Global warming reached central Greenland (over a decade ago)

Even with all of our fancy technology, fieldwork in places like central Greenland remains difficult and dangerous. The conditions are unforgiving, and the ground is treacherous. That’s why, despite the global importance of studying the ice sheet, expeditions into the heart of that island aren’t particularly common. A recently published study shows the results of an effort to update our ice core data. Previous cores from the 1990s didn’t show clear evidence of warming, but the new data, extending to 2011, is very different:

“The time series we recovered from ice cores now continuously covers more than 1,000 years, from year 1000 to 2011. This data shows that the warming in 2001 to 2011 clearly differs from natural variations during the past 1,000 years. Although grimly expected in the light of global warming, we were surprised by how evident this difference really was,” says AWI glaciologist Dr Maria Hörhold, lead author of the study. Together with colleagues from AWI and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, she analysed the isotope composition in shallow ice cores gathered in central-north Greenland during dedicated AWI expeditions.

[…]

The AWI researchers have now extended the previous datasets up to winter 2011/2012 by a dedicated redrilling effort, recovering time series unprecedented length and quality. The temperatures were reconstructed by using consistently one single method for the entire record in the lab: measuring concentrations of stable oxygen isotopes within the ice, which vary with the temperatures prevailing at times of ice formation. Previous studies had to draw on a range of different climate archives and combine results to reconstruct temperature, introducing much larger uncertainties in the assessment of natural variability.

In addition to the temperature, the team reconstructed the melt production of the ice sheet. Melting has increased substantially in Greenland since the 2000s and now significantly contributes to global sea-level rise. “We were amazed to see how closely temperatures inland are connected to Greenland-wide meltwater drainage – which, after all, occurs in low-elevation areas along the rim of the ice sheet near the coast,” says Maria Hörhold.

As Dr. Hörhold stated, this result was, to some degree, expected. The planet has warmed so much, and has been reacting to that warming so much, that there was very little chance that it wouldn’t be detectable by 2011. It’s nice that scientific understanding of the climate is good enough that expectations more or less match reality, but obviously it’d be nice if things were moving a bit more slowly. These data don’t change what needs to be done, and they don’t really change the urgency. It’s certainly frightening to hear that one of the coldest places of the earth is warming so dramatically, but I think it’s good to remember that our need for swift action is not driven by models or ice cores, but by the effects that the tiny amount of warming we’ve seen so far is already having on humanity.

I recently had a bit of a discussion with a longtime reader about the eugenicist history of the environmental movement, and it’s a good reminder of the importance of centering humanity as a whole in how we respond to environmental crises and injustices. A lot of environmentalism over the last century has followed the notion that humanity is somehow separate from the rest of this planet’s biosphere, and that advances in technology are some level of “unnatural”. This has been used, at times, as a justification for the under-development of the so-called Global South. Efforts to stop deforestation, for example, put the focus on the people doing it, rather than the systemic factors that made put them in that position in the first place.

The first example of a better approach that I personally saw was at the Kakamega Rainforest in Kenya. During the Moi regime, someone lower down in the government came up with the idea of putting a tea plantation around the rainforest, and employing the locals to work there. The basic idea was to provide them with a means of survival other than hunting in the forest. I’m sure it’s far from a perfect solution, but it was the first time I’d seen an environmental project that focused on the factors that caused people to do “bad” things.

That arrangement, however, still relies on the notion that keeping people out of “nature” is the best way to safeguard that nature from “human nature” as defined by a colonialist, capitalist society. The modern movement for environmental justice is trying to be something different, centering humanity’s right to personal autonomy and self-governance as inseparable from the environmental issues facing us. It aims its ire not at the people who are actually doing the clear-cutting, but on the global capitalist system its endless drive for ever-increasing profit, humanity and nature be damned. We’re trying to build something new, informed by science like this Greenland study, as well as science surrounding humans and our history. That’s why it’s good to know about this research, even though I honestly think that it should not affect your day to day life much if at all. This stuff informs me, but it’s not what drives me, if that makes sense.

And on that note, this study gave us another interesting finding – it turns out Greenland sort of has its own microclimate, separate from the rest of the Arctic:

Another exciting finding from the study: the climate of the Greenland Ice Sheet is largely decoupled from the rest of the Arctic. This could be shown in comparison with the Arctic-wide temperature reconstruction ‘Arctic 2k’. Although ‘Arctic 2k’ is an accurate representation of the circumpolar region, it does not reflect the conditions in central Greenland. “Our reconstruction now offers a robust representation of temperature evolution in central Greenland, which has proven to have a dynamic of its own,” says Prof. Thomas Laepple, AWI climate researcher and co-author of the study. “Actually, we had expected the time series to strongly covary with the warming of the Arctic region,” Laepple reports. But the authors have an explanation for these differences: the ice sheet is several kilometres thick; because of its height, Greenland is more affected by atmospheric circulation patterns than other parts of the Arctic. Temperature time series on the Arctic with regional resolution are needed, says Laepple, in order to reliably describe climate change in the Arctic.

I periodically run into people on Twitter and such places who insist that the world is too complex for us to ever understand or influence, and I honestly find that to be a bit of a depressing outlook. The last person that told me that had also openly said that he doesn’t need to know what climate scientists have to say about all this. That seems like a very self-limiting approach to life. It’s like he’s in Plato’s cave, and someone went out, saw the rest of the world, came back and told him about it, and he just dismissed them without even turning his head.

The world is complex – wonderfully so. It sometimes feels as though most of our problems come from people who desperately want that to not be the case. Personally, I love finding out that the Greenland ice sheet is such a massive chunk of ice that it stands out from the rest of the Arctic, a place that’s rather well known for having a lot of ice. Maybe I’ve just achieved some level of enlightened detachment, but stories like this give me just a glimpse of what it might be like to watch this incredible, planet-spanning change take place from the point of view of a scientist who is somehow not emotionally invested in the outcome.

It’s just a glimpse, because I am emotionally invested, but it’s still there. Nothing like this has ever happened in human history, and it’s teaching us all sorts of things about how the many interlocking systems of this planet function. We’re seeing how it affects migratory species that don’t rely on weather for migration cues. We’re seeing how it affects animals’ body sizes, and plants’ toxicity. We’re seeing how changes in the Arctic affect life thousands of miles away. We’re seeing what happens when a species creates chemical compounds that never existed before, and spreads them across the planet.

It often sucks to be a part of it, but it is absolutely fascinating to watch. I think it helps that I feel like I’m more or less doing what I’m able to at this point in time. I’d like to do more, but I’ve come to accept that I have limits on what I’m can to do, and when can do it. All of that buys me enough space to be able to appreciate how cool it is that people were able to go drill a few holes in the ice in north-central Greenland, and get so much intelligible information about the world’s past and present from that. For all the man-made horrors beyond our comprehension, it’s still a strange and wonderful world.

