyed Lahaina, Hawaii, in August.

Other billion-dollar disasters included Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida in August; floods in the Northeast and California; and nearly two dozen other severe storms across the country. States in a swath from Texas to Ohio were hit by multiple billion-dollar storms.

NBC News: “New details of the devastating Lahaina wildfire that killed over 100 people”

El Niño played a role in some of these disasters, but at the root of the world’s increasingly frequent extreme heat and weather is global warming. The year 2023 was the hottest on record globally and the fifth warmest in the U.S.

I am an atmospheric scientist who studies the changing climate. Here’s a quick look at what global warming has to do with wildfires, storms and other weather and climate disasters.

Dangerous heat waves and devastating wildfires

When greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from vehicles and power plants, accumulate in the atmosphere, they act like a thermal blanket that warms the planet.

These gases let in high-energy solar radiation while absorbing outgoing low-energy radiation in the form of heat from the Earth. The energy imbalance at the Earth’s surface gradually increases the surface temperature of the land and oceans.

The most direct consequence of this warming is more days with abnormally high temperatures, as large parts of the country saw in 2023.

Phoenix went 30 days with daily high temperatures at 110 F (43.3 C) or higher and recorded its highest minimum nighttime temperature, with temperatures on July 19 never falling below 97 F (36.1 C).

Although heat waves result from weather fluctuations, global warming has raised the baseline, making heat waves more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting.

That heat also fuels wildfires.

Increased evaporation removes more moisture from the ground, drying out soil, grasses and other organic material, which creates favorable conditions for wildfires. All it takes is a lightning strike or spark from a power line to start a blaze.

How global warming fuels extreme storms

As more heat is stored as energy in the atmosphere and oceans, it doesn’t just increase the temperature – it can also increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

When that water vapor condenses to liquid and falls as rain, it releases a large amount of energy. This is called latent heat, and it is the main fuel for all storm systems. When temperatures are higher and the atmosphere has more moisture, that additional energy can fuel stronger, longer-lasting storms.

Tropical storms are similarly fueled by latent heat coming from warm ocean water. That is why they only form when the sea surface temperature reaches a critical level of around 80 F (27 C).

With 90% of the excess heat from global warming being absorbed by the ocean, there has been a significant increase in the global sea surface temperature, including record-breaking levels in 2023.

Higher sea surface temperatures can lead to stronger hurricanes, longer hurricane seasons and the faster intensification of tropical storms.

Cold snaps have global warming connections, too

It might seem counterintuitive, but global warming can also contribute to cold snaps in the U.S. That’s because it alters the general circulation of Earth’s atmosphere.

The Earth’s atmosphere is constantly moving in large-scale circulation patterns in the forms of near-surface wind belts, such as the trade winds, and upper-level jet streams. These patterns are caused by the temperature difference between the polar and equatorial regions.

As the Earth warms, the polar regions are heating up more than twice as fast as the equator. This can shift weather patterns, leading to extreme events in unexpected places. Anyone who has experienced a “polar vortex event” knows how it feels when the jet stream dips southward, bringing frigid Arctic air and winter storms, despite the generally warmer winters.

In sum, a warmer world is a more violent world, with the additional heat fueling increasingly more extreme weather events.

This article, originally published Dec. 19, 2023, was updated Jan. 9, 2024, with NOAA’s disasters list.

Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Although 2023 saw the beginnings of an El Nino climate phenomenon, which brings extra heat every few years, the El Nino effects were still small this year and most of the increase in heating was owing to humans having put billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (which they are still doing steadily, instead of reducing emissions).

Moreover, NOAA says, we have seen 537 (soon to be 538) months in a row of temperatures above the average for the twentieth century.

That statistic means that no one born after 1978 has ever lived through a normal year of temperatures, as we twentieth-century people knew them (I’m 71). We moved a lot and my father was stationed for a few months at places like Fort Dietrich in Maryland and Fort Dix in New Jersey. I can’t remember now when and where, but I recollect joining with other children to tunnel beneath the snow in the winter. Do children do that now? Last year Maryland had virtually no snow, and Baltimore got 0.2 inches. That absence of snowfall was admittedly a little extreme and may not be repeated in 2024, but this world is clearly not the one I grew up in.

