Chile’s record-breaking drought makes climate change ‘very easy’ to see
Esteban Medel
A cow is seen on a land that used to be filled with water, at the Aculeo Lagoon in Paine
SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A punishing, decade-long drought in Chile has gone from bad to worse due to a scorching July, a month which typically brings midwinter weather showering the capital Santiago in rain and snow.
But a lack of precipitation this year has left the towering and typically snowcapped Andes above the city mostly bare, reservoir levels low and farm fields parched. The scenes, government officials say, are clear evidence of global warming.
On Tuesday, a central Santiago weather station had recorded just 78 mm (3 inches) of rainfall so far this year compared to last year’s 180 mm and an average amount of 252 mm, according to Chile’s Meteorological Service.
Science Minister Andres Couve told Reuters on Tuesday that the steady decline in water reserves due to climate change was now a “national priority.”
He added the government was addressing the crisis by investing in water conservation and storage, creating a post for a subsecretary of water and establishing a scientist working group on water management, as well as a climate change observatory.
“We already have overwhelming evidence and it is climatic evidence,” he said. “We are seeing a very significant decrease in rainfall and that is generating water shortages.”
On Monday, United Nations climate scientists warned that extreme heat waves, which not long ago struck once every 50 years, are now to be expected once per decade.
Droughts and downpours are also becoming more frequent, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said, and humans are “unequivocally” to blame through greenhouse gas emissions.
Couve said Chile, a long thin nation with the world’s driest deserts at its north, glaciers, forests and wetlands throughout and the Antarctic at its south, had bountiful proof of climate change in action.
“The scientific evidence is there but also the weather events are happening with a frequency and intensity that makes it very easy for people to see,” he said.
‘DAY ZERO’
Some scientists and politicians in Chile are warning of growing, and potentially irreversible, water shortages in the central region whose Mediterranean climate has made it home to vineyards and farms, as well as a third of its population in Santiago, the country’s economic engine.
Two rivers that provide Santiago with water – the Mapocho and the Maipo – are drier than they were in 2019, the driest year in Chile’s history, Public Works Minister Alfredo Moreno said, prompting regulators to clamp down on water use and seek alternative sources.
Chile’s utilities companies have invested heavily in new infrastructure to avoid the arrival of “Day Zero,” – the day the taps run dry, a threat which prompted major water restrictions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Chennai, India, in recent years.
That day however “arrived almost a decade ago for nearly 400 thousand people who inhabit rural areas of Chile and today receive water in tanker trucks,” said Raul Cordero, University of Santiago climatologist and leader of its Antarctic Investigation Group.
Cordero said the situation faced by rural communities in central Chile is likely to spread and worsen over time.
“It is unlikely the precipitation we once had in the central region in the 1980s and 1990s (will) return, or that we recover that climate,” he said.
Chile must build more reservoirs and desalination plants, which are increasingly relied on by its critical mining sector, he added.
“Our only advantage is we now know how climate change will hit us hardest, so we know what we need to do to face the consequences,” he said.
(Reporting by Reuters TV, writing by Dave Sherwood and Aislinn Laing; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
Judge asks why Capitol riot damage restitution is $1.5 million when cost to taxpayers is $500M
Axios
A federal judge asked prosecutors Monday to explain why restitution in Capitol riot cases was limited to $1.5 million for repairs to the building when the total cost to taxpayers was $500 million, per Politico.
Of note: D.C. Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell’s comments come some two weeks after she questioned whether it’s appropriate for prosecutors to offer defendants misdemeanor plea deals in cases that saw insurrectionists “terrorizing members of Congress.”
Driving the news: Howell made the costing comments during the plea hearing of Glenn Wes Lee Croy, 46, of Colorado Springs, Colo., who “pleaded guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a capitol building” after attending a pro-Trump rally, according to KUSA.
What they’re saying: Howell questioned why the U.S. attorney’s office was looking to “require only $2,000 in each felony case and $500 in each misdemeanor case,” the Washington Post notes.
