[D66] [JD: 151] We are fiddling while the world burns, floods and chokes | washingtonpost.com

[R.O.]

washingtonpost.com
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/22/we-are-fiddling-while-world-burns-floods-chokes/>



  We are fiddling while the world burns, floods and chokes

Eugene Robinson
5-6 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

We are fiddling while the world burns. And floods. And chokes. And maybe
even careens past some kind of unforeseen climate change tipping point
that will make what are now extreme weather events devastatingly
commonplace.

World Weather Attribution, an international group of leading climate
scientists, concluded in a new study
<https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-american-extreme-heat-virtually-impossible-without-human-caused-climate-change/>
that the recent deadly heat wave in the Pacific Northwest — which broke
all-time high temperature records not in tiny increments, which is how
that almost always happens, but by as many as 4 or 5 whole degrees
Celsius — would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused
climate change.”

That’s bad enough, but what follows in this analysis is worse. Please
stay with me while I quote it at length, because the scary part comes at
the end:

“The observed temperatures were so extreme that they lie far outside the
range of historically observed temperatures. This makes it hard to
quantify with confidence how rare the event was. In the most realistic
statistical analysis the event is estimated to be about a 1 in 1,000
year event in today’s climate.

“There are two possible sources of this extreme jump in peak
temperatures. The first is that this is a very low probability event,
even in the current climate which already includes about 1.2°C [almost
2.2 degrees Fahrenheit] of global warming — the statistical equivalent
of really bad luck, albeit aggravated by climate change. The second
option is that nonlinear interactions in the climate have substantially
increased the probability of such extreme heat, much beyond the gradual
increase in heat extremes that has been observed up to now. We need to
investigate the second possibility further, although we note the climate
models do not show it.”

Note the phrase “nonlinear interactions.” The possibility the authors
raise is that the warming we have already caused may have somehow
triggered sudden and unpredictable changes in weather patterns,
including the frequency and intensity of extreme events.

What kinds of events, hypothetically, might those be? We don’t have to
imagine these scenarios. The torrential, almost biblical rainfall last
week
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/belgium-flood-mourning-germany-1.6110259>
in Germany and Belgium, which caused unprecedented flooding that washed
away picturesque villages and claimed at least 200 lives, might be one
example. So is the similar deluge this week in China’s Henan Province
<https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018764692/china-blasts-dam-to-divert-massive-flooding-that-has-killed-at-least-25>,
which caused flooding and a final death toll that has yet to be tabulated.

This year’s fire season in the American West is already worse
<https://www.kqed.org/science/1975814/a-punishing-california-fire-season-is-here-fueled-by-historic-drought>
than last year’s, which was horrific. As of this writing, the National
Interagency Fire Center reports
<https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn> that 79 significant fires
have torn through 1,448,053 acres of land. Among these conflagrations is
the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which is so big and hot that it creates its
own local weather
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/climate/bootleg-wildfire-weather.html>.
The wildfires are generating so much smoke that impacts have reached the
East Coast. On Tuesday, New York had its worst air quality in 15 years
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/21/weather/us-western-wildfires-wednesday/index.html>
because of smoke brought there by high-altitude winds from the other
side of the continent.

Skeptics often attack climate scientists for alleged overconfidence in
their predictions about the disastrous impact of climate change. But
leading researchers are being honest, and humble, about the extreme
weather we’re seeing. World Weather Attribution calculated that if we
have another 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit of warming — which is projected to
occur by the 2040s, unless we take bold action — an extreme heat wave in
the Northwest like the one we just saw would no longer be expected to
happen every 1,000 years, but “roughly every 5 to 10 years.” But if some
“nonlinear” process is happening, the scientists have no idea what we
should expect, and they acknowledge it.

Michael E. Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth
System Science Center, told CNN
<https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_f064b29de2b03dc7ff0edae39466a61c>
that “the signal is emerging from the noise more quickly” than climate
scientists’ models predicted. “The signal is now large enough that we
can ‘see’ it in the daily weather.”

_It’s clear to me that we are now at the point where the old disclaimer
about not being able to ascribe any specific weather event to climate
change no longer applies in the way it used to. Thousand-year floods or
fires or storms are supposed to be, by definition, rare. When they
happen in bunches, all around the world, obviously something is going on._

_The question is: What, precisely? The models climate scientists
developed told us that these kinds of events were our future. If the
future is now, we’ll need to figure out what’s going on and how to
respond to it fast. The luxury of dithering and delay has gone up in smoke._

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