What kind of world could we build?

One of the reasons why I write science fiction, is that it’s a way for me to think about what the world could look like, and how it could be different from what I’ve always known. It can be hard to imagine how such a society might work, but fortunately a lot of people over the years have put a lot of thought into societal structures and forms of governance that lack the incentives for injustice and inequality that currently exist. I don’t think I or any other person is capable of giving the “right” answer, but as a collective, we can build on each other’s ideas and strengths, and create things that are better than any one of us could achieve.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what society is all about? Anyway, here’s Thought Slime on that very topic:

Bad news for the Thwaites Glacier

Most of the time, when we talk about melting sea ice, the focus is on the Arctic Ocean. There are a few reasons for this, the biggest one being that sea ice is a much larger part of what happens there, compared to the continent of Antarctica. It’s also a bit easier to measure what’s going on up there. Multiple countries have naval activity under the ice, and they keep track of thickness so they know where their submarines can or cannot surface. There are also many more people living in the Arctic circle, so more people pay attention to what’s happening there, because it affects their daily lives.

There are also three very big considerations when it comes to the rate and impact of global warming. The first is the albedo feedback loop – ice melts, exposing more water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, and so on. Melting sea ice speeds the rate at which warming happens. The second is that as more and more water is exposed for more of the year, the warmth rising from the water pushes arctic air south, leading to the “polar vortex” events with which we’ve become familiar. And last but certainly not least, the ice and low temperatures of the Arctic play a big role (along with salt concentration, also affected by meltwater) in driving the big oceanic currents that bring oxygen into the abyss, and keep northern regions like western Europe nice and warm. As the planet warms and ice melts, it’s expected that those currents will change, causing a huge change in weather patterns all around the planet on top of those we’re already seeing. I will be writing more about that very soon.

All of that is why we most often hear about Arctic sea ice. This post is about what’s happening on the other side of the planet. Ice around Antarctica plays many of the same roles, and it is also being closely monitored, but it gets a bit less press. The biggest news we tend to see is when a particularly large ice shelf breaks up, and that’s what this news is about – a breakup that we’ve been waiting for, and that we’ve been hoping would happen slowly, and not soon.

So much for that.

Scientists have discovered a series of worrying weaknesses in the ice shelf holding back one of Antarctica’s most dangerous glaciers, suggesting that this important buttress against sea level rise could shatter within the next three to five years.

Until recently, the ice shelf was seen as the most stable part of Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized frozen expanse that already contributes about 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. Because of this brace, the eastern portion of Thwaites flowed more slowly than the rest of the notorious “doomsday glacier.”

But new data show that the warming ocean is eroding the eastern ice shelf from below. Satellite images taken as recently as last month and presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union show several large, diagonal cracks extending across the floating ice wedge.

These weak spots are like cracks in a windshield, said Oregon State University glaciologist Erin Pettit. One more blow and they could spiderweb across the entire ice shelf surface.

“This eastern ice shelf is likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs,” she said. “Suddenly the whole thing would collapse.”

The failure of the shelf would not immediately accelerate global sea level rise. The shelf already floats on the ocean surface, taking up the same amount of space whether it is solid or liquid.

But when the shelf fails, the eastern third of Thwaites Glacier will triple in speed, spitting formerly landlocked ice into the sea. Total collapse of Thwaites could result in several feet of sea level rise, scientists say, endangering millions of people in coastal areas.

“It’s upwardly mobile in terms of how much ice it could put into the ocean in the future as these processes continue,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a leader of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). He spoke to reporters via Zoom from McMurdo Station on the coast of Antarctica, where he is awaiting a flight to his field site atop the crumbling ice shelf.

“Things are evolving really rapidly here,” Scambos added. “It’s daunting.”

Pettit and Scambos’s observations also show that the warming ocean is loosening the ice shelf’s grip on the underwater mountain that helps it act as a brace against the ice river at its back. Even if the fractures don’t cause the shelf to disintegrate, it is likely to become completely unmoored from the seafloor within the next decade.

Other researchers from the ITGC revealed chaos in the “grounding zone” where the land-bound portion of the glacier connects to the floating shelf that extends out over the sea. Ocean water there is hot, by Antarctic standards, and where it enters crevasses it can create “hot spots” of melting.

Without its protective ice shelf, scientists fear that Thwaites may become vulnerable to ice cliff collapse, a process in which towering walls of ice that directly overlook the ocean start to crumble into the sea.

This process hasn’t been observed in Antarctica. But “if it started instantiating it would become self-sustaining and cause quite a bit of retreat for certain glaciers” including Thwaites, said Anna Crawford, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews.

This would continue the already measurable acceleration of sea level rise, as NASA reported in 2018:

We’re a very long way away from the scenario in my “flooded Manhattan” stories, and there’s no guarantee it’ll ever get to that point, but we are already seeing things like “ghost forests”, caused by salt creeping into the groundwater as seas rise, and multiple island nations are understandably concerned about their looming inundation. On the whole, I think adapting ourselves to sea level rise could be one of the easier climate problems to solve. It will require a lot of construction work, but that’s one thing that we’re generally quite good at, around the world. As always, I think the bigger problem is ensuring just treatment of those affected as part of a broader fight for environmental justice.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Suffocating Seas: An update on this blog’s namesake climate catastrophe

The title of this blog comes from a frustration I had, back in 2010, about the absurdly optimistic climate scenarios that were being described by politicians and pundits as “alarmist”. At that point in time, I remember people scoffing at the notion that we might see two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and most of the other effects of a warming planet, like crop failures, were largely ignored. Honestly, climate change in general was being largely ignored, which is part of how we got where we are today.

So I started out to write about worst-case scenarios, and the possibility of warming oceans leading to widespread anoxic conditions struck me as particularly worrisome. More on this later, but that exact scenario is the most likely cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as The Great Dying. All the food we get from the sea requires oxygen to survive. Specifically, it requires dissolved oxygen, which means oxygen molecules in the water that are not part of the H2O molecules, but that saturate the space between water molecules. The air we breathe is around 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. In aquatic environments, H2O is roughly analogous to nitrogen in air, when it comes to respiration, but the concentration of oxygen available for “breathing” is much lower. This isn’t a problem – gills tend to be very efficient, and aquatic life has evolved to deal with that. What it does mean is that despite oxygen being a major component of water, most of what’s there isn’t actually usable for breathing. There are a number of factors that affect how much there is, but temperature is a big one, and it’s feeding into a rise in so-called “dead zones”.