Taylor Swift, born 1989, doesn’t know what a normal year is like. She is literally a force of nature. The megastar has made headlines when her fans danced and stomped so hard to the loud music at her concert in Seattle that they produced a mild earthquake. But mother nature is angry and is more powerful still.

We are heating our world so rapidly and so extremely by burning coal, fossil gas and gasoline that even Swift herself is being overtaken by climate effects.

It has just been confirmed that Ana Clara Benevides Machado, 23, who attended Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Rio de Janeiro on November 17 died of heat exhaustion.

Rio that day was 102 F. (39C), but because of humidity it felt like 138.7 F. (59.3C). Scientists have discovered fairly recently that humans cannot survive very high “wet bulb” temperatures, where both the temperature and the humidity are unusually elevated. We cool down by sweating, and very high heat and humidity don’t allow sweating to have that cooling effect. So our brains boil.

Ms Swift herself seemed at some points during her conference to be gasping for breath. She had her staffers distribute water and threw out some bottles herself. She canceled her scheduled Nov. 18 follow-up concert because of the extreme heat and Ms. Machado’s death.

Page 6: “Taylor Swift struggles to breathe while performing during deadly Brazil Eras Tour”

Mid-November is the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere, but even so you didn’t used to see over 100 degrees F. in Rio at that time. Things are changing, and not for the better. Latin America didn’t really have a spring this year, suffering heat domes with temperatures as high as 104 F. (40C) even in August and September. (I was once in Rio for a conference in July and it was cold and rainy.) Those elevated, unseasonable temperatures were made 100 times more likely by the climate crisis, reports Scientific American.

Rio was not alone in seeing anomalous temperatures in 2023.

In just one week of summer 2023, 20,000 air flights were affected by the extreme heat globally. Thunderstorms, cracked take-off lanes, and — if it gets to 117 degrees F. or higher, thin air — can all interfere with flights.

Some twenty southern and southwestern cities in the US experienced either unprecedentedly high temperatures or unprecedentedly long heat waves, or both. Phoenix hit 110 degrees F. on 54 days this summer. Dallas-Fort Worth was also hit by a heat dome, which extended down into Mexico.

Friends, we are doing this to ourselves, every day, all day. We are hitting golf balls in our bathrooms and are surprised when they boomerang on us. It won’t get better until we stop. That probably means we have to stop electing Republicans. At all. And we have to pressure even the Dems, constantly, to do the right thing. This thing is too big for us as individuals to solve it. We need government, and the Dem Inflation Reduction Act was a good start. More of that.

( Tomdispatch.com) – A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn’t rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn’t causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to — yes! — green energy.

The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties — countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE’s green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he’s also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national petroleum company. Worse yet, he’s committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.

Embed from Getty Images
COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber attends a plenary session during the United Nations climate summit in Dubai on December 13, 2023. Nearly 200 nations meeting in Dubai on December 13 approved a first-ever call for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, the top culprit of climate change behind a planetary crisis. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP) (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, since COP28 was held in the heart of the petroleum-producing Middle East, it also platformed bad actors like Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to stop the conference from committing to ending the use of fossil fuels by a specific date. The awarding of COP28 to the Emirates by the UNFCCC Secretariat allowed a whole country, perhaps a whole region, to be greenwashed, a genuinely shocking decision that ought to be investigated by the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. (And next year, it looks like COP29 will be hosted by another significant oil producer. In other words, the oil countries seem to be on a hot streak!)

Imaginary Algae

Mind you, those Gulf oil states are anything but the only major greenwashers on this planet. After all, the private sector has outdone itself in this arena. A congressional investigation into the major oil companies produced a long report and an appendix that came out last year, including internal corporate emails showing repeated and systemic bad faith on the subject of climate change. ExxonMobil executives, for instance, had publicly committed their company to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the increase in the average surface temperature of the earth to no more than 1.5° Centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era. Although a 1.5-degree increase might sound small, keep in mind that, as a global average, it includes the cold oceans of the higher latitudes, the North and South Poles, and the Himalayas. In already hot climates like South Asia and the Middle East, that means over time it might translate into a stunning 10- to 15-degree increase that could make some places literally unlivable.

