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Using existing data on five climate variables (3 from the atmosphere, 2 from the oceans) from 1860 to 2005, and some 39 models for future climates,a study published by the University of Hawaii determined for various locations around the world "the projected timing of climate departure from recent variability." One major measure is the "projected year when annual or monthly air temperature means move to a state continuously outside annual or monthly historical bounds." Note the word "continuously." Basically what it means is determining the year when the climate changes, for all practical purposes, permanently.
The change is measured basically in this way: when the coldest years are warmer than the warmest years in the past. (This is in fact the headline of the New York Times story on the study.) The conclusion is that this change will happen very soon.
The changes they project will happen from south to north, beginning in tropical countries.The study has two sets of conclusions: the first based on carbon pollution continuing at projected rates, the second on carbon pollution being reigned in. In the "business as usual" scenario, the first set of cities reaches this tipping point in the 2020s, including Kingston, Jamaica. The change is projected for New York City, Washington, DC and many other U.S. cities in 2047. It may take until 2071 to reach Anchorage, Alaska. (The study is based on a margin of error of plus or minus 5 years.)
Though these conclusions are accompanied by the usual call for action now to curb carbon pollution, the second set of numbers is not much farther in the future. The 2047 date for much of the world becomes 2069.
Effects of the climate crisis are already occurring, but this is the most obvious and important effect: the change to a new climate for all the life on this planet. Various stories sought out climate scientists for comment, and some called this study conservative. For instance: "Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said the research "may actually be presenting an overly rosy scenario when it comes to how close we are to passing the threshold for dangerous climate impacts. By some measures," he said, "we are already there." One of those measures, the study's authors note, may well be ocean acidity, which may have passed the tipping point in 2008 or so.
The most salient quote in the stories I saw is this one, from the Washington Post: “I think people don’t appreciate the fact that one of the metrics we are most familiar with, and definitely have the most difficulty dealing with, extreme heat, is coming down the track,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University."
A few late 1980s/early 90s extreme heat waves in Pittsburgh more than convinced me that unrelenting extreme heat is the worst: it makes thinking clearly very difficult, or controlling impulses, or conquering lethargy and despair. I assume one of the reasons people "have the most trouble with" this "metric" is that it is so terrifying.
So basically what this study says is that the world changes--that for practical purposes, our world begins to end--well within the lifetime of adults living today. In the earliest cases, just 7 to 10 years from now, when this heat hits millions of the poorest people and poorest societies in the world. And 20 or so years later, when it completely transforms daily life everywhere in North America except the northernmost areas.
The study also looks at what species are most vulnerable when. And that's not a pretty picture either. As humans we are dependent on the life around us, even if that doesn't seem so clearly to be so. It will become obvious.
The implications include how societies will cope, will even survive. Temperature and related climate factors affect not only nature as natural resources but elements of the familiar. The animals, the trees, the winters, the birds, the skies we know now will be different, or no more. Food sources from the sea are especially vulnerable, but so are all food resources in this stretched-out global society, where food comes from great distances and must feed huge populations, every day. Many people alive today will see this change as it happens. The next generation will probably not even know many aspects of our world.
So why have newspapers like the aforementioned NY Times, Washington Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette done this (admittedly one-day) story, as well as USA Today TPM etc but not Climate Progress, Real Climate and other such sites?
One possibility is that they are still examining the science, from scientists they don't know. Another is that the conclusions run up against the political and fundraising stance of working to "solve" or "stop" or "reverse" climate change, or simply the deflating effect of futility, of despair.
But there is much that can and must be done to prepare for the change, as a society and as individuals and families. In order to face these tasks and this future while living in the now while we have it--and all the other challenges, can't even be approached without confronting the implications of this probable near future. There is much to be done to save even worse effects in the farther future--effects that are not survivable for much of existing life--by drastically reducing carbon and other greenhouse gas pollution.
This very hard future has been suggested in recent books such as Mark Hertsgaard's Hot, Bill McKibben's Eaarth, David Orr's Down to the Wire and Paul Gilding's The Great Disruption, among others. (And these are probably the most optimistic or at least gentler treatments.) Now there are dates associated with this new world.
So far however the trend of denying and avoiding the implications holds. If it continues, the prophesy of T.S. Eliot becomes ever more salient:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Update: There is a brief story at Live Science.
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