As ocean and atmospheric scientists focused on climate, we believe that oceanic oxygen levels are the next big casualty of global warming. To stop this, we need to build on the momentum of the recent COP26 summit and expand our attention to the perilous state of oceanic oxygen levels—the life support system of our planet. We need to accelerate ocean-based climate solutions that boost oxygen, including nature-based solutions like those discussed at COP26.

As the amount of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, not only does it warm air by trapping radiation, it warms water. The interplay between oceans and the atmosphere is complex and interwoven, but simply, oceans have taken up about 90 percent of the excess heat created by climate change during the Anthropocene. Bodies of water can absorb CO2 and O2, but only to a temperature-dependent limit. Gas solubility decreases with warming temperatures; that is, warmer water holds less oxygen. This decrease in oxygen content, coupled with a large-scale die-off of oxygen-generating phytoplankton resulting not just from climate change, but from plastic pollution and industrial run-off, compromises ecosystems, asphyxiating marine life and leading to further die-offs. Large swaths of the oceans have lost 10–40 percent of their oxygen, and that loss is expected to accelerate with climate change.

The dramatic loss of oxygen from our bodies of water is compounding climate-related feedback mechanisms described by scientists in many fields, hundreds of whom signed the 2018 Kiel Declaration on Ocean Deoxygenation. This declaration has culminated in the new Global Ocean Oxygen Decade, a project under the U.N. Global Ocean Decade (2021–2030). Yet, despite years of research into climate change and its effect on temperature, we know comparatively little about its effect on oxygen levels and what falling oxygen levels, in turn, may do to the atmosphere. To address this unfolding crisis, we need more research and more data.

In the past 200 years, humans have shown remarkable ability to change the planet by altering the timescales in which the Earth cycles chemicals such as CO2. We need to evaluate any possible solutions for their impact on not just greenhouse gases but other critical elements of life, such as oxygen levels. As the financial world invests in climate change solutions focused on CO2 drawdown, and possibly including future geoengineering efforts such as iron fertilization, we run the risk of causing secondary harm by exacerbating oxygen loss. We need to evaluate potential unintended consequences of climate solutions on the full life support system.

Beyond enhanced monitoring of oxygen and the establishment of an oxygen accounting system, such an agenda encompasses fully valuing the ecosystem co-benefits of carbon sequestration by our ocean’s seaweed, seagrasses, mangroves and other wetlands. These so-called “blue carbon” nature-based solutions are also remarkable at oxygenating our planet through photosynthesis. The theme of COP26 chosen by the host country (U.K.) was “nature-based solutions.” And we saw a lot of primarily terrestrial focused (forestry) initiatives and commitments that are an excellent step forward. We hope this year’s conference and next year’s COP27 help oceanic nature-based solutions to come into their own, propelled by the U.N. Global Ocean Decade.

Putting oxygen into the climate story motivates us to do the work to understand the deep systemic changes happening in our complex atmospheric and oceanic systems. Even as we celebrated the return of humpback whales in 2020 to an increasingly clean New York Harbor and Hudson River, dead fish littered the Hudson River in the summer as warmer waters carried less oxygen. Ecosystem changes connected to physical and chemical systems-level data may point the way to new approaches to climate solutions—ones that encompass an enhanced understanding of the life support system of our planet and that complement our understanding of drawdown to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Roughly 40 percent of the world depends on the ocean for their livelihoods. If we do not stop marine life from oxygen-starvation, we propagate a further travesty on ourselves.

I think it’s important to understand that not all life on Earth has the requirement for oxygen that is common among the organisms that surround us. Because we require an environment with a certain oxygen saturation, we simply don’t interact with life forms that rely on, for example, sulfur as an electron receptor. This applies both on land and in the water, but possibly the most common anoxic environment on Earth is the muck under bodies of water. When oxygen concentration dips low enough, anaerobic life gets to come out and play, and that’s bad for us aerobic critters. If a dead zone becomes permanent, rather than seasonal like the ones described in the article I quoted, then the rise in anaerobic life, and its waste products, will mean that lack of oxygen will not be the only problem – you also see a rise in sulfur compounds that are poisonous to us all by themselves. It may also be possible for sulfide-saturated waters to release toxic gas that could suffocate coastal areas.

Our oceans are so huge that it’s hard to wrap our heads around the scale. From everything I’ve read, it should be thousands of years before heat-driven dead zones in the oceans start gassing low-lying land, but it does seem to be a real possibility. Furthermore, I think it’s worth remembering a few things:

The first predictions of global warming due to fossil fuel emissions, in the 1890s, projected a timeline of 3,000 years to the “palm trees growing in Sweden” mark. As it stands today, I think we will be lucky if it takes 300 from the same starting point (meaning we’re over a century in), and the most common refrain from living climate scientists seems to be that everything is happening faster than anyone expected.

Chemical changes like this aren’t really something a lot of people are talking about, but I think if they do happen, it will be similar to how sea level rise has been happening – unevenly, and more or less destructive depending on local conditions. It will be a long time before we get to the water levels in my “flooded NYC” stories, but we’ve already seen the city’s subways flooded a number of times in the last few years. I don’t think it’s out of the question for there to be localized “gas events” driven by aquatic dead zones centuries before anoxic conditions exist in a majority of our oceans.

We are living through an event unlike anything our species, or any of those with which we share the planet, have experienced. Knowledge of our history can help us, but it cannot guide us. The reality is that things are moving fast, and the only certainty we have is that the world in which our civilization was born no longer exists, and this new one is not pulling its punches.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Rich people from the U.S. emit more than rich people of other countries, but there’s more to it than just that

This weeks’ theme, for those who missed it, is news that’s not surprising to anyone.