“I’m accustomed to the government being fairly aggressive in terms of fraud when there have been damages that accrue from a criminal act for the restitution amount,” she said, according to WashPost.
“Where we have Congress acting, appropriating all this money due directly to the events of January 6th, I have found the damage amount of less than $1.5 million — when all of us American taxpayers are about to foot the bill for close to half a billion dollars — a little bit surprising.”
Prosecutor Clayton O’Connor told the judge he’d be “happy” to get her the answer to her costings question, Politico reports.
Context: Congress last month passed a $2.1 billion Capitol security bill to help cover the costs incurred during the deadly insurrection.
This included $70.7 million for the Capitol Police response to the attack and $521 million to reimburse the National Guard for deploying guards to help with security efforts on Jan. 6 and after.
Background: Prosecutors announced riot damage estimate of “approximately $1,495,326.55” in June. While it was unclear how it arrived at this figure, it seems to be related to damages such as broken windows, per WashPost.
A spokesperson for the Architect of the Capitol said the agency “gave damage assessments to the Justice Department, which calculated the per-case penalty, and separate assessments to House and Senate appropriators for wider security costs,” the outlet reports.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined to comment on Howell’s latest remarks beyond what was said in court.
Nice Surprise: Africa’s first digital map of its land reveals a surprising fact about its trees
By Seth Onyango, Bird contributor August 10, 2021
New FAO digital land use study reveals that in Africa there are about 7 billion trees not counting major woodlands like the Congo rainforest.
From Our Obsession – The climate economy. Every industry can be part of the solution — or part of the ongoing problem.
As Africa registered a significant first, becoming the first continent in the world to complete its digital land-use data, new revelations emerged about its trees outside of key forests in Africa. There are more trees in Africa than initially thought, with the latest study showing there are about 7 billion trees on the continent, not counting the continent’s major woodlands like the Congo rainforest. This is according to a recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The open data initiative that covered the period between 2018 and 2020, disclosed more forests and arable lands than were previously detected.
FAO said the findings reveal huge opportunities for the management of the environment, agriculture, and land use in Africa, and increase countries’ ability to track changes and conduct analyses for informed sustainable production, restoration interventions, and climate action.
Consequently, countries can detect where deforestation is happening, where settlement land is encroaching on cropland or grassland and where the wetland is being lost.
Africa is the first continent to complete a digital land use study of this type
The African Union Commission (AUC) revealed that the continent is the first to complete the collection of accurate, comprehensive, and harmonized digital land use and land-use change data under the Africa Open DEAL initiative. DEAL stands for Data for the Environment, Agriculture, and Land Initiative.
“Africa Open DEAL initiative has made Africa the first continent to complete the collection of accurate, comprehensive, and harmonized digital land use and land-use change data,” FAO and the AUC said at the virtual launch of the initiative July 13, 2021.
The collection of digital land-use data is crucial in agricultural policymaking.
“This collaboration has…assured that we can still turn the tide, that we can still restore degraded land for agricultural use, through models such as agroforestry, that we can still halt desertification, that we can still fight climate change, and above all that we can still restore hope for humanity despite the odds,” said Josefa Sacko, the African Union Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy, and Sustainable Environment.
Moreover, land-cover data is used as basic information for sustainable management of natural resources; it is increasingly needed for the assessment of impacts of economic development on the environment.
According to Down To Earth, Collect Earth, free and open-source software developed by FAO, was used to collect data through Google Earth.
It is part of the set of tools called Open Foris and was developed in 2017 in collaboration with Google Earth, Bing Maps, and Google Earth Engine.
The data was analyzed to highlight land-use change over the past two decades and the potential for restoration at the national level for every country in the African continent.
“This initiative showed that science and innovation could provide real solutions and that collaboration and pooling experience led to the best results,” Qu Dongyu, FAO director-general, said in his statement.