Scientists worry that exceeding that level could throw the world’s climate system into full-scale chaos, producing mega-storms, substantial sea level rise, ravaging wildfires, and deadly heat and drought over large parts of the earth’s surface. Still, despite his public commitment to it in 2019, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, asked an oil industry lobbying group to delete a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement from the draft of a statement on sustainability it had prepared. That mention, Woods said, “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals.” So much for oil company pledges!

In a similar fashion, in 2020, executives of the London-based Shell PLC asked public relations employees to highlight that the company’s vow to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2050 was “a collective ambition for the world,” rather than a “Shell goal or target.” As a company executive admitted all too bluntly, “Shell has no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.” (Oh, and in case you missed this, the profits of the major fossil-fuel outfits have in recent years gone through the roof.)

Buy the Book

Nor is corporate greenwashing simply a matter of public pronouncements by oil company executives. ExxonMobil has run a multi-million-dollar campaign of television and streaming advertising attempting to pull the wool over people’s eyes about what it’s doing. In one instance, it paid the New York Times to run an extended commercial gussied up as if it were a news article, a shameful procedure to which the Times acquiesced. Studies show that most readers miss disclaimers about such pieces actually being paid advertisements. It was entitled, “The Future of Energy? It may come from Where you Least Expect: How scientists are tapping algae and plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” The advertisement was extremely misleading. As Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, told BU Today last February, “Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be.”

In fact, about a month after Wells gave that interview, ExxonMobil admitted publicly that it had pulled out of algae biofuels research entirely at the end of 2022, having invested about $29 million a year over 12 years. It spent more millions, however, in advertising to give the public the impression that this paltry investment outweighed the company’s multi-billion-dollar efforts to bring ever more petroleum online.

The environmentalist group Client Earth notes that ExxonMobil spends between $20 billion and $25 billion annually looking for — yes, of course! — new oil fields and is committed to doing so through at least 2025. The company had a net profit of $55.7 billion in 2022. In other words, it’s still devoting nearly half of its annual profits to looking for more petroleum when, of course, it could be using them to launch its transition to sustainable forms of energy. Such — to put it politely — inertia is clearly unwise. New electric vehicle sales in the U.S. soared to about a million this year alone, and EVs will have avoided using 1.8 million barrels of oil in 2023. Better yet, the cost of battery packs for the vehicles fell 14% and is expected to keep heading down, guaranteeing that EVs will be ever more affordable over time. Moreover, in significant parts of the rest of the world, as the New York Times reported recently, electric-powered two- and three-wheeled vehicles are beginning to give the giant oil companies a run for their money. In the decades to come, ExxonMobil’s inflexibility and refusal to innovate will undoubtedly doom the company, but the question remains: In the process, will it doom the rest of us, too?

A Deceptive Greenwashing Marketing Campaign

In another, better world, the courts could punish the oil majors for their greenwashing. That misleading paid ad in the New York Times forms but one cornerstone of a wide-ranging lawsuit against ExxonMobil by the state of Massachusetts, initiated in 2019, which has so far survived that company’s legal challenges. As the office of Attorney General, Andrea Campbell explains, it is “alleging that the company violates Massachusetts law through a deceptive ‘greenwashing’ marketing campaign that misleadingly presents Exxon as a leader in cutting-edge clean energy research and climate action… and… its products as ‘green’ while the company is massively ramping up fossil fuel production and spending only about one-half of 1% of revenues on developing clean energy.” Campbell, an African-American born in Boston, is keenly aware that climate change is an equity issue, since its deleterious effects will initially be felt most strongly among the less privileged. (Of course, given our present Supreme Court, don’t hold your breath on this one.)