Science, in theory, provides reliable information about reality because after someone conducts research and figures out something new, other scientists come along and test their results, using their instructions. This is a good system, and it has worked. That said, it’s also very often not what actually happens. Because of how our society is structured, if you want to do research, and you’re not independently wealthy, you have to convince someone with money to fund your work. More often than not, that means you have to make the case that your research, no matter what it’s about, is somehow vitally important to solving some contemporary problem. You can’t just look into the physiology of shrimp because there are unanswered questions, you have to convince someone that doing so will either make a lot of money, or will save the world. This leads to grandiose claims in some cases and fraud in others, but it also means that it’s often hard to get funding for research that has already been done. Reproducing the results of other researchers is generally not valued by people with money.

This means that mistakes and fraud can be overlooked until someone tries to apply the erroneous research to a new study, and reality disagrees with the hitherto accepted understanding. This is very like an attempt to reproduce the first study, but it’s less conclusive than doing so directly, and it can take years for such errors to come to light. That is why I’m generally in favor of research into “obvious” topics. Checking people’s work is good, and it makes it less likely that we’ll have policy inadvertently rooted in nonsense.

In the case of studies like this one, it’s also worth quantifying, because we live in a society that is both science-obsessed, and scientifically illiterate. Being able to cite a study that covers a specific topic like the relative emissions between different populations of rich people is sometimes the only way to get someone to admit that reality.

That rich people release more carbon than poor people is no surprise, but I find it valuable that this study compares income groups to each other and to comparable income groups in other countries.

This idea of “emissions inequality” underscores how nations that are contributing to climate change the most are disproportionately affecting regions that produce far less greenhouse gases. But the report by the World Inequality Lab also shows that the wealthiest citizens of the U.S. and other countries are more responsible for rising temperatures than people who earn less money in those same nations.

In North America, the top 10 percent of people by income produce nearly 73 tons of carbon dioxide per person annually. In Europe and East Asia, the top earners release 29 tons and 39 tons, respectively.

At the other end of the income spectrum, however, the bottom 50 percent of North Americans emit 10 tons per person annually. In Europe and East Asia, the same category of earners release 5 tons and 3 tons, respectively.

“It is striking that the poorest half of the population in the US has emission levels comparable with the European middle 40 percent, despite being almost twice as poor,” the report states.

One reason is because the U.S. energy mix is more carbon intensive and there is a greater reliance on bigger, less efficient vehicles.

The report finds that if total emissions were divided by the global population, each person would release roughly 6.6 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That’s about twice as much as is required to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by midcentury and well above the 1.1 tons per person needed to hold warming to 1.5 C.

Average emissions vary greatly by regions. People in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, emitted just 1.6 tons of carbon in 2019 compared with 20.8 tons for each person living in North America.

But inequalities within countries are growing, a shift from 1990 when the average person in rich countries contributed more carbon pollution than anyone else worldwide, according to the report.

The top 10 percent of emitters today are responsible for nearly half of all CO2, while the bottom 50 percent produce just 12 percent of total carbon pollution, the report finds. And while per capita emissions have decreased for poorer people in rich countries, they have increased substantially among the world’s richest 1 percent.

“Global economic inequality fuels the ecological crisis and makes it much harder to address it,” World Inequality Lab co-Director Lucas Chancel said in a statement. “It’s hard to see how we can accelerate efforts to tackle climate change without more redistribution of income and wealth.”

Having those numbers is useful for the propaganda war. The whole notion of “carbon footprints” is, in my view, an effort to individualize a systemic, collective problem, and convince people that they have to achieve carbon neutrality themselves, within a society that makes it incredibly difficult to do so. In other words, it’s a way to slow or prevent action, and it’s a trick I’ve fallen for myself. Another part of that shifting of responsibility is best exemplified by the comparisons made between the United States and China. The U.S. has made some progress in slowing the growth in our emissions rate, and at the same time, China’s emissions have been rising. Once China became “the biggest emitter” in 2007, those opposing climate action in the U.S. began using that to distract from historic emissions, and to say that the U.S. shouldn’t have to do anything unless China did as much or more. The problem with this argument is that it ignores the way U.S. corporations moved their manufacturing to China, among other places. A sizable portion of China’s emissions come from the production of goods sold in the United States and other places around the world. Fortunately, this report actually tries to account for that, which gives us an adjusted emissions calculation that considers emissions taking place outside the borders of the country to which they are assigned, which also means accounting for emissions within a given country that are driven by a different country:

The emissions levels outlined in the report differ from the way countries typically count their carbon contributions under international compacts like the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The report includes emissions produced within a country—its “territorial emissions”—as well as those embedded in the goods and services that a country imports and consumes—what’s known as its “carbon footprint.”

Using that calculation, the report finds that Europe’s carbon footprint is 25 percent higher than its territorial emissions. The carbon footprint for East Asia, where the bulk of the world’s goods are produced, is 8 percent lower than its territorial emissions.

“Factoring in the carbon that is embedded in the consumption of goods and services increases the inequality between high- and middle- to low-income regions, compared with when we count territorial emissions only,” the report states.

It’s also the best way to measure emissions associated with different standards of living, it concludes.

“From an equity perspective, it probably does make sense to talk about the carbon that you’re consuming in your country,” said Aaron Cosbey, a senior associate and carbon market expert with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, who was not involved with the report.

Changing the way emissions are reported, however, would require agreement among all the countries involved. And there are winners and losers from moving to a different system.

It matters how we talk about things. It matters how we frame discussions. A “heartwarming story” about elderly people volunteering to help their favorite restaurants with a labor shortage can also be seen as people who don’t need money taking away leverage that those who do still need a paycheck to survive could have used to negotiate for a living wage.

It’s honestly encouraging to see an analysis like this that accounts for the degree to which the global economy is interconnected, and to which nations – especially the United States – literally externalize things like pollution.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

A hotter planet means more extreme weather. Extreme weather means more expensive food.