The initiative further revealed that 350 million hectares of cropland are cultivated in Africa. This is a 25% jump over the cropland in the continent. FAO estimates show, in 2018, 279 million hectares of cropland were cultivated in the continent.
This story was republished with the permission of bird, a story agency under Africa No Filter.
Welcome to NC Voices, where leaders, readers and experts from across North Carolina can speak on issues affecting our communities.
Learn from Miami regarding NC 12. Start planning now for it to disappear.
Staff
The Army Corps of Engineers is planning to build sea wall around downtown Miami, 20 feet high in places, to protect the city from storm surges and flooding.
The problem is that Miami sits atop porous limestone through which rising sea waters will soon flood the city — a 100-foot seawall would not make a difference. The rising water from below is well known and understood, and it may have played a role in the recent Miami area building collapse.
It seems some planners in Miami just can’t get their heads around the catastrophe that the city faces — a catastrophe that could lead to eventual abandonment and 4 million environmental refugees fleeing north.
The Highway 12 situation along the Outer Banks has similarities to the Miami situation. There is not the slightest doubt that N.C. 12 is a goner. The only question is when.
University of Miami geologist Hal Wanless argues that a 2- to 3-foot sea level rise will halt development on all the world’s barrier islands. It’s not that the islands will be under water; it’s that low spots will be under water and access roads will be flooded and washed away.
Current estimates of global sea level rise range from 3 to 8 feet max by the end of this century assuming that we don’t reduce the rate of carbon dioxide release.
The evidence pointing to intensifying storms and accelerating rise in sea levels is clear. Oceanographer John Englander has shown that based on satellite observations the sea level rise rate more than doubled between 2000 and 2020.
The Highway 12 situation is not only ripe for increased rates of erosion and island overwash, but the possibility of damaging seaward overwash is greatly increased because of the large bodies of water behind the islands — Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds.
Barrier island dwellers should accept these facts as the gospel truth. They should not delay until the wolf is at the door, which is the case in Miami. Instead, learn from Miami and start planning now.
For planning purposes, I believe the assumption of a decade long maximum future lifespan for N.C. 12 is a reasonable one.
Orrin H. Pilkey. The writer is a professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
Heat, drought and fire: how climate dangers combine for a catastrophic ‘perfect storm’
Gabrielle Canon
Photograph: Fred Greaves/Reuters
Northern California’s Dixie fire this weekend swelled to become the single largest fire incident the state has ever recorded, a mammoth that has leveled mountain towns, produced flames that shot 200ft in the air, and scorched through close to 490,000 acres.
“It is just the perfect storm,” says Rick Carhart, the California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire) public information officer, adding that the difficult and steep terrain, parched vegetation, and hot, dry weather had all come together to fuel the conflagration that has sent flames 200ft into the sky.
And, he says, the Dixie fire was just one of a series of large blazes that have affected the area in recent years. “It has been giant devastating fire after giant devastating fire.”
Researchers are concerned that the Dixie fire’s record won’t hold for long. The parched landscapes and increased temperatures that set the stage for bigger blazes this year are not anomalies – they are trends. And the conditions are going to get worse.
A climate crisis trifecta
Drought, extreme heat, and destructive infernos are each devastating in their own right, but together they cause calamity. The combination augments their effects and causes each individual condition to intensify. Scientists say they are seeing the trifecta more frequently in the west and that climate breakdown is the key culprit.
“This is what climate scientists have been warning about for years now,” says Park Williams, a hydro-climatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Drought and fire have always been part of the climate in the western US, but increasing heat, which scientists say is directly attributable to human-caused climate change, has had a devastating impact. “These things amplify each other,” Williams says, adding that the effects exponentially increase.
The climate conditions don’t act alone, and fire and and water policies play a part in increasing risks and determining the outcome as well. Most fires are still started by people. The expansion of communities in forested and fire-prone areas adds new dimensions that complicate containment efforts when blazes get big. But what’s happening in the environment has made fires much harder to fight.