In its complaint, the state points to marketing campaigns like those featured on ExxonMobil’s YouTube channel, which still shows an ad produced eight years ago, “Making the World’s Energy go Further,” that, in just 30 seconds, presents a medley of greenwashing’s greatest early hits — algae biofuel, “new technology for capturing CO2 emissions,” and cars twice as efficient in their gas mileage. Algae biofuels, however, have by now bitten the dust; there is no affordable and safe method of capturing and storing carbon dioxide; and electric cars are between “2.6 to 4.8 times more efficient at traveling a mile compared to a gasoline internal combustion engine,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

The biggest fault in such commercials, however, is that the oil company’s ad makers were trying to convince the public that ExxonMobil was putting major resources into sustainable alternatives.  As the state of Massachusetts points out, in reality “ExxonMobil has ramped up production and reportedly is now the most active driller in the Permian Basin, the shale oil field located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico that yields low-cost oil in months, rather than the years required for larger offshore projects to begin producing crude… ExxonMobil has invested billions of dollars into the development of massive Canadian oil sands projects, which are among the costliest and most polluting oil extraction projects in the world.”

Carbon Capture and Lake Nyos

An even more dangerous scam than algae biofuels (implausible but not life-threatening) is the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Remind me: Why would we try to store billions of tons of a poisonous gas? On August 21, 1986, subterranean carbon dioxide deposits bubbled up through Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing nearly 2,000 people, thousands of cattle and other animals, and in the process turned four local villages into graveyards. Some scientists fear similar underground carbon dioxide storage elsewhere could set off earthquakes. And what if such quakes in turn release the gas? Honestly, since I still remember the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster where 11 million gallons of oil, spilled into the waters off Alaska, wrecked hundreds of miles of shoreline and killed unknown numbers of sea creatures and birds, I’d just as soon not have ExxonMobil store carbon dioxide in my neighborhood.

Worse yet, most of the CO2 harvested by oil companies so far has been injected into drill sites to help bring in — yes, you guessed it! — more petroleum. Worse yet, studies have shown that carbon-capture technology itself emits a lot of carbon dioxide, that it can only capture a fraction of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, and that just shutting down coal, fossil gas, and petroleum production and substituting wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is far safer, cheaper, and better for the environment. 

Carbon capture is, however, a favorite greenwashing tool of Big Oil, since company executives can pretend that a technological breakthrough somewhere on the horizon justifies continuing to spew out record quantities of CO2 in the present moment. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wasted billions of taxpayer dollars by including provisions for CCS research and development in Joe Biden’s otherwise admirable Inflation Reduction Act. In the process, he managed to insert a key greenwashing technique into even the most progressive climate legislation ever passed by an industrialized hydrocarbon state.

As for Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of COP28, he let his mask slip in November in a testy exchange with former Irish President Mary Robinson, who had invited him to an online discussion of how women’s lives could be improved if the climate crisis were effectively addressed. When she urged him to act as president of COP28, he exploded: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” He was pushing back against the goal advocated by scientists and many diplomats of quickly phasing hydrocarbons out. He claims to advocate phasing them down, not presumably eliminating them. He added, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Al-Jaber was posturing, since he surely knows that the International Energy Agency has issued just such a roadmap, which does indeed require rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Oh, and if he has his way, it’s quite conceivable that, somewhere down the road, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, could become too hot to be livable.

“City of Salt,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ IbisPaint, 2023.

Given the plummeting cost of green energy, it’s clear that moving quickly and completely away from fossil fuels will improve the quality of life for people globally while making energy cheaper. In the end, COP28 could only issue an anodyne call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Despite al-Jaber’s globe-straddling greenwashing at the climate summit, however, there is no realistic alternative to phasing fossil fuels not just down but out, and on an accelerated timeline, if our planet’s climate isn’t to turn into a Frankenstein’s monster. After all, 2023 has already proved a unique year for heat — with month after month of record-setting warmth across the globe. And sadly, as fossil-fuel production only continues to increase, that’s just the beginning, not the end, when it comes to potentially broiling this planet.

Admittedly, under the best of circumstances, this transition would be challenging and, according to the United Nations, will certainly require more investments than the countries of the world are now making, but it still appears eminently achievable. As for ExxonMobil and other oil majors, every day they resist investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin. In the meantime, they are, of course, wreaking historically unprecedented harm on the planet, as was all too apparent with the serial climate disasters of 2023, now believed to be the hottest of the last 125,000 years.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Clean Energy Wire ) – German industry is increasingly investing in climate protection measures, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reported just before the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28), which kicked off on 30 November.