Thank you for reading! If you found this post enjoyable or interesting, please share it around! Due to my immigration status, my writing is my only source of income right now, which is why I like to “pass around the hat” now and then for people’s spare change. Supporting me on Patreon can cost as little as three or four cents per day, and when enough people join in, even those $1/month pledges add up. There’s not currently much in the way of patron-only content, but my $5 patrons do have the option to name a character in the fantasy novel I’m currently working on, so if you like my fiction and want to immortalize yourself, or someone you know, then giving me money may just be your best option!

Video: Positive Leftist News from December (and late November), 2022

Obviously I’m a bit behind in posting this, but better late than never. The December edition of Positive Leftist News covers “massive” turnout for late November’s National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, MA to honor the Native people whose genocide was whitewashed by the Thanksgiving myth. On the other side of the continent, a similar demonstration drew 400 people to call for the protection of California’s shell mounds, burial sites from a number of Indigenous nations that are threatened by capitalist developers.

In labor news, PLN highlights the international organization and solidarity shown by the “Make Amazon Pay” demonstrations that took place on November 25th in over 30 countries across five continents. I very much hope to see this kind of international action more in the future. A few days  before, a new cross-sector service union was formed in the United States, called the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), and they are demanding, of course, better pay and working conditions. There had been a niggling worry in my mind about how well people would be able to organize in the atomized modern workplace, but it seems like the answer to that is “pretty well”. This union represents people in retail, gas station, fast food, and care work across the Southern U.S., and frankly I find it uplifting to see all of these people finding solidarity in their fight for their rights.

In South Korea, truckers defied their government’s order to end their strike. In Zimbabwe food industry workers are fighting for better treatment as well. Specifically, it’s brewery and sugar workers. It seems that among other things, they’re dealing with wage theft like workers in the U.S. Small-scale farmers in the socialist republic of Tanzania have been working together for decades to fight back against the economic forces that have been pushing them down, and the plans they put together this year focus on acroecology, food sovereignty, fighting against evictions by developers – sometimes whole villages have been evicted – and economic justice. Apparently they’ve been working to build up something that sounds like credit unions. It’s encouraging to see that work continue, and I fully support their work for not just Pan-African solidarity, but a recognition of the need for global solidarity.

In Montreal, London, and Dublin, demonstrators marched for tenants rights and housing for all. I’m ashamed to admit that I did hear about the Dublin demonstration, but couldn’t muster the energy to go. I intend to be more active in that regard in 2023.

Greece saw great turnout for their annual demonstrations to honor the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against a U.S.-backed military junta.

Columbia announced the release of prisoners from its 2021 national strike, and Columbia’s new president declared them to be “guardians of peace”.

Elon Musk’s incompetent flailing at Twitter led to a bunch of big corporations, including Lockheed Martin and Eli Lilly, collectively losing billions on the stock market. I doubt it did them any real harm, because consequences are only for the peasantry, but it was fun to watch them freak out a little because an impersonator pretended they could be anything other than evil.

A Dutch court ordered compensation for victims of an illegal Dutch military airstrike in Afghanistan. Don’t hold your breath for the U.S. to follow that example.

Barbados seems to be having a winning streak. They ditched the British Monarchy, demanded reparations from British aristocrats involved in colonialism, and now their courts have struck down two laws that discriminated against LGBTQ+ people.

France seems to be on track to make abortion a constitutional right.

The governor of Oregon, US, commuted the sentences of all 17 death row inmates in that state, calling the death penalty immoral.

The students of the University of Stirling, in Scotland, have voted to make the university’s menu 100% plant-based, as part of their commitment to reduce carbon emissions, calling out all the universities that produce research pointing to emissions from animal agriculture, while doing little to nothing in response to that research.

  And last but very much not least, a new museum and clinic is to be opened in Montgomery, Alabama, to honor the “Mothers of Gynecology – enslaved women whose torture at the hands of white doctors built the foundations of modern gynecology. I’m not a fan of the way the article describes this as “sacrifice”, which seems to minimize the horror of what happened, but I think that this museum, clinic, and training facility seem like a good way to honor their memories, provide for people in need of care, and help work to prevent such atrocities from being committed in the future. Amidst everything that’s been happening in the U.S., I find it uplifting to see this kind of work continuing.

The video and linked articles have quite a few more details, but I figured I’d try to give a summary for those who won’t be watching the video for whatever reason.

As ever, all we have is us, and it’s when we work together for the good of all, that we are at our strongest.

Scientists: It’s dangerous to assume we’ll be able to cool the planet later this century

A month or two ago, I heard some politician/executive type person saying that there wasn’t any real concern with the likelihood that we’ll overshoot our climate “goals”. His reasoning was that the goal was to be under two degrees warming by the end of the century, maybe that’ll mean that we overshoot, and spend 2060-2100 bringing the temperature back down through stuff like carbon capture. I don’t remember who it was, or where I heard it (Found it! It was Shell CEO Ben van Beurden talking to John Stewart (in this video)). I also have no idea whether he believed what he was saying, but I doubt that matters. The level of irresponsibility is honestly breathtaking, given that this dude is certainly not going to be around for the period in question. He’s just cheerfully declaring that his grandkids will deal with it. Clearly the dogma of “personal responsibility” has always been projection, just like all other conservative rhetoric.

Meanwhile, back in reality, we have research confirming what anyone who’d been paying attention already knew: passing the goals set by the Paris climate agreement is unlikely to be temporary

“To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than 1°C—we are currently already at about 1.2°C,” noted study co-author Jonathan Donges, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The latest IPCC report is showing that we’re most likely on a path to temporarily overshoot the 1.5°C temperature threshold.”

The researchers examined various scenarios with peak temperatures from 2°C to 4°C. As lead author and PIK scientist Nico Wunderling explained, they found that “the risk for some tipping events could increase very substantially under certain global warming overshoot scenarios.”

“Even if we would manage to limit global warming to 1.5°C after an overshoot of more than 2°C, this would not be enough as the risk of triggering one or more global tipping points would still be more than 50%,” Wunderling said. “With more warming in the long-term, the risks increase dramatically.”

I’ve long felt that we have already passed some tipping points, such that even if we eliminated most or all of our CO2 emissions, we’d keep warming, albeit more slowly. This is by no means a confirmation of that belief, but I think it does imply that whether or not I’m right, we should be acting with a great deal more urgency. That is also why I keep insisting that we should be planning for life in a hotter planet, and we should expect “too hot” to be the norm for at least a century, probably much longer. Barring a political or technological revolution on a scale that I find unlikely (though that won’t stop me from trying), we’re headed for rough times.

