Bill McKibben: How Bad Is It?

Another excellent article written before Hurricane Ian. 

Bill McKibben writes: "I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story." 

YES, this is the truth! — Molly

Farmers carrying feed for their animals, yesterday in Balochistan province Pakistan

 How Bad Is It?

And what does that question even mean?

 

By Bill McKibben

I got a phone call last night, from a person I admire as much as anyone I know; she’s spent her life working, with great effectiveness, for a wide variety of progressive causes. I turn to her for guidance on dozens of questions. But last night she was turning to me, and with a simple, despairing question: “is it just all over for the climate?”

She’d been reading stories from the past week about the truly horrific flooding in Pakistan (watch this video, please—it’s the single best depiction I’ve seen of what the crisis feels like, and though it’s on CNN, the most mainstream of media, it does not shy away for a second from talking about the blame that falls on the global north for the climate crisis, and the need for reparations), and about the giant Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic retreating twice as fast as scientists had thought, and about a new study showing that even if we stopped emitting carbon now melting ice on Greenland would produce almost a foot of sea level rise. 

I heard from one of the co-authors of that study, Jason Box, a few days later. He sent me photos of a spot where we’d camped on the Greenland ice sheet a few years ago; he’d been back there over the weekend, he said, when his team had to decamp fast because an unprecedented melt was underway. September 1 is supposed to mark the end of the melt season on Greenland, but all of a sudden temperatures were soaring—above freezing even at the very summit of the ice sheet, which is almost always safely below zero. “While rushing down the ice sheet, we felt surprisingly warm pulses of air on our faces, like the Chinook winds I remember from Colorado,” he wrote. As a result of the anomalous warm weather, the Washington Post reported, As a result, “tens of billions of tons of ice were lost — an event that could further Greenland’s already significant contributions to rising sea levels.” As another researcher explained, “Greenland’s ice margin can’t tolerate the conditions that are becoming increasingly common for it. This event is typical of those destabilizing conditions.”

So. There’s an ongoing, sometimes acrid, debate in climate circles about ‘doomism’ versus ‘hopium,’ which I have no desire to join. (As usual, count me with Rebecca Solnit, who spends her time highlighting the fights we are winning: that seems to me entirely useful, because it motivates). I've been fighting this battle for so many years now that sometimes the largest-scale questions don’t even occur to me; but they occur to others, obviously, and they deserve answers. Given events like those of the past few weeks (I haven’t even mentioned what may be the most prolonged heatwave in human history that hit China this summer, nor the current raging heat in the American west) it is a fair question to ask: are we reaching the point where events are so far out of control that our efforts to stem the tide are pointless?

So let me just lay out my own sense, in case it’s helpful to anyone else. 

 

1.We are not getting out of this crisis unscathed, or anything like it. It’s been many years since “stopping global warming” was on the menu. We’ve raised the temperature a degree celsius already, and that’s way too much because—well, see above. A degree is a mess

2. It will get worse. Even if we do everything right at this point, there’s enough momentum in the system to take us near two degrees; that’s going to be far far worse. Not just twice as bad—damage increases exponentially, not linearly, as we head past various tipping points.

3. If we don’t do everything right, that “near to two degrees” will actually be nearer three degrees Celsius, which is five or six degrees Fahrenheit, which is a world where civilizations won’t be able to function in the ways we’re used to them functioning. That civilizational breakdown—a political and human phenomenon, not a scientific one—could come sooner; we don’t know where the civilizational red lines are, only that we’re close. 

4. Which means: despair is not an option yet, at least if it’s that kind of despair that leads to inaction. But desperation is an option—indeed, it’s required. We have to move hard and fast. 

5. The most obvious place we have to move is the energy transition. Physics means we have to go fast; economics means going fast will focus for now on sun, wind, and batteries because they are cheap and available. The fossil fuel industry, desperate to maintain its business model, is in the way; they must be fought.

6. But we also have to shore up civilizations in all the other ways we can imagine, especially by sharing resources and technologies. Our systems are too brittle now; places like Pakistan just lack the resilience to deal with a crisis they did not create. Global solidarity is not kindness; on a small world it’s a survival strategy.

I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story.

Please go here for the original article: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/how-bad-is-it     

Bill McKibben: Hurricane Ian Is a Storm That We Knew Would Occur

This is an excellent and deeply important article by Bill McKibben.

For more years than I can remember I have been listening to — and reading, attending his talks in Portland, watching on Democracy Now! and other independent media resources — Bill McKibben (and many others) inform, warn, and illuminate the urgent need for action related to the climate crisis. Yet, here we are. Here we are. 

My heart is broken with all the suffering and loss, dislocation and death, horror and outrage that we have let decades go by without collectively acting and demanding radical systemic change. So much time has been squandered. Completely and tragically wasted. And the consequences of our inaction is catastrophic and only growing worse.

And now, right now, Hurricane Ian is slamming into Florida with terrifying ferocity and overwhelming power. There are people and other beings who are alive in this very moment who will not be here tomorrow. Yet, the denial and distraction and disinformation and inaction continues. 

