When we look back at 2023, will we call it the time when everything changed—when the media, governments, and individuals stared straight into the reality of our warming climate, and all that entails, and said “it’s happening to us/me?” Or will we go through numerous seasons of startled acknowledgement interspersed with seasons of forgetting or ignoring? I’m impressed that so few scientists are specifically saying “told you so,” even as they publish stories affirming that climate change is indeed fueling heat waves and wildfires, that what we see this year is what their models predicted although there are some differences.
Humans are predisposed to quickly dismiss disastrous events, it’s how we are wired. But what happens when we reset our psyches back to a normal we can no longer count on to occur—will this help or damage our ability to make the essential responses? There is no “new normal” except perhaps change, but even the rate and scope of changes are changing.
Where are we in the climate change process? Can we adapt to changes that don’t settle into new permanent settings? The first set of stories explores these questions.
can we be the clay pot, not the refrigerator.
time
The term “new normal” gets bandied about a lot. It’s meant, of course, to provoke alarm—to point out we’re not experiencing freak aberrations, but rather the entirely predictable long-term effects of pumping huge quantities of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. But the phrase, to me, also has the connotation that now, at least, is “normal,” as if we’ve been riding an elevator of global temperature rise, and just arrived at the top floor. “It sure is hot up here at the new normal,” we say. “Good thing it won’t get any worse.”
Unfortunately, though, it will. The changes we are experiencing are only accelerating. Each new season is a baseline from which things will get weirder still. There’ll be yet more heat domes, hurricanes, and flooding, coming at a faster and faster clip. In less than ten years, tropical Dengue-carrying mosquitoes could be breeding in London and New York. Next decade might bring the first ice-free summer in the Arctic. By 2050, the world could be dealing with 1.2 billion climate refugees fleeing for their lives.
MIT Tech Review
The dizzyingly quick shift from an abstract threat to an era of tumbling temperature records, megadroughts, and pervasive fires has many people wondering: is climate change unfolding faster than scientists had expected? Are these extreme events more extreme than studies had predicted they would be, given the levels of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere?
As it happens, those are two distinct questions, with different and nuanced answers.
For the most part, the computer models used to simulate how the planet responds to rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere aren’t wildly off the mark, especially considering that they aren’t geared for predicting regional temperature extremes. But the recent pileup of very hot heat waves does have some scientists wondering whether models could be underestimating the frequency and intensity of such events, whether some factors are playing more significant roles than represented in certain models, and what it all may mean for our climate conditions in the coming decades.
Let’s address these issues point by point.
grist
This article is a Q and A with author Jeff Goodell.
On an early August morning in 2021, a family — two parents in their 30s and 40s, their 1-year-old, and a big dog — set out on a hike in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The temperature was a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit when they started out, but the day became dangerously hot as the four began the climb back up to where their truck was parked. At ground level, the temperature was likely hotter than 110 degrees F. They never made it back. All four of them — the dog, the parents, the baby — died on the trail. [...]
That story is one of many examples of heat’s deadly toll in The Heat Will Kill You First, author and climate change journalist Jeff Goodell’s new opus about extreme heat. “If there’s one thing in this book that will save your life,” Goodell writes, “it is this: … if your body gets too hot too fast — it doesn’t matter if that heat comes from the outside on a hot day or the inside from a raging fever — you are in big trouble.”
register here for a wapo program with Jeff Goodell.
Jeff Goodell, longtime climate journalist and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, is documenting the global toll of extreme heat in his new book, “The Heat Will Kill You First.” On Monday, July 24 at 3:00 p.m. ET, Goodell joins The Post’s Juliet Eilperin to discuss the impact of a warming planet, the record temperatures this summer and how human beings can adapt.
I was in Santa Cruz for the 1991-92 rainy season. I remember news stories and photos of school kids taken outside to play in the rain. They were born during a seven year drought and had never seen rain. Absence of rain was their normal.
Will today’s young kids view summer smoky skies as normal?
Children are sensitive, in part because, simply put, they are little: Kids breathe in more air each minute than adults do. “High levels of particulate matter can get deep into lung fields” during a bad smoke day, which may cause adverse effects, Marissa Hauptman, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, where she works on environmental health, told me. And children’s developing organs are more prone to injury.
“The younger the child, the more vulnerable they are,” she said. Kids with existing health conditions, such as asthma or diabetes, or children born prematurely, can be especially at risk on smoky days. Rima Habre, an associate professor at the University of Southern California with expertise in environmental health, told me in an email that “cough, runny nose, itchy or burning eyes, wheezing or difficulty breathing, and irritation in their eyes and throats” are among the issues children may face after being exposed to wildfire smoke.