Climate protection investments in the manufacturing sector have increased by 74.3 percent over a decade. In 2021, manufacturers spent some 4.15 billion euros on systems to avoid emissions or use resources more sparingly, up from 2.38 billion in 2011. Legal regulations and government funding have contributed to the increase in investments, Destatis notes.

Nearly 50 percent of climate protection investments in 2021 — 2.04 billion euros [$2.22 bn.] — went to renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and photovoltaic systems.

Image by Melanie from Pixabay

Companies invested a further 1.63 billion euros ($1.77 bn) (39.2%) in increasing energy efficiency and energy saving, such as thermal insulation of buildings or systems with combined heat and power. The manufacturing and service sectors generated sales of 53 billion euros with climate protection products in 2021 – an 11.9 percent increase compared to the previous year.

The solar sector saw the biggest sales increase in 2021 with a 24 percent boost (920 million euros) for a total of 4.8 billion euros. From 2011 to 2021, sales of climate protection products – such a solar PV arrays and insulation – rose 16 percent. Nearly 55 percent of sales, or 28.6 billion euros, came from measures to increase energy efficiency in 2021.

Thermal insulation of buildings contributed substantially, generating almost 10.2 billion euros [$11.1 bn.] in sales, while the manufacture and installation of wind turbines resulted in revenue of 11.8 billion euros [$12.8 bn.].

Meanwhile, the number of employees in “green jobs,” increased by 44 percent between 2011 and 2021.

German development bank KfW recently reported that climate protection investments by domestic companies in 2022 rose by 18 percent in real terms to 72 billion euros [$78.4 bn.].

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

They find that during the past year, 73% of the world’s population suffered through at least one month of sweltering temperatures that were so torrid because humans have been burning coal, fossil gas and petroleum for over a century in gargantuan amounts. Some 25% of humans experienced at least one 5-day heat wave caused by global heating.

While this will be an El Nino year and so there will be extra heat on top of the carbon-induced warming, these scientists maintain that the full effect of El Nino hadn’t been felt by the end of October, so mostly they are reporting disasters caused by human-induced climate change.

They also found that the average temperature of the earth’s surface has already reached 1.3 °C (2.34 °F) above the pre-industrial average.

Climate scientists fear that if we go beyond 1.5 °C, the climate may go chaotic in ways that will be challenging for industrial civilization. For instance, enormous hurricanes and cyclones may flatten all the electricity poles, frequent flooding and storm surges may strike low-lying coastal areas, wildfires may endanger everyone living near forest cover, and long-term drought may ruin agriculture in some places. We forget how dependent our civilization is on it being relatively cool, as it was when the industrial revolution took place in the mid-eighteenth century. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries people used to have frost fairs on the frozen Thames River in London. The last time any part of the Thames froze over was 1963.

We’ve already seen summers when it got too hot in Phoenix for airplanes to take off. Hot air is thinner and doesn’t provide the wings enough lift.

The only way to avoid severe challenges to keeping up civilization is for the world to stop burning petroleum, fossil gas and coal immediately. If we don’t, we are bequeathing our children and grandchildren a host of difficult challenges that may detract from their quality of life or even pose a threat to their lives.

According to the report, in the past six months, 92% of humans on earth experience a heat wave lasting at least 5 days that would not have occurred without human burning of fossil fuels.

Climate change affects different regions differently. The Arctic is warming 4 times faster that the global average, and the Middle East is heating up twice as fast as the global average.

In the past year, Jamaica, Guatamala and Rwanda have been especially affected. The authors write, “on the average day, the average person in Jamaica experienced temperatures made more than four times more likely by human-caused climate change.” Islands in the Caribbean and the South Pacific suffered more than the average with extra hot days caused by climate change.

Reuters: “Scientists say 2023 set to be warmest in 125,000 years”

Among the G20 wealthiest countries in the world, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Indonesia saw the most temperature rise in the first half of the year, but in the second half they were joined by India, Italy, Japan, Brazil, France, and Turkey in suffering from climate change-driven high temperatures.

