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"Flying Blind" as Climate Change Wrecks Havoc on our World [1]
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Date: 2023-08-28
A group of 45 leading climate scientists spoke to the Guardian about the severity of rapidly accelerating “off the chart” climate change, warning that while we have not yet reached the tipping point we are perilously close. Within a decade we can expect the extreme weather of 2023 to become the new normal.
The only solution is to bring the burning of fossil fuels to zero.
“Climate science’s projections are pretty robust over the last decades. Unfortunately, humanity’s stubbornness to spew out ever-higher amounts of greenhouse gases has also been pretty robust,” Prof Malte Meinshausen, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, told the Guardian.
As we head into hurricane and wildfire season, NOAA reports 2023 weather disasters have already cost the US $15 billion to date.
Among these 15 costly events were 13 separate rounds of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes from March through late June primarily in the southern and central U.S., NOAA detailed in their monthly national climate report released Tuesday. The tally of such disasters through July was more than any previous year to-date, one more than January-July 2017, NOAA said. Record-keeping for billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. dates back to 1980.
The extreme weather events we are currently experiencing are merely the “tip of the iceberg,” scientists project. Without a drastic uptick in climate action, record-breaking heat waves, out-of-control forest fires, floods, and atmospheric rivers will become even more catastrophic. Climate modeling’s conservative predictions continue to underestimate extreme weather, leading to a case where we are “flying partially blind” to catastrophes awaiting us as a species.
The temperature of the planet is driven by two factors: the heat trapped by the ever-growing concentration of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities and, to a lesser extent, natural climate variation. Carbon emissions were already driving up temperatures faster than for thousands of years, and the re-emergence of the natural El Niño phenomenon in 2023 is adding a further boost. “While some of the records being set in 2023 are just crazy off-the-charts, everything is actually tracking within the range of projections of how Earth would respond to increasing greenhouse gas emissions – projections we’ve had now for the last 30-plus years,” said Prof Matthew England, of the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. -snip- “The impacts are frighteningly more impactful than I – and many climate scientists I know – expected,” said Prof Krishna AchutaRao, of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Prof Francisco Eliseu Aquino, of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, said: “I have also been scared by these extreme events in the last weeks and months. They are more intense and going beyond what we expected for this decade.”
“My expertise is in heatwaves, and I’m not surprised most of the northern hemisphere has had heatwaves this summer, but the intensity is greater than I expected,” Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, an associate professor at UNSW told the Guardian. “We are hitting record-breaking extremes much sooner than I expected. That’s frightening, scary and concerning, and it really suggests that we’re not as aware of what’s coming as we thought we were.”
Professor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, UK, says we can expect July’s record-breaking heat to be the new average “unless the world cooperates and puts climate action top of the agenda.”
The Global Fight to End Fossil Fuels takes place in New York City on September 15 and 17 to coincide with Climate Week and the UN Climate Ambition Summit. Demonstrations are also planned across the country and internationally. Information on transportation is available on the site.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/28/2190174/--Flying-Blind-as-Climate-Change-Wrecks-Havoc-on-our-World
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