Maybe lack of surprise is going to be a theme this week…

Agriculture, throughout human history, has been heavily dependent on predictable weather conditions. We have crops for every climate in which we live, but, they’re always tailored to the natural conditions, or to alterations like irrigation that rely on natural conditions. That means that we’ve known for a long time that, as climate change is now well underway and has planet-sized momentum, that our food supply will be affected. Just as increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere means that the planet will trap more heat until the new “insulation” is saturated, there’s no scenario in which that warming doesn’t change agriculture.

This past year has been a rough one for agriculture, and because our ability to access food is tied to markets and capitalism’s endless need for profit, that means that food prices are rising.

Global food prices in November rose 1.2% compared to October, and were at their highest level since June 2011 (unadjusted for inflation), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its monthly report on December 2. After adjusting for inflation, 2021 food prices averaged for the 11 months of 2021 are the highest in 46 years.

The high prices come despite expectations that total global production of grains in 2021 will set an all-time record: 0.7% higher than the previous record set in 2020. But because of higher demand (in part, from an increased amount of wheat and corn used to feed animals), the 2021 harvest is not expected to meet consumption requirements in 2021/2022, resulting in a modest drawdown in global grain stocks by the end of 2022, to their lowest levels since 2015/2016.

The November increase in global food prices was largely the result of a surge in prices of grains and dairy products, with wheat prices a dominant driver. In an interview at fortune.com, Carlos Mera, head of agri commodities market research at Rabobank, blamed much of the increase in wheat prices on drought and high temperatures hitting major wheat producers including the U.S., Canada, and Russia.

Drought and heat in the U.S. caused a 40% decline in the spring wheat crop in 2021, and a 10% decline in the total wheat crop (spring wheat makes up about 25% of total U.S. wheat production). Economic damages to agriculture in the U.S. are expected to exceed $5 billion in 2021, according to Aon (see Tweet below). The highest losses are expected in the Northern Plains, where the spring wheat crop was hit hard by drought and heat. Fortunately, the 2021 U.S. corn crop was estimated to be the second largest on record, 7% larger than in 2020. The 2021 soybean crop was also estimated to be second largest on record, up 5% from 2020.

[…]

According to Reuters, global fertilizer prices have increased 80% this year, reaching their highest levels since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Primary causes of the current high prices include extreme weather events (particularly the February cold wave in Texas and Hurricane Ida in August), which disrupted U.S. fertilizer production, and the high cost in Europe of natural gas, a key component in producing fertilizer). Fertilizer shortages threaten to reduce grain harvests in 2022, according to CF Industries, a major fertilizer producer.

Carlos Mera of Rabobank pointed out that Russia, a major wheat producer, hiked its export tax on wheat this year to incentivize keeping supplies at home. “That is quite scary,” said Mera. “Events like the French Revolution and the Arab Spring have been blamed on high food prices.” High wheat prices in 2011 (in the wake of export restrictions triggered by the 2010 drought in Russia) helped lead to massive civil unrest and the toppling of multiple governments (the “Arab Spring”).

As I will keep saying, we need to make radical changes to how we produce food, if we want to avoid mass starvation in my lifetime. More than that, as the article mentions, food shortages will cause political unrest and war, which in turn is bad for the environment, bad for agriculture, and in case this needs to be said, bad for humans. I’m also very worried that the nationalistic, and in some cases piratical behavior by wealthy and powerful nations will mean that the pattern of enforced poverty will continue, unless those of us living in those nations stand up to our own governments, in solidarity with those whose lives will be destroyed to keep us fed and happy.

I’m writing this as Storm Barra, which Wikipedia tells me is a “hurricane-force bomb extratropical cyclone”, rages outside. There has been some rain, but most of what I’ve noticed has been the wind. My area is already pretty windy, but this storm is really highlighting the degree to which cold temperatures haven’t been a problem here. Damp, and the mold it brings, is a constant concern, so there hasn’t been a lot of pressure to do things like make sure windows and their frames are fully sealed (it’s free ventilation!), and the flat has vents to the outside in every room. This means that while our home provides real shelter, it’s also very drafty, and doesn’t hold heat very well.

I’m wearing a wool sweater, a wool capote, and a fleece-lined wool hat over my clothes, because I don’t want to waste the gas or the money to keep the flat at a more comfortable temperature. It always strikes me as strange when I’m thinking about the horrors caused by global warming, while dressing like I’m outdoors to keep warm; it’s also the nature of climate change. The cold and darkness of winter can make it easy to feel like this crisis is still far enough away that we have time, but the numbers consistently point in the same direction – we’ve been out of time for a while now, and we should probably start acting like it.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

A glimpse of the distant future if we utterly fail

I’ve become so accustomed to the fact that climate change increases both droughts and floods, that when I saw research on the precipitation patterns during “hothouse earth” eras, I immediately assumed that it was about an extreme version of that pattern. It turns out I was both forgetting what “hothouse” really means, and underestimating how strange weather patterns can get at high planetary temperatures. While I think it’s possible we could reach these temperatures again, it wouldn’t be any time soon, even in the worst-case scenarios scientists look into. At the moment, I think it’s looking like we’ll see warming of around 5-6°F (I’m using Fahrenheit because this research report does) by 2100, whereas this research was looking into conditions far beyond that.

 Today, we are experiencing the dramatic impacts that even a small increase in global temperatures can have on a planet’s climate. Now, imagine an Earth 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than today. Earth likely experienced these temperatures at various times in the distant past and will experience them again hundreds of millions of years from now as the sun continues to brighten.

Little is known about how the atmosphere and climate behaved during these so-called hothouse periods. In a new study, researchers from Harvard University found that during these epochs of extreme heat, Earth may have experienced cycles of dryness followed by massive rain storms hundreds of miles wide that could dump more than a foot of rain in a matter of hours.

“If you were to look at a large patch of the deep tropics today, it’s always raining somewhere,” said Jacob Seeley, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at Harvard and first author of the paper. “But we found that in extremely warm climates, there could be multiple days with no rain anywhere over a huge part of the ocean. Then, suddenly, a massive rainstorm would erupt over almost the entire domain, dumping a tremendous amount of rain. Then it would be quiet for a couple of days and repeat.”