DeSantis and others like him are absolute poison. And last night I heard one of the "experts" on CNN who, when asked about this hurricane and so many others and the link to climate change, refused to affirm that the strength of Ian, and the pattern of growing strength of these storms, can be tied to the human caused warming of our planet. He said that he just couldn't say if there's a connection. And there was another human who sold his soul rather than stand in integrity and truth. I wanted to scream at him!!! 

These lies are killing humans, other beings, and a sustainable, habitable planet.There are no greater criminals than those in positions of power who spread the toxic lies that have been the biggest obstacles to our collective mobilization and action to get off the suicidal trajectory we have long been on and instead act to save ourselves. And save our children and grandchildren and all the children of all of the species on Earth.

And we hear all the talk about rebuilding back better and stronger than ever. Where is the talk of the truth — that so many places in Florida, and across our nation and the world, will and are becoming uninhabitable?!? 

It is hard to shake the feelings of outrage, horror, and immense grief that I feel related to how we humans have been so profoundly ignorant, propagandized and polarized, and under the trance of sociopaths in power who f*cking don't care that the human caused climate catastrophe that we're in the midst of now, and which will only grow, could have been prevented or at a minimum greatly lessened if we had begun to change our ways and stop poisoning our Earth Mother decades ago. They don't care.

AND we must care! We must! And we must act! NOW! In the very least, we can dig deep and educate ourselves in an ongoing way. We can share what we are learning and speak the truth again and again and again. We can support those who are acting on the climate crisis and vote out of office those who refuse to do so. We can protest and put our bodies on the line. We can donate to the many causes and activists and politicians and independent journalists who are working to save our hurting, beautiful world. We can do this. Please. 🙏 Molly 

Officials have done little, if anything, with decades of information on the phenomena that are making storms more severe.Photograph by Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty

  Too much climate energy, too little climate action.

 

By Bill McKibben

 

Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in southwest Florida on Wednesday, may join that lineage of truly monster storms—Katrina, Sandy, Camille—whose names are repeated for generations. Ian hit Cuba on Tuesday as a Category 3 hurricane, causing an island-wide blackout that left eleven million people without power. The storm blessedly moved a little to the east overnight, sparing Tampa Bay a direct hit; it cursedly jumped in strength to the very border of Category 5 on the intensity scale, and so Floridians face a deadly combination of roaring wind, surging ocean, and pelting rain. Whatever the eventual damage, it’s already another stark demonstration of what happens when there’s too much physical energy in a closed system, and too little political energy.

 

Physical energy first. We’ve trapped a huge amount of the sun’s heat in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel—the heat equivalent of more than half a million Hiroshima-sized explosions each day. That energy gets expressed in many ways. Some of it drives mammoth heat waves, such as the one that afflicted China for most of the summer. (Next week, the temperature there is forecast to top forty degrees Celsius—a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit—which would be a national record for October.) Most of that excess heat—about ninety-three per cent of it—has gone not into the atmosphere but into the oceans, and that has a direct bearing on storms like Ian. Hurricanes draw their power from ocean heat, and so more storms in recent years have shown an inclination toward what scientists call “rapid intensification,” their winds spinning up rapidly as they pass over patches of particularly hot water (such as, for instance, the current Gulf of Mexico).

 

Some of that energy also melts ice, in glaciers, marine ice sheets, and polar ice caps, and that has started to raise the level of the oceans. But heat also does something else: the molecules in hot water move faster, taking up more space. This “thermal expansion” accounts for about half of the observed sea-level rise so far; together with the melt, it means, as Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections noted, that the water in Tampa Bay is a foot higher than it was in 1921, when a great hurricane devastated the region. (There are also, sadly, particularly high tides this week, attributable not to man but to the moon.) Give a hurricane a foot-high head start and it can do plenty of extra damage.

 

And Ian has another devastating edge on earlier storms: the atmosphere is wetter than before, because warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air can. This is part of the reason that we’ve seen one record-setting rainfall after another in recent years. (Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, dropped five feet of rain on the Texas coast, near Houston, smashing the continental record.) Forecasters are predicting that we could see as much as two feet of rain in parts of Florida from this storm, falling on ground that is already saturated from earlier rains.

 

It’s not as if any of this is a secret: scientists have been explaining each of these phenomena for decades. And yet officials, seemingly lacking the political energy, have done little, if anything, with the information. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis (who may now be wishing that he hadn’t spent funds budgeted to the Florida Department of Transportation on the political stunt of flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month) summed up his level of concern about global warming last year. “What I’ve found,” he said, “is, people when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. We are not doing any left-wing stuff.”

 

Instead, Florida has done what it always does—it has grown, particularly along its coast. Take Cape Coral, a city near where Ian was expected to make landfall. It’s the fastest-growing city in southwest Florida, and part of the eighth-fastest-growing metro area in the United States. New commercial and residential development absorbs about five hundred acres a year. One very much hopes that those acres make it through today unscathed, but that seems unlikely, and the state hasn’t yet managed to fix its rickety property-insurance system, which will make recovery harder for many.   

 

Today’s task for Floridians is survival, and the next week’s task—which the nation should share—is recovery. But the other job is limiting the danger going forward, and it must be approached with the same energy that Ian is bringing onshore this week.

 

Please go here for the original article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/hurricane-ian-is-a-storm-that-we-knew-would-occur