Cassandra's World II

The Overlook

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Thursday at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it).  Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

          Last week, the COP26 – international climate summit – began in Glasgow. It continues this week with literally billions of people needing to see if the nations will agree to substantial changes. The best comparison of what could happen was the Paris climate agreement. Before it was reached, the world was on track to heat up nearly 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would be catastrophic. Six years later, thanks to the rapid growth of clean energy, we’re on pace to have a 3-degree increase.

Yes, that is progress. The bad news is that it is not nearly enough to avoid devastating consequences. Pledges were made by many countries to slash emissions even faster to limit total warming to 2.4 degrees or less. But what is needed is no more than a 1.5 increase. If the representatives in Glasgow, especially the larger emitters like China and the U.S., do not commit to a new and more effective pledge, we cannot wish the results away but must prepare for them as best we can with increasingly jeopardized resources.

Of all the effects of climate change, the most significant one is heat. That is the mother ship. Every impact we are experiencing is because of a warming planet. To repeat a telling tidbit from last week’s column, since the 19th century, when the Industrial Age got traction, Planet Earth has warmed 1.1 degree Celsius. Numerous studies have projected that the world will warm by at least 1.5 degree Celsius not by 2100 but in the next two decades. Every way you look at it, our planet is getting hotter, and everything in climate change flows from that like lava.

Unless you are a denier or simply don’t care, it is hard to dismiss recent weather events as coincidences or aberrations. I’m not going to inundate you with all kinds of data, but some – not conjecture, supposition, or opinion but scientific facts – are necessary to illustrate our situation. According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the mid-summer month this year, July, was the hottest month on record. It was 1.67 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th century average of 60.4 degrees, beating the previous record set in July 2016 which was then tied by the Julys in 2019 and 2020. This comes after June 2021 was the hottest ever June recorded in North America. Asia and other continents saw record-tying and record-setting temperatures too.

But things cool off in autumn, don’t they? Let’s look at last month, October. The average temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 57.0 degrees F, 2.9 degrees above the 20th-century average, making it the sixth-warmest October in 127 years.

All right, let’s have a consensus that the Earth is warming – it has been for much of the 20th century and it will continue to do so this century. Again, you can believe this is from man-made causes like carbon emissions or a natural cycle we’re in. The belief matters much less than the evidence of scientific facts. Most important is what are the impacts confronting us now and in at least the near future?

A study published in Spring 2020 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stated that during the next 50 years up to one-third of the world’s population is likely to live in areas that are considered unsuitably hot for humans. Right now, only 25 million live in the world’s hottest areas -- just one being the Sahara region of Africa – where the average annual temperature is 84 degrees. (Remember, the Earth’s average is nearing 61 degrees.) But with the world population expected to be 10 billion by 2070 that means as many as 3.5 billion people could inhabit those hot zones. Some of them could migrate to cooler areas, but that would bring economic and societal disruption with it.

The migration issue will be addressed in a later installment. For now, let’s wrap our heads around the expectation that when my granddaughter, Cassandra, is still not 50 years old, at least 3 billion people will be trying to inhabit uninhabitable areas. These could include portions of the United States. Millions will die every year, and you can extrapolate the consequences of such a huge heat pandemic.

A major consequence of hotter temperatures is drought. The heating of the Earth is causing wider parched areas. The most basic component of life is water, and the irony is as saltwater rises and absorbs more land the earth is running out of fresh water. India is a poster country for this. At least 21 of its cities are soon to face “Day Zero,” when its piped water sources will run dry. In Chennai, which has 8 million people, the monsoon season brought 55 percent less rainfall than average. As a result, many of its residents were forced to stand in long lines in sweltering heat to receive a small ration of water. The Indian government estimates as many as 600 million people are dealing with high to extreme water shortages. Diseases, which could include the origin of the next pandemic, are close behind given that people in cities like Chennai have turned to open defecation as a way to reduce water usage and are reusing dirty water for cooking and cleaning.

 Droughts such as this one are affecting more areas annually, subjecting more people globally to land that can’t grow crops and support animals, as well as more violent storm activity, such as tornadoes inland and hurricanes and cyclones along the coasts. This is not a political issue and I am not blaming anyone for anything.

In case you’re not terribly interested in climate-change consequences in India, let’s look in our own backyard. Recently, the New York Times reported that the “western United States is locked in an extreme drought that is one of the worst on record,” adding, “Much of the Southwest is in the throes of a megadrought.” This has lasted, and gotten worse, since 2000. And the region is in the driest 20-year period since the last megadrought in the 1500 and the second-driest since the 800s.

Drier conditions mean more fires. Every year in the U.S., the wildfire season is longer. And such fires are becoming more violent and even unprecedented. Remember the Dixie fire in California earlier this year? In addition to all the acres and structures it consumed, there was a science fiction-like but real aspect to it. That blaze was so big, it created its own weather system. Towering storm clouds burst from the flames, generating lightning and wind that further pushed the fire in every direction. The Dixie fire created eight firestorms and at least one fire “whirl,” a sort of mini-tornado. In the past, this may have been viewed as a once in a century or a once in a decade event. However, we will have Dixies every year, and perhaps more than one at the same time. How can firefighters cope with any enemy getting stronger while their resources – especially water – dwindle?

The megadrought means a lot less of that water. An obvious impact – which Californians and other Southwesterners are experiencing – is being persuaded and even forced to use less water for showers, toilets, cooking, and even drinking. This will affect utilities too. For the first time since it began operating five decades ago, the Oroville dam in California has stopped producing electricity because the reservoir has dipped to just 24 percent capacity, which to too low to generate power. The Shasta Lake dam at the top of the Sacramento Valley, at 30 percent, could be next.

What about agriculture? Many farmers in the Southwest are in desperate straits as their crops dry out or they have been unable to plant at all. Cattle and other stock are coming close to dying of thirst. More and more, we will see this worsening situation reflected in the prices of meat and produce as well as their availability, plus the other financial ramifications of farmers getting deeper into debt and going out of business altogether.

Just a thought: Given that we can construct pipelines extending hundreds of miles to carry oil, couldn’t we also build pipelines to transport water from areas in the U.S. with plenty to areas that are running out? Conceivably, yes. But two concerns: (1) Who will pay for these pipelines? Will people in Pennsylvania and Vermont and Virginia be willing to chip in to help Texas and California and Arizona? (2) Can it happen politically? Forget the money – as divided a country as we are, one that can’t all get behind the best way to defeat Covid, how can we expect a united effort to make sure every U.S. citizen has access to water?

So we’re going to have more fires, more intense fires with shocking outcomes, and less water and other resources to fight them . . . not to mention the exhaustion year after year of the firefighters. One other thing (sigh): As we saw this year, the smoke from these fires travels thousands of miles and has an impact on the air quality of communities around the country. In turn, more people with respiratory ailments will be at higher risk and more people will develop such problems. Will more New Yorkers and Bostonians have to remain indoors for months at a time because of fires raging west of the Missouri River?

In a 2018 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a part of the United Nations, concluded the planet can sustain a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees C without seeing some of the worst effects of climate change “including the destruction of ecosystems, the disappearance of some island nations and unpredictable changes to weather patterns.” The same nonpartisan report contends that the only way to prevent the global temperature from surpassing that threshold is to be on a path to stopping carbon-dioxide emissions (or at least pull out more than we put in) and have renewable energy provide at least 70 percent of global electricity.

However, since that report was issued, it is clear (even through the smoke) we are not making much progress on that direction. The heat is indeed on.

Let’s leave that issue for now. Next week: Stormy weather.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Tombstone, Blood and Treasure (with Bob Drury), and Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, just published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.