That’s why new records don’t just nose out the old ones – they obliterate them. In 2020, the 4.2m acres that burned in California was nearly triple the previous record. This year, fires have burned more than three times as much land as they had by this point in 2020, according to Cal Fire.
“And there’s really no end in sight for the capacity for that type of thing to happen again,” Williams says.
A vicious cycle of heat and drought
Heat affects drought in several ways. Higher temperatures cause precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow. Snow that does fall melts away much more quickly, leaving less to trickle into streams, rivers, and reservoirs. People, plants and animals depend on the snowpack to feed the water systems and with less available, the landscape and anything living in it or off of it will feel the strain.
Heat also bakes moisture right out of the landscape. The hotter it is, the more water plants and animals need to regulate themselves, and that increases water scarcity even further. What makes all this more complicated is that the relationship works in the other direction as well – drought conditions increase heat.
“Heat is both a response to drought and also a driver of drought,” says Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s physical sciences laboratory. Dry soils radiate and reflect the sun’s energy that otherwise would be used in evaporation. That pushes surface temperatures even higher.
“Just like we get cold when we climb out of a swimming pool, the earth cools off when water evaporates,” Hoell says. “When soils are dry, when it’s hot out, there isn’t as much water available to evaporate. That means the earth doesn’t get to cool off.”
That’s why Hoell calls climate change a “threat multiplier”. As the region becomes hotter and drier, the risk of small sparks quickly igniting into enormous and erratic wildfires magnifies.
Fires add another dimension to the threat
New research also suggests that the wildfires themselves will increase drought and heat, adding a new dimension to the catastrophic cycle. Researchers are discussing hypotheses, Hoell explains, that smoke and aerosols released into the atmosphere by wildfires can alter weather patterns. There are already studies that show wildfires influence the formation of clouds in the sky and could decrease precipitation.
“It is very dynamic and very complicated but that’s where we are going as a science community – we are trying to figure out how wildfires feed back on to drought,” he said.
Researchers are also investigating how reduced canopies from forests decimated in fires expose the snowpack that was once shaded to the sun.
Although more research is needed to better understand these complex relationships, the scientific record is clear that rising heat will lead to an increase in extreme events.
“Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth report, released on Monday, which went on to detail and list the expected increase in both frequency and intensity of hot extremes, ecological droughts, and the reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost, along with other catastrophic conditions.
“Under all future scenarios and global warming levels, temperatures and extreme high temperatures are expected to continue to increase,” the report said of North and Central America, attributing the rise to “human influence”.
Models show that extreme heatwaves are expected to happen more frequently, more intensely, and across larger areas of land in just the next three decades. “Historically we have had between four and six extreme heat events in any given year,” said Steve Ostoja, director of the USDA California Climate Hub. “By 2050, we expect that number to go somewhere between 25 and 30 events. That’s a huge difference. That basically means it is going to be that hot all the time.”
No time to lose
The trends are already being felt. Currently, about half of the contiguous US is in drought, according to federal agencies. The entire state of California is experiencing drought conditions, with more than 88% of the state in the “extreme drought” category, as determined by the US Drought Monitor. Meanwhile, dozens of climate stations across the west documented the warmest June and July on record, as extreme heatwaves spiked temperatures across the region.
Climate scientists say that there is still time to make big changes, and there’s a chance that the worst effects of the changing climate can be staved off. But there’s no time to lose.
In the west, the wildfires, drought, and heat are already wreaking havoc. Williams, the climate scientist from UCLA, says there are clear indications that places like California won’t look like they do now for much longer. The landscape is growing arid, and as it gets drier and hotter, there will be more fires. That will lead to fewer forests and more grasslands, shrublands, and deserts.
“Fire has been around for hundreds of millions of years and it is a critical part of the earth’s system,” he said. But the fires of the future will do much more than clear the underbrush. “Now the fires we are seeing are eliminating giant patches of forest entirely,” he added, explaining that many tree species had not evolved to repopulate the giant gaps quickly.