Of course, there’s also the fact that the more it warms, the more it’s likely to keep warming, which is why I think our preparations need to include dealing with our emissions. We have to do everything at once. I’m not kidding about the time frame, either. What we do over the next fifty years or so is likely to set the climate trajectory well into the future:

Study co-author Ricarda Winkelmann, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at PIK, pointed out that “especially the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are at risk of tipping even for small overshoots, underlining that they are among the most vulnerable tipping elements.”

“While it would take a long time for the ice loss to fully unfold, the temperature levels at which such changes are triggered could already be reached soon,” she said. “Our action in the coming years can thus decide the future trajectory of the ice sheets for centuries or even millennia to come.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire climate would be as “doomed” as the ice sheets – it may be that we could get to a point where the collapse of the ice sheets will continue even if cool back down significantly. Unfortunately, that kind of long-term risk isn’t limited to the ice – it threatens other systems like the Amazon rainforest, which could be turned into grassland even without continued clear-cutting. What’s possibly even more worrying is the risk to ocean currents:

An analysis of the Amazon released in September by scientists and Indigenous leaders in South America stated that “the tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in some areas of the region,” meaning portions of the crucial rainforest may never recover—which could have “profound” consequences on a global scale.

A study on the AMOC from last year, also published in Nature Climate Change, warned that the collapse of the system of currents that carries warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic “would have severe impacts on the global climate system,” from disrupting rains that billions of people need for food and increasing storms to further threatening the Amazon and ice sheets.

Donges stressed that “even though a temporary temperature overshoot would definitely be better than reaching a peak temperature and remaining there, some of the overshoot impacts may lead to irreversible damages in a high climate risk zone and this is why low-temperature overshoots are key here.”

Pointing to estimates that current policies could lead to an average global temperature of up to 3.6°C by 2100, Donges declared that “this is not enough.”

As Winkelmann put it: “Every tenth of a degree counts. We must do what we can to limit global warming as quickly as possible.”

Neither the actions that we have taken so far, nor the actions that have been promised, are not enough. “Better than nothing” is, you know, better than nothing, but we’ve got beyond the obscene callousness shown by rulers to their subjects, and entered an era where we can see a murderous scorn for the entirely of humanity, extending indefinitely into the future.

Or, you know, maybe they’re just deluding themselves, and they’re driving us to extinction out of ignorance. As far as I can tell, there’s no material difference for the rest of us. It’s clear that they cannot be talked into actually giving a shit about anything but themselves. Hell, we can barely get the media to even pay attention to the issue. Hell, a guy literally set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court to draw attention to the issue, and it felt like it barely made a ripple. I have an almost compulsive urge to find a way to end every post on a positive note, but sometimes it’s just hard to find a silver lining. I’m sure the darkness of the season isn’t helping my mood, but for all some progress was made in this last year, it’s progress on a scale that would have been more appropriate two or more decades ago.

Climate change has already killed millions of people, and we’re still getting what feels like less than half-measures, while those at the top are allowed to literally steal billions from workers, and legislators are concerned with their “right” to engage in insider trading. As far as I can tell, there is no line. There’s no “tipping point” at which those in charge will do the right thing. We have to do it ourselves. I’ll be updating my direct action post some time in early 2023, so if you have suggestions to improve it, feel free to let me know. We’ve got a lot to do, and it’s still hard to figure out how to go about doing it in a world so clearly shaped to make us spend all our energy enriching those at the top.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

The U.S. is about to freeze. Stay warm, and help others if you can!

It looks like the U.S. is headed for another devastating cold snap driven by the increasingly distorted polar vortex. I’ve seen no indication that places like Texas are any better prepared to deal with this than they have been for such events in the past. As is usual for this sort of thing, anarchist groups on the ground are doing what they can.

 

 

The infuriating reality is that even people with shelter are going to get hit by this, and I’m willing to bet a lot of people didn’t have the resources to do much preparation. In this age of endless recovery those with the means to make a difference at the systemic level clearly have no interest in doing so, and so it’s left folks on the ground with the time, energy, and tools to help both neighbors and strangers.

Try to stay safe and warm, and help others if you can. Remember to *always* run generators outdoors, even if that means you have to crack a door or a window for the cable. Far too many people die of carbon monoxide poisoning when cold weather hits and the power goes out, and we need you – yes you – to be alive, so no gassing yourself! I’ve always found enjoyment and a degree of beauty in cold weather, but that’s because I’ve always known I have the means to get warm. I want a world in which that’s the default (and *not* because of global warming), but we’re not there yet.

If you want more updates on this sort of thing, you can follow It’s Going Down on Mastodon.

The land defenders of the world are right: To save ourselves, we must protect the forests.

I have to say, I really enjoy the metaphor of a Jenga tower, for the way the world is going. Blocks are being removed to build the top to new heights, with no concern for the overall instability being created. Sea level rise, chemical pollution, habitat destruction, extreme weather, fascism, decaying capitalism, new diseases – things are feeling pretty unstable right now. To extend the metaphor, a lot of what we are trying to do is to add blocks at the bottom to re-stabilize things. Some of that is social – adding new “stabilizers” like universal healthcare, free mass transit, reliable access to power, housing, food, and water, and so on. And some of it, as we so often discuss here, is ecological – actively working to add new “blocks” through things like rewilding, while also working to prevent the blocks that remain from being taken like so many others to add to the top.

Specifically, to disentangle ourselves from the metaphor, we need to preserve existing, and especially old wilderness. This is not some kind of “it was better before humans messed everything up” nostalgia or something. As I’ve written about before, ancient trees bring resources and stability that younger forests simply lack. The research we’re looking at today underscores the importance of old-growth trees when it comes to drought resistance:

A new analysis of more than 20,000 trees on five continents shows that old-growth trees are more drought tolerant than younger trees in the forest canopy and may be better able to withstand future climate extremes.

The findings highlight the importance of preserving the world’s remaining old-growth forests, which are biodiversity strongholds that store vast amounts of planet-warming carbon, according to University of Michigan forest ecologist Tsun Fung (Tom) Au, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Global Change Biology.

“The number of old-growth forests on the planet is declining, while drought is predicted to be more frequent and more intense in the future,” said Au, lead author of the study published online Dec. 1 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Given their high resistance to drought and their exceptional carbon storage capacity, conservation of older trees in the upper canopy should be the top priority from a climate mitigation perspective.”

The researchers also found that younger trees in the upper canopy—if they manage to survive drought—showed greater resilience, defined as the ability to return to pre-drought growth rates.

While deforestation, selective logging and other threats have led to the global decline of old-growth forests, subsequent reforestation—either through natural succession or through tree planting—has led to forests dominated by increasingly younger trees.

For example, the area covered by younger trees (<140 years old) in the upper canopy layer of temperate forests worldwide already far exceeds the area covered by older trees. As forest demographics continue to shift, younger trees are expected to play an increasingly important role in carbon sequestration and ecosystem functioning.

