Friday, 23 August 2024, 8:43 am
Article: Independent Media Institute
By Lorraine Chow
The summer of 2023 was intense:
deadly wildfires, massive storms, and record-breaking heat.
Although scientists exercise great care before linking
individual weather events to climate change, the rise in
global temperatures caused by human activities has increased
the severity,
likelihood,
and
duration of such conditions.
Globally, 2024 is on
pace to be the hottest
year on record. The Paris Agreement aims to limit the
rise of the average global temperature to below 1.5 to 2
degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, if
humankind continues its business-as-usual approach to
climate change, there’s a 93
percent chance we’ll be barreling toward a world that
is 4 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century, which
is a potentially catastrophic level of warming.
A
Warning and a Reckoning
In 1992, 1,700 scientists
around the world issued a chilling “warning
to humanity.” The infamous letter declared that
humanity would be on a “collision course” with the
natural world if we did not rein in their environmentally
damaging activities.
Such apocalyptic thinking might
be easy to mock and only partially helpful in inspiring
political action if the end times are nigh. In 2019,
however, more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries
co-signed their names to an updated—and even bleaker
statement on the issue.
The most recent version,
from 2020, is titled “World Scientists’ Warning of a
Climate Emergency.” It asserts that most of the
environmental challenges raised in the original letter
remain unsolved and require “bold and drastic
transformations regarding economic and population
policies.”
Similarly, a
2017 paper states, “Especially troubling is the
current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate
change due to rising [greenhouse gases] from burning fossil
fuels, deforestation, and agricultural
production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat
consumption.”
“Moreover,” the authors wrote,
“We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in
roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms
could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by
the end of this century.”
But they stressed, “Soon
it will be too late to shift course away from our failing
trajectory, and time is running out.”
In
2023, President Biden released the lengthy Fifth
National Climate Assessment, a quadrennial report
compiled by over a dozen federal agencies. Beneath
optimistic talk about mitigation and adaptation, this report
paints a grim picture, including “heat-related illnesses
and death, costlier storm damages, longer droughts that
reduce agricultural productivity and strain water systems,
and larger, more severe wildfires.”
So
what we saw in the summer
of 2023? Unless humanity gets its act together, we can
expect much worse. Here’s a peek into our climate-addled
future.
1. Species Extinction
The Amazon, one
of the most biodiverse places on Earth, could lose about 70
percent of its plant and amphibian species and more than 60
percent of its birds, mammals and reptile species from
unchecked climate change, according to a 2018 study
by the University of East Anglia, the James Cook University
and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which analyzed the impact of
climate change on nearly 80,000 species of plants, birds,
mammals, reptiles and amphibians inhabiting the WWF’s 35
“Priority
Places” for conservation.
The study’s most
alarming projection was for the Miombo
Woodlands in Central and Southern Africa, one of the
priority places most vulnerable to climate change. If global
temperatures rose 4.5 degrees Celsius, the researchers
projected the loss of 90 percent of amphibians and 80
percent or more of plants, birds, mammals, and
reptiles.
Over 10,000 species of plants and animals
are likely to become extinct in all, according to a 2021
report by 200 scientists and researchers. This incredible
loss of biodiversity affects humans, too. Droughts, fires,
and other “cascading effects would have tremendous impacts
on climate and, in turn, agriculture, hydropower generation,
and human health and well-being.”
2. Food
Insecurity and Nutritional Deficiencies
While climate
change could actually
benefit colder parts of the world with longer growing
seasons, tropical and subtropical regions in Africa, South
America, India, and Europe could lose vast chunks of arable
land.
“About 80 [percent] of the global population
most at risk from crop failures and hunger from climate
change are in [sub-Saharan] Africa, South Asia, and
Southeast Asia, where farming families are
[disproportionately] poor and vulnerable,” said
the World Bank. For coastal countries, rising
seas could inundate farming land and drinking water with
salt.
Staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize, and
soybeans, which provide two-thirds
of the world’s caloric intake, are sensitive to
temperature and precipitation and to rising atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide. A sweeping 2017 study
showed that every degree Celsius of warming will reduce
average global wheat yields by 6 percent, rice by 3.2
percent, maize by 7.4 percent, and soybeans by 3.1
percent.
According to a 2018 paper,
carbon dioxide levels expected by 2050 will make staple
crops such as rice and wheat less nutritious. This could
result in 175 million people becoming zinc deficient (which
can cause a wide
array of health impacts, including impaired growth and
immune function and impotence) and 122 million people
becoming protein deficient (which can cause
edema, fat accumulation in liver cells, loss of muscle mass
and in children, stunted growth). Additionally, the
researchers found that more than 1 billion women and
children could lose a large portion of their dietary iron
intake, putting them at increased risk of anemia and other
diseases.
