Josh Edelson AFP / Getty Images |
Deadly
fires have scorched swaths of the Northern Hemisphere this summer, from
California to Arctic Sweden and down to Greece on the sunny
Mediterranean. Drought in Europe has turned verdant land barren, while
people in Japan and Korea are dying from record-breaking heat.
Climate
change is here and is affecting the entire globe -- not just the polar
bears or tiny islands vulnerable to rising sea levels -- scientists say.
It is on the doorsteps of everyday Americans, Europeans and Asians, and
the best evidence shows it will get much worse.
This summer, 119 people in Japan died in a heat wave, while 29 were killed in South Korea,
officials there say. Ninety-one people in Greece died in wildfires, and
ongoing fires in California have taken at least eight lives. Spain and
Portugal sweltered through an exceptionally hot weekend with a heat wave
that has killed three people in Spain and pushed temperatures toward record levels.
Deadly heat waves will become more frequent and occur in more places on the planet in coming decades, according to a study published last summer in the journal Nature Climate Change. Extreme heat waves are frequently cited as one of the most direct effects of man-made climate change.
Remarkably,
scientists can now work out in just a matter of days how much
human-induced climate change has had to do with a particular weather
event, using a combination of observation, historical data and current
information from weather stations.
"The European heat wave was at least twice as likely to happen because
of human intervention. Based on findings in Ireland it was double -- and
we know that with very high confidence -- and based on data from all
other weather stations it was more than double," said Karsten Haustein
from the World Weather Attribution Project, part of Oxford University's
Environmental Change Institute.
Scientists have been able to use this
kind of modeling for more than a decade, but improved technology now
allows them to do it nearly in real time, letting people understand the
links between what they are seeing and climate change.
Despite
the deadly summer, overwhelming evidence that humans are altering the
planet, and ever-improving science that links specific weather events to
global warming, the international politics around the issue of climate
change are in disarray. And there are alarming signs that the planet may
be in worse shape than ever before.
A house is caught up in the Carr fire in Redding, California, on July 27. Josh Edelson AFP / Getty Images |
Carbon levels highest in 800,000 years
A report released Wednesday by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) gave the Earth in 2017 a grim report card.
The
major greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide --
all rose to record levels last year. The global average carbon dioxide
concentration was the highest ever recorded, and higher than at any
point in the past 800,000 years, according to ice-core data.
Spending on oil and gas increased last
year, pushing up the share of fossil fuels in energy supply investment
for the first time since 2014, according to the International Energy Agency.
Investment in renewable energy dropped 7%, while demand for coal rose,
largely to keep Asia's furnaces burning as the region rapidly develops.
And last year also saw US President Donald Trump announce his plan to pull the US from the Paris Agreement,
in a striking blow to global action on climate change. The US is the
world's second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, and a pact without the
powerhouse nation is significantly weakened.
The
symptoms of climate change were also dramatic. Last year was the second
or third-hottest year on record, depending on the dataset used,
following three record-breaking hot years, the NOAA report showed. It
was the hottest year on record without an El NiƱo, the natural weather
event that adds to the warming of the seas and the whole planet.
A
new record for global sea levels was set. Unprecedented coral bleaching
occurred, and both the Arctic and the Antarctic saw record-low levels
of sea ice, as warmer air and seas continued the trend of thinning out
the polar ice.
Most Americans accept man-made climate change is real
The
Earth has been getting steadily warmer since humans began using high
levels of fossil fuels in the 18th to 19th centuries, during the
Industrial Revolution. The planet has already warmed by around 1 degree Celsius since the late 19th century.
More and more Americans are starting to
accept climate change is happening, despite Trump's pledge to pull the
US from the Paris Agreement.
American
acceptance of climate change returned to an all-time high of 71% in
October last year after sliding significantly from around a decade ago, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which conducts quarterly surveys on attitudes to global warming. It has dropped to 70% this year so far.
Some
58% of Americans believe that climate change is mostly man-made, a
clear majority but a lower percentage than in most other developed
nations.
This understanding that
climate change is at least happening has a lot to do with what people
are seeing and experiencing, according to the Yale program's director,
Anthony Leiserowitz.
After the US
was hit with several catastrophic hurricanes, the number of people who
felt global warming was affecting US weather "a lot" leaped to 33% last
October from 25% in May, five months earlier. That number went back down
when winter came and extreme weather events subsided.
People walk through flooded roads in Houston, Texas, on August 27, 2017 as Hurricane Harvey hit the city. |
"People are increasingly connecting the
dots when they see these weather events happening across the United
States," Leiserowitz said.