“Our findings—that older trees in the upper canopy are more drought tolerant, while younger trees in the upper canopy are more drought resilient—have important implications for future carbon storage in forests,” Au said.

“These results imply that in the short term, drought’s impact on forests may be severe due to the prevalence of younger trees and their greater sensitivity to drought. But in the long run, those younger trees have a greater ability to recover from drought, which could be beneficial to the carbon stock.”

It’s good that younger trees are able to bounce back, and it shows the validity of re-foresting, but the unique properties of old-growth forests are another reason why, as I said last time I wrote about this, it’s important to defend what we have. The work that land defenders are doing in Atlanta, and other places around the world, benefits all of us, even if we never, ever actually walk under those trees, or have to deal with the cops that want to cut them down. When it comes to ecosystems on the other side of the world from you, think of them like your city’s water treatment plant, or the power plant, miles and miles away, that’s generating your electricity. The way those ecosystems affect the air and water does actually impact your life, albeit indirectly.

The one upside of inheriting a world that’s been ravaged by greed for the last couple centuries, is that there are so many ways we could start improving things. Some of that can be done directly, right now, and I have immense respect for those who put their bodies between our environment and destruction, as well as those that provide them with material support. It’s also worth noting that in some cases, their work puts them in clear, immediate danger, especially when they’re indigenous.

We’ve been fortunate, in that the “Jenga tower” of our world had a lot of blocks to remove, so it’s taken a while, for the instability to become obvious. It’s also very good that, while much has been lost, there’s still a fair amount of land out there that’s relatively “untouched”, in addition to the various “younger” ecosystems. It sometimes bugs me that I keep coming back to the need for political change, but at the end of the day, most of the big problems in the world lead back to our political and economic status quo. Support land back, support land and water protectors, and do what you can to build collective power and move other people to the left. We’re blessed with an abundance of opportunities for making the world better, but a lot of them are time-limited, so there’s no time to lose!

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Whales, Carbon Sinks, and Eco-Socialism

The “mainstream media” has gotten ahold of a bit of interesting research, and I wanted to give my own two cents on the subject. Basically, cetaceologists (and others, but I wanted to use that word) have added a little weight and some important framing to something we already knew – whales sequester carbon.

“Understanding the role of whales in the carbon cycle is a dynamic and emerging field that may benefit both marine conservation and climate-change strategies,” write the authors, led by Heidi Pearson, a biologist from the University of Alaska Southeast. “This will require interdisciplinary collaboration between marine ecologists, oceanographers, biogeochemists, carbon-cycle modelers, and economists.”

Whales can weigh up to 150 tons, live over 100 years, and be the size of large airplanes. Like all living things, their hefty biomass is composed largely of carbon and they make up one of the largest living carbon pools in the pelagic ocean, part of the marine system that is responsible for storing 22% of Earth’s total carbon.

“Their size and longevity allow whales to exert strong effects on the carbon cycle by storing carbon more effectively than small animals, ingesting extreme quantities of prey, and producing large volumes of waste products,” write the authors. “Considering that baleen whales have some of the longest migrations on the planet, they potentially influence nutrient dynamics and carbon cycling over ocean-basin scales.”

Whales consume up to 4% of their massive body weight in krill and photosynthetic plankton every day. For the blue whale, this equates to nearly 8,000 pounds. When they finish digesting their food, their excrement is rich in important nutrients that help these krill and plankton flourish, aiding in increased photosynthesis and carbon storage from the atmosphere.

A blue whale can live up to 90 years. When they die and their bodies fall to the seafloor, the carbon they contain is transferred to the deep sea as they decay. This supplements the biological carbon pump, where nutrients and chemicals are exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere through complex biogeochemical pathways. Commercial hunting, the largest source of population decline, has decreased whale populations by 81%, with unknown effects on biological carbon pump.

It seems that “nature-based solutions” is a catchphrase that is very much in vogue right now, and I’m thrilled to see it. The authors of this study state right at the beginning – before the abstract – that we need to do something about climate change, and if we know what’s good for us, we’ll save the fucking whales.

  • As climate change accelerates, there is increasing interest in the ability of whales to trap carbon (i.e., whale carbon), yet it is currently undetermined if and how whale carbon should be used in climate-change mitigation strategies.
  • Restoring whale populations will enhance carbon storage in whale biomass and sequestration in the deep sea via whale falls, though the global impact will be relatively small.
  • Whale-stimulated primary productivity via nutrient provisioning may sequester substantially more carbon, though there is uncertainty regarding the carbon fate in these food webs.
  • Recovery of whale populations via reduction of anthropogenic impacts can aid in carbon dioxide removal but its inclusion in climate policy needs to be grounded in the best available science and considered in tandem with other strategies known to directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Good note at the end there. Even a full recovery of whale populations, back to their numbers before commercial whaling began, would not “fix” the climate. It would be awesome, and it would certainly help, but it’s just one part of the system I always rant about changing.

Confession time – during a rather bleak period a couple years before I left the U.S., I more or less gave up on saving marine ecosystems. Honestly, I have up on pretty much everything for a bit. That coincided with a number of health problems, which may have influenced my mood, but a lot of it was from grim news about oceanic plankton levels, my recently-assuaged fears about the so-called “clathrate gun”, and a growing understanding of just how incredibly fucked up our political and economic systems were. Improvements to my health and to Raksha’s also helped my mood, I think, as did a change of employment.

More than that, however, I needed a shift in how I looked at things. I had had the “ecologist” perspective, and the “environmentalist” perspective, but I think I was lacking the “socialist” perspective to bring me to some form of eco-socialism. I couldn’t see hope for a better future, because all the paths to change that I knew about were blocked by the immense and utterly ruthless power of corporate interests. The solution, of course, is to forge a new path, by attacking that power itself. People talk about grassroots organizing, and while that’s basically what I advocate, I think tree roots might be a better metaphor here – we need to increase our own power by cracking apart the foundations of theirs.

All of this is to say that while I still feel the outlook is not currently good, there is a synergy between problem and solution that makes the way forward not only clear, but beneficial to humanity in the short term, if only we can convince people to abandon their understandable fear of big changes. Whales may or may not be the most charismatic of the charismatic megafauna, but they certainly fit the “mega” part of the description. Maybe a new “save the whales” campaign will tie into the same nostalgia-obsession that has a stranglehold on Hollywood and TV? I joked about charisma, but honestly, whales really are cool.

The more I think about them, the more fascinating they become. The obvious thing about them, of course, is their size. They’re just way, way too big, and unlike other organisms of comparable size (I’m thinking trees and some fungus), they move around a lot. This means that in addition to their role in ocean mixing (along with smaller critters), they also move large amounts of biological material around. Some of that was covered in the quotes above, but it seems that in addition to moving nutrients around vertically in the water column, the fact that they are so big means that they distribute nutrients all over the planet, simply by being nomadic and huge.

