My professional environmental advocacy career began after law school in 1969. I quickly learned the critical importance of establishing credibility by not resorting to hyperbole and misguided “the sky is falling” tactics. It was essential that sound science guide my activism.
In the case of global warming, it is hard to overstate the urgency. We are confronted by apocalyptic ecological changes threatening life on Earth. The world’s best climate scientists have become so alarmed, they can no longer refrain from using hyperbolic terms to describe the existential threat. The definitive 2,000-page United Nations report on climate change released in February by 200 top scientists warns that harmful carbon emissions since 2010 have never been higher in human history, putting the world on a fast track to disaster.
These scientists demand immediate action or the world will be uninhabitable. They predict low-lying cities will be permanently flooded, and “unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III. They call this the price humanity will pay for its failure to significantly reduce carbon emissions.
The UN report, reviewed and agreed upon by 195 countries, is a sobering document delineating an unfolding horror story.
For proof, just look around at catastrophic events this year. Europeans are in shock as a “heat apocalypse,” a term that a French meteorologist François Gourand coined to Agence France-Presse, ferociously ranged from Scotland to Greece leaving a trail of raging wildfires, lost lives and evacuated homes. In France, the temperature soared to 109 degrees with more than 37,000 people evacuated as 2,000 firefighters battled blazes that burned 80 square miles of parched forest in an explosive cocktail.
England declared a national emergency. Grass fires erupted in London burning homes. Workers wrapped the historic Hammersmith Bridge across the River Thames in silver insulation foil to protect the cast-iron spans from cracking. Transit officials warned passengers to stay away as maintenance crews checked for bent and buckling steel tracks. Planes were diverted from airports due to melting runways and roads. Spain, Italy, and Greece endured major wildfires as record temperatures scorched forests. The heat wave in Spain and Portugal alone killed more than 1,600 people.
The U.S. was blasted last week with record heat as 100 million people were under heat advisories. Alarmingly hot temperatures set or tied 359 daily records and 709 records were set or tied for the warmest overnight low temperature.
People are dying. Fox News reported on July 23 that the record heat led to the deaths of at least 29 people.
Record smashing rainfall flooded St. Louis this week with as much as 12 inches in 10 hours, an event tied to warming climate with a 0.1% percent chance of happening in any year. Such extreme Midwest events radically increased by 42% since 1901. (David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP) (David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP)
In July 2021, record temperatures in the Pacific Northwest melted power cables and buckled roads as Portland hit a record 116 degrees. A new Canadian record high of 121 degrees was reached in Lytton, British Columbia. Approximately 600 people died from heat-related causes in one week in Oregon and Washington. More than 1 billion sea creatures perished along the Vancouver coast.
The same area of the Pacific Northwest is again undergoing a killer heatwave with temperatures hitting 109 degrees. Such excessive heat is the leading cause of weather-related U.S. deaths, outpacing hurricane deaths by more than 15-to-1 over the past decade. In a recent study, 13,000 to 20,000 adult U.S. deaths were linked to extreme heat between 2008 and 2017.
Record-breaking heatwaves wreaked havoc in India, Pakistan, China, and. Argentina, killing people, affecting water and energy supplies and agriculture. On Jan. 14, an Australian town hit 123.3 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. Once-frigid Russian Siberia reached 100.4 degrees in June 2020, the highest ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. Antarctic hit a record 64.9 degrees.
Global warming also is causing more massive and intense forest fires as seen in Europe and in the Oak Fire in Northern California raging since last Friday. The Oak Fire so far has burned 19,000 acres, threatening people, homes, and Yosemite National Park and its ancient giant sequoias, the largest trees on Earth by volume.
More than 3,000 people have been evacuated with 50 residential structures destroyed. Global warming causes hot, dry conditions making it harder to control the extent and ferocity of these fires, further adding to global warming gases. The most severe drought affecting the American West in at least 1,200 years helps fuel the fires.
Destroyed property is left in the wake of the Oak Fire in Yosemite National Park as lives, property, and the ancient giant sequoia tress are threatened. July 23 Photo: David McNew/AFP via Getty Images (David McNew/AFP via Getty Images)
Scientists document that 40% of the drought’s intensity is linked to human-caused climate change. In California, more than 2.5 million acres were burned in nearly 9,000 fires last year. Sequoias are built for survival and can live more than 3,000 years, but more than 85% of all giant sequoia acreage across the Sierra Nevada burned in wildfires between 2015 and 2021, compared to 25% in the preceding century. The world’s oldest living organism, the Great Basin bristlecone pine, is being killed off by our actions. Found only in the American West, these trees that can live for 5,000 years are being discovered dead and dying linked to severe climate-induced drought.
River, lake, and reservoir water sources are drying up, reaching record lows, crippling farm production as warming has reduced agricultural productivity by 12.5% since 1961. As more weed and pest species survive, farm production may decline further. Global warming is fueling food shortages, especially in the developing world, where agricultural productivity is declining and supply chains are disrupted. Called a “hunger pandemic,” the number of people living in famine-like conditions has increased sixfold since the end of 2019, with 11 people likely dying every minute from acute hunger, outpacing COVID-19 fatalities. Rising world hunger now afflicts 10% of humanity.
Rising sea levels are leading to severe flooding as our polar ice caps and Greenland’s ice are rapidly melting. Mid-ocean depths that support fisheries worldwide are losing oxygen, with predictions that by 2080, around 70% of the world’s oceans could be suffocating from a lack of oxygen as a result of climate change. Marine ecosystems and their fisheries could collapse. Heated Chesapeake Bay waters give rise to increasing flesh-eating human bacterial diseases increasing the toxicity of the bacteria. Intertidal grasses are disappearing as are important submerged eel grass.
Climate warming is also helping to drive the loss of biodiversity, fostering the Sixth Great Extinction. Pollinators, including bees and butterflies, are in sharp decline despite being responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food. The International Union for Conservation of Nature just listed the iconic monarch butterfly as endangered. Species ranging from sea turtles to polar bears, walrus and wolverines, face extinction at least partially linked to a warming climate.
These findings are not made up or fake news. They are reality, and the reality is that these conditions are going to grow worse unless we act boldly now to reduce the warming gases we continue to pour into the atmosphere. The standard political response is to pander to voters by setting goals that go unattained, cutting gas taxes, and to drill, baby, drill. This occurs while the Earth burns, baby, burns.
Next week, I will detail how we can all act to cut carbon emissions and help save the planet from a climate Armageddon.
Gerald Winegrad represented the greater Annapolis area in the General Assembly for 16 years. Contact him at gwwabc@comcast.net.