The Gathering Storms

After the huge Typhoon Bopha wracked the Philippines last year, the country's lead climate negotiator at a diplomatic conference, Naderev Sano, delivered an impassioned plea to finally take the climate crisis seriously as a matter of life and death:

I appeal to the whole world, I appeal to leaders from all over the world, to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face. I appeal to ministers. The outcome of our work is not about what our political masters want. It is about what is demanded of us by 7 billion people.

I appeal to all, please, no more delays, no more excuses. Please, let Doha [location of the conference] be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around. Please, let 2012 be remembered as the year the world found the courage to find the will to take responsibility for the future we want. I ask of all of us here, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?

Now another even more devastating typhoon has wreaked havoc in the Philippines, and yet another delegate is at yet another climate conference, this time in Warsaw, delivering an impassioned plea.

"We can fix this. We can stop this madness. Right now, right here," he said, and later began a hunger strike--a fast for climate.  Video excerpts of his speech are at Youtube here.

But more than the connection between the climate crisis and more intense tropical storms is at issue here.  Forecasts of impacts suggest that poorer places like the Philippines are going to suffer the most, especially at first,while they are least able to cope with the effects.  This Philippines situation is becoming a rally point for poorer countries in the already tense relationship with rich countries, who contributed the most to the greenhouse gas pollution that will affect them.  

Munjurul Hannan Khan, representing the world's 47 least affluent countries at the Warsaw conference, said of the wealthy governments who are ignoring real action to address the climate crisis: "They are behaving irrationally and unacceptably." Hard to argue with that.

If affluent TV audiences are watching the slow progress of relief aid and the dimensions of the catastrophe in the Philippines, they may begin to understand that while much more serious and sustained attention must be paid to dealing with the very likely effects of the climate crisis, it is cheaper and much less painful in the long run to deal with the causes.  International aid organizations are making the connection, and demanding action on the causes of the climate crisis.

 But doing something now might cause pain to fossil fuel executives and rich bankers, rather than helpless poor in faraway foreign lands.  These poorer nations see this pretty clearly. As Temperatures Rise, Empires Fall was the Time Magazine headline on lessons of history in climate crises.  There's more than one way this can happen.

Meanwhile, the news on rising temperatures keeps getting worse.  Arctic temps are the highest in at least 44,000 years.  Based just on the latest UN climate report, researchers have estimated that deaths from heat waves may rise by a factor of 10.  But that may not even be the worst news of the month so far.

Climate scientists and especially climate crisis deniers have been talking about the reasons why global temps haven't risen as fast in the past 15 years as predicted.  The deep ocean carbon storage was pretty convincing, but some British and Canadian researchers suggest an even stronger reason: there was no pause.  The estimates were too low, by half.  There were gaps in the data, covered by faulty assumptions, etc.  You can read the column.  So if they are right, there's been no pause, and yet the deep oceans are still holding an enormous amount of carbon which someday will be released into the atmosphere.  Meanwhile, their graphic conclusions are in the graph higher at the top of this post.

Now to finish all the bad news I currently have, because there is some more or less good news on the topic..a very potent and clean way to soak carbon out of the atmosphere is with lots and lots of trees, with forests.  For awhile deforestation, especially in the Amazon, seemed to be waning, but apparently no more.  Brazil just announced that the massacre of the Amazon rainforest increased 28% in just one year.

Google Earth now has an interactive map of forest change for the first 12 years of this century.  The static version is below.  It shows deforestation but also new forest, though it's far and away a net loss.