What climate change-caused -tastrophe will be next month?
This month’s climate change-caused disaster was the smoketastrophe on the upper east coast. If you have been living under a rock (lucky you), smoke from unprecedented climate change-caused Canadian wildfires was sucked up into a low pressure system that had stalled across the Northeast. This stall is also a characteristic of climate change, where arctic amplification (less temperature difference between mid- and high-latitudes) causes the jet stream to move more slowly west to east, slowing the progression of weather systems that ride on the jet stream, like the stall during Winter Storm Uri, or Hurricane’s Harvey and Sandy.
Air quality in a broad swath of the upper East Coast was twice as bad as ever recorded and rivalled the West Coast event of 2020 that was responsible for 3,000 excess deaths. The fires in Canada have burned 10 million acres so far and it is only the 12th of June. A bad year for Canadian fires is no less than this with a 20-year annual average of 6.7 million acres.
We are just getting started folks. Further warming to 1.5 C may have been ok five or ten years ago; not today. Earth systems are now obviously in collapse. A collapse of any kind does not self-restore, or is even capable of being restored, until the perturbation to the system that caused the collapse (warming) is removed. This is simple tenth grade science and the reason why the Club adopted a warming target that is cooler than today, so these ongoing collapses can stabilize and we can be safe. It’s real simple: we have warmed beyond the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth systems. They are now in collapse so they can re-evolve with species and mechanism that are tolerant of the new conditions.
One of the greatest things with climate restoration vs. further warming to 1.5 C is that, the already significantly increased injustice and inequity caused by our current warming above normal, will be eliminated if we restore our climate back to normal. Not to mention returning the mayhem back to its former rare levels.
Remember: Further warming to the globally accepted 1.5 C target (we are at 1.1 degrees C above normal today) is not restoration. Restoration is cooling Earth to within the evolutionary boundaries of her systems at a temperature that is cooler than today, or cooler than 1 degree C above normal, which is the maximum natural variation of our old climate. |
