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My Extreme World
And (Un)Welcome to It
Admittedly, I hadn't been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now" well, it's more or less gone, though they survived. The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already "blackened" 504 square miles of Northern California in what was still essentially the (old) pre-fire season. It would soon become the second-largest wildfire in the state's history. When it swept through Greenville, much of downtown, along with more than 100 homes, were left in ashes as the 1,000 residents of that Gold Rush-era town fled.
I remember Greenville as a wonderful little place that, all these years later, still brings back fond memories. I'm now on the other coast, but much of that small, historic community is no longer there. This season, California's wildfires have already devastated three times the territory burned in the same period in 2020's record fire season. And that makes a point that couldn't be more salient to our moment and our future. A heating planet is a danger, not in some distant time, but right now yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Don't just ask the inhabitants of Greenville, ask those in the village of Monte Lake, British Columbia, the second town in that Canadian province to be gutted by flames in recent months in a region that normally or perhaps I should just say once upon a time was used to neither extreme heat and drought, nor the fires that accompany them.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're no longer just reading about the climate crisis; we're living it in a startling fashion. At least for this old guy, that's now a fact not just of life but of all our lives that simply couldn't be more extreme and I don't even need the latest harrowing report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to tell me so. Whether you've been sweating and swearing under the latest heat dome; fleeing fires somewhere in the West; broiling in a Siberia that's releasing startling amounts of heat-producing methane into the atmosphere; being swept away by flood waters in Germany; sweltering in an unprecedented heat-and-fire season in Greece (where even the suburbs of Athens were being evacuated); baking in Turkey or on the island of Sardinia in a "disaster without precedent"; neck-deep in water in a Chinese subway car; or, after "extreme rains," wading through the subway systems of New York City or London, you all of us are in a new world and we better damn well get used to it.
Floods, megadrought, the fiercest of forest fires, unprecedented storms you name it and it seems to be happening not in 2100 or even 2031, but now. A recent study suggests that, in 2020 (not 2040 or 2080), more than a quarter of Americans had suffered in some fashion from the effects of extreme heat, already the greatest weather-based killer of Americans and, given this blazing summer, 2021 is only likely to be worse.
By the way, don't imagine that it's just us humans who are suffering. Consider, for instance, the estimated billion or more yes, one billion! mussels, barnacles, and other small sea creatures that were estimated to have died off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, during the unprecedented heat wave there earlier in the summer.
A few weeks ago, watching the setting sun, an eerie blaze of orange-red in a hazy sky here on the East Coast was an unsettling experience once I realized what I was actually seeing: a haze of smoke from the megadrought-stricken West's disastrous early fire season. It had blown thousands of miles east for the second year in a row, managing to turn the air of New York and Philadelphia into danger zones.
In a way, right now it hardly matters where you look on this planet of ours. Take Greenland, where a "massive melting event," occurring after the temperature there hit double the normal this summer, made enough ice vanish "in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water." But there was also that record brush fire torching more than 62 square miles of Hawaii's Big Island. And while you're at it, you can skip prime houseboat-vacation season at Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, since that huge reservoir is now three-quarters empty (and, among Western reservoirs, anything but alone!).
It almost doesn't matter which recent report you cite. When it comes to what the scientists are finding, it's invariably worse than you (or often even they) had previously imagined. It's true, for instance, of the Amazon rain forest, one of the great carbon sinks on the planet. Parts of it are now starting to release carbon into the atmosphere, as a study in the journal Nature reported recently, partially thanks to climate change and partially to more direct forms of human intervention.
It's no less true of the Siberian permafrost in a region where, for the first time above the Arctic Circle, the temperature in one town reached more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a summer day in 2020. And yes, when Siberia heats up in such a fashion, methane (a far more powerful heat-trapping gas than CO2) is released into the atmosphere from that region's melting permafrost wetlands, which had previously sealed it in. And recently, that's not even the real news. What about the possibility, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that what's being released now is actually a potential "methane bomb" not from that permafrost itself but from thawing rock formations within it?
In fact, when it comes to the climate crisis, as a recent study in the journal Bioscience found, "some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content, and ice mass, set worrying new records." Similarly, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide "have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021."
Mind you, just in case you hadn't noticed, the last seven years have been the warmest in recorded history. And speaking of climate-change-style records in this era, last year, 22 natural disasters hit this country, including hurricanes, fires, and floods, each causing more than $1 billion in damage, another instant record with the safest prediction around many more to come.
"It Looked Like an Atomic Bomb"
Lest you think that all of this represents an anomaly of some sort, simply a bad year or two on a planet that historically has gone from heat to ice and back again, think twice. A recent report published in Nature Climate Change, for instance, suggests that heat waves that could put the recent ones in the U.S. West and British Columbia to shame are a certainty and especially likely for "highly populated regions in North America, Europe, and China." (Keep in mind that, a few years ago, there was already a study suggesting that the North China plain with its 400 million inhabitants could essentially become uninhabitable by the end of this century due to heat waves too powerful for human beings to survive!) Or as another recent study suggested, reports the Guardian, "heatwaves that smash previous records" would become two to seven times more likely in the next three decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051-2080, unless carbon emissions are immediately slashed."
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