The Correspondent - Eric Holthaus
Big, headline-grabbing climate disasters make the news, but it’s steady changes to the Earth’s ecosystems that truly threaten civilisation as we know it.
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All images by David Ellingsen from the series Weather Patterns, an ongoing project of more than 10 years. Read more about this series at the end of the article. LARGE IMAGE
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Author
Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist, climate scientist and journalist, working mostly in the US, the Caribbean, and East Africa. |
There was once a time when the weather was the
realm of the gods. Lightning strikes, tornadoes, droughts and floods
were all subject to the whims of the divine – powers beyond not only
humanity’s control but also beyond our comprehension.
It’s even written into our insurance contracts: “Acts of God.”
But over thousands of years, scientists have
learned that the weather follows repeatable, predictable patterns. And
one of the main stories of the past 100 years has been the realisation
that
human activities are powerful enough to bend those patterns. One of the main stories of
the next 100 years will be whether or not we change those activities
fast enough.
Within our lifetimes, something remarkable has
happened. It’s no longer the gods that cause the most extreme of weather
events. It’s us.
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2018 Wildfires, Sunrise Through Smoke. In 2018 British Columbia had the worst fire season to date; the smoke left some areas in the province with the worst air quality in the world. LARGE IMAGE
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Human activities now affect every single weather event in every part
of the globe. That’s not to say every single weather event is driven
solely by human activities – the sun still drives
the hydrologic cycle and all weather on Earth. But it’s no longer true to say that we live in a world where “natural” weather patterns exist.
Meteorological
science has progressed so far that its implications are being written
into law. One of the most rapidly developing fields of climate science
is called
"event attribution" – scientists can now assign
a percentage of climate blame to every weather event,
with specificity
down to individual oil and gas companies.
Knowing that fossil fuel companies are directly responsible for
imperceptible changes in daily weather is not hyperbole. It’s integral
to our understanding of the new era we are now in.
The end of the era of climate stability
To put it simply, we’ve left the era of climate stability that’s given rise to human civilisation.
In the absence of human activities, the world
would be slightly cooling right now.
In fact,
according to several assessments,
humans are responsible for
greater than 100% of global
warming. We’ve offset the natural cooling trend, and then some. The
planet’s temperature and chemistry are now changing at the sharpest rate
in at least 55 million years.
If every part of the atmosphere has now been affected by
humanity’s presence, we should pay just as close attention to the
everyday subtle shifts in the weather as we do the headline-grabbing
mega-disasters. It’s these steady changes, a degree or two here and
there, year after year, that are breaking the system.
Climate change is no longer a prediction
Over
all the millennia of our existence, weather disasters were deadly but
temporary. Now, the worst of them are subtle, cumulative, and permanent.
Climate
change is the shorthand term we have for that long-term, irreversible
shift in the baseline conditions of our existence on the planet. On the
timescale of a human lifetime, these shifts in the weather are barely
perceptible. From the perspective of the global ecosystem, they are as
loud and damaging as an asteroid strike.
Abrupt climate change used to be a prediction. Now it is recent world history, and
the greatest shared threat we face as a civilisation. Air pollution – one of the world’s leading causes of death –
already kills millions of people per year.
By the end of the century,
extreme heat alone could kill as many people as all infectious diseases
combined do today. And none of this factors in the threat to the
stability of nations as
migration due to natural disasters approaches levels not seen since the second world war.
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2017 Dissipating Heat, Summer Evenings. The summer of 2017 in the Pacific Northwest broke dozens of maximum temperature records. LARGE IMAGE
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There are
hundreds of examples of plants and animals whose long-term behaviours have already shifted
due to subtle changes in the weather over the past few decades.
Individually, these changes are not alarming. A certain species of plant
blooming three days earlier, on average, shouldn’t matter much to a
robust ecosystem.
But if nearly every animal and plant is
changing their behaviour, the fragile relationships between them can
fray remarkably fast. A certain type of bee may no longer be able to
pollinate the flower it has co-evolved with over millions of years, and
the migratory bird that depends on that plant’s fruit may now starve. If that bird needs to traverse the Arctic on its migration and there is no more sea ice, it may go extinct.
If
that bird goes extinct, it won’t be because of a single extreme weather
disaster; it will be because small shifts in the weather became too
much for it to bear. Magnified over millions of species, and amplified
over all the other environmental factors at work like habitat loss and
pollution, you can gradually come to see why climate change is an
existential threat. Not only because of rising seas and fiercer
hurricanes but because the web of life on which our existence depends is
fraying.
How the weather is different now
This era of
irreversible weather disasters has arrived without a grand entrance, so
it’s important to distinguish exactly what it looks like. Any time a
system moves outside the range that it’s adapted to, it’s prone to
breaking down. When it does so quickly, it could collapse.
There are several ways to think about how the weather is different now.
From a human perspective, some weather and climate events have been made better by climate change. There are
fewer deaths from hypothermia in colder climates, like northern Europe. Some places with short
growing seasons may begin to produce more food. Arctic countries may
benefit from increased maritime trade as the sea ice melts and the
shipping season lengthens.
