When it comes to convincing climate change deniers, Al
Gore says, "Mother Nature is more persuasive than the scientific
community." Claire Harbage/NPR
Former Vice President Al Gore helped shape the conversation about climate change with An Inconvenient Truth. Now he's back with a sequel — called An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, due out next month —and it follows Gore as he continues the crusade he made famous with that first film.
The
movie shows Gore standing in Miami floodwater, flying over imploding
boulders of ice in Greenland and in Paris — trying to push the climate
agreement over the finish line.
President Trump, however, promised last month to undo that victory when he announced plans to pull the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.
"I did my best to convince him to stay in the Paris agreement," Gore tells NPR's Steve Inskeep in one of two recent Morning Edition interviews. "And I thought that there was a chance he would come to his senses, but I was wrong."
Still, Gore is hopeful about reversing the effects of global climate change.
"[O]ne
of the big differences between today and a decade ago is that we do
have the solutions now," he says. Renewable energy like solar and wind
electricity, he says, have evolved just like other technologies such as
mobile phones and TVs so that "when production scales up they come down
even faster in cost."
The first clip from the sequel to 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Paramount Pictures
Interview Highlights On recutting the movie to address President Trump's withdrawing of the Paris climate accord
We
always anticipated that we could not end the movie until we realized
who was going to win the election and what would happen thereafter. And I
will tell you that when President Trump made his announcement that the
U.S. will pull out of the Paris agreement I was deeply concerned that
other countries might use that as an excuse to withdraw themselves. But
I've been gratified that the entire rest of the world has doubled down
on their commitments to the Paris agreement and that here in this
country so many governors and mayors and business leaders have stepped
up to fill the gap and say "We're still in Paris." And I really think,
and the scientists think now as well, that we have an excellent chance
of meeting the commitments that former President Obama made in the Paris
agreement regardless of what Donald Trump says. On whether he thinks Trump believes in human-caused climate change
I don't know. I have heard him say different things. I've heard him
say in public things that would lead you to believe that he doesn't
believe in it. But the scientific community has been virtually unanimous
for a couple of decades and now there's a new participant in the
debate: Mother Nature. The other big change from 10 years ago is that
these climate-related extreme weather events are way more common —
unfortunately way more destructive. Here in the U.S. we've had 11
once-in-a-thousand-year events in the last seven years. Last year was
the hottest year globally ever measured. The second hottest was the year
before, the third hottest was the year before that. And Mother Nature
is more persuasive than the scientific community.
On those who dismiss climate change science because they've lost faith in experts
I
think that one cause of this populist authoritarianism that we've seen
not just in the U.S. but in Poland and Turkey and the Philippines and in
Hungary ... is that the expert blueprint for globalization that has
been touted for quite some time has caused those who feel left behind to
feel real anger that middle-income wages have stagnated for decades and
I think that generalized anger at how things are going extends over
into a vulnerability to listen to demagogic claims that the scientific
community doesn't know what it's talking about when they warn us of the
climate crisis.
On climate change's role in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton
I
know the events I did for [Hillary Clinton] in the 2016 election evoked
a powerful response. I didn't see any other events that were devoted to
climate so maybe I missed that. I think that a lot of national politicians are told by their
pollsters and experts that they ought to focus on other issues, but I
think that's changing quite a bit. And I think that the partisan divide
is now fading on climate, I really do. I think the Democratic
Party should focus much more on [climate change]. And I believe that's
beginning to happen. If you look at Jerry Brown in California, Jay
Inslee in the state of Washington, Andrew Cuomo in the state of New York
and many others, we're now beginning to see a surge of interest in
people who want to get away from the fossil fuel utilities, they want
energy freedom, they want energy choice, and I think it will be a much
bigger political plus in the years to come.
Links
Watch the first clip from the sequel to 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Paramount Pictures.
USA TODAY NETWORK
A new global temperature baseline casts doubt on humanity's ability to meet the Paris target
Credit: MamiGibbs Getty Images
The temperature baseline used in
the Paris climate agreement may have discounted an entire century's
worth of human-caused global warming, a new study has found.
Countries in the Paris climate agreement set a target of keeping
warming below 2 degrees Celsius by curbing carbon emissions compared to
their preindustrial levels. But a new study shows that the preindustrial
level used in the agreement, based on temperature records from the late
19th century, doesn't account for a potential century of rising
temperatures caused by carbon dioxide emissions. Accounting for those
gases, released from about 1750 to 1875, would add another one-fifth of a
degree to the baseline temperature, the study found.
Published yesterday in Nature Climate Change, the research
suggests there's less time than previously believed to address global
warming, said Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State
University.
