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Climate Brief: Trees are not Going to Save Us [1]
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Date: 2022-10-01
From Yale Climate Connections We all love trees, but they’re not the climate solution we need:
All land-based farming would have to cease; we would need to genetically engineer trees so they could grow on solid ice in Antarctica and Greenland, on pure sand in the Sahara Desert, and on roads and solid pavement in cities. All the people would have to move from land to giant sea colonies and switch to a diet of nothing but seafood. If we were to fill in the Indian Ocean with soil, perhaps obtained by grinding up the Himalayas into powder, we could gain more than enough additional land to complete the task. What could go wrong? Any takers? - snip- Amount of land required: (8 trillion / 500 billion) * 3.47 million = 55.5 million square miles of new forest; Land on the planet: 57.5 million square miles, 14 million of which is already forested; Shortfall: 55.5 – (57.5 – 14) = 12 million square miles. Bill Chapman, co-chair of Conservative Climate Activists.
IPCC Report
The IPCC has delayed publishing its seventh assessment report until early 2023, which means it will not be available prior to COP27, the UNFCCC climate talks this November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
x .@COP27P, you just signed the world's worst plastic polluter who is fuelling the climate crisis to sponsor a climate conference? How would you hold @CocaCola accountable when you are taking their fossil fuel-fed dirty money? Unconscionable!! #ActOnClimate
https://t.co/Re46jh72ih — Ghana Youth Environmental Movement (GYEM) (@gyemgh) September 30, 2022
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which works under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, is tasked with researching and disseminating knowledge on climate change.
The meeting will be the first however since the publication earlier this year of the IPCCs sixth assessment report on how climate change impacts the world.
x You should sign this!
https://t.co/kJMeyXDLi8 — People's Climate (@Climate_Ireland) October 1, 2022
The IPCC's technical summary for its Sixth Assessment Report warns that warmer temperatures will generally correspond with more rain falling on the year's wettest day in a given region. And new data last week from the National Centers for Environmental Information seem to bear this out: the U.S. saw one of its hottest Augusts on record, with precipitation notably above average in several vulnerable regions. Talk about a wet, hot American summer.
Water World
In a Real Clear Policy article The Jackson Water Crisis & the Urgency of Climate Adaptation, author Jordan McGillis explores how water management will be vital as we adapt to a world with increased precipitation and flooding. Citing the recent tragedies in Jackson, Mississippi and in Pakistan, McGillis points to the successful adaptation efforts in Bangladesh, a country which is highly prone to flooding.
Bangladesh has made significant investments in its water management policies which include installilng community alert systems, subsidizing home raising, and building shelters. Nearly half a million died in a 1970 cyclone whereas two years ago only 30 died in a storm of equal strength.
Pakistan, on the other hand, has failed to keep pace and finds itself currently mired in the worst flooding it has experienced in decades, with 72 out of 160 national districts considered disaster zones amid this year’s monsoon rains and more than 1,100 people dead as of this writing. What Bangladesh displays, and what Pakistan must embrace, is a hawk-like focus on weathering a changing climate.
In Jackson, vital infrastructure was not prepared to handle the torrential rains which inundated the city.
McGilllis argues that practical management plans need to be prioritized over debates on how humans have caused climate change and grappling over energy policy.
What effect did anthropogenic global warming have on the rains that inundated Mississippi and overwhelmed Jackson’s water management system? Attribution science will never give us a perfect answer to that, but a lack of certainty on causation is no salve to Jackson residents who were without drinking water for more than two weeks.
Climate Suicide
2022 will be remembered by history as the year that the mega-scale impacts of climate change became suddenly, frighteningly real,” writes umair haque in This Is What a Civilization Committing Climate Suicide Looks Like.
“Think of the last four months alone. In each of those months, a mega-scale impact of climate change — aka Extinction — has occurred. Just last week, Florida drowned, as Hurricane Ian hit it with hammer blow after blow. In September, Pakistan flooded, leaving tens of millions of people’s lives, homes, futures underwater. In August, a mega-heatwave stretched around the globe, from China to America. In July, Britain had its hottest day ever — the mercury crossing 40 degrees Centigrade — while Europe, from France to Portugal burned.”
Haque continues:
The mega-scale impacts of climate change are arriving way ahead of schedule. The models predicted that such events wouldn’t really materialize until the 2050s or so — entire nations drowned, whole regions burning, events on vast scales that even drones and satellite images fail to capture them well. The mega-scale impacts of climate change are arriving decades faster than predicted or expected. They’re here now.
ActOnClimate
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