This past June 23, I awoke with a thought I often have on this date. This was the day in 1988 that Jim Hansen went up to Capitol Hill to announce that human-caused global warming had arrived. “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” the then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the U.S. Senate Energy Committee. It made national headlines, only to be met with a deluge of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, whose scientists decades before accurately projected the global temperature increase from burning fossil fuels, and which was funding climate change research as early as 1954. Thirty-six years after Hansen made that statement, the world seems little closer to getting it, thanks in huge part to that fossil industry campaign, by far the greatest corporate crime in history.
The June 23rd anniversary coincided with a heat wave that over the days from June 16-24 roasted 5 billion people in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. Much of the U.S. was sweltering under heat advisories.
Climate Central reported that the global heatwave was on average 3 times more likely to happen because of climate change, and across wide regions up to 5 times more likely. In Mexico and the Southwest U.S., a heatwave that happened in prior weeks was 35 times more likely to happen due to global heating, World Weather Attribution reported. On June 21 Mexico tied its hottest day on record at 125.6°F, while over the course of this year 70% of days in that nation have been extraordinarily hot. Saudi Arabia reported 1,300 heat deaths during this years Hajj pilgrimage, it was reported June 23.
Meanwhile the unusually hot waters of the Atlantic have spurred Beryl, the first hurricane of the year and projected to be the third earliest major hurricane on the books. It is the furthest east any hurricane has formed in June, fueled by the warmest June waters in that region. This animation tells the story.
Beryl could be a precursor for what is likely to be a vicious tropical storm season.
‘Someone needs to remind me what part of the hurricane season we are in as this is very unusual,” tweeted Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel. “I guess these historic warm ocean temperatures are changing the game.”
Heating wasn’t the only extreme in recent days. Across the world drenching rainfalls were producing inundations from Switzerland and Italy to South China and the Indian subcontinent. In the U.S. upper Midwest floods drowned lands and communities in states including Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota. Nearly half of that state was affected, while waters eroded the banks and flowed around the Rapidan Dam, threatening to take it out. Southern Brazil was still recovering from record May flooding and slowly receding waters. Of the half million driven from their homes, 389,000 were still displaced.
“It’s a warning signal, but we’ve been seeing warning signals now for five, 10 years,” said Andrew Harper, a U.N. Refugee Agency climate advisor who visited the area. “At what point do you basically have to slap somebody in the face and say: Wake up…(?)” While world rolls to 1.5° fossil fuels hit record
Harper’s question is one for the world, where fossil fuel use hit record levels in 2023, growing 1.5% over the previous year to release 40 billion tonnes of CO2 for the first time. The share of global primary energy coming from coal, oil and gas was 81.5% barely budging from 2022’s 82%, despite 13% growth in wind and solar energy. That is the story. Certainly wind and solar have been expanding at rapid rates, but are still only a sliver of world primary energy usage, and not enough to keep up with overall growth in world energy demand, particularly in India and China.
Even as fossil fuel use set a record, so did the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, rising at a record rate of 4.7 parts per million from March 2023 to March 2024. The heat-trapping gas does increase faster during an El Niño ocean warming event such as has occurred over the past year. But even as El Niño fades the rate of increase remains high. “This recent surge shows how far we still need to go to stabilize the climate system,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Stabilization will require that CO2 levels start to fall. Instead, CO2 is rising faster than ever.”
Yet a third disturbing record was set in 2023. Global temperatures increased to 1.35°C over the preindustrial baseline of 1850-1900, and by a record margin of 0.27°C. That continued a string of the world’s hottest years on record, 10 in the last 10 years. “After seeing the 2023 climate analysis, I have to pause and say that the findings are astounding,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far . . . We will continue to see records broken and extreme events grow until emissions go to zero”
The world is rapidly rolling toward the 1.5°C temperature increase threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate Summit as the limit to avert the worst climate disruptions. Hansen nowadays is saying we have already effectively breached it, and are seeing an acceleration of global heating. You can read his work here. Those assertions have stirred debate in the climate science community. But we are already moving perilously close. As a February the world had already breached the 1.5°C mark 12 months in a row for the first time on record. Recent months have seen a continuation of record temperatures. Heating has been driven by the El Niño, and some cooling is expected.
In any event, sometime in the coming decade, the world is expected to plow through the 1.5°C barrier and stay there. Carbon Brief projects that likely occurring by 2030, and as soon as 2028, with a 95% chance by 2036. So it is probably time to ditch language such as “so many years to avert catastrophe,” and realize that as a world we are going to cross lines. Instead we need to understand this as a continuum, that each tenth of a degree we avoid is human lives saved and species spared from extinction.
The world sometimes seems like an alcoholic or drug addict. We know our problem. We know it’s going to take us down. Already it is eroding our basic health. We make endless promises to swear off, get off our addictions. But we never really do, and the problem just gets worse. Will we have to hit bottom before we get it? To be forced to do what we should have done years ago? And then how far gone will we be? Will we have triggered climate tipping points that swamp all efforts to deal with the problem? We don’t know. But it is clear there is only one way to begin stabilizing the climate, massive and rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Of course, an end to deforestation and a reform of agriculture are also necessary.
Source: CounterPunch