Fortunately, efforts to restore whale populations have actually had some success, and that in turn has had a real effect on the oceans:

“As humpbacks, gray whales, sperm whales and other cetaceans recover from centuries of overhunting, we are beginning to see that they also play an important role in the ocean,” Roman said. “Among their many ecological roles, whales recycle nutrients and enhance primary productivity in areas where they feed.” They do this by feeding at depth and releasing fecal plumes near the surface — which supports plankton growth — a remarkable process described as a “whale pump.” Whales also move nutrients thousands of miles from productive feeding areas at high latitudes to calving areas at lower latitudes.

That article, which also mentions the cetacean role in carbon sequestration, is from 2014, which triggers a couple thoughts. The first is that, as I said at the beginning, we’ve known for a while that whales play a part in natural carbon sequestration and natural carbon capture, but as with so many other things, it hasn’t been given much attention in media or in policy.

The second is that we actually have a pretty good idea about how to make life easier for whales. Recovery efforts have had huge successes just in my lifetime! This is yet another area in which we pretty much know what needs to be done, and to some degree it is actually being done in this case. I feel like I don’t get to say stuff like that very often. Even so, it’s not like whales are out of the woods. While they are, by themselves, foundational to oceanic ecosystems, they also depend on said ecosystems, and we’re messing with those in a variety of ways. As ever, what we’ve done is good, and we need to do more.

I mentioned the fears people tend to have about change, and the article I quoted just above actually addresses what may be both the most long-standing and the most culturally persuasive objection to the idea of a boom in global whale populations: What about the fishermen?

Sometimes, commercial fishermen have seen whales as competition. But this new paper summarizes a strong body of evidence that indicates the opposite can be true: whale recovery “could lead to higher rates of productivity in locations where whales aggregate to feed and give birth,” supporting more robust fisheries.

As whales recover, there may be increased whale predation on aquaculture stocks and increased competition — real or perceived — with some commercial fisheries. But the new paper notes “ a recent investigation of four coastal ecosystems has demonstrated the potential for large increases in whale abundance without major changes to existing food-web structures or substantial impacts on fishery production.”

I think a lot of people cling to the way we do things now, because of how well it’s done for us. For all of its problems, there’s a lot to like about life as it exists, especially if you live in richer nations. We have a fear of putting our weight on an unproven bridge, especially if it doesn’t look like the bridges we’ve crossed before. That combines with the modern love of incremental change (which seems to be uncomfortably similar to the slippery slope fallacy) to persuade people that the path forward is for people who care about this stuff to try their changes and see how they do “in the marketplace of ideas”. Somewhere along the way we seem to have developed a societal belief that we can make the world better without risk or discomfort, because of how well our current system supposedly works. We’re in the perfect vessel, and it’s on autopilot, so just go don’t rock the boat and everything will get better.

Part of the beauty of the path I want us to take is that while it will not be easy, safe, or free of problems, every step we take actually takes us in the right direction. We’ve been taught to view good things with suspicion. To quote The Dread Pirate Roberts, “life is pain, and anyone who says differently is selling something.” We hear it so often, in so many different ways, that it feels like it’s just… how things are. Everyone’s always trying to get one over on us, because that’s just how the world works, right? My twitter bio may say “utopian pragmatist”, but this isn’t a matter of even the most level-headed of utopianism. This more akin to understanding why an increase in greenhouse gases causes an increase in temperature.

When we take measures to reduce our impact on the ecosystems around us, we reliably get results that make life better for us. In some ways, this feels obvious, right? It’s like how maintaining good hygiene, diet, and exercise habits pretty reliably improves our health. There are real and important benefits to modern technology, social innovations, etc., that have made life better, and for many people possible. Most of the good stuff we can keep, and that does include a variety of “toxic” chemicals. What we need is to make a societal priority out of global ecosystem health in a way that includes us as a part of that global ecosystem.

Hence, eco-socialism, hence solarpunk, hence climate justice, hence the call to organize and build collective power.

The advances we’ve made have not come from “capitalism” or from our so-called leaders. They have come from the hard work of people, often fighting against capitalism and its leaders. That includes labor rights, civil rights, environmental protections, even safe living spaces – none of that was given to us. All of it was taken, by people working together to make life better for everyone. That’s the attitude I see in the rise in unionization and strikes in the United States. It’s the attitude I see in the Land Defenders of Atlanta, and the Water Protectors of Standing Rock. I would say it’s also an attitude that’s been long-standing among indigenous activists around the world, which is why it is so important to listen to them on things like ecosystem management, and to support the land back movement. It’s a matter of justice, but it’s also a matter of changing our relationship with the planet.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, you’ll burn in the fire, if you don’t get fried.

Many years ago, in this blog’s toddler years, I wrote a little about the advantages of being motivated not just by fear of the future we want to avoid, but also by hope for the future that we want to build. While that fear is valid, if it’s our sole motivator, we’ll be too busy looking over our shoulder to pay attention to where we’re going. Most of the time, when I’ve talked about this, the focus has been on the kind of society we want to build, and how being proactive could head off disaster. At that point, I wasn’t thinking much about politics, economics, and power, but I I think the overall idea holds true there as well. What I hadn’t really considered was how literal the metaphor of running away could end up being.

I suppose it’s obvious, in hindsight, and it’s not like the subject of climate refugees hasn’t been discussed. I had assumed that if people were leaving an area because of climate change, if they had a choice in where to go, they’d factor climate change into their decision. After all, if you’re moving away from hurricanes and killer heat waves, you might not want to move to somewhere that’s having a problem with drought, heat waves, and an ever-worsening fire season, right? Right?

Oh dear.

Americans are leaving many of the U.S. counties hit hardest by hurricanes and heatwaves — and moving towards dangerous wildfires and warmer temperatures, finds one of the largest studies of U.S. migration and natural disasters.

The ten-year national study reveals troubling public health patterns, with Americans flocking to regions with the greatest risk of wildfires and significant summer heat. These environmental hazards are already causing significant damage to people and property each year — and projected to worsen with climate change.

“These findings are concerning, because people are moving into harm’s way—into regions with wildfires and rising temperatures, which are expected to become more extreme due to climate change,” said the University of Vermont (UVM) study lead author Mahalia Clark, noting that the study was inspired by the increasing number of headlines of record-breaking natural disasters.

Published by the journal Frontiers in Human Dynamics, the study—titled “Flocking to Fire”—is the largest investigation yet of how natural disasters, climate change and other factors impacted U.S. migration over the last decade (2010-2020). “Our goal was to understand how extreme weather is influencing migration as it becomes more severe with climate change,” Clark said.