The team found that of the 700 cities they looked at, Houston, Texas, had the longest streak of extremely high temperatures, at 22 days. Some 12 cities had heat streaks of 5 days or more, caused or intensified by climate change. They were located for the most part in Texas, Florida and Louisiana.

The team found that in the United States, climate change was implicated in 24 extreme weather events during the past year that left nearly 400 people dead and caused $67 billion in damage.

The graph, with its clear demonstration that our carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution have created a powerful greenhouse effect, alarmed Big Oil and its political lackeys no end. They mobilized to harass Mann, and if possible to marginalize him and destroy his career with smears and dirty tricks. Needless to say, they failed, and Mann became a major voice of reason and science, helping all of us confront the climate crisis.

In fact, in my view he has taken on the mantle of the great Carl Sagan (d. 1996), the Cornell astronomer who became the foremost communicator of science to the public in the late twentieth century.

Mann has a new book,
Michael Mann, Our Fragile Moment How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis Click here.

It is the subject of the following interview:

Juan Cole: Our Fragile Moment appeals to me as a historian because it looks back at the earth’s climate history during previous epochs so as to help us interpret our present. You point to times in the past when biological organisms have helped shape the earth’s climate. That is, scientists used mainly to look solely at physical phenomena like volcanic activity, sunspots, and the earth’s orbit to understand climate change, but it is now clear that our own Anthropocene may not be the first time living beings have reshaped the atmosphere and the climate. Could you tell us more about these episodes?

Also, in the book you refer to the Gaia thesis that the earth has remained hospitable to life in part because it has thermostat-like mechanisms that swing into play when it gets too hot or too cold. You also point to the proposed Medea principle, that earth can become prey to feedback loops that turn it toward climate extremes at some points. You suggest that both have operated in earth’s climate history. I was a little confused by this exposition, because I had thought that a Medea principle would refute the Gaia thesis. Could you explain more about how each may have operated in our past and what that means for our future? Are humans now the Medea principle?

Michael E. Mann: “It’s an important point. We are the first life forms who had the capacity to understand how we are impacting our environment, but life has played an active role in the Earth system for billions of years. As noted in the book, that role has at times been benevolent (the development of vascular plants allowed for more efficient carbon burial and a stronger stabilizing impact on Earth’s carbon cycle. But the rise of oxygen due to oxygen-producing photosynthetic bacteria 2.5 billion years ago caused a rapid drawdown of the strong greenhouse gas methane that had been prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere, sending Earth into a snowball state, and nearly killing off all life on the planet (life made it through the event by retreating to “refugee” like deep ocean hydrothermal vents). The lesson is that living things can have both a stabilizing and destabilizing impact on our global environment. We are the first organisms to be in a position to make that choice.”

Cole: The theory that the Chixculub meteor killed off most of the dinosaurs depends on the notion of a climate “winter,” i.e. that the impact threw up so much particulate matter into the atmosphere that the world was plunged into a few years of darkness and cold that killed off the large land animals that could no longer find sufficient pasturage. Carl Sagan theorized that a major nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union would produce an analogous “nuclear winter.” I remember seeing him debate Henry Kissinger about this. Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin is speaking, once more, of tactical nuclear war, that debate has become relevant again. What is the scientific consensus nowadays about the possibility of a nuclear winter?

Mann: In my view, the consensus has strengthened, because we have far more elaborate and comprehensive models of Earth’s climate today than the more primitive models used in Carl’s day. Climate scientists such as Alan Robock of Rutgers University have done simulations using state-of-the-art climate models that validate Sagan’s basic premise of Nuclear Winter. Putin’s saber-rattling over the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons in his war on Ukraine is a chilling reminder that this threat has not gone away.