As blistering heat waves, fatal floods or toxic wildfire smoke afflict nearly every corner of the U.S. this summer, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds that a growing number of Americans say climate change has “made things worse” in their lives — and will continue to do so in the future.
The survey of 1,638 U.S. adults, which was conducted from July 13 to 17, shows that more than a third (34%) now believe they have already been personally affected in a negative way by climate change, up 7 points from October 2021 (the last time Yahoo News and YouGov asked the question). Likewise, 47% of Americans — a 5-point increase — now say their own lives will get worse in years to come because of the warming planet.
the guardian
Despite extreme heat and weather in the US, most Americans aren’t cowering in fear. There’s a psychological reason for it.
For one, the climate crisis is a much lower priority for Americans than other national issues, such as the economy and healthcare costs. That isn’t to say that we aren’t concerned: two-thirds of Americans say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, while 30% are “very worried”, per a Yale University survey. But because of the nature of the way that many humans experience fear, connecting this emotion to something as vast and complex as the climate crisis is difficult. According to Brian Lickel, a social psychologist who researches human responses to threats, we aren’t designed to remain in a high state of fear for long. “A very fundamental feature of the normal kind of expected emotional processing is hedonic adaptation,” he said. “Our emotion system is designed to be labile, to go up or have certain responses, but then to not stick there.”
The emotional response to the climate crisis – even if we feel fearful during an episode of wildfire smoke or flooding – is similar to what many people who live in war zones may experience, Lickel said. While at first, the threat of bombs and attacks are imminent and extremely frightening, eventually those who remain in these areas adapt somewhat to a life in which the threat becomes just another thing to deal with daily. “If they’re not escalating or the nature of the threat’s not changing,” Lickel said, “it is to be expected that the felt emotion is going to go down.”
As a disabled person, this is familiar terrain. Disability has forced me to reckon more forthrightly with the limits of my flesh, to confront the truth that bodies and minds cannot do it all. It has helped me learn to embrace rest, to resist the voices that clamor for more, always more. But disability has also taught me to push back against injustice, to fight hard against the structural barriers that stand in disabled people’s way. Both of these insights are powerful tools for confronting climate change. [...]
It’s disability community that’s helped me realize that the measure of my life is more than a simple tally of accomplishment. My work is not my worth. Living with disability, as Rabbi Elliot Kukla observes, “is a long, slow detox from capitalist culture and its mandate that we never rest.” [...]
In these times of increased climate disruption, this is disability wisdom that the world desperately needs. Climate change is a consequence of the collective human choice to push past our limits, to force this planet to carry more than it can bear. We live in a take-and-burn culture, one that pushes us to blaze bright without regard for the cost. I don’t just mean fossil fuels and fracking. I mean a broader set of cultural patterns that privilege growth and speed, that valorize profit over care, that fuel the fires of greed.
The average warming of the planet – including the most up-to-date measurements for 2023 – is entirely consistent with what climate modelers warned decades ago would happen if we continued with the business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Yes, there are alarming data coming in, from record-shattering loss of winter sea ice in the southern hemisphere to off-the-charts warmth in the North Atlantic with hot tub-grade waters off the Florida coast. We’ve also seen the hottest week on record for the planet as a whole this month. We can attribute blame to a combination of ongoing human-caused warming, an incipient major El Niño event and the vagaries of natural variability. [...]
Yes, we have failed to prevent dangerous climate change. It is here. What remains to be seen is just how bad we’re willing to let it get. A window of opportunity remains for averting a catastrophic 1.5C/2.7F warming of the planet, beyond which we’ll see far worse consequences than anything we’ve seen so far. But that window is closing and we’re not making enough progress.
We cannot afford to give in to despair. Better to channel our energy into action, as there’s so much work to be done to prevent this crisis from escalating into a catastrophe. If the extremes of this summer fill you with fears of imminent and inevitable climate collapse, remember, it’s not game over. It’s game on.
wapo
black fire beetle|spotted owl|antechinus (tiny marsupial)|black-backed woodpecker|frilled lizards
A beetle that can sense infrared light. A bird that lays eggs the color of charred ground. A woodpecker that specializes in hunting in burned bark.
Larger and longer-lasting fires are wiping through wildlife populations, morphing habitats and pushing the evolution of animals’ bodies and behaviors to survive in this new, scorched world.
“With megafires and really large, severe fire events, these kinds of adaptations can go into overdrive pretty quickly,” said Gavin Jones, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who wrote an analysis on fire-driven animal evolution published Wednesday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.