This is a more comprehensive article on that subject. John Upton writes:
Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures. That’s the ominous conclusion of a vast and growing body of research that links sweeping Pacific Ocean cycles with rates of warming at the planet’s surface — warming rates that could affect how communities and nations respond to threats posed by climate change.
This is a very near future prediction. The research seems to indicate that this spurt could begin at any time but probably within the next five years.
The article reviews the research, some connections between higher temps and the climate crisis ("A suite of modeling studies have independently concluded that heat waves that ravaged Australia in 2013 would have been almost impossible without the warming effects of our greenhouse gas pollution.")
It also briefly reviews preparations being made (and not made) to deal with the effects, especially hotter temps for longer periods. “The public health community is starting to talk a lot more about climate generally,” Georgetown University Law Center adjunct professor Sara Pollock Hoverter, who specializes in climate change and climate resilience, said. “I think that all of us need to do more.”
The article also discusses whether new doses of extreme weather will finally lead to action, with a little more detail--but no firmer conclusion (i.e. from probably to maybe) than the piece I linked last time. You know what I'm going to say: it's crucial to always talk about both causes and consequences, or we may yield to panicky attempts to deal with effects and ignore addressing the causes.
The subject is mentioned in Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon by Theodore H. White (whose "Making of the President" series of campaign books set a new standard.) The book begins with Nixon's final days as President, as proof of his criminal behavior became clear, his support vanished layer by layer, and his closest aides tried to guide him towards resignation.
White pauses in relating the dramatic developments at the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill (the House impeachment investigation) and in the White House to note the ongoing issues being engaged within the government that had nothing to do with the presidential crisis. One was this: the NOAA administrator Robert M. White was trying to impress on other officials the concern of scientists that the 1974 Midwest drought might be a harbinger of major climate change in the future.
Ten pages later, at the moment Nixon was making his televised farewell to the White House staff, White brings the subject up again. Weather scientists were
preparing for a meeting that afternoon "with other executive agencies, trying to devise some plan that might bring the long-range problems of climate change to the attention of the New President."
But--White quickly adds--"...the next President, or the next few Presidents, might have a fifty-year span in which to make ready this civilization for the changes that climate might force on mankind..." so they paused to watch Nixon's farewell.
This book was published in 1975, yet White considered the concern serious enough to write about it in this context. This excerpt tells us of course that such concerns existed at a high level in 1974. But it also suggests one reason nothing much was done: there's always some drama of the moment to absorb attention.
That has remained true for forty years. By the time that fiftieth year comes, those civilization-challenging changes will very likely be impossible to ignore. And the world will be changed, for considerably longer than 50 more years.
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