I hate heat. People are different. Some are intolerant to, and fear, cold.
Others are like me, who, in stepping off the plane in Raleigh, North Carolina more than 40 years ago into temperatures and humidity in the 90s, knew she had made a big mistake to choose a medical school in the South.
So, perhaps I am more subjectively affected by last week’s reports of temperatures of 114 degrees Fahrenheit in Eyguieres, France. Not that reacting to heat is mainly an emotional experience. It is a public health issue. It kills people.
Seventy thousand Europeans died in the 2003 heat wave that was the continent’s rude awakening to the reality of global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels. The dead have not been tallied officially for the present heat wave, but many have been reported.
Temperatures exceeded an inconceivable 122 degrees in parts of South Asia and the Middle East in June. Heat killed 76 people in a single weekend in Bihar State, India, and Bihar hospitals were filled with patients with heat-related illness. Two-thirds of all India faced the heat wave, which situated itself in a country half of whose area is affected by the worst drought in 60 years.
The World Meteorological Organization reported that the four warmest years on record were in the past four years, and we are on track for 2015-2019 to be the warmest five years on record. The warming trend continues unabated so far in 2019 and the months January to May were the third hottest such period ever recorded.
“Heat waves will become more intense, they will become more drawn out, they will become more extreme, they will start earlier, and they will finish later,” Clare Nullis, a spokesperson for the WMO, said of its expectation for the coming years.
Science-based climate predictions are being fulfilled often sooner than expected. It’s getting hotter.
What happens to ice when temperatures rise? It melts. And polar sea ice and Himalayan glacial ice are melting faster than predicted. But even more alarming to most scientists is the report from Alaska that the tundra is melting 70 years before predicted, “leaving pristine Arctic terrain dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks — waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst.”
What’s to worry? A lot. The melting of ice introduces a feedback loop of more warming because dark water and land absorbs heat, whereas the white ice had previously reflected that heat back into space. Melting from warming itself brings about more warming.
But the melting of Arctic tundra is one of the truly Big Climate Change Kahunas. Melting tundra produces massive amounts of previously locked-in carbon dioxide and methane. The latter is a greenhouse gas more than 80 times as potent as CO2 over 20 years. Greenhouse gas production thus becomes independent of human efforts to control it.
“Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International.
“Climate disruption is happening now and it is happening to all of us,” said United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutierres last weekend at the Abu Dhabi World Climate meeting, calling it a “grave emergency … It is progressing even faster than the world’s top scientists have predicted … It is plain to me that we have no time to lose. Sadly, it is not yet plain to all the decision makers that run our world.”
To whom might have he been referring? I’ll take a wild guess. Could it be the leader who just replaced Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan with regulations for electricity generation that do little more than the market itself in reducing emissions from coal in the powering of our country’s grid?
Could it be the outlier from all the other G-20 leaders in Japan who refused to declare continuing support for the Paris Climate Accord? Is it possibly the heel-spurred warrior who has bloated the military budget to a size that emissions exceed those of the whole country of Portugal?
Yup. It is. We are in a climate emergency, our house is on fire, and the Trump administration is spraying gasoline on it, literally and figuratively.
There is much we must do, but our main focus in the next year and a half must be to replace this most dangerous of governments in history, one that not just ignores but feeds the global warming that threatens our society and the continued existence of millions of species on earth.
The Democrats must provide an alternative. There must be a national presidential climate debate to highlight the dire straits we are in and the need to decarbonize immediately. Our nation’s voters and our candidates must explore in detail what we can and should do to fight this terrible threat.
You can act on the local level. If you are a Democrat or independent, write or call your local committee and demand a presidential debate on the climate emergency. You can try it if you are a Republican, but I can’t guarantee how far you’ll get.
There is no doubt in my mind, though, that the coming election will decide our chances for a livable world.
Marty Nathan, MD, is a physician, mother and grandmother and serves on the steering committee of Climate Action NOW and the Springfield Climate Justice Coalition. She may be reached at martygjf@comcast.net.