This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
A Slow-Motion Gaza
Or How to Carbonize Planet Earth
Imagine this: humanity in its time on Earth has already come up with two distinct ways of destroying this planet and everything on it. The first is, of course, nuclear weapons, which once again surfaced in the ongoing nightmare in the Middle East. (An Israeli minister recently threatened to nuke Gaza.) The second, you won't be surprised to learn, is what we've come to call "climate change" or "global warming" the burning, that is, of fossil fuels to desperately overheat our already flaming world. In its own fashion, that could be considered a slow-motion version of the nuking of the planet.
Put another way, in some grim sense, all of us now live in Gaza. (Most of us just don't know it yet.)
Yes, if you actually do live in Gaza, your life is now officially a living (or dying) hell on Earth. Your home has been destroyed, your family members wounded or killed, the hospital you fled to decimated. And that story, sadly enough, has been leading the news day after day for weeks now. But in the process, in some sense even more sadly, the deepest hell of our time has largely disappeared from sight.
I'm thinking about the urge to turn our whole planet into a long-term, slow-motion version of Gaza, to almost literally set it ablaze and destroy it as a habitable place for humanity (and so many other species).
Yes, in the midst of the ongoing Middle Eastern catastrophe, the latest study by James Hanson, the scientist who first sounded the climate alarm to Congress back in the 1980s, appeared. In it, he suggested that, in this year of record temperatures, our planet is heating even more rapidly than expected. The key temperature danger mark, set only eight years ago at the Paris climate agreement, 1.5 degrees Centigrade above the pre-industrial level, could easily be reached not in 2050 or 2040, but by (or even before) 2030. Meanwhile, another recent study suggests that humanity's "carbon budget" that is, the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere while keeping global temperature rise at or under that 1.5-degree mark is now officially going to hell in a handbasket. In fact, by October, a record one-third of the days in 2023 had broken that 1.5-degree mark in what is undoubtedly going to prove another and yes, I know how repetitive this is record year for heat.
Oh, and when it comes to the globe's two greatest greenhouse gas emitters, China is still opening new coal mines at a remarkably rapid pace, while the U.S., the world's biggest oil producer, is expected to have "a third of planned oil and gas expansion globally between now and 2050." And the news isn't much better for the rest of the planet, which, given the dangers involved, should be headline-making fare. No such luck, of course.
Setting the Planet Afire
In fact, I'll bet you hardly noticed. And I'm not surprised. After all, the news could hardly be worse these days in a country that, however indirectly, seems distinctly bound for war. There's Ukraine, turning into ever more of a disaster zone by the week; there's Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank promising yet more of the same, whether you're listening to Hamas or Benjamin Netanyahu (with American military activity increasing in the region as well); and then there's that "cold war" between the U.S. and China yes, I know, I know, President Biden and China's President Xi Jinping actually met and chatted recently, including about climate change but don't hold your breath when it comes to truly improving relations.
And yet, if you were to look away from Gaza for a moment, you might notice that significant parts of the Middle East have been experiencing an historic megadrought since 1998 (yes, 1998!). The temperatures baking the region are believed to be "16 times as likely in Iran and 25 times as likely in Iraq and Syria" thanks to the warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, if you take a skip and a jump from the flaming Middle East to Greenland, you might notice that, in recent years, glaciers there have been melting at yes, I know this sounds unbearably repetitious record rates (five times faster, in fact, in the last 20 years), helping add to sea level rise across the planet. And mind you, that rise will only accelerate as the Arctic and Antarctic melt ever more rapidly. And perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the Arctic is already warming four times faster than the global average.
If you have the urge to put all of this in context for 2023, you need to remind yourself that we're now ending November, which means a final accounting of the devastation wrought by climate change this year isn't quite in. Admittedly, it's already been one hell of a year of record heat and fires, floods, extreme drought, and so on (and on and on). You've probably forgotten by now, but there were those record heat waves and fires and no, I'm not thinking about the ones that swept across Europe or that broiled parts of Greece amid record flooding. I'm thinking about the ones in Canada that hit so much closer to home for us Americans. The wildfires there began in May and, by late June, had already set a typical seasonal record, only to burn on and on and on (adding up to nine times the normal seasonal total!) deep into October, sending billows of smoke across significant parts of the United States, while setting smoke pollution records.
Nor is the news exactly great when it comes to climate change and this country. Yes, heat records are still being set month by month this year in the U.S., even if the record highs are still to be fully tallied. Just consider those 55 days in which our sixth largest city, Phoenix, suffered temperatures of 110 degrees or more (31 of them in a row), resulting in a heat version of Gazan casualties, a 50% surge in the deaths mostly of seniors and the homeless to almost 600. A recent congressionally mandated report released by the Biden administration on global warming found that this country is actually heating up faster than the global average. "The climate crisis," it reported, "is causing disruption to all regions of the U.S., from flooding via heavier rainfall in the northeast to prolonged drought in the southwest. A constant is heat 'across all regions of the U.S., people are experiencing warming temperatures and longer-lasting heatwaves' with nighttime and winter temperatures rising faster than daytime and summer temperatures."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