The study estimates that there may have already been 0.2 degree
Celsius of warming, or 0.36 degree Fahrenheit, built into Earth, he
said. That means the Paris Agreement would have to be more aggressive,
according to the study, which was also written by researchers from the
universities of Edinburgh and Reading in the United Kingdom.
“When you take that into account, it turns out we have 40 percent less carbon to burn than we thought we had,” Mann said.
When it comes to climate change science, researchers typically use
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from the late 19th century as a
guideline, because that's when instrumentation was developed to
accurately measure temperatures. Researchers use models that combined
observed temperatures with simulated sea surface temperatures and
surface air temperatures to determine temperatures from 1401 to 1800.
The new baseline casts doubt on humanity's ability to meet the Paris
target of holding temperatures below 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above
preindustrial levels.
“The probability of exceeding the thresholds and timing of exceedance
is highly dependent on the pre-industrial baseline,” the authors wrote.
Mann cautioned that there is still time to stave off the worst
effects of warming, and that the Paris Agreement is the best path to get
there. Still, he said, the study suggests the world's carbon budget —
the amount of carbon dioxide the world can burn while keeping global
temperatures below 2 degrees — may be smaller than nations realize.
The advent of the internal-combustion engine sparked a major release
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that has warmed the Earth. The
Paris climate accord is the broadest attempt in human history to limit
those emissions. Re-establishing a new baseline would put more pressure
on countries around the world. The study came after Trump announced he
was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement in order to
get a “better deal.”
Before the age of industrialization, the amount of atmospheric carbon
dioxide was about 280 parts per million (ppm), scientists have
determined. They measured air bubbles frozen in Arctic ice to ascertain
that number. The early decades of industrialization, fueled by economic
growth in Europe, may have added 30 to 40 ppm of carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere, according to Mann.
Now, atmospheric CO2 is rising at a record pace and is already at 410
ppm. It's expected to climb for decades. A growing body of research
suggests that the continuing rise in atmospheric CO2 could eventually
make some places on the planet uninhabitable, cause sea levels to swamp
coastal cities and lead to millions of refugees.
“The Paris commitments were seen as at least getting us on to the
right path and putting in place a framework where we could tighten the
framework in the years ahead,” Mann said. “Our studies suggest it's even
more urgent than we might have thought, because Paris, at least by this
measure, doesn't even get us halfway there. It gets us a third of the
way there.”
The global pact is supposed to review the best available science
every few years to inform progress toward limiting global temperature
rise. The study released yesterday is exactly the type of research that
could inform future negotiations, said Andrew Light, a distinguished
fellow at the World Resources Institute and a former senior climate
change adviser in the Obama administration.
“There has always been a strong tie between the scientific community
and the negotiations process,” he said. “The forum where most of this
stuff gets hashed out is the IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change] ... [and] there will be more of an ongoing opportunity
for parties to think about whether or not they need to revise their
targets in response to this.”
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.
A young, fit US soldier is marching in a Middle
Eastern desert, under a blazing summer sun. He's wearing insulated
clothing and lugging more than 100 pounds of gear, and thus sweating
profusely as his body attempts to regulate the heat. But it's 108
degrees out and humid, too much for him bear. The brain is one of the
first organs affected by heat, so his judgment becomes impaired; he does
not recognize the severity of his situation. Just as his organs begin
to fail, he passes out. His internal temperature is in excess of 106
degrees when he dies.
An elderly woman with
cardiovascular disease is sitting alone in her Chicago apartment on the
second day of a massive heatwave. She has an air conditioner, but she's
on a fixed income and can't afford to turn it on again—or maybe it broke
and she can't afford to fix it. Either way, she attempts to sleep
through the heat again, and her core temperature rises. To cool off,
her body's response is to work the heart harder, pumping more blood to
her skin. But the strain on her heart is too much; it triggers cardiac
arrest, and she dies.
Such scenarios could
surely happen today, if they haven't already. But as the world warms due
to climate change, they'll become all too common in just a few
decades—and that's according to modest projections.
AFP/Getty Images
This is not meant to scare you quite like this month's cover story in New York magazine, "The Uninhabitable Earth." That story was both a sensation and quite literally sensational, attracting more than two million readers
with its depiction of "where the planet is heading absent aggressive
action." In this future world, humans in many places won't be able to
adapt to rising temperatures. "In the jungles of Costa Rica, where
humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when
it's over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would
be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from
both inside and out," David Wallace-Wells writes. "[H]eat stress in New
York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet's
hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain 'would induce hyperthermia
in even sleeping humans.'"
