The New Normal: The Accelerating Extreme

    WA Post:Remains of a home moved back from encroaching sea levels in RI

In a way it was a headline I dreaded to see for thirty years, and it appeared yesterday in the Washington Post:  Extreme Climate Change Has Reached the United States.

This long, careful story--calm, specific, with a minimum of jargon, replete with photos and interactive maps (there's also a podcast version)--is a snapshot in context, the America that exists this summer in the context of the ongoing process of global heating since the 19th century, but most consistently registering since 1970.

It notes that the goal of the Paris Accords to address the causes of global heating and the resulting climate crisis was to keep the global temperature "well below" a rise of 2 degrees C from 1895 levels by the turn of the century, which scientists marked as indicating catastrophic consequences.

Baltimore, from earlier WAPost story

The story reveals that in several places in the US, the 2 degree rise has already been exceeded.  These tend to be in northern states, at high elevations or on sea coasts (particularly the Atlantic), and/or the biggest urban concentrations that generate their own heat to add to the atmosphere, chiefly New York City and the LA metro area.

They begin with New Jersey where for generations a lake froze over every winter, with ice so thick that a winter festival could be held on it.  But where the ice no longer freezes that deep, or at all.  That's also the first point: that so far, despite hotter summers, the rise in average temperature comes from warmer winters.

The northern aspect comports with other data, that temperatures are rising fastest in the Arctic at least as far south as Alaska.  Rising winter temperatures may be temporarily pleasant,  but disease-bearing insects that normally would die back in the cold now can become more profuse in the warmer months.  And ice and snow that reflects heat no longer can when it's gone, and so both the land and the oceans get progressively warmer, raising sea levels.

This news is not surprising to me, though it is still shocking.  I know as well about the mechanisms that make this dangerous for the future: the feedback effects, the time lags--so global heating feeds on itself, and the effects come long after the causes.

 I once thought that these were the most challenging aspects of the climate crisis--these apparently new features of complexity.  But it seems to have turned out that the responses falter on the same primitive level of fear, selfishness and willful denial as in the past.

There's not a lot to say about what this means for the future.  That's pretty obvious, and it's not good.  It is however further confirmation of the road we're on--and that we're a ways down that road.

Personally, I would like to endorse what the aging  H.G. Wells said he would like for an epitaph: "God damn you all, I told you so."  Wells was one of the best known writers of his time, with a wide public that included the most powerful people in England and America.  Yet his warnings--of World War I, of World War II, of the atomic bomb--went essentially unheeded.  I wrote a few pieces published in newspapers on the climate crisis, and posted on what were then popular community blogs, beginning in the early 1990s.  But basically I've been making my points on blogs that nobody reads.  I am therefore not surprised I've had no influence.  So such an epitaph for me would be pointless.  Nevertheless...