“This episodic cycle of deluges is a new and completely unexpected atmospheric state” said Robin Wordsworth, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the study.

There’s always the caution that these results are from a climate model, but the reality is that these models were good enough to predict the cooling effect of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and as you are no doubt aware, computers and our ability to use them have both improved somewhat in the last 30 years. Climate models these days can do a pretty good job of mimicking realty. So back to the original article – they wanted to see how the atmosphere and water cycle would respond to a 64x increase in atmospheric CO2, leading to sea surface temperatures of 130°F

At those temperatures, surprising things start happening in the atmosphere. When the air near the surface becomes extremely warm, absorption of sunlight by atmospheric water vapor heats the air above the surface and forms what’s known as an “inhibition layer,” a barrier that prevents convective clouds from rising into the upper atmosphere and forming rain clouds.

Instead, all that evaporation gets stuck in the near-surface atmosphere.

At the same time, clouds form in the upper atmosphere, above the inhibition layer, as heat is lost to space. The rain produced in those upper-level clouds evaporates before reaching the surface, returning all that water to the system.

“It’s like charging a massive battery,” said Seeley. “You have a ton of cooling high in the atmosphere and a ton of evaporation and heating near the surface, separated by this barrier. If something can break through that barrier and allow the surface heat and humidity to break into the cool upper atmosphere, it’s going to cause an enormous rainstorm.”

That’s exactly what happens. After several days, the evaporative cooling from the upper atmosphere’s rainstorms erodes the barrier, triggering an hours-long deluge. In one simulation, the researchers observed more rainfall in a six-hour period than some tropical cyclones drop in the U.S. across several days.

After the storm, the clouds dissipate, and precipitation stops for several days as the atmospheric battery recharges and the cycle continues.

The researchers are clear that the temperature increase they looked at far exceeds anything scientists are now predicting, but it’s fascinating to think about what life would be like – assuming humans could survive anywhere on such a planet – a cloudburst cycle like that. If we do enough in our lifetimes, we should be able to prevent those temperatures from occurring within the next billion years or so (yes, I’m ridiculously optimistic about humanity’s capacity to survive), but it’s sobering to think how radically different this familiar planet can become.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Dwindling water supplies highlight the need for systemic change.

Our modern society was born in a period of relative climatic stability. Regional climate change did destroy various civilizations, but most of the planet remained stable enough for the various human populations to thrive.

A crucial product of that stability has been access to fresh water. That’s why our biggest cities grew by lakes and rivers, and in more recent years, why we’ve been able to expand in dry regions by tapping into vast deposits of underground water. We’ve known for some time that our consumption has far outstripped the ability of aquifers to replenish themselves, but it seems that we’ve reached a point at which some will never recover:

Under a best-case scenario where drought years are followed by consecutive wet years with above-average precipitation, the researchers found there is a high probability it would take six to eight years to fully recover overdrafted water, which occurs when more groundwater is pumped out than is supplied through all sources like precipitation, irrigation and runoff.

However, this best-case scenario where California has six to eight consecutive wet years is not likely because of the state’s increasingly hot and dry climate. Under a more likely, drier climate, there is less than a 20% chance of full overdraft recovery over a 20-year period following a drought.

The Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food and is home to around 6.5 million people. Using too much groundwater during and after droughts could soon push this natural resource beyond the point of recovery unless pumping restrictions are implemented. The study finds recovery times can be halved with modest caps on groundwater pumping in drought and post-drought years.

“This is really threatening,” said Sarfaraz Alam, a hydrologist at Stanford and lead study author. “There are many wells that people draw water from for drinking water. Since [groundwater is] always going down, at some point these wells will go dry and the people won’t have water.”

In ages past, the human populations in California would respond to this by collapsing. Many would die, many would migrate away from whatever had caused the wells to dry up, and some would stay. Those who stayed survived because they were able to adapt their community practices to the new conditions.

There are places that currently have plenty of water, but as the temperature rises, so does water consumption, and there’s no place on the planet that’s “safe” from the warming climate. Migrating will absolutely be part of how we cope with climate change (which is why it’s so important to end our nationalistic obsession with borders) but at the same time we will all be forced to confront the other two options: adapt or die.

The need for us to radically change how we use and dispose of water is almost as important as the need to stop our greenhouse gas emissions. That’s one reason I like the idea of moving food production indoors, where water can be more easily recycled, and temperatures can be controlled. It’s also why I think that the kinds of power generation we use should vary depending on regional and local conditions.

We’ve spent centuries behaving as though we were separate from nature, and many of us are consequently unused to adapting ourselves to the material conditions of our local ecosystem. It’s a thing we need to re-learn, and because I also think we absolutely need to retain the use of technology and science, it’s a thing we need to re-invent. I believe it’s possible to have a high-tech human society that can exist as a conscious part of the global ecosystem, and as stewards of it. I also believe that doing so will require us to let go of expectations about our lives that are rooted in a world that no longer exists because of the societies that gave us those expectations.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Solar panels and shade: using “negative space” to increase climate resilience

I’m generally a fan of solar power, both photovoltaic and thermal. As I’ve said for a while now, I think our best bet for a resilient society is to have a diverse set of tools available, so that the strengths of one kind of power generation can help reinforce the weaknesses of another. I like distributed power generation for its potential to make it harder to control people’s access to electricity, which in turn gives more political power to everyday folks, similar to how a solid mutual aid network or strike fund can allow communities to survive unexpected hardship or to win the “siege” of a strike. I also very much like the portability of solar panels. As circumstances like rising sea levels or persistent heat force us to abandon some of the places in which we currently live, the whole process will be much easier if we can bring our power sources with us.

One problem with solar power is that whether you’re using mirrors to concentrate heat, or photovoltaic cells to generate electricity, both depend on a large surface area covered in the relevant material to “catch” enough sunlight to use. While I don’t buy the idea that we can run our entire society with just wind or just solar, scaling up renewable power in general can potentially conflict with the equally important goals of re-wilding parts of the landscape, and growing “carbon crops” for sequestration.