‘Red-hot’ real estate

The top U.S. migration destinations over the last decade were cities and suburbs in the Pacific Northwest, parts of the Southwest (in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah), Texas, Florida, and a large swath of the Southeast (from Nashville to Atlanta to Washington, D.C.)—locations that face significant wildfire risks and relatively warm annual temperatures. In contrast, people tended to move away from places in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and along the Mississippi River, including many counties hit hardest by hurricanes or frequent heatwaves, the researchers say.

“These findings suggest that, for many Americans, the risks and dangers of living in hurricane zones may be starting to outweigh the benefits of life in those areas,” said UVM co-author Gillian Galford, who led the recent Vermont Climate Assessment. “That same tipping point has yet to happen for wildfires and rising summer heat, which have emerged as national issues more recently.”

One implication of the study—given how development can exacerbate risks in fire-prone areas—is that city planners may need to consider discouraging new development where fires are most likely or difficult to fight, researchers say. At a minimum, policymakers must consider fire prevention in areas of high risk with large growth in human populations, and work to increase public awareness and preparedness.

I want to say that I’m not blaming these people, as such. There are a lot of factors that go into deciding where to move, and very often the “choice” is no choice at all. You have a job in California? You move to California. We live where we can, not always where we’d like to.

I am blaming the federal government, and the largely corrupt crowd that comprises it. This is the result of inaction. This is what neoliberal, laissez-faire policies, gets us. Why are there no programs to help people resettle somewhere with more water? Why haven’t we already been moving people out of the Colorado River Valley? Because it would threaten fossil fuel profits, of course, but also because most politicians in both major parties view government action as essentially evil. Some Democrats view it as a necessary evil, and a handful are mostly focused on the good it can do, but as a party, they mostly seem to serve the same agenda as the GOP.

We will be seeing more climate refugees as the temperature continues to rise. Literally the only way to prevent that would be to find a way to get them to move to a safer place before disaster drives them. Instead, we have a borderline useless federal government, and a disorienting fog of misinformation about the issue. People are left to figure things out while navigating a ruthless housing market that’s increasingly controlled by big corporations, with a government whose advisors are advocating an increase in unemployment. This kind of crisis is exactly what society is supposed to be for, but our world is run by people who want to convince everyone that society shouldn’t provide us with any real benefits.

Beyond the aversion to hurricanes and heatwaves, the study identified several other clear preferences—a mix of environmental, social, and economic factors—that also contributed to U.S. migration decisions over the last decade.

The team’s analysis revealed a set of common qualities shared among the top migration destinations: warmer winters, proximity to water, moderate tree cover, moderate population density, better human development index (HDI) scores—plus wildfire risks. In contrast, for the counties people left, common traits included low employment, higher income inequality, and more summer humidity, heatwaves, and hurricanes.

Researchers note that Florida remained a top migration destination, despite a history of hurricanes—and increasing wildfire. While nationally, people were less attracted to counties hit by hurricanes, many people—particularly retirees—still moved to Florida, attracted by the warm climate, beaches, and other qualities shared by top migration destinations. Although hurricanes likely factor into people’s choices, the study suggests that, overall, the benefits of Florida’s desirable amenities still outweigh the perceived risks of life there, researchers say.

“The decision to move is a complicated and personal decision that involves weighing dozens of factors,” said Clark. “Weighing all these factors, we see a general aversion to hurricane risk, but ultimately—as we see in Florida—it’s one factor in a person’s list of pros and cons, which can be outweighed by other preferences.”

For the study, researchers combined census data with data on natural disasters, weather, temperature, land cover, and demographic and socioeconomic factors. While the study includes data from the first year of the COVID pandemic, the researchers plan to delve deeper into the impacts of remote work, house prices, and the cost of living.

For most of my life, climate change has been talked about as some kind of future issue. It has also been talked about as something that will hit poorer countries first, and hardest. While there’s some truth to that latter point, I hope it’s obvious to all of you by now that it’s happening now, and it’s hitting everywhere. It will get worse, of course, but we have entered the Age of Endless Recovery, and part of that is the endless, weary movement of people trying to find that one place where maybe they can live in peace.

This doesn’t have to be our future.

We could, if we can build the collective power to do so, stop prioritizing endless war and the indulgence of bottomless greed. We could build quality public housing in places that are likely to have plenty of water going forward. We could pay people to do ecosystem support and management work, or to clean up pollution, or to work on indoor food production, or any number of a hundred other things that society needs people to do.

We could, in short, respond to this crisis by proactively building a better world, with the changing climate in mind. We have the resources and knowledge to do this, and we’ve had them for a long time. What we lack is political and economic power among those who actually want the world to get better, because the people who currently hold that power? They would rather see the world burn around their bunkers than allow for systemic change.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

SLoSSing out climate conservation policy

There’s an old debate in the field of conservation, about what strategy is best when setting aside land for conservation. Should our efforts go into getting large contiguous areas, or would it be better to have a collection of smaller reserves distributed over a wider area: Single Large, or Several Small (SLoSS).

There are good arguments for both. A single, large area can allow for habitats that cannot occur in a smaller space. The edge of a forest, for example, lets light and wind penetrate into the understory from the side, spurring the growth of less shade-tolerant plants, different animals, and even affecting things like soil moisture. Deep forest habitats are much darker, tend to have less undergrowth, and can harbor very different kinds of life. This distinction is reliable enough, that undergraduate ecology students often do “research” on these dynamics as part of their training. It’s not generally a way to learn something new, so much as a way to practice the skills, knowing the results you should be getting. I know less about it, but I’m sure similar things exist in aquatic ecosystems, accounting for stuff like depth, fishing and other human activities, proximity to pollution sources like farms and factories, and so on.

The “Several Small” perspective is also generally about a diversity of habitats, but accounts for the way the changing landscape allows for different conditions over much wider areas. A mountaintop will have different life from a river, which will be different from a forest, or a plain, or a lake, or the boundary between those habitats. While one large place can encompass a good amount diversity in that regard, spreading your reserves out can cover more ground, so to speak. Having scattered nature reserves can also serve to create vital safe “pit stops” for migrating birds.

Both of perspectives are a form of triage, in the face of the relentless, escalating environmental destruction being driven by capitalism. The “ideal middle ground” could be described as a number of large reserves, connected by corridors, but that’s rather difficult to arrange in a world where capitalists get what they want by default most of the time.

I think this research supports my preferred approach of ending capitalism, and integrating our development into our surrounding ecosystems as much as possible (I mean, they don’t actually talk about capitalism, but in my opinion a growth-obsessed system like that can never allow for the kinds of change we need). Not only may the heat tolerance of sub-populations vary, but a population starting in a cooler area has more “room” for warming before temperatures start to get dangerous. This means that if you want a species to be able to survive global warming, the best thing you can do is make sure that the populations are not fragmented, and have space to move and change.