3. Farewell to Coastal Cities and Island
Nations
According to the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report,
sea levels could rise by three feet by 2100 if we don’t
cut heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This could bring high
tides and surges from intense storms, devastating the
millions of people living in coastal areas. The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published
a report in 2018 that predicted parts of Miami, New York
City, and San Francisco could flood every day by 2100, under
a three-foot sea-level rise scenario.
Due
to global warming, entire countries could be swallowed by
the sea. Kiribati, a nation of 33 atolls and reef islands in
the South Pacific, is expected
to be among the first.
Kiribati won’t be alone.
Since
2016, at least eight islands have disappeared into the
Pacific Ocean due to rising sea levels, and an April 2018 study
said that most coral atolls will be uninhabitable by the
mid-21st century.
Even those nations that do survive
will be dramatically affected. “By mid-century, [about] 5
times more people will be flooded compared with present-day
for the lowest emissions scenario… and nearly 7 times as
many under the very high-emissions scenario,” said the
authors of a 2023 study.
4. Social Conflict and Mass
Migration
In 2017, New York Magazine Deputy Editor
David Wallace-Wells wrote an alarming and widely read essay,
“The
Uninhabitable Earth,” that focused almost entirely on
worst-case climate scenarios. He discussed that, with
diminished resources and increased migration caused by
flooding, “social conflict could more than double this
century.”
The article’s scientific merit has been
fiercely
debated, but the World Bank did conclude
in March 2018 that water scarcity, crop failure, and rising
sea levels could displace 143 million people by 2050. The
report focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin
America, which represent more than half of the developing
world’s population. Unsurprisingly, the poorest and most
climate-vulnerable areas will be the hardest hit.
We
can see those effects already, said Lawrence Huang for the
non-profit organization Migration Policy Institute; “more
than 1 million Somalis were displaced by drought in 2022,
primarily within Somalia… [i]n rural Honduras and
Guatemala, [indirect effects of climate change] have
combined and amplified other drivers to prompt people to
move to cities, the United States, and other
destinations.”
5. Lethal Heat
A 2017 analysis
showed that around 30 percent of the global population
suffers deadly heat and humidity levels for at least 20 days
a year. If emissions continue increasing at current rates,
the researchers suggest that 74 percent of the global
population—nearly three in four people—will experience
more than 20 days of lethal heat waves.
“Our
attitude towards the environment has been so reckless that
we are running out of good choices for the future,” Camilo
Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the study’s
lead author, told National
Geographic.
“For heatwaves, our options are now
between bad or terrible,” he added. “Many people around
the world are already paying the ultimate price of
heatwaves.”
“Extremely high temperatures of over
110 degrees Fahrenheit likely killed hundreds or thousands
of people across multiple countries” in West Africa in
March and April 2024, said
Emmanuel Akinwotu for National Public Radio. Akinwotu
further noted that a network of scientists had found that
the disaster would not have been possible without
“human-induced climate change.”
6. Surging
Wildfires
The Camp Fire, which burned more than
150,000 acres in Butte County in November, was the deadliest
and most destructive fire in California’s history, killing
86 people. The August
Complex Fire, which started in August 2020 and torched
roughly 1 million acres in Northern California, was the
largest fire in the state’s modern history. The
second-largest was 2018’s Mendocino Complex Fire, which
burned about 300,000 acres in Mendocino and three other
Northern California counties.
However,
according to California’s
Fourth Climate Change Assessment released by the
governor’s office in August 201, the Golden State’s
fires will only worsen. If greenhouse gases continue rising,
large fires that burn more than 25,000 acres will increase
by 50 percent by the end of the century, and the volume of
acres that wildfires will burn in an average year will
increase by 77 percent, the report
said.
“Higher spring and summer
temperatures and earlier
spring snowmelt typically cause soils to be drier for
longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a
longer wildfire season, particularly in the western
United States,” The Union of Concerned Scientists
explained in a blog
post.
“These hot, dry conditions also increase
the likelihood that wildfires will be more
intense and long-burning once they are started by
lightning strikes or human error.”
7. Hurricanes:
More Frequent, More Intense
It’s not currently
clear if climate changes directly lead to each major
hurricane in a given summer. However, we know this: Moist
air over warm ocean water is hurricane
fuel.
“Everything in the atmosphere now is impacted
by the fact that it’s warmer than it’s ever been,” CNN
Senior Meteorologist Brandon Miller said.
“There’s more water vapor in the atmosphere. The ocean
is warmer. And all of that really only pushes the impact in
one direction, and that is worse: higher surge in storms,
higher rainfall in storms.”