"It's
about the pattern -- if an extreme event happens once or twice, it's
just a coincidence, but three, five, 12, 22 times, seeing record-setting
events, seeing 1,000-year event after 1,000-year event happen
frequently, people begin to see that larger pattern, that climate change
is actually affecting the weather today. And that's a new concept for
many Americans."
This increase in awareness appears to be
happening in Redding, California. The Carr Fire has torched more than
130,000 acres of land -- the equivalent of nearly 100,000 football
fields -- and it became so big and hot this week, it created its own weather system.
Firefighter
Gabriel Lauderdale, 29, has lived all his life by the forest near
Redding, and he says even that's enough time to have noticed the pattern
and behavior of wildfires change dramatically.
"There seems to be more destructive wildfires and they're happening more frequently," said Lauderdale.
"It
used to be that a 10,000-acre fire was a large fire, and in these
cases, we're seeing many exceed 100,000 acres, and they reach that size
relative quickly. They move into homes and businesses, and they move
very fast from structure to structure."
The US pulls the plug on Paris
The
Paris Agreement in 2015 was widely celebrated as an achievement, but it
has major flaws -- it is not legally binding, it's unenforceable and
soon it is likely to lack one of the world's biggest polluters.
The
agreement's predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, was much stronger. It set
ambitious and legally binding emissions reduction targets. But it too
had its problems.
It included only developed nations, so China, the world's biggest carbon emitter, was not obliged to make reductions.
This was always a sticking point for the
US. George W. Bush in 2001 pulled his country out of the Kyoto
agreement, which Congress had never ratified.
Kyoto's other major flaw was that although it was legally binding, no one was ever sanctioned for over-polluting.
So
the success of Paris lies in the fact that it at least engaged more
than just developed nations. Those who ratify it make pledges to combat
climate change as their countries see fit, and they are obliged to
report on them transparently, in more of a name-and-shame system than
one with mutually set goals.
Another
success of Paris is the recognition that the world should try to
contain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or
two degrees as a worst-case scenario.
The
agreement, however, did not include the legally binding goals to reduce
carbon emissions that were sought by Europe but largely opposed by the
US.
Cars are blocked after a wildfire caused a road closure in Kineta in Greece on July 23. |
Now the world is left with a
watered-down agreement, and the country that pushed strongly for that
dilution is no longer playing along.
Todd
Stern, the chief US negotiator in Paris, and the Obama administration
are credited with bringing the US back into the fold after pulling out
of Kyoto. But, Stern said, they knew they would never get binding
targets past Congress, so they went into talks seeking an agreement that
wouldn't need Congressional approval.
Stern
denies, however, that the US was the only one against binding targets,
saying he would be "stunned" if all countries had agreed to get on
board.
He made clear his strong disapproval of
Trump's announcement the day after it happened, and he has written op-ed
after op-ed warning of the dangers of doing so.
"It's
a completely mind-bogglingly, ill-informed and unwise decision for so
many reasons," Stern told CNN, adding that the US was "too big and
influential" to be left out.
Trump
has governed with his "America First" agenda at the forefront of his
policy making and had argued that the Paris Agreement placed "draconian"
financial burdens on the American people.
"I was elected by the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," he said upon making his announcement in June last year.
With
the Paris Agreement being largely non-binding and with the US out of
the deal, environmental groups are calling on the rest of the world to
make stronger commitments.
"All
other nations have to ditch incremental action for transformational
change," said Claire Norman, speaking for Friends of the Earth in the
UK.
"Other nations will need to
step up -- especially the UK, we used to be world-leading -- and use
every diplomatic and economic tool to compel the US to act."
Links
- 2018 is on pace to be the 4th-hottest year on record
- Grim report card for planet ranks 2017 one of hottest years in recorded history
- Deadly heat waves becoming more common due to climate change
- Scorched Earth: Counting The Costs Of Extreme Weather
- Record-Breaking Heat And Fires Are Worsened By Climate Change, Scientists Say
- Fire, Fire Everywhere: The 2018 Global Wildfire Season Is Already Disastrous
- It’s A Savage Summer In The Northern Hemisphere – And Climate Change Is Slashing The Odds Of More Heatwaves
- 'Emphatic': Odds Point To Big Dry Expanding Across Eastern Australia
- Heatwave Made More Than Twice As Likely By Climate Change, Scientists Find
- The Guardian View On The Heatwave: Our Climate Is Endangered
- The Global Heatwave Is About To Hit Your Wallet
- The World Is Hot, On Fire, And Flooding. Climate Change Is Here.
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