These scenarios are
supported by the science. "For heat waves, our options are now between
bad or terrible," Camilo Mora, a geography professor at University of
Hawaii at Manoa, told CNN last month. Mora was the lead author of a recent study, published in the journal Nature,
showing that deadly heat days are expected to increase across the
world. Around 30 percent of the world's population today is exposed to
so-called "lethal heat" conditions for at least 20 days a year. If we
don't reduce fossil-fuel emissions, the percentage will skyrocket to 74
percent by the year 2100. Put another way, by the end of the century
nearly three-quarters of the Earth's population will face a high risk of
dying from heat exposure for more than three weeks every year.
Even the best-case scenario shows that nearly half of humanity will be exposed regularly to deadly heat by the year 2100.
This
is the worst-case scenario. Even the study's best-case scenario—a
drastic reduction in greenhouse gases across the world—shows that 48
percent of humanity will be exposed regularly to deadly heat by the year
2100. That's because even small increases in temperature can have a
devastating impact. A study published in Science Advances
in June, for instance, found that an increase of less than one degree
Fahrenheit in India between 1960 and 2009 increased the probability of
mass heat-related deaths by nearly 150 percent.
And
make no mistake: Temperatures are rising, in multiple ways. "We've got a
new normal," said Howard Frumkin, a professor at the School of Public
Health at the University of Washington. "I think all of the studies of
trends to date show that we're having more extreme heat, and we've
having higher average temperatures. Superimposed on that, we're seeing
more short-term periods of extreme heat. Those are two different trends,
and they're both moving in the wrong direction." Based on those trends,
the US Global Change Research Program predicts
"an increase of thousands to tens of thousands of premature
heat-related deaths in the summer ... each year as a result of climate
change by the end of the century." And that's along with the deaths
we've already seen: In 2015, Scientific American noted that nine out of the ten deadliest heat waves ever have occurred since 2000; together, they've killed 128,885 people.
In
other words, to understand how global warming wreaks havoc on the human
body, we don't need to be transported to some imagined dystopia.
Extreme heat isn't a doomsday scenario but an existing, deadly
phenomenon—and it's getting worse by the day. The question is whether
we'll act and adapt, thereby saving countless lives.
There
are two ways a human body can fail from heat. One is a direct heat
stroke. "Your ability to cool yourself down through sweating isn't
infinite," said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American
Public Health Association. "At some point, your body begins to heat up
just like any other object. You go through a variety of problems. You
become dehydrated. Your skin dries out. Your various organs begin to
shut down. Your kidneys, your liver, your brain. As gross as this may
sound, you in effect, cook." (So maybe Wallace-Wells wasn't being
hyperbolic after all.)
Heat
death can also be happen due to a pre-existing condition, the fatal
effects of which were triggered by high temperature. "Heat stress
provokes huge amounts of cardiovascular strain," said Matthew Cramer of
the Institute of Exercise and Environmental Medicine. "For these people,
it's not necessarily that they've cooked, but the strain on their
cardiovascular system has led to death." This is much more common than
death by heat stroke, but is harder to quantify since death certificates
cite the explicit cause of death—"cardiac arrest," for instance, rather
than "heat-related cardiac arrest."
In both
scenarios, the body's natural ability to cool itself off through
sweating has either reached its capacity or has been compromised through
illness, injury, or medication. There are many people who have reduced
capacity for sweating, such as those who have suffered severe burns over
large parts of their bodies. Cramer,
who studies heat impacts on burned people, says 50,000 people suffer
severe burn injuries per year in America, and the World Health
Organization considers burns "a global public health problem," with the majority of severe burn cases occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Bodies
that are battling illness or on medication may also struggle with heat
regulation. Diuretics tend to dehydrate people; anticholinergics and
antipsychotics reduce sweating and inhibit heat dissipation. An analysis
of the 2003 heat wave in France that killed 15,000 people suggested
that many of these deaths could have been avoided had people been made
aware of the side effects of their drugs. As for illnesses, "Anything
that impairs the respiratory or circulatory system will increase risk,"
said Mike McGheehin, who spent 33 years as an environmental
epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Obesity, diabetes, COPD, heart disease, and renal disease." Kidney
disease, mental illness, and multiple sclerosis. The list goes on and
on.
This summer has presented many opportunities for bodies to break down from heat. Temperature records, some more than a century old, have been broken across California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Arizona. (Speaking of Arizona, it's been so hot there that planes can't fly.) And it's not just America. Last month, Iran nearly set the world record for highest temperature ever recorded. The May heatwave that hit India and Pakistan set new world records as well, including what the New York Timescalled
"potentially the hottest temperature ever recorded in Asia": 129.2
degrees Fahrenheit. Worldwide, 2017 is widely expected to be the second-hottest year, after 2016, since we began keeping global average temperature records in 1880.
A Pakistani resident helps a heatstroke victim at a market area during a heatwave in Karachi on June 23, 2015. RIZWAN TABASSUM / Getty Images
These
trends have public health professionals concerned about how people are
going to deal with the heat when it comes their way. "Clearly this is
one of the most important problems we're going to see from a public
health perspective," Benjamin said. "This is not a tomorrow problem.