NOAA concluded
in June 2018, “It is likely that greenhouse warming will
cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense
globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day
hurricanes.”
8. Melted Polar Ice and
Permafrost
The Arctic is warming at a rate twice as
fast as the rest of the planet, and continued loss of ice
and snow cover “will cause big changes to ocean currents,
to the circulation of the atmosphere, to fisheries and
especially to the air temperature, which will warm up
because there isn’t any ice cooling the surface
anymore,” Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics
Group at the University of Cambridge, told Public
Radio International. “That will have an effect, for
instance, on air currents over Greenland, which will
increase the melt rate of the Greenland ice
sheet.”
Also, frozen Arctic soil—or
permafrost—is starting to melt, releasing methane, a far
more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The Arctic
permafrost holds 1.8
trillion tons of carbon—more than twice as much as is
currently suspended in the Earth’s
atmosphere.
Wadhams explained that the fear is that
the permafrost will melt in “one rapid go.” If that
happens, “The amount of methane that comes out will be a
huge pulse, and that would have a detectable climate change,
maybe 0.6 of a degree… So, it would be just a big jerk to
the global climate.”
9. The Spread of
Pathogens
Disturbingly, permafrost is full of
pathogens, and its melting could unleash once-frozen
bacteria and viruses, The
Atlantic reported. In 2016, dozens of people were
hospitalized, and a 12-year-old boy died after an outbreak
of anthrax in Siberia. More than 2,000 reindeer were also
infected. Anthrax hadn’t been seen in the region for 75
years. The cause? According to NPR, scientists suggested
that a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that was infected
with the disease decades
ago.
While we shouldn’t get too frightened about
Earth’s once-frozen pathogens wiping us out (yet), the
warming planet has also widened the geographic ranges of
ticks, mosquitoes, and other organisms that carry
disease.
“We now have dengue in southern parts of
Texas,” George C. Stewart, McKee Professor of Microbial
Pathogenesis and chair of the department of veterinary
pathobiology at the University of Missouri, told Scientific
American. “Malaria is seen at higher elevations and
latitudes as temperatures climb. And the cholera agent,
Vibrio cholerae, replicates better at higher
temperatures.”
10. Dead Corals
As the
world’s largest carbon sink, our oceans bear the brunt of
climate change. But the more carbon it absorbs (about 22
million tons a day), the more acidic the waters become. This
could put a whole host of marine life at risk, including
coral reef ecosystems, the thousands of species that depend
on them, and the estimated 1
billion people around the globe who rely on healthy
reefs for sustenance and income. According to Science,
“Researchers predict that with increasing levels of
acidification, most
coral reefs will be gradually dissolving away by the end
of the century.”
These climate predictions are
worst-case scenarios, but there are many more dangers to
consider in our warming world. A report
published in 2018 in the journal Nature Climate Change found
“evidence for 467 pathways by which human health, water,
food, economy, infrastructure, and security have been
recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming,
heatwaves, precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms,
sea-level rise and changes in natural land cover and ocean
chemistry.”
“Even if humanity moves swiftly to
rein in global warming, 70 to 90 percent of today’s
reef-building corals could die in the coming decades. If we
don’t, the toll could be 99 percent or more. A reef can
look healthy right up until its corals start bleaching and
dying. Eventually, it is a graveyard,” write Raymond Zhong
and Mira Rojanasakul in an August 2024 New York Times report.
Half
a Degree Matters
Since the 19th century, the Earth
has warmed by over 1 degree Celsius. A major IPCC special
report released in October 2018 warned that even a
half-degree more warming could be disastrous. “Every extra
bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5
degrees Celsius or higher increases the risk associated with
long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of
some ecosystems,” said
Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of IPCC Working Group
II.
The panel said
that “limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius
compared to 2 degrees Celsius could go hand in hand with
ensuring a more sustainable and equitable
society.”
However, “[p]rojected CO2 emissions from
existing fossil fuel infrastructure without additional
abatement would exceed the remaining carbon budget for 1.5
degrees Celsius,” the IPCC said
in 2023. In other words, staying under 2 degrees Celsius
is increasingly unlikely, and because of that, a sustainable
and equitable society stubbornly remains a distant
dream.
Author Bio: Lorraine Chow is
the stewardship and outreach coordinator at the Santa
Fe Watershed Association. She is also an environmental
journalist and a contributor to the Observatory.
Her work has appeared in Truthout, EcoWatch, Nation of
Change, Salon, AlterNet, and Common Dreams. She is based in
Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Credit Line:
This article first appeared on Truthout
and was produced in partnership with Earth
| Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
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