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20 March 2019, 48 Temperature Records Broken on First Day of Spring. 122 provincial high-temperature records were broken over the third week of March. LARGE IMAGE
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But these trends don’t hold for the world as a whole. Northern Europe and Canada are
the main beneficiaries of shorter winters, the same countries that have made a huge percentage of their fortunes from the fossil fuel industry.
Then
there are weather events that are made worse by climate change. Nearly
every new high temperature record, like the recent 37.8°C/100°F in
London or the 54.4°C/130°F in California, was made more likely by
climate change. The wind speeds of some extremely strong cyclones, like
Hurricane Dorian’s impact in the Bahamas last year, are likely due in
part to warmer ocean temperatures caused by climate change.
There’s
evidence that certain heavy rain events – like this year’s
exceptionally strong south Asian monsoon that has flooded large parts of
India and Bangladesh – were also connected to warming oceans. But it’s
plausible these events could have happened without climate change, even
though their severity is increasing.
Some weather events, like
2018’s heatwave in Japan, were so unusual that they could not have happened without climate change. This year,
another heatwave hit Japan with similar force.
Recent heatwaves
in the Middle East
and
south Asia
are approaching
the level at which human survival is impossible, which they are expected to reach by the end of the century if the world
remains on anything like a business-as-usual course. As deadly as these
heatwaves are, they aren’t irreversible. They didn’t kickstart some
long-dormant Earth process on their own.
Climate ‘tipping points’
And then there’s the third category:
weather events that, if they happen enough times in the same place,
turn into climate disasters that alter the environment permanently.
These
disasters are what we are trying to prevent when we take action on
climate change. These are the disasters that, if left unchecked, will
endanger civilisation as we know it.
Some of them are already underway:
the loss of the
Great Barrier Reef, the collapse of mountain glaciers worldwide, the desertification of the
Mediterranean region. Some are already effectively irreversible, like
the acidification of the oceans. All of them are causing immense
suffering to people and to the biosphere in ways that rarely make the
news.
These disasters happen through a process that scientists also call “tipping points”.
The phrase “tipping point” is often used as a colloquial way of saying things are starting to get really bad, but it’s also
a technical term scientists use to describe a point at which a natural system in a steady state irreversibly transitions to an entirely new equilibrium.
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2019 June July August, Hottest Ocean Temperature in Recorded History (global). June 2019 recorded the hottest global ocean temperature in recorded history. July broke that record and August surpassed it. LARGE IMAGE
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The classic example is sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, which has been
continuously covered with a bright white reflective layer of frozen
seawater for thousands of years. The region is now one of the
fastest-warming places on Earth, and as more dark blue liquid is exposed
beneath the ice, the water absorbs more and more heat energy due to a
lower
albedo.
The warmer the Arctic gets, of course, the faster it melts. The fear is that in just a few years, the Arctic will experience a
“blue ocean event”, after which ice will have trouble reforming, sending a cascade of
weather and ecosystem implications throughout the northern hemisphere.
It’s this category of climate consequences that are most worrying.
To name a few more
When
they burn, forest fires release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and soot
that warm the atmosphere. This year’s fires in the Arctic alone
have already released more carbon than Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland will over the entire year
from all human activities combined. Those additional emissions will warm
the atmosphere further, boosting the likelihood of larger fires in the
coming years.
And those fires, clearly, are already bad enough. Forest fires in the Amazon are happening
at a frequency unseen in the past 20,000 years. Even the wetlands in Brazil are on fire.
This year’s bushfires in Australia, one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history,
may have pushed at least 113 species closer to extinction.
Because of an increase in drought, floods, and heatwaves, climate change
is already reducing crop yields worldwide. An overlap of crises in 2020 has kicked off
the most severe global food shortage in 50 years.
That’s just
one of more than a dozen effects that the climate emergency is having this year, worsening the effects of the pandemic and stressing human systems to the breaking point.
A trend toward overlapping disasters is causing an exponential growth in the
complexity and danger of every other type of disaster. As we saw during
the Arab Spring revolutions, food crises can create political crises,
which can destabilise governments and create humanitarian crises, which
greatly reduce our ability to deal with the climate crisis.
When
climate change makes the news – that “it’s worse than you think” story
we all dread reading – this is what they’re talking about. Donald
Rumsfeld, the US philosopher-military architect, had a famous saying
about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” that was meant to strike
fear and build the case for rapid action. Climate change has reached the
point where even the known unknowns should be enough for us to take
action. No need to tempt the gods even more.
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Figures released by the US science agency NOAA for March 2015 show that for the first time since records began the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere were over 400 globally for an entire month. The grid illustrates the 16 days Ellingsen photographed this location in March 2015, multiplied by 25, in order to mark this milestone event with a composite work of 400 parts. LARGE IMAGE
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About the images
Photographer David
Ellingsen has been working on his series Weather Patterns for more than
10 years. Using a consistent set of parameters such as location, focal
length, aperture and framing, he captured the landscape in front of him
on a daily basis, interested by events related to the changing global
climate system – such as temperature records, drought or wildfires. At a
later stage, he would go back into his archive and assemble single
pictures into a bigger composition.
As viewers, if we consider the single landscape image as one shot, it is
just the image of a regular sunset or a sea that we all experience
during our lives. It is only by putting them together that we can
perceive visually and materially that it is the accumulation of all
those moments that lead to the tipping point of climate disasters.
(Veronica Daltri, Image editor)
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