Cole: In the preindustrial era, say 1750, there were about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and as I understand it, the level fluctuated between 150 and 300 ppm throughout the last 800,000 years. That is, human beings evolved and developed civilization in relatively cool times. We are now heading toward a much hotter earth and are not sure what it will look like. Many observers have suggested that the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, about 3 million years ago, affords the best picture of what our era of climate change will look like. That was a period in which parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were about 400, compared to an annual average of roughly 420.2 in 2023. Wasn’t most of Florida under water then, with sea levels about 30 feet higher? Wouldn’t this imply that the 60 million Egyptians in the Nile Delta are going to be inundated? That Bangladesh and Louisiana are doomed? Wouldn’t there be swathes of the earth where the wet bulb temperature (heat plus humidity) is so high as to be deadly to human beings? How long do you think it would take for these catastrophes to unfold? Can human civilization flourish in a neo-Pliocene?

Mann: It’s a great question, and one I dig into in some depth in the book. Without going into all of the details, it turns out to matter where you’re coming from. A warm planet getting colder (that’s what happened in the mid-Pliocene) or a cool climate getting warmer (that’s what we’re causing today). In the latter case, it probably takes a modestly higher level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to cause the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the massive (probably 30 feet) sea level rise that comes with that. So this buys us a bit of a cushion, but probably not a big cushion. If we warm the planet beyond 1.5°C higher than the preindustrial average and, almost certainly, if we warm the planet beyond 2°C, then we might indeed be subject to such catastrophic levels of inundation. It really underscores the urgency of reducing carbon emissions now.

Cole: Your new book is underpinned by a philosophy of moderation. You are concerned to use sound science to refute the worst-case scenarios of the doomsayers. You also seem to suggest that we have the resources to confront the baked-in results of climate change so as to keep life bearable on most of the planet. The French philosopher and archeologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that we may as well believe there won’t be a nuclear war, since believing it would simply paralyze us. Is that the sort of thing you are getting at? You often dismiss exaggerations by saying, “reality is bad enough.” Could you explain more about your philosophy of life, which seems to drive your public advocacy?

Mann: There are two things going on here. One, in my view the science has often been mis-stated to support a narrative of inevitability of catastrophic, civilization-ending warming. An objective review of the science doesn’t support that scenario. But it’s also true that doomism can be self-fulfilling, and for that reason isn’t very helpful as a philosophical outlook. If the science told me we were doomed, I would be forced, by the bounds of scientific objectivity, to say so. Fortunately, it doesn’t! The evidence very much supports the notion that we can prevent the worst impacts of climate change through urgent action. But the window of opportunity is shrinking, and we have not yet seen nearly enough action.

Cole: You seem optimistic that the world can get near zero carbon emissions by 2050. Although it is true that our emissions have leveled off at the moment, that outcome seems unlikely to me. What if we go to 800 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere? Wouldn’t the historical analogy at that point be to the early Eocene hothouse, when there was no surface ice, seas were 150 feet higher, when there was substantial acidification of the oceans and maybe half of one-celled marine organisms were killed off? Doesn’t humanity have 30 years to choose between living in the Pliocene Warm Period of 3 million years ago and living in the Eocene Hothouse of 50 million years ago?

Mann: I addressed this question in my answer above above with respect to overly high estimates of the mid-Pliocene sea level. But in the final chapter, I use as an epigraph a quote from French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from his posthumous volume of reflections entitled Citadelle, translated to English: “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” I would say that characterizes my view here. As long as we have it within ourselves to prevent the massive additional release of carbon pollution and catastrophic warming of our planet, I refuse to accept that it is preordained we won’t. The laws of physics are immutable. The laws of politics are not.

Scientists say severe climate change is now the greatest threat to humanity. Extreme weather is expected to upend lives and livelihoods, intensifying wildfires and pushing ecosystems towards collapse as ocean heatwaves savage coral reefs. The threats are far-reaching and widespread.

So what effect would you expect this to have on the economy in coming decades? It may surprise you, but most economic models predict climate change will just be a blip, with a minor impact on gross domestic product (GDP).

Heating the planet beyond 3℃ is extraordinarily dangerous. The last time Earth was that warm was three million years ago, when there was almost no ice and seas were 20 metres higher. But economic models predict even this level of heat to have very mild impacts on global GDP per capita by century’s end. Most predict a hit of around 1% to 7%, while the most pessimistic modelling suggests GDP shrinking by 23%.