By conducting a metanalysis of 90 previously published studies, from which Cheng and his co-authors mined data on 61 species, the team was able to construct a set of “upper thermal limits”—specific temperatures above which each species could not survive. However, by zooming in further and looking at 305 distinct populations drawn from that pool of 61 species, they found that different populations of the same marine species often had widely different thermal limits. This suggests that some populations have evolved different abilities to tolerate high temperatures. The key then, is to keep different populations of the same species connected so that the populations that have adapted to the higher temperatures can pass this advantage on to the populations with the lower thermal limits.

In other words, imagine a wide-ranging marine species, such as the diminutive Atlantic killifish, which occurs from the warm Florida coast of the United States north to the frigid waters of Newfoundland, Canada. The northern killifish populations may be better able to withstand warming waters if some of their southern kin are able to naturally shift their range to the north.

“Scale matters,” says Matthew Sasaki, a marine biologist and evolutionary ecologist who completed this research as part of his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut and is the paper’s lead author. “The patterns you see across species aren’t the same you see within species, and the big-picture story doesn’t necessarily match what is happening on the local level.”

In case you need the refresher, working to preserve biodiversity can help us deal with climate change. That’s why I like the idea of, to the greatest degree possible, bringing nature into our cities and other developed spaces, both by setting aside land around us for wildlife, any by making “our” territory safer. Less dependence on cars for transit (and more rail and foot traffic) would also make it a lot safer for animals to move through our landscape as they go from place to place.

When it comes down to it, they key seems to be having a clear understanding of the local conditions, and the needs of local ecosystems. What works for one place, one species, or one community of interacting species, may not work for another:

In yet another twist, the team, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and was composed of biologists specializing in terrestrial as well as marine ecosystems, discovered that this intra-species variability was primarily a feature of animals living in the ocean and intertidal areas. Populations of widespread species that live on land or in freshwater exhibit far more homogeneity in their thermal limits, and thus could be more sensitive to rising temperatures. However, on land, plants and animals can take advantage of microclimates to cool down and avoid extreme temperatures, by moving into shady spots, for example.

Taken together, the research suggests that a one-size-fits-all-species approach to conservation and management won’t work. Instead, write the authors, we need to understand how populations have adapted to their local conditions if we want to predict their vulnerability to changing conditions. A more effective approach would include ensuring that marine species can find wide swaths of undamaged habitat throughout their entire range, so that different populations of the same species can mix and pass on the adaptations that help them survive warmer waters. And on land, we need to maintain large patches of cool ecosystems—such as old-growth forests—that terrestrial species can use as refuges.

“The glimmer of hope here,” says Cheng, “is that with conservation policies tailored to individual populations, we can buy them time to adapt to the warming world.”

As with antifascist action, and human climate adaptation, local understanding, local communities, and local solutions are going to be key. The big advantage we have over more locally-focused societies of the past, is that we can retain the ability to communicate and trade globally. We really can make this world more peaceful, just, and more beautiful, all as a part of saving ourselves from the disastrous conditions we’ve created.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Soggy Sunday: There can be no climate action without fresh water.

There are a lot of reasons why I keep stressing the need for ecosystem management as the core of our climate action. We have, throughout our history, been utterly dependent on the natural world, even as we have been destroying it in the name of endless “growth”. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the medicines that keep us alive, the materials we use to shelter ourselves from the elements – all of it ties back to so-called “nature”, because we are a part of it.

That means that as we work to end greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt to the changes we’ve already caused, we must also change how we do business in other areas. Ending our direct contribution to warming will mean little if we increase other forms of pollution as we do it. It’s not as simple as swapping out what kind of fuel powers our society, and if we pretend that the climate is our only existential environmental threat, then we will continue driving ourselves toward extinction through other means.

A holistic approach is going to mean a lot of things, but when it comes down to it, none of that is possible without continual access to fresh water. That may seem obvious, but it’s cause for real concern, as this report made for COP27 discusses:

The report titled: “The essential drop to reach Net-Zero: Unpacking Freshwater’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation,” released November 9 2022 at COP27 in harm El-Sheikh, is the first-ever summary of current research on the role of water in climate mitigation. A key message is the need to better understand global water shortages and scarcity in order to plan climate targets that do not backfire in future. If not planned carefully, negative impacts of climate action on freshwater resources might threaten water security and even increase future adaptation and mitigation burdens.

“Most of the measures needed to reach net-zero carbon targets can have a big impact on already dwindling freshwater resources around the world,” said Dr Lan Wang Erlandsson from Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. “With better planning, such risks can be reduced or avoided.”

The report describes why, where, and how freshwater should be integrated into climate change mitigation plans to avoid unexpected consequences and costly policy mistakes. Even efforts usually associated with positive climate action – such as forest restoration or bioenergy – can have negative impacts if water supplies are not considered.

Done right, however, water-related and nature-based solutions can instead address both the climate crisis and other challenges, said Dr Malin Lundberg Ingemarsson from Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

“We have identified water risks, but also win-win solutions that are currently not used to their full potential. One example is restoration of forests and wetlands which bring social, ecological, and climate benefits all at once. Another example is that better wastewater treatment can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from untreated wastewater, while improving surface water and groundwater quality, and even provide renewable energy through biogas.”

That was when I decided I actually wanted to write about this a bit. “Nature-based solutions” are exactly what we need. As dangerous as heat waves and storms may be, one of the biggest dangers to our species is the breakdown of ecosystem services, of which most people seem to be largely unaware. I couldn’t say the exact numbers, but for all we must spend trillions on ending fossil fuel use, I think we should also spend trillions on ecosystem restoration and support. Even if we weren’t depleting both ground and surface water, and even if we weren’t poisoning what remains with reckless abandon, the melting of mountain glaciers around the world means that before long, billions could lose their primary water source. We need to be actively working to build up ecosystems, because they aren’t just affected by the weather, they affect the weather. Deforestation means less rainfall. That’s going to vary from ecosystem to ecosystem, but it’s not hard to understand.

Plants don’t just absorb rainwater, they also transfer it from the ground to the air. Trees in particular act as giant vaporizers, humidifying the air around their crowns. That, in turn, helps create rain downwind, or even sometimes right over the same forest. That movement of water, as I’ve discussed before, also moves heat around, which can help mitigate extreme heat, which affects everyone’s need for water. My insistence on viewing ourselves as a part of nature isn’t some spiritual feeling of connection, it’s a simple fact, supported by overwhelming evidence.

The report highlights five key messages on the interlinkage between water and mitigation:

• Climate mitigation measures depend on freshwater resources. Climate mitigation planning and action need to account for current and future freshwater availability.
•  Freshwater impacts – both positive and negative – need to be evaluated and included in climate mitigation planning and action.
•  Water and sanitation management can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient drinking water and sanitation services save precious freshwater resources and reduce emissions.
•  Nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change can deliver multiple benefits for people and the environment. Measures safeguarding freshwater resources, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring resilient livelihoods are crucial.
•  Joint water and climate governance need to be coordinated and strengthened. Mainstreaming freshwater in all climate mitigation planning and action requires polycentric and inclusive governance.

