Climate Links: 9/11/17

This is how your world could end. Peter Brannen. The Guardian. Sep. 7 2017.

In an extract from his book Ends of the World, Peter Brannen examines mass extinction events and the catastrophic outcome of rising temperatures for all the world’s population

Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary. 

If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by as much as 18C and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. This is a warming spike of an even greater magnitude than that so far measured for the end-Permian mass extinction. If the worst-case scenarios come to pass, today’s modestly menacing ocean-climate system will seem quaint. Even warming to one-fourth of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved or on which civilisation has been built. The last time it was 4C warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 80 metres higher than it is today. 

I met University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber at a diner near his campus in Durham, New Hampshire. Huber has spent a sizable portion of his research career studying the hothouse of the early mammals and he thinks that in the coming centuries we might be heading back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago, when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle. 

“The modern world will be much more of a killing field,” he said. “Habitat fragmentation today will make it much more difficult to migrate. But if we limit it below 10C of warming, at least you don’t have widespread heat death.” 

In 2010, Huber and his co-author, Steven Sherwood, published one of the most ominous science papers in recent memory, An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress. 

“Lizards will be fine, birds will be fine,” Huber said, noting that life has thrived in hotter climates than even the most catastrophic projections for anthropogenic global warming. This is one reason to suspect that the collapse of civilisation might come long before we reach a proper biological mass extinction. Life has endured conditions that would be unthinkable for a highly networked global society partitioned by political borders. Of course we’re understandably concerned about the fate of civilisation and Huber says that, mass extinction or not, it’s our tenuous reliance on an ageing and inadequate infrastructure, perhaps, most ominously, on power grids, coupled with the limits of human physiology that may well bring down our world.

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Today, the most common maximums for wet-bulb temperatures around the world are 26C to 27C. Wet-bulb temperatures of 35C or higher are lethal to humanity. Above this limit, it is impossible for humans to dissipate the heat they generate indefinitely and they die of overheating in a matter of hours, no matter how hard they try to cool off. 

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What that means is that this limit is likely far too generous for human survivability.
“When you do real modelling, you hit a limit much sooner, because human beings aren’t wet socks,” he said. According to Huber and Sherwood’s modelling, 7C of warming would begin to render large parts of the globe lethally hot to mammals. Continue warming past that and truly huge swaths of the planet currently inhabited by humans would exceed 35C wet-bulb temperatures and would have to be abandoned. Otherwise, the people who live there would be literally cooked to death.

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... the US Midwest is going to be one of the hardest hit,” said Huber. “There’s a plume of warm, moist air that heads up through the central interior of the US during just the right season and, man, is it hot and sticky. You just add a couple of degrees and it gets really hot and sticky. These are thresholds, right? These aren’t just like smooth functions. It gets above a certain number and you hurt yourself very badly.”

China, Brazil, and Africa face similarly infernal forecasts, while the already sweltering Middle East has what Huber calls “existential problems”.

interview based on his book:
The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses. Peter Brannen



Systemic Change Driven by Moral Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Richard Heinberg, EcoWatch. Aug. 14, 2017.

Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS TURNING DEHYDRATION INTO A DEADLY EPIDEMIC. Jane Palmer, JSTOR Daily. Sept. 7, 2017.


Season of Smoke. Naomi Klein, The Intercept. Sept. 9, 2017.

In a summer of wildfires and hurricanes, my son asks "why is everything going wrong?"

on a sidenote:
How Much the US Economy Has Recovered For Most Workers. Ian Welsh. Sept. 10, 2017.