In these models, some countries are completely unaffected by climate change. Others even benefit. For most countries, the damage is small enough to be offset by technological growth. Australia’s recent Intergenerational Report suggests something similar.

This, it is becoming abundantly clear, is a failure of the modelling. To make these models, economists reach into the past to model damage from weather. But severe climate change would be a global shock that is wholly outside our experience. Inevitably, models can’t come close to capturing the upheavals climate change could cause in markets fundamental to human life, such as agriculture.

Economic models aren’t capturing the reality

When the Intergenerational Report came out in August, it pictured what Australia would look like in 2063.

What would unchecked climate change mean for the economy? The report estimated what it would do to labour productivity –  Australia’s GDP would be lower by between A$135 and $423 billion. Over 40 years, that figure is actually vanishingly small, implying an average yearly effect of around 0.3% of today’s GDP.

The report stressed that a number of impacts of severe climate change were not modelled. Even so, it appears the damages that were included weren’t likely to be major economic concerns.

So why the disconnect between climate scientists and economists?

Most economic models in this area rely on a fundamental premise – that we can gain useful insight into future damage by looking at how economies have been hit by earlier weather shocks.

But there’s a fundamental limitation here. Historically, weather shocks tended to be local or regional. Even if there’s intense drought in, say, India, harvests will still be good elsewhere. And, for economists, that means you can potentially trade your way out of danger.

Photo by Saikiran Kesari on Unsplash

There is some truth to it. Almost every country – including Australia – uses international trade to cushion themselves from weather shocks. Even in regular years, large parts of the globe rely on imported food.

Here’s how it works. During the intense 2018–2020 drought in eastern Australia, wheat production across the country roughly halved compared to 2017.

In New South Wales and Queensland, the production of all grains fell below consumption levels. That forced these states to import grain, largely from Western Australia where the drought was not as severe.

But what would have happened if Australia’s western and eastern grain regions were hit by severe drought at the same time? Prices would rise significantly. Wholesalers would look to import grains from overseas.

But climate change makes it more and more likely that several parts of the world could be in severe drought at the same time. As Australian researchers have found, climate change could indeed lead to crop failures across multiple regions at once. If that happened, food prices would surge to unprecedented levels.

You can see the early warning signs already. When there are food production shortfalls, the first thing exporters tend to do is stop exporting to try to keep down domestic prices. India did exactly this earlier this year because of damage to their crops from extreme weather. At a stroke, the world’s largest rice exporter stopped half their exports – and made it harder for other countries to trade their way out of food shortages. Top soy and corn producer Argentina had less to export this year too due to severe drought.

Already, the world’s surging growth in farm productivity has slowed to the lowest rate in 60 years. Yet the risk of global food insecurity is not captured in economic models of climate change.

Global shocks are greater than the sum of their parts

National security experts and the United Nations have warned climate change makes wars more likely, as countries fight over water, food or land. Climate change also threatens crop yields and damage to homes and infrastructure from extreme weather and sea level rise.

A collapse in biodiversity and mounting extinctions could also have fundamental implications for our economy. That’s to say nothing of labour productivity, health impacts, zoonotic virus spillover, and mass migration among other possibilities. These upheavals will interact in unpredictable ways.

When economists model how economies perform in the future, they often have to simplify by ignoring certain risks or variables. The Intergenerational Report did just this by focusing on the climate impact on labour productivity and crop yields.

But these kinds of damage can overlap and make others worse. Because our global economy is so tightly interwoven, what happens elsewhere affects us here in many ways, as we saw during the early COVID years and the global financial crisis.

We need better economic models of climate damage

So why, in 2023, are we still not properly accounting for the real risks? It’s hard, but it is possible. My research – as well as that of other other economists – is working towards building global weather shocks into modelling of what climate change will do to individual economies, which should radically change economic predictions.

In the meantime, when you see economic modelling suggesting climate change won’t do much, you should treat it with serious scepticism. Look at what is being modelled – and everything left out.

The impact of climate change on natural systems is well understood. We don’t know nearly as much about what it will do to human systems. We must hope the world decarbonises before we find out the hard way.

Timothy Neal, Senior lecturer in Economics / Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.