The solution that’s most commonly offered – at least for photovoltaic power – is to mount the panels on places like rooftops or parking lots, where there’s already guaranteed direct sunlight. I like this for a lot of reasons. Part of it is that it provides a failsafe for individuals and communities – if your building generates at least some of the power you use, that’s a huge benefit for surviving the various dangers of the growing climate crisis. At the same time, there are things that require a lot of power in one place, and power is always lost in transmission. That’s one reason why the whole “we could power the whole planet if we just cover a section of the Sahara with solar panels” idea has never actually been seriously considered – even with magically indestructible transmission lines, too much power would be lost getting to to where people live.

Rooftops are nice because they generally have at least some correlation to the amount of power being used; more people consume more power, and more people means more rooftops. On the other hand, I think as the temperature continues to rise, cities are going to need to introduce a lot more plant life if they want to keep outdoor temperatures at survivable levels. It’d be nice if I didn’t feel the need to keep saying it, but we’re at the point where we need to be deliberately engineering our surroundings to account for lethal heat. If we can, it would be wise for us to also take some action to help our ecosystems cope with the chaos we’ve caused. Fortunately, with solar panels, there’s a way to do that while also getting the benefits of centralized solar farms.

While we should be reducing our use of highways for rapid transit lining those that we do have with solar panels, either on the roadside or even covering parts of the highway is one option. Another is covering canals.

California’s water system is one of the largest in the world and brings critical water resources to over 27 million people. Brandi McKuin, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study, found that that shading the canals would lead to a reduction in evaporation of water, kind of like keeping your glass of water under the shade instead of out in the open on a hot summer day prevents evaporation from stealing sips. Putting up a solar panel using trusses or suspension cables to act as a canal’s umbrella is what makes the double-whammy of a solar canal.

“We could save upwards of 63 billion gallons of water annually,” she says. “That would be comparable to the amount needed to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland, or meet the residential water needs of over 2 million people.” Water is of especially critical importance to California, a state regularly stricken with drought.

The actual water savings aren’t huge, but there are also benefits to shading the water that go beyond losing less to evaporation:

Aquatic weeds also plague canals and can bring water flow to a standstill, but the researchers found that by adding shade, and decreasing the plant’s sunshine slashes the amount of weed growth. McKuin says preventing weed growth would also lighten the load for sometimes costly mechanical and chemical waterway maintenance.

As usual, the United States is lagging a bit behind on this one. India has been covering canals with solar panels for some time now, and have found that not only does it keep the canals cooler and more functional for human use, but the lower temperatures and limited sunlight reduce algal blooms that can make people sick, and that suck oxygen out of water, making it difficult for organisms like fish to survive.

Not only do we get those benefits, but the evaporation that does occur also helps keep the solar panels cool, improving their efficiency:

And while the water can benefit from the solar panels above, so do the panels from the water below. The running water helps the panels to remain cool, which increases their efficiency by at least 2.5-5%.

As most articles I’ve read on this point out, the up-front cost of solar farms over water tend to be higher than building on dry land, but I hope I don’t need to point out that cost should not be the primary concern when responding to global climate chaos. I’d like to see more research into the effects of things like shading ponds, lakes and rivers, but with those feeling the burn of climate change too, I think it’s worth trying out.

Going forward, I think there’s going to be a lot of austerity propaganda surrounding climate change. Whenever society has a ruling class, those rulers will always talk about the need to show “the resilience and ingenuity of our people”, by making everyone else suffer more, so that those at the top don’t have give up their power.

There are a lot of ways to combat that, but one is to relentlessly insist on framing the conversation about what collective investments will yield the biggest improvements to life for people in general. Reducing algal blooms and creating shaded swimming and boating areas, for example, could make a hotter climate far more bearable, and we’re going to need as much “more bearable” as we can get.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Machine learning and complex information: How much of humanity has been affected by climate change?

A few years ago, I was working as a curriculum writer at a non-profit science education research company called TERC. The company has been around for a long time, but its central purpose, as I understand it, is to study how people teach and learn science of all sorts, with the goal of improving the process for both teachers and students. This means that while my job was to write lesson plans, readings, and so on, it was always as part of a larger research project. The difficulty with this sort of research is that if you’re trying to actually assess how well students understand the subject before and then after an attempt to teach it to them, you can’t just rely on an easily generated dataset like a multiple choice test. The best way to gauge a person’s understanding of a subject is to have them explain it, in their own words, to someone whose understanding is already good enough to assess the answer.

So how can you conduct data analysis on data that’s not in a simple numerical form?

You find a way to convert it.

For example, let’s take a basic question: What does the term “ecological mismatch” mean? Define it, and give an example.

For those who are unfamiliar, “ecological mismatch”, at least in the context of climate change, refers to a situation in which the seasonal patterns of different species that normally line up, cease to do so. For example, there are numerous bird species that breed in North America during the spring and summer, but fly south to South or Central America to avoid the cold winters. Why do they put in all the effort to make such a long trip? Why not just stay in the south? Because the explosion of insect and plant life in the northern spring provides an abundance of food far beyond the day to day in their more tropical “winter homes”.

The problem is that as the climate has warmed, spring has begun to come earlier to North America, and for those birds wintering around the equator, their evolved migratory instinct relies on Earth’s orbit around the sun, which is almost entirely unaffected by global warming. That means that their migration signal has stayed the same, but spring is coming earlier, so they arrive later in the season. The food supply that made this a successful behavior isn’t always there by the time they arrive. The timing is mismatched. This means the insects they’d normally eat have a population boom, as do the birds that don’t migrate as far. That in turn can affect plant populations, other insect populations, and so on.

So. We ask a class full of people to answer this question, and what we get is a mix of responses. Some are blank or completely wrong. Some get the definition mostly right, but the example wrong. Some get the example right and the definition wrong. Some get both right. Our goal, as researchers, is to convert this qualitative data into quantitative data, so that we can run it through equations, make graphs, and so on. One could simply go with “right” or “wrong”, but that’s going to give us an inaccurate picture. The students who are partly right do have some understanding of the subject. We could split it into three options – right, partially right, and wrong. That’s also not quite right, because it doesn’t tell us what they’re partly right about; so we split it into four – right, partly right (about the definition), partly right(about the example), and wrong. Now, with options 1, 2, 3, and 4, and a clear definition of each, we can go through everyone’s answer to the question, give it a number, and actually analyze the overall pattern of understanding.