“It could take hundreds of years for ponderosa or Jeffrey pine – which we see a lot of in the Sierra Nevada – to actually reoccupy giant patches of forest,” he said. “By that time the climate might be totally inappropriate for those species anyway.”
How elite, oil-backed think tanks worked to lift the ban on US crude oil exports
by Rob Galbraith
Brookings Institution senior fellow Charles Ebinger testifies before Congress in favor of lifting the crude oil export ban in 2014(via C-SPAN)
In early July, Brookings Institution Vice President Darrell M. West blasted Unearthed, an investigative journalism project of Greenpeace UK,in a since-deleted post on the Brookings blog for secretly recording ExxonMobil lobbyists candidly disclosing the company’s playbook for blocking government action on climate change.
Lawrence Carter, a reporter at Unearthed, had published an exposé based on undercover interviews with two ExxonMobil lobbyists who revealed how the company persuaded lawmakers to drastically limit the scope of the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill, backed proposals for a carbon tax to give the appearance of supporting climate action in the belief that the policy was unlikely to ever pass, and backed “shadow groups” to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.
After West criticizedthe Unearthed report as “erod[ing] trust in civic life,” Kate Aronoff pointed out that Brookings is funded by ExxonMobil and was explicitly named, along with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), as one of “the two big think tanks that we work with and that we’re actively involved in” by one of the ExxonMobil lobbyists in the report.
Aronoff noted in her article at The New Republicthat “funding the institutions that help define ideas about what constitutes a reasonable climate debate” can help ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies influence climate policy in ways that are hidden to the general public.
Indeed, while the lobbyists’ unwitting admissions to Unearthed revealed ExxonMobil’s tactics in particularly stark terms, Big Oil’s use of think tanks to shape policy is nothing new. We documented this phenomenon as it related to a specific policy debate in our 2015 report “The Oil Tanks.” The report examined fossil fuel industry funding for Brookings, CSIS, and seven other elite think tanks advocating for repealing the ban on exporting crude oil from the United States.
In 2014, Brookings published a report titled “Economic Benefits of Lifting the Crude Oil Export Ban” written by Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow at Brookings with a long history of advising energy companies and governments on energy issues. In that year Brookings reported receiving between $1.7 and $3.6 million from nine major oil and gas companies, including between $500,000 and $999,999 from ExxonMobil. Further, at the time 15 of Brookings’ 74 were current or former directors, executives, or lobbyists of oil and gas companies who gave an additional $1.3 to $3.1 million to the institute.
Other think tanks profiled in our report who worked to lift the crude oil export ban while taking money from the fossil fuel industry include CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, and the Bipartisan Policy Center.
In her article, Aronoff describes the influence that Brookings and other elite think tanks funded with fossil fuel money and other corporate donations have on US policy: “These institutions often feed experts to top posts in the White House and serve as landing pads for ex-administration officials when their parties lose control, weighing in on key policy debates with recommendations for lawmakers.”
We observed this precise dynamic in our 2015 report on the effort to allow oil drillers to begin exporting crude oil from the United States.
Frank Verrastro, senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ energy security and climate change program and lead author of the report “Delivering the Goods: Making the Most of North America’s Evolving Oil Infrastructure,” held positions in the White House energy policy and planning staff as well as the Department of Interior’s oil and gas office and the Department of Energy’s domestic policy and international affairs office, according to one bio.