“Climate change mitigation efforts will not succeed if failing to consider water needs,” said Marianne Kjellén, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). “Water must be part of powerful solutions for enhancing ecosystem resilience, preserving biodiversity and regenerative food and energy production systems. In short, water security needs to be factored in to climate action,” she adds.

There’s a part of me that simply cannot believe that that last thought needs to be spelled out. How could anybody possibly think that we could respond to the threat of climate change without factoring in water? Hasn’t everyone been talking about “the coming water wars” for years? But, of course, action on that end of things has been woefully inadequate, just as it has been in every other area. Not only that, but the system we’re trying to change uses war not just to control people, but also to generate profit. Those of us still connected to our humanity hear “water wars” and think of the horrors of war, and perhaps the horrors of water scarcity. The rich and powerful, particularly in the United States, think of all the money they’ll make by converting raw resources into dead bodies, ravaged landscapes, and fat paychecks. There’s also a rather large portion of the population that is ideologically committed to the belief that a magical being put this entire cosmos here for “us” (which means the rich and powerful) to do with as we see fit. So yeah – it needs to be spelled out. For a lot of people, I’m afraid we’ll have to change the world around them, and hope their minds change afterwards, but in the meantime, it’s good to figure out what we should be doing about the water problem.

While I hope to go through the report more thoroughly, and write about its contents, I’ve had such intentions in the past. I’m approaching a year of daily posting (not counting the time I took off for Raksha’s death), which is a strange new experience for me, so hopefully I’ll actually be able to follow through this time. Still, maintaining work on my current novel is a more important right now, so in the meantime, here’s a link to the report, all nicely laid out by section. If you want me make this project (or any other) more of a priority, I’ll take that into consideration once you sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia and send me a message about it.

It is a simple fact that on this planet, water is life. It’s also a fact that when we have tried to, we’ve been able to clean up polluted bodies of water, restore ecosystems, and bring species back from the brink of extinction. We do have the resources and understanding to make the world better, all we lack is a political an economic system that values doing so.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

It’s not just the flooding: Hurricanes as heat pumps

While I don’t know a whole lot about the demographics of my readership, I’m going to assume that most of you have at least a passing familiarity with the water cycle. Maybe it’s just me, but when I learned about it as a kid, I learned about it as a description of the movement of water around the surface of the planet. The water cycle is about water. Straightforward, yes?

Then, a few years ago, I was writing a climate science lesson, and I had a minor revelation. The water cycle also describes the movement of energy in our atmosphere. When water evaporates, it effectively absorbs the heat required to keep it in a gaseous state. That cools off the place where the evaporation happens, which is why our own ability to regulate our temperatures relies heavily on evaporation. So now you have that water vapor, kept in that state by a combination of temperature and pressure. It rises up, and after a certain point reaches a low enough pressure and temperature to condense, which turns it into water droplets (clouds, rain, mist, etc), and warms up the air around them. That heat was just transported, as water vapor, from one part of the world to another. Of course, that same bit of water might absorb and release heat like that many times over before it falls back to the ground. If you watch clouds for long enough, on a mostly clear day, you can see some of them forming, or even some that fade in and out of existence as they move through pressure gradients shifting from gas to droplets, and back to gas again.

As I said, this may all be obvious to you, but for some reason it never really clicked in my head until I was actually studying the movement of heat energy in our atmosphere. From that perspective, when enough water fell on Pakistan to submerge one third of the entire country, a huge amount of heat was released into the air above. It’s been interesting to think about, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what predictive value that has for our day to day lives. It could mean that we should expect heat to follow flooding, but if the air warmed is pretty high up to begin with, would that follow? Further, all that water starts evaporating again, sucking up more heat. Fortunately, the world need not wait for people like me to puzzle this stuff out. A team out of Arizona has  found that when a tropical cyclone hits a city, it causes a spike in temperature in the days that follow. 

Three days after Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico in mid-September, the National Weather Service issued an extreme heat advisory, warning that the heat index – which incorporates humidity to calculate perceived temperature – could reach up to 109 degrees.

Above-average temperatures almost always follow tropical cyclones – which by definition include tropical storms and hurricanes – and may soar to nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average, according to a new University of Arizona-led study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The study’s authors stressed that their results are likely conservative estimates of just how high temperatures can climb following a cyclone.

Tropical cyclones often cause damage from strong winds, storm surges, intense rain and flooding, but extreme heat is an additional hazard, the researchers found. Above-average temperatures can occur days later and even in nearby areas that were not directly impacted by the storm.

“Multiple extreme events happening within a very short window of time can complicate disaster recovery,” said lead study author Zackry Guido, an assistant research professor in the university’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for Environment and Societies, or AIRES. “To medical providers, heat is a concern. Our results suggest that tropical cyclone preparedness should also include public information about heat risk.”

The research team analyzed 53 tropical cyclones in the eastern Caribbean between 1991 and 2020 and 205 interactions between the cyclones and 14 Caribbean cities. They found that the cities’ heat index values were always warmer than average after the storm.

“Everyone’s focus is on the destructive power of tropical storms and hurricanes – the storm surge, winds, flooding – and that’s obviously quite substantial, but our focus is on the combined hazard of storm and subsequent heat,” Guido said. “Hurricanes are massive heat pumps, redistributing heat for a large spatial distance around the center of the storm, and they leave massive destruction in their wake that can knock out the energy grid. That combination is often dangerous because it slows recovery and poses risks to human health.”

While the paper doesn’t explore how climate change may be impacting the phenomenon, the authors expect that high heat index values following tropical cyclones will increase in the future.

“It’s very easy to understand the climate change impacts of this,” Guido said. “Our future will likely have hurricanes dropping more intense rain and have more people in harm’s way. Then, if you drape on top of that a hotter environment, you will therefore expect a greater overall impact.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. The proportion of tropical cyclones that become hurricanes or typhoons is increasing in part because weaker ones are being cut off by increased wind shear, and in part because the oceans are warming so rapidly. The strength of the storm generally ties directly to sea surface temperatures, which means that the amount of heat that that storm pumps into an area is also going to go up.

In terms of impacts, a big storm like that means that in addition to the heat dumped, there’s also an increase in humidity (the other factor in the heat index). That means a higher chance of hitting “wet bulb” conditions, in which people can die fast without artificial cooling. Losing power – as so often happens – becomes that much more dangerous. At the same time, floods can contaminate the water supply, which could leave those trying to survive with a choice between lethal dehydration or drinking water that will probably make them sick.

I get why the water cycle wasn’t taught to me as a way that heat moves around in the atmosphere, but it seems that that’s a perspective we’ll need to keep in mind going forward.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!