And now we’re ready to teach the lesson.

Then, you give the same test after the lesson, break it down the same way, and compare the two to see how the overall level of understanding changed. Ideally, each student will be assigned a number so you can compare them to themselves, as well as looking at the group as a whole (the data should be anonymized as much as possible, both to protect people’s privacy in published data, and to prevent conscious or subconscious bias). There was also a long process of systematizing the instructions for evaluating these quizzes so that multiple qualified people would fairly reliably get the same results going through the same process. Remember: with research part of the goal is to ensure that strangers can reproduce what you did from your publication.

We generally didn’t do a quiz like this for a single lesson. The ideal was a full unit of about a week (longer if possible) to test what did or didn’t work, and the “after” quiz would be on the last day of the unit. Each quiz would have a mix of short- and long-answer questions, and once the framework for “coding” the tests was established, someone on the team would have to go through and code every test from every student, with checks on tough calls (you’d be amazed at how many ways there are to be almost right or partly wrong about a question like this), enter the numbers into a spreadsheet, and then we could start actually analyzing the data.

This is to answer a few relatively straightforward questions about how well students understand the subject matter we presented to them.

Now let’s get to the actual point of this article, and look at a different question – How much of the human population has been directly affected by climate change?

As before, we need to break the question down, so we know what answers we’re actually looking for. Obviously we need to define what it means to be affected by climate change. Going broadly, let’s say “forced to change behavior in some way (movement, spending, place of residence, etc.) by weather that would not have caused that change absent warming caused by humans”. That means we need to determine which weather phenomena count as “normal”, and which ones can be attributed to the rise in temperature. In many cases, that’s a matter not just of determining whether climate change influenced a given event, but how much of that event was due to higher global temperatures. Would the storm surge have breached the levees if sea levels were an inch lower? Would the storm have been as powerful if the planet was a degree cooler? Trying to figure this stuff out is very difficult and time-consuming, for those with the task of actually quantifying it.

And again, that’s just for one event, like a hurricane. We’re trying to see what patterns there are on a global scale, which means our best bet is to look at the answers that have already been given – the numerous publications on individual weather events, and how they affected people, and while all of these studies do have quantitative data, they’re often studying different things, using different methods, which means the numbers they get can also mean different things. Ideally, again, you would have a team of people who already know the subject matter very well, to analyze each publication and make sure the overall data analysis actually says what we think it does. If you’re being thorough, that means having a team examining over 100,000 studies of many different weather events, and generating a dataset that will give us results we can trust.

It’s a monumental amount of work – possibly more work than could reasonably be done by a group of experts.

So some folks trained computers to do it for them.

Increasing evidence suggests that climate change impacts are already observed around the world. Global environmental assessments face challenges to appraise the growing literature. Here we use the language model BERT to identify and classify studies on observed climate impacts, producing a comprehensive machine-learning-assisted evidence map. We estimate that 102,160 (64,958–164,274) publications document a broad range of observed impacts. By combining our spatially resolved database with grid-cell-level human-attributable changes in temperature and precipitation, we infer that attributable anthropogenic impacts may be occurring across 80% of the world’s land area, where 85% of the population reside. Our results reveal a substantial ‘attribution gap’ as robust levels of evidence for potentially attributable impacts are twice as prevalent in high-income than in low-income countries. While gaps remain on confidently attributabing climate impacts at the regional and sectoral level, this database illustrates the potential current impact of anthropogenic climate change across the globe.

The debut of the remarkable new word “attributabing” not withstanding, this approach to meta-analysis could end up being hugely useful in helping people in general keep up with the massive collective effort known as “science”. There are millions of scientific papers published every year, from people all over the planet. Our collective knowledge is such that it’s impossible for any person to read the current research on all but the tiniest fraction of it, and yet we need to have at least some general grasp of these issues if we want to have any control over our future as a species. Our capacity to understand what’s happening around us and respond accordingly is one of our greatest strengths as a species, but climate change is happening at a scale that’s a bit outside what we can easily wrap our minds around. That’s probably part of why we’ve gone so long without treating global warming as the crisis it is.

From a Washington Post article on the study:

In the United States, climate disasters have already caused at least 388 deaths and more than $100 billion in damage this year, according to analyses from The Washington Post and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Yet despite a pledge to halve emissions by the end of the decade, congressional Democrats are struggling to pass a pair of bills that would provide hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy, electric vehicles and programs that would help communities adapt to a changing climate.

The contrast between the scope of climate disasters and the scale of global ambition is top of mind for hundreds of protesters who have descended on Washington this week to demand an end to fossil fuel use.

“How can you say that we are in this climate emergency and be going around and saying we’re at this red point … and at the same time be giving away land for additional oil and gas infrastructure?” said Joye Braun, a community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who rallied in Washington this week.

The activists, many of them from Indigenous communities that have been harmed by global warming, risked arrest as they remained on the sidewalk outside the White House after police ordered them to clear the area.

The new research in Nature adds to a growing body of evidence that climate change is already disrupting human life on a global scale. Scientists are increasingly able to attribute events like heat waves and hurricanes to human actions. In August, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change devoted an entire chapter to the extreme weather consequences of a warming world.

The study’s conclusion that 85 percent of humanity is experiencing climate impacts may sound high. But it’s “probably an underestimation,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.

The study looked at average temperature and precipitation changes, rather than the most extreme impacts, for which Otto says there is even more evidence of climate change’s role.

“It is likely that nearly everyone in the world now experiences changes in extreme weather as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

The human toll of these events has become impossible to ignore. This summer, hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest died after unprecedented heat baked the usually temperate region. More than 1 million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as a historic drought morphs into a climate-induced famine. Catastrophic flooding caused New Yorkers to drown in their own homes, while flash flooding has inundated refugee camps in South Sudan.