David Goldwyn was co-director of the Atlantic Council’s pro-export report “Empowering America: How Energy Abundance Can Strengthen US Global Leadership.” Previously, as Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs in the State Department, Goldwyn was critical to the Obama administration’s strategy of encouraging eastern European countries to embrace fracking and lease land to US oil companies, including Chevron, a major Atlantic Council donor. Goldwyn has also held roles at other elite, fossil fuel-funded think tanks that promoted lifting the export ban. From 2001 until 2009 when he joined the federal government, Goldywn was a senior associate at CSIS. In 2007, Goldwyn was a member of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency. In 2014, Goldwyn was a member of the Brookings Institution’s natural gas task force, which endorsed liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
Overall, as we observed in 2015, the effect was to create an “echo chamber of highly influential institutions funded, directed, and staffed by many of the same corporations and people and delivering the same pro-industry messages,” through 2014 and 2015 calling for a major policy shift to benefit the United States oil industry. On December 18, 2015, just two weeks after we published our report, then-President Barack Obama signed a bill lifting the export ban. Now, thanks to the reporting of Lawrence Carter at Unearthed and Kate Aronoff at The New Republic we have evidence, in Exxon’s own words, of how they use elite liberal and right-wing think tanks to advance their agenda in Washington.
‘Code Red for Humanity’: IPCC Report Warns Window for Climate Action Is Closing Fast
By Jake Johnson at Common Dreams August 9, 2021
“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
Wildfire in the Pacific Northwest Credit: BLM Oregon & Washington. CC By 2.0
A panel of leading scientists convened by the United Nations issued a comprehensive report Monday that contains a stark warning for humanity: The climate crisis is here, some of its most destructive consequences are now inevitable, and only massive and speedy reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can limit the coming disaster.
Assembled by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a team of more than 200 scientists — the new report represents a sweeping analysis of thousands of studies published over the past eight years as people the world over have suffered record-shattering temperatures and deadly extreme weather, from catastrophic wildfires to monsoon rains to extreme drought.
The result of the scientists’ work is a startling assessment of the extent to which human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, has altered the climate, producing “unprecedented” planetary warming, glacial melting, sea level rise, and other changes that are wreaking havoc in every region of the globe — wiping out entire towns, imperiling biodiverse ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon rainforest, and endangering densely populated swaths of the world.
“This report is a reality check,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at the University of Paris-Saclay and co-chair of the panel that produced the report. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present, and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.”
One central finding of the new analysis is that the Paris accord’s goal of limiting global temperature rise to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is in serious danger as policymakers fail to take the necessary steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Each of the past four decades, according to the report, has been successively warmer than any preceding decade dating back to 1850, atmospheric CO2 has soared to levels not seen in two million years, and “global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered.”
“Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century,” the IPCC panel warns, “unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.”
“Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years,” reads the report, which was approved by 195 member nations of the IPCC.
“However,” the report emphasizes, “strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize.”
Panmao Zhai, another co-chair of the IPCC working group, stressed that “stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net-zero CO2 emissions.”
“Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” Zhai added.
The planet has warmed at an unprecedented rate, the IPCC report states.
The new report, the first of three installments, was released just weeks before world leaders are set to gather in Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), which activists view as a pivotal moment for the global climate fight.
“Many see COP26 as our last, best chance to prevent global temperatures from spiraling out of control,” Dorothy Grace Guerrero of Global Justice Now wrote last month. “Unfortunately, we are not yet on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the threshold that scientists agree will prevent the most dangerous climate impacts. Failure to reach this goal will take a disproportionate toll on developing countries.”
António Guterres, secretary-general of the U.N., said in a statement Monday that the IPCC’s latest findings are “a code red for humanity.”
“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk,” said Guterres. “Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.”
“There is a clear moral and economic imperative to protect the lives and livelihoods of those on the front lines of the climate crisis,” Guterres continued. “If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But, as today’s report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses. I count on government leaders and all stakeholders to ensure COP26 is a success.”
This article was republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Slower circulation may bring droughts to west Africa and colder weather to Europe and North America.
In the 2004 film “The Day After Tomorrow,” a climatologist played by Dennis Quaid warns world leaders about a rapid climate shift.
The key factor is an ocean current system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which moves warm water from the equatorial tropics up to Europe and the north Atlantic. This influx of warmer water contributes to western Europe’s mild, temperate climate.
