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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/22/we-are-fiddling-while-world-burns-floods-chokes/">washingtonpost.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">We are fiddling while the world burns,
floods and chokes</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Eugene Robinson</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">5-6 minutes</div>
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<p data-el="text">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.</p>
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<p data-el="text">World Weather Attribution, an
international group of leading climate scientists, <a
href="https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-american-extreme-heat-virtually-impossible-without-human-caused-climate-change/">concluded
in a new study</a> 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.”</p>
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<p data-el="text">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:</p>
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<p data-el="text">“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.</p>
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<p data-el="text">“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.”</p>
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<p data-el="text">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.</p>
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<p data-el="text">What kinds of events, hypothetically,
might those be? We don’t have to imagine these
scenarios. The torrential, almost biblical <a
href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/belgium-flood-mourning-germany-1.6110259"
target="_blank">rainfall last week</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018764692/china-blasts-dam-to-divert-massive-flooding-that-has-killed-at-least-25"
target="_blank">Henan Province</a>, which caused
flooding and a final death toll that has yet to be
tabulated.</p>
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<p data-el="text">This year’s fire season in the
American West <a
href="https://www.kqed.org/science/1975814/a-punishing-california-fire-season-is-here-fueled-by-historic-drought">is
already worse</a> than last year’s, which was
horrific. As of this writing, <a
href="https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn">the
National Interagency Fire Center reports</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/climate/bootleg-wildfire-weather.html">creates
its own local weather</a>. The wildfires are
generating so much smoke that impacts have reached the
East Coast. On Tuesday, New York had its <a
href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/21/weather/us-western-wildfires-wednesday/index.html">worst
air quality in 15 years</a> because of smoke brought
there by high-altitude winds from the other side of
the continent.</p>
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<p data-el="text">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.</p>
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<p data-el="text">Michael E. Mann, director of
Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science
Center, <a
href="https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_f064b29de2b03dc7ff0edae39466a61c">told
CNN</a> 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.”</p>
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<p data-el="text"><u>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.</u></p>
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<p data-el="text"><u>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.</u></p>
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