In a letter released Monday, some 450 organizations representing 45 million health-care workers called attention to the way rising temperatures have increased the risk of many health issues, including breathing problems, mental illness and insect-borne diseases. One of the papers analyzed for the Nature study, for example, found that deaths from heart disease had risen in areas experiencing hotter conditions.

“The climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” the health organizations’ letter said.

As Braun points out in the quote above, the feeble “climate response” plans of most governments become a sick joke when put next to continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction, and the unwillingness of groups like the Democratic Party to do more than just say they care about the issue. It’s hard to tell if it’s malice or delusion, but in either case, it’s a problem, and it feels like they’re hoping people will just continue to underestimate the scale of what’s happening. Things like this new research could help us make a more compelling case for the change we need, by making it harder to wave the problem away. That said, the resources going into understanding what’s happening around the world aren’t much better distributed than wealth has been in this era of colonialism and neoliberalism:

Yet in many of the places that stand to suffer most from climate change, Callaghan and his colleagues found a deficit of research on what temperature and precipitation shifts could mean for people’s daily lives. The researchers identified fewer than 10,000 studies looking at climate change’s effect on Africa, and about half as many focused on South America. By contrast, roughly 30,000 published papers examined climate impacts in North America.

In poorer countries, the researchers say, roughly a quarter of people live in areas where there have been few impact studies, despite strong evidence that they are experiencing changes in temperature and precipitation patterns. In wealthier countries, that figure stands at only 3 percent.

“But it indicates that we’re not studying enough,” Callaghan said, “not that there isn’t anything happening.”

Otto attributes this discrepancy, known as an “attribution gap,” to a lack of capacity and funding for research in poor countries, as well as researchers’ tendency to reflect the priorities of wealthy nations.

In South Sudan, for example, efforts to understand flooding have been stymied by conflict and the difficulty of collecting weather data in the world’s youngest country.

Liz Stephens, an associate professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, wrote in an email that the Global Flood Awareness System from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service is “notoriously bad” at forecasting flooding in the White Nile and Blue Nile river basins. Without good data, scientists can’t easily say what places are likely to be deluged or warn when a disaster is about to hit. Officials may be caught off guard by weather events. Vulnerable people are less able to get out of harm’s way.

South Sudanese officials say half a million people — about 4 percent of the country’s population — have been displaced by the floods.

But the “attribution gap” makes machine-learning-based analyses like Callaghan’s all the more valuable, Otto said. These programs can help identify climate impacts even in places where there are not enough scientists studying them.

“It seems a very useful way … to understand better what climate change is costing us today in a global way that is more bottom-up,” Otto said.

A September study in Nature found that 60 percent of Earth’s oil and fossil methane gas and 90 percent of coal must remain in the ground for the world to have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a threshold that scientists say would spare humanity the most disastrous climate impacts.

Increasingly, groups are calling on President Biden to restrict fossil fuel production outright.

On Wednesday, a coalition of more than 380 groups filed a legal petition demanding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Two days later, hundreds of scientists submitted an open letter asking Biden to do the same.

“The reality of our situation is now so dire that only a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel extraction and combustion can fend off the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” they wrote.

In response to Monday’s protests, however, American Petroleum Institute spokeswoman Megan Bloomgren said curbing the country’s energy options would harm the economy and national security. “American energy is produced under some of the highest environmental standards in the world,” she said.

In other words, they have no intention of changing course.

The difficulty in studying climate change in regions currently suffering from things like war or the effects of climate change, is one part of why it’s so important to stop the imperialist policies of the United States in particular, and wealthy countries in general – the pattern for the last century and beyond has been for powerful nations to subject the less powerful ones to debt, invasions, coups, assassinations, death squads, and more, all in the name of securing the “interests” of a tiny ruling class. This is what drives the obscenely high emissions of the U.S. war machine, and the overthrow of regimes – like that of the Brazilian Workers Party, or the Bolivian Movement for Socialism – that are committed to both eliminating poverty and finding a way for us to live that doesn’t destroy the ecosystems on which we rely.

We can’t adapt to what’s happening if we don’t know what’s happening, and if we’re still focused on narrowminded ideas like profit and nationalism, we won’t have the resources to study the problem, let alone prepare for what’s coming.

If we want to avoid an unprecedented tide of death, we’re going to need truly revolutionary change in our political and economic systems. The alternative could well be extinction.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and due to my immigration status in Ireland this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Folks on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. are going to need help

Hurricane Ida will hit Louisiana later today, and it seems like it’s going to hit New Orleans. It’s a smaller storm than Katrina was, but it’s also a stronger storm. A fair amount of money has gone into making New Orleans more storm-proof since 2005, but I have to admit I’m worried it won’t be enough. I’ll probably write more about this in the coming days, but in the mean time, I guess I have a diffuse call to action.

First, if you’re in the area and still trying to evacuate, check your routes – if the traffic is too bad, you could get caught out in your car when the storm hits, and that’s more likely to be bad than not. If you’re not out already, take shelter.

For everyone else, start making plans and gathering resources. Pitch in to efforts to get help to those affected, but more than that, make plans to push the federal government hard. Both Republicans and Democrats have a history of favoring austerity even in disasters, and I don’t generally have high hopes for Democratic leadership. Maybe they’ll see this as an opportunity to prove they could have done better on Katrina than Bush did, but I worry. Find your members of Congress and push them to call for ending their vacation early to deal with the crisis. If they refuse, ask them why their vacation is more important than human lives. Do it on camera if you can.

When it comes to things like donating goods, please pay close attention to what’s actually needed. Disasters like this turn everything upside down, and conditions on the ground can render some goods more or less useless.

Also bear in mind that we’re still in the middle of the pandemic, and there are plenty of people who still aren’t vaccinated. Many may be anti-vaxxers, but many have been unable to get time or access to the shots. That’s another thing that may be best solved through political action.

As always, I hope this post will be proven to be needlessly pessimistic, but with the hot conditions leading to a stronger storm, and the ongoing pandemic, I fear that every hour without action by the federal government will kill more people. Do what you can with the power you have, and take care of yourselves and each other.