In the movie, the AMOC stops completely, causing an ice age to begin almost overnight. While the speed and intensity of that cold snap are hyperbolized in the film, the AMOC is very real, and research suggests a slow down of its circulation is a likely consequence of climate change.
In a paper published last week, climate scientist Niklas Boers concluded that the AMOC is approaching a tipping point. If enough fresh water from melting polar ice enters the ocean, the current system will experience an “abrupt weakening,” and destabilize, he told Insider.
A new climate report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) similarly suggests that the AMOC will very likely weaken by the end of the century.
According to Boers, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, this weakening would cause temperatures in Europe to fall, and “the cooling effect would be stronger the further north you go.”
On the US East Coast, meanwhile, sea levels would rise. Parts of central and west Africa would experience persistent drought conditions, since those areas also benefit from the AMOC’s circulation.
An on/off switch for the Atlantic’s currents
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic (in red), where the water cools and sinks before flowing back south (in blue). NASA/JPL
When the AMOC is flowing quickly, western Europe enjoys a wet and warm climate. Scientists have likened the system to a conveyor belt: Once warmer water reaches the area around the UK, it cools and sinks to the bottom of the Labrador and Nordic Seas. Then that cold water makes a U-turn and snakes along the ocean floor, down to Antarctica’s Southern Ocean.
But if this circulation is sluggish and weak, warm tropical waters don’t get moved up, and the north Atlantic cools.
The AMOC’s speed is determined by a delicate balance of salt and fresh water. Salty water is dense, so it sinks easily. But as Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers continue to melt, more fresh water is joining the AMOC’s salty surface water, making it lighter and less likely to sink. That clogs up the circulation’s flow.
Prior research suggests that a change in the strength of water circulation in the Atlantic really does precede abrupt climate changes. By examining ice cores dated to Earth’s last ice age, scientists have found that the AMOC alternates between two states – a strong “on” state, where the current system runs quickly, and a weak “off” state where that circulation decelerates.
“A shutdown of the AMOC is the easiest, most efficient way to disrupt the climate system,” Francesco Muschitiello, a geographer specializing in paleoclimatology at the University of Cambridge told Insider, adding, “95% of time when we talk about rapid climate change, it’s associated with AMOC.”
Still, Boers said, any cooling related to the AMOC wouldn’t look like “The Day After Tomorrow” – it “would take a few decades,” and North America “won’t get as cold as the movie suggests.”
It would take at least a few hundred years for the AMOC to re-strengthen
A small iceberg melting in southern Greenland. Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In the past, when the AMOC reached a tipping point, the transition from strong to weak took a couple of decades, Boers said. But it takes much longer for the system to switch back.
“It typically took a few hundred to a few thousand years for the AMOC to go back to the strong mode,” he said, adding, “if the AMOC were to collapse to the weak mode at some point in the future, it would indeed be very hard to bring it back to the strong mode.”
According to the IPCC report, it’s possible that the AMOC will experience an abrupt collapse by 2100. That collapse, the report authors said, could be triggered by an unexpected additional melted ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has been thawing at an unprecedented rate. A 2019 study found the ice sheet was melting six times faster than it was 40 years ago.
The Atlantic Ocean. Getty/MKnighton/Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing
It’s unlikely, however, that the Greenland Ice Sheet will ever melt quickly enough to completely stop the AMOC.
A full halt like the one depicted in “The Day After Tomorrow,” would only happen “if the Greenland ice sheet was to melt over the course of a few days,” Muschitiello previously told Insider.
That said, some studies suggest that the AMOC has stopped entirely in the past.
“These major distortions of the AMOC led to the coldest events ever recorded,” Muschitiello said.
In those cases, the cold events may have lasted for up to 1,000 years. If the AMOC were to shut down completely again, Boers said, the only way to undo it would be “to reverse the global temperature trend and get back to pre-industrial conditions.”
Fire Threatens Second California Town as Heat Stokes Flames
Will Wade
(Bloomberg) — Hot, dry weather is hampering California firefighters’ efforts to combat the Dixie blaze, which swelled over the weekend to become the second-largest in state history and is threatening to engulf a second town.