It's a significant public health problem that we need to address today."
It's
a public health problem especially in cities, says Brian Stone, a
professor at Georgia Tech's City and Regional Planning Program. "Our
fundamental work shows that larger cities are warming at twice the rate
of the planet," he said, describing a phenomenon known as urban heat islands, where built-up areas tend to be hotter than surrounding rural areas, mainly because plants have been replaced by heat-absorbing concrete.
Global warming is making that phenomenon worse. "We're really worried
about the rate of how quickly we're starting to see cities heat up,"
Stone said.
According
to Stone's analysis, the most rapidly warming city is Louisville,
Kentucky, followed by Phoenix, Arizona, and Atlanta, Georgia. But he's
less concerned about cities like Phoenix, which already have
infrastructure to deal with brutally high temperatures, than he is about
Chicago, Buffalo, and other cities in the northern United States that
have really never had to deal with extreme heat. That is precisely why
the Chicago heat wave of 1995 that killed 759 people was so deadly.
According to the Chicago Tribune,
the city was "caught off guard," and had "a power grid that couldn't
meet demand and a lack of awareness on the perils of brutal heat."
In other words, Stone and others say, excessive death rates are not always due to just extreme temperatures, but unusual
temperatures. People are more likely to die when they are confronted
with temperatures they don't expect and thus aren't prepared for. That's
why officials in cities not experiencing heat-related extremes need to
improve emergency response systems, now. "Those people have got to start
thinking in term of, 'two years ago we had four hot days, the year
after we had eight hot days,'" Benjamin said. "Public health systems
should be put in place to respond to prolonged heat waves. Emergency
cooling centers where people can go should be built. Identify where the
people who are most socially isolated live." Absent preventative action,
heat-related deaths in New York City could quintuple by the year 2080,
according to recent research.
Some cities have already started to prepare. Stone recently completed a heat adaptation study
for Louisville that includes not only emergency management planning but
also ways the city can prevent itself from getting so hot (by improving
energy efficiency and installing green roofs, for instance). But as for
now, he said, it's rare to see a city actually adopt policies
supportive of heat management. "We do see flooding adaptation plans—New
York City has one, and New Orleans has one—but heat adaptation planning
is a very new idea, in the US and really around the world," he said. "It
takes a lot to convince a mayor that a city can actually cool itself
down. It's not intuitive."
The good news is
that humans adapt to heat, both physiologically (through
acclimatization) and socially (with air conditioning, for instance).
That will continue, according to the US Global Change Research Program,
which states with very high confidence that adaptation efforts in humans
"will reduce the projected increase in deaths from heat."
"It's a quintessential public health problem in that it impacts the most disenfranchised of our society."
But
there's a limit to this. "There's no way to adapt to heat that's more
than a certain amount," Frumkin said. "And socially, there's always
going to be people we miss, who don't have access to air conditioning."
McGeehin noted those people will likely be poor, elderly, and minority
populations. "It's a quintessential public health problem in that it
impacts the most disenfranchised of our society. Young, healthy,
middle-class people will largely be left alone," he said.
Air
conditioners also have limits, especially in cities where blackouts can
occur. "It is inevitable," Stone said, that large cities will see
blackouts during future heat waves. "The number of blackouts we see year
over year is increasing dramatically," he said. "Whether that's caused
by the heatwave or just happens during the heatwave doesn't really
matter.... The likelihood of an extensive blackout during a heatwave is
high, and getting higher as we add more devices and stressors to the
grid."
It's a "cruel irony," Frumkin said, that
as the world gets hotter, we need more air conditioning, and thus
consume more electricity. And if that electricity comes from fossil fuel
sources, it will create more global warming, which in turn will
increase the demand for air conditioning. The answer, he said, is to
"decarbonize the electric grid." But that's easier said than done,
especially when the Trump administration is devoted to increasing the
use of fossil fuels to support the country's electrical grid.
As with many other efforts to fight climate change, though, cities don't need Washington's help
to take action on heat adaptation. "Cities can manage their own heat
islands on their own, and that's where we most need to be focused,"
Stone said. But that will require convincing elected leaders that
extreme heat is big a threat as, say, rising seas—and one that can't be
addressed with something as obvious as a sea wall. That's the challenge,
says McGeehin: "Heat as a major natural disaster is mostly overlooked
in this country." It's a quiet killer, and perhaps more lethal because
of it. How Climate Change Is Already Affecting Earth Though the planet has only warmed by one-degree Celsius since the
Industrial Revolution, climate change's effect on earth has been
anything but subtle. Here are some of the most astonishing developments
over the past few years.
This story originally appeared on New Republic and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Links