The fire, which troubled utility giant PG&E Corp. said may have been sparked by one of its power lines, has ripped through more than 489,000 acres (198,000 hectares), destroying the Gold-Rush-era town of Greenville last week. It’s now spreading toward Janesville, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast.
“Our intention is that we will not lose any more structures, we will not lose any more communities,” Mark Brunton, operations section chief with California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in a briefing Sunday. “That is our priority.”
More than a dozen blazes are burning across California, fueled by a historic drought and heat waves that parched the West and created ideal wildfire conditions. Wildfires have also devastated Greece, Turkey and Siberia this year, and a landmark report Monday from the United Nations found “unequivocal” evidence that human activities have warmed the atmosphere.
The Dixie fire has been burning for almost four weeks and has destroyed more than 600 structures, according to Cal Fire, as the agency is known. The destruction is a growing risk for PG&E, which said last month that a worker had discovered a tree leaning against a power line near the start of the blaze.
The company’s shares were up 0.2% at 3:25 p.m. in New York Monday.
A judge on Friday ordered the utility to identify each of the California wildfires its equipment started this year. PG&E emerged from bankruptcy last year after sparking a series of wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that killed more than 100 people.
The Dixie fire has prompted mass evacuations as it continues to tear across the region, and was just 21% contained on Monday morning. Firefighters were aided over the weekend as the winds shifted in their favor, but higher temperatures this week are helping to fuel the blaze.
“Really hot conditions and really dry conditions are what is fueling the fire,” said Hannah Chandler-Cooley, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento. “It is still pretty dry and that is really not going to improve much.”
The Dixie Fire started on July 13 and destroyed much of the northern Sierra Nevada town of Greenville last week, leveling buildings and melting lamp posts.
“We’re really focusing on this effort just to keep it out of Janesville,” Jake Cagle, an operations sections chief with the U.S. Forest Service, said in a briefing. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
California’s eight biggest wildfires have all burned since December 2017, department statistics show. Last year’s August Complex fire that destroyed more than 1 million acres remains the largest.
“Apocalyptic, catastrophic”: World leaders, activists react to “sobering” UN climate report
Jacob Knutson
A sweeping United Nations-sponsored review of climate science published Monday projected that the world will cross a crucial temperature threshold as early as 2030 — up to a decade sooner than previously thought.
Why it matters: Warming is affecting every area of the globe, the report notes, and extreme weather events are becoming more common and severe contributing to a more volatile world.
What they’re saying:
United Kingdom: “Today’s report makes for sobering reading, and it is clear that the next decade is going to be pivotal to securing the future of our planet. We know what must be done to limit global warming – consign coal to history and shift to clean energy sources, protect nature and provide climate finance for countries on the frontline,” U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a statement.
The U.K. hosts the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as the COP26 summit, in November.
United States: “The IPCC report underscores the overwhelming urgency of this moment. The world must come together before the ability to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is out of reach,” U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry said in a statement.
“As the IPCC makes plain, the impacts of the climate crisis, from extreme heat to wildfires to intense rainfall and flooding, will only continue to intensify unless we choose another course for ourselves and generations to come.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken added in his own statement: “We cannot delay ambitious climate action any longer.”
Eric Lander, President Biden’s science advisor, said the report confirms “that climate change is intensifying faster than we thought.”
Activists: “The new IPCC report contains no real surprises. It confirms what we already know from thousands previous studies and reports – that we are in an emergency. It’s a solid (but cautious) summary of the current best available science,” Greta Thunberg tweeted.
“Today, I, and so many other young people, wake up enraged — the IPCC report is apocalyptic, catastrophic, and nothing we haven’t been screaming from the rooftops for years. Our politicians shouldn’t need a report to tell them how bad things are. We’re already living it,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said in a statement.
This story